Brush had begun to encroach across the trail since it had gone unused. It was not a hard trail but it took ceaseless alertness, and was all uphill. Abruptly, at the top of a sharp pull, they came out of the forest darkness. The air seemed almost bright. There was a clear view of land and sky. They had come out at one end of the Long Meadow, an immense alpine pasture, a terrace in the northeast face of the mountain.
She stood under the last trees, in the high grass, getting her breath after the climb. Hugh stood beside her. She saw his chest rise and fall in deep, even breaths as he looked along the distances of the meadow and the slopes that rose sheer above it.
“Is this the place?” he asked.
It was the first word he had spoken since they crossed the bridge.
“No. About halfway I guess. The High Step is on up there.” She pointed to grey cliffs and crags overhanging the Long Meadow far to the right of where they stood. “With the sheep it took two days to get up there; they always camped here in the Long Meadow.”
“I wondered why they gave me all this food.”
“Saint George and the sandwiches,” Irene said, and a fit of crazy laughter came over her and went away as fast as it had come. She looked at Hugh. He had slipped off his backpack and leather coat and was readjusting his belt, scowling. “Damned sword keeps tripping me.” He looked up and met her eyes. “It’s all fake,” he said, and turned red. “Playacting.”
“I know.”
But the silence hung around their voices, and they heard it.
“You don’t feel the—” he hesitated, with clumsy delicacy—“the fear?”
“Not exactly. I feel nervous, but not…I feel like it had its back turned.”
He got the sword slung to his satisfaction, ran his hand through his hair, and sighed, a big houf! sigh.
“You never have felt it?” she asked with curiosity.
“I don’t think so.”
“That’s good.”
“Last time, when I went past the gate, I was scared. You know. Really scared, panicked. But that was because I was afraid of getting lost. It isn’t like that, is it?”
She shook her head. “Not at all. It’s more like you’re going to find something you don’t want to find.”
He grimaced.
“It’s awful,” she said. “But I’ve never been afraid of getting lost, here. I always know where the gateway is. And the town. And the city, I guess.”
He nodded. “It’s all on the same line, the same axis. But when I went past the gate I lost that. It all looked alike. I didn’t even recognize the gateway creek when I crossed it. If I hadn’t met you—”
“But you were on the path—almost on it. It’s more like you panicked and didn’t think.”
“When they said I had to go up the mountain, off the axis, I was about ready to panic again. When you said you’d come, that made…you know. Like I had a chance.”
He was trying to thank her, but she did not know how to be thanked.
“What did you mean about playacting?”
“I don’t know.” He stood looking out across the meadow. Miles of high, flowerless grass, silvery green in the unchanging light, bowed very slightly to the wind. The sky was empty. No bird, no wisp of cloud. “The sword, I guess.”
“You think you won’t need it?”
“Need it?” He looked at her rather stupidly.
“What’s it for? What is it you’re supposed to fight with it?”
“I don’t know.”
“What if you aren’t even supposed to fight—it isn’t any good? If there is something up here, some sort of creature or power or something, why don’t they tell us what it is? What if there’s no use trying to fight it?”
“Why would they trick us?” he asked, his voice grave.
“Because it’s all they can do. I don’t mean Lord Horn is bad. I don’t know what he is. You can’t say good and bad about what they do. Like you said, they do what they have to. The Master talked about making the bargain, about paying. He meant—I don’t know what he meant. I just don’t understand it, I don’t know what we’re trying to do here.”
Again he ran his hand through his thick, sweaty hair. “But you didn’t have to come up here,” he said in his gentle, obstinate way.
“Yes, I did. I don’t know. I had to. It was time to go.”
“But why this way? You could have just gone home.”
“Home!” she said.
He did not reply for a while. He nodded once. “I guess so,” he said. And after a moment, “Let’s go on. I keep thinking it’s going to get dark soon.”
7
The grass was high, thick, tangled, showing no path. The girl set off confidently, angling towards the grey crags far across the great terrace of grass. There was no need to go single file here, as on the narrow forest trails. Hugh kept alongside her, but a couple of yards away, for she had left no doubt that she disliked to be crowded or even approached. The dense, lithe grasses tangled his feet, and he learned to set his foot straight down at each stride, as when walking in snow. The clumsy sword banged at his thigh, but it was pleasant to get a rhythmic stride going, instead of groping and climbing. And it was a pleasant and rare thing in this forest land to have their goal in sight, to watch the crags slowly towering higher.
After a long time he spoke. “Now I keep thinking it’s morning.”
The girl nodded. “Because it’s lighter up here, I guess. No trees.”
“And open to the east.”
They walked on steadily, silent. In this vast, empty grassland it seemed natural that there should be no sound but the faint lash and flick of the grass against their legs, and sometimes the hum of wind in the ears. A mild exultation came into Hugh’s body and mind, a buoyant rhythm in time with his stride. He was doing what he had come to do, going where he had to go. He had earned his right to be here, his right to love Allia.
It did not matter that she did not know the language in which he had said, “I love you.” It did not matter if they never met again. It was his love that mattered, that bore him onward, without grief or fear. He could not be afraid. Death is love’s sister, the sister with the shadowed face.
As they went on and slowly the cliff towered higher and the folds and scars and slides of its surface revealed themselves, and the wild grass lashed and flicked in the rhythm of his stride, and the depths of the sky lay overhead like water, he felt once more that he would be content to walk in silence across the high land forever. There was no weariness in him now. He would never grow tired. He could go on forever, his back to everything.
The girl was saying his name. She had said it more than once. He did not want to stop. There wasn’t anything worth stopping for. But her voice sounded thin, like the voice of a sea bird crying, and he stopped and turned back.
Some while ago they had come directly under the cliffs, and had since been walking northward in shorter grass beside huge falls and slides of broken rock half overgrown with broom and grasses. The girl stood a good way behind him, at the outer fold of a cleft in the base of the cliffs, which he saw as he came back to be the entrance to a path. It looked a dark, narrow way.
“This is the way up to the High Step,” she said.
He looked at it with disfavor.
“I want a break before we start up. It’s steep,” she said. She sat down in the grass, here dry and short, tawny, worn-looking. “Are you hungry?”
“Not very.” He did not want to bother with eating, though when he thought back he knew they had come a long way and walked a long time, that the dark road where Allia had stood was very far behind, below, down there. He wanted to go on. But the girl was right to stop, and she looked tired, her face pinched and frowning. He dropped his coat and swordbelt and sword and pack near her and went off behind a waste of huge fallen boulders to piss; came back, feeling with pleasure the warmth and spring of his whole body, untired but glad now to rest a little; and levered himself up onto a reddish boulder beside the girl sitting in the grass. She was eating. She passed a strip of dried meat and some chips of some kind of dried fruit to him; and it tasted good.