There was one sound: the wind whistling in the dry grass or past the tumbled stones, a tiny, cold piping, low to the ground.
She wrapped up the packet of food.
“Better?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said, and sighed. He saw her round, sallow face turn towards the dark path.
“Listen,” he said. He wanted to say her name. “You don’t need to go on.”
She shrugged. She stood up, fastening her homemade backpack, a roll of red wool.
“The place I’m supposed to go is at the top of that path?” She nodded.
“O.K. No problem.”
She stood with her sullen look and then, startling him, she looked at him and smiled. “You’d get lost,” she said. “You keep getting lost. You need a navigator.”
“I can’t get lost on a path two feet wide—”
“You did, when we came, you walked right off the south road.” The smile broadened to a laugh, very brief. “When I get scared, you get lost. Seems to be how it works.”
“Are you scared now?”
“A little,” she said. “It’s starting again.” But the laugh was not altogether gone.
“Then you shouldn’t go on. It’s not necessary. I feel responsible. If it wasn’t for me you wouldn’t do it.”
But she had started up the path. He followed her at once, shrugging his pack on hurriedly. They entered the cleft, a raw vertical scar in the mountain wall. High, dry walls of red and blackish-brown rock closed in upon them. The way was stony, and immediately steep.
“You’re not responsible for what I do,” she said over her shoulder.
“Then you’re not responsible for keeping me from getting lost.”
“But we have to get there,” she said.
They climbed on. The path turned sharply back and forth. There was a scramble up, where rocks had slipped. Hugh looked at the girl’s hand as she steadied herself against a raw-edged boulder. It was a small hand, thin and dark, the crescent moons of the nails white.
“Listen,” he said. “I want to—I never did understand your name.”
She looked back at him. “Irena,” she said clearly, and spelled it.
He repeated it, and again the broad, sweet, secret smile went across her face as she looked down at him, steadying herself among the harsh ruin of raw earth and rock. Then she went on, going lightly.
The sword impeded him constantly here, the heavy leather scabbard either tripping him or whacking his thigh or driving like a crutch up under his arm; he finally got it riding secure at the right angle on the swordbelt, but in doing so fell back a long way behind the girl. As he went on he heard a sound of water running. He turned one of the numberless sharp elbows of the path and saw a small stream scurrying transparent across the way from its spring in the rocks, dropping down into a basin of green weeds and ferns. Irena was kneeling by it waiting for him to catch up; her face and hands were wet and muddy. He knelt too and drank, his hands sinking into the miniature bog beside the rivulet. The water tasted of iron or brass, like blood, but very cold.
The way was always narrow, always steep, following the fissures in the wall of stone. Where there was dust underfoot it was marked, dried mud scored, with the narrow hoofprints of the last flock that had been driven down the mountain. The strip of sky overhead stood high and remote. Not much light came down to the path except where it followed the side of a widening canyon for a while. When the walls narrowed in again Hugh felt that it was leading into, inside the mountain. His hiking boots slipped on the stone; his footing was uneasy. He envied the girl, who went like a shadow up the steep, twisting way ahead of him.
She stopped at the foot of a long straight stretch. He caught up with her and asked, whispering because of the deep silence, “You all right?”
“Just winded.” Like him, she was breathing hard.
“How long does it go on?”
The rocks overhanging the path were strangely shaped, bulbous, as if waterworn long ago. They looked like half-formed animals, tumors, huge entrails of stone.
“I don’t know. It took all day with the sheep.”
Her eyes, in this rock-weighted dusk, looked dark and frightened.
“Go slower,” he said. “There’s no hurry.”
“I want to get out of here.”
Twisting and burrowing in the gorges, the path went mercilessly upward. Twice again they stopped to get their wind back. The last stretch was so steep that they clambered as on a ladder, using their hands. When abruptly the way leveled and there were no more walls, Hugh was on all fours. He stood up and then, his head swimming, dropped back to his knees. The cleft path had ended on the outer edge of a second alpine meadow, narrow, a green shelf. A thousand, two thousand feet below, the great meadow they had come from lay distance-misted, green as moss. He had no idea how to judge the height, the miles; but they were high up, for the enormous slant of the mountainside was now perceptible, both above this meadow and below it, as the main direction of this part of the earth, as absolute as the horizon, which itself lay so high and far that it was lost in the thickness of the twilit atmosphere. Overhead and north and east from the mountain arched the calm, unimpeded sky.
Irena was sitting in the grass, nearer the edge than he wanted to be. She was looking northward over the lower lands. Hugh looked to the east: down the slopes at first, wondering if from here you could see the gleam of the lights of Mountain Town, but it made him dizzy again to look down. He looked out, across the gulf of air, to the eastern mountains. Behind those dim outlines, as if drawn with grey pencil on grey paper, was there a hint of color, of brightening? He watched a long time, but could not be sure. When he followed Irena’s gaze to the north he saw no glimpse of the lights of towns, no faint clustering brightness that might be the City far away. All was blue-grey, indistinct, silent, vast.
She stood up finally and moved inward from the edge, walking carefully. “This is the High Step,” she said, half whispering. “My legs are all rubber from climbing.”
It made his head swim to see her stand between him and that immensity of empty air. He got up and faced inward towards the meadow. Across the grass—short, up here, and vivid, like a lawn—between the edge and the mountain wall rising above, there was an outcropping of rock, a kind of island in the grass. He walked towards that. It was a mass of big, licheny, grey rocks, tumbled and cracked, reassuring in size and solidity in this high, strange place. It felt good to get the rock at your back. They both sat down there with their backs against the main rock mass, fifteen or twenty feet high.
“That was a long pull,” he said. She only nodded. He got food out of his backpack and they shared it in silence. She leaned her head back against the rock and closed her eyes. The profile of her face was small and stem, like a bronze coin, against the sky.
“Irena.”
“What?”
“If you want to go to sleep I’ll watch out.”
“O.K.,” she said, and without more ado curled down against the rock with her red backroll for a pillow.
He ate another dry roll—hard, knot-shaped, grainy, with a pleasant taste—and a lump of goatsmilk cheese, which he did not like but was hungry enough to eat; after consideration, he ate one more roll stuffed with a strip of smoked mutton, and then put the food back into his pack. He wanted more but this would do. He felt a great deal better for it. It was a long time and a long way since they had left the town, and he was tired, but not worn out. Only if he sat here with his back comfortably against the rock he would fall asleep, like her. He ought to keep watch. He got up and began a leisurely patrol back and forth by the rock island.
In the clarity of this high-altitude light, less a dusk than a translucence, an everywhereness of light without source, the color of the grass was intense: dark and clear like an emerald. The forests closing off both ends of the shelf-meadow—nearby to the south, distant to the north—looked rough and black. Above the cliffs that overhung the meadow, the next riser of these huge stairs, hung the same rough blackness of trees, steep and remote; above that, bare rock, the summits. In this world of air and rock and forest there was no color but the dark jewel green. No flowers bloomed in the alpine grass. No flowers could open in the grass when no stars opened in the sky. This seemed clear to Hugh; then he decided his mind was getting fuzzy. To wake himself up he changed his patrol, going part way around the rock island; not all the way. He did not like to leave the sleeping girl out of sight.