“Yes.” He looked at her. He wanted to ask her what she had seen, for he could neither forget nor believe the image in his own eyes. But he could not bring himself to speak directly of the thing.
“It would be stupid to try to face it,” she said. “It wouldn’t be courage, just stupid.” Her voice was thin. “When I even think of it I get sick.”
After a pause, his voice sticking in his throat, he said, “Is it—did it have eyes?”
“Eyes?” She pondered. “I didn’t see.”
“If it was blind…it acted blind. The way it ran.”
“Maybe.”
“You could be ready for it. If it’s blind.”
“Ready!” she mocked.
“It’s the noise. The damned noise it makes,” he said in despair.
“That’s the fear,” she said. “I mean it’s like that’s what happens when you feel the fear—you’re hearing that voice. I heard it once when I was asleep. It’s like it just turns your mind off. It’s just—I can’t do anything, Hugh. I can’t be any help. If it comes again I’ll just run again. Or not even be able to run.”
Not even be able to run: the words stood in his mind. He saw the flat stone in the grass. The iron rings in the stone. The knot of rawhide through the ring. His breath stuck and cold saliva welled into his dry mouth.
“What did they say to do?” he said. “They said a lot you didn’t translate. They gave me the sword, they sent us up here, to that meadow—”
“Lord Horn didn’t say anything. Sark said to go to the flat stone. I guess he meant that pile of rocks we sat down by.”
“No,” Hugh said; but he did not explain.
“I guess they just knew that if we went there we’d—it would come—” She was silent a while and then said very quietly, “Bait.”
He said nothing.
“I loved them,” she said. “For so long. I thought…”
“They were doing what they had to do. And we—we didn’t come here by accident.”
“We came here running away.”
“Yes. But we came here. We got here.”
This time she did not reply.
After a while he said, “I feel like I ought to be here. Even now. But you’ve done what you promised. You ought to go on now, go on back down to the gateway.”
“Alone?”
“I couldn’t protect you if I was with you.”
“That’s not the point!”
“It’s just dangerous for you here. I don’t need you, now. If I was alone, I could—I’d be able to act freely.”
“I already said you’re not responsible for me.”
“I can’t help it. Two people are always sort of responsible for each other.”
She sat silent, hugging her knees. When she spoke it was without defiance. “Hugh. What could you do better alone? Except get killed?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
Presently she said, “We ought to eat something,” and crawled back under the rhododendrons for her bedroll. She laid out the packets of food and sat looking at them.
“My pack’s back by those rocks,” he said.
“I don’t want to go back there!”
“No. This is enough.”
“Well, it could be a couple of days’ worth. If we stretch it.”
“It’s enough.” It did not matter. Nothing mattered. He was defeated. He had run away and hid, again, and he was safe and always would be safe and never free. “Let’s go,” he said. “I’m not hungry.”
“Go where?”
“Down to the gate. And get out of here.”
She looked up at him as he stood up. Her face was unhappy, indecisive. He refastened the swordbelt, settled the leather coat on his shoulders. His muscles ached, he felt ill and heavy. “Let’s go,” he repeated.
She rolled up her red pack and strapped it, keeping out a strip of dried mutton, which she held in her teeth as she slipped her arms into the straps. He set off, climbing the steep, thickly forested slope they had descended, until he came to the path that entered the forest from the High Step. On it he turned left.
Catching up to him with a considerable racket of rustling leaves and cracking twigs, Irena said, “Where are you going?”
“To the gate.” He pointed, with certainty, a little left of the direction of the path. “It’s down there.”
“Yes. But this path—”
He knew she meant but did not want to say that it was the path the white crying thing had used, had made.
“It goes the right direction. When it stops going the right direction we’ll cut across country to the axis path, the south road.”
She did not argue. She looked worried still, but there was no use worrying, it did not matter how they went or where. He went on, and she followed.
The trail was faint but quite clear, without side trails or deer crossings to confuse the way. It went fairly level, and the direction was south, though it wound left and right in u and v curves as it followed the hollows and musculature of the mountainside. The trees grew thin-trunked, close, and high. Often there were rock formations, outcrops of pale granite, and occasionally a bare rocky slope above the path. Where the earth was softer under the trees the fallen fir needles were swept off the path in places and the dirt was scraped aside and scored. Noticing that, Hugh thought of the heavy, pumping, pale, wrinkled legs, the dragging body. It ran upright, as a man runs. But it was much larger than a man, and ran heavily but very quickly, dragging itself and crying as if in pain. Once allowed into his mind the image was with him constantly. He thought there was an odor in the air along the path, vaguely familiar, no, intimately familiar, but he could not name it. There were white flowers in summer on some kind of bush that smelled like that, like semen, that was it, the sweet, dull smell. He went on and on and had nothing in his mind but the endless moment of the glimpse of the white thing running above him on this path.
A small stream crossed the way, rising from springs higher on the mountain. He stopped to drink, for he was very thirsty. The girl came up beside him. He had forgotten for a long time that she was there, behind him, coming along. The gleam of the water and the shape of her face came between him and the image of the white thing. After drinking, Irena washed her face, washing off dirt, salt, blood, sluicing the water up her arms and on the back of her neck. He imitated her, and the touch of the water roused him a little, though his mind worked slowly and everything seemed dull and dim, without meaning or difference.
She was saying something.
“I don’t know,” he said at random.
For a moment he saw her eyes, dark and bright in the formless twilight under the trees.
“If we’re still on the east side of the mountain, then that’s south,” she said, pointing. He nodded. “The gateway. But the path turns so much. I’m getting mixed up. If we’re going to leave this path we should do it now, maybe, while I still have some sense of the—of where the gate is.” Again she looked at him.
“We should stay on the path,” he said.
“You’re sure?” she asked with relief.
He nodded, and stood up. He crossed the little stream, and they went on. It was dark under the close, dark trees. There were no distances, there was no choice, there was no time. They went on. The trail descended gradually now. All its turns veered farther to the right than to the left as it led them around the mighty contour of the mountain westward. It will get darker as we go farther west, Hugh thought.
Irena pulled at his arm: she wanted him to stop. He stopped. She wanted him to sit down and share food with her. He was not hungry and could not stay there long, but it was pleasant to rest a little while. He got up, and they went on. Steep streams crossed the path now and then in the dark infolds of the canyons, and Hugh knelt to drink at each, for he was always thirsty, and the water roused him for a minute. He would look up and see the sky between the black jagged branches, and look beside him at the quiet, soft, severe face of the girl kneeling next to him at the stream’s edge; he would hear the sough of wind above and below them on the mountainside. He would be aware of these things, and perhaps of the small ferns and water plants beside his hands. Then he would get up and go on walking.