9
She led the way. He came along as well as he could. She looked back often, and sometimes had to wait for him. He tried to keep up, but the going was not easy along the stream bank. Roots, bushes, ferns crowded together and the ground beneath them was uneven, sometimes slippery. Since he had pulled something wrong, coming down the steep ravine, the pain in his side never left off any more. It shortened his breath and his stride. After a while he did not think about trying to keep up but only about trying to keep going. Where a lesser stream came down into the one they were following it spread out into a marsh where there was no sound footing, and they decided they would have to cross the water. That was very difficult. The dizziness that came and went in his head made it hard to balance on the slick stones against the tug of the current. He was afraid that if he fell he would pull something wrong there again in his side. He got across all right, but a while later they had to cross again, he did not know why; he was concentrating entirely now on the next few steps. She tried to give him a hand, crossing, but it wasn’t much good. She wasn’t big enough, if he slipped he slipped, damned elephant. The water was burning cold. They were across now, and an easier way opened along a sandy shore under grey trees. If only his side didn’t burn, and the sword drive into him a little deeper now, and again now, and again now. She was like a shadow, she went before him so lightly; the only shadow in this world without shadows, without moon or sun. Wait for me, Irena! he wanted to say, but he didn’t have to; she waited. She turned to him, returned to him. Her warm, strong hand touched his. “You want to rest a while, Hugh?” He shook his head. “I want to go on,” he said. The sword drove into him a little deeper, again, now. His name, his father’s name, which he had hated, in her voice was baptism: a breath, the outbreath: you. You my fulfillment. You beyond all expectation met: you my life. Not death but life. Before the cave of the dragon we were married.
“For a little while,” he said. He was on his knees. She came to him, faithful and concerned. He told her not to worry, he wanted to sit down and rest for a little while, or he meant to tell her that.
She made him lie down, and put the red cloak around him; she held him and tried to warm him with her warmth. It was he that was the shadow, she was warmth, sunlight.
“Sing the song,” he said.
She did not hear him at first; he could not speak loudly because of the sword in his side. When he said it again she understood. She propped herself up on her elbow and turned her face away a little and sang in her thin, sweet voice, the lark’s voice, without fear,
“It’s that one,” he said.
“What is it?”
“Home’s that country,” he said. “Not this one.”
Her face was close to his, and she stroked his hair. Her warmth had come into him. He closed his eyes. When he woke whatever was wrong in his side did not hurt at all, until he moved. Getting up was the hardest part. He could not kneel down to the water to drink without having to get up all over again, ashamed of the noises that came out of his chest as he did so, a series of creaking gasps, but he couldn’t stand up without making them. “Come on,” Irena said, “along here.” She spoke so reassuringly that he asked, “You found the way?” She did not hear him. He could walk all right, but he stumbled a lot. It worked best if she walked with him. She guided him so well that he could walk with his eyes shut part of the time, but when he staggered off the path he pulled her with him, so he tried to keep his eyes open. The going was easy. The trees parted before them, made way for them. But they had to cross the creek again. It was not possible.
“You did it before,” she said.
Had he? That would be why he felt so cold: he was wet. No harm to get wet again, then. The water burned like fire, the dark, quick-running water he would not drink again. There was the shelf-rock above the creek where he, where she had knelt. And the bushes and the flowerless grass of the glade, the beginning place, but the end, now; and the pine and the high laurels, but no way between them, not till her hand opened it for him. But still he could not go through it till she took his hand and came beside him into the new world.
She had expected sunlight. She had always thought they would come out into the hot, tremendous sunlight of that hot summer. They came across the threshold into night and rain.
The rain was falling thick in big drops. The sound of it hitting the leaves of the woods and the ground was beautiful, and the smell of it. Her face was wet with rain as if with tears. But she could not let Hugh rest, as she had counted on doing as soon as they got through. Not on this soaked ground, and their jeans and shoes already wet through from crossing the three rivers. They had to keep on going. It wasn’t fair, he was blind with pain and fever. But she kept hold of his arm and he kept going. They worked their way slowly through the dark wood, and out across the waste fields. Air and ground were streaked by turning distant carlights from the highway fanning out through the falling rain. Once Hugh stumbled and as he recovered himself, pulling heavily on her, cried out; but then he said, “It’s all right,” and they went on, getting closer to the gravel road, the all-night lights beside the paint factory their beacon. On the short slope up to the road he sank down onto his knees and then without any word or sign slipped forward and lay face down on the ground.
She had come down with him; she crouched beside him in the wet grass. After a while she scrambled up onto the road’s edge, stood there a moment looking back at the darkness where he lay. She could not see him. Whimpering with misery as he had whimpered with pain, she started to walk down the road, towards the farm.
Headlights behind her, from the factory. In rabbit terror she froze on the road’s edge, heard the engine slow, the tires grate.
“Hey. Anything wrong?”
That it might yet be, that it might always be what she feared she knew, but she turned around and went to the car. She was shaking. She made out a redbearded face in the back glow of the lights. “My friend’s hurt,” she said.
“Where? Hang on.”
It was a small car, and Hugh never came to enough to be much help, but Redbeard, determined, got him folded somehow into the front seat, then jack-knifed Irena into the back and drove at eighty and enjoying it to Fairways Hospital. He was out of the car as he jammed on the brake at the emergency entrance, enjoying that too. Once Hugh had been taken in the glamorous part was over, but still Redbeard waited with her in the emergency waiting room, got her coffee and a candy bar from the machines in the lobby, did what a fellow human being might do; not an uncommon thing, in Irena’s experience, nor yet, nor ever, a common one. It is royalty that call each other sister, brother.
The doctor that talked to her at last asked a few questions. Irena had been listening to Redbeard talking basketball scores and had prepared no story. “He got beat up,” she said, all she could think of when she realized there had to be some explanation.
“You were in the woods,” the doctor said.
“Hiking.”
“You got lost? How long have you been there?”
“I don’t know exactly.”
“I’d better have you checked over.”
“I’m all right. Just tired. I was scared.”
“You’re certain you weren’t hurt yourself?” the doctor said harshly: a middle-aged woman, tired, grey-faced in the merciless fluorescent light of the ten P.M. Labor Day weekend hospital emergency ward hallway.
“I’m O.K., I’ll be fine when I get some sleep. Is Hugh—”
“Have you somewhere to go?”
“The man that picked us up, he’ll drive me to my mother’s place. Is Hugh—”