He woke, turned his head, found the place by him empty.
" Ilya!" he cried, and woke the house.
They found him by the gate, by the corner of the front-yard fence, partly covered by the blowing snow, frozen and with tiny ice crystals clinging to clothes and face. . . not terrible, as some of the dead were which the cold killed, but rather as one gazing into some fair dream, and smiling. Andrei touched his face as Anna held him, shedding tears which melted ice upon his cheek; and suddenly in his agony he sprang up and ran to the stable, with the others calling out after him. Umnik lay there, quite stiff and dead. The other pony looked at him reproachfully, and the goats bleated, and he turned away, walked back to the others, gathered Anna into his arms. The spring was then not long in coming; the winds shifted and the snows shrank and the rivers began to groan with breaking ice.
Andrei rode the other pony in the trodden street, the bay, the younger, a beast which would never be what Umnik had been. The drifts within the city yielded up the white wind-blasted pillars which had been statues, turned up small and pitiful discoveries, small animals which had been frozen the winter long; and an old woman had been found near the Moskva river. But such tragedies came with every winter; and spring came and the white retreated. He passed the gates and the bridge, and neglected his eye-shields as he rode along. He had a new bow and quiver. . . the old ones, from Ilya's dead hand, had seemed unlucky to him. . . and he rode out along the edge of the retreating woods, where trees shed their burdens of snow, where the tracks of deer were visible.
He and Anna had begun their living together before the spring; he wore work of her stitchery, and she swelled with child, and the dull scar of winter past seemed bearable. He had taken a free gift to the old wizard, Mischa, who had now lived yet another winter—a parr of fat hares, paying for truth he had gotten, and bearing no resentments.
The bay pony's hooves broke melting snow, cracked ice, and there was a glistening on it from the sun, but the day was still overcast. He shielded his eyes with a gloved hand and looked at the drifts of gray-centered cloud, shivered somewhat later as the cloud blew athwart the sun, and a chill came into the air.
There were only ordinary days, forever. He saw the places in Moskva where the paint peeled, saw cracks in the images of Moskva; the patterns which Anna made to clothe him seemed garish and far less lovely than once they had; he had seen beauty once, and aimed at it and wounded it. Now he saw truth.
"Was it your sight you gave the Wolf?" he had asked Mischa finally. "Or was it the hand?"
"I destroyed my sight," Mischa had said, "—after."
Mischa had had no one. He had three families; had Anna; had a growing child. . Had had a friend.
Ilya's carvings faded; would crack; would decay with the age of Moskva. Ilya had made nothing lasting. Nor did any man.
The colors would fade and the ice would come; he knew that, but looked at the colors and the patterns men made, because he had seared the other from his heart and from his eyes; and he went on looking at it because others needed him.
Cold touched the side of his face and pushed at his body, a touch of deep chill, a breathing of sleet and snowflakes. The bay pony threw her head and snorted in unease. What had Ilya seen? he wondered again and again. What, if not the Wolf?
What had it been, that drew him away?
Snowflakes dusted the pony's black mane, smallish stars, each different, each delicate and white and in the world's long age, surely duplicated again and again. As human grief was. He looked toward the north, toward the gleam of ice and sunlight, opal and orange and rose and gold, melting-bright. There was nothing there. Forever.
1981
NIGHTGAME
( Rome )
They offered him food and drink. He accepted, although by all his codes he should not. He was no one. They had taken his name with his totem and his weapons, and they had killed Ta'in, who was his heart. A warrior of the netang, he would have refused food and drink offered from an enemy's hand, and died of it, but they had forced it into him during the long traveling that had brought him to this place, and taken from him all that he was, and he was tired. His weapons, had he had them, could never have fought the like of them, with their machines and their mocking smiles. He would have killed them all if he could, but that was while he had been a warrior, and while he had had a name. Now he sat listlessly and waited what more would happen, and what he would be, which was something of their purposing.
Belat switched the vid off and smiled at the portly executive who rested in the bowl-chair in the offices of the Earth Trade Center, next the crumbling port. " Netangtribesman, off Phoenix IV. That's what I've gotten us."
Ginar folded his hands across his paunch and nodded slowly to Belat the trader. Grinned, in rising amusement. "The Tyrant will be vastly surprised. You go as planned. . . tonight?"
"I've advised the usual contacts," Belat said, "that I have a special surprise for the evening. I've permission to cross the bridge. I even detected a spark of enthusiasm."
"A special surprise." Ginar chuckled again. It would be that. "You'll not," he said, "mention myname in the City, as sponsor of this. . . should something go wrong. Yourrisk. After all—it's your risk. I only provide you. . . opportunity."
The city was old as Earth was old, in the waning chill of its plague-spotted sun. The Eternal City. . . under the latest of its many names, in the reign of the latest of its tyrants. It sat on its seven hills by its sluggish, miasmic river, and dreamed dreams. That was the passion of its Tyrant, and of all the nobles of the city—dreams. The apparatus (which might have originated here, or perhaps on one of the colonial worlds: no one remembered) existed in the Palace which dominated the city; it gave substance to dreams, and by that substance consoled the violet nights and the oppressive days of the sickly star. There was nothing left to doon Earth, nothing at all, for the vanities were all exposed, the ambitions, the conceits of empire, the meaningless nature of power on one world, when greater powers now spanned the void and embraced worlds in the plural, when those powers themselves had had time to grow old and to decay many times. Earth had seen it all. The Eternal City had seen such eras pass. . . too often to be amused by the exercise of power or the pursuit of empire. It had no hopes left, being merely old, as the sun was old, and the moon looming large and sickly in the sky, lurid with the reflected glow of the ailing sun. Earth and the City could have no ambitions. Ambitions were for younger worlds. For the City there was only pleasure. And the dreaming.
Exquisite decadence, the dreams. . . in which some lost themselves and failed to return—dreams which, in the strange power of the machine, could become too real, which for those that fell too far within their power wrought real consequences on fleshly bodies.
The days the Eternal City gave to mundane pursuits, for those who waked. . . the supervision of the dullard laborers who toiled in the catacomb depths of the City. The sun was a fearsome thing, and during most of the day the City stirred only beneath the ground, in the far-reaching windings of the tunnels, where mushrooms grew, and blind fishes, and yeasts and other such things; and by mornings and evenings, when the sun was kinder, the laborers tended the crops which still flourished on the edges of the sluggish River. Such men chose to work, and not to dream, amid the fearsome cruelties of their lords. The day belonged to them, and to the lesser nobles whose tedious duty it was to oversee, and to tally, and to arrange trade with the few ships which might chance to touch at the port across the River. The City had some mundane concerns, and labor existed, not because it had to, but because some men knew themselves doomed to be victims, and knew themselves less imaginative, and less fierce, and made themselves beasts of burden, because beasts toiled their little share and so fed themselves and so lived. Such were the days of the City.