“Go on, Lev,” she whispered aloud. “Go on to the mountains, go higher … .”
But where shall I go? Where shall I go, alone?
Without Lev, without the mother I never knew and the father I can never know, without my house and my City, without a friend—oh, yes, friends, Vera, Southwind, Andre, all the others, all the gentle people, but they’re not my people. Only Lev, only Lev was, and he couldn’t stay, he wouldn’t wait, he had to go climb his mountain, and put life off till later. He was my chance, my luck. And I was his. But he wouldn’t see it, he wouldn’t stop and look. He threw it all away.
So now I stop here, between the valleys, under the trees, and I have to look. And what I see is Lev dead, and his hope lost; my father a murderer and mad; and I a traitor to the City and a stranger in the Town.
And what else is there?
All the rest of the world. The river there, and the hills, and the light on the Bay. All the rest of this silent living world, with no people in it. And I alone.
As she came down from the hill she saw Andre coming out of Southwind’s house, turning to speak to Vera at the door. They called to each other across the fallow fields, and he waited for her at the turn of the lane that led to Shantih.
“Where were you, Luz?” he asked in his concerned, shy way. He never, like the others, tried to draw her in; he was simply there, reliable. Since Lev’s death there had been no joy for him, and much anxiety. He stood there now, sturdy and a little stooped, overburdened, patient.
“Nowhere,” she answered, truthfully. “Just walking. Thinking. Andre, tell me. I never want to ask you while Vera’s there, I don’t like to upset her. What will happen now, between the City and Shantih? I don’t know enough to understand what Elia says. Will it just go on the way it was—before?”
After a fairly long pause, Andre nodded. His dark face, with jutting cheekbones like carved wood, was shut tight. “Or worse,” he said. Then, scrupulous to be fair to Elia, “Some things are better. The trade agreement—if they keep to it. And the South Valley expansion. There won’t be forced labor, or ‘estates’ and all that. I’m hopeful about that. We may work together there, for once.”
“Will you go there?”
“I don’t know. I suppose so. I should.”
“What about the northern colony? The valley you found, the mountains?”
Andre looked up at her. He shook his head.
“No way—?”
“Only if we went as their servants.”
“Marquez won’t agree to your going alone, without City people?”
He shook his head.
“What if you went anyway?”
“What do you think I dream of every night?” he said, and for the first time there was bitterness in his voice. “After I’ve been with Elia and Jewel and Sam and Marquez and the Council, talking compromise, talking cooperation, talking reason?—But if we went, they’d follow.”
“Then go where they can’t follow.”
“Where would that be?” Andre said, his voice patient again, ironic and miserable.
“Anywhere! Farther east, into the forests. Or southeast. Or south, down the coast, down past where the trawlers go—there must be other bays, other town sites! This is a whole continent, a whole world. Why do we have to stay here, here, huddled up here, destroying each other? You’ve been in the wilderness, you and Lev and the others, you know what it’s like—”
“Yes. I do.”
“You came back. Why must you come back? Why couldn’t people just go, not too many of them all at once, but just go, at night, and go on; maybe a few should go ahead and make stopping-places with supplies; but you don’t leave a trail, any trail. You just go. Far! And when you’ve gone a hundred kilometers, or five hundred, or a thousand, and you find a good place, you stop, and make a settlement. A new place. Alone.”
“It’s not—it breaks the community, Luz,” Andre said. “It would be … running away.”
“Oh,” Luz said, and her eyes shone with anger. “Running away! You crawl into Marquez’s trap in the South Valley and call that standing firm ! You talk about choice and freedom—The world, the whole world is there for you to live in and be free, and that would be running away! From what? To what? Maybe we can’t be free, maybe people always take themselves with themselves, but at least you can try. What was your Long March for? What makes you think it ever ended?”
11
Vera had meant to stay awake to see them off, but she had fallen asleep by the fire, and the soft knock at the door did not waken her. Southwind and Luz looked at each other; Southwind shook her head. Luz knelt and hastily, as silently as she could, laid a fresh square of peat behind the coals, so the house would stay warm through the night. Southwind, made awkward by her heavy coat and backpack, stooped and touched Vera’s gray hair with her lips; then she looked around the house, a bewildered, hurried look, and went out. Luz followed her.
The night was cloudy but dry, very dark. The cold of it woke Luz from her long trance of waiting, and she caught her breath. There were people around her in the dark, a few soft voices. “Both there? All right, come on.” They set off, past the house, through the potato field, toward the low ridge that lay behind it to the east. As Luz’s eyes became accustomed to the dark she made out that the person who walked beside her was Lev’s father, Sasha; sensing her gaze in the darkness he said, “How’s the pack?”
“It’s all right,” she said in a bare whisper. They must not talk, they must not make any noise, she thought, not yet, not till they were clear of the settlement, past the last village and the last farm, across Mill River, a long way. They must go fast and silently, and not be stopped, O Lord God please not be stopped!
“Mine’s made of iron ingots, or unforgiven sins,” Sasha murmured; and they went on in silence, a dozen shadows in the shadow of the world.
It was still dark when they came to Mill River, a few kilometers south of where it joined the Songe. The boat was waiting, Andre and Holdfast waiting with it. Hari rowed six across, then the second six. Luz was in the second lot. As they neared the eastern shore the solid blackness of the nightworld was growing insubstantial, a veil of light dimming all things, a mist thickening on the water. Shivering, she set foot on the far shore. Left alone in the boat, which Andre and the others had already pushed off again, Hari called out softly, “Good luck, good luck! Peace go with you!” And the boat vanished into the mist like a ghost; and the twelve stood there on the ghostly, fading sand.
“Up this way,” said Andre’s voice out of the mist and pallor. “They’ll have breakfast for us.”
They were the last and smallest of the three groups to leave, one group a night; the others were waiting farther on among the rugged hills east of the Mill, country where only coney trappers went. In single file, following Andre and Holdfast, they left the riverbank and set off into the wild land.
She had been thinking for hours and hours, step after step, that as soon as they stopped she would sink right down on the dirt or the mud or the sand, sink down and not move again till morning. But when they stopped she saw Martin and Andre, up at the front, discussing something, and she went on, step after step, till she came up with them, and even then did not sink down, but kept standing, to hear what they were talking about.
“Martin thinks the compass isn’t reading true,” Andre said. With a dubious look, he held the instrument out to Luz, as if she could judge its inaccuracy at a glance. What she saw was its delicacy, the box of polished wood, the gold ring, the glass, the frail burnished needle hovering, trembling between the finely incised points: what a beautiful thing, miraculous, improbable, she thought. But Martin was looking at it with disapproval. “I’m sure it’s pulling east,” he said. “Must be iron-ore masses in those hills, deflecting it.” He nodded toward the east. For a day and a half they had been in a queer scrubby country that bore no ringtrees or cottonwools but only a sparse, tangled scrub which grew no more than a couple of meters high; it was not forest, but not open country; there was seldom any long view. But they knew that to the east, to their left, the line of high hills they had first seen six days ago went on. Whenever they came up on a rise in the scrublands, they saw the dark red, rocky skyline of the heights.