You must remember me as I actually was, Bartan. Do not fuel your self-pity by imagining that I was anything but a very ordinary woman.
“So good, so pure…”
Bartan! It may help you if I make you aware that I was never faithful to you. Glave Trinchil was only one of the men from whom I took my pleasures. There were many of them—including my Uncle Jop…
“That isn’t true! I have dreamed foul lies into your mouth.” On another level of Bartan’s drugged consciousness there came the first stirrings of comprehension and wonder: This is not a dream! This is really happening!
That is so, Bartan. The non-voice, the modulations of silence, somehow conveyed wisdom and kindliness. This is really happening, but it will not happen again—so mark well what I am saying. I am not dead! You must stop torturing yourself and dissipating your one-and-only life. Put the past behind you and go on to other things. Above all, forget about me. Goodbye, Bartan…
The sound of his cup splintering on the ground brought Bartan to his feet. He stood there in the star-shot darkness, swaying and shivering, staring at Farland, which was now just above the western horizon. It registered as a point of pure green light without fringes or optical adornments—but for the first time he saw it as another planet, a world, a real place which was as large as Land or Overland, a seat of life.
“Sondy!” he called out, running a few futile paces forward. “Sondy!”
Farland continued its slow descent to the rim of the world.
Bartan went back into the house, fetched another cup and returned to his bench. He filled the cup and drank from it in small, regular, relentless sips as the enigmatic mote of brilliance gradually extinguished itself, winking on the horizon. When it had vanished from sight he found that his mind had acquired a strange and precarious clarity, an ability—which had to fade soon—to deal with unearthly concepts. Momentous judgments and decisions had to be made quickly, before a vinous tide swept him into lasting unconsciousness.
“I still repudiate all religious belief,” he announced to the darkness, calling on the act of speaking aloud to help imprint his thinking on the coming days and years.
“In doing so I am being totally logical. How do I know I’m being totally logical? Because the Alternists preach that only the soul, the spiritual essence, ventures along the High Path. It is an article of faith that there is no continuance of memory— otherwise every man, woman and child would be burdened beyond endurance with recollections of previous existences. It is obvious that Sondeweere remembers me and every circumstance of our lives—therefore she cannot be an Alternist reincarnation.
“As well as that, there are no known instances of those who have passed on communicating with those who remain. And Sondeweere herself referred to my one-and-only life, which…
which does not really prove anything… but if we all have only one life, and she spoke to me, that proves her life has not ended…
“Sondeweere is physically alive somewhere!”
Bartan shivered and took a longer drink, blurrily elated and overwhelmed at the same time. His momentous discovery had brought many questions in its wake, questions of a kind he was not accustomed to dealing with. Why was he persuaded that Sondeweere was on Farland and not, as was much more likely, in another part of his own world? Was it that the apparition had been so intimately associated with the image of the green planet, or had the strange voiceless message from her been layered with meanings not contained in the bare words? And if she were on Farland—how had she been transported? And why? Was it something to do with the inexplicable lights he had seen on the night of her disappearance? And, granting the other suppositions, what had given her the miraculous ability to speak to him across thousands of miles of space?
And—most pressing of all—now that he had been vouchsafed the new knowledge, what was he going to do with it? What action was he going to take?
Bartan grinned, staring glassily into the darkness. The last question had been the only one to which he could easily supply an answer.
It was obvious that he had to go to Farland and bring Sondeweere home!
“Your wife was abducted!” Reeve Majin Karrodall’s cry of astonishment was followed by an attentive silence among the tavern’s other customers. Bartan nodded. “That’s what I said.”
Karrodall moved closer to him, hand dropping to the hilt of his smallsword. “Do you know who did it? Do you know where she is?”
“I don’t know who was responsible, but I know where she is,” Bartan said. “My wife is living on Farland.”
Some of those nearby emitted gleeful sniggers and the group around him began to increase in size. Karrodall gave them an impatient glance, his red face deepening in colour, before he narrowed his eyes at Bartan.
“Did you say Farland? Are you talking about Farland… in the sky?”
“I am indeed talking about the planet Farland,” Bartan said solemnly. He reached for the alepot which had been set out for him, overbalanced and had to grasp the table for a moment of support.
“You’d better sit down before you fall down.” Karrodall waited until Bartan lowered himself on to a bench. “Bartan, is this more of Trinchil’s teachings? Are you trying to say your wife has died and travelled the High Path?”
“I’m saying she is^alive. On Farland.” Bartan drank deeply from the alepot. “Is that so hard to understand?”
Karrodall straddled the bench. “What’s hard to understand is why you let yourself into a condition which so ill becomes you. You look terrible, you stink—and not only of bad wine—and now you are so soused that your talk is that of a madman. I have told you this before, Bartan, but you must quit the Haunt before it is too late.”
“I have already done so,” Bartan said, wiping froth from his lips with the back of a hand. “I’ll never set foot there again.”
“At least that is one sensible decision on your part. Where will you go?”
“Have I not said?” Bartan surveyed the ring of gleefully incredulous faces. “Why, I’m going to Farland to rescue my wife.”
There was an outbreak of laughter which the reeve’s authority could no longer hold in check. More men crowded around Bartan, while others hurried away to spread the word of the unexpected sport which was to be had at the tavern. Somebody slid a fresh tankard into place in front of Bartan.
The plump, limping figure of Otler approached the group, shouldered his way in and said, “But, my friend, how do you know that your wife has taken up residence on Farland?”
“She told me three nights ago. She spoke to me.”
Otler nudged the man beside him. “The woman looked as though she had a healthy set of bellows, but they must have been better than we knew. What do you say, Alsorn?”
The remark disturbed Bartan’s alcoholic composure. He grabbed Otler’s shirt and tried to pull him down on to the bench, but the reeve thrust them apart and swung a warning finger between the two men.
“All I meant,” Otler complained, tucking his shirt back into his breeches, “was that Farland is a long way off.” He brightened up as a witticism occurred to him. “I mean, that’s what Farland means, isn’t it? Far-land!”
“Being in your company is an education in itself,” Bartan said. “Sondeweere appeared to me in a vision. She spoke to me in a vision.”
Again there was a burst of merriment, and Bartan—stupefied though he was—recognised that he had only succeeded in making himself a figure of fun.