"You've done that already," it said, and destroyed his hope. "Do you want a drink, Herrin Law?"
It was not innocent. He looked into the approximate place of its eyes in the dark, in its dark face, and found his mouth dry and logic on the side of its reality; it knew what it did and how it answered him. He defied it and rolled onto his belly, crawled to the water's edge and used his broken hands to dip up the icy water, drank, muddying his sleeves and paining his hands, then awkwardly tried to get himself back to a dry spot, lay there with his head spinning, feeling feverish.
Patiently it tucked the cloak about him again, silent statement.
"Why did you bring me here?" he asked. Curiosity was always his enemy; he recognized that. It led him places better avoided.
"I rest here," it said.
Worse and worse places. "Where, then?"
A dark, robed arm lifted, toward the west and the hills, up-river. The road ran past those hills, but there were no farms there; were no humans there.
I'll die first, he thought, but in this and in everything he had diminished confidence. "Why?" he asked.
"Where would you go?" it asked him.
He thought, shook his head and squeezed his eyes shut, pressing out tears of frustration. He looked at it again.
"I'll take you into the hills," it said. "There are means I can find there, to heal your hurts."
An end of pain, perhaps; it worked on him with that, as Waden Jenks might, and perhaps as pitilessly. "Do what you like," he said with desperate humor. "I permit it"
The ahnit relaxed its mouth and small, square teeth glinted. "Mostly," it said, "humans are insane." Herrin's heart beat shatteringly hard when he heard that, for what it implied of realities, and this reality was devastatingly strong. "Who broke your hands, Herrin Law?"
He was trembling. "Outsiders. At Waden Jenks's orders."
"Why?"
"So there would be no more statues."
"You disturbed them, didn't you?"
He rolled his eyes to keep the burning from becoming tears, but what he saw was stars and that black distance made him smaller still. "It seems," he said, carefully controlling his voice, "that raw power has its moment."
"Where would you go?" it asked. "Where do you want to go? What is there?"
He shook his head, still refusing to blink. There was nowhere. Wherever he was, what had happened to him remained.
Carefully it slipped its arms beneath him and gathered him up, wrapped as he was in its cloak. It folded him against its bony chest and he made no resistance. It walked, and chose its own way, a sure and constant movement.
XXIII
Student: What if Others existed?
Master Law: Have they relevancy?
Student: Not to man.
Master Law: What if man were their dream?
Master Law: How would you know?
Student: (Silence.)
There was a long time that he shut his eyes and yielded to the motion, and passed more and more deeply into insensibility, jolted out of it occasionally when some stitch of pain grew sharp. Then he would twist his body to ease it, faint and febrile effort, and the ahnit would shift him in its arms, seldom so much as breaking stride. Most of all he could not bear to have his hands dangle free, with the blood swelling in them, with the least brush at the swollen skin turned to agony. He turned to keep them tucked crossed on his chest and thus secure from further hurt. He trusted the steadiness of the arms which held him and the thin legs which strode almost constantly uphill. It was all dark to him. He was lost, without orientation; the river lay behind them—there was no memory of crossing the only bridge but his memory was full of gaps and he could not remember what direction they had been facing when the ahnit had pointed toward the hills. Across the river, he had thought; and up the river; but then he had not remembered the bridge, and he trusted nothing that he remembered.
They climbed and the climb grew steeper and steeper. Grass whispered. The breeze would have been cold if not for the ahnit's own warmth. We shall stop soon, he thought, reckoning that it had him now within its own country, and that it would be content.
But it kept going, and he had time for renewed fear, that it was, after all, mad, and that he was utterly lost, not knowing back from forward. In time exhaustion claimed him again and he had another dark space.
He wakened falling, and flailed wildly, hit his hand on an arm and cried out with surprised misery. His back touched earth gently, and the ahnit's strong arms let him the rest of the way down, knelt above him to touch his face and bend above him. "Rest," it said.
He slept, and wakened with the sun in his face. Waked alone, and with nothing but grass and hills about him and a rising panic at solitude. He levered himself up, squeezing tears of pain from his eyes, broken ribs aching, and his hands . . . at every change in elevation of his head he came close to passing out. Standing up was a calculated risk. He took it swayed on his braced legs and tried to see where he was, but there were hills in all directions.
"Ahnit!" he called out, panicked and thirsty and lost. He wandered a few steps in pain, felt a pressure in his bladder and, crippled as he was, had difficulty even attending that necessity. It frightened him, in a shamed and inexpressible way, that even the privacy of his body was threatened. His knees were shaking under him. He made it back to the place where he had slept and sank down, hands tucked upward on his chest, eyes squeezed shut in misery.
There was sun for a while, and finally a whispering in the grass. He looked toward it, vaguely apprehensive, and an ahnit came striding down the hill, cloakless. By that, it was the one which had left him here: it came to him and knelt down, regarded him with wet black eyes and small, pursed mouth, midnight-skinned. It reached beneath its robes and brought out a ball of matted grasses, contained in some inner pocket; it spread it and revealed a loathsome mass of gray-green pulp. "For your hands," it said.
He was apprehensive of it, but suffered it to take the cloak on which he sat and to shred strips from it . . . finally let it take his right hand and with its three-fingered hand—two proper fingers and opposing member—begin to spread the pungent substance over it. The touch was like ice; it comforted, numbed. "Lie down," it advised him. "Lie still. Take some of it in your mouth and you will feel less."
It offered a bit to his tongue; he took it, mouth at once numbed. In a moment more it dizzied him, and he tried to settle back. It helped him. It took his numb hand then and bound it, and while it hurt, it was a distant hurt and promised ease. "The swelling will go," it promised him. "Then I shall try to straighten the bones. And then too I will be very careful."
He drew easier breaths, drifting between here and there. It tended the other hand and probed his whole body for injury. "Ribs," he said, and with its cautious touches it exposed the bruises and salved them and bound them tightly, holding him in its arms when it had done, for the numbness had spread from his mouth to his fingertips and his toes. He breathed as well as he could, eyes shut, out of most of the pain that he had thought would never stop. Only his mouth was a misery, numb and dry; he tried to moisten his lips over and over and it seemed only worse.
It let him back then, and pillowed his head. "Rest," it seemed to whisper. He was aware of the day's warmth, of sweat trickling on him, of a lassitude too great to be borne. The sweat stopped finally, and the torment of his mouth grew worse.
"Water?" a far, alien voice asked him, rousing him enough to focus on its dark face and liquid eyes. "I can give it from my mouth to yours if you permit."