CHAPTER SEVEN: The Southing

BRIGHT ABOVE the roofpeaks burned the star whose rising told the start of Whiter, as cheerlessly, bright as Wold remembered it from his boyhood sixty moonphases ago. Even the great, slender crescent moon opposite it in the sky seemed paler than the Snowstar. A new moonphase had begun, and a new season. But not auspiciously.

Was it ture what the farborns used to say, that the moon was a world like Askatevar and the other Ranges, though without living creatures, and the stars too were worlds, where men and beasts, lived and summer and winter came? ... What sort of men would dwell on the Snowstar? Terrible beings, white as snow, with pallid lipless mouths and fiery eyes, stalked through Wold's imagaination. He shook his head and tried to pay attention to what the other Elders were saying.

The fore-runners had returned after only five days with various rumors from the north; and the Elders had built a fire in the great court of Tevar and held a Stone-Pounding. Wold had come last and closed the circle, for no other man dared; but it was meaningless, humiliating to him. For the war he had declared was not being fought, the men he had sent had not gone, and the alliance he had made was broken.

Beside him, as silent as he, sat Umaksuman. The others shouted and wrangled, getting nowhere. What did they ex- pect? No rhythm had risen out of the pounding of stones, there had been only clatter and conflict.

After that, could they expect to agree on anything? Fools, fools, Wold thought, glowering at the fire that was too far away to warm him. The others were mostly younger, they could keep warm with youth and with shouting at one another. But he was an old man and furs did not warm him, out under the glaring Snowstar in the wind of Winter. His legs ached now with cold, his chest hurt, and he did not know or care what they were all quarreling about.

Umaksuman was suddenly on his feet. "Listen!" he said, and the thunder of his voice (He got that from me, thought Wold) compelled them, though there were audible mutters and jeers. So far, though everybody had a fair idea what had happened, the immediate cause or pretext of their quarrel with Landin had not been discussed outside the walls of Wold's Kinhouse; it had simply been announced that Umaksuman was not to lead the foray, that there was to be no foray, that there might be an attack from the farborns. Those of other houses who knew nothing about Rol-ery or Agat knew what was actually involved: a power-struggle between factions in the most powerful clan. This was covertly going on in every speech made now in the Stone-Pounding, the subject of which was, nominally, whether the farborns were to be treated as enemies when met beyond the walls.

Now Umaksuman spoke: "Listen, Elders of Tevar! You say this, you say that, but you have nothing left to say. The Gaal are coming: within three days they are here. Be silent and go sharpen your spears, go look to our gates and walls, because the enemy comes, they come down on us—see!" He flung out his arm to the north, and many turned to stare where he pointed, as if expecting the hordes of the Southing to burst through the wall that moment, so urgent was Umak-suman's rhetoric.

"Why didn't you look to the gate your kinswoman went out of, Umaksuman?" Now it was said.

"She's your kinswoman too, Ukwet," Umaksuman said wrathfully.

One of them was Wold's son, the other his grandson; they spoke of his daughter. For the first time in his life Wold knew shame, bald, helpless shame before all the best men of his people. He sat moveless, his head bowed down.

"Yes, she is; and because of me, no shame rests on our Kin! I and my brothers knocked the teeth out of the dirty face of that one she lay with, and I had him down to geld him as he-animals should be gelded, but then you stopped us, Umaksuman. You stopped us with your fool talk—"

"I stopped you so that we wouldn't have the farborns to fight along with the Gaal, you fool! She's of age to sleep with a man if she chooses, and this is no—"

"He was no man, kinsman, and I am no fool."

"You are a fool, Ukwet, for you jumped at this as a chance to make quarrel with the farborns, and so lost us our one chance to turn aside the Gaal!"

"I do not hear you, liar, traitor!"

They met with a yell in the middle of the circle, axes drawn. Wold got up. Men sitting near him looked up expecting him, as Eldest and clan-chief, to stop the fight. But he did not. He turned away from the broken circle and in silence, with his stiff, ponderous shuffle, went down the alley between the high slant roofs, under projecting eaves, to the house of his Kin.

He clambered laboriously down earthen stairs into the stuffy, smoky warmth of the immense dug-out room. Boys and womenfolk came asking him if the Stone-Pounding was over and why he came alone.

"Umaksuman and Ukwet are fighting," he said to get rid of them, and sat down by the fire, his legs right in the firepit. No good would come of this. No good would come of anything any more. When crying women brought in the body of his grandson Ukwet, a thick path of blood dropping behind them from the ax-split skull, he looked on without moving or speaking. "Umaksuman killed him, his kinsman, his brother," Uk-wet's wives shrilled at Wold, who never raised his head. Finally he looked around at them heavily like an old animal beset by hunters, and said in a thick voice, "Be still ... Can't you be still..."

It snowed again next day. They buried Ukwet, the first-dead of the Winter, and the snow fell on the corpse's face before the grave was filled. Wold thought then and later of Umaksuman, outlawed, alone hi the hills, in the snow. Which was better off?

His tongue was very thick and he did not like to talk. He stayed by the fire and was not sure, sometimes, whether outside it was day or night. He did not sleep well; he seemed somehow always to be waking up. He was just waking up when the noise began outside, up above ground.

Women came shrieking in from the side-rooms, grabbing up then- little Fall-born brats. "The Gaal, the Gaal!" they screeched. Others were quiet as befitted women of a great house, and put the place in order and sat down to wait.

No man came for Wold.

He knew he was no longer a chief; but was he no longer a man? Must he stay with the babies and women by the fire, in a hole hi the ground?

He had endured public shame, but the loss of his own self-respect he could not endure, and shaking a little he got up and began to rummage in his old painted chest for his leather vest and his heavy spear, the spear with which he had killed a snow-ghoul singlehanded, very long ago. He was stiff and heavy now and all the bright seasons had passed since then, but he was the same man, the same that had killed with that spear in the snow of another winter. Was he not the same man? They should not have left him here by the fire, when the enemy came.

His fool womenfolk came squealing around him, and he got mixed up and angry. But old Kerly drove them all off, gave him back his spear that one of them had taken from him, and fastened at his neck the cape of gray korio-fur she had made for him in autumn. There was one left who knew what a man was. She watched him in silence and he felt her grieving pride. So he walked very erect. She was a cross old woman and he was a foolish old man, but pride remained. He climbed up into the cold, bright noon, hearing beyond the walls the calling of foreign-voices.

Men were gathered on the square platform over the smokehold of the House of Absence. They made way for him when he hoisted himself up the ladder. He was wheezing and trembling so that at first he could see nothing. Then he saw. For a while he forgot everything in the unbelievable sight.

The valley that wound from north to south along the base of Tevar Hill to the river-valley east of the forest was full—full as the river in the flood-time, swarming, overrunning with people. They were moving southward, a sluggish, jumbled, dark flood, stretching and contracting, stopping and starting, with yells, cries, calls, creaking, snapping whips, the hoarse bray of hann, the wail of babies, the tuneless chanting of travois-pullers; the flash of color from a rolled-up red felt tent, a woman's painted bangles, a red plume, a spearhead; the stink, the noise, the movement—always the movement, moving southward, the Southing. But in all timepast there had never been a Southing like this, so many all together. As far as eye could follow up the widening valley northward there were more coming, and behind them more, and behind them more. And these were only the women and the brats and the baggage-train ... Beside that slow torrent of people the Winter City of Tevar was nothing. A pebble on the edge of a river in flood.