White-faced men with red plumes twined hi their horn-like hair came yelling and swinging axes, defending their loot. The dart from Agat's gun shot straight into the open mouth of one; he saw Umaksuman take the arm off a Gaal's shoulder as an axman lops a branch from a tree. Then there was silence. Women crouched in silence in the half-darkness. A baby bawled and bawled. "Come with us!"
Agat shouted. Some of the women moved towards him, and seeing him, stopped.
Umaksuman loomed up beside him in the dun light from the doorway, heavy laden with some burden on his back. "Come, bring the children!" he roared, and at the sound of his known voice they all moved. Agat got them grouped at the stairs with his men strung out to protect them, then gave the word. They broke from the Kinhouse and made for the gate. No Gaal stopped their run—a queer bunch of women, children, men, led by Agat with a Gaal ax running cover for Umaksuman, who carried on his shoulders a great dangling burden, the old chief, his father Wold.
They made it out the gate, ran the gauntlet of a Gaal troop in the old tenting-place, and with other such flying squads of Landin men and refugees hi front of them and behind them, scattered into the woods. The whole run through Tevar had taken about five minutes.
There was no safety in the forest. Gaal scouts and troops were scattered along the road to Landin.
The refugees and rescuers fanned out singly and in pairs southward into the woods. Agat stayed with Umaksuman, who could not defend himself carrying the old man. They struggled through the underbrush. No enemy met them among the gray aisles and hummocks, the fallen trunks and tangled dead branches and mummied bushes. Somewhere far behind them a woman's voice screamed and screamed.
It took them a long time to work south and west in a half-circle through the forest, over the ridges and back north at last to Landin. When Umaksuman could not go any farther, Wold walked, but he could go only very slowly. When they came out of the trees at last they saw the lights of the City of Exile flaring far off in the windy dark above the sea. Half-dragging the old man, they struggled along the hillside and came to the Land Gate.
"Hilfs coming!" Guards sang out before they got within clear sight, spotting Umaksuman's fair hair. Then they saw Agat and the voices cried, "The Alterra, the Alterra!"
They came to meet him and brought him into the city, men who had fought beside him, taken his orders, saved his skin for these three days of guerilla-fighting hi the woods and hills.
They had done what they could, four hundred of them against an enemy that swarmed like the vast migrations of the beasts—fifteen thousand men. Agat had guessed. Fifteen thousand warriors, between sixty or seventy thousand Gaal hi all, with their tents and cookpots and travois and hann and fur rugs and axes and armlets and cradleboards and tinderboxes, all their scant belongings, and their fear of the Whiter, and their hunger. He had seen Gall women in their encampments gathering the dead lichen off logs and eating it. It did not seem probable that the little City of Exile still stood, untouched by this flood of violence and hunger, with torches alight above its gates of iron and carved wood, and men to welcome him home.
Trying to tell the story of the last three days, he said, "We came around behind their line of march, yesterday afternoon." The words had no reality; neither had this warm room, the faces of men and women he had known all his life, listening to him. "The ... the ground behind them, where the whole migration had come down some of the narrow valleys—it looked like the ground after a landslide. Raw dirt. Nothing. Everything trodden to dust, to nothing ..."
"How can they keep going? What do they eat?" Huru muttered.
"The Whiter stores in the cities they take. The land's all stripped by now, the crops are in, the big game gone south. They must loot every town on their course and live off the hann-herds, or starve before they get out of the snow-lands."
"Then they'll come here," one of the Alterrans said quietly.
"I think so. Tomorrow or next day." This was true, but it was not real either. He passed his hand over his face, feeling the dirt and stiffness and the unhealed soreness of his lips. He had felt he must come make his report to the government of his city, but now he was so tired that he could not say anything more, and did not hear what they were saying. He turned to Rolery, who knelt in silence beside him. Not raising her amber eyes, she said very softly, "You should go home, Alterra."
He had not thought of her ah1 those endless hours of fighting and running and shooting and hiding in the woods. He had known her for two weeks; had talked with her at any length perhaps three times; had lam with her once; had taken her as his wife hi the Hall of Law in the early morning three days ago, and an hour later had left to go with the guerillas. He knew nothing much about her, and she was not even of his species. And in a couple of days more they would probably both be dead. He gave his noiseless laugh and put his hand gently on hers. "Yes, take me home," he said.
Silent, delicate, alien, she rose, and waited for him as he took his leave of the others.
He had told her that Wold and Umaksuman, with about two hundred more of her people, had escaped or been res- cued from the violated Winter City and were now in refugee quarters in Landin. She had not asked to go to them. As they went up the steep street together from Alla's house to his, she asked, "Why did you enter Tevar to save the people?"
"Why?" It seemed a strange question to him. "Because they wouldn't save themselves."
"That's no reason, Alterra."
She seemed submissive, the shy native wife who did her lord's will. Actually, he was learning, she was stubborn, willful, and very proud. She spoke softly, but said exactly what she meant.
"It is a reason, Rolery. You can't just sit there watching the bastards kill off people slowly.
Anyhow, I want to fight —to fight back ..."
"But your town: how do you feed these people you brought here? If the Gaal lay siege, or afterwards, in Winter?"
"We have enough. Food's not our worry. All we need is men."
He stumbled a little from weariness. But the clear cold night had cleared his mind, and he felt the rising of a small spring of joy that he had not felt for a long time. He had some sense that this little relief, this lightness of spirit, was given him by her presence. He had been responsible for everything so long. She the stranger, the foreigner, of alien blood and mind, did not share his power or his conscience or his knowledge or his exile. She shared nothing at all with him, but had met him and joined with him wholly and immediately across the gulf of their great difference: as if it were that difference, the alienness between them, that let them meet, and that in joining them together, freed them.
They entered his unlocked front door. No light burned in the high narrow house of roughly dressed stone. It had stood here for three Years, a hundred and eighty moon-phases; his great-grandfather had been born in it, and his grandfather, and his father, and himself. It was as familiar to him as his own body. To enter it with her, the nomad woman whose only home would have been this tent or that on one hillside or another, or the teeming burrows under the snow, gave him a peculiar pleasure. He felt a tenderness towards her which he hardly knew how to express. Without intent he said her name not aloud but paraver-bally. At once she turned to him in the darkness of the hall; in the darkness, she looked into his face* The house and city were silent around them.
In his mind he heard her say his own name, like a whisper in the night, like a touch across the abyss.
"You bespoke me," he said aloud, unnerved, marveling. She said nothing but once more he heard hi his mind, along his blood and nerves, her mind that reached out to him: Agat, Agat ...