Seiko only nodded. Her face was tight and strange. She said in a high voice, "They're shooting firebrands now, and throwing burning stuff down from the roofs. They can't break in so they're going to burn the buildings and the stores and then we all can starve together in the cold. If the Hall catches fire you'll be trapped down here. Burnt alive."
Rolery ate her food and said nothing. The hot bhan-meal had been flavored with meat juice and chopped herbs. The farborns under siege were better cooks than her people in the midst of Autumn plenty. She finished up her bowl, and also the half-bowlful a wounded man left, and another scrap or two, and brought the tray back to Seiko, only wishing there had been more.
No one else came down for a long time. The men slept, and moaned in their sleep. It was warm; the heat of the gas-fires rose up through the gratings making it comfortable as a fire-warmed tent.
Through the breathing of the men sometimes Rolery could hear the tick, tick, tick of the roundfaced things on the walls, and they, and the glass cases pushed back against the wall, and the high rows of books, winked in gold and brown glimmerings in the soft, steady light of the gasflares.
"Did you give him the analgesic?" Wattock whispered, and she shrugged yes, rising from beside one of the men. The old bonesetter looked half a Year older than he was, as he squatted down beside Rolery at a study table to cut bandages, of which they had run short. He was a very great doctor, hi Rolery's eyes. To please him in his fatigue and discouragement she asked him, "Elder, if it's not the weapon-evil that makes a wound rot, what thing does?"
"Oh—creatures. Little beasts, too small to see. I could only show 'em to you with a special glass, like that one in the case over there. They live nearly everywhere; they're on the weapon, in the air, on the skin. If they get into the blood, the body resists 'em and the battle is what causes the swelling and all that. So the books say. It's nothing that ever concerned me as a doctor."
"Why don't the creatures bite farborns?"
"Because they don't like foreigners." Wattock snorted at his small joke. "We are foreign, you know. We can't even digest food here unless we take periodic doses of certain enzymoids. We have a chemical structure that's very slightly different from the local organic norm, and it shows up in the cytoplasm—You don't know what that is. Well, what it means is, we're made of slightly different stuff that you hilfs are."
"So that you're dark-skinned and we light?" "No, that's unimportant. Totally superficial variations, color and eye-structure and all that. No, the difference is on a lower level, and is very small—one molecule in the hereditary chain," Wattock said with relish, warming to his lecture. "It causes no major divergence from the Common Hominid Type in you hilfs; so the first colonists wrote, and they knew. But it means that we can't interbreed with you; or digest local organic food without help; or react to your viruses... . Though as a matter of fact, this enzymoid business is a bit overdone. Part of the effort to do exactly as the First Generation did.
Pure superstition, some of that. I've seen people come hi from long hunting-trips, or the Atlantika refugees last Spring, who hadn't taken an enzy^ moid shot or pill for two or three moonphases, but weren't failing to digest. Life tends to adapt, after all." As he said this Wattock got a very odd expression, and stared at her. She felt guilty, since she had no idea what he had been explaining to her: none of the key words were words in her language. "Life what?" she inquired timidly.
"Adapts. Reacts. Changes! Given enough pressure, and enough generations, the favorable adaptation tends to prevail... . Would the solar radiation work in the long run towards a sort of local biochemical norm ... all the stillbirths and miscarriages then would be overadaptations or maybe incompatibility between the mother and a normalized fetus ..." Wattock stopped waving his scissors and bent to his work again, but in a moment he was looking up again in his unseeing, intense way and muttering, "Strange, strange, strange! ... That would imply, you know, that cross-fertilization might take place."
"I listen again," Rollery murmured.
"That men and hilfs could breed together!" This she understood at last, but did not understand whether he said it as a fact or a wish or a dread. "Elder, I am too stupid to hear you," she said.
"You understand him well enough," said a weak voice nearby: Pilotson Alterra, lying awake. "So you think we've finally turned into a drop in the bucket, Wattock?" Pilotson had raised up on his elbow. His dark eyes glittered in his gaunt, hot, dark face.
"If you and several of the others do have infected wounds, then the fact's got to be explained somehow."
"Damn adaptation then. Damn your crossbreeding and fertility!" the sick man said, and looked at Rolery. "So long as we've bred true we've been Man. Exiles, Alterrans, humans. Faithful to the knowledge and the Laws of Man. Now, if we can breed with the hilfs, the drop of our human blood will be lost before another Year's past. Diluted, thinned out to nothing. Nobody will set these instruments, or read these books. Jakob Agat's grandsons will sit pounding two rocks together and yelling, till the end of time ... Damn you stupid barbarians, can't you leave men alone— alone!"
He was shaking with fever and fury. Old Wattock, who had been fiddling with one of his little hollow darts, filling it up, now reached over in his smooth doctorly way and shot poor Pilotson in the forearm. "Lie down, Huru," he said, and with a puzzled expression the wounded man obeyed. "I don't care if I die of your filthy infections," he said in a thickening voice, "but your filthy brats, keep them away from here, keep 'em out of the ... out of the City ..."
"That'll hold him down a while," Wattock said, and sighed. He sat hi silence while Rolery went on preparing bandages. She was deft and steady at such work. The old doctor watched her with a brooding face.
When she straightened up to ease her back she saw the old man too had fallen asleep, a dark pile of skin and bones hunched up in the corner behind the table. She worked on, wondering if she had understood what he said, and if he had meant it: that she could bear Agat's son.
She had totally forgotten that Agat might very well be dead already, for all she knew. She sat there among the sleep of wounded men, under the ruined city full of death, and brooded speechlessly on the chance of life.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN: The First Day
THE COLD gripped harder as night fell. Snow that had thawed in sunlight froze as slick ice.
Concealed on nearby roofs or in attics, the Gaal shot over their pitch-tipped arrows that arched red and gold like birds of fire through the cold twilit air. The roofs of the four beleaguered buildings were of copper, the walls of stone; no fire caught. The attacks on the barricades ceased, no more arrows of iron or fire were shot. Standing up on the barricade, Jakob Agat saw the darkening streets slant off empty between dark houses.
At first the men in the Square waited for a night attack, for the Gaal were plainly desperate; but it grew colder, and still colder. At last Agat ordered that only the minimum watch be kept, and let most of the men go to get their wounds looked after, and get food and rest. If they were exhausted, so must the Gaal be, and they at least were clothed against this cold while the Gaal were not. Even desperation would not drive the northerners out into this awful, starlit clarity, in their scant rags of fur and felt. So the defenders slept, many at their posts, huddled hi the halls and by the windows of warm buildings. And the besiegers, without food, pressed around campfires built in high stone rooms; and their dead lay stiff-limbed hi the ice-crusted snow below the barricades. Agat wanted no sleep. He could not go inside the buildings, leaving the Square where all day long they had fought for their lives, and which now lay so still under the Winter constellations. The Tree; and the Arrow; and the Track of five stars; and the Snowstar itself, fiery above the eastern roofs: the stars of Whiter. They burned like crystals hi the profound, cold blackness overhead.