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December 28, 2024 - January 9, 2025
inside her head, a voice said, “Run. Get up and run. To the island—now, quick.” And before she knew, she had got to her feet; she was running.
Men have damn short memories.” What he said was harsh, but his voice was always quiet and without harshness.
“I couldn’t stand and watch you drown. Even if you deserved to. But don’t worry. I won’t do it again, and it didn’t give me any power over you. No matter what your Elders may tell you. So go on, you’re free as air and ignorant as ever.”
Closing her right hand, she seemed to hold against her palm a handful of darkness, where his touch had been.
There was some good in outliving your time and remembering old evils.
All of them, in this labor that had gone on half a moonphase now, had obeyed him, and he had obeyed the old Way of Man.
There was lie or panic in that tale. The Gaal never attacked stone walls.
So he heaved himself up and stood to greet the farborn with averted face and hand held out in the greeting of equals. As an equal the alien greeted him, unhesitating. They had always that arrogance, that air of thinking themselves as good as men, whether or not they really believed it.
farborns.” “It’s hard to survive on a world you weren’t made for,”
Take your own counsel, but believe my words!”
Wold felt sorry for him, as he often did for young men, who have not seen how passion and plan over and over are wasted, how their lives and acts are wasted between desire and fear.
Having lived all his life in a little community of his own kind, knowing every name and face and heart, it was hard for him to face strangers. Especially hostile strangers of a different species, in crowds, on their own ground.
Racial pride forbade him to feel any shame for his treatment of the girl, and in fact he felt relief and a return of confidence.
Before the crescent moon rose, the history of a race for six hundred moonphases, ten Years, twenty generations, the long struggle, the long pull might end. Unless he had luck, unless he had patience.
it was the two hundred and second day of Year 1405 of the League of All Worlds; and that it was the twelfth of August at home.
Most people doubted that there was still a League of All Worlds, and a few paradoxicalists liked to question whether there ever had in fact been a home. But the clocks, here in the Great Assembly and down in the Records Room underground, which had been kept running for six hundred League Years, seemed to indicate by their origin and their steadfastness that there had been a League and that there still was a home, a birthplace of the race of man.
Everybody in Landin knew everything, and candor, though wearing and difficult, was the only possible solution to this problem of over-communication.
His cousin ten times over, his sister-playmate-lover-companion, she possessed an immediate understanding of any weakness in him and any pain he felt, and her sympathy, her compassion closed in on him like a trap.
“You’ve got very powerful sense-projection, and lousy control when you’re under strain. He probably did see a ghost.”
All their luxuries, all that made them civilized, all that kept them Alterran, was old.
this world on which he had been born, on which his father and forefathers for twenty-three generations had been born, was not his home. His kind was alien. Profoundly, they were always aware of it. They were the farborn. And little by little, with the majestic slowness, the vegetable obstinacy of the process of evolution, this world was killing them—rejecting the graft.
they had not the knowledge or the skill to combat the sterility and early abortion that reduced their generations.
but there was no telling. All men were alien one to another, at times, not only aliens.
He knew also that it was the last decision he would ever make. He could send them to war: but Umaksuman would come back the leader of the warriors, and thereby the strongest leader among the Men of Askatevar.
Ukwet and others had said openly that when they had finished with the Gaal they would finish off the witches. Agat discounted this, foreseeing that victory would modify, and defeat end, their prejudice; but it worried Umaksuman, who did not look so far ahead.
A flickering speck of white touched his wrist and was gone.
if there was anything he hated it was the stupidity, the obstinate stupidity of uncontrolled passion. It led men to take blind risks, to hazard really important things for a mere moment of lust, to lose control over their acts.
Tomorrow he was off to the north, and if he came back, then there would be time enough to explain to the girl that there could be no more such nights, no more lying together on his fur cloak in the shelter in the forest’s heart, starlight overhead and the cold and the great silence all around … no, no more.… The absolute happiness she had given him came up in him like a tide, drowning all thought. He ceased to tell himself anything.
Through that noise he also heard Umaksuman’s voice. Even he, then … But he did not care, so long as they would go away, would let him be. It was getting dark very early.
At this point whatever we do, any of us, alone or together, is wrong. We can’t do the right thing, the lucky thing. We can only go on committing suicide, little by little, one by one. Till we’re all gone, till Alterra is gone, all the exiles dead …
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 in the ground?
She was a cross old woman and he was a foolish old man, but pride remained.
They were so strong, so safe in their numbers, that their warriors came behind.…
each creature biding its time through the great Year, flourishing and dying down to wait again.
When Agat had gone and the rooms were deathly still she stood gazing at this picture till it became the world and she the wall.
She was no longer a girl, and no longer free. She was the wife of an Alterran, and a prisoner on sufferance. For the first time in her life, she obeyed.
It was not like the hilfs, Agat thought as he lay hidden under an immense fallen tree, waiting for his little army to take their positions for their own assault on Tevar.
They did not look down over time but were in it as the lamp in the night, as the heart in the body.
This planning ahead, this trying to keep hold of a conquered place across both space and time, was untypical; it showed—what? An autonomous change in a hilf culture-pattern, or an infection from the old northern colonies and forays of Man?
You can’t just sit there watching the bastards kill off people slowly.
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.
Other refugees trickled in, some of them from sacked Winter Cities to the north; in all there were now about three hundred of Wold’s race in the farborns’ town. It was so strange to be weak, to be few, to live on the charity of pariahs,
Knowing that he was very far along the way to death, he looked with great benevolence on each day and on all younger men, human or farborn: they were the ones who had to keep fighting.
If the clansmen of Tevar had been ready, if they had marched north to meet the Gaal, if they had looked ahead into a coming time the way Agat seemed to do … No wonder people called farborns witchmen. But then, it was Agat’s fault that they had not marched.
She had lost all her lightness, her aimless, endearing insolence; she was urgent and gentle.
She was equally certain that Agat could not be killed, and that since he would live, she would live. What had death to do with him? He was life; her life.
All at once she saw that she was in fact going to die, believed in her death; she stood still and cried out under her breath, there in the empty street between the high, empty houses.
You cannot begin a love in the beginning of the season of death.
When bearers came with a new patient she looked up with a surge of hope: if it were Agat wounded, then he was not dead.
she was crying because hope was intolerably painful, breaking through into the resignation in which she had lived for days; and pain, since she was only a woman, made her weep.
