Kingdoms of the Wall (24 page)

"All right," I said, after a time. "I'll give him a handshake, if you think it'll do any good. What else do you suggest, Hendy?"

"That you invite Muurmut to share his ideas with us about the direction we should take."

"Grycindil said that also."

"As well she might have."

She stared me straight in the eyes for a long moment. Then she turned and walked away.

* * *

Around the campfire that night Jaif sang the Song of the High Peaks, and Ais and Tenilda made astonishingly lovely music by clicking sticks together, and Naxa told a long, involved, and oddly perverse comic fable that he said he had learned from a manuscript five thousand years old, which dealt with the mating of gods and rock-apes. Though we had achieved nothing useful in our day's travel, we were strangely cheerful that evening.

When Naxa was done I walked over to the place where Muurmut sat on the far side of the fire with Talbol and Seppil and said to him, "May we talk?"

"I don't know. May we?"

"Go easy, Muurmut. This has been too pleasant an evening to have it spoiled now."

"You came to me, Crookleg. There was nothing I wanted to say to you."

I could gladly have thrown him into the stream for that "Crookleg." But I held myself in check and said, with a quick glance at Grycindil—who was watching us from a distance—"I owe you an apology, Muurmut."

His expression was one of mingled amazement and wariness. "An apology? For what?"

"For some of the things I said to you when you came back after looking for Min."

He was all suspicion now.

"What are you getting at, Poilar?"

I took a deep breath. And told him that I never would have given him permission to go in search of Min the way he had if he had asked me, but that I had been wrong to accuse him of disobedience, because he had simply jumped up and run off impulsively, without taking the time to ask me whether he could. If there is no refusal of permission, I said, there is no disobedience.

He listened to these dry legalisms with a skeptical expression on his face, and made no reply.

"Furthermore," I said, "I told you then that it had been wrong for you to go after her. In fact I now realize that you did the right thing. If there was any chance at all that Min could have been found and brought back to us, what you did was worth trying."

Plainly Muurmut had expected none of this from me. I was amazed myself that I was able to say it. He continued to stare at me, as if weighing my words to find some secret mockery in them. But there was none, and he seemed to be struggling to believe that. Seppil and Talbol looked at each other in complete bewilderment. I saw Grycindil coming toward us, smiling.

"Well—" Muurmut began, and then he stopped, not knowing what to say.

I said, "I spoke too harshly to you that day. I regret that now. And so I wanted to tell you that I've come to think it was right of you to go in search of Min. And very brave to attempt it alone."

"Well," he said again, almost tongue-tied with perplexity, "Well, then, Poilar—"

He had never seen me in this mode before. No one ever had. And he wasn't at all sure what to make of it. Part of him must still have thought that I was setting him up for some new kind of humiliation.

I stared at him levelly. This was very difficult for me, but I was determined to see it through.

"Well, Muurmut? Are you going to accept my apology or aren't you?"

"If it's sincere, yes, I accept. Why shouldn't I? But I confess I don't understand why you're bothering."

"Because we've used up much too much energy in hatred," I said, "and now we have none to spare." There was little warmth in my tone, none in my eyes. It was hard, all right, forcing myself to crawl to him like this. But I held my hand out toward him. "Can we make an end to all this bickering?"

"Are you resigning your leadership to me, then?" he asked coolly.

Again I came close to dunking him. But I clenched my jaw and replied, as evenly as I could, "Our fellow Pilgrims chose me leader by their vote. If they want to remove me by their vote, so be it. But resigning's not in my spirit. I ask you to accept me ungrudgingly as the leader of this Pilgrimage, Muurmut, as you should. And I'll promise you in return to put aside the coldness I've felt toward you, and draw you into my circle of advisers."

"You want us to be
friends
?" he asked, in disbelief.

"Allies, rather. Fellow Pilgrims, working together for the good of all."

"Well—"

Grycindil, who was at his side now, nudged him sharply with her foot. He glared at her; but then he rose, unlimbering himself until he stood high above me, for he was a very big man. My hand was still out. He took it, though his expression was a strange, strained one.

"Allies, then," he said. "Fellow Pilgrims. Yes. Yes. All right, Poilar. Fellow Pilgrims, working together."

It wasn't the most tender of reconciliations. But it did the job. Tomorrow, I resolved, I would quietly call Muurmut aside and ask him if he had any thoughts on how to leave this valley of streams.

As I walked back to my side of the fire Grycindil came by me and whispered a word of thanks. I nodded and kept going. None of this had been pleasant for me. I had done it the way one lets the cautery be put to a bloody wound: because one must.

14

Every moon was in the sky that night. In all that brightness anyone might have had trouble sleeping; but it was not the brightness that kept me awake. That little talk with Muurmut had left me utterly sleepless, my mind boiling over with turbulent thoughts. I lay tossing for what felt like hours, wondering if I had destroyed myself as a leader by my willingness to make the conciliatory gesture that I had offered Muurmut, which some might see as cowardice, or, at best, unsteadiness of purpose.

No, I kept telling myself. A leader can only gain by showing generosity of spirit. And it was wiser to neutralize and disarm Muurmut with kindness than to allow his rage to fester any longer in his heart.

But none of these fine philosophical thoughts helped me to get to sleep. I lay like a clamped fist, unable to let go. Finally I could lie there no longer. My eyes were aching and my face felt feverish. I slipped out of my bedroll and went down to the stream to splash water in my face.

The others, scattered here and there around the fire, were all asleep, all but Kilarion and Malti, who were on sentry shift They looked half asleep themselves. As I went past them they nodded drowsily toward me. I envied them their drowsiness.

I looked across the stream and saw Hendy camped by herself, as she usually did. I had spoken to her more than once about the risks of keeping herself apart from the rest, but she did as she pleased all the same and finally I had ceased to trouble her about it.

She was awake and alert, sitting up in her bedroll with her chin propped on her hand, watching me. Her eyes were sparkling by the light of the many moons. I remembered how beautiful Hendy had looked, suddenly, while she had been urging a reconciliation with Muurmut upon me a few hours before, and how sweet the fragrance of her shoulders had been. I stared at her and waited, hoping against all hope that she would beckon to me. But of course she merely returned my gaze without responding. Then I remembered how in my anger I had asked her if she were making the Changes with Muurmut, simply because she had come to me to plead on his behalf; and I felt shame rim through me like a bolt of lightning from head to toe.

I had to make amends for that bit of coarseness. Though I had had no invitation from her, I waded across the stream to her side of it. Halfway across I stumbled on a slippery rock and fell headlong, and for a moment I crouched there in the chilly flow, cursing my clumsiness, but laughing also. At such times laughter is best. But this had not been an amusing night for me and it seemed to be getting worse as it went along.

I picked myself up and went to her, and stood above her, dripping. She looked up at me and a flutter of some quick emotion—fear? Or something more complex?—showed on her face for a moment.

I said, "Well, I spoke with Muurmut as you asked."

"Yes. I know."

"I offered him an apology. He wasn't particularly graceful about accepting it. I may not have been all that graceful in the way I offered it. But we made peace, after a fashion."

"Good."

"And tomorrow I'll invite him into councils."

"Yes. Good."

She said no more than that. I stood there, waiting for something else. I felt more like a boy of thirteen than I did like the man of twenty years that I was, with half my life already behind me.

"May I sit next to you?" I asked finally.

Perhaps she smiled, a little. "If you want to. You're all wet. Are you cold?"

"Not really"

"I saw you fall as you were crossing the stream."

"Yes," I said. "I was looking at you instead of at the stream bed. That's a stupid way to cross a stream, I suppose. But I was more interested just then in looking at you."

She said nothing. Her eyes were unreadable.

I knelt beside her and said, "You know that I didn't mean it, don't you, when I asked you before if you were making the Changes with Muurmut?"

"I understood what you were saying, yes."

"It was because I was surprised that you were taking the trouble to speak up for Muurmut, when you had hardly ever involved yourself in disputes of any sort before. And you came to me right after Grycindil, who
is
making the Changes with him. So I felt outnumbered. And in my anger—"

"I told you that I understood what you were saying. There's no need to keep explaining it and explaining it. You'll only muddle things up again." Hendy put her hand on my wrist. It tightened on me with surprising strength. "I can't bear to see you shivering like this. Come in here with me." And she held the flap of her bedroll open.

"Do you mean that?" I asked. "I'll get everything all wet."

"Oh, you
are
stupid, aren't you?"

For the second time in five minutes I laughed at my own foolishness, and scrambled in beside her. She moved to the right-hand side of the bedroll to make room for me; there was open space between us. For the moment I made no move toward closing it. I sensed a war going on in Hendy between her innate mistrust of other people and the desire finally to let herself go, to open herself to another person and allow herself to be embraced. Thissa too had been like that. But Thissa was a santha-nilla, cut off from all those around her by the powers of her witchcraft: she could never be anything more than a visitor in the lives of others. Hendy, I suspected, was struggling to put an end to the aloofness that imprisoned her; and the struggle must not have been a simple one for her. But she had decided that now was the moment for ending it. I was amazed and grateful that she would choose me for that. She could have whatever she wanted of me, whether it be an hour's quiet talk or a gentle embrace or even the Changes itself. I told myself that I would be as patient and as gentle as I knew how to be. I had done all the clumsy things I meant to do for this night.

She said, lying back and speaking upward into the darkness, "You aren't really stupid, Poilar. You were trying to be kind, I know."

That is not the sort of thing to which one can reply. So I lay there quietly beside her.

"And you knew all along that there was nothing between Muurmut and me, that there never could be."

"Yes. That much I knew. Truly."

"I would never choose someone like Muurmut for a lover. He reminds me too much of the men of Tipkeyn who stole me from our village when I was a girl." She paused for a little while. Then she said, "I haven't ever chosen
anyone
for a lover, Poilar."

I looked at her in astonishment. "You've never made the Changes, not ever?"

"That was not what I said," she replied, and I felt foolish all over again. "But I've never
chosen
anyone. To choose means to express one's own free will."

I pondered that for a moment. Then my face grew hot with confusion.

"You mean that when you were living in Tipkeyn—without your consent—they attempted to—"

"Yes. Don't ask me about it. Please."

I couldn't stop myself. "But how could they?" I said. "It's impossible to force the Changes. How can it be done, if the woman doesn't initiate them in herself?" I faltered and fell silent. What did I know about such things? There were evils in the world beyond my dreaming, and unquestionably some of them had touched Hendy—and again, yet again, I was being stupid.

I found myself unable to look at her, unwilling to let my eyes intrude on her shame. So I turned so that I was lying with my face upward, looking into the moonlit sky, as she was.

"I was ten years old," she said softly. "I was in a strange village and I was frightened. They gave me wine, very strong wine. Then I wasn't so frightened. And they began to touch me. They told me what I had to do, and when I balked, they gave me more wine. After a time I didn't know where I was or who I was or what I was doing."