Otherwise (33 page)

Returning from town, he pushed his way through the small knot of people at the front gate and let himself in at the wicket. When questions were asked he only smiled and shrugged as though he were idiotic, and concentrated on passing quickly through the wicket and getting it locked again, so as not to tempt anyone to follow, and went quickly up the snow-choked road, away from their voices.

He stopped at the farmhouse and went in. A small cell heater had been brought down from the house and was kept going here always, though it barely took the chill from the stone rooms. That was all Hawk needed.

Hawk was deep in molt. He stood on his screen perch, looking scruffy and unhappy. Two primaries had fallen since Loren had last looked in on him—they fell always in pairs, one from each side, so that Hawk wouldn’t be unbalanced in flight—and Loren picked them up and put them with the others. They could be used to make repairs, if ever Hawk broke a feather; but chiefly they were saved as a baby’s outgrown shoes are saved.

The day was calm and bright, the sun almost hot. He’d take Hawk up to the perch on the lawn.

Speaking softly to him, with a single practiced motion he slipped the hood over Hawk’s face and pulled it tight—it was too stiff, it needed oiling, there was no end to this falconer’s job—and then pulled on his glove. He placed the gloved hand beneath Hawk’s train and brushed the back of his legs gently. Hawk, sensing the higher perch behind him, instinctively stepped backward, up onto the glove. He bated slightly as Loren moved his hand to take the leash, and only when Hawk was firmly settled on his wrist did Loren untie the leash that held him to the perch. As between thieves, there was honor between falconer and bird only when everything was checked and no possibility for betrayal—escape—was allowed.

He walked him in the house for a time, stroking up the feathers on his throat with his right forefinger till Hawk seemed content, and then went out into the day, blinking against the glare from the snow, and up to the perch on the wide lawn. From behind the house, he thought he heard the faint whistle of the new motorsleds being started. He tied Hawk’s leash firmly to the perch with a falconer’s one-handed knot, and brushed the perch against the back of his legs so that Hawk would step from his hand up to the perch. He unhooded him. Hawk roused and opened his beak; the inner membranes slid across his dazzled eyes. He looked with a quick motion across the lawn to where three motorsleds in quiet procession were moving beyond a naked hedge.

“What’s up?” Loren shouted, pulling off his glove and hurrying toward them. Mika, and Sten, to whose sled the third, piled up with gear wrapped in plastic, was attached, didn’t turn or stop. Loren felt a sudden, heart-sickening fear. “Wait!” Damn them, they must hear…. He broke through the hedge just as the sleds turned into the snowy fields that stretched north for miles beyond the house. Loren, plowing through the beaten snow, caught Sten’s sled before Sten could maneuver his trailer into position to gather speed. He took Sten’s arm.

“Where are you going?”

“Leave me alone. We’re just going.”

Mika had stopped her sled, and looked back now, reserved, proud.

“I said
where
? And what’s all this stuff?”

“Food.”

“There’s enough here for weeks! What the hell…”

“It’s not for us.”

“Who, then?”

“The leos.” Sten looked away. He wore snow glasses with only a slit to look through; it made him look alien and cruel. “We’re bringing it to the leos. We didn’t tell you because you’d only have said no.”

“Damn right I would! Are you crazy? You don’t even know where they are!”

“I do.”

“How?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“And when will you come back?”

“We won’t.”

“Get out of that sled, Sten.” They had meant to sneak away, without speaking to him, without asking for help. “I said get out.”

Sten pulled away from him and began to pull at the sled’s stalled engine. Loren, maddened by this betrayal, pulled him bodily out of the sled and threw him away from it so that he stumbled in the snow. “Now listen to me. You’re not going anywhere. You’ll get this food back where it belongs”—he came up behind Sten and pushed him again—“and get those sleds out of sight before… before…”

Sten staggered upright in the snow. His glasses had fallen off, but his face was still masked, with something cold and hateful Loren had never seen in it before. It silenced him.

Mika had left her sled and came toward them where they stood facing each other. She looked at Loren, at Sten. Then she came and took Sten’s arm.

“All right,” Loren said. “All right. Listen. Even if you know where you’re going. It’s against the law.” They made no response. “They’re hunted criminals. You will be too.”

“I am already,” Sten said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You wouldn’t have helped, would you?” Mika said. “Even if we’d told you.”

“I would have told you what I thought.”

“You wouldn’t have helped,” she said with quiet, bitter contempt.

“No.” Even as he said it, Loren knew he had indicted himself before them, hopelessly, completely. “You just don’t throw everything up like this. What about the animals? What about Hawk?” He pointed to the bird on his perch, who glanced at them when they moved, then away again.

“You take care of him,” Sten said.

“He’s not my hawk. You don’t leave your hawk to someone else. I’ve told you that.”

“All right.” Sten turned and strode through the snow to the perch. Before Loren could see what he was doing, he had drawn a pocketknife and opened it; it glinted in the snowlight.

“No!”

Sten cut Hawk’s jesses at the leash. Loren ran toward them, stumbling in the snow.

“You little
shit!”

Hawk for a moment didn’t notice any change, but he disliked all this sudden motion and shouting. He was in a mood to bate—to fly off his perch—though he had learned in a thousand bates that he would only fall, flapping helplessly head downward. Sten had taken off his jacket, and with a sudden shout waved it in Hawk’s face. Hawk, with an angry scream, flew upward, stalled, and found himself free; for a moment he thought to return to the perch, but Sten shouted and waved the jacket again, and Hawk rose up in anger and disgust. It felt odd to be free, but it was a good day to fly. He flew.

“Now,” Sten said when Loren reached him, “now he’s nobody’s hawk.”

With an immense effort, Loren stemmed a tide of awful despair that was rising in him. “Now,” he said, calmly, though his voice shook, “go down to the farm and get the long pole and the net. With the sleds, we might be able to get him after dark. He’s gone east to those trees. Sten.”

Sten pulled on his jacket and walked past Loren back to the sleds.

“Mika,” Loren said.

She stood a moment between them, hugging herself. Then, without looking back to Loren, she went to her sled too.

Loren knew he should go after them. Anything could happen to them. But he only stood and watched them struggle with the sleds, get them aligned and started. Sten gave Mika a quiet command and put his snow glasses on again. He looked back once to Loren, masked, his hands on the sticks of the sled. Then the sleds moved away with a high whisper, dark and purposeful against the snow.

“Yes,” Reynard said. “It was I who told Sten where the leos were. It was very clever of him to have worked it out.”

“And you had brought out the film, too, that we saw?”

“Yes.”

“How did you get to them, find them, without being stopped? And back again?”

Reynard said nothing, only sat opposite Loren at the water-ringed table.

“You made Sten a criminal. Why?”

“I couldn’t let the leos die,” Reynard said. “You can understand my feelings.”

Actually that was impossible. His thin, inexpressive voice could mean what it said, or the opposite, or nothing at all. His feelings were undiscoverable. Loren watched him scratch his whiskery chops with delicate dark fingers; it made a dry-grass sound. Reynard took a black cigarette from a case and lit it. Loren watched, trying to discover, in this peculiarly human gesture of lighting tobacco, inhaling smoke, and expelling it, what in Reynard was human, what not. It couldn’t be done. Nothing about the way Reynard used his cigarette was human, yet it was as practiced, casual, natural—as appropriate—as it would be in a man.

“He saved them,” Reynard said, “from death. Not only the leos, but two humans as well. Don’t you think it was brave of him? The rest of the world does.”

From his papers, reaching him usually a week late, Loren had learned of Sten’s growing fame; it was apparent even here, far north of the Autonomy. “It was very foolhardy,” was all he said.

“He took risks. There was danger. Unnecessary, maybe. Maybe if you’d been there, to help… Anyway, he brought it off.”

Loren drank. The whiskey seemed to burn his insides, as though they had already been flayed open by his feelings. He couldn’t tell the fox that he hated him because the fox had taken Sten from him. It wasn’t admissible. It wasn’t even true. Sten had gone on his own to do a difficult thing, and had done it. Mika, who loved him, had gone with him. Loren had been afraid, and so he had lost Sten. Was that so, was that the account he must come to believe?

“He had you, didn’t he?” Loren said.

“Well. I’m not much good now. I was never—strong, really, and you see I’m lamed now.”

“You seem to get around.”

“I’m also,” Reynard said as though not hearing this, “getting very old. I’m nearly thirty. I never expected a life-span that long. I feel ancient.” Smoke-curled from his nostrils. “There is a hunt on for me, Mr. Casaubon. There has been for a long time. I’ve thrown off the scent more than once, but it’s growing late for me. I’m going to earth.” He smiled—perhaps it was a smile—at this, and the ignored ash of his cigarette fell onto the table. “Sten will need you.”

“What is it you wanted from Sten?” Loren asked coldly. He tried to fix Reynard’s eyes, but like an animal’s they wouldn’t hold a stare. “Why did you choose him? What for?”

Reynard put out the cigarette with delicate thoroughness, not appearing to feel challenged. “Did you know,” Reynard said, “how much Sten means in the Northern Autonomy? And outside it too?” He moved slowly in his chair; he seemed to be in some pain. “There is a movement—one of the kind that men seem so easily to work up—to make Sten a kind of king.”

“King?”

“He’d make a good one, don’t you think?” His long face split again in a smile, and closed again. “That he’s an outlaw now, and hunted by the Federal, is only appropriate for a young king—a pretender. The Federal has mismanaged their chance in the Autonomy, as it had to. Sten seems to people everywhere to be—an alternative. Somehow. Some kingly how. Strong, and young, and brave—well. If there are kings—kings born—he’s one. Don’t you agree?”

From the time Loren had opened the
North Star
magazine he had been a subject of Sten’s, he knew that. That Sten must one day pick up a heritage that lay all around him he had always known too, though he had tried to ignore it. He felt, momentarily, like Merlin, who had trained up the boy Arthur in secrecy; saw that what he had trained Sten to be was, in fact, king. There wasn’t any other job he was suited for.

“It’s a fact about kings,” Reynard said, “That they must have around them a certain kind of person. Persons who love the king in the king, but know the man in the king. Persons for whom the king will always be king. Always. No matter what. I don’t mean toadies, or courtiers. I mean—subjects. True subjects. Without them there are no kings. Of course.”

“And you? Are you a king’s man?”

“I’m not a man.”

Already the northern afternoon was gathering in the light. Loren tried to count out the feelings contending in him, but gave it up. “Where is he now?”

“Between places. Nowhere long.” He leaned forward. His voice had grown small and exhausted. “This is a difficulty. He needs a place, a place absolutely secret, a base. Somewhere his adherents could collect. Somewhere to hide—but not a rathole.” Again, the long, yellow-toothed smile. “After all, it will be part of a legend someday.”

Loren felt poised on the edge of a high place, knowing that swarming up within him were emotions that would eventually make him step over. He drank quickly and slid the empty glass away from him on a spill of liquor. “I know a place,” he said. “I think I know a place.”

Reynard regarded him, unblinking, without much interest, it seemed, as Loren described the shot tower, where it was, how it could be gotten to; he supposed the food, the cans anyway, and the cell heater would still be there.

“When can you be there?” Reynard said when he had finished.

“Me?” Reynard waited for an answer. “Listen. I’ll help Sten, because he’s Sten, because… I owe it to him. I’ll hide him if I can, keep him from harm. But this other stuff.” He looked away from Reynard’s eyes. “I’m a scientist. I’ve got a project in hand here.” He drew in spilled liquor on the table—no, not that name, he rubbed it away. “I’m not political.”

“No.” Reynard, unexpectedly, yawned. It was a quick, wide motion like a silent bark; a string of saliva ran from dark palate to long, deep-cloven tongue. “No. No one is, really.” He rose, leaning on his stick, and walked up and down the small, smelly barroom—deserted at this hour—as though taking exercise. “Geese, isn’t it? Your project.” He stopped, leaning heavily on the stick, holding his damaged foot off the ground and turning it tentatively. “Isn’t there a game, fox and geese?”

“Yes.”

“A grid, or paths…”

“The geese try to run past the fox. He catches them where paths join. Each goose he catches has to help him catch others.”

“Ah. I’m a—collector of that kind of lore. Naturally.”

“My geese,” Loren said, “are prey for foxes.”

“Yes?”

“And they know it. They teach it—the old ones teach the young. It doesn’t seem to be imprinted—untaught goslings wouldn’t run from a fox instinctively. The older ones teach them what a fox looks like, by attacking foxes, in a body, and driving them off. The young ones learn to join in. I’ve seen my flock follow a fox for nearly a mile, honking, threatening. The fox looked very uncomfortable.”