The wind's twelve quarters - vol 2 (10 page)
Read The wind's twelve quarters - vol 2 Online
Authors: Ursula K. Le Guin
Tags: #Science Fiction, #General, #Short Stories, #Short stories; English, #Fiction
If
he thought, sitting there in the dark, his thoughts found no words. He was
feverish from exhaustion and smoke inhalation and a few slight burns, and in an
abnormal condition of mind; but perhaps his mind's workings, though lucid and
serene, had never been normal. It is not normal for a man to spend twenty years
grinding lenses, building telescopes, peering at stars, making calculations,
lists, maps and charts of things which no one knows or cares about, things
which cannot be reached, or touched, or held. And now all he had spent his life
on was gone, burned. What was left of him might as well be, as it was, buried.
But
it did not occur to him, this idea of being buried. All he was keenly aware of
was a great burden of anger and grief, a burden he was unfit to carry. It was
crushing his mind, crushing out reason. And the darkness here seemed to relieve
that pressure. He was accustomed to the dark, he had lived at night. The weight
here was only rock, only earth. No granite is so hard as hatred and no clay so
cold as cruelty. The earth's black innocence enfolded him. He lay down within
it, trembling a little with pain and with relief from pain, and slept.
Light
waked him. Count Bord was there, lighting the candle with flint and steel.
Bord's face was vivid in the light: the high color and blue eyes of a keen
huntsman, a red mouth, sensual and obstinate. 'They're on the scent,' he was
saying. 'They know you got away.'
'Why...'
said the astronomer. His voice was weak; his throat, like his eyes, was still
smoke-inflamed. 'Why are they after me?'
'Why?
Do you still need telling? To burn you alive, man! For heresy!' Bord's blue
eyes glared through the steadying glow of the candle.
'But
it's gone, burned, all I did.'
'Aye,
the earth's stopped, all right, but where's their fox? They want their fox! But
damned if I'll let them get you.'
The
astronomer's eyes, light and wide-set, met his and held. 'Why?'
'You
think I'm a fool,' Bord said with a grin that was not a smile, a wolf's grin,
the grin of the hunted and the hunter. 'And I am one. I was a fool to warn you.
You never listened. I was a fool to listen to you. But I liked to listen to
you. I liked to hear you talk about the stars and the courses of the planets
and the ends of time. Who else ever talked to me of anything but seed corn and
cow dung? Do you see? And I don't like soldiers and strangers, and trials and
burnings. Your truth, their truth, what do I know about the truth? Am I a
master? Do I know the courses of the stars? Maybe you do. Maybe they do. All I
know is you have sat at my table and talked to me. Am I to watch you burn?
God's fire, they say; but you said the stars are the fires of God. Why do you
ask me that, "Why?" Why do you ask a fool's question of a fool?'
'I
am sorry,' the astronomer said.
'What
do you know about men?' the count said. 'You thought they'd let you be. And you
thought I'd let you burn.' He looked at Guennar through the candlelight,
grinning like a driven wolf, but in his blue eyes there was a glint of real
amusement. 'We who live down on the earth, you see, not up among the stars...'
He
had brought a tinderbox and three tallow candles, a bottle of water, a ball of
peas-pudding, a sack of bread. He left soon, warning the astronomer again not
to venture out of the mine.
When
Guennar woke again a strangeness in his situation troubled him, not one which
would have worried most people hiding in a hole to save their skins, but most
distressing to him: he did not know the time.
It
was not clocks he missed, the sweet banging of the church bells in the villages
calling to morning and evening prayer, the delicate and willing accuracy of the
timepiece he used in his observatory and on whose refinement so many of his discoveries
had depended; it was not the clocks he missed, but the great clock.
Not
seeing the sky, one cannot know the turning of the earth. All the processes of
time, the sun's bright arch and the moon's phases, the planet's dance, the
wheeling of the constellations around the pole star, the vaster wheeling of the
seasons of the stars, all these were lost, the warp on which his life was
woven.
Here
there was no time.
'O
my God,' Guennar the astronomer prayed in the darkness underground, 'how can it
offend you to be praised? All I ever saw in my telescopes was one spark of your
glory, one least fragment of the order of your creation. You could not be
jealous of that, my Lord! And there were few enough who believed me, even so.
Was it my arrogance in daring to describe your works? But how could I help it,
Lord, when you let me see the endless fields of stars? Could I see and be
silent? O my God, do not punish me any more, let me rebuild the smaller
telescope. I will not speak, I will not publish, if it troubles your holy
Church. I will not say anything more about the orbits of the planets or the
nature of the stars. I will not speak, Lord, only let me see!'
'What
the devil, be quiet, Master Guennar. I could hear you halfway up the tunnel,'
said Bord, and the astronomer opened his eyes to the dazzle of Bord's lantern.
'They've called the full hunt up for you. Now you're a necromancer. They swear
they saw you sleeping in your house when they came, and they barred the doors;
but there's no bones in the ashes.'
'I
was asleep,' Guennar said, covering his eyes. 'They came, the soldiers ... I
should have listened to you. I went into the passage under the dome. I left a
passage there so I could go back to the hearth on cold nights, when it's cold
my fingers get too stiff, I have to go warm my hands sometimes.' He spread out
his blistered, blackened hands and looked at them vaguely. 'Then I heard them
overhead...'
'Here's
some more food. What the devil, haven't you eaten?'
'Has
it been long?'
'A
night and a day. It's night now. Raining. Listen, Master: there's two of the
black hounds living at my house now. Emissaries of the Council, what the devil,
I had to offer hospitality. This is my county, they're here, I'm the count. It
makes it hard for me to come. And I don't want to send any of my people here.
What if the priests asked them, 'Do you know where he is? Will you answer to
God you don't know where he is?' It's best they don't know. I'll come when I
can. You're all right here? You'll stay here? I'll get you out of here and over
the border when they've cleared away. They're like flies now. Don't talk aloud
like that. They might look into these old tunnels. You should go farther in. I
will come back. Stay with God, Master.'
'Go
with God, count.'
He
saw the color of Bord's blue eyes, the leap of shadows up the rough-hewn roof
as he took up the lantern and turned away. Light and color died as Bord, at the
turning, put out the lantern. Guennar heard him stumble and swear as he groped
his way.
Presently
Guennar lighted one of his candles and ate and drank a little, eating the
staler bread first, and breaking off a piece of the crusted lump of
peas-pudding. This time Bord had brought him three loaves and some salt meat,
two more candles and a second skin bottle of water, and a heavy duffle cloak.
Guennar had not felt cold. He was wearing the coat he always wore on cold
nights in the observatory and very often slept in, when he came stumbling to
bed at dawn. It was a good sheepskin, filthy from his rummagings in the
wreckage in the dome and scorched at the sleeve-ends, but it was as warm as
ever, and was like his own skin to him. He sat inside it eating, gazing out
through the sphere of frail yellow candlelight to the darkness of the tunnel
beyond. Bord's words, 'You should go farther in,' were in his mind. When he was
done eating he bundled up the provisions in the cloak, took up the bundle in
one hand and the lighted candle in the other, and set off down the side-tunnel
and then the adit, down and inward.
After
a few hundred paces he came to a major cross-tunnel, off which ran many short
leads and some large rooms or stopes. He turned left, and presently passed a
big stope in three levels. He entered it. The farthest level was only about
five feet under the roof, which was still well timbered with posts and beams.
In a corner of the backmost level, behind an angle of quartz intrusion which
the miners had left jutting out as a supporting buttress, he made his new camp,
setting out the food, water, tinderbox, and candles where they would come under
his hand easily in the dark, and laying the cloak as a mattress on the floor,
which was of a rubbly, hard clay. Then he put out the candle, already burned
down by a quarter of its length, and lay down in the dark.
After
his third return to that first side-tunnel, finding no sign that Bord had come
there, he went back to his camp and studied his provisions. There were still
two loaves of bread, half a bottle of water, and the salt meat, which he had
not yet touched; and four candles. He guessed that it might have been six days
since Bord had come, but it might have been three, or eight. He was thirsty,
but dared not drink, so long as he had no other supply.
He
set off to find water.
At
first he counted his paces. After a hundred and twenty he saw that the
timbering of the tunnel was askew, and there were places where the rubble fill
had broken through, half filling the passage. He came to a winze, a vertical
shaft, easy to scramble down by what remained of the wooden ladder, but after
it, in the lower level, he forgot to count his steps. Once he passed a broken
pick handle; farther on he saw a miner's discarded headband, a stump of candle
still stuck in the forehead socket. He dropped this into the pocket of his coat
and went on.
The
monotony of the walls of hewn stone and planking dulled his mind. He walked on
like one who will walk forever. Darkness followed him and went ahead of him.
His
candle burning short spilled a stream of hot tallow on his fingers, hurting
him. He dropped the candle, and it went out.
He
groped for it in the sudden dark, sickened by the reek of its smoke, lifting
his head to avoid that stink of burning. Before him, straight before him, far
away, he saw the stars.
Tiny,
bright, remote, caught in a narrow opening like the slot in the observatory
dome: an oblong full of stars in blackness.
He
got up, forgetting about the candle, and began to run towards the stars.
They
moved, dancing, like the stars in the telescope field when the clockwork
mechanism shuddered or when his eyes were very tired. They danced, and
brightened.
He
came among them, and they spoke to him.
The
flames cast queer shadows on the blackened faces and brought queer lights out
of the bright, living eyes.
'Here
then, who's that? Hanno?'
'What
were you doing up that old drift, mate?'
'Hey,
who is that?'
'Who
the devil, stop him—'
'Hey,
mate! Hold on!'
He
ran blind into the dark, back the way he had come. The lights followed him and
he chased his own faint, huge shadow down the tunnel. When the shadow was
swallowed by the old dark and the old silence came again he still stumbled on,
stooping and groping so that he was oftenest on all fours or on his feet and
one hand. At last he dropped down and lay huddled against the wall, his chest
full of fire.
Silence,
dark.
He
found the candle end in the tin holder in his pocket, lighted it with the flint
and steel, and by its glow found the vertical shaft not fifty feet from where
he had stopped. He made his way back up to his camp. There he slept; woke and
ate, and drank the last of his water; meant to get up and go seeking water
again; fell asleep, or into a doze or daze, in which he dreamed of a voice
speaking to him.
'There
you are. All right. Don't startle. I'll do you no harm. I said it wasn't no
knocker. Who ever heard of a knocker as tall as a man? Or who ever seen one,
for that matter. They're what you
don't
see, mates,
I said. And what we did see was a man, count on it. So what's he doing in the
mine, said they, and what if he's a ghost, one of the lads that was caught when
the house of water broke in the old south adit, maybe, come walking? Well then,
I said, I'll go see that. I never seen a ghost yet, for all I heard of them. I
don't care to see what's not meant to be seen, like the knocker folk, but what
harm to see Temon's face again, or old Trip, haven't I seen 'em in dreams, just
the same, in the ends, working away with their faces sweating same as life? Why
not? So I come along. But you're no ghost, nor miner. A deserter you might be,
or a thief. Or are you out of your wits, is that it, poor man? Don't fear. Hide
if you like. What's it to me? There's room down here for you and me. Why are
you hiding from the light of the sun?'
