16. Between Drumner and Dremegole

   Odyrny Thern. Ai asks from his sleeping-bag, “What is it you’re writing, Harth?”
   “A record.”
   He laughs a little. “I ought to be keeping a journal for the Ekumenical files; but I never could stick to it without a voice-writer.”
   I explain that my notes are intended for my people at Estre, who will incorporate them as they see fit into the Records of the Domain; this turning my thoughts to my Hearth and my son, I seek to turn them away again, and ask, “Your parent—your parents, that is—are they alive?”
   “No,” says Ai. “Seventy years dead.”
   I puzzled at it. Ai was not thirty years old. “You’re counting years of a different length than ours?”
   “No. Oh, I see. I’ve timejumped. Twenty years from Earth to Hain-Davenant, from there fifty to Ellul, from Ellul to here seventeen. I’ve only lived off-Earth seven years, but I was born there a hundred and twenty years ago.”
   Long since in Erhenrang he had explained to me how time is shortened inside the ships that go almost as fast as starlight between the stars, but I had not laid this fact down against the length of a man’s life, or the lives he leaves behind him on his own world. While he lived a few hours in one of those unimaginable ships going from one planet to another, everyone he had left behind him at home grew old and died, and their children grew old… I said at last, “I thought myself an exile.”
   “You for my sake—I for yours,” he said, and laughed again, a slight cheerful sound in the heavy silence. These three days since we came down from the pass have been much hard work for no gain, but Ai is no longer downcast, nor overhopeful; and he has more patience with me. Maybe the drugs are sweated out of him. Maybe we have learned to pull together.
   We spent this day coming down from the basaltic spur which we spent yesterday climbing. From the valley it looked a good road up onto the Ice, but the higher we went the more scree and slick rock-face we met, and a grade ever steeper, till even without the sledge we could not have climbed it. Tonight we are back down at the foot of it in the moraine, the valley of stones. Nothing grows here. Rock, pebble-dump, boulder-fields, clay, mud. An arm of the glacier has withdrawn from this slope within the last fifty or hundred years, leaving the planet’s bones raw to the air; no flesh of earth, of grass. Here and there fumaroles cast a heavy yellowish fog over the ground, low and creeping. The air smells of sulphur. It is 12°, still, overcast. I hope no heavy snow falls until we have got over the evil ground between this place and the glacier-arm we saw some miles to the west from the ridge. It seems to be a wide ice-river running down from the plateau between two mountains, volcanoes, both cappedwith steam and smoke. If we can get onto it from the slopes of the nearer volcano, it may provide us a road up onto the plateau of ice. To our east a smaller glacier comes down to a frozen lake, but it runs curving and even from here the great crevasses in it can be seen; it is impassible to us, equipped as we are. We agreed to try the glacier between the volcanoes, though by going west to it we lose at least two days’ mileage towards our goal, one in going west and one in regaining the distance.
 
   Opposthe Thern. Snowing neserem [7]
   No travel in this. We both slept all day. We have been hauling nearly a halfmonth, the sleep does us good.
   Ottormenbod Thern. Snowing neserem. Enough sleep. Ai taught me a Terran game played on squares with little stones, called go, an excellent difficult game. As he remarked, there are plenty of stones here to play go with.
   He endures the cold pretty well, and if courage were enough, would stand it like a snow-worm. It is odd to see him bundled up in hieb and overcoat with the hood up, when the temperature is above zero; but when we sledge, if the sun is out or the wind not too bitter, he takes off the coat soon and sweats like one of us. We must compromise as to the heating of the tent. He would keep it hot, I cold, and either’s comfort is the other’s pneumonia. We strike a medium, and he shivers outside his bag, while I swelter in mine; but considering from what distances we have come together to share this tent a while, we do well enough.
   Getheny Thanern. Clear after the blizzard, wind down, the thermometer around 15° all day. We are camped on the lower western slope of the nearer volcano: Mount Dremegole, on my map of Orgoreyn. Its companion across the ice-river is called Drumner. The map is poorly made; there is a great peak visible to the west not shown on it at all, and it is all out of proportion. The Orgota evidently do not often come into their Fire-Hills. Indeed there is not much to come for, except grandeur. We hauled eleven miles today, difficult work: all rock. Ai is asleep already. I bruised the tendon of my heel, wrenching it like a fool when my foot was caught between two boulders, and limped out the afternoon. The night’s rest should heal it. Tomorrow we should get down onto the glacier.
   Our food-supplies seem to have sunk alarmingly, but it is because we have been eating the bulky stuff. We had between ninety and a hundred pounds of coarse foodstuffs, half of it the load I stole in Turuf; sixty pounds of this are gone, after fifteen days’ journey. I have started on the gichy-michy at a pound a day, saving two sacks of kadik-germ, some sugar, and a chest of dried fishcakes for variety later. I am glad to be rid of that heavy stuff from Turuf. The sledge pulls lighter.
   Sordny Thanern. In the 20’s; frozen rain, wind pouring down the ice-river like the draft in a tunnel. Camped a quarter mile in from the edge, on a long flat streak of firn. The way down from Dremegole was rough and steep, on bare rock and rock-fields; the glacier’s edge heavily crevassed, and so foul with gravel and rocks caught in the ice that we tried the sledge on wheels there too. Before we had got a hundred yards a wheel wedged fast and the axle bent. We use runners henceforth. We made only four miles today, still in the wrong direction. The effluent glacier seems to run on a long curve westerly up to the Gobrin plateau. Here between the volcanoes it is about four miles wide, and should not be hard going farther in towards the center, though it is more crevassed than I had hoped, and the surface rotten.
   Drumner is in eruption. The sleet on one’s lips tastes of smoke and sulphur. A darkness loured all day in the west even under the rainclouds. From time to time all things, clouds, icy rain, ice, air, would turn a dull red, then fade slowly back to gray. The glacier shakes a little under our feet.
   Eskichwe rem ir Her hypothesized that the volcanic activity in N.W. Orgoreyn and the Archipelago has been increasing during the last ten or twenty millennia, and presages the end of the Ice, or at least a recession of it and an interglacial period. CO2 released by the volcanoes into the atmosphere will in time serve as an insulator, holding in the longwave heat-energy reflected from the earth, while permitting direct solar heat to enter undiminished. The average world temperature, he says, would in the end be raised some thirty degrees, till it attains 72°. I am glad I shall not be present. Ai says that similar theories have been propounded by Terran scholars to explain the still incomplete recession of their last Age of Ice. All such theories remain largely irrefutable and unprovable; no one knows certainly why the ice comes, why it goes. The Snow of Ignorance remains untrodden.
   Over Drumner in the dark now a great table of dull fire burns.
   Eps Thanern. The meter reads sixteen miles hauled today, but we are not more than eight miles in a straight line from last night’s camp. We are still in the ice-pass between the two volcanoes. Drumner is in eruption. Worms of fire crawl down its black sides, seen when wind clears off the roil and seethe of ash-cloud and smoke-cloud and white steam. Continuously, with no pause, a hissing mutter fills the air, so huge and so long a sound that one cannot hear it when one stops to listen; yet it fills all the interstices of one’s being. The glacier trembles perpetually, snaps and crashes, jitters under our feet. All the snowbridges that the blizzard may have laid across crevasses are gone, shaken down, knocked in by this drumming and jumping of the ice and the earth beneath the ice. We go back and forth, seeking the end of a slit in the ice that would swallow the sledge whole, then seeking the end of the next, trying to go north and forced always to go west or east. Above us Dremegole, in sympathy with Drum-ner’s labor, grumbles and farts foul smoke.
   Ai’s face was badly frostbitten this morning, nose, ears, chin all dead gray when I chanced to look at him. Kneaded him back to life and no damage done, but we must be more careful. The wind that blows down off the Ice is, in simple truth, deadly; and we have to face it as we haul.
   I shall be glad to get off this slit and wrinkled ice-arm between two growling monsters. Mountains should be seen, not heard.
   Arhad Thanern. Some sove-snow, between 15 and 20°. We went twelve miles today, about five of them profitable, and the rim of the Gobrin is visibly nearer, north, above us. We now see the ice-river to be miles wide: the “arm” between Drumner and Dremegole is only one finger, and we now are on the back of the hand. Turning and looking down from this camp one sees the glacier-flow split, divided, torn and churned by the black steaming peaks that thwart it. Looking ahead one sees it broaden, rising and curving slowly, dwarfing the dark ridges of earth, meeting the ice-wall far above under veils of cloud and smoke and snow. Cinders and ash now fall with the snow, and the ice is thick with clinkers on it or sunk in it: a good walking surface but rather rough for hauling, and the runners need recoating already. Two or three times volcanic projectiles hit the ice quite near us. They hiss loudly as they strike, and burn themselves a socket in the ice. Cinders patter, falling with the snow. We creep infmitesimally northward through the dirty chaos of a world in the process of making itself.
   Praise then Creation unfinished!
   Netherhad Thanern. No snow since morning; overcast and windy, at about 15°. The great multiple glacier we are on feeds down into the valley from the west, and we are on its extreme eastern edge. Dremegole and Drumner are now somewhat behind us, though a sharp ridge of Dremegole still rises east of us, almost at eyelevel. We have crept and crawled up to a point where we must choose between following the glacier on its long sweep westward and so up gradually onto the plateau of ice, or climbing the ice-cliffs a mile north of tonight’s camp, and so saving twenty or thirty miles of hauling, at the cost of risk.
   Ai favors the risk.
   There is a frailty about him. He is all unprotected, exposed, vulnerable, even to his sexual organ which he must carry always outside himself; but he is strong, unbelievably strong. I am not sure he can keep hauling any longer than I can, but he can haul harder and faster than I—twice as hard. He can lift the sledge at front or rear to ease it over an obstacle. I could not lift and hold that weight, unless I was in dothe. To match his frailty and strength, he has a spirit easy to despair and quick to defiance: a fierce impatient courage. This slow, hard, crawling work we have been doing these days wears him out in body and will, so that if he were one of my race I should think him a coward, but he is anything but that; he has a ready bravery I have never seen the like of. He is ready, eager, to stake life on the cruel quick test of the precipice.
   “Fire and fear, good servants, bad lords.” He makes fear serve him. I would have let fear lead me around by the long way. Courage and reason are with him. What good seeking the safe course, on a journey such as this? There are senseless courses, which I shall not take; but there is no safe one.
   Streth Thanern. No luck. No way to get the sledge up, though we spent the day at it.
   Sove-snow in flurries, thick ash mixed with it. It was dark all day, as the wind veering around from the west again blew the pall of Drumner’s smoke on us. Up here the ice shakes less, but there came a great quake while we tried to climb a shelving cliff; it shook free the sledge where we had wedged it and I was pulled down five or six feet with a bump, but Ai had a good handhold and his strength saved us from all careering down to the foot of the cliff, twenty feet or more. If one of us breaks a leg or shoulder in these exploits, that is probably the end of both of us; there, precisely, is the risk—rather an ugly one when looked at closely. The lower valley of the glaciers behind us is white with steam: lava touches ice, down there. We certainly cannot go back. Tomorrow we shall try the ascent farther west.
   Beren Thanern. No luck. We must go farther west. Dark as late twilight all day. Our lungs are raw, not from cold (it remains well above zero even at night, with this west wind) but from breathing the ash and fumes of the eruption. By the end of this second day of wasted effort, scrabbling and squirming over pressure-blocks and up ice-cliffs always to be stopped by a sheer face or overhang, trying farther on and failing again, Ai was exhausted and enraged. He looked ready to cry, but did not. I believe he considers crying either evil or shameful. Even when he was very ill and weak, the first days of our escape, he hid his face from me when he wept. Reasons personal, racial, social, sexual—how can I guess why Ai must not weep? Yet his name is a cry of pain. For that I first sought him out in Erhenrang, a long time ago it seems now; hearing talk of “an Alien” I asked his name, and heard for answer a cry of pain from a human throat across the night. Now he sleeps. His arms tremble and twitch, muscular fatigue. The world around us, ice and rock, ash and snow, fire and dark, trembles and twitches and mutters. Looking out a minute ago I saw the glow of the volcano as a dull red bloom on the belly of vast clouds overhanging the darkness.
   Orny Thanern. No luck. This is the twenty-second day of our journey, and since the tenth day we have made no progress eastward, indeed have lost twenty or twenty-five miles by going west; since the eighteenth day we have made no progress of any kind, and might as well have sat still. If we ever do get up on the Ice, will we have food enough left to take us across it? This thought is hard to dismiss. Fog and murk of the eruption cut seeing very close, so that we cannot choose our path well. Ai wants to attack each ascent, however steep, that shows any sign of shelving. He is impatient with my caution. We have got to watch our tempers. I will be in kemmer in a day or so, and all strains will increase. Meanwhile we butt our heads on cliffs of ice in a cold dusk full of ashes. If I wrote a new Yomesh Canon I should send thieves here after death. Thieves who steal sacks of food by night in Turuf. Thieves who steal a man’s hearth and name from him and send him out ashamed and exiled. My head is thick, I must cross out all this stuff later, too tired to reread it now.
   Harhahad Thanern. On the Gobrin. The twenty-third day of our journey. We are on the Gobrin Ice. As soon as we set out this morning we saw, only a few hundred yards beyond last night’s camp, a pathway open up to the Ice, a highway curving broad and cinder-paved from the rubble and chasms of the glacier right up through the cliffs of ice. We walked up it as if strolling along the Sess Embankment. We are on the Ice. We are headed east again, homeward.
   I am infected by Ai’s pure pleasure in our achievement. Looked at soberly it is as bad as ever, up here. We are on the plateau’s rim. Crevasses—some wide enough to sink villages in, not house by house but all at once—run inland, northward, right out of sight. Most of them cut across our way, so we too must go north, not east. The surface is bad. We screw the sledge along amongst great lumps and chunks of ice, immense debris pushed up by the straining of the great plastic sheet of ice against and among the Fire-Hills. The broken pressure-ridges take queer shapes, overturned towers, legless giants, catapults. A mile thick to start with, the Ice here rises and thickens, trying to flow over the mountains and choke the fire-mouths with silence. Some miles to the north a peak rises up out of the Ice, the sharp graceful barren cone of a young volcano: younger by thousands of years than the ice-sheet that grinds and shoves, all shattered into chasms and jammed up into great blocks and ridges, over the six thousand feet of lower slopes we cannot see.
   During the day, turning, we saw the smoke of Drumner’s eruption hang behind us like a gray-brown extension of the surface of the Ice. A steady wind blows along at ground level from the northeast, clearing this higher air of the soot and stink of the planet’s bowels which we have breathed for days, flattening out the smoke behind us to cover, like a dark lid, the glaciers, the lower mountains, the valleys of stones, the rest of the earth. There is nothing, the Ice says, but Ice. But the young volcano there to northward has another word it thinks of saying.
   No snowfall, a thin high overcast. −4° on the plateau at dusk. A jumble of firn, new ice, and old ice underfoot. The new ice is tricky, slick blue stuff just hidden by a white glaze. We have both been down a good deal. I slid fifteen feet on my belly across one such slick. Ai, in harness, doubled up laughing. He apologized and explained he had thought himself the only person on Gethen who ever slipped on ice.
   Thirteen miles today; but if we try to keep up such a pace among these cut, heaped, crevassed pressure-ridges we shall wear ourselves out or come to worse grief than a bellyslide.
   The waxing moon is low, dull as dry blood; a great brownish, iridescent halo surrounds it.
   Guyrny Thanern. Some snow, rising wind and falling temperature. Thirteen miles again today, which brings our distance logged since we left our first camp to 254 miles. We have averaged about ten and a half miles a day; eleven and a half omitting the two days spent waiting out the blizzard. 75 to 100 of those miles of hauling gave us no onward gain. We are not much nearer Karhide than we were when we set out. But we stand a better chance, I think, of getting there.
   Since we came up out of the volcano-murk our spirit is not all spent in work and worry, and we talk again in the tent after our dinner. As I am in kemmer I would find it easier to ignore Ai’s presence, but this is difficult in a two-man tent. The trouble is of course that he is, in his curious fashion, also in kemmer: always in kemmer. A strange lowgrade sort of desire it must be, to be spread out over every day of the year and never to know the choice of sex, but there it is; and here am I. Tonight my extreme physical awareness of him was rather hard to ignore, and I was too tired to divert it into untrance or any other channel of the discipline. Finally he asked, had he offended me? I explained my silence, with some embarrassment. I was afraid he would laugh at me. After all he is no more an oddity, a sexual freak, than I am: up here on the Ice each of us is singular, isolate, I as cut off from those like me, from my society and its rules, as he from his. There is no world full of other Gethenians here to explain and support my existence. We are equals at last, equal, alien, alone. He did not laugh, of course. Rather he spoke with a gentleness that I did not know was in him. After a while he too came to speak of isolation, of loneliness.
   “Your race is appallingly alone in its world. No other mammalian species. No other ambisexual species. No animal intelligent enough even to domesticate as pets. It must color your thinking, this uniqueness. I don’t mean scientific thinking only, though you are extraordinary hypothesizers-it’s extraordinary that you arrived at any concept of evolution, faced with that unbridgeable gap between yourselves and the lower animals. But philosophically, emotionally: to be so solitary, in so hostile a world: it must affect your entire outlook.”
   “The Yomeshta would say that man’s singularity is his divinity.”
   “Lords of the Earth, yes. Other cults on other worlds have come to the same conclusion. They tend to be the cults of dynamic, aggressive, ecology-breaking cultures.
   Orgoreyn is in the pattern, in its way; at least they seem bent on pushing things around. What do the Handdarata say?”
   “Well, in the Handdara … you know, there’s no theory, no dogma… Maybe they are less aware of the gap between men and beasts, being more occupied with the likenesses, the links, the whole of which living things are a part.” Tormer’s Lay had been all day in my mind, and I said the words,

 
Light is the left hand of darkness
and darkness the right hand of light.
Two are one, life and death, lying
together like lovers in kemmer,
like hands joined together,
like the end and the way.
 

   My voice shook as I said the lines, for I remembered as I said them that in the letter my brother wrote me before his death he had quoted the same words.
   Ai brooded, and after some time he said, “You’re isolated, and undivided. Perhaps you are as obsessed with wholeness as we are with dualism.”
   “We are dualists too. Duality is an essential, isn’t it? So long as there is myself and the other.”
   “I and Thou,” he said. “Yes, it does, after all, go even wider than sex…”
   “Tell me, how does the other sex of your race differ from yours?”
   He looked startled and in fact my question rather startled me; kemmer brings out these spontaneities in one. We were both self-conscious. “I never thought of that,” he said. “You’ve never seen a woman.” He used his Terran-language word, which I knew.
   “I saw your pictures of them. The women looked like pregnant Gethenians, but with larger breasts. Do they differ much from your sex in mind behavior? Are they like a different species?”
   “No. Yes. No, of course not, not really. But the difference is very important. I suppose the most important thing, the heaviest single factor in one’s life, is whether one’s born male or female. In most societies it determines one’s expectations, activities, outlook, ethics, manners—almost everything. Vocabulary. Semiotic usages. Clothing. Even food. Women… women tend to eat less… It’s extremely hard to separate the innate differences from the learned ones. Even where women participate equally with men in the society, they still after all do all the childbearing, and so most of the child-rearing…”
   “Equality is not the general rule, then? Are they mentally inferior?”
   “I don’t know. They don’t often seem to turn up mathematicians, or composers of music, or inventors, or abstract thinkers. But it isn’t that they’re stupid. Physically they’re less muscular, but a little more durable than men. Psychologically—”
   After he had stared a long time at the glowing stove, he shook his head. “Harth,” he said, “I can’t tell you what women are like. I never thought about it much in the abstract, you know, and—God!—by now I’ve practically forgotten. I’ve been here two years… You don’t know. In a sense, women are more alien to me than you are. With you I share one sex, anyhow…” He looked away and laughed, rueful and uneasy. My own feelings were complex, and we let the matter drop.
   Yrny Thanern. Eighteen miles today, east-northeast by compass, on skis. We got clear of the pressure-ridges and crevasses in the first hour of pulling. Both got in harness, I ahead at first with the probe, but no more need for testing: the firn is a couple of feet thick over solid ice, and on the firn lie several inches of sound new snow from the last fall, with a good surface. Neither we nor the sledge broke through at all, and the sledge pulled so light that it was hard to believe we are still hauling about a hundred pounds apiece. During the afternoon we took turns hauling, as one can do it easily on this splendid surface. It is a pity that all the hard work uphill and over rock came while the load was heavy. Now we go light. Too light: I find myself thinking about food a good deal. We eat, Ai says, ethereally. All day we went light and fast over the level ice-plain, dead white under a gray-blue sky, unbroken except for the few black nuna-tak-peaks now far behind us, and a smudge of darkness, Drumner’s breath, behind them. Nothing else: the veiled sun, the ice

17. An Orgota Creation Myth

   The origins of this myth are prehistorical; it has been recorded in many forms. This very primitive version is from a pre-Yomesh written text found in the Isenpeth Cave Shrine of the Gobrin Hinterlands.


   In the beginning there was nothing but ice and the sun. Over many years the sun shining melted a great crevasse in the ice. In the sides of this crevasse were great shapes of ice, and there was no bottom to it. Drops of water melted from the ice-shapes in the sides of the chasm and fell down and down. One of the ice-shapes said, “I bleed.” Another of the ice-shapes said, “I weep.” A third one said, “I sweat.”
   The ice-shapes climbed up out of the abyss and stood on the plain of ice. He that said “I bleed,” he reached up to the sun and pulled out handfuls of excrement from the bowels of the sun, and with that dung made the hills and valleys of the earth. He that said “I weep,” he breathed on the ice and melting it made the seas and the rivers. He that said “I sweat,” he gathered up soil and sea-water and with them made trees, plants, herbs and grains of the field, animals, and men. The plants grew in the soil and the sea, the beasts ran on the land and swam in the sea, but the men did not wake. Thirty-nine of them there were. They slept on the ice and would not move.
   Then the three ice-shapes stooped down and sat with their knees drawn up and let the sun melt them. As milk they melted, and the milk ran into the mouths of the sleepers, and the sleepers woke. That milk is drunk by the children of men alone and without it they will not wake to life.
   The first to wake up was Edondurath. So tall was he that when he stood up his head split the sky, and snow fell down. He saw the others stirring and awakening, and was afraid of them when they moved, so he killed one after another with a blow of his fist. Thirty-six of them he killed. But one of them, the next to last one, ran away. Haharath he was called. Far he ran over the plain of ice and over the lands of earth. Edondurath ran behind him and caught up with him at last and smote him. Haharath died. Then Edondurath returned to the Birthplace on the Gobrin Ice where the bodies of the others lay, but the last one was gone: he had escaped while Edondurath pursued Haharath.
   Edondurath built a house of the frozen bodies of his brothers, and waited there inside that house for that last one to come back. Each day one of the corpses would speak, saying, “Does he burn? Does he burn?” All the other corpses would say with frozen tongues, “No, no.” Then Edondurath entered kemmer as he slept, and moved and spoke aloud in dreams, and when he woke the corpses were all saying, “He burns! He burns!” And the last brother, the youngest one, heard them saying that, and came into the house of bodies and there coupled with Edondurath. Of these two were the nations of men born, out of the flesh of Edondurath, out of Edondurath’s womb. The name of the other, the younger brother, the father, his name is not known.
   Each of the children born to them had a piece of darkness that followed him about wherever he went by daylight. Edondurath said, “Why are my sons followed thus by darkness?” His kemmering said, “Because they were born in the house of flesh, therefore death follows at their heels. They are in the middle of time. In the beginning there was the sun and the ice, and there was no shadow. In the end when we are done, the sun will devour itself and shadow will eat light, and there will be nothing left but the ice and the darkness.”

18. On the Ice

   Sometimes as I am falling asleep in a dark, quiet room I have for a moment a great and treasurable illusion of the past. The wall of a tent leans up over my face, not visible but audible, a slanting plane of faint sound: the susurrus of blown snow. Nothing can be seen. The light-emission of the Chabe stove is cut off, and it exists only as a sphere of heat, a heart of warmth. The faint dampness and confining cling of my sleeping-bag; the sound of the snow; barely audible, Estraven’s breathing as he sleeps; darkness. Nothing else. We are inside, the two of us, in shelter, at rest, at the center of all things. Outside, as always, lies the great darkness, the cold, death’s solitude.
   In such fortunate moments as I fall asleep I know beyond doubt what the real center of my own life is, that time which is past and lost and yet is permanent, the enduring moment, the heart of warmth.
   I am not trying to say that I was happy, during those weeks of hauling a sledge across an ice-sheet in the dead of winter. I was hungry, overstrained, and often anxious, and it all got worse the longer it went on. I certainly wasn’t happy. Happiness has to do with reason, and only reason earns it. What I was given was the thing you can’t earn, and can’t keep, and often don’t even recognize at the time; I mean joy.
   I always woke up first, usually before daylight. My metabolic rate is slightly over the Gethenian norm, as are my height and weight; Estraven had figured these differences into the food-ration calculations, in his scrupulous way which one could see as either housewifely or scientific, and from the start I had had a couple of ounces more food per day than he. Protests of injustice fell silent before the self-evident justice of this unequal division. However divided, the share was small. I was hungry, constantly hungry, daily hungrier. I woke up because I was hungry.
   If it was still dark I turned up the light of the Chabe stove, and put a pan of ice brought in the night before, now thawed, on the stove to boil. Estraven meanwhile engaged in his customary fierce and silent struggle with sleep, as if he wrestled with an angel. Winning, he sat up, stared at me vaguely, shook his head, and woke. By the time we were dressed and booted and had the bags rolled up, breakfast was ready: a mug of boiling hot orsh, and one cube of gichy-michy expanded by hot water into a sort of small, doughy bun. We chewed slowly, solemnly, retrieving all dropped crumbs. The stove cooled as we ate. We packed it up with the pan and mugs, pulled on our hooded overcoats and our mittens, and crawled out into the open air. The coldness of it was perpetually incredible. Every morning I had to believe it all over again. If one had been outside to relieve oneself already, the second exit was only harder.
   Sometimes it was snowing; sometimes the long light of early day lay wonderfully gold and blue across the miles of ice; most often it was gray.
   We brought the thermometer into the tent with us, nights, and when we took it outside it was interesting to watch the pointer swing to the right (Gethenian dials read counterclockwise) almost too fast to follow, registering a drop of twenty, fifty, eighty degrees, till it stopped somewhere between zero and −60°.
   One of us collapsed the tent and folded it while the other loaded stove, bags, etc. onto the sledge; the tent was strapped over all, and we were ready for skis and harness. Little metal was used in our straps and fittings, but the harnesses had buckles of aluminum alloy, too fine to fasten with mittens on, which burned in that cold exactly as if they were redhot. I had to be very careful of my fingers when the temperature was below minus twenty, especially if the wind blew, for I could pick up a frostbite amazingly fast. My feet never suffered—and that is a factor of major importance, in a winter-journey where an hour’s exposure can, after all, cripple one for a week or for life. Estraven had had to guess my size and the snowboots he got me were a little large, but extra socks filled the discrepancy. We put on our skis, got into harness as quick as possible, bucked and pried and jolted the sledge free if its runners were frozen in, and set off.
   Mornings after heavy snowfall we might have to spend some while digging out the tent and sledge before we could set off. The new snow was not hard to shovel away, though it made great impressive drifts around us, who were, after all, the only impediment for hundreds of miles, the only thing sticking out above the ice.
   We pulled eastward by the compass. The usual direction of the wind was north to south, off the glacier. Day after day it blew from our left as we went. The hood did not suffice against that wind, and I wore a facial mask to protect my nose and left cheek. Even so my left eye froze shut one day, and I thought I had lost the use of it: even when Estraven thawed it open with breath and tongue, I could not see with it for some while, so probably more had been frozen than the lashes. In sunlight both of us wore the Gethenian slit-screen eyeshields, and neither of us suffered any snow-blindness. We had small opportunity. The Ice, as Estraven had said, tends to hold a high-pressure zone above its central area, where thousands of square miles of white reflect the sunlight. We were not in this central zone, however, but at best on the edge of it, between it and the zone of turbulent, deflected, precipitation-laden storms that it sends continually to torment the subglacial lands. Wind from due north brought bare, bright weather, but from northeast or northwest it brought snow, or harrowed up dry fallen snow into blinding, biting clouds like sand or dust-storms, or else, sinking almost to nothing, crept in sinuous trails along the surface, leaving the sky white, the air white, no visible sun, no shadow: and the snow itself, the Ice, disappeared from under our feet. Around midday we would halt, and cut and set up a few blocks of ice for a protective wall if the wind was strong. We heated water to soak a cube of gichy-michy in, and drank the water hot, sometimes with a bit of sugar melted in it; harnessed up again and went on. We seldom talked while on the march or at lunch, for our lips were sore, and when one’s mouth was open the cold got inside, hurting teeth and throat and lungs; it was necessary to keep the mouth closed and breathe through the nose, at least when the air was forty or fifty degrees below freezing. When it went on lower than that, the whole breathing process was further complicated by the rapid freezing of one’s exhaled breath; if you didn’t look out your nostrils might freeze shut, and then to keep from suffocating you would gasp in a lungful of razors.
   Under certain conditions our exhalations freezing instantly made a tiny crackling noise, like distant firecrackers, and a shower of crystals: each breath a snowstorm.
   We pulled till we were tired out or till it began to grow dark, halted, set up the tent, pegged down the sledge if there was threat of high wind, and settled in for the night. On a usual day we would have pulled for eleven or twelve hours, and made between twelve and eighteen miles.
   It does not seem a very good rate, but then conditions were a bit adverse. The crust of the snow was seldom right for both skis and sledge-runners. When it was light and new the sledge ran through rather than over it; when it was partly hardened, the sledge would stick but we on skis would not, which meant that we were perpetually being pulled up backward with a jolt; and when it was hard it was often heaped up in long wind-waves, sastrugi, that in some places ran up to four feet high. We had to haul the sledge up and over each knife-edged or fantastically corniced top, then slide her down, and up over the next one: for they never seemed to run parallel to our course. I had imagined the Gobrin Ice Plateau to be all one sheet like a frozen pond, but there were hundreds of miles of it that were rather like an abruptly frozen, storm-raised sea.
   The business of setting up camp, making everything secure, getting all the clinging snow off one’s outer clothing, and so on, was trying. Sometimes it did not seem worthwhile. It was so late, so cold, one was so tired, that it would be much easier to lie down in a sleeping-bag in the lee of the sledge and not bother with the tent. I remember how clear this was to me on certain evenings, and how bitterly I resented my companion’s methodical, tyrannical insistence that we do everything and do it correctly and thoroughly. I hated him at such times, with a hatred that rose straight up out of the death that lay within my spirit. I hated the harsh, intricate, obstinate demands that he made on me in the name of life. When all was done we could enter the tent, and almost at once the heat of the Chabe stove could be felt as an enveloping, protecting ambiance. A marvelous thing surrounded us: warmth. Death and cold were elsewhere, outside.
   Hatred was also left outside. We ate and drank. After we ate, we talked. When the cold was extreme, even the excellent insulation of the tent could not keep it out, and we lay in our bags as close to the stove as possible. A little fur of frost gathered on the inner surface of the tent. To open the valve was to let in a draft of cold that instantly condensed, filling the tent with a swirling mist of fine snow. When there was blizzard, needles of icy air blew in through the vents, elaborately protected as they were, and an impalpable dust of snow-motes fogged the air. On those nights the storm made an incredible noise, and we could not converse by voice, unless we shouted with our heads together. On other nights it was still, with such a stillness as one imagines as existing before the stars began to form, or after everything has perished.
   Within an hour after our evening meal Estraven turned the stove down, if it was feasible to do so, and turned the light-emission off. As he did so he murmured a short and charming grace of invocation, the only ritual words I had ever learned of the Handdara: “Praise then darkness and Creation unfinished,” he said, and there was darkness. We slept. In the morning it was all to do over. We did it over for fifty days. Estraven kept up his journal, though during the weeks on the Ice he seldom wrote more than a note of the weather and the distance we had come that day. Among these notes there is occasional mention of his own thoughts or of some of our conversation, but not a word concerning the profounder conversation between us which occupied our rest between dinner and sleep on many nights of the first month on the Ice, while we still had enough energy to talk, and on certain days that we spent storm-bound in the tent. I told him that I was not forbidden, but not expected, to use paraverbal speech on a non-Ally planet, and asked him to keep what he learned from his own people, at least until I could discuss what I had done with my colleagues on the ship. He assented, and kept his word. He never said or wrote anything concerning our silent conversations.
   Mindspeech was the only thing I had to give Estraven, out of all my civilization, my alien reality in which he was so profoundly interested. I could talk and describe endlessly; but that was all I had to give. Indeed it may be the only important thing we have to give to Winter. But I can’t say that gratitude was my motive for infringing on the Law of Cultural Embargo. I was not paying my debt to him. Such debts remain owing. Estraven and I had simply arrived at the point where we shared whatever we had that was worth sharing.
   I expect it will turn out that sexual intercourse is possible between Gethenian double-sexed and Hainish-norm one-sexed human beings, though such intercourse will inevitably be sterile. It remains to be proved; Estraven and I proved nothing except perhaps a rather subtler point. The nearest to crisis that our sexual desires brought us was on a night early in the journey, our second night up on the Ice. We had spent all day struggling and back-tracking in the cut-up, crevassed area east of the Fire-Hills. We were tired that evening but elated, sure that a clear course would soon open out ahead. But after dinner Estraven grew taciturn, and cut my talk off short. I said at last after a direct rebuff, “Harth, I’ve said something wrong again, please tell me what it is.” He was silent.
   “I’ve made some mistake in shifgrethor. I’m sorry; I can’t learn. I’ve never even really understood the meaning of the word.”
   “Shifgrethor? It comes from an old word for shadow.” We were both silent for a little, and then he looked at me with a direct, gentle gaze. His face in the reddish light was as soft, as vulnerable, as remote as the face of a woman who looks at you out of her thoughts and does not speak.
   And I saw then again, and for good, what I had always been afraid to see, and had pretended not to see in him: that he was a woman as well as a man. Any need to explain the sources of that fear vanished with the fear; what I was left with was, at last, acceptance of him as he was. Until then I had rejected him, refused him his own reality. He had been quite right to say that he, the only person on Gethen who trusted me, was the only Gethenian I distrusted. For he was the only one who had entirely accepted me as a human being: who had liked me personally and given me entire personal loyalty: and who therefore had demanded of me an equal degree of recognition, of acceptance. I had not been willing to give it. I had been afraid to give it. I had not wanted to give my trust, my friendship to a man who was a woman, a woman who was a man.
   He explained, stiffly and simply, that he was in kemmer and had been trying to avoid me, insofar as one of us could avoid the other. “I must not touch you,” he said, with extreme constraint; saying that he looked away.
   I said, “I understand. I agree completely.”
   For it seemed to me, and I think to him, that it was from that sexual tension between us, admitted now and understood, but not assuaged, that the great and sudden assurance of friendship between us rose: a friendship so much needed by us both in our exile, and already so well proved in the days and nights of our bitter journey, that it might as well be called, now as later, love. But it was from the difference between us, not from the affinities and likenesses, but from the difference, that that love came: and it was itself the bridge, the only bridge, across what divided us. For us to meet sexually would be for us to meet once more as aliens. We had touched, in the only way we could touch. We left it at that. I do not know if we were right.
   We talked some more that night, and I recall being very hard put to it to answer coherently when he asked me what women were like. We were both rather stiff and cautious with each other for the next couple of days. A profound love between two people involves, after all, the power and chance of doing profound hurt. It would never have occurred to me before that night that I could hurt Estraven.
   Now that the barriers were down, the limitation, in my terms, of our converse and understanding seemed intolerable to me. Quite soon, two or three nights later, I said to my companion as we finished our dinner—a special treat, sugared kadik-porridge, to celebrate a twenty-mile run—”Last spring, that night in the Corner Red Dwelling, you said you wished I’d tell you more about paraverbal speech.”
   “Yes, I did.”
   “Do you want to see if I can teach you how to speak it?”
   He laughed. “You want to catch me lying.”
   “If you ever lied to me, it was long ago, and in another country.”
   He was an honest person, but rarely a direct one. That tickled him, and he said, “In another country I may tell you other lies. But I thought you were forbidden to teach your mind-science to… the natives, until we join the Ekumen.”
   “Not forbidden. It’s not done. I’ll do it, though, if you like. And if I can. I’m no Educer.”
   “There are special teachers of the skill?”
   “Yes. Not on Alterra, where there’s a high occurrence of natural sensitivity, and—they say—mothers mindspeak to their unborn babies. I don’t know what the babies answer. But most of us have to be taught, as if it were a foreign language. Or rather as if it were our native language, but learned very late.”
   I think he understood my motive in offering to teach him the skill, and he wanted very much to learn it. We had a go at it. I recalled what I could of how I had been educed, at age twelve. I told him to clear his mind, let it be dark. This he did, no doubt, more promptly and thoroughly than I ever had done: he was an adept of the Handdara, after all. Then I mindspoke to him as clearly as I could. No result. We tried it again. Since one cannot bespeak until one has been bespoken, until the telepathic potentiality has been sensitized by one clear reception, I had to get through to him first. I tried for half an hour, till I felt hoarse of brain. He looked crestfallen. “I thought it would be easy for me,” he confessed. We were both tired out, and called the attempt off for the night.
   Our next efforts were no more successful. I tried sending to Estraven while he slept, recalling what my Educer had told me about the occurrence of “dream-messages” among pre-telepathic peoples, but it did not work.
   “Perhaps my species lacks the capacity,” he said. “We have enough rumors and hints to have made up a word for the power, but I don’t know of any proven instances of telepathy among us.”
   “So it was with my people for thousands of years. A few natural Sensitives, not comprehending their gift, and lacking anyone to receive from or send to. All the rest latent, if that. You know I told you that except in the case of the born Sensitive, the capacity, though it has a physiological basis, is a psychological one, a product of culture, a side-effect of the use of the mind. Young children, and defectives, and members of un-evolved or regressed societies, can’t mindspeak. The mind must exist on a certain plane of complexity first. You can’t build up amino acids out of hydrogen atoms; a good deal of complexifying has to take place first: the same situation. Abstract thought, varied social interaction, intricate cultural adjustments, esthetic and ethical perception, all of it has to reach a certain level before the connections can be made—before the potentiality can be touched at all.”
   “Perhaps we Gethenians haven’t attained that level.”
   “You’re far beyond it. But luck is involved. As in the creation of amino acids… Or to take analogies on the cultural plane—only analogies, but they illuminate—the scientific method, for instance, the use of concrete, experimental techniques in science. There are peoples of the Ekumen who possess a high culture, a complex society, philosophies, arts, ethics, a high style and a great achievement in all those fields; and yet they have never learned to weigh a stone accurately. They can learn how, of course. Only for half a million years they never did… There are peoples who have no higher mathematics at all, nothing beyond the simplest applied arithmetic. Every one of them is capable of understanding the calculus, but not one of them does or ever has. As a matter of fact, my own people, the Terrans, were ignorant until about three thousand years ago of the uses of zero.” That made Estraven blink. “As for Gethen, what I’m curious about is whether the rest of us may find ourselves to have the capacity for Foretelling—whether this too is a part of the evolution of the mind—if you’ll teach us the techniques.”
   “You think it a useful accomplishment?”
   “Accurate prophecy? Well, of course!—”
   “You might have to come to believe that it’s a useless one, in order to practice it.”
   “Your Handdara fascinates me, Harth, but now and then I wonder if it isn’t simply paradox developed into a way of life…”
   We tried mindspeech again. I had never before sent repeatedly to a total non-receiver. The experience was disagreeable. I began to feel like an atheist praying. Presently Estraven yawned and said, “I am deaf, deaf as a rock. We’d better sleep.” I assented. He turned out the light, murmuring his brief praise of darkness; we burrowed down into our bags, and within a minute or two he was sliding into sleep as a swimmer slides into dark water. I felt his sleep as if it were my own: the empathic bond was there, and once more I bespoke him, sleepily, by his name—”Therem!”
   He sat bolt upright, for his voice rang out above me in the blackness, loud. “Arek! is that you?”
   “No: Genly Ai: I am bespeaking you.”
   His breath caught. Silence. He fumbled with the Chabe stove, turned up the light, stared at me with his dark eyes full of fear. “I dreamed,” he said, “I thought I was at home—”
   “You heard me mindspeak.”
   “You called me– It was my brother. It was his voice I heard. He’s dead. You called me—you called me Therem? I… This is more terrible than I had thought.” He shook his head, as a man will do to shake off nightmare, and then put his face in his hands.
   “Harth, I’m very sorry—”
   “No, call me by my name. If you can speak inside my skull with a dead man’s voice then you can call me by my name! Would he have called me ‘Harth’? Oh, I see why there’s no lying in this mindspeech. It is a terrible thing… All right. All right, speak to me again.”
   “Wait.”
   “No. Go on.”
   With his fierce, frightened gaze on me I bespoke him: “Therem, my friend, there’s nothing to fear between us.”
   He kept on staring at me, so that I thought he had not understood; but he had. “Ah, but there is,” he said.
   After a while, controlling himself, he said calmly, “You spoke in my language.”
   “Well, you don’t know mine.”
   “You said there would be words, I know… Yet I imagined it as—an understanding—”
   “Empathy’s another game, though not unconnected. It gave us the connection tonight. But in mindspeech proper, the speech centers of the brain are activated, as well as—”
   “No, no, no. Tell me that later. Why do you speak in my brother’s voice?” His voice was strained.
   “That I can’t answer. I don’t know. Tell me about him.”
   “Nusuth… My full brother, Arek Harth rem ir Es-traven. He was a year older than I. He would have been Lord of Estre. We… I left home, you know, for his sake. He has been dead fourteen years.”
   We were both silent for some time. I could not know, or ask, what lay behind his words: it had cost him too much to say the little he had said.
   I said at last, “Bespeak me, Therem. Call me by my name.” I knew he could: the rapport was there, or as the experts have it, the phases were consonant, and of course he had as yet no idea of how to raise the barrier voluntarily. Had I been a Listener, I could have heard him think.
   “No,” he said. “Never. Not yet…”
   But no amount of shock, awe, terror could restrain that insatiable, outreaching mind for long. After he had cut out the light again I suddenly heard his stammer in my inward hearing—”Genry—” Even mindspeaking he never could say “l” properly.
   I replied at once. In the dark he made an inarticulate sound of fear that had in it a slight edge of satisfaction. “No more, no more,” he said aloud. After a while we got to sleep at last.
   It never came easy to him. Not that he lacked the gift or could not develop the skill, but it disturbed him profoundly, and he could not take it for granted. He quickly learned to set up the barriers, but I’m not sure he felt he could count on them. Perhaps all of us were so, when the first Educers came back centuries ago from Rokanon’s World teaching the “Last Art” to us. Perhaps a Gethenian, being singularly complete, feels telepathic speech as a violation of completeness, a breach of integrity hard for him to tolerate. Perhaps it was Estraven’s own character, in which candor and reserve were both strong: every word he said rose out of a deeper silence. He heard my voice bespeaking him as a dead man’s, his brother’s voice. I did not know what, besides love and death, lay between him and that brother, but I knew that whenever I bespoke him something in him winced away as if I touched a wound. So that intimacy of mind established between us was a bond, indeed, but an obscure and austere one, not so much admitting further light (as I had expected it to) as showing the extent of the darkness.
   And day after day we crept on eastward over the plain of ice. The midpoint in time of our journey as planned, the thirty-fifth day, Odorny Anner, found us far short of our halfway point in space. By the sledge-meter we had indeed traveled about four hundred miles, but probably only three-quarters of that was real forward gain, and we could estimate only very roughly how far still remained to go. We had spent days, miles, rations in our long struggle to get up onto the Ice. Estraven was not so worried as I by the hundreds of miles that still lay ahead of us. “The sledge is lighter,” he said. “Towards the end it will be still lighter; and we can cut rations, if necessary. We have been eating very well, you know.”
   I thought he was being ironic, but I should have known better.
   On the fortieth day and the two succeeding we were snowed in by a blizzard. During these long hours of lying blotto in the tent Estraven slept almost continuously, and ate nothing, though he drank orsh or sugar-water at mealtimes. He insisted that I eat, though only half-rations. “You have no experience in starvation,” he said.
   I was humiliated. “How much have you—Lord of a Domain, and Prime Minister—?”
   “Genry, we practice privation until we’re experts at it. I was taught how to starve as a child at home in Estre, and by the Handdarata in Rotherer Fastness. I got out of practice in Erhenrang, true enough, but I began making up for it in Mishnory… Please do as I say, my friend; I know what I’m doing.”
   He did, and I did.
   We went on for four more days of very bitter cold, never above −25°, and then came another blizzard whooping up in our faces from the east on a gale wind. Within two minutes of the first strong gusts the snow blew so thick that I could not see Estraven six feet away. I had turned my back on him and the sledge and the plastering, blinding, suffocating snow in order to get my breath, and when a minute later I turned around he was gone. The sledge was gone. Nothing was there. I took a few steps to where they had been and felt about. I shouted, and could not hear my own voice. I was deaf and alone in a universe filled solid with small stinging gray streaks. I panicked and began to blunder forward, mindcalling frantically, “Therem!”
   Right under my hand, kneeling, he said, “Come on, give me a hand with the tent.”
   I did so, and never mentioned my minute of panic. No need to.
   This blizzard lasted two days; there were five days lost, and there would be more. Nimmer and Anner are the months of the great storms.
   “We’re beginning to cut it rather fine, aren’t we,” I said one night as I measured out our gichy-michy ration and put it to soak in hot water.
   He looked at me. His firm, broad face showed weight-loss in deep shadows under the cheekbones, his eyes were sunken and his mouth sorely chapped and cracked. God knows what I looked like, when he looked like that. He smiled. “With luck we shall make it, and without luck we shall not.”
   It was what he had said from the start. With all my anxieties, my sense of taking a last desperate gamble, and so on, I had not been realistic enough to believe him. Even now I thought, Surely when we’ve worked so hard-
   But the Ice did not know how hard we worked. Why should it? Proportion is kept.
   “How is your luck running, Therem?” I said at last.
   He did not smile at that. Nor did he answer. Only after a while he said, “I’ve been thinking about them all, down there.” Down there, for us, had come to mean the south, the world below the plateau of ice, the region of earth, men, roads, cities, all of which had become hard to imagine as really existing. “You know that I sent word to the king concerning you, the day I left Mishnory. I told him what Shusgis told me, that you were going to be sent to Pulefen Farm. At the time I wasn’t clear as to my intent, but merely followed my impulse. I have thought the impulse through, since. Something like this may happen: The king will see a chance to play shifgrethor. Tibe will advise against it, but Argaven should be growing a little tired of Tibe by now, and may ignore his counsel. He will inquire. Where is the Envoy, the guest of Karhide? —Mishnory will lie. He died of horm-fever this autumn, most lamentable. —Then how does it happen that we are informed by our own Embassy that he’s in Pulefen Farm? —He’s not there, look for yourselves. —No, no, of course not, we accept the word of the Commensals of Orgoreyn… But a few weeks after these exchanges, the Envoy appears in North Karhide, having escaped from Pulefen Farm. Consternation in Mishnory, indignation in Erhenrang. Loss of face for the Commensals, caught lying. You will be a treasure, a long-lost hearth-brother, to King Argaven, Genry. For a while. You must send for your Star Ship at once, at the first chance you get. Bring your people to Karhide and accomplish your mission, at once, before Argaven has had time to see the possible enemy in you, before Tibe or some other councillor frightens him once more, playing on his madness. If he makes the bargain with you, he will keep it. To break it would be to break his own shifgrethor. The Harge kings keep their promises. But you must act fast, and bring the Ship down soon.”
   “I will, if I receive the slightest sign of welcome.”
   “No: forgive my advising you, but you must not wait for welcome. You will be welcomed, I think. So will the Ship. Karhide has been sorely humbled this past half-year. You will give Argaven the chance to turn the tables. I think he will take the chance.”
   “Very well. But you, meanwhile—”
   “I am Estraven the Traitor. I have nothing whatever to do with you.”
   “At first.”
   “At first,” he agreed.
   “You’ll be able to hide out, if there is danger at first?”
   “Oh yes, certainly.”
   Our food was ready, and we fell to. Eating was so important and engrossing a business that we never talked any more while we ate; the taboo was now in its complete, perhaps its original form, not a word said till the last crumb was gone. When it was, he said, “Well, I hope I’ve guessed well. You will… you do forgive…”
   “Your giving me direct advice?” I said, for there were certain things I had finally come to understand. “Of course I do, Therem. Really, how can you doubt it? You know I have no shifgrethor to waive.” That amused him, but he was still brooding.
   “Why,” he said at last, “why did you come alone—why were you sent alone? Everything, still, will depend upon that ship coming. Why was it made so difficult for you, and for us?”
   “It’s the Ekumen’s custom, and there are reasons for it. Though in fact I begin to wonder if I’ve ever understood the reasons. I thought it was for your sake that I came alone, so obviously alone, so vulnerable, that I could in myself pose no threat, change no balance: not an invasion, but a mere messenger-boy. But there’s more to it than that. Alone, I cannot change your world. But I can be changed by it. Alone, I must listen, as well as speak. Alone, the relationship I finally make, if I make one, is not impersonal and not only political: it is individual, it is personal, it is both more and less than political. Not We and They; not I and It; but I and Thou. Not political, not pragmatic, but mystical. In a certain sense the Ekumen is not a body politic, but a body mystic. It considers beginnings to be extremely important. Beginnings, and means. Its doctrine is just the reverse of the doctrine that the end justifies the means. It proceeds, therefore, by subtle ways, and slow ones, and queer, risky ones; rather as evolution does, which is in certain senses its model… So I was sent alone, for your sake? Or for my own? I don’t know. Yes, it has made things difficult. But I might ask you as profitably why you’ve never seen fit to invent airborne vehicles? One small stolen airplane would have spared you and me a great deal of difficulty!”
   “How would it ever occur to a sane man that he could fly?” Estraven said sternly. It was a fair response, on a world where no living thing is winged, and the very angels of the Yomesh Hierarchy of the Holy do not fly but only drift, wingless, down to earth like a soft snow falling, like the windborne seeds of that flowerless world.
   Towards the middle of Nimmer, after much wind and bitter cold, we came into a quiet weather for many days. If there was storm it was far south of us, down there, and we inside the blizzard had only an all but windless overcast. At first the overcast was thin, so that the air was vaguely radiant with an even, sourceless sunlight reflected from both clouds and snow, from above and below. Overnight the weather thickened somewhat. All brightness was gone, leaving nothing. We stepped out of the tent onto nothing. Sledge and tent were there, Estraven stood beside me, but neither he nor I cast any shadow. There was dull light all around, everywhere. When we walked on the crisp snow no shadow showed the footprint. We left no track. Sledge, tent, himself, myself: nothing else at all. No sun, no sky, no horizon, no world. A whitish-gray void, in which we appeared to hang. The illusion was so complete that I had trouble keeping my balance. My inner ears were used to confirmation from my eyes as to how I stood; they got none; I might as well be blind. It was all right while we loaded up, but hauling, with nothing ahead, nothing to look at, nothing for the eye to touch, as it were, it was at first disagreeable and then exhausting. We were on skis, on a good surface of firn, without sastrugi, and solid—that was certain—for five or six thousand feet down. We should have been making good time. But we kept slowing down, groping our way across the totally unobstructed plain, and it took a strong effort of will to speed up to a normal pace. Every slight variation in the surface came as a jolt—as in climbing stairs, the unexpected stair or the expected but absent stair—for we could not see it ahead: there was no shadow to show it. We skied blind with our eyes open. Day after day was like this, and we began to shorten our hauls, for by mid-afternoon both of us would be sweating and shaking with strain and fatigue. I came to long for snow, for blizzard, for anything; but morning after morning we came out of the tent into the void, the white weather, what Estraven called the Un-shadow.
   One day about noon, Odorny Nimmer, the sixty-first day of the journey, that bland blind nothingness about us began to flow and writhe. I thought my eyes were fooling me, as they had been doing often, and paid scant attention to the dim meaningless commotion of the air until, suddenly, I caught a glimpse of a small, wan, dead sun overhead. And looking down from the sun, straight ahead, I saw a huge black shape come hulking out of the void towards us. Black tentacles writhed upwards, groping out. I stopped dead in my tracks, slewing Estraven around on his skis, for we were both in harness hauling. “What is it?”
   He stared at the dark monstrous forms hidden in the fog, and said at last, “The crags… It must be Esherhoth Crags.” And pulled on. We were miles from the things, which I had taken to be almost within arm’s reach. As the white weather turned to a thick low mist and then cleared off, we saw them plainly before sunset: nunataks, great scored and ravaged pinnacles of rock jutting up out of the ice, no more of them showing than shows of an iceberg above the sea: cold drowned mountains, dead for eons.
   They showed us to be somewhat north of our shortest course, if we could trust the ill-drawn map that was all we had. The next day we turned for the first time a little south of east.

19. Homecoming

   In a dark windy weather we slogged along, trying to find encouragement in the sighting of Esherhoth Crags, the first thing not ice or snow or sky that we had seen for seven weeks. On the map they were marked as not far from the Shenshey Bogs to the south, and from Guthen Bay to the east. But it was not a trustworthy map of the Gobrin area. And we were getting very tired.
   We were nearer the southern edge of the Gobrin Glacier than the map indicated, for we began to meet pressure-ice and crevasses on the second day of our turn southward. The Ice was not so upheaved and tormented as in the Fire-Hills region, but it was rotten. There were sunken pits acres across, probably lakes in summer; false floors of snow that might subside with a huge gasp all around you into the air-pocket a foot deep beneath; areas all slit and pocked with little holes and crevasses; and, more and more often, there were big crevasses, old canyons in the Ice, some wide as mountain gorges and others only two or three feet across, but deep. On Odyrny Nimmer (by Estraven’s journal, for I kept none) the sun shone clear with a strong north wind. As we ran the sledge across the snow-bridges over narrow crevasses we could look down to left or right into blue shafts and abysses in which bits of ice dislodged by the runners fell with a vast, faint, delicate music, as if silver wires touched thin crystal planes, falling. I remember the racy, dreamy, light-headed pleasure of that morning’s haul in the sunlight over the abysses. But the sky began to whiten, the air to grow thick; shadows faded, blue drained out of the sky and snow. We were not alert to the danger of white weather on such a surface. As the ice was heavily corrugated, I was pushing while Estraven pulled; I had my eyes on the sledge and was shoving away, mind on nothing but how best to shove, when all at once the bar was nearly wrenched out of my grip as the sledge shot forward in a sudden lunge. I held on by instinct and shouted “Hey!” to Estraven to slow him down, thinking he had speeded up on a smooth patch. But the sledge stopped dead, tilted nose-down, and Estraven was not there.
   I almost let go the sledge-bar to go look for him. It was pure luck that I did not. I held on, while I stared stupidly about for him, and so I saw the lip of the crevasse, made visible by the shifting and dropping of another section of the broken snow-bridge. He had gone right down feet-first, and nothing kept the sledge from following him but my weight, which held the rear third of the runners still on solid ice. It kept tipping a little farther nose-downward, pulled by his weight as he hung in harness in the pit.
   I brought my weight down on the rear-bar and pulled and rocked and levered the sledge back away from the edge of the crevasse. It did not come easy. But I threw my weight hard on the bar and tugged until it began grudgingly to move, and then slid abruptly right away from the crevasse. Estraven had got his hands onto the edge, and his weight now aided me. Scrambling, dragged by the harness, he came up over the edge and collapsed face down on the ice.
   I knelt by him trying to unbuckle his harness, alarmed by the way he sprawled there, passive except for the great gasping rise and fall of his chest. His lips were cyanotic, one side of his face was bruised and scraped.
   He sat up unsteadily and said in a whistling whisper, “Blue—all blue– Towers in the depths—”
   “What?”
   “In the crevasse. All blue—full of light.”
   “Are you all right?”
   He started rebuckling his harness.
   “You go ahead—on the rope—with the stick,” he gasped. “Pick the route.”
   For hours one of us hauled while the other guided, mincing along like a cat on eggshells, sounding every step in advance with the stick. In the white weather one could not see a crevasse until one could look down into it—a little late, for the edges overhung, and were not always solid. Every footfall was a surprise, a drop or a jolt. No shadows. An even, white, soundless sphere: we moved along inside a huge frosted-glass ball. There was nothing inside the ball, and nothing was outside it. But there were cracks in the glass. Probe and step, probe and step. Probe for the invisible cracks through which one might fall out of the white glass ball, and fall, and fall, and fall… An unrelaxable tension little by little took hold of all my muscles. It became exceedingly difficult to take even one more step.
   “What’s up, Genry?”
   I stood there in the middle of nothing. Tears came out and froze my eyelids together. I said, “I’m afraid of falling.”
   “But you’re on the rope,” he said. Then, coming up and seeing that there was no crevasse anywhere visible, he saw what was up and said, “Pitch camp.”
   “It’s not time yet, we ought to go on.”
   He was already unlashing the tent.
   Later on, after we had eaten, he said, “It was time to stop. I don’t think we can go this way. The Ice seems to drop off slowly, and will be rotten and crevassed all the way. If we could see, we could make it: but not in unshadow.”
   “But then how do we get down onto the Shenshey Bogs?”
   “Well, if we keep east again instead of trending south, we might be on sound ice clear to Guthen Bay. I saw the Ice once from a boat on the Bay in summer. It comes up against the Red Hills, and feeds down in ice-rivers to the Bay. If we came down one of those glaciers we could run due south on the sea-ice to Karhide, and so enter at the coast rather than the border, which might be better. It will add some miles to our way, though– something between twenty and fifty, I should think. What’s your opinion, Genry?”
   “My opinion is that I can’t go twenty more feet so long as the white weather lasts.”
   “But if we get out of the crevassed area…”
   “Oh, if we get out of the crevasses I’ll be fine. And if the sun ever comes out again, you get on the sledge and I’ll give you a free ride to Karhide.” That was typical of our attempts at humor, at this stage of the journey; they were always very stupid, but sometimes they made the other fellow smile. “There’s nothing wrong with me,” I went on, “except acute chronic fear.”
   “Fear’s very useful. Like darkness; like shadows.” Estraven’s smile was an ugly split in a peeling, cracked brown mask, thatched with black fur and set with two flecks of black rock. “It’s queer that daylight’s not enough. We need the shadows, in order to walk.”
   “Give me your notebook a moment.”
   He had just noted down our day’s journey and done some calculation of mileage and rations. He pushed the little tablet and carbon-pencil around the Chabe stove to me. On the blank leaf glued to the inner back cover I drew the double curve within the circle, and blacked the yin half of the symbol, then pushed it back to my companion. “Do you know that sign?”
   He looked at it a long time with a strange look, but he said, “No.”
   “It’s found on Earth, and on Hain-Davenant, and on Chiffewar. It is yin and yang. Light is the left hand of darkness… how did it go? Light, dark. Fear, courage. Cold, warmth. Female, male. It is yourself, Therem. Both and one. A shadow on snow.”
   The next day we trudged northeast through the white absence of everything until there were no longer any cracks in the floor of nothing: a day’s haul. We were on 2⁄3 ration, hoping to keep the longer route from running us right out of food. It seemed to me that it would not matter much if it did, as the difference between little and nothing seemed a rather fine one. Estraven, however, was on the track of his luck, following what appeared to be hunch or intuition, but may have been applied experience and reasoning. We went east for four days, four of the longest hauls we had made, eighteen to twenty miles a day, and then the quiet zero weather broke and went to pieces, turning into a whirl, whirl, whirl of tiny snow-particles ahead, behind, to the side, in the eyes, a storm beginning as the light died. We lay in the tent for three days while the blizzard yelled at us, a three-day-long, wordless, hateful yell from the unbreathing lungs.
   “It’ll drive me to screaming back,” I said to Estraven in mindspeech, and he, with the hesitant formality that marked his rapport: “No use. It will not listen.”
   We slept hour after hour, ate a little, tended our frostbites, inflammations, and bruises, mindspoke, slept again. The three-day shriek died down into a gabbling, then a sobbing, then a silence. Day broke. Through the opened door-valve the sky’s brightness shone. It lightened the heart, though we were too rundown to be able to show our relief in alacrity or zest of movement. We broke camp—it took nearly two hours, for we crept about like two old men—and set off. The way was downhill, an unmistakable slight grade; the crust was perfect for skis. The sun shone. The thermometer at midmorning showed −10°. We seemed to get strength from going, and we went fast and easy. We went that day till the stars came out.
   For dinner Estraven served out full rations. At that rate, we had enough for only seven days more.
   “The wheel turns,” he said with serenity. “To make a good run, we’ve got to eat.”
   “Eat, drink, and be merry,” said I. The food had got me high. I laughed inordinately at my own words. “All one-eating-drinking-merrymaking. Can’t have merry without eats, can you?” This seemed to me a mystery quite on a par with that of the yin-yang circle, but it did not last. Something in Estraven’s expression dispelled it. Then I felt like crying, but refrained. Estraven was not as strong as I was, and it would not be fair, it might make him cry too. He was already asleep: he had fallen asleep sitting up, his bowl on his lap. It was not like him to be so unmethodical. But it was not a bad idea, sleep.
   We woke rather late next morning, had a double breakfast, and then got in harness and pulled our light sledge right off the edge of the world.
   Below the world’s edge, which was a steep rubbly slope of white and red in a pallid noon light, lay the frozen sea: the Bay of Guthen, frozen from shore to shore and from Karhide clear to the North Pole.
   To get down onto the sea-ice through the broken edges and shelves and trenches of the Ice jammed up amongst the Red Hills took that afternoon and the next day. On that second day we abandoned our sledge. We made up backpacks; with the tent as the main bulk of one and the bags of the other, and our food equally distributed, we had less than twenty-five pounds apiece to carry; I added the Chabe stove to my pack and still had under thirty. It was good to be released from forever pulling and pushing and hauling and prying that sledge, and I said so to Estraven as we went on. He glanced back at the sledge, a bit of refuse in the vast torment of ice and reddish rock. “It did well,” he said. His loyalty extended without disproportion to things, the patient, obstinate, reliable things that we use and get used to, the things we live by. He missed the sledge. That evening, the seventy-fifth of our journey, our fifty-first day on the plateau, Harhahad Anner, we came down off the Gobrin Ice onto the sea-ice of Guthen Bay. Again we traveled long and late, till dark. The air was very cold, but clear and still, and the clean ice-surface, with no sledge to pull, invited our skis. When we camped that night it was strange to think, lying down, that under us there was no longer a mile of ice, but a few feet of it, and then salt water. But we did not spend much time thinking. We ate, and slept.
   At dawn, again a clear day though terribly cold, below −40° at daybreak, we could look southward and see the coastline, bulged out here and there with protruding tongues of glacier, fall away southward almost in a straight line. We followed it close inshore at first. A north wind helped us along till we skied up abreast a valley-mouth between two high orange hills; out of that gorge howled a gale that knocked us both off our feet. We scuttled farther east, out on the level sea-plain, where we could at least stand up and keep going. “The Gobrin Ice has spewed us out of its mouth,” I said.
   The next day, the eastward curve of the coastline was plain, straight ahead of us. To our right was Orgoreyn, but that blue curve ahead was Karhide.
   On that day we used up the last grains of orsh, and the last few ounces of kadik-germ; we had left now two pounds apiece of gichy-michy, and six ounces of sugar.
   I cannot describe these last days of our journey very well, I find, because I cannot really remember them. Hunger can heighten perception, but not when combined with extreme fatigue; I suppose all my senses were very much deadened. I remember having hunger-cramps, but I don’t remember suffering from them. I had, if anything, a vague feeling all the time of liberation, of having got beyond something, of joy; also of being terribly sleepy. We reached land on the twelfth, Posthe Anner, and clambered over a frozen beach and into the rocky, snowy desolation of the Guthen Coast.
   We were in Karhide. We had achieved our goal. It came near being an empty achievement, for our packs were empty. We had a feast of hot water to celebrate our arrival. The next morning we got up and set off to find a road, a settlement. It is a desolate region, and we had no map of it. What roads there might be were under five or ten feet of snow, and we may have crossed several without knowing it. There was no sign of cultivation. We strayed south and west that day, and the next, and on the evening of the next, seeing a light shine on a distant hillside through the dusk and thin falling snow, neither of us said anything for some time. We stood and stared. Finally my companion croaked, “Is that a light?”
   It was long after dark when we came shambling into a Karhidish village, one street between high-roofed dark houses, the snow packed and banked up to their winter-doors. We stopped at the hot-shop, through the narrow shutters of which flowed, in cracks and rays and arrows, the yellow light we had seen across the hills of winter. We opened the door and went in.
   It was Odsordny Anner, the eighty-first day of our journey; we were eleven days over Estraven’s proposed schedule. He had estimated our food supply exactly: seventy-eight days’ worth at the outside. We had come 840 miles, by the sledge-meter plus a guess for the last few days. Many of those miles had been wasted in backtracking, and if we had really had eight hundred miles to cover we should never have made it; when we got a good map we figured that the distance between Pulefen Farm and this village was less than 730 miles. All those miles and days had been across a houseless, speechless desolation: rock, ice, sky, and silence: nothing else, for eighty-one days, except each other.
   We entered into a big steaming-hot bright-lit room full of food and the smells of food, and people and the voices of people. I caught hold of Estraven’s shoulder. Strange faces turned to us, strange eyes. I had forgotten there was anyone alive who did not look like Estraven. I was terrified.
   In fact it was rather a small room, and the crowd of strangers in it was seven or eight people, all of whom were certainly as taken aback as I was for a while. Nobody comes to Kurkurast Domain in midwinter from the north at night. They stared, and peered, and all the voices had fallen silent.
   Estraven spoke, a barely audible whisper. “We ask the hospitality of the Domain.”
   Noise, buzz, confusion, alarm, welcome.
   “We came over the Gobrin Ice.”
   More noise, more voices, questions; they crowded in on us.
   “Will you look to my friend?”
   I thought I had said it, but Estraven had. Somebody was making me sit down. They brought us food; they looked after us, took us in, welcomed us home.
   Benighted, contentious, passionate, ignorant souls, countryfolk of a poor land, their generosity gave a noble ending to that hard journey. They gave with both hands. No doling out, no counting up. And so Estraven received what they gave us, as a lord among lords or a beggar among beggars, a man among his own people.
   To those fishermen-villagers who live on the edge of the edge, on the extreme habitable limit of a barely habitable continent, honesty is as essential as food. They must play fair with one another; there’s not enough to cheat with. Estraven knew this, and when after a day or two they got around to asking, discreetly and indirectly, with due regard to shifgrethor, why we had chosen to spend a winter rambling on the Gobrin Ice, he replied at once, “Silence is not what I should choose, yet it suits me better than a lie.”
   “It’s well known that honorable men come to be outlawed, yet their shadow does not shrink,” said the hot-shop cook, who ranked next to the village chief in consequence, and whose shop was a sort of living-room for the whole Domain in winter.
   “One person may be outlawed in Karhide, another in Orgoreyn,” said Estraven.
   “True; and one by his clan, another by the king in Erhenrang.”
   “The king shortens no man’s shadow, though he may try,” Estraven remarked, and the cook looked satisfied. If Estraven’s own clan had cast him out he would be a suspect character, but the king’s strictures were unimportant. As for me, evidently a foreigner and so the one outlawed by Orgoreyn, that was if anything to my credit. We never told our names to our hosts in Kurkurast. Estraven was very reluctant to use a false name, and our true ones could not be avowed. It was, after all, a crime to speak to Estraven, let alone to feed and clothe and house him, as they did. Even a remote village of the Guthen Coast has radio, and they could not have pleaded ignorance of the Order of Exile; only real ignorance of their guest’s identity might give them some excuse. Their vulnerability weighed on Estraven’s mind, before I had even thought of it. On our third night there he came into my room to discuss our next move. A Karhidish village is like an ancient castle of Earth in having few or no separate, private dwellings. Yet in the high, rambling old buildings of the Hearth, the Commerce, the Co-Domain (there was no Lord of Kurkurast) and the Outer-House, each of the five hundred villagers could have privacy, even seclusion, in rooms off those ancient corridors with walls three feet thick. We had been given a room apiece, on the top floor of the Hearth. I was sitting in mine beside the fire, a small, hot, heavy-scented fire of peat from the Shenshey Bogs, when Estraven came in. He said.”
   “We must soon be going on from here, Genry.”
   I remember him standing there in the shadows of the firelit room barefoot and wearing nothing but the loose fur breeches the chief had given him. In the privacy and what they consider the warmth of their houses Karhiders often go half-clothed or naked. On our journey Estraven had lost all the smooth, compact solidity that marks the Gethenian physique; he was gaunt and scarred, and his face was burned by cold almost as by fire. He was a dark, hard, and yet elusive figure in the quick, restless light.
   “Where to?”
   “South and west, I think. Towards the border. Our first job is to find you a radio transmitter strong enough to reach your ship. After that, I must find a hiding place, or else go back into Orgoreyn for a while, to avoid bringing punishment on those who help us here.”
   “How will you get back into Orgoreyn?”
   “As I did before—cross the border. The Orgota have nothing against me.”
   “Where will we find a transmitter?”
   “No nearer than Sassinoth.”
   I winced. He grinned.
   “Nothing closer?”
   “A hundred and fifty miles or so; we’ve come farther over worse ground. There are roads all the way; people will take us in; we may get a lift on a powersledge.”
   I assented, but I was depressed by the prospect of still another stage of our winter-journey, and this one not towards haven but back to that damned border where Estraven might go back into exile, leaving me alone.
   I brooded over it and finally said, “There’ll be one condition which Karhide must fulfill before it can join the Ekumen. Argaven must revoke your banishment.”
   He said nothing, but stood gazing at the fire.
   “I mean it,” I insisted. “First things first.”
   “I thank you, Genry,” he said. His voice, when he spoke very softly as now, did have much the timbre of a woman’s voice, husky and unresonant. He looked at me, gently, not smiling. “But I haven’t expected to see my home again for a long time now. I’ve been in exile for twenty years, you know. This is not so much different, this banishment. I’ll look after myself; and you look after yourself, and your Ekumen. That you must do alone. But all this is said too soon. Tell your ship to come down! When that’s done, then I’ll think beyond it.”
   We stayed two more days in Kurkurast, getting well fed and rested, waiting for a road-packer that was due in from the south and would give us a lift when it went back again. Our hosts got Estraven to tell them the whole tale of our crossing of the Ice. He told it as only a person of an oral-literature tradition can tell a story, so that it became a saga, full of traditional locutions and even episodes, yet exact and vivid, from the sulphurous fire and dark of the pass between Drumner and Dremegole to the screaming gusts from mountain-gaps that swept the Bay of Guthen; with comic interludes, such as his fall into the crevasse, and mystical ones, when he spoke of the sounds and silences of the Ice, of the shadowless weather, of the night’s darkness. I listened as fascinated as all the rest, my gaze on my friend’s dark face.
   We left Kurkurast riding elbow-jammed in the cab of a road-packer, one of the big powered vehicles that rolls and packs down the snow on Karhidish roads, the main means of keeping roads open in winter, since to try to keep them plowed clear would take half the kingdom’s time and money, and all traffic is on runners in the winter anyway. The packer ground along at two miles an hour, and brought us into the next village south of Kurkurast long after nightfall. There, as always, we were welcomed, fed, and housed for the night; the next day we went on afoot. We were now landward of the coastal hills that take the brunt of the north wind off the Bay of Guthen, in a more heavily settled region, and so went not from camp to camp but from Hearth to Hearth. A couple of times we did get a lift on a power-sledge, once for thirty miles. The roads, despite frequent heavy snowfall, were hard-packed and well-marked. There was always food in our packs, put there by the last night’s hosts; there was always a roof and a fire at the end of the day’s going.
   Yet those eight or nine days of easy hiking and skiing through a hospitable land were the hardest and dreariest part of all our journey, worse than the ascent of the glacier, worse than the last days of hunger. The saga was over, it belonged to the Ice. We were very tired. We were going the wrong direction. There was no more joy in us.
   “Sometimes you must go against the wheel’s turn,” Estraven said. He was as steady as ever, but in his walk, his voice, his bearing, vigor had been replaced by patience, and certainty by stubborn resolve. He was very silent, nor would he mindspeak with me much.
   We came to Sassinoth. A town of several thousand, perched up on hills above the frozen Ey: roofs white, walls gray, hills spotted black with forest and rock outcropping, fields and river white; across the river the disputed Sinoth Valley, all white…
   We came there all but empty-handed. Most of what remained of our travel-equipment we had given away to various kindly hosts, and by now we had nothing but the Chabe stove, our skis, and the clothes we wore. Thus unburdened we made our way, asking directions a couple of times, not into the town but to an outlying farm. It was a meager place, not part of a Domain but a single-farm under the Sinoth Valley Administration. When Estraven was a young secretary in that Administration he had been a friend of the owner, and in fact had bought this farm for him, a year or two ago, when he was helping people resettle east of the Ey in hopes of obviating dispute over the ownership of the Sinoth Valley. The farmer himself opened his door to us, a stocky soft-spoken man of about Estraven’s age, His name was Thessicher.
   Estraven had come through this region with hood pulled up and forward to hide his face. He feared recognition, here. He hardly needed to; it took a keen eye to see Harth rem ir Estraven in the thin weatherworn tramp. Thessicher kept staring at him covertly, unable to believe that he was who he said he was.
   Thessicher took us in, and his hospitality was up to standard though his means were small. But he was uncomfortable with us, he would rather not have had us. It was understandable; he risked the confiscation of his property by sheltering us. Since he owed that property to Estraven, and might by now have been as destitute as we if Estraven had not provided for him, it seemed not unjust to ask him to run some risk in return. My friend, however, asked his help not in repayment but as a matter of friendship, counting not on Thessicher’s obligation but on his affection. And indeed Thessicher thawed after his first alarm was past, and with Karhidish volatility became demonstrative and nostalgic, recalling old days and old acquaintances with Estraven beside the fire half the night. When Estraven asked him if he had any idea as to a hiding place, some deserted or isolated farm where a banished man might lie low for a month or two in hopes of a revocation of his exile, Thessicher at once said, “Stay with me.”
   Estraven’s eyes lit up at that, but he demurred; and agreeing that he might not be safe so near Sassinoth, Thessicher promised to find him a hideout. It wouldn’t be hard, he said, if Estraven would take a false name and hire out as a cook or farmhand, which would not be pleasant, perhaps, but certainly better than returning to Orgoreyn. “What the devil would you do in Orgoreyn? What would you live on, eh?”
   “On the Commensality,” said my friend, with a trace of his otter’s smile. “They provide all Units with jobs, you know. No trouble. But I’d rather be in Karhide… if you really think it could be managed…”
   We had kept the Chabe stove, the only thing of value left to us. It served us, one way or another, right to the end of our journey. The morning after our arrival at Thessicher’s farm, I took the stove and skied into town. Estraven of course did not come with me, but he had explained to me what to do, and it all went well. I sold the stove at the Town Commerce, then took the solid sum of money it had fetched up the hill to the little College of the Trades, where the radio station was housed, and bought ten minutes of “private transmission to private reception.” All stations set aside a daily period of time for such shortwave transmissions; as most of them are sent by merchants to their overseas agents or customers in the Archipelago, Sith, or Perunter, the cost is rather high, but not unreasonable. Less, anyway, than the cost of a secondhand Chabe stove. My ten minutes were to be early in Third Hour, late afternoon. I did not want to be skiing back and forth from Thessicher’s farm all day long, so I hung around Sassinoth, and bought a large, good, cheap lunch at one of the hot-shops. No doubt that Karhidish cooking was better than Orgota. As I ate, I remembered Estraven’s comment on that, when I had asked him if he hated Orgoreyn; I remembered his voice last night, saying with all mildness, “I’d rather be in Karhide…” And I wondered, not for the first time, what patriotism is, what the love of country truly consists of, how that yearning loyalty that had shaken my friend’s voice arises: and how so real a love can become, too often, so foolish and vile a bigotry. Where does it go wrong?
   After lunch I wandered about Sassinoth. The business of the town, the shops and markets and streets, lively despite snow-flurries and zero temperature, seemed like a play, unreal, bewildering. I had not yet come altogether out of the solitude of the Ice. I was uneasy among strangers, and constantly missed Estraven’s presence beside me.
   I climbed the steep snow-packed street in dusk to the College and was admitted and shown how to operate the public-use transmitter. At the time appointed I sent the wake signal to the relay satellite which was in stationary orbit about 300 miles over South Karhide. It was there as insurance for just a situation as this, when my ansible was gone so that I could not ask Ollul to signal the ship, and I had not time or equipment to make direct contact with the ship in solar orbit. The Sassinoth transmitter was more than adequate, but as the satellite was not equipped to respond except by sending to the ship, there was nothing to do but signal it and let it go at that. I could not know if the message had been received and relayed to the ship. I did not know if I had done right to send it. I had come to accept such uncertainties with a quiet heart.
   It had come on to snow hard, and I had to spend the night in town, not knowing the roads well enough to want to set off on them in the snow and dark. Having a bit of money still, I inquired for an inn, at which they insisted that I put up at the College; I had dinner with a lot of cheerful students, and slept in one of the dormitories. I fell asleep with a pleasant sense of security, an assurance of Karhide’s extraordinary and unfailing kindness to the stranger. I had landed in the right country in the first place, and now I was back. So I fell asleep; but I woke up very early and set off for Thessicher’s farm before breakfast, having spent an uneasy night full of dreams and wakenings.
   The rising sun, small and cold in a bright sky, sent shadows westward from every break and hummock in the snow. The road lay all streaked with dark and bright. No one moved in all the snowy fields; but away off on the road a small figure came toward me with the flying, gliding gait of the skier. Long before I could see the face I knew it for Estraven.
   “What’s up, Therem?”
   “I’ve got to get to the border,” he said, not even stopping as we met. He was already out of breath. I turned and we both went west, I hard put to keep up with him. Where the road turned to enter Sassinoth he left it, skiing out across the unfenced fields. We crossed the frozen Ey a mile or so north of town. The banks were steep, and at the end of the climb we both had to stop and rest. We were not in condition for this kind of race.
   “What happened? Thessicher—?”
   “Yes. Heard him on his wireless set. At daybreak.” Estraven’s chest rose and fell in gasps as it had when he lay on the ice beside the blue crevasse. “Tibe must have a price on my head.”
   “The damned ungrateful traitor!” I said stammering, not meaning Tibe but Thessicher, whose betrayal was of a friend.
   “He is that,” said Estraven, “but I asked too much of him, strained a small spirit too far. Listen, Genry. Go back to Sassinoth.”
   “I’ll at least see you over the border, Therem.”
   “There may be Orgota guards there.”
   “I’ll stay on this side. For God’s sake—”
   He smiled. Still breathing very hard, he got up and went on, and I went with him.
   We skied through small frosty woods and over the hillocks and fields of the disputed valley. There was no hiding, no skulking. A sunlit sky, a white world, and we two strokes of shadow on it, fleeing. Uneven ground hid the border from us till we were less than an eighth of a mile from it: then we suddenly saw it plain, marked with a fence, only a couple of feet of the poles showing above the snow, the pole-tops painted red. There were no guards to be seen on the Orgota side. On the near side there were ski-tracks, and, southward, several small figures moving.
   “There are guards on this side. You’ll have to wait till dark, Therem.”
   “Tibe’s Inspectors,” he gasped bitterly, and swung aside.
   We shot back over the little rise we had just topped, and took the nearest cover. There we spent the whole long day, in a dell among the thick-growing hemmen trees, their reddish boughs bent low around us by loads of snow. We debated many plans of moving north or south along the border to get out of this particularly troubled zone, of trying to get up into the hills east of Sassinoth, even of going back up north into the empty country, but each plan had to be vetoed. Estraven’s presence had been betrayed, and we could not travel in Karhide openly as we had been doing. Nor could we travel secretly for any distance at all: we had no tent, no food, and not much strength. There was nothing for it but the straight dash over the border, no way was open but one.
   We huddled in the dark hollow under dark trees, in the snow. We lay right together for warmth. Around midday Estraven dozed off for a while, but I was too hungry and too cold for sleep; I lay there beside my friend in a sort of stupor, trying to remember the words he had quoted to me once: Two are one, life and death, lying together. … It was a little like being inside the tent up on the Ice, but without shelter, without food, without rest: nothing left but our companionship, and that soon to end.
   The sky hazed over during the afternoon, and the temperature began to drop. Even in the windless hollow it became too cold to sit motionless. We had to move about, and still around sunset I was taken by fits of shuddering like those I had experienced in the prison-truck crossing Orgoreyn. The darkness seemed to take forever coming on. In the late blue twilight we left the dell and went creeping behind trees and bushes over the hill till we could make out the line of the border-fence, a few dim dots along the pallid snow. No lights, nothing moving, no sound. Away off in the southwest shone the yellow glimmer of a small town, some tiny Commensal Village of Orgoreyn, where Estraven could go with his unacceptable identification papers and be assured at least of a night’s lodging in the Commensal Jail or perhaps on the nearest Commensal Voluntary Farm. All at once—there, at that last moment, no sooner—I realized what my selfishness and Estraven’s silence had kept from me, where he was going and what he was getting into. I said, “Therem—wait—”
   But he was off, downhill: a magnificent fast skier, and this time not holding back for me. He shot away on a long quick curving descent through the shadows over the snow. He ran from me, and straight into the guns of the border-guards. I think they shouted warnings or orders to halt, and a light sprang up somewhere, but I am not sure; in any case he did not stop, but flashed on towards the fence, and they shot him down before he reached it. They did not use the sonic stunners but the foray gun, the ancient weapon that fires a set of metal fragments in a burst. They shot to kill him. He was dying when I got to him, sprawled and twisted away from his skis that stuck up out of the snow, his chest half shot away. I took his head in my arms and spoke to him, but he never answered me; only in a way he answered my love for him, crying out through the silent wreck and tumult of his mind as consciousness lapsed, in the unspoken tongue, once, clearly, “Areck!” Then no more. I held him, crouching there in the snow, while he died. They let me do that. Then they made me get up, and took me off one way and him another, I going to prison and he into the dark.

20. A Fool’s Errand

   Somewhere in the notes Estraven wrote during our trek across the Gobrin Ice he wonders why his companion is ashamed to cry. I could have told him even then that it was not shame so much as fear. Now I went on through the Sinoth Valley, through the evening of his death, into the cold country that lies beyond fear. There I found you can weep all you like, but there’s no good in it.
   I was taken back to Sassinoth and imprisoned, because I had been in the company of an outlaw, and probably because they did not know what else to do with me. From the start, even before official orders came from Erhenrang, they treated me well. My Karhidish jail was a furnished room in the Tower of the Lords-Elect in Sassinoth; I had a fireplace, a radio, and five large meals daily. It was not comfortable. The bed was hard, the covers thin, the floor bare, the air cold—like any room in Karhide. But they sent in a physician, in whose hands and voice was a more enduring, a more profitable comfort than any I ever found in Orgoreyn. After he came, I think the door was left unlocked. I recall it standing open, and myself wishing it were shut, because of the chill draft of air from the hall. But I had not the strength, the courage, to get off my bed and shut my prison door.
   The physician, a grave, maternal young fellow, told me with an air of peaceable certainty, “You have been underfed and overtaxed for five or six months. You have spent yourself. There’s nothing more to spend. Lie down, rest. Lie down like the rivers frozen in the valleys in winter. Lie still. Wait.”
   But when I slept I was always in the truck, huddling together with the others, all of us stinking, shivering, naked, squeezed together for warmth, all but one. One lay by himself against the barred door, the cold one, with a mouth full of clotted blood. He was the traitor. He had gone on by himself, deserting us, deserting me. I would wake up full of rage, a feeble shaky rage that turned into feeble tears.
   I must have been rather ill, for I remember some of the effects of high fever, and the physician stayed with me one night or perhaps more. I can’t recall those nights, but do remember saying to him, and hearing the querulous keening note in my own voice, “He could have stopped. He saw the guards. He ran right into the guns.”
   The young physician said nothing for a while. “You’re not saying that he killed himself?”
   “Perhaps—”
   “That’s a bitter thing to say of a friend. And I will not believe it of Harth rem ir Estraven.”
   I had not had in mind when I spoke the contemptibility of suicide to these people. It is not to them, as to us, an option. It is the abdication from option, the act of betrayal itself. To a Karhider reading our canons, the crime of Judas lies not in his betrayal of Christ but in the act that, sealing despair, denies the chance of forgiveness, change, life: his suicide. “Then you don’t call him Estraven the Traitor?”
   “Nor ever did. There are many who never heeded the accusations against him, Mr. Ai.”
   But I was unable to see any solace in that, and only cried out in the same torment, “Then why did they shoot him? Why is he dead?” To this he made no answer, there being none. I was never formally interrogated. They asked how I had got out of Pulefen Farm and into Karhide, and they asked the destination and intent of the code message I had sent on their radio. I told them. That information went straight to Erhenrang, to the king. The matter of the ship was apparently held secret, but the news of my escape from an Orgota prison, my journey over the Ice in winter, my presence in Sassinoth, was freely reported and discussed. Estraven’s part in this was not mentioned on the radio, nor was his death. Yet it was known. Secrecy in Karhide is to an extraordinary extent a matter of discretion, of an agreed, understood silence—an omission of questions, yet not an omission of answers. The Bulletins spoke only of the Envoy Mr. Ai, but everybody knew that it was Harth rem ir Estraven who had stolen me from the hands of the Orgota and come with me over the Ice to Karhide to give the staring lie to the Commensals’ tale of my sudden death from horm-fever in Mishnory last autumn… Estraven had predicted the effects of my return fairly accurately; he had erred mainly in underestimating them. Because of the alien who lay ill, not acting, not caring, in a room in Sassinoth, two governments fell within ten days.
   To say that an Orgota government fell means, of course, only that one group of Commensals replaced another group of Commensals in the controlling offices of the Thirty-Three. Some shadows got shorter and some longer, as they say in Karhide. The Sarf faction that had sent me off to Pulefen hung on, despite the not unprecedented embarrassment of being caught lying, until Argaven’s public announcement of the imminent arrival of the Star Ship in Karhide. That day Obsle’s party, the Open Trade faction, took over the presiding offices of the Thirty-Three. So I was of some service to them after all.
   In Karhide the fall of a government is most likely to mean the disgrace and replacement of a Prime Minister along with a reshuffling of the kyorremy; although assassination, abdication, and insurrection are all frequent alternatives. Tibe made no effort to hang on. My current value in the game of international shifgrethor, plus my vindication (by implication) of Estraven, gave me as it were a prestige-weight so clearly surpassing his, that he resigned, as I later learned, even before the Erhenrang Government knew that I had radioed to my ship. He acted on the tip-off from Thessicher, waited only until he got word of Estraven’s death, and then resigned. He had his defeat and his revenge for it all in one.
   Once Argaven was fully informed, he sent me a summons, a request to come at once to Erhenrang, and along with it a liberal allowance for expenses. The City of Sassinoth with equal liberality sent their young physician along with me, for I was not in very good shape yet. We made the trip in powersledges. I remember only parts of it; it was smooth and unhurried, with long halts waiting for packers to clear the road, and long nights spent at inns. It could only have taken two or three days, but it seemed a long trip and I can’t recall much of it till the moment when we came through the Northern Gates of Erhenrang into the deep streets full of snow and shadow.
   I felt then that my heart hardened somewhat and my mind cleared. I had been all in pieces, disintegrated. Now, though tired from the easy journey, I found some strength left whole in me. Strength of habit, most likely, for here at last was a place I knew, a city I had lived in, worked in, for over a year. I knew the streets, the towers, the somber courts and ways and facades of the Palace. I knew my job here. Therefore for the first time it came plainly to me that, my friend being dead, I must accomplish the thing he died for. I must set the keystone in the arch.
   At the Palace gates the order was for me to proceed to one of the guest-houses within the Palace walls. It was the Round-Tower Dwelling, which signaled a high degree of shifgrethor in the court: not so much the king’s favor, as his recognition of a status already high. Ambassadors from friendly powers were usually lodged there. It was a good sign. To get to it, however, we had to pass by the Corner Red Dwelling, and I looked in the narrow arched gateway at the bare tree over the pool, gray with ice, and the house that still stood empty.
   At the door of the Round-Tower I was met by a person in white hieb and crimson shirt, with a silver chain over his shoulders: Faxe, the Foreteller of Otherhord Fastness. At sight of his kind and handsome face, the first known face that I had seen for many days, a rush of relief softened my mood of strained resolution. When Faxe took my hands in the rare Karhidish greeting and welcomed me as his friend, I could make some response to his warmth.
   He had been sent to the kyorremy from his district, South Rer, early in the autumn. Election of council-members from the Indwellers of Handdara Fastnesses is not uncommon; it is however not common for a Weaver to accept office, and I believe Faxe would have refused if he had not been much concerned by Tibe’s government and the direction in which it was leading the country. So he had taken off the Weaver’s gold chain and put on the councillor’s silver one; and he had not spent long in making his mark, for he had been since Thern a member of the Hes-kyorremy or Inner Council, which serves as counterweight to the Prime Minister, and it was the king who had named him to that position. He was perhaps on his way up to the eminence from which Estraven, less than a year ago, had fallen. Political careers in Karhide are abrupt, precipitous.
   In the Round-Tower, a cold pompous little house, Faxe and I talked at some length before I had to see anyone else or make any formal statement or appearance. He asked with his clear gaze on me, “There is a ship coming, then, coming down to earth: a larger ship than the one you came to Horden Island on, three years ago. Is that right?”
   “Yes. That is, I sent a message that should prepare it to come.”
   “When will it come?”
   When I realized that I did not even know what day of the month it was, I began to realize how badly off I had in fact been, lately. I had to count back to the day before Estraven’s death. When I found that the ship, if it had been at minimum distance, would already be in planetary orbit awaiting some word from me, I had another shock.
   “I must communicate with the ship. They’ll want instructions. Where does the king want them to come down? It should be an uninhabited area, fairly large. I must get to a transmitter—”
   Everything was arranged expeditiously, with ease. The endless convolutions and frustrations of my previous dealings with the Erhenrang Government were melted away like ice-pack in a flooding river. The wheel turned… Next day I was to have an audience with the king.
   It had taken Estraven six months to arrange my first audience. It had taken the rest of his life to arrange this second one.
   I was too tired to be apprehensive, this time, and there were things on my mind that outweighed self-consciousness. I went down the long red hall under the dusty banners and stood before the dais with its three great hearths, where three bright fires cracked and sparkled. The king sat by the central fireplace, hunched up on a carven stool by the table.
   “Sit down, Mr. Ai.”
   I sat down across the hearth from Argaven, and saw his face in the light of the flames. He looked unwell, and old. He looked like a woman who has lost her baby, like a man who has lost his son.
   “Well, Mr. Ai, so your ship’s going to land.”
   “It will land in Athten Fen, as you requested, sir. They should bring it down this evening at the beginning of Third Hour.”
   “What if they miss the place? Will they burn everything up?”
   “They’ll follow a radio-beam straight in; that’s all been arranged. They won’t miss.”
   “And how many of them are there—eleven? Is that right?”
   “Yes. Not enough to be afraid of, my lord.”
   Argaven’s hands twitched in an unfinished gesture. “I am no longer afraid of you, Mr. Ai.”
   I’m glad of that.”
   “You’ve served me well.”
   “But I am not your servant.”
   “I know it,” he said indifferently. He stared at the fire, chewing the inside of his lip.
   “My ansible transmitter is in the hands of the Sarf in Mishnory, presumably. However, when the ship comes down it will have an ansible aboard. I will have thenceforth, if acceptable to you, the position of Envoy Plenipotentiary of the Ekumen, and will be empowered to discuss, and sign, a treaty of alliance with Karhide. All this can be confirmed with Hain and the various Stabilities by ansible.”
   “Very well.”
   I said no more, for he was not giving me his whole attention. He moved a log in the fire with his boot-toe, so that a few red sparks crackled up from it. “Why the devil did he cheat me?” he demanded in his high strident voice, and for the first time looked straight at me.
   “Who?” I said, sending back his stare.
   “Estraven.”
   “He saw to it that you didn’t cheat yourself. He got me out of sight when you began to favor a faction unfriendly to me. He brought me back to you when my return would in itself persuade you to receive the Mission of the Ekumen, and the credit for it.”
   “Why did he never say anything about this larger ship to me?”
   “Because he didn’t know about it: I never spoke to anyone of it until I went to Orgoreyn.”
   “And a fine lot you chose to blab to there, you two. He tried to get the Orgota to receive your Mission. He was working with their Open Traders all along. You’ll tell me that was not betrayal?”
   “It was not. He knew that, whichever nation first made alliance with the Ekumen, the other would follow soon: as it will: as Sith and Perunter and the Archipelago will also follow, until you find unity. He loved his country very dearly, sir, but he did not serve it, or you. He served the master I serve.”
   “The Ekumen?” said Argaven, startled.
   “No. Mankind.”
   As I spoke I did not know if what I said was true. True in part; an aspect of the truth. It would be no less true to say that Estraven’s acts had risen out of pure personal loyalty, a sense of responsibility and friendship towards one single human being, myself. Nor would that be the whole truth.
   The king made no reply. His somber, pouched, furrowed face was turned again to the fire.
   “Why did you call to this ship of yours before you notified me of your return to Karhide?”
   “To force your hand, sir. A message to you would also have reached Lord Tibe, who might have handed me over to the Orgota. Or had me shot. As he had my friend shot.”
   The king said nothing.
   “My own survival doesn’t matter all that much, but I have and had then a duty towards Gethen and the Ekumen, a task to fulfill. I signaled the ship first, to ensure myself some chance of fulfilling it. That was Estraven’s counsel, and it was right.”
   “Well, it was not wrong. At any rate they’ll land here; we shall be the first… And they’re all like you, eh? All perverts, always in kemmer? A queer lot to vie for the honor of receiving… Tell Lord Gorchern, the chamberlain, how they expect to be received. See to it that there’s no offense or omission. They’ll be lodged in the Palace, wherever you think suitable. I wish to show them honor. You’ve done me a couple of good turns, Mr. Ai. Made liars of the Commensals, and then fools.”
   “And presently allies, my lord.”
   “I know!” he said shrilly. “But Karhide first—Karhide first!”
   I nodded.
   After some silence, he said, “How was it, that pull across the Ice?”
   “Not easy.”
   “Estraven would be a good man to pull with, on a crazy trek like that. He was tough as iron. And never lost his temper. I’m sorry he’s dead.”
   I found no reply.
   “I’ll receive your…countrymen in audience tomorrow afternoon at Second Hour. Is there more needs saying now?”
   “My lord, will you revoke the Order of Exile on Estraven, to clear his name?”
   “Not yet, Mr. Ai. Don’t rush it. Anything more?”
   “No more.”
   “Go on, then.”
   Even I betrayed him. I had said I would not bring the ship down till his banishment was ended, his name cleared. I could not throw away what he had died for, by insisting on the condition. It would not bring him out of this exile.
   The rest of that day went in arranging with Lord Gorchern and others for the reception and lodging of the ship’s company. At Second Hour we set out by powersledge to Athten Fen, about thirty miles northeast of Erhenrang. The landing site was at the near edge of the great desolate region, a peat-marsh too boggy to be farmed or settled, and now in mid-Irrem a flat frozen waste many feet deep in snow. The radio beacon had been functioning all day, and they had received confirmation signals from the ship.
   On the screens, coming in, the crew must have seen the terminator lying clear across the Great Continent along the border, from Guthen Bay to the Gulf of Charisune, and the peaks of the Kargav still in sunlight, a chain of stars; for it was twilight when we, looking up, saw the one star descending.
   She came down in a roar and glory, and steam went roaring up white as her stabilizers went down in the great lake of water and mud created by the retro; down underneath the bog there was permafrost like granite, and she came to rest balanced neatly, and sat cooling over the quickly refreezing lake, a great, delicate fish balanced on its tail, dark silver in the twilight of Winter.
   Beside me Faxe of Otherhord spoke for the first time since the sound and splendor of the ship’s descent. “I’m glad I have lived to see this,” he said. So Estraven had said when he looked at the Ice, at death; so he should have said this night. To get away from the bitter regret that beset me I started to walk forward over the snow towards the ship. She was frosted already by the interhull coolants, and as I approached the high port slid open and the exitway was extruded, a graceful curve down onto the ice. The first off was Lang Heo Hew, unchanged, of course, precisely as I had last seen her, three years ago in my life and a couple of weeks in hers. She looked at me, and at Faxe, and at the others of the escort who had followed me, and stopped at the foot of the ramp. She said solemnly in Karhidish, “I have come in friendship.” To her eyes we were all aliens. I let Faxe greet her first.
   He indicated me to her, and she came and took my right hand in the fashion of my people, looking into my face. “Oh Genly,” she said, “I didn’t know you!” It was strange to hear a woman’s voice, after so long. The others came out of the ship, on my advice: evidence of any mistrust at this point would humiliate the Karhidish escort, impugning their shifgrethor. Out they came, and met the Karhiders with a beautiful courtesy. But they all looked strange to me, men and women, well as I knew them. Their voices sounded strange: too deep, too shrill. They were like a troupe of great, strange animals, of two different species: great apes with intelligent eyes, all of them in rut, in kemmer… They took my hand, touched me, held me.
   I managed to keep myself in control, and to tell Heo Hew and Tulier what they most urgently needed to know about the situation they had entered, during the sledge-ride back to Erhenrang. When we got to the Palace, however, I had to get to my room at once.
   The physician from Sassinoth came in. His quiet voice and his face, a young, serious face, not a man’s face and not a woman’s, a human face, these were a relief to me, familiar, right… But he said, after ordering me to get to bed and dosing me with some mild tranquilizer, “I’ve seen your fellow-Envoys. This is a marvelous thing, the coming of men from the stars. And in my lifetime!”
   There again was the delight, the courage, that is most admirable in the Karhidish spirit-and in the human spirit—and though I could not share it with him, to deny it would be a detestable act. I said, without sincerity, but with absolute truth, “It is a marvelous thing indeed for them as well, the coming to a new world, a new mankind.”
   At the end of that spring, late in Tuwa when the Thaw-floods were going down and travel was possible again, I took a vacation from my little Embassy in Erhenrang, and went east. My people were spread out by now all over the planet. Since we had been authorized to use the aircars, Heo Hew and three others had taken one and flown over to Sith and the Archipelago, nations of the Sea Hemisphere which I had entirely neglected. Others were in Orgoreyn, and two, reluctant, in Perunter, where the Thaws do not even begin until Tuwa and everything refreezes (they say) a week later. Tulier and Ke’sta were getting on very well in Erhenrang, and could handle what might come up. Nothing was urgent. After all, a ship setting out at once from the closest of Winter’s new allies could not arrive before seventeen years, planetary time, had passed. It is a marginal world, on the edge. Out beyond it towards the South Orion Arm no world has been found where men live. And it is a long way back from Winter to the prime worlds of the Ekumen, the hearth-worlds of our race: fifty years to Hain-Davenant, a man’s lifetime to Earth. No hurry.
   I crossed the Kargav, this time on lower passes, on a road that winds along above the coast of the southern sea. I paid a visit to the first village I had stayed in, when the fishermen brought me in from Horden Island three years ago; the folk of that Hearth received me, now as then, without the least surprise. I spent a week in the big port city Thather at the mouth of the River Ench, and then in early summer started on foot into Kerm Land.
   I walked east and south into the steep harsh country full of crags and green hills and great rivers and lonely houses, till I came to Icefoot Lake. From the lakeshore looking up southward at the hills I saw a light I knew: the blink, the white suffusion of the sky, the glare of the glacier lying high beyond. The Ice was there.
   Estre was a very old place. Its Hearth and outbuildings were all of gray stone cut from the steep mountainside to which it clung. It was bleak, full of the sound of wind.
   I knocked and the door was opened. I said, “I ask the hospitality of the Domain. I was a friend of Therem of Estre.”
   The one who opened to me, a slight, grave-looking fellow of nineteen or twenty, accepted my words in silence and silently admitted me to the Hearth. He took me to the wash-house, the tiring-rooms, the great kitchen, and when he had seen to it that the stranger was clean, clothed, and fed, he left me to myself in a bedroom that looked down out of deep slit-windows over the gray lake and the gray thore-forests that lie between Estre and Stok. It was a bleak land, a bleak house. Fire roared in the deep hearth, giving as always more warmth for the eye and spirit than for the flesh, for the stone floor and walls, the wind outside blowing down off the mountains and the Ice, drank up most of the heat of the flames. But I did not feel the cold as I used to, my first two years on Winter; I had lived long in a cold land, now.
   In an hour or so the boy (he had a girl’s quick delicacy in his looks and movements, but no girl could keep so grim a silence as he did) came to tell me that the Lord of Estre would receive me if it pleased me to come. I followed him downstairs, through long corridors where some kind of game of hide-and-seek was going on. Children shot by us, darted around us, little ones shrieking with excitement, adolescents slipping like shadows from door to door, hands over their mouths to keep laughter still. One fat little thing of five or six caromed into my legs, then plunged and grabbed my escort’s hand for protection. “Sorve!” he squeaked, staring up wide-eyed at me all the time, “Sorve, I’m going to hide in the brewery—!” Off he went like a round pebble from a sling. The young man Sorve, not at all discomposed, led me on and brought me into the Inner Hearth to the Lord of Estre.
   Esvans Harth rem ir Estraven was an old man, past seventy, crippled by an arthritic disease of the hips. He sat erect in a rolling-chair by the fire. His face was broad, much blunted and worn down by time, like a rock in a torrent: a calm face, terribly calm.
   “You are the Envoy, Genry Ai?”
   “I am.”
   He looked at me, and I at him. Therem had been the son, child of the flesh, of this old lord. Therem the younger son; Arek the elder, that brother whose voice he had heard in mine bespeaking him; both dead now. I could not see anything of my friend in that worn, calm, hard old face that met my gaze. I found nothing there but the certainty, the sure fact of Therem’s death.
   I had come on a fool’s errand to Estre, hoping for solace. There was no solace; and why should a pilgrimage to the place of my friend’s childhood make any difference, fill any absence, soothe any remorse? Nothing could be changed now. My coming to Estre had, however, another purpose, and this I could accomplish.
   “I was with your son in the months before his death. I was with him when he died. I’ve brought you the journals he kept. And if there’s anything I can tell you of those days—”
   No particular expression showed on the old man’s face. That calmness was not to be altered. But the young one with a sudden movement came out of the shadows into the light between the window and the fire, a bleak uneasy light, and he spoke harshly: “In Erhenrang they still call him Estraven the Traitor.”
   The old lord looked at the boy, then at me.
   “This is Sorve Harth,” he said, “heir of Estre, my sons’ son.”
   There is no ban on incest there, I knew it well enough. Only the strangeness of it, to me a Terran, and the strangeness of seeing the flash of my friend’s spirit in this grim, fierce, provincial boy, made me dumb for a while. When I spoke my voice was unsteady. “The king will recant. Therem was no traitor. What does it matter what fools call him?”
   The old lord nodded slowly, smoothly. “It matters,” he said.
   “You crossed the Gobrin Ice together,” Sorve demanded, “you and he?”
   “We did.”
   “I should like to hear that tale, my Lord Envoy,” said old Esvans, very calm. But the boy, Therem’s son, said stammering, “Will you tell us how he died? Will you tell us about the other worlds out among the stars– the other kinds of men, the other lives?”

The Gethenian Calendar and Clock

The Year

   Gethen’s period of revolution is 8401 Terran Standard Hours, or.96 of the Terran Standard Year. The period of rotation is 23.08 Terran Standard Hours: the Gethenian year contains 364 days.
   In Karhide/Orgoreyn years are not numbered consecutively from a base year forward to the present; the base year is the current year. Every New Years Day (Getheny Thern) the year just past becomes the year “one-ago,” and every past date is increased by one. The future is similarly counted, next year being the year “one-to-come,” until it in turn becomes the Year One.
   The inconvenience of this system in record-keeping is palliated by various devices, for instance reference to well-known events, reigns of kings, dynasties, local lords, etc. The Yomeshta count in 144-year cycles from the Birth of Meshe (2202 years-ago, in Ekumenical Year 1492), and keep ritual celebrations every twelfth year; but this system is strictly cultic and is not officially employed even by the government of Orgoreyn, which sponsors the Yomesh religion.


The Month

   The period of revolution of Gethen’s moon is 26 Gethenian days; the rotation is captured, so that the moon presents the same face to the planet always.
   There are 14 months in the year, and as solar and lunar calendars concur so closely that adjustment is required only about once in 200 years, the days of the month are invariable, as are the dates of the-phases of the moon. The Karhidish names of the months:
   Winter:
   Thern
   Thanern
   Nimmer
   Anner
   Spring:
   Irrem
   Moth
   Tuwa
   Summer:
   Osme
   Ockre
   Kus
   Hakanna
   Autumn:
   Gor
   Susmy
   Grende
   The 26-day month is divided into two halfmonths of 13 days.


The Day

   The day (23.08 T.S.H.) is divided into 10 hours (see below); being invariable, the days of the month are generally referred to by name, like our days of the week, not by number. (Many of the names refer to the phase of the moon, e.g. Getheny, “darkness,” Arhad, “first crescent,” etc. The prefix od– used in the second halfmonth is a reversive, giving a contrary meaning, so that Odgetheny might be translated as “undarkness.”) The Karhidish names of the days of the month:
   Getheny
   Sordny
   Eps
   Arhad
   Netherhad
   Streth
   Berny
   Orny
   Harhahad
   Guyrny
   Yrny
   Posthe
   Tormenbod
   Odgetheny
   Odsordny
   Odeps
   Odarhad
   Onnetherhad
   Odstreth
   Obberny
   Odorny
   Odharhahad
   Odguyrny
   Odyrny
   Opposthe
   Ottormenbod


The Hour

   The decimal clock used in all Gethenian cultures converts as follows, very roughly, to the Terran double-twelve-hour clock (Note: This is a mere guide to the time of day implied by a Gethenian “Hour”; the complexities of an exact conversion, given the fact that the Gethenian day contains only 23.08 Terran Standard Hours, are irrelevant to my purpose):

   First Hour noon to 2:30 p.m.
   Second Hour 2:30 to 5:00 p.m.
   Third Hour 5:00 to 7:00 p.m.
   Fourth Hour 7:00 to 9:30 p.m.
   Fifth Hour 9:30 to midnight
   Sixth Hour midnight to 2:30 a.m.
   Seventh Hour 2:30 to 5:00 a.m.
   Eighth Hour 5:00 to 7:00 a.m.
   Ninth Hour 7:00 to 9:30 a.m.
   Tenth Hour 9:30 to noon

---

1

   Karhosh, island, the usual word for the apartment-boardinghouse buildings that house the greatest part of the urban populations of Karhide. Islands contain 20 to 200 private rooms; meals are communal; some are run as hotels, others as cooperative communes, others combine these types. They are certainly an urban adaptation of the fundamental Karhidish institution of the Hearth, though lacking, of course, the topical and genealogical stability of the Hearth ready for supper. Karhiders eat four solid meals a day, breakfast, lunch, dinner, supper, along with a lot of adventitious nibbling and gobbling in between. There are no large meat-animals on Winter, and no mammalian products, milk, butter or cheese; the only high-protein, high-carbohydrate foods are the various kinds of eggs, fish, nuts, and the Hainish grains. A lowgrade diet for a bitter climate, and one must refuel often. I had got used to eating, as it seemed, every few minutes. It wasn’t until later in that year that I discovered the Gethenians have perfected the technique not only of perpetually stuffing, but also of indefinitely starving.

2

   His transgression of the code controlling incest became a crime when seen as the cause of his brother’s suicide. (G.A.)

3

   The Pering Ice is the glacial sheet that covers the northernmost portion of Karhide, and is (in winter when the Guthen Bay is frozen) contiguous with the Gobrin Ice of Orgoreyn.

4

   Kurem, damp weather, 0° to -20° F.

5

   This is a mystical expression of one of the theories used to support the expanding-universe hypothesis, first proposed by the Mathematical School of Sith over four thousand years ago and generally accepted by later cosmologists, even though meteorological conditions on Gethen prevent their gathering much observational support from astronomy. The rate of expansion (Hubble’s constant; Rerherek’s constant) can in fact be estimated from the observed amount of light in the night sky; the point here involved is that, if the universe were not expanding, the night sky would not appear to be dark.

6

   The Handdarata.

7

   Neserem: fine snow on a moderate gale: a light blizzard.

Legvin Ursula

ZEMLJOMORJE
Prevod: Živković Mirjana/Janoski Sonja

Leguin Ursula K. EARTHSEA TRILOGY (THE), 1968.

Serija "Zemljomorje"

(1) RUNE
1988.

Prva knjiga: ČAROBNJAK ZEMLJOMORJA

1. RATNICI U MAGLI

     Ostrvo Gont, usamljeni planinski vrh koji se uzdiže čitavu milju iznad večito uskovitlane površine Severoistočnog mora, čuveno je po svojim čarobnjacima. Iz gradova na njegovim visoravnima i luke po mračnoim mu uvalama mnogo je Gontijaca odlazilo da stupe u službu Gospodara Arhipelaga i budu im čarobnjaci, ili, čak, magi, a oni pustolovniji među njima da lutaju od ostrva do ostrva širom Zemljomorja i prave čarolije. Najveći među njima - kažu neki; ali, svakako najveći putnik - slažu se svi - bio je čovek zvani Jastreb, koji je svojevremeno uspio da postane i Gospodar Zmajeva i Arhimag. O njegovom životu govori ep Podvizi Geda i još mnogo manjih pesama, ali ovo je priča o njemu iz vremena kad još nije postao slavan, kada još ne beše ušao u pesmu.
     Rodio se u usamljenom selu zvanom Deset jova, visoko u planini, na najvišoj tački Severne doline. Ispod njegovog sela spuštaju se stepenasto sve do samog mora njive i pašnjaci koji pripadaju Dolinama, i mali gradovi leže posejani duž okuka reke Ar; iznad njegovog sela uzdiže se još samo prašuma, jedan greben pun stabala za drugim, sve do stenovitih, snegom pokrivenih planinskih vrhova. Ime koje je nosio u detinjstvu dala mu je majka, i to ime, pored života samog bilo je sve što je mogla da mu podri, jer je umrla pre nego što je on napunio godinu dana. Otac, seoski kovač bronze, bio je mrgodan, ćutljiv čovek, i s obzirom da su šestorica Danijeve braće bili mnogo godina stariji od njega i jedan po jedan počeli da napuštaju roditeljski dom da bi se bavili zemljoradnjom, ili moreplovstvom, ili, takođe, kovačkim zanatom, ali u drugim naseljima Severne doline, niko se nije našao da detetu posveti pažnju i nežnost. Izdžikljao je kao korov u divljini, i postao visoki, hitri dečak, prkosan i bučan, i veoma naprasit. Sa još nekolicinom seoske dece čuvao je koze po strmim livadama iznad izvorišta reke Ar; a kada je dovoljno porastao i ojačao da može da gore-dole pritiska dugačke ručke na kovačkim mehovima otac ga je uzeo da mu pomaže u kovačnici, uz mnogo bubotaka i šibanja. Iz Danija se nije moglo mnogo izvući. Stalno je negde šalabazao; tumarao po prašumi, plivao po plićacima reke Ar koje je, kai i sve ostale reke na Gontu, veoma brza i hladna, ili pentrao po strminama i zakosima sve do onih vrhova iznad prašume sa kojih je mogao da vidi more, pučinu onog severnog okeana na kojoj više nema nijednog ostrva kada se prođe Peregal.
     Sestra njegove pokojne majke živela je u istom selu. Ona se starala o njemu koliko je bilo neophodno dok je bio beba; ali, i ona je ona je imala svoja posla i potpuno je prestala da obraća pažnju na njega čim je odrastao toliko da je mogao da se sam brine o sebi. Ali jednoga dana, kad mu je bilo sedam godina i kad je još bio neuk i nije imao pojma o veštinama i moćima kojima se vlada svetom, čuo je kako tetka dovijuje nešto kozi koja je bila skočila na slamni krov njene kolibe i nikako nije htela da siđe: ali, smesta je skočila onog trenutka kada joj je tetka doviknula izvesne reči koje su se rimovale. Sutradan, čuvajući dugodlake koze na livadama iznad Visoke urvine, Dani im viknu one iste reči, ne znajući ni šta znače ni čemu služe, ni šta su, same po sebi:

     Noth hierth malk man
     hiolk han merth han!

     Vikao je koliko ga grlo nosi i koze su mu prišle. Hitro su se okupile oko njega, ne puštajući ni glasa. Samo su ga gledale, onim svojim žutim očima i tamnim, iskošenim dupljama.
     Dani se zakikota i opet viknu istu tu pjesmicu koja mu je davala moć nad kozama. One su sabiše još više, zbijajući se u gomilu oko njega. Odjednom ga uhvati strah od njihovih debelih, rebarstih rogova, čudnih očiju i još čudnijeg ćutanja. On stoga pokuša da se izvuče iz njihovog obruča i da utekne. Ali koze potrčaše zajedno s njim, čvrsto ga okružujući svojim telima kao čvor, i tako na kraju stigoše i do sela, silazeći u trku; koze tesno zbijene kao da ih sve opasuje neki nevidljivi konopac, a dečak u sredini, plačući i zapomažući. Seljaci istrčaše na ulicu da psuju koze i da se podsmevaju dečaku. Među njima se našla i dečakova tetka, ali ona se nije smejala. Samo je rekla jednu reč kozama, i životinje opet stadoše da mekeću i tumaraju unaokolo čupkajući travu, oslobođene od čini.
     "Hajde sa mnom", pozva ona Denija.
     Odvela ga je u kolibu u kojoj je živela sasvim sama. Obično nije puštala decu da joj ulaze, i deca su se pribojavala toga mesta. Koliba je bila niska i polumračna, bez prozora, ispunjena mirisima trava koje su se sušile obešene na poprečnoj gredi krova, nane i belog luka i majčine dušice, hajdučke trave i site i crnog sleza, kopitca, đavolove trave, vratike i lovora. Tetka se spusti pokraj ognjišta i ukrsti noge, pogledajući iskosa na dečaka kroz zamršene crne čvorove svoje kose i zapita ga šta je to rekao kozama i da li zna šta, u stvari, predstavlja ta pesmica. Kada je otkrila da ne zna ništa, a ipak je magijom primorao koze da mu priđu i da ga prate u stopu, bilo joj je jasno da on u sebi nosi urođenu moć.
     Dok ga je smatrala samo sinom svoje sestre nije joj ništa značio, ali sada je počela da gleda na njega drugim očima. Pohvalila ga je i rekla mu da ume da ga nauči pesmicama koje će mu se možda više dopasti, kao što je reč kojom se puž može naterati da proviri iz kućice, ili ime kojim se soko može dozvati sa neba.
     "Aha, kaži mi to ime"! uzviknu on, jer već uveliko beše prebrodio strah od koza, i sav se naduo od gordosti zato što ga je ona pohvalila i rekla da je pametan.
     "Ali, kada ti kažem tu reč, nikada je ne smeš reći drugoj deci", reče mu vračara.
     "Obećavam."
     Ona se nasmeši na tu silnu spremnost što dolazi od neznanja. "Dobro, u redu. Ali, moram te vezati za to obećanje. Nećeš moći da progovoriš dokle god ja ne odlučim da ti razvežem jezik, pa i tada, iako ćeš biti u stanju da govoriš, reč koju sam te naučila nećeš moći nikada da izgovoriš tamo gde bi neko mogao da te čuje. Moramo čuvati tajne svoga zanata."
     "Dobro", prihvati dečak, jer ionako nije imao želje da otkrije tajnu svojim drugovima, pošto mu se dopalo što će znati i umeti nešto što oni ne znaju i ne mogu.
     Sedeo je nepomičan dok je tetka vezivala neočešljanu kosu i pravila čvor na pojasu svoje haljine, a potom sela ukrštenih nogu i počela da baca pune šake nekakvog lišća u ognjište, tako da se podigao veliki dim i potpuno ispunio mračnu kolibu. Počela je da peva. Glas joj se povremeno menjao i postajao dubok ili tanak, kao da kroz nju peva neko drugi, i to pevanje je trajalo i trajalo, sve dok dečak na kraju više nije znao da li je budan ili sanja, i sve to vreme njen stari crni pas koji nikada nije zalajao sedeo je pored njega, očiju pocrvenelih od dima. Napokon se čarobnica obrati Daniju jezikom koji nije razumeo i natera ga da zajedno sa njom izgovara izvesne basme i reči sve dok nije postao potpuno omađijan i nije mogao da mrdne.
     "Govori!" naredi mu ona, da bi iskušala jačinu čini.
     Dečak nije mogao da progovori, ali se glasno nasmejao.
     Tada mu se tetka malo prepade od njegove snage, jer to su bile čini kakve je samo ona umela da baci; pokušala je ne samo da ovlada njegovim govorom i ćutanjem, već i da ga istovremeno priveže za sebe, da joj služi kao šegrt u čarobnjačkom zanatu. Ali itako omađijan, on se ipak naglas smejao. Nije mu ništa rekla. Posula je vatru čistom vodom i kada se dim raspršio dala mu da popije malo. Kada je vazduh opet postao čist i on mogao da progovori, otkrila mu je istinsko ime sokola, ono na koje se soko mora odazvati.
     Takav je bio prvi Denijev korak na putu kojim će ići čitavog života, putu magije, putu koji će ga najzad naterati da goni jednu senku i kopnom i morem, do samih mračnih obala carstva smrti. Ali, pri prvim koracima taj put je još uvek izgledao širok i svetao.
     Kada je ustanovio da se divlji sokoli zaista obrušavaju svom brzinom ka njemu čim ih pozove tim imenom, spuštajući se uz gromovito lepetanje krila na njegov ručni zglob poput lovačkih sokola nekakvog kralja, u njemu se javila glad za novim imenima; stoga se vratio tetki, moljakajući je da ga nauči imenima jastreba, kostoloma i orla. Da bi je privolio da mu saopšti reći što daju moć, činio je sve što je čarobnica od njega zatražila i učio od nje sve čemu bi ga podučavala, iako sve to nije baš uvek bilo prijatno da se radi ili uči. Na Gontu postoji izreka - Slab kao ženske čini; a postoji još jedna - Zao kao ženske čini. Čarobnica iz Deset jova nije bila zla veštica koja se bavi crnom magijom, niti se ikada upuštala u veštine visokog stupnja, one kojima se opšti sa Prastarim silama; ali pošto je bila neuka među prostim svetom, često je svojom veštinom služila u glupe i sumnjive svrhe. Nije pojma imala ni o Ravnotežju, niti o Ustrojstvu, za koje zna pravi čarobnjak i kojim se pokorava, i što ga obuzdava da svoje čini koristi samo kada je to zaista neophodno. Ona je za svaku priliku imala po neku basmu i bez prestanka se bavila čaranjem. Najveći dio tog njenog znanja, nasleđenog iz usmenog predanja, bio je bezvredno đubre i čista podvala, a ona nije umela da razlikuje prave bajalice od lažnih. Znala je mnoge kletve i kao da je bolje umela da izaziva tuđe bolesti nego da ih leči. Kao svaka prava seoska veštica umela je da svari ljubavni napitak, ali bilo je i drugih, ružnijih tečnosti, koje je pravila da posluže muškoj ljubomori ili mržnji. Ipak, takve stvari nije otkrila svom mladom šegrtu, i, onoliko koliko je bila u stanju, učila ga je samo poštenom zanatu.
     Kada je tek počeo da uči veštine čaranja, zadovoljstva su mu se, na pravi detinji način, iscrpljavala u saznanjima kako da ovlada zverinjem i pticama. To osećanje zadovoljstva zadržao je i kasnije, tokom čitavog života. Pošto su ga na planinskim pašnjacima često viđali u pratnji neke ptice grabljivice, deca mu nadenuše nadimak Jastreb, i na to ime se tako navikao da ga je i kasnije u životu zadržao za svakodnevnu upotrebu, tamo gde mu nisu znali istinsko ime.
     Pošto mu je veračara neprestano pričala o slavi, bogastvima i moći nad ljudima koje može da stekne prvi čarobnjak, on se napokon sasvim posveti proučavanju i korisnijih tajnih znanja. Učio je veoma brzo. Vračara ga je hvalila, a deca u selu počeše da ga se pribojavaju, dok je on sam bio siguran da će uskoro postati velik i slavan. I tako je, zajedno sa vračarom, prelazio reč po reč i bajalicu po bajalicu, sve dok nije napunio dvanaestu i naučio od nje skoro sve što je znala; to baš nije bilo mnogo, ali dovoljno za sitnu seosku vešticu, i više nego dovoljno za dvanaestogodišnjeg dečaka. Naučila ga je svemu što je znala iz usmenih predanja o čarobnim travama i vidarstvu, i svemu što je znala o veštinama otkrivanja, bacanja čini, lečenja, oslobađanja od čini i proricanja. Otpevala mu je sve bajke putujućih pevača i sve epske Podvige koje je znala, i sve one reči Istinskog jezika kojima nju beše naučio njen učitelj-čarobnjak ona je saopštila Daniju. A od vrača-vremenaša i putujućih mađioničara, koji su išli od mesta do mesta širom Severne doline i u Istočnoj prašumi, naučio je razne trikove i zabavne stvari, i opsenarske veštine. I upravo jednom od takvih sitnih vradžbina prvi put je pokazao ogromnu moć koja mu je bila urođena.
     U to doba carstvo Kargard je bilo velika sila. Njega sačinjavaju četiri velike zemlje koje leže između Severnog i Istočnog Prostranstva: Karego-At, Atuan, Hur-at-Hur i Atnini. Jezik njihovih stanovnika ne liči ni na jedan kojim se govori u Arhipelagu ili nekom od drugih Prostranstava, a oni sami su divljaci, bele puti i plave kose, koji vole da vide krv i osete miris grada. Pre godinu dana bili su napali Torikle i utvrđeno ostrvo Torheven, ogromnom vojskom koja je doplovila njihovom flotom sa crvenim jedrima. Vesti o tome stigle su i na sever, do Gonta, ali Gospodari Gonta bili su isuviše zauzeti vlastitim gusarenjem i nisu se obazirali na pozive u pomoć drugih zemalja. A onda je Spivi pao u ruke Karaga i bio opljačkan i opustošen a njegovi stanovnici odvedeni u roblje, tako da je do dana današnjeg ostao ostrvo pod ruševinama. Ispunjeni osvajačkim zanosom, Karzi onda zajedriše u pravcu Gonta, i njihova vojska u trideset dugovratih brodova stiže u Istočnu luku. Boreći se ulicama grada osvojiše ga i spališe; ostavivši brodove pod stražom usidrene u ušću reke Ar, uputiše se potom uz Dolinu, rušeći pljačkajući sve pred sobom, kasapeći stoku i ljude. Uz put su se podelili u bande, i svaka banda krenu da pljačka gde god je htela. Izbeglice, međutim, upozoriše na opasnost sela na većim visinama. Uskoro stanovnici Deset jova ugledaše kako nebo na istoku tamni od dima, i oni koji su se iste noći popeli do crvenom izmaglicom i prošaranu vatrenim nitima, tamo gde su polja spremna na žetvu bila zapaljena, gde su goreli voćnjaci i voćke se pekle viseći na gorećem granju, a ambari i seoske kuće bili pretvoreni u tinjajuće gomile pepela.
     Neki od seljana pobegoše naviše, kroz krševite klance, i posakrivaše se po prašumi; drugi stadoše da se spremaju za borbu na život i smrt, a neki, opet, ne učiniše ni jedno ni drugo, već se stadoše okupljati unaokolo, zapomažući. Vračara je bila jedna od onih koji su pobegli, sakrivši se sasvim sama u jednu pećinu na Strmini Kaperding, čiji je ulaz zatrpala pomoću čarolije. Danijev otac, kovač bronze, bio je jedan od onih koji su ostali, jer ne bi ni za živu glavu napustio jamu za taljenje i kovačnicu u kojoj je, mučno radeći, proveo pedeset godina. Svu noć je radio iz petnih žila, iskivajući od metala koji mu se našao pri ruci vrhove za koplja, a drugi su radili uporedo s njim, vezujući te vrhove za držalja ašova i vila, jer nije bilo više vremena da se na svakom vrhu npravi odgovarajući otvor i da se tako pričvrsti za držalje kako valja. U selu nije bilo oružja sem lovačkih lukova i strela i kratkih kama, jer goroštaci iz Gonta nisu nikada bili skloni ratovanju; nisu se oni proslavili kao ratnici, već kao kradljivci koza, gusari i čarobnjaci.
     U zoru se pojavi debela, bela magla, kao što često biva u jesenja jutra na visinama toga ostrva. Između svojih koliba i kuća duž krivudave ulice u Deset jova seljani su stajali na oprezu, sa svojim lovačkim lukovima i tek iskovanim kopljima, ne znajući da li su Karzi još daleko, ili možda sasvim blizu, svi ćutkei svi napeto zureći u maglu koja je od njihovih očiju skrivala oblike, rastojanja i opasnosti.
     S njima je bio i Dani. Radio je cele noći na mehovima, gurajući naviše i naniže dve dugačke ručke spojene kozjom kožom, iz koje su mlazevi vazduha potpirivali vatru. Sada su g ruke toliko bolele i toliko se mu podrhtavale od iznemoglosti da nije mogao dadrži uzdignuto koplje koje sam sebi beše odabrao. Nije mu bilo jasno kako će uopšte moći da se bori, ili da na bilo koji način bude od koristi i sebi i seljacima. Srce mu je razdirala strepnja da će umreti, naboden na koplje Karga, ovako mlad i zelen; da će morti da ode u carstvo mraka, i da nikada neće saznati svoje pravo ime, ono istinsko ime koje bi trebalo da dobije kada odraste... On spusti pogled nasvoje tanušne ručice, vlažne od hladne jutarnje magle, i pobesne zbog vlastite slabosti, jer je dobro znao koliko je jak.U njemu je bila moć, samo kad bi znao kako da je upotrebi, i on među bajalicama koje je znao potraži neku koja bi njemu i njegovim saborcima mogla doneti izvesnu prednost, ili, makar, priliku da se bore ravnopravno. Ali potreba nije sama po sebi dovoljna da se ta moć oslobodi; potrebno je i znanje.
     Magla je počela da se razilazi pod toplotom sunca koje je sijalo na vedrom nebu iznad planinskog vrha. Dok su se magle kovitlale i razdvajale u velikim oblacima i tankim pramenovima, seljaci ugledaše grupu ratnika kako im se približava, idući uzbrdo. Nosili su bronzane kacige, a stegna u grudni koš su im bili oklopljeni pločama od debele kože; u rukama su imali štitove od drveta i bronze, i behu naoružani mačevima i dugačkim kargadskim kopljima. Krivudajući naviše, duž strme obale Ara, primicali su se jedan po jedan u perjanicama okičenoj, zveketavoj, istrzanoj koloni, i već su bili toliko blizu da su im se mogla videti bela lica i čuti odlomci neobičnog narečja na kome su se dovikivali. U toj grupi osvajačke horde bilo je otprilike stotinu ljudi, što nije mnogo; ali u selu ih je čekalo samo osamnaest odraslih muškaraca i dečaka.
     I tek tada je potreba uspela da prizove znanje; gledajući kako se magla razvejava i postaje sve tanja na stazi ispred Karga, Dani se seti bajalice koja bi mu mogla pomoći. Jedan stari vrač-vremenaš iz Doline, koji je svojevremeno pokušavao da namami dečaka da mu postane šegrt, beše ga naučio nekim vradžbinama. Jedan od tih trikova se zvao "tkanje magle", i bila je to vezujuća basma kojom se magla mogla zgusnuti i zadržati neko vreme na jednom određenom mestu; i ako je čovek bio vešt opsenar mogao je tu maglu da uobliči u prekrasna, eterična priviđenja, koja kratko traju i brzo iščile. Dečak nije bio toliko vešt, ali nije ni nameravao da to uradi; međutim, imao je moći da te čini preobrati tako da posluže njegovom cilju. Brzo i na sav glas nabrojao je mesta kojima je selo bilo oivičeno, a zatim izgovorio bajalicu za "tkanje magle", ali je u nju ubacio i reči za skrivanje, i na kraju je uzviknuo onu reč kojom se vradžbina stavlja u dejstvo.
     I baš kad je završio, njegov otac, prišavši mu s leđa, odalami ga snažno po glavi tako da se smesta srušio. "Miruj, budalo! Prestani da blebećeš i sakrij se, ako već nisu u stanju da se boriš!"
     Dani ustade. Sada jeveć mogao da čuje glasove Karga na ulazu u selo; već su bili pored ogromnog tisovog stabla ispred kožarevog dvorišta. Jasno su im se čuli glasovi i zveckanje i škripa oružja i oklopa, ali nisu se mogli videti. Magla se sklopila i zgusnula nad selom, svetlost je posivela, a sve unaokolo postalo nekako razliveno i nejasno, tako da je čovek na kraju jedva mogao da vidi i vlastite ruke, kad ih ispruži pred sobom.
     "Sve sam nas sakrio", uzviknuDani natmureno, jer ga je glava još bolela od očevog udarca, a udvostručavanje bajalice beše ga potpuno iscrpilo. "Zadržaću ovu maglu dokle god budem mogao. Kaži ostalima da ih odvedu uzbrdo, sve do Visoke urvine."
     Kovač je buljio u svoga sina koji je stajao poput utvare u toj volšebnoj, gustoj magli. Prošao je čitav minut dok otac nije shvatio šta mu Dani kaže, ali potom otrča bez oklevanja, nečujno, jer je poznavao svaki kutak i svaku živicu u selu, da pronađe ostale i kaže im šta da urade. Tada se kroz sivilo magle probi crvena, sjajna mrlja; to Karuzi behu zapalili jedan slamnati krov. Ali još uvek nisu ulazili dublje u selo, već su čekali na donjem njegovom kranju da se magla digne i otkrije im gde su pljačka i plen.
     Kožar, čiju su kuću bili zapalili, poslao je dva dečaka koji su se prikrali Karuzima pod nos, stali da ih začikavaju i deru se, a potom iščezli, stopivši se s maglom. U međuvremenu su odrasli, šunjajući se iza živice i pretrčavajući od zgrade do zgrade, prišli sa druge strane i obasuli ratnike koji su stajali u gomili pljuskom strela i kopalja. Jedan Karg pade, i ostade da se koprca, tela probodenog kopljem koje je još bilo vruće od kovanja. Ostali su bili izranjavljeni strelama, i svi odreda pobesneše. Karzi krenuše na juriš, da saseku svoje slabašne napadače, ali naiđoše samo na maglu, punu glasova. Jurcali su za tim glasovima, nasumice ubadajući kroz maglu svojim ogromnim, perjem okićenim, okrvavljenim kopljima. Uspinjali su se urlajući duž ulice, i nisu ni primetili kada su protrčali kroz selo, jer su prazne kuće i kolibe samo iskrsavale i opet nestajale u uskovitlanoj, sivoj magli. Seljaci su trčali pred njima, bežeći na sve strane, većina daleko napred, jer su poznavali teren; ali nekolicina, dečaci i starci, bili su sporiji. Karzi koji bi naleteli na njih probadali su ih kopljima ili sekli mačevima, puštajući svoj ratni poklič, imena dva bela božanska brata od Atuana:
     "Vuluah! Atvah!"
     Neki iz njihove bande zastadoše kada pod stopalima osetiše kako tlo postaje neravno, ali ostali nastaviše da navaljuju napred, tragajući za avetinjskim selom, jureći za nejasnim, lelujavim prilikama koje su im izmicale držeći se stalno van domašaja. Magla beše prosto oživela od tih bežećih prilika koje su ševrdale i nestajale na sve strane. Jedna grupa Karga lovila je te utvare sve do Visoke urvine, provalije iznad izvora reke Ar iprikaze koje su gonili otrčaše po oblacima i nestadoše u uzmaglici, a gonioci se sunovratiše, vrišteći, kroz maglu i iznenadno sunčevo svetlo stotinu stopa u dubinu, do plitkih vrela među stenjem. A oni koji su pristigli za njima i nisu pali ostadoše na ivici provalije, osluškujući.
     Sada se srca Karga ispuniše strahom i oni stadoše da traže jedni druge, a ne više seljake, kroz tu jezovitu i sablasnu maglu. Okupiše se napokon na susednoj uzbrdici, ali su ih još pratile prikaze i utvarna bića, a druga takva bića pritrčavala su im iznenada s leđa, probadala po nekoga od njih, kopljem ili kamom i ponovo iščezavala. Svi Karuzi potrčaše niz brdo, ćutke i spotičući se, i odjednom izleteše napolje iz sive, zaslepljujuće magle i ugledaše uvale i brežuljke ispod sela sasvim čiste i okupane jutarnjim suncem. Tek tada se zaustaviše i okupiše,i osvrnuše za sobom. Neprozirni zid od uskomešanog, drhtavog sivila ležao je popreko na putu koji su prešli, skrivajući sve što je ležalo iza njih. Iz njega izleteše jošdva-tri borca, teturajući se i spotičući, dok su im se dugačka koplja njihala na ramenima. Nijedan Karg se više ne osvrnu. Svi pohitaše naniže, što dalje od tog ukletog mesta.
     Kad su odmakli nešto niže kroz Severnu dolinu, te je ratnike čekala borba do mile volje. Gradovi Istočne prašume, od Dvarka pa sve do morske obale,sakupili su svoje momke i poslali ih da se suprostave osvajačima Gonta. Jedna četa za drugom silazila je sa okolnih brda, i tog i sledećeg dana Karzi behu potisnuti sve do peščanog priobalja iznad Istočne luke, u kojoj su našli svoje spaljene brodove; i tako su morali da se bore bez odstupnice, imajući samo more iza leđa, dok nisu svi izginuli. Pesak u ušću Ara postade tamnosmeđe boje od krvi, i takav ostade sve do dolaska plime.
     Ali onoga jutra u selu Deset jova i iznad njega, na Visokoj urvini, gusta, siva magla potrajala je još neko vreme, a zatim se iznenada razvejala i iščilela. U vetrovitom, vedrom jutru, ljudi su se jedan po jedan uspravljali i radoznalo osvrtali oko sebe. Evo gde leži leš jednog Karga, duge, raspletene kose, pune krvi; eno i seoskog kožara, koji beše poginuo u bici, kao kakav kralj.
     Ona zapaljena kuća, dole u selu, još je gorela. Seljani potrčaše da ugase vatru, jer bitka je već bila dobijena. Na ulici, pored ogromne tise, našli su Danija, sina kovača bronze, kako stoji, bez ijedne ogrebotine, ali onemeo i pometen, kao da je u šoku. Dobro su znali šta je uradio, i zato ga uvedoše u očevu kuću i otiđoše da pozovu vračaru da siđe iz pećine i izleči momčića koji im beše spasao život i imovinu, svima izuzev četvorici koje su pobili Karzi, i izuzev one jedne kuće koja je izgorela.
     Dečak nije bio ranjen nikakvim oružjem, ali nije ni govorio, ni jeo, ni spavao; izgledalo je kao da ne čuje kad mu se nešto kaže, kao da ne vidi one koji su dolazili da ga obiđu. U okolini nije bilo nikoga ko bi bio dovoljno veliki čarobnjak da izleči njegovu bolest. "Isuviše je iscrpeo svoju moć", objasni im tetka, ali ni ona nije znala kako da mu pomogne.
     Dok je ležao tako mračan i nem, priča o dečaku koji je istkao maglu i naterao ratnike Karga naouružane mačevima da pred gomilom senki od straha pobegnu glavom bez obzira, išla je od usta do usta niz Severnu dolinu i po Istočnoj prašumi, i visoko u planinu i preko njenog grebena sve do Velike luke Gronta. I tako se slučilo da je petoga dana posle pokolja na ušću Ara u selo Deset jova stigao stranac, ni mlad ni star, ogrnut plaštom i gologlav, noseći sa lakoćom veliki hrastov štap, visok koliko i on sam. Nije došao uzvodno, dolinom Ara kao sav ostali svet, već sišao u selo iz prašume na planinskim visinama. Seoske babice odmah u njemu prepoznadoše čarobnjaka, a kada im je rekao da je svevidar, odvedoše ga pravo u kovačevu kuću. Pošto je sve koji su se u kući zatekli zamolio da iziđu, izuzev dečakovog oca i tetke, stranac se nagnu nad poljskim krevetom na kome je ležao Dani, nepomično zureći u tamu, i sve što je uradio bilo je da mu samo dotakne čelo i usnu.
     Dani se polako ispravi u postelji, gledajući oko sebe. Ubrzo je i progovorio, i snaga i glad počeše da mu se vraćaju. Dali su mu nešto malo da popije i pojede, i on opet leže, ne skidajući nemirni pogled svojih crnih očiju sa stranca.
     Kovač bronze najzad oslovi nepoznatog. "Vi niste običan čovek."
     "Ni ovaj dečak neće biti običan čovek", odgovori došljak. "Priča o njegovom podvigu s maglom stigla je u Re Albi, gde ja živim. Došao sam da mu dam ime, ako još nije prešao prag detinjstva, kao što kažu."
     "Brate", šapnu vračara kovaču, "ovo mora da je mag od Re Albija, Ogion ćutljivi, onaj što je ukrotio zemljotres..."
     "Gospodine", reče kovač bronze, koji se nije dao zbuniti slavnim imenom, "moj sin će kroz mesec dana napuniti trinaest godina, ali mi smo mislili da proslavimo njegov Prelazak na praznik Sunčeve povratnice, ove zime."
     "Neka dobije ime što pre", odvrti mag, "jer ime mu je već sada potrebno. Ja sada imam druga posla, ali vratiću se na dan koji vi izaberete. Ako vam bude odgovaralo, povešću ga sa sobom kad krenem odavde. i ako se pokaže sposobnim, zadržaću ga kao šegrta, ili ću se postarati da dobije obrazovanje koje će odgovarati njegovom daru. Opasno je da se um onoga koji je rođen da bude mag drži u neznanju."
     Ogion je govorio veoma blago, ali odlučno, i čak je i tvrdoglavi kovač klimao glavom na svaku njegovu reč.
     Na dečakov trinaesti rođendan, jednoga dana raskošne rane jeseni, dok je sveže lišće još blistalo na drveću, Ogion se vrati u selo sa svojih lutanja po planini Gontu, i tada bi proslavljen obred Prelaska. Vračara od dečaka oduzme ime Dani, ime koje mu je majka dala kad se rodio. Bezimen i go ušao je u ledene izvore Ara, među kamenje ispod okomitih stena. Dok je ulazio u vodu oblaci pređoše suncu preko lica, i ogromne senke skliznuše i izmešaše se nad vodom u plićaku oko njega. Prešao je na drugu obalu drhteći od hladnoće, ali koračajući polako i uspravno, onako kako treba, kroz tu ledenu, živu vodu. Kad je stigao na drugu obalu, Ogion, koji ga je tamo čekao, ispruži ruku i, uhvativši dečaka za mišicu, šapnu mu na uvo njegovo istinsko ime: Ged.
     I tako je dobio ime od onoga koji je bio posvećen u sve tajne korišćenja moći.
     Gozba je bila u punom jeku, i svi seljaci su se veselili uz obilje hrane i piva, i uz pesmu pevača iz nižih područja doline, koji im je pevao Podvige Gospodara Zmajeva; a onda se mag obrati Gedu svojim spokojnim glasom: "Hajdemo, momče. Pozdravi se sa svojima i ostavi ih da i dalje blaguju."
     Ged uze ono što je trebalo da ponese, dobar bronzani nož koji mu je otac iskovao, kožni kaput koji mu je skrojila po meri kožareva udovica, i jovin štap koji mu je tetka uvraćala; to je, pored košulje i pantalona,bila sva njegova imovina. Oprostio se od njih, jedinih ljudi na svetu koje je poznavao, i osvrnuo se još samo jednom na selo koje se, raštrkano, beše šćućurilo pod okomitim stenjem iznad rečnih izvora. A zatim krenu sa svojim novim učiteljem kroz strmu, iskošenu prašumu na planinskom prevoju, kroz lišće i senke sunčanog jesenjen dana.