The D’neeran Factor (117 page)

Shen was already there. She looked at Hanna with disapproval.

Here the soil had encroached on the road, and a tangle of grasses and scraggly shrubs rose up at the edge of the trees nearest the road. To the right and ahead there was a clearing, and the building nestled against the forest at the rear of this space, the setback having kept them from seeing it until they reached the clearing itself. Michael peered from behind the screen of brush. The clearing was in the same condition as
GeeGee
's landing site. The house was built of
dressed stone and was structurally intact, but some of the glazed windows were broken, and no light came from any of them in the dark afternoon. A few tiles had fallen from the roof, the gutters were thick with debris; it was the picture of desertion. But it was not deserted. There were chimneys at each of the three corners in sight—and over the roof, from the place where a fourth chimney ought to be, a stream of smoke rose sadly into the drizzle.

Hanna whispered, “What is it?”

“I don't know.” He racked his newfound memory. There was nothing. “It looks like one of
their
places. But we must be a long way from the Post.”

“Five or six hours on foot,” Shen said. “In a landcar, half an hour's ride.”

She added, “Start here.”

“Start what?”

“Questions.”

Hanna nodded. Michael was slower. Then he saw what they did, the advantages. If there were people here there would only be a few, isolated from the city. They would not have to be entirely ignorant when they reached the Post; they could find out something about it here.

“All right,” he said. “We'll knock on the front door.”

“Wait,” Hanna said. “Stop thinking.”

A ridiculous request—but he tried; could stop thinking in words, anyway. Shen became quiet as a stone. Hanna bowed her head, eyes closed. Listening for what? The afternoon was darker. Michael felt himself slip some mooring and float, as if he might take leave of his body. The absoluteness of time slipped; he was back in trance. He was suddenly certain that there were three people in that dying building. Two males, one female.
They think of the past and what might be and what might never be. One with hope and one without and one whose hope is soured
…

Hanna lifted her head. “They're not on guard,” she said. “I could find out more, if we waited. But I think some other people might be here before dark.”

“I didn't catch that.” He looked at her in wonder. “I saw some of it, though. Did you make that happen?”

“What?”

He looked at Shen. “Did you see it?”

She gave him a dubious look and shook her head.

“Never mind,” Hanna said. “You're not turning into a telepath. It'll only happen when we're together.”

“Right. Come on,” he said, shaken, and stepped out of the brush.

They crossed the dreary clearing, mounted a shallow flight of stone steps, and passed over the colonnaded porch without hearing a challenge. Shen's eyes darted everywhere, but Hanna's were distant; she watched for threat with another sense. They did not knock. The door opened with a creak, but nothing met them in the dark passage beyond. There were doors on either side of the hallway, some open and some not; they looked into all the rooms and found no one. The rooms were furnished, but in most the dust lay thick.

Hanna said to Michael's thought, with conviction:
There are ghosts here. Living or not, they are ghosts.

He didn't like that. He walked more quickly, found a passage that seemed to lead toward the corner of the house where a fire must burn, and started into it. Near the end there was a door that promised revelations. But there was a staircase, too, and before he had taken three steps there was a flicker of light at the top of it.

He was flat on his belly with the stunner drawn before he thought about what to do. Behind him Hanna and Shen had dropped, too.

The top of the stair disappeared into shadow. A figure came out of the shadow and stopped with a gasp. A girl no more than eighteen stood shrinking in fright from the muzzles pointed in her direction. She held a lamp in both shaking hands.

Michael got up with a sigh and put the gun away. “I greet you,” he said, the first words he had spoken to a native of this place in more than thirty years. But the girl only stared; perhaps he had gotten the language wrong after all.

Hanna had risen, too. She said quietly in the same tongue, “I am sorry; you surprised us. We will not hurt you. Please come down. We would like to talk to you.”
If she doesn't come down, we'll go after her,
she added, but no one but Michael heard that.

But the girl started down the staircase. They did not move; their stillness calmed her. When she came near, the light showed a pale oval face, brown hair exquisitely dressed, soft
blue eyes; she wore a richly figured blue gown that was a little large for her and looked as if it had been made for someone else. She looked from one to another and stopped in front of Michael and looked up—and stared, discomfiting him; started to speak, was silent, stared some more.

“Eyes,” Hanna muttered in Standard.

“What—oh. My name is Mikhail,” he said to the girl. “Who did you think I was?”

“You are a Saddhi, that is plain,” she answered. “But I have never seen you before.”

“What is your name?”

“Marin—of the Saddhis. Why do I not know you? Why have I not heard of you?”

He could not answer. The words took their time sinking in. Nowhere else in the universe would his eyes say who he was.

There was a sound beyond the door at the end of the passage. Hanna whispered to Shen and the two women, practical, flawless, slipped by Michael and Marin and took up positions of guard, Shen on the staircase, Hanna in the angle the door would make when it opened.

“What do they want?” said Marin, voice rising. He thought she might flee and put a hand on her shoulder. She looked up again and was still.

The door opened and a man came in. He was clearly a near relative of the girl; his face declared it. He said sharply, “Who are you? What do you do here?” Then he saw Shen and her stunner and froze. He had not seen Hanna, who waited as if expecting someone else to come in.

Michael felt a lurch, a great compulsion to tell the truth, to reveal himself. Instead he said a half-truth, with difficulty: “We are travelers.”

“Well, what of it? Where from? Why intrude on my home with weapons? Come here, Marin.”

She did not obey. She said, “He is of the family, Pavah. But he is called Mikhail, and I have never heard of one so named.”

“There is no one,” said the man; he was irritated, not afraid. He went forward to fetch his daughter and also saw Michael's eyes. He said, “Marin, go. Get your uncle.” And to Michael, savagely, “What do you want? There is nothing here to steal. There is nothing here for you.”

He talked like a man who was used to being robbed, with more bitterness than fear.
Saddhi,
said the echo of Marin's voice. Shadhili? Michael could not say a word. Centuries ticked away while he looked at his kinsman with a bastard's eyes, disowned. The chill of the place got colder. He still held Marin's shoulder; that alone was warm. He let go and she moved for the first time since he had touched her. The silence had lasted too long.

Hanna came forward then. “We will not take anything,” she said. “We are travelers, as Mikhail said. We need knowledge of this land. Do our weapons trouble you? We have them because we did not know what we would find. We will put them away—if you give your word that we are safe.”

“Why, as to that…” The man half-smiled. “How can any man pledge to another that he will be safe at all times and in all ways? But I will not try to harm you. Is that enough?”

“It will suffice,” Hanna said.

*   *   *

They made a strange picture on that wet afternoon, the three men, three women, two sets of flotsam thrown up by the sea. They talked by the fire in a high square room that appeared at first glance well-kept. But the fire scarcely touched the damp, and it flared up sometimes, and showed details of disintegration: spreading cracks in window cornices, water-stained walls, fragments of tile underfoot. The lamps shed no light; they only thickened the shadows in the room. The man Marin called father was Orne. The uncle who had not stirred from the fire was Hyde. Orne called him brother, but they did not look much alike. Instead when Michael looked into Hyde's face, he looked into a distorting mirror. It was not only that Hyde had the Saddhi eyes; there were other resemblances, too. They kept Michael silent—silent as Hyde, who acknowledged their presence with an indifferent nod and went on staring at the fire.

They sat in a semicircle before the fire, their backs to the door. But Hanna had turned her seat so that she could see most of the room, and Shen was openly on guard in a corner from which she could see all the rest. Hanna did most of the talking, too. Did she think Michael too simple to spin a convincing lie?—but he knew what she was doing before she was half-done. She plucked Orne's own conjectures from his thoughts, let him make up a tale that suited him; then
she confirmed his guesses. She said the travelers had come from a settlement so far away that there had been no news of the Post in some time, and they had come to get some, guessing as they came that much was awry, finding nearer settlements abandoned. They had gotten clothes and weapons in one of these, Hanna said. (Had some question crossed Orne's mind about their gear? Hanna's eyes were not guileless. But they said:
Prove that I lie.)

“One of the lost hamlets to the south, no doubt,” Orne said, and his eyes were sharp, but Hanna answered, “No, far to the north. I did not know anyone lived to the south.” She must have seen a map in Orne's head, and slipped past a trap.

“There were towns at the end of this road,” the girl Marin said. “I have heard that people live there again. Is it true?”

“We saw no one, but we did not go to all of them. What towns were they?” Hanna said. Michael lifted his head, listening for a name.

“What does it matter?” Orne said. “They rot with the rest. Leave the dead in peace!”

“How many dead?” Hanna said. “Of what cause?”

“Did it not come to your little godforsaken town? Well, it was the sickness. You'd best hope you don't take it home with you; it is not dead yet. Not quite.”

Michael said, “There was a great sickness long ago, when I was a child. But it passed. Was this the same?”

“It might have been. The leeches talk of cycles of the thing. Where do you live, that you do not know this, and your speech has come to sound strange?”

Michael stirred a little. He had worried about the accent that was heavy on Hanna's tongue, and Shen's, and even his, though not so thick. But Hanna ignored the question. She said, “We have heard that the great families were spared in that earlier time. I do not think you have been spared.”

“No, as you can see. Birds nest in the tower that was my wife's chamber, and worms crawl in the cradle of my brother's child. His wife also died, and our father and mother, though we fled here at the first, to this summer lodge. No great loss, you might think, the old being anyhow in sight of death; but their old age had promised to be hale. That was how it was. Few families lost less than two parts of their folk—this time.”

“And the rest of the people?” Michael said. His tongue did not want to move. The words on it weighed it down. “The people who, I heard, lived crowded close outside the wall?”

“Worse,” Orne said. “Hardly any are left. There is no help to be gotten anywhere, no one to farm, no one to work.”

“How do you live?” Hanna said.

“Well, there are the fields we used to own, when owning them meant something. There are still the tithes, though so few folk remain that tithes do no more than fill our mouths.”

Hyde spoke for the first time, rumbling: “It will not come again.”

Orne would have gone on without giving any attention to his brother, but Hanna said, “What will not come again?”

Hyde said, “Life. Now we die. Only a fool denies it.”

Marin leaned closer to the fire; Michael could not see her face. Orne said, “My brother's mind was turned by grief. He would have it that all who live now are doomed.”

“I am not a fool,” Hyde said. “I remember the old days, before sickness and want. It began to break then, yes, when we were boys. Now it is broken. I will see the end of the world.”

There was silence, except for the sound of the rain, which began to form itself into a sad melody. At last Michael said, “Is there no more music, then?”

Orne looked at him curiously. “No, no more. I don't think there are any musicians left. If you find one, don't send him here, unless he can feed himself. And what musician ever could?”

*   *   *

They had stayed too long. The dark was rolling in, and they could not go on tonight. The servants of the house had gone to town for stores and might return tonight, tomorrow, next week. Their places were the empty ones Hanna had sensed; they were the others who belonged here and would come home. If they had been there, Michael thought, the travelers would have been relegated to their company. Since they were not, certain distinctions were blurred. Orne gave them a hot porridge he made himself, and bitter beer to go with it, and the parties ate and drank together. But later he told them to sleep on the floor before the fire and told them where to find bedding; then he and Hyde and Marin disappeared
into the upper regions of the house, where there were beds.

They got through to Theo and took turns whispering to him, and afterward went to sleep. Only one thing more happened that night, in that house. Michael woke to find the fire dead; he was cold. It was very dark, and he got up to look for more blankets. He was coming back through the hall with his arms full when he saw a light at the head of the stairs, just where he had seen it in the afternoon. It was Marin again. She came down on soft bare feet and stood there and looked at him in silence.