The Shadow and Night (7 page)

“He is tired, Merral. He's gone to bed.”

“He's not unwell? Any symptoms?”

“No. Just tired.” She paused as if uncertain whether to continue. When she spoke again, it was in puzzled tones.

“It seems . . . it
seems
as if he dreamed as well last night—something strange and not very nice. He won't say what.” She moved again as if to go.

In his surprise, Merral said without thinking, “Oh, I'm sorry to hear that, Aunt. But I thought he said he hadn't dreamed.”

Zennia, looking away from him, remained still, her only movement the agitated twisting of her fingers on the door frame. When she spoke it was in awkward, hacked phrases. “Well . . . I really can't—I'm not sure . . . exactly what he said.”

There was a clumsy pause in which both were silent. Then she turned, gave him a cool, formal smile, and left, calling gently over her shoulder as she pulled the door behind her closed, “Good night and blessings, Merral.”

The door was closed by the time he had begun to return her benediction.

With his mind in total confusion, Merral clicked the diary off, and the image looming over his desk instantly vanished. He sat back in the chair, arms behind his head, trying to unravel his perplexed thoughts. So, Barrand had had a foul dream too. That was curious. One bad dream in a house was odd, but for two people to have one on the same night was very mysterious. Yet the dream was not what worried him or, he suspected, Zennia. No, what was making his mind reel was that this morning Barrand had definitely said that he had slept well and had had no dreams. He had said it plainly. And Zennia's unhappiness when he had pressed her had confirmed it. She avoided answering his inquiry because she couldn't face the fact that her husband had lied earlier in the day. And with that answer came a terrible awareness: Could it really be that his uncle had lied?

Under the thrust of the word
lied
Merral got up and paced the small room in agitation. The very word
lie
was unfamiliar. To deceive, to willfully alter truth; he knew theoretically—as everyone did—what it meant. But understood it was never practiced. You might sometimes mislead people in sport, like in Team-Ball games, where you made them think you were going right not left, but that, of course, was not lying. Nor was it lying to pull a verbal surprise, as in a joke or a riddle. And even when asked a question where the answer would be hurtful to the hearer, it was easy enough, at least in Communal—the historic languages were harder—to give an answer that allowed it to be understood that, for whatever reason, you preferred not to commit yourself. True, the idea of lying came to you on occasions, particularly when you had made a mistake. But you just pushed the idea aside. Since the time of the Great Intervention, the temptation to willfully deceive someone had had little real force. Jannafy's rebellion in the first days of the Assembly had probably been the last instance of large-scale deception.

No, Merral concluded, the idea of lying was hateful. The entire edifice of the civilization of the Assembly of Worlds was built on truth and on its counterpart, trust. The lie was the enemy to all that. As he lay down on the bed, he reflected that it was an axiom of the whole era of the Lord's Peace from the Intervention till now that no one lied. Truth had been sacred since the Dark Times, over eleven thousand years ago.

And yet, the thought nagged at Merral until sleep finally fell on him; the conclusion seemed inescapable.

His uncle had lied.

3

M
erral was up early the next morning, and after donning his jacket, slipped outside to look at the weather. Although the sun should have been rising there was only a dull glow in the east, and in the gloom he could faintly make out that during the night the wind had changed and was now coming out of the barren wastelands of the west. At least, he comforted himself, from that direction neither rain nor snow would come.

When Merral entered the kitchen he found Barrand sitting at the table. There was an unhappy look on his face, and after the briefest of greetings he blurted out, “Merral, I'm so sorry about yesterday! The whole thing was ridiculous! Zennia said you were worried because I seemed to have, well—
contradicted
—myself. It could, I suppose, seem like that. The fact is that . . . well . . . I did dream, it's true. But I had—I suppose—pushed it out of my mind. When you spoke about having a dream, I began to remember it, but I was unsure about it.” Here he paused, as if uncertain what to say next. “I mean I was unsure about whether I had had a dream. If you follow my meaning.”

Uncertain how to respond, Merral just nodded, and his uncle went on in an unsteady fashion. “So, anyway it was just later on in the day that it all came flooding back. And when I said in the morning that I hadn't dreamed, it was, well . . . true then. But I mean, it wasn't a major dream anyway. So the whole thing is nothing serious. I wouldn't want you to get it all out of proportion.”

I need to think about this,
Merral thought, recognizing that his uncle seemed to be in serious difficulties.

“I think I understand, Uncle. But actually, if you'll excuse me, I'd better have breakfast and be off—if that's all right with you. Graceful and I have a long way to go today.”

A look of relief seemed to cross the gray-blue eyes. “Yes, yes. Now tell me your plans while I get some food out for you.”

Fifteen minutes later as he came down the stairs with his pack, ready to leave, Zennia was waiting at the outer door. She smiled rather distantly at him. “Your uncle has explained everything, has he? A sort of delay in recognizing that he had had a dream. It all makes sense now. Something about nothing.”

Merral hesitated. “Yes, I hope so. I'm glad you've got it all sorted out.” He kissed her on the cheek. “I must be away, Aunt. Give my love to the children. I'll be back this way soon.”

There was the clatter of feet on the stairs and a slender figure in a fluffy pink robe with a straw-colored mop of hair bounced lightly down the stairs, ran over, and clutched his hand.

“Bye, Cousin Merral. Don't get talking to the trees now.”

Merral gave Elana a hug, noticing as he did that she was already nearly up to his shoulder. “Bye, Elana.”

There was a heavy thudding on the stairs and Thomas leapt down, slid across the wood floor like a skater, and wrapped his arms around Merral.

“Cousin! You nearly left without saying good-bye.”

Laughing, Merral disentangled himself from Thomas's clutches and lifted the boy high so that his head nearly touched the roof. “Owf! You are getting too heavy to do this.”

“Have a safe trip, Cousin Merral. Look after Graceful.” Thomas giggled as, with a playful tickle, Merral put him down.

“I will. And you look after the dogs!”

Merral turned to his aunt. “I'd best be off before the rest of the family comes down.”

He raised his hand. “A blessing on this house.” Then he pressed the door switch and, as it slid open, stepped out into the raw grayness of the dawn.

It was still little more than half-light when, ten minutes later, Merral rode Graceful southwest from the hamlet. The route he had planned was a long one. He intended to travel first west over Brigila's Wastes, keeping south of the still-barren lava seas, then south along the Long Marshes before swinging back through the eastern tip of the Great Northern Forest. From there, a track should allow him to make Wilamall's Farm, the most northerly forestry base, by midafternoon at the latest. There he would leave Graceful in the stables while he took the daily overland transporter down to Ynysmant. There were more rapid routes home from Herrandown, but Merral wanted to see as much as he could. Sampling and observer machines made regular survey trips across these lands, and drones flew overhead to monitor for changes, but he knew that there was no substitute for walking or riding the ground.

Fifteen minutes later, having carefully crossed the solid ice of the Lannar River on foot and ridden up the sparsely wooded western bank, Merral squinted across at the wastes before him and wondered why he had been so zealous.

Ahead was a desolate and empty landscape across which a cutting wind whistled hungrily around him. Facing into it, he found that there was little escape even with the glare goggles on and the face baffle of his jacket up round his nose. As he rode on, with Graceful picking her way across the frozen tussocks, he decided that there was little to choose between the west and the north wind. While lacking the polar chill of the wind from the north, the west wind had its own cruel character. Here every turbulent gust that struck carried a reminder that it was drawn across five thousand kilometers of treeless waste, much of it a dry, salty, and sandy desert. At least, he reminded himself, in winter there was still enough moisture to remove the dust. In summer, the dry and baking west wind was filled with dust, silt, and static, and became the scourge of machinery and men's lungs.

Merral, trying to keep his face averted from the wind as much as he could, found little compensation in his route. Here only the thinnest skins of frozen soil and turf covered hard black volcanic rock. There were patches of powdery snow and, every so often, dangerous stretches of colorless ice over which dismounting was necessary. The only vegetation was clumps of rough tussocky grass with occasional straggly bushes of hazel and willow. Given the scarcity of the vegetation and the harsh weather, Merral found no surprise in the fact that he saw little life in the wastes. Every so often he put to flight a party of migrating tundra hares, pale in their winter coats, and once he came across a herd of grazing reindeer, which stared at him stupidly before turning away and shuffling off to resume their foraging. Once a pair of great Gyrfalcons circled above him, ghostly below the clouds, then drifted away southward. But that was all he saw.

Soon he found that he was in a featureless landscape where the gray of the ground faded into the softer grayness of the sky to give an elusive and unchanging horizon. Merral decided that here he could not afford to be lost and set his diary to check the route: a thing he rarely did. So his progress was marked by periodic noises from the diary, a deep long beep for a deviation to the left, a short high one for one to the right, and a bell-like chime for a correct course. Like all Forestry horses Graceful understood the signals enough to steer herself. So together, horse and man progressed slowly over Brigila's Wastes, the silence broken only by the whistles of the wind, the clip-clop of Graceful's hooves, and the occasional interruption from the diary.

For the first half hour or so, Merral was preoccupied by what had happened at Herrandown. He was unsatisfied by what both his uncle and aunt had said this morning. Something odd, alarming, and even wrong had happened yesterday. But what? No hypothesis he could invent would make any sense. In the end, Merral reluctantly decided that Zennia and Barrand must be right: It was some sort of psychological oddity that they had mishandled between them so that it had become completely distorted. After all, human beings were complex. On that basis, Merral pushed the affair out of his mind.