Ursula K Le Guin - Malafrena

In the cool dawn of the equinox the statue of St Christopher of the Wayfarers stood distinct over Old Bridge, over the river and the light mist on the surface of the water. A purity of light, a stillness of air and sky effaced the boundaries between living and inanimate; the stone saint seemed to have paused there to look eastward, smiling and unseeing. There were no clouds. The sun rose over dark hills and sent its first rays straight in the eyes of two horsemen riding over Old Bridge, dazzling them, making them squint and smile. The bridge was crossed, the riders entered the shadow of a long street, eight hooves clattered with a clipped, brisk noise on the cobbles of the Trasfiuve between files of sleeping houses. One rider turned in the saddle to see the new light on the towers of the cathedral behind them, across the river. “Look there, Amadey, the light.”

Estenskar did not turn. He looked ahead, down the long straight street, and said, “Come on, this horse wants to run.” The fretting bay, then the brown mare broke into a trot. They were spirited, their riders good horsemen, a handsome sight as they rode from the city towards the first sunrise of the year’s fall.

By eight o’clock, from the climbing streets of Grasse, Itale could look back and see all Krasnoy lying along its sunlit river, beautiful and smoky in the morning warmth. Then leaving the little town they crossed the crown of the ridge and lost the valley, its river and city, behind them on their way.

Down all day among the hills, a faint warm wind in their faces bearing the smells of earth, hay, woodsmoke; at dusk a village ahead in the next fold of the hills, trees and thatched roofs and chimney smoke, offering rest, firelight after the long day’s ride. “There’ll be an inn,” Itale said. He began to sing “Red are the berries on the autumn bough,” and his mare pricked her ears and stepped along towards hay and dinner. Dusk was heavy under old trees as they rode up into the village, and the sign of the Golden Lion creaked in the evening breeze. “What a good place,” Itale said, dismounting. There were no other travellers at the inn; they were served good beer before the fire, and a big old hen roasted crisp; they left nothing of her but bones. Then Itale stretched out his legs and, for the ritual and completeness of the thing, lighted the clay pipe provided by the host of the Golden Lion.

Estenskar went on watching him, since Itale, extended in profound comfort and puffing hard on the pipe, was oblivious. “I’m glad we’re travelling together,” he said.

“It’s good to get out of the city. You must take the mare tomorrow, she has a lovely gait. How long since I rode a horse, let alone a good one? This is a holiday. More than holiday. Escape…” Itale waved the pipe, which has gone out. “I was full up, Amadey. Absolutely full up. Now I’m empty again. At last! Air, sunlight, silence, space…”

Estenskar got up and went to the door of the inn room, which gave directly on the village street without threshold between the hard earth outside and the hard earth of the inn floor. The darkness under the wide-armed oaks was cool and soft. Wind stirred now and then, the sign creaked, in the black foliage a few stars shone fitfully and eclipsed behind the restless leaves.

“Is it so easy?” he said after so long that Itale, befogged with exercise, fresh air, beer, and well-being, was not sure what he was talking about. “You set out…you set out to make yourself. To make the world. All the things you must do, and see, and learn, and be, you must go through it all. You leave home, come to the city, travel, miss nothing, experience it all, you make yourself, you fill the world with yourself and your purposes, your ambitions, your desires. Until there’s no room left. No room to turn around.”

“There is, here,” Itale put in. “I told you. I’m as empty as that beer-jug. Air, sunlight, silence, space.”

“Now that I know that I can’t choose,” he said, “now that I’ve finally learned that there are no choices, that I can’t make my way and never could, that it was all deceit and conceit and waste—now that I’ve given up trying to make my way, I can’t find it; I can’t hear the voice. I’m lost. I went too far and there’s no way home.”

In later years when Itale heard his friend’s name spoken what came to him always was this moment, the big dirt-floored room, the candle and beer-jug on an oaken table, the fire, the stir of autumn wind in dark branches, the silence that underlay and surrounded and closed over Estenskar’s voice so that the last word, softly spoken, seemed to fail and die away in the immense unheeding quiet.

“But by going back to Esten—” Itale began, and stopped, knowing his words were stupid, but wanting to change Estenskar’s mood. He had been happy that day and was sorry to let happiness go.

“That’s not my home. It’s too late. One road goes east, another west, but there’s no destination unless you’re given it. Given it! You don’t choose it. You only accept it—when it’s offered—if it’s offered. Why am I going to Esten, then? I don’t know.” He spoke harshly, glancing around at Itale with a vindictive stare, but Itale had learned long ago that Estenskar’s anger was never for him.

“It always makes a difference where you are,” he said. “Come back and sit down. We just got free. No point worrying about where we’re going, yet.”

Estenskar obeyed him; he came back to the table and sat down, putting his elbows on the table and his head between his hands, ruffling up his coarse reddish hair. “All I do is think about myself and talk about myself,” he said miserably.

“I don’t know. I only know that since it I’ve known I had to get out of Krasnoy, get away.”

“And ate that cheese. Two years ago. And I was still living with Rosalie then—right in the depths of it. God! What a fool!”

Itale investigated the beer-jug again, found what he expected, nothing, and got up, stretching his arms. “I’ll be stiff tomorrow morning, I’m out of condition for riding.”

Itale put his hands against the heavy mantel-piece, looking down into the fire. “To sleep with her.”

“No.—Less.” Itale spoke very slowly, trying to say what he did not know how to say. “I don’t understand it. We are in love but we…we don’t get on. We hurt each other a good deal. I don’t understand why.”

“‘I don’t understand, I don’t understand,’ said the straw in the fire.—In love…Love is an invention of the poets, Itale. Believe me, I should know! It is a lie. It is the worst of all the lies. A word without meaning. Not a rock but a whirlpool, the emptiness that sucks down the soul.”

“But there must be…Oh, well, I don’t much want to talk about it. I’m running away, for a while, maybe I’ll see things clearer. Afterwards. You wouldn’t look back when we left Krasnoy. You were right.”

Estenskar nodded; but twenty-four hours later, after their night at the Golden Lion and a day’s ride through pleasant, quiet country, when they were lying on a great strawmound in a barn loft, each wrapped in a horse-blanket lent them by the hospitable farmer, all the smells of barn and stable strong in their nostrils and all the stars brilliant outside the great loading-window of the loft, he returned to the subject.

“Luisa is trying to make the world,” he said. “The way I did. And she’ll destroy it, the way I did. Don’t let her pull you off course, Itale.”

“I don’t know what my course is! I thought I did…I don’t know what’s right, what I ought to do. I don’t like this—she calls it freedom—an affair, a love-affair, secrecy, nothing ever to count on—”

“That is her freedom. She’s no fool. If she married you then you’d be free and she’d be the one trapped! Love’s the game where there are only losers. Listen, Itale, I won’t bring this up again, it’s none of my business, I know that. I’ve known Luisa for years, I might have fallen in love with her if I hadn’t met the other one first. She’s like me. She tries to take and choose. She sees you and she can’t let you be—if she can’t own you she will destroy you—you do not know, I hope you never know the envy that eats her, when she looks at you. But I know it. Look out for her, look out for me. We will destroy you if we can, Itale.” His tone was cold and playful.

The stars shone splendid in the great square of the window, Vega overhead, the Lion like a mower’s sickle left lying in the white wheat, the Swan on the river of stars, and in the southwest Scorpio huge among lesser constellations, cold above the warm earth-night. The horses and cattle in the stalls beneath snorted, shifted, slept their queer waking sleep. A few late crickets trilled, no longer alarmed by human voices. Itale slept, and waking before dawn opened his eyes to colorless gulfs of space where, fading, Orion stood, hunter and warrior of the winter sky.

They came that day to Sorg, a little city on the confluence of the rivers Sorg and Ras, and following the Ras for a few miles in late afternoon left the Frelana province and entered the Polana. As if waiting for them there the east wind rose after sunset, carrying the chill of great spaces crossed, long plains and empty hills. They stayed at a village inn, wakened often from sleep by the bleating of hundreds of sheep penned in fields behind the inn, the clanking of sheep-bells, the carousing of the drovers in the commonroom beneath. The next day was cool; a fine fog was dissolved through the sky so that in the pale glare reflected from horizon to horizon the sun looked small and wan. As they went east and south the wind blew in their faces. The land grew poorer as they rode. Ploughlands yielded to grasslands rolling to an interminable distance. They rode all day alone between earth and sky, with few trees or streams or houses or men to keep them company in the middle space. The road mounted, taking a whole day to rise a thousand feet. As they neared Esten the slopes became steeper, the rare farms poorer, crouched with their sheep-pens under the western side of a hill in the lee of the endless wind. They came to the village of Kolleiy in the late afternoon and pushed on four more miles to Esten, arriving after night had fallen. All Itale saw of the house then was its lights hidden among trees at the foot of a hill whose high, smooth curve blocked out the east wind and the eastern stars. All round were dark hills in starlight, no light to be seen but the stars and the one house, lonely as a ship in midsea. After a brief supper with Estenskar’s brother and sister-in-law the travellers went off to bed. Itale was given a room at the southeast corner, high, sparsely furnished, clean as bone; all the house was like that. The house, the room smelled of the country. It was utterly silent.

Waking late, he opened his eyes to a flood of white sunlight. In the yard below his window a stable-boy was singing as he curried a stamping, snorting horse. Itale had never heard the tune, and the dialect was hard for him to follow.

In Rakava, beneath the high walls,

I left my love forever,

I came to live among the barren hills

Where runs no river…

The archaic turns, the high, harsh, fluent voice pouring over trills and catches as a shallow stream pours over rocks, it was all part of the stirring bright windy morning, and Itale got up ready for whatever came next.

He took breakfast with Amadey in the long dining room; Ladislas Estenskar was “on the fields” as his wife said—at work. She sat with them, though she had got up long before, when her husband did. She was quiet, dark, barely eighteen, she had been married five months. Her manner was more that of a girl at home than a woman head of her household, and she was evidently in awe of her brother-in-law. With Itale she got on at once, and he said to his friend as they climbed the hill above the house, “I like her, your little sister.”

“And taste…They don’t come like that in the city. I knew a girl like her, at Malafrena…”

“They sent her to convent school in Aisnar, married a rich widower—Should never have let her leave the country. Town spoils them. My word, what a view!”

Beneath them now the house and stables huddled at the head of the vale, at the edge of a sparse, straggling wood. All round the barren crest where they stood stretched pale, rounded hills, even in the farthest distance hardly blued by the dry, pure, sunlit air. The grass on them was short as stubble after mowing. Here and there the flocks, ragged grey like patches of dandelion in seed, were scattered on the slopes; sheep-bells made a faint, sparse music over all the great landscape. Northward, beyond the end of the woods, on a scarped and wrinkled summit higher than the other hills, something stood at the edge of sight, a wall or tower.

Estenskar turned. The wind and light made him squint; his hard, thin face looked as if it was made of the same stuff as the high, pale, arid land. “That tower? Radiko, it’s called.”

Estenskar laughed. “The Pretender. People here are never on the winning side…”

When they came down from the hilltop the cessation of the wind was a relief, as was the presence of things close at hand, walls and trees, giving shelter from the pale distances.

They met Ladislas coming into the yard, and with him went to the stables to look at the two horses Amadey had bought in Krasnoy. Admiring the brown mare, he stroked her neck and said, “You always had an eye for horses, Amadey,” and it was plain that he was glad the younger brother had come home, that he loved him, admired him, and was afraid of him. In the afternoon they rode out to show Itale the estate. The elder brother talked farming with him, the younger was mostly silent. Sheep were raised in the Montayna but Itale had had little to do with them and had never seen flocks or pasturage on anything like this scale; he was impressed, fascinated, asked Ladislas endless questions, to which the answers became increasingly technical and complete as Ladislas discovered that he was talking to a man who had worked “on the fields,” and began to forget that the guest was a literary fellow from the city. They reined in beside one of the deep, stone-mounted wells, and dismounted to look at it, and remounted but neglected to ride on, discussing intently and with passion the principal problem of farming in the Polana and its principal difference from farming in the Montayna, the lack of surface water. Amadey sat silent, patient on a patient old horse from the stable of the farm, gazing at the hills.

As he rode back to the house with Itale he said, “It’s queer, coming back. Like coming to a foreign country, utterly foreign, and finding one speaks the language perfectly…”

That night after supper they sat talking by the fire. Ladislas’ wife began to gather courage, and when Amadey said something about his book now in press she asked, in her soft voice, “Have you brought it with you?”

“You’re the cause of our meeting, Amadey,” his brother said. “Givana wanted to see what Estenskar’s brother looked like.”

“I’m Estenskar’s brother and glad to have been of use. It’s the first time I’ve heard of my reputation doing any good to anyone.”

“He is weary of fame,” Itale said. “Soon he will get weary of being weary, I hope. He always runs his books down, too, the better they are the more he reviles them; this next one may really be quite fair, going by that indication.”

“Is it a novel?” asked Givana. “What will it be called? Can you say what it’s about?”

“It’s called Givan Faugen, and it’s about him,” Amadey replied, with an evident effort not to intimidate her. “Very gloomy. It didn’t really come off.”

“See?” said Itale. “No one has seen it, but we’ve all been told how very poor it is.”

Ladislas grinned; either he liked to see his brother teased a bit, or liked to see him fire up.

“It’s not what it should have been. That’s all. It’s not as good as Karantay’s book. I wish it was.”

“The Young Man Liyve?” Givana asked, timorous, her eyes very large and dark, her hands tensely clasped in her lap.

“There’s young Liyve, you know, in person,” Amadey said, indicating Itale, who at once got hot in his turn: “Oh, rot, Amadey! Givan Karantay was writing that book before he ever met me—besides there’s absolutely nothing in common—”

“Sorde’s dignity is hurt, and he can’t think of anything clever to say,” said Itale. “Is that a piano, hidden over there?”

It was a delicate and cranky old harpsichord, and Givana played for them, formal little salon pieces of the last century; her husband stood protectively near her while she played, turning the pages of the music; they sang together, a Scottish love-song so the yellowed book said, a yearning tune in which their voices blended with a reticent clarity. They had sung it before, alone in the lonely house, for their own pleasure. Itale, watching them, thought: But this is how it should be, how have they found it so simply?—and for a minute there in the peaceful room by the fire listening to that music, it seemed to him that life was an infinitely simple thing if only one looked at it clearly, without fear; that if one were thirsty, one need only look to see, close by, however dry the land, the deep well, the well of clear water.

He stayed a week at Esten. He went about the farm with Ladislas, went shooting with Amadey in the sparse forests, talked with the brothers and Givana in the evenings; he felt half at home because it was the country, a farm, and half strange, a city visitor among these hard-working people, no part of the spare silent current of their life. Amadey was increasingly silent, speaking curtly and sometimes at random out of some inner preoccupation. On his last day there Itale suggested they ride over to the ruined tower, Radiko.

Then becoming aware of the uncouthness of his refusal he scowled: “Nothing there,” he said. “I’d rather—I want to go there alone. I’m sorry.” His face was angry, obdurate, suffering. Everything, Itale thought, came hard to him, he could take nothing lightly in life. Even Itale’s admiring, undemanding friendship caused him pain. All love hurt him. “The ropes burn my hands,” said the ferryman of the icy river in his first book.

“Stay a while longer,” he said, late that last night; Ladislas and Givana had gone to bed, leaving them talking by the fire.

“It’s a foul city, Rakava,” Amadey said, brooding, gazing into the fire. “You shouldn’t go there. Only easterners can understand the east.”

Next day at noon, beside the little, dusty coach that would take Itale to Rakava, he said, “When you see Karantay this winter, tell him…” He paused for a long time, shrugged, looked off down the dusty, straggling street of the village. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. The driver was up on his box, it was time for Itale to mount up beside him. “Don’t stay here too long, Amadey, come back to your friends,” he said, putting out his hand to touch his friend’s arm, to embrace him if Amadey would: Amadey pulled away from him, saying, “All right. Goodbye, have a good trip,” and without looking at him turned and went off. Itale stood a moment nonplussed, then swung himself up on the high wheel and took his place; the coach set off with a jangle and commotion of harness and wheels and shouting. Itale looked back through the dust thrown up by the horses’ hooves and saw his friend already mounted on the bay horse, riding off on the road to Esten; behind him the mare, her saddle empty, followed quietly.

Late that night Amadey lay awake and listened to the wind. It had risen strong and cold, bearing gusts of rain. When it was still a moment there was a sighing sound which might be the settling of the house whose wooden walls strained against the blast, but which sounded like breathing, as if the wind itself took breath before its next sweep across the hills into the west. Amadey sat up at last, groped for the tinderbox, and lighted his candle. The room appeared around him, an island of dim light in the night and the storm of wind. On one high wall hung a map of Europe which he recalled from his earliest childhood, the Latin names of realms, the strange indented coastlines, the boundaries of nations all changed by eighty years of history, the decorative monsters sporting in the ocean he had never seen. The east wind in the darkness blew towards that ocean, towards the remote and cold, autumnal sea, over the hills, plains, cities of the inland, the dawn behind it and the sunset ahead; sunrise might catch it on the coasts of France, or it catch up with evening on the Atlantic, near the shores of the western world. A great gust like a stormwave struck the house. Voices cried along the eaves and roof-peaks. The candle flickered, smoky. “I’m through, I’m done,” he whispered furiously in the sighing stillness after the gust. “It’s gone, all gone, there’s nothing left, what do you want of me?”

Silence, wind, darkness, the walls of the room where he had slept as a boy. When he blew out his candle he could see the window as a paler oblong, and as the clouds streamed westward glimpsed Orion fiery in the black gulfs.

In the afternoon he went to the stable to take out the bay horse. The other horse he had bought in Krasnoy, the brown mare, was in the next stall. He heard Itale in the Golden Lion inn saying, “You must take the mare tomorrow, she has a lovely gait,” the pleasant, easy voice and the open, easy dialect, the generous heart—Again tears came into Amadey’s eyes as they had when he tried to say goodbye to Itale beside the coach, no warm sentimental expansion but a painful and frightening storm of grief like an attack from behind, which he met as best he could, turning to face it with surprise and rage.

He saddled up the mare instead of the bay, and set off alone towards Radiko. In the forest October was setting its somber fires, the birches were beginning to lose their leaves; the wind had blown itself out. The mare’s long gait soon took them out of the trees and up the long slopes towards the high place. The hills were empty except for his brother’s scattered flocks, the agile, heavy-bodied sheep turning their remote gaze on the rider. The sky was pale blue. Once a hawk circled indolently near the sun, and flew off to the north.

At the top of the hill he dismounted in what had been the courtyard of the keep. A long mound broken by angles of half-buried stone showed where the walls had stood. The wind that never stilled on these summits played in the yellow grass. The body of the castle was gone except for a fragment of the gateway and, overhanging the scarp, some ruins of the outer defense wall. The tower stood scarred and intact, sharing its eminence with two things: the sun now sinking to the west, and, far off in the east, more sensed than seen in the obscure distances of autumn, a violet bulk, the mountains of another land. A ramp led up inside the tower to a first floor of stone. The higher floors had been burned away when the castle was taken, a hundred and eighty years before, leaving only stone beam-supports and a jagged blue circle of sky overhead. Weeds flourished between the stones of floor and walls; in a window fifty feet above the floor a few purple daisies nodded. Amadey went to the south window of the first floor, a narrow bright shaft of view over sunlit hills. An inscription was scratched in the sill, in the hard yellow-grey sandstone:

Amadeus • Ioannes • Estensis

anno MDCCCXVIII

vincam

He had cut the words there two days before he first left Esten for Krasnoy. He had been seventeen years old. He remembered in one intense imponderable vision full of scents and weathers and the light of other sunsets all the times he had stood alone here in Radiko. The first time he had come had been in the days after his mother’s death. He had come to the tower on foot, he had climbed up the broken ramp and sat down, worn out, here under the south window, and found himself in a place where death had no power, all here being dead and yet enduring, invulnerable. The sun had gone down, the tower had filled with blue shadows. He had heard his name called on the hills, and at last had answered. His father, Ladis, the servants had been out looking for him, calling; he had been only a boy of ten.

Again the tower filled slowly with shadow, and as it did so grew cold, as if the shadow were clear, still water. He went out and sat on the ruined wall over the cliff in the sun’s last warmth, looking out over the vast landscape that as a child he had pretended was his domain, he the prince of the fallen castle, until the shadow had risen to the top of the highest hills. The frightening pang of loss that he had felt parting with Itale, all the bitter restlessness that had followed him from Krasnoy, dropped away from him at last, here, among the largeness of things, the high ruin, wind, evening. When he stood up at last he still lingered, surrendering to those things, acknowledging their absolute, healing indifference and their absolute claim upon him. He stood alone at last in the only place where he could be alone, could be himself, and free. “This is it, the place. This is where I was to come,” he thought with triumph. In the same moment he turned again, seeing himself posing and boasting, a fool in the house of grandeur. Why had he refused to come here with Itale? Because he was ashamed. He did not want Itale to see the word scratched on the stone of the tower, I shall conquer, and, in his ignorance and magnanimity, believe it. For Itale believed in victory, in the spirit’s struggle and triumph. He had not lived in the ruined tower, on the barren land. He had not seen that there was only a single choice, between illusion and hypocrisy, a choice not worth making. What am I doing here? Amadey asked himself jeering, and went to remount; once off the steep heights he put the mare into a run, leaving behind in the dead place his defeat and his irrecoverable glimpse of peace.

In a bad mood that night, he got into a worse one seeing his brother meet his sullenness with patience, and the “little sister”—Itale’s voice again—grow shy and circumspect. But why couldn’t they let him alone? He could not manage their interest, their affection, their human needs and offerings; he was not able, he had never been able, to live with people. He should leave them and go. But he did not know where to go.

“I liked your friend very much,” Ladis said, days after Itale had left. They were in the stable yard, he had asked Amadey to help him rehang the gate with a new set of hasps from the smithy in Kolleiy. They had just got it mounted and he was testing the iron latch-tongue, his dark face bent down to his work, as it mostly was. “He wasn’t what I’d imagined your friends there to be.”

Amadey flooded his hands at the pump to get the rust from the old ironwork off them. “Friends,” he said. “He’s the only person I met in ten years there that I ever think of, here.”

“It’s all right,” the older brother said, “you know that. Where I’m concerned, and Givana. It’s your house. But how old are you, twenty-six or seven, this is no place for a man unless you want to come into the farming with me. There’s nothing else here.”

“I’m a farmer. Also I’ve got a wife. I had to ride sixty miles to court her. You need more than that. What do you want with rye and sheep? That would be to waste your work.”

Ladislas looked up then from the gate-latch. “What do you mean, your books? You’re done writing?”

“It’s done with me, is the way I’d put it. Finished. Used up and thrown away.”

Ladislas’ eyes were extremely direct, a steady gaze. “You can’t give up a thing like that,” he said, with certainty.

“Ah!” Ladislas said with disgust. “You haven’t changed at all.” That brotherly contempt based upon knowledge and unshakable loyalty, that unanswerable, just, forgiving assessment of character, left Amadey wordless. He felt like a child who has said something very foolish, and he flushed up red as he stood with his arms on the pump-handle, staring at Ladislas.

That night after supper Amadey spoke not at all to his brother, but more than usual to Givana. He made her laugh; he disconcerted her by praising her understanding, and reassured her again by a blunt correction; he began to describe, for the first time since he had come home, the life he had lived in Krasnoy, people he had known, the fashionable, the literary, the actors, the politicals. It was all the Arabian Nights to Givana. She was enchanted, shocked, fascinated, she begged more detail, more circumstance, her eyes were dark and bright and she said, “I don’t believe it, Amadey…”

That night in his room in bed Amadey heard her, “I don’t believe it, Amadey!” and saw her round, strong, childish hands clasped across the dark bodice, and cursed himself aloud to get the sound of her voice out of his head, and turned over, and lighted the candle at last. The other one, the older one lay in his bed in the darkness beside her while she slept soundly, and heard her voice, “I don’t believe it, Amadey!” and clenched his hands in anger, jealousy, and savage self-accusation.

Three more nights passed the same way. After supper Amadey and Givana talked, laughed, played the harpsichord; Givana sang for him, or mocked and admired the bizarre impromptus he played for her. She had become quite at ease with him, and teased him as she never teased Ladislas, ordered him about as if imitating the Krasnoy great ladies he described to her, flirted with him. The idea of the theater fascinated her, she asked endless questions about the stage, the plays, the players, the actresses, women whose lives were in all ways, in all things the opposite of hers: where do they live? how are they paid? what do they do with their money? do they ever have children? on and on, commanding Amadey to answer; and the young man, with his jarring laugh, obeyed her, while Ladislas sat silent beside the hearth.

The fourth night Ladislas left the house after supper and went down to the sheepfolds. He sat a long time with his shepherds by their fire there, as silent and dour as he had sat by his own fire. But when he came back to the house his wife sat alone sewing by the hearth, looking tired and a little scared. “Where’s Amadey?” he asked in an unnatural tone.

“The wind’s so bad,” she said. They always said that in the Polana. She looked up at him, and put up her hand to him timidly.

“You look tired,” he said. “Go to bed.” His voice was very gentle. She went upstairs; he stayed by the fire and did not follow her till after midnight. There was light under Amadey’s door, the thin rayed fan of gold across the worn hall carpeting: he was awake, alone. The older brother stood outside the closed door in the darkness broken by that fan of light at his feet and fought for the strength to be silent, not to speak.—On the other side of the closed door Amadey sat hunched over the scarred writing-table seeking the word, the gift of speech, in an emotionless ecstasy. He had got from Givana what he wanted of her, the excitement of nerves, the uneasy impatient tenacious desire blocked at is own inception, which was his poetic mood. As soon as Ladislas left the house he had left her and come up to his room, rancorous with shame and self-contempt; he sat down to write a letter to somebody, anybody in Krasnoy, he had to get out of here and go back to Krasnoy; as he cut his pen to a new point words appeared in his mind, shifted, stabilised, reshifted: “Here at the ruined tower, the end of hope…Here at the house of desolation, Prince…At the tower at the edge of hope…” The words fell apart, the pattern changed, the resonance returned and filled the universe out to its boundaries and he dipped his half-sharpened pen blindly and began to write, scribbling, crossing out, scribbling again, wrestling the angel skillfully, cleverly, a professional fighter out to win.

For four days he stayed mostly shut up in his room; when he appeared he was goodhumored and heedless; he ate whatever was put in front of him, answered questions at random, and went back up to work. On the fourth night he came into his brother’s study, a cold shed of a room where Ladislas shut himself up to do his accounting. “Can you spare me a half hour?”

“Taxes. Three years running I’ve appealed to Rakava for clarification. They send back the same stupid orders from the administration in Krasnoy. How do they think our peasants can pay this new house tax? Do they want blood? They’ll get blood all right, one of these days, if the Estates can’t change things!”

“Taxes make revolutions, you didn’t have to go to the city to learn that,” Ladislas said with irony or self-irony. “What’s that?”

Ladislas sat down at his desk; Amadey, standing, read the long poem aloud in his harsh, clear voice, that scarcely softened even for the most musical lines. It had all the fluent tenderness, the sweetness of sound, that his verse was famous for, none of which was in his voice as he read it, or in the sense of the words, a fantasy or dream-piece on the ruined castle, a flood of somber and precipitous images in darkness ending with darkness, obscure, abrupt.

When he was done there was silence, then Ladislas in a curious gesture held out his empty hands before his chest and looked from one to the other with a smile. “There you are,” he said in a whisper.

“In reality. In itself.” The poet’s voice, now, was softened by the release of feeling after reading the work.

“The only road across the hills goes to it, and there is only one road to it—it’s like a dream, where you never choose, there are never any choices—It is frightening, Amadey,” the older brother said in his grave, diffident voice, and Amadey smiled accepting, for a moment, praise, victory.

“You were always my best reader, Ladis.” He sat down and they faced each other, Ladislas dark and watchful, Amadey, dressed as always carefully and formally, his reddish hair well cut and combed; he crossed his legs, tapping his knee with the rolled-up manuscript of the poem. “It was a dream, of course. This isn’t the place itself, it’s a dream—a vision of it—months ago. Last July. I don’t know if I can describe it. I hadn’t done anything for weeks, hadn’t written anything for months. One night in July I went back…I went back to a house I used to go to, a woman…You know that story. I’d broken with her more than a year ago, I was beginning to respect myself again, working with Sorde and his lot, I was—So I went back to her, and she took me in, of course, it amused her a good deal, she sent away her current lover to make room in the bed for me, I got drunk and cried and she turned me out again finally, it was…I went around the city all night, I remember parts of it…Got home in the morning and went to sleep. I got up in the evening. It was hot, July in Krasnoy. I was sick of course, it was…it was farther down than I’d been…I sat at my window for a long time. I kept those rooms five years because of that window, looking out over the park, down the mall to the Sinalya. The big chestnut trees under my window, and then the lawns and the mall full of people and carriages in the slanting light on an evening in summer, and behind all that the facade of the palace, long and regular behind the trees, a kind of dreary splendor, a melancholy, the end of something…Well, I sat there where I had sat ten thousand times, with the warm wind blowing in over my table, and the light getting broken up in dusty shafts between the trees, not thinking anything, run out, run dry at last, empty…And then I had this dream, if that’s what it was. I wasn’t asleep. I don’t know what it was. I don’t know what it was about, even…In the novel, I tried to write about a man who couldn’t get away from his destiny, all he did was part of it even when he thought he was acting freely. The dream was like that. I saw my own life—behind me and ahead of me. As if it were a road, lying along the hills. But I wasn’t on it. I could see it, and the hills, I could see places I knew, but had I know them before or did I recognise them because they have always lain ahead of me? And that—that’s all, I can’t describe it, I can’t bring it back.” He sat poised, as if listening. “No use,” he said, and shrugged. “But then, when I came to write this,” and he tapped the paper on his knee, “when I came to the passage about the castle at night, then I realised I was describing one of the things I had seen in the dream. Radiko at night, in the rain, in the dark, before sunrise. I saw that. I saw it in broad daylight two hundred miles away. Why? How? What does it mean? I don’t know, I’ve given up asking. I have no right to ask. I’ve forfeited my rights. I lived in my mind, in my emotions, in my vanity, I lived in the world I made, and made the rules for it. I chose to dream. But then when you wake up you have lost your citizenship in daylight. You have forgotten what real things mean. You have forfeited your rights…”

Amadey sat silent. Ladislas stood up, solid and stocky in the sheepskin vest he wore for warmth in the cold room; he walked up and down the room a couple of times. “When I was twelve and you were six we went over to Fonte for the Easter mass. Do you remember that?”

“But we came back by the old road, by Fasten and Radiko, that time, because the bridge over the Garayna was out. It took all night to come back. We passed below Radiko a while before sunrise. I remember it, because you woke us all up, you were wide awake at the window trying to get it open and saying, ‘Look at the castle, look at the castle!’ And father gave you a cuff and we all settled down again. But I remember waking up suddenly like that and seeing the tower looming up on the sky, with the darkness just lifting behind it. Exactly as in your poem. You are describing that moment.”

“I don’t remember it at all. Twenty years ago! Queer how the mind works, isn’t it?” Amadey said; his hands were shaking uncontrollably. This moment of his childhood which his brother could remember but which he could not, this was no explanation, no answer, but an abyss. From it he turned away in terror. “It’s cold in here, Ladis,” he said. “Let’s go in by the fire.”

III

Winter settled down over the Polana with cold and rain and the endless east wind blowing. At evening under a ragged iron-grey sky the flocks came in over the hills to the great paddocks of Esten. The fields lay grey and poor, the forest was grey, leafless. Givana and Ladislas followed a steady routine, the girl as methodical in her housework as the man in his farmwork. Amadey lapsed into listlessness, finding nothing that needed his doing. At times he found it impossible to get up, cross the room, and trim a guttering lamp. The ounce of energy was lacking; he sat still. His need to make poetry had been his master; having lost his master, he had lost his freedom. Like a tree grown up on a hillcrest where the wind always blows the same he had grown all in one direction, trunk and branches shaped to the wind, and the wind had ceased to blow. He would stand at the window for an hour at a time, looking out at the rain-lashed garden and yards, staring, not thinking, not wondering even why he had come here and why he stayed here in this winter of boredom, this waste, this prison.

The new year came, and in a burst of energy he wrote all his friends in Krasnoy, Itale, Karantay, Helleskar, Luisa, that he was coming back as soon as the roads were fit to travel. He wrote them long letters full of crazy puns and jokes. He would come back to the city in April or in May, when the lindens would be flowering along the Molsen Boulevard, and the chestnuts in the park, and the pretty women on the mall; he would leave behind him at wind-beleaguered Esten all his cobweb notions, his self-torment, the last, senseless tatters of his adolescence. For that was all the trouble. Given up to his imagination, to the drunkenness of words, he had never taken time yet to become a man. It was time to face the real world.

“What would I be running from?” he said angrily to the night, as if denying a grave, heedless accusation; and the wind went on in its tremendous tides to the west, to the sea, under Orion standing bright above the January hills.

He thought of his boast and promise scratched in the stone of the tower of Radiko: I shall conquer: the word now remaining both lie and truth, as enduring as the stone of the tower itself that ignored, in its solitude, all conquerors and all defeat.

When Ladislas and Givana called on their wide-scattered neighbors he went with them, and they had people come in as often as they could, perhaps in an effort to entertain him; he was aware of their shy attempts to offer him work or talk or simply mute companionship, though he was not able to make adequate response. The evenings with other people were easier. The visitors did not really want him to talk. They were daunted by him as a poet, a famous man, a city man, and wanted at best to look at him, then to turn back to one another and discuss sheep, weather, neighbors, politics. The political arguments got hot; he kept out of them, listening with a sense of detachment and disloyalty. Ladislas was a strong reformer and constitutionalist, and was supported by the parish priest of Kolleiy; most of the other domey and farmers combatted his opinions, but not out of love for the government. Things were not going well in the country. Taxation fell heavy on those who had no cash to pay it, police investigations and arrests were becoming common even in small towns, and the eastern provinces, where independence and conservatism were so extreme as to deserve the name of anarchism, were in a resentful, stormy temper. So Ladislas and his neighbors argued and grumbled; and Amadey was silent, always with that vague sense that his silence betrayed something or someone; and when there were no other women, kept home by the bitter weather and the foul roads, Givana also was silent, busy with her handwork and with looking after the tea, the supper, and so on. She was pregnant, and beautiful in pregnancy. She had gained in self-possession; she was gentle, reasonable, timid in manner, yet Amadey saw in her now also the unshakable strength, the assurance of her womanhood. She knew her way. She was happy. He watched her, without envy or hope of participation. Ladislas and two neighbors were going at it hammer and tongs; she came over to the harpsichord, near which Amadey was sitting, sat down, and with a smile of mockery began to play very softly. He came to stand beside her. “Oh, they are so boring,” she said joyously. “They’ll never even hear this, it won’t bother.” And she played and sang, half under her breath,

From out my tower window

I saw the red rose and the may,

From out my tower window

I saw the red rose and the thorn.

Who rides beneath my window

Before the break of day,

Who rides beneath my window
Before the morn?

“Go on,” said Amadey, who knew it from childhood, the ballad of Death who carries the girl away, but Givana smiled and said, “I can’t sing, I’m so shortwinded,” and went on playing one of her quaint old sonatinas. When she was done she tuned a couple of the wires, which forever needed tuning, and then sitting back on the bench asked him, “Do you still mean to leave in April?”

“I don’t know,” he said absently, his gaze following the design painted on the front of the harpsichord, a wreath of roses and hawthorn, chipped and faded on the cracked varnish. “I don’t want to leave.”

“No. I don’t think so. There is no reason to. I came here looking for the reason to come here, but I haven’t found it. You see, when I went to Krasnoy, I knew exactly why I was going, what I had to do. To write my books, meet people, make my way, fall in love, all the rest of it. I did all that. I went through all I had to go through. And now it’s done. It’s all done.”

“Don’t think I’m lazy, Givana. You’ve scarcely seen me work. I worked very hard, when I had work to do. But it’s done. So, I can go back to Krasnoy, or anywhere else, and write articles, and earn a living, take up life as most people do, get married, go on from day to day for fifty years if I like—I can see that; but I don’t believe it. I don’t see my life ahead. I have already lived it. All the rest seems meaningless. Do you know what I mean? You foresee your own life to come, in a way, don’t you?”

“I never did until now. Since I’ve been pregnant. I see things…as if the baby saw them dreaming…a summer evening out there, under the poplar, the child and I are standing there waiting, for Ladis to ride home I suppose, and it’s a lovely summer evening, a little sad…because the wind is blowing.” She smiled. “And because I’ll be older, then.”

They had forgotten the others; she spoke without the least convention, and he answered, harsh and pleading, “But I can’t. I can’t see anything ahead. There’s no way to see ahead through one’s own eyes, it’s the child as you say, the future you bear, that’s your vision, the truth, but I—I have lost the way—I can’t see.”

“You worked so hard, you said so yourself; you’re tired, you’re worn out. You have to wait. It’s like winter, everything has to rest and wait.” She spoke earnestly, with confidence.

The thaws came early, there was no snow after the last week of January. In February he received the first mail to come through to Kolleiy since Christmas: two letters from Karantay, one dated in early December asking if he had any news from Itale, the other an empty envelope, the seal broken. There was also a packet from the Rochoy publishing house, copies of his new book, Givan Faugen. He gave one to his brother. “Read it next winter!” he said, for Ladislas was in the thick of lambing season, at work twenty hours a day, and often not at the house for two or three days at a time. “No, in a week or so now,” Ladislas answered seriously. “But give it to Givana. It will please her.”

“If you like.” Ladislas swung upon his little horse, raised a hand in salute, and rode off. Amadey went to find Givana in the garden west of the house. It was a cold day, the wind blowing light and keen; sunlight flashed, dimmed, flashed in rain-pools on the raw black ground. Givana was stooping over a bed of dirt, her figure bright and frail in the restless light. “My crocuses are up,” she said proudly. “Two of them, see them?”

She took the book, looked at the title, turned it over, did not know what to say. He showed her the flyleaf, on which he had written with the bad pen and gummy ink of the Kolleiy Post Inn, “For Givana and Ladislas from their loving brother Amadey.” She read the inscription and sought for words to say, then suddenly breaking through her own constraint she smiled and said, “Read me some of it!” She sat down on the garden seat, putting up her feet on a paving-stone to keep them from the mud under the bench.

Standing there in the uneasy sunlight he opened the book and read the first page aloud; he paused, and shut the book. “It seems years ago, someone else’s book…”

He glanced down at her, then opened to the last page of the book, and read about in his hard voice: “‘Givan made no reply for some minutes, but leaned on the railing of the bridge in mute contemplation of the river, which ran fast beneath, foam-streaked and yellow, swollen by the torrents of Spring. At length, raising his head, he said, “If life is anything more than a brief exile from the kingdoms beyond Death—”’”

He stopped again. He closed the book and laid it down on the bench beside Givana. She looked up at him, helpless. The wind blew, the sun shone out and faded on the high, pale hill above the house. “It’s a very gloomy book,” the young man said.

“All my kingdom is here. It always was.” Hands in his pockets he turned away to the gate, then turned back as if to speak again; he smiled a little as if in apology, shrugged, and went on around the house.

Givana soon followed him, wearied and oppressed by the cold wind. She lay down in her room and dozed uncomfortably. Through halfsleep she heard Amadey’s voice down in the yard, the stamping of a horse. Rain began to patter on the roof and window, and she slept.

“Perhaps he went out to shoot in the forest,” she said, that night. Ladislas, at his long-delayed supper, nodded and went on eating.

“It’s been dark two hours,” he said, setting down knife and fork. “There’s been some accident with the horse, maybe.”

He came back from the forest past midnight. “Gil is going on to Kolleiy with the lantern,” he said. Givana helped him pull off his mired boots; he sat back on the hearthseat, and almost at once fell asleep, before he had lain down. Wakeful in her pregnancy, Givana sat with him, keeping the fire built up; the old housekeeper brought quilts and they made a bed of the hearthseat. Ladislas slept there until dawn, when he woke suddenly. Givana was asleep, curled up in the armchair by the fire. Ladislas went quietly upstairs to his brother’s room to check that no one was there, then put on his boots and went out into the icy white sunrise. The crest of the hill above the house was lipped with gold; stables, yard, house, trees stood pallid and rigid in the dawn light. Ladislas pulled the collar of his coat up around his neck and went to the stables. The stable-boy came clambering down to meet him from the loft room.

“Where’s the Rakava bridle,” Ladislas said, his voice hoarse with sleep and cold, “did Dom Amadey take it?”

He set off on his little black horse through the frostbound forest, up the hills now bright along their eastern slopes, riding towards the summit and the tower that stood yellow in the level light. As he came over the last rise before the valley under Radiko he saw the brown mare standing halfway down the steep ascent, her reins dragging. She shied away as he rode close; she ran a little, stumbled on the reins and stopped, turning her dark nervous head to watch Ladislas. He rode up past her and across the fallen wall of the courtyard, dismounted, and went to the foot of the ramp leading up into the tower. Amadey had set the gun, a hunting rifle, against his chest under the heart, and had fallen forward, sprawled out, his head turned to the side. His coat was soaking wet with rain and his hair looked black. Ladislas touched his hand which lay on the muddy ground, mudstained and as cold as the ground or the rain. The wind kept blowing on the hills, the domain of Radiko, as it always did. Amadey’s eyes were open, so that he seemed to be looking westward over the ruined wall and the hills at the sky where, for him, there had been no sunrise, the night continuing.

PART FOUR The Way to Radiko

I

II

III

PART FOUR
The Way to Radiko