Aimu sobbed audibly. Kurt could take no more. He turned suddenly and fled the hall, out into the entryway.
“It is done.” Kta knelt where he found him, crouched in the corner of the entry against the door. He set his hand on Kurt’s shoulder. “It is over now. We will put her to rest. Will you wish to be present?”
Kurt shuddered and turned his face toward the wall. “I can’t,” he said, lapsing into his native tongue. “I can’t. I loved her, Kta. I can’t go.”
“Then we will care for her, my friend. We will care for her.”
“I loved her,” he insisted, and felt the pressure of Kta’s fingers on his shoulder.
“Is there… some rite you would wish? Surely… surely our Ancestors would find no wrong in that.”
“What could she have to do with my people?” Kurt swallowed painfully and shook his head. “Do it the way she would understand.”
Kta arose and started to leave, then knelt again. “My
friend, come to my room first. I will give you something that will make you sleep.”
“No,” he said. “Leave me alone. Leave me.”
“I am afraid for you.”
“Take care of her. Do that for me.”
Kta hesitated, then rose again and withdrew on silent feet.
Kurt sat listening for a moment. The family left the rhmei by the left-hand hall, their steps dying away into the far places of the house. Kurt rose then and opened the door quietly, shutting it quietly behind him in such a way that the inner bar fell into place.
The streets were deserted, as they had been since the Methi’s guards had taken their places at the wall-street. He walked not toward the Afen, but downward, toward the harbor.
XIV
Daylight was finally beginning to break through the mists, lightening everything to gray, and there was the first stirring of wind that would disperse the fog.
Kurt skirted the outermost defense wall of Nephane, the rocking, skeletal outlines of ships ghostly in the gray dawn. No one watched this end of the harbor, where the ancient walls curved against Haichema-tleke’s downslope, where the hill finally reached the water, where the walls towered sixty feet or more into the mist.
Here the city ended and the countryside began. A dirt track ran south, rutted with the wheels of hand-pulled carts, mired, thanks to the recent rains. Kurt ran beside the road and left it, heading across country.
He could not think clearly yet where he was bound. Elas was closed to him. If he set eyes on Djan or t’Tefur now he would kill them, with ruin to Elas. He ran, hoping only that it was tTefur who would pursue him, out beyond witnesses and law.
It would not bring back Mim. Mim was buried by now, cold in the earth. He could not imagine it, could not accept it, but it was true.
) He was weary of tears. He ran, pushing himself to the point of collapse, until that pain was more than the pain for Mim, and exhaustion tumbled him into the wet grass all but senseless.
When he began to think again, his mind was curiously clear. He realized for the first time that he was bleeding from an open wound-had been all night, since the assassin’s blade had passed his ribs. It began to hurt. He found it not deep, but as long as his hand. He had no means to bandage it. The bleeding was not something he would die of. His bruises were more painful; his cord-cut wrists and ankles hurt to bend. He was almost relieved to feel these things, to exchange these miseries for the deeper one of Mim’s loss, which had no limit. He put Mim away in his mind, rose up and began to walk again, steps weaving at first, steadier as he chose his direction.
He wanted nothing to do with the villages. He avoided the dirt track that sometimes crossed his way. As the day wore on and the warmth increased he walked more surely, choosing his southerly course by the sun.
Sometimes he crossed cultivated fields, where the crops were only now sprouting and the earliest trees were in bloom and not yet fruited. Root-crops like stas were stored away in the safety of barns, not to be had in the fields.