I feel a moment’s unease. We are in no park, with laid-out trails and campground services. \Ve are in wildeountry. Not many men come here, ever, and still fewer women; for the region is, literally, beyond the law. No deed done here is punishable. ~Ve are told that this helps consolidate society, as the most violent among us may thus vent their passions. But I have spent much time in wild-country since my Morning Star went out—myself in quest of nothing but solitude—and I have watched what happens through eyes that have also read anthropology and history. Institutions are developing; ceremonies, tribalisms, acts of blood and cruelty and acts elsewhere called unnatural are becoming more elaborate and more expected every year. Then the practitioners go home to their cities and honestly believe they have been enjoying fresh air, exercise, and good tension-releasing fun.
Let her get angry enough and Thrakia can call knives to her aid.
Wherefore I make myself lay both hands on her shoulders, and meet the tormented gaze, and say most gently, “I’m sorry. I know you mean well. You’re afraid She will be annoyed and bring misfortune on your people.”
Thrakia gulps. “No,” she whispers. “That wouldn’t be logical. But I’m afraid of what might happen to you. And then—” Suddenly she throws herself against me. I feel arms, breasts, belly press through my tunic, and smell meadows in her hair and musk in her mouth. “You’d be gonel” she wails. “Then who’d sing to us?”
“Why, the planet’s crawling with entertainers,” I stammer.
“You’re more than that,” she says. “So much more. I don’t like what you sing, not really—and what you’ve sung since that stupid girl died, oh, meaningless, horrible!—but, I don’t know why, I want you to trouble me.”
Awkward, I pat her back. The sun now stands very little above the treetops. Its rays slant interminably through the booming, frosting air. I shiver in my tunic and buskins and wonder what to do.
A sound rescues me. It conies from one end of the valley below us, where further view is blocked off by two cliffs; it thunders deep in our ears and rolls through the earth into our bones. We have heard that sound in the cities, and
been glad to have walls and lights and multitudes around us. Now we are alone with it, the noise of Her chariot.
The women shriek, I hear them faintly across wind and rumble and my own pulse, and they vanish into the woods. They will seek their camp, dress warmly, build enormous fires; presently they will eat their ecstatics, and rumors are uneasy about what they do after that.
Thrakia seizes my left wrist, above the soul bracelet, and hduls. “Harper, come with me!” she pleads. I break loose from her and stride down the hill toward the road. A scream follows me for a moment.
Light still dwells in the sky and on the ridges, but as I descend into that narrow valley I enter dusk, and it thickens. Indistinct bramblebushes whicker where I brush them, and claw back at me. I feel the occasional scratch on my legs, the tug as my garment is snagged, the chill that I breathe, but dimly. My perceived-outer-reality is overpowered by the rushing of Her chariot and my blood. My inner-universe is fear, yes, but exaltation too, a drunkenness which sharpens instead of dulling the senses, a psychedelia which opens the reasoning mind as well as the emotions; I have gone beyond myself, I am embodied purpose. Not out of need for comfort, but to voice what Is, I return to words whose speaker rests centuries dust, and lend them my own music. I sing:
“—Gold is my heart, and the world’s golden, And one peak tipped with light;
And the air lies still about the hill With the first fear of night;
“Till mystery down the soundless valley Thunders, and dark is here;
And the wind blows, and the light goes, And the night is full of fear.
“And I know one night, on some far height, In a tongue I never knew, I yet shall hear the tidings clear From them that were friends of you.