And I did not want to let him go. I did not want to lose him in life as I had lost Darak and Asren and Vazkor in death. Nor did he wish to leave me, this much I knew.
Four days after I had come to the ship, it landed smoothly in a rocky valley high hi the hills beyond the sea. A new land, yet the same as the land where I had dragged through my year of life. Summer heat droned in the valley, over the tumble of green-edged boulders. No human habitation showed itself for miles. Three or four wild sheep ran from our coming, and I knew that silence would be there, that silence of fear for the unknown thing.
I stood in the glassy room among the pillars, staring at the valley through a viewing screen in the wall. Ciorden had
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come, and kissed my hand, reminding me again of the notaries of Ezlann or Za. I had thanked him, and smiled at the awe which stole onto his face as he looked at me. It was foolish for him to be taken aback by what he had helped liberate. We both knew it, but it was there all the same. After Ciorden I knew that Rarm would come. And when he came at last, I realized fully that after this I should not see him anymore. The tie that had held me to Sekish was dissolved. There was no fascinated hatred in my love for this man, the man who had given me myself.
“I must take the ship up very soon,” he said. “I’ve overstayed my leave here.”
“I understand,” I said.
“And you’ll take nothing with you?”
“No, Rarm, only this one dress. Before the winter comes I shall have shelter of some sort, and, as we both know now, I do not need food at all, only what I draw from the air as I breathe. It will be a hard lesson for me to relearn, that lost habit, but it can be done, and the sooner I begin, the better.”
“I wish this didn’t have to be the finish of it,” he said quietly. “I don’t want to leave you.”
“Nor I you,” I said, “but there is no other way for us.”
“No, there isn’t any other way.”
It seemed I had been coming toward him from my past all the years I traveled; and now that we met and touched, the moment was achieved-and ended.
He came to me then, and kissed me, intently, yet without particular passion. There was no point in any passion or desire between us. It was too late for us, more than that, there had never been a time for us, would never be. It was the first and last meeting, and now there was almost nothing else to say or do.
Together we walked to the lock of the ship and the hatchway, which gave onto the valley. It opened for me, slowly, lustily, as if reluctant.
“Ciorden would say his computer didn’t want you to go,” Rarm said.
I looked outward, and the world yawned before me like the empty void which had hung about the ship.
I put my hand in his a moment, then I looked away from him, into the valley. The hatchway slid toward the ground. I stepped out. I did not look back. I walked over the rocks and the rough mosses. Small pink flowers stood up like a child’s vision of stars embroidered on the grass.
I did not look back at him, nor at the ship.
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When I reached the crest of the valley, I heard the thin high moan start up behind me. I did not turn. I imagined the oval silver thing lifting, gleaming, from the burned earth, lifting, lifting, high into the blue summer sky, dwindling, changing to a tiny silver light, vanishing, going away and away.
The sound eased and melted into the air. The silence all around me stirred a little. First a cricket creaking, next a flutter of bird wings as a brown pigeon circled over the rocks. Soon a thousand small twitters, rustlings, scutterings. Fear had gone.
Over the crest the world was green, running down toward trees and the far-off glitter of water. Toward pastures, too, perhaps, and toward people. Toward villages and towns and cities, which held their own scattered remembrance of the Lost, where there might be stone bowls burning flame, and golden books with faded leaves whose guilt and fearful hope of surviving the Plague had given rise to a legend of a second coming of gods.
A hot breeze burned on my naked face, lifted strands of my hair.
I am alone. No one stands beside me, I have no Dark Prince to ride in my chariot, to walk with me, to hold me to him. I have no one. And yet. I have myself at last, I have myself. And to me, at this time, it seems enough. It seems more, much more, than enough.