“As I did before—cross the border. The Orgota have nothing against me.”
“Where will we find a transmitter?”
“No nearer than Sassinoth.”
I winced. He grinned.
“Nothing closer?”
“A hundred and fifty miles or so; we’ve come farther over worse ground. There are roads all the way; people will take us in; we may get a lift on a powersledge.”
I assented, but I was depressed by the prospect of still another stage of our winter-journey, and this one not towards haven but back to that damned border where Estraven might go back into exile, leaving me alone.
I brooded over it and finally said, “There’ll be one condition which Karhide must fulfill before it can join the Ekumen. Argaven must revoke your banishment.”
He said nothing, but stood gazing at the fire.
“I mean it,” I insisted. “First things first.”
“I thank you, Genry,” he said. His voice, when he spoke very softly as now, did have much the timbre of a woman’s voice, husky and unresonant. He looked at me, gently, not smiling. “But I haven’t expected to see my home again for a long time now. I’ve been in exile for twenty years, you know. This is not so much different, this banishment. I’ll look after myself; and you look after yourself, and your Ekumen. That you must do alone. But all this is said too soon. Tell your ship to come down! When that’s done, then I’ll think beyond it.”
We stayed two more days in Kurkurast, getting well fed and rested, waiting for a road-packer that was due in from the south and would give us a lift when it went back again. Our hosts got Estraven to tell them the whole tale of our crossing of the Ice. He told it as only a person of an oral-literature tradition can tell a story, so that it became a saga, full of traditional locutions and even episodes, yet exact and vivid, from the sulphurous fire and dark of the pass between Drumner and Dremegole to the screaming gusts from mountain-gaps that swept the Bay of Guthen; with comic interludes, such as his fall into the crevasse, and mystical ones, when he spoke of the sounds and silences of the Ice, of the shadowless weather, of the night’s darkness. I listened as fascinated as all the rest, my gaze on my friend’s dark face.
We left Kurkurast riding elbow-jammed in the cab of a road-packer, one of the big powered vehicles that rolls and packs down the snow on Karhidish roads, the main means of keeping roads open in winter, since to try to keep them plowed clear would take half the kingdom’s time and money, and all traffic is on runners in the winter anyway. The packer ground along at two miles an hour, and brought us into the next village south of Kurkurast long after nightfall. There, as always, we were welcomed, fed, and housed for the night; the next day we went on afoot. We were now landward of the coastal hills that take the brunt of the north wind off the Bay of Guthen, in a more heavily settled region, and so went not from camp to camp but from Hearth to Hearth. A couple of times we did get a lift on a power-sledge, once for thirty miles. The roads, despite frequent heavy snowfall, were hard-packed and well-marked. There was always food in our packs, put there by the last night’s hosts; there was always a roof and a fire at the end of the day’s going.
Yet those eight or nine days of easy hiking and skiing through a hospitable land were the hardest and dreariest part of all our journey, worse than the ascent of the glacier, worse than the last days of hunger. The saga was over, it belonged to the Ice. We were very tired. We were going the wrong direction. There was no more joy in us.
“Sometimes you must go against the wheel’s turn,” Estraven said. He was as steady as ever, but in his walk, his voice, his bearing, vigor had been replaced by patience, and certainty by stubborn resolve. He was very silent, nor would he mindspeak with me much.