My papers and my presence were at last approved, and by Fourth Hour I got my first meal since early breakfast—supper: kadik-porridge and cold sliced bread-apple. For all its array of officials, Siuwensin was a very small, plain place, sunk deep in rural torpor. The Commensal Transient-House was shorter than its name. Its dining-room had one table, five chairs, and no fire; food was brought in from the village hot-shop. The other room was the dormitory: six beds, a lot of dust, a little mildew. I had it to myself. As everybody in Siuwensin appeared to have gone to bed directly after supper, I did the same. I fell asleep in that utter country silence that makes your ears ring. I slept an hour and woke in the grip of a nightmare about explosions, invasion, murder, and conflagration.
It was a particularly bad dream, the kind in which you run down a strange street in the dark with a lot of people who have no faces, while houses go up in flames behind you, and children scream.
I ended up in an open field, standing in dry stubble by a black hedge. The dull-red halfmoon and some stars showed through clouds overhead. The wind was bitter cold. Near me a big barn or granary bulked up in the dark, and in the distance beyond it I saw little volleys of sparks going up on the wind.
I was bare-legged and barefoot, in my shirt, without breeches, hieb, or coat; but I had my pack. It held not only spare clothes but also my rubies, cash, documents, papers, and ansible, and I slept with it as a pillow when I traveled. Evidently I hung onto it even during bad dreams. I got out shoes and breeches and my furlined winter hieb, and dressed, there in the cold, dark country silence, while Siuwensin smoldered half a mile behind me. Then I struck out looking for a road, and soon found one, and on it, other people. They were refugees like me, but they knew where they were going. I followed them, having no direction of my own, except away from Siuwensin; which, I gathered as we walked, had been raided by a foray from Passerer across the bridge.
They had struck, set fire, withdrawn; there had been no fight. But all at once lights glared down the dark at us, and scuttling to the roadside we watched a land-caravan, twenty trucks, come at top speed out of the west toward Siuwensin and pass us with a flash of light and a hiss of wheels twenty times repeated; then silence and the dark again.
“We soon came to a communal farm-center, where we were halted and interrogated. I tried to attach myself to the group I had followed down the road, but no luck; no luck for them either, if they did not have their identification-papers with them. They, and I as a foreigner without passport, were cut out of the herd and given separate quarters for the night in a storage-barn, a vast stone semi-cellar with one door locked on us from outside, and no window. Now and then the door was unlocked and a new refugee thrust in by a farm-policeman armed with the Gethenian sonic “gun.” The door shut, it was perfectly dark: no light. One’s eyes, cheated of sight, sent starbursts and fiery blots whirling through the black. The air was cold, and heavy with the dust and odor of grain. No one had a handlight; these were people who had been routed out of their beds, like me; a couple of them were literally naked, and had been given blankets by others on the way. They had nothing. If they had had anything, it would have been their papers. Better to be naked than to lack papers, in Orgoreyn.
They sat dispersed in that hollow, huge, dusty blindness. Sometimes two conversed a while, low-voiced. There was no fellowfeeling of being prisoners together. There was no complaint.
I heard one whisper to my left: “I saw him in the street, outside my door. His head was blown off.”
“They use those guns that fire pieces of metal. Foray guns.”
“Tiena said they were’t from Passerer, but from Ovord Domain, come down by truck.”