“Is there any alternative?”
“Karhide. Overland.”
“How far is it—a thousand miles?”
“Yes, by road. But we couldn’t go on the roads. We wouldn’t get past the first Inspector. Our only way would be north through the mountains, east across the Gobrin, and down to the border at Guthen Bay.”
“Across the Gobrin—the ice-sheet, you mean?”
He nodded.
“It’s not possible in winter, is it?”
“I think so; with luck, as in all winter journeys. In one respect a Glacier crossing is better in winter. The good weather, you know, tends to stay over the great glaciers, where the ice reflects the heat of the sun; the storms are pushed out to the periphery. Therefore the legends about the Place inside the Blizzard. That might be in our favor. Little else.”
“Then you seriously think—”
“There would have been no point taking you from Pulefen Farm if I did not.”
He was still stiff, sore, grim. Last night’s conversation had shaken us both.
“And I take it that you consider the Ice-crossing a better risk than waiting about till spring for a sea-crossing?”
He nodded. “Solitude,” he explained, laconic.
I thought it over for a while. “I hope you’ve taken my inadequacies into account. I’m not as coldproof as you, nowhere near it. I’m no expert on skis. I’m not in good shape—though much improved from a few days ago.”
Again he nodded. “I think we might make it,” he said, with that complete simplicity I had so long taken for irony.
“All right.”
He glanced at me, and drank down his cup of tea. Tea it might as well be called; brewed from roasted perm-grain, orsh is a brown, sweetsour drink, strong in vitamins A and C, sugar, and a pleasant stimulant related to lobeline. Where there is no beer on Winter there is orsh; where there is neither beer nor orsh, there are no people.
“It will be hard,” he said, setting down his cup. “Very hard. Without luck, we will not make it.”
“I’d rather die up on the Ice than in that cesspool you got me out of.”
He cut off a chunk of dried breadapple, offered me a slice, and sat meditatively chewing. “We’ll need more food,” he said.
“What happens if we do make it to Karhide—to you, I mean? You’re still proscribed.”
He turned his dark, otter’s glance on me. “Yes. I suppose I’d stay on this side.”
“And when they found you’d helped their prisoner escape—?”
“They needn’t find it.” He smiled, bleak, and said, “First we have to cross the Ice.”
I broke out, “Listen, Estraven, will you forgive what I said yesterday—”
“Nusuth.” He stood up, still chewing, put on his hieb, coat, and boots, and slipped otterlike out the self-sealing valved door. From outside he stuck his head back in: “I may be late, or gone overnight. Can you manage here?”
“Yes.”
“All right.” With that he was off. I never knew a person who reacted so wholly and rapidly to a changed situation as Estraven. I was recovering, and willing to go; he was out of thangen; the instant that was all clear, he was off. He was never rash or hurried, but he was always ready. It was the secret, no doubt, of the extraordinary political career he threw away for my sake; it was also the explanation of his belief in me and devotion to my mission. When I came, he was ready. Nobody else on Winter was.
Yet he considered himself a slow man, poor in emergencies.
Once he told me that, being so slow-thinking, he had to guide his acts by a general intuition of which way his “luck” was running, and that this intuition rarely failed him. He said it seriously; it may have been true. The Foretellers of the Fastnesses are not the only people on Winter who can see ahead. They have tamed and trained the hunch, but not increased its certainty. In this matter the Yomeshta also have a point: the gift is perhaps not strictly or simply one of foretelling, but is rather the power of seeing (if only for a flash) everything at once: seeing whole.
I kept the little heater-stove at its hottest setting while Estraven was gone, and so got warm clear through for the first time in—how long? I thought it must be Thern by now, the first month of winter and of a new Year One, but I had lost count in Pulefen.