Now she saw that Skula’s dwellers and Skula’s God had come from Skula itself, with winter seas in their veins. David had not been struggling toward normality; he had been reshaping himself into something which—down underneath— Magnus Ryerson thought was not human. Suddenly, almost blindingly, Tamara remembered a few weeks ago, one night when the old man had set her a ballad to translate. “Our folk have sung it for many hundreds of years,” he said—and how he had looked at her under his heavy brows.
He hath taken off cross and iron helm,
He hath bound his good horse to a limb,
He hath not spoken Jesu name
Since the Faerie Queen did first kiss him.
Tamara struck a fist into one palm. The wind caught her cloak and peeled it from her, so that it flapped at her shoulders like black wings. She pulled it back around her, shuddering.
The sun was a red sliver on the world’s rim. Darkness would come in minutes, so thick you could freeze to death fumbling your way home. Tamara began to walk, quickly, hoping to find a decision. She had not come out today just because the house was unendurable. But her mind had been stiff, as if rusted. She still didn’t know what to do.
Or rather, she thought, I do know, but haven’t saved up enough courage.
W
HEN she reached the house, the air was already so murky she could almost not make out whitewashed walls and steep snowstreaked roof. A few yellow gleams of
light came through cracks in the shutters. She paused at the door. To go in —! But there was no choice. She twisted the knob and stepped through. The wind and the sea-growl came in with her.
“Close the door,” said Magnus. “Close the door, you little fool.”
She shut out all but a mumble and whine under the eaves, hung her cloak on a peg and faced around. Magnus Ryerson sat in his worn leather chair with a worn leather-bound book in his hands. As always, as always! How could you tell one day from the next in this den? The radiglobe was turned low, so that he was mostly shadow, with an icicle gleam of eyes and a dirty-white cataract of beard. A peat fire sputtered forlornly, trying to warm a tea kettle on the hob.
Ryerson put the book down on his lap, knocked out his archaic pipe—it had made the air foul in here—and asked roughly: “Where have you been all day, girl? I was about to go look for you. You could turn an ankle and die of exposure, alone on the ling.”
“I didn’t,” said Tamara. She exchanged her boots for zori and moved toward the kitchen.
“Wait!” said Magnus. “Will you never learn? I want my high tea just at 1630 hours—Now. You must be more careful, lass. You’re carrying the last of the Ryersons.”
Tamara stopped. There was a downward slant to the ancient brick floor, she felt vaguely how her body braced itself. More nearly she felt how her chilled skin, which had begun to tingle as it warmed, grew numb again.
“Besides David,” she said.
“If he is alive. Do you still believe it, after all these weeks?” Magnus began scraping out his pipe. He did not look at her.
“I don’t believe he is dead,” she answered.
“The Lunar crew couldn’t establish gray-beam contact. Even if he is still alive, he’ll die of old age before that ship reaches any star where men have an outpost. No, say rather he’ll starve!”
“If he could repair whatever went wrong—”
The muffled surf drums outside rolled up to a crescendo. Magnus tightened his mouth. “That is one way to destroy yourself . . . hoping,” he said. “You must accept the worst,
because there is always more of the worst than the best in this universe.”
She glanced at the black book he called a Bible, heavy on one of the crowded shelves. “Do your holy writings claim that?” she asked. Her voice came out as a stranger’s croak.
“Aye. So does the second law of thermodynamics.” Magnus knocked his pipe against the ashtray. It was an unexpectedly loud noise above the wind.