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"Let me help!" Dilna shouted, nearly hysterical with the terror of knowing that her son had fallen, that her husband was about to fall. She threw herself to the ground and slid forward, face down, toward the edge, out of control. "Dilna!" Stipock cried, and she was only stopped by grabbing at Wix, which jolted him enough that he lost his grip on Hoom's foot. Wix cried out in the agony of trying to force his fingers to grasp, but Hoom slid away, struck the ledge Cammar had been standing on, bounced limply out into midair, and for a moment it seemed that he'd fly into the abyss — and then he was out of sight.
Dilna was hysterical, screaming Hoom's name and beating at Wix. Both of them were in a precarious position, and Stipock was afraid that anything he did might break the equilibrium. But he decided, and acted quickly, pulling Dilna by force backward toward safer, more level ground. When she was well clear of the edge, still weeping uncontrollably, Stipock went carefully back and pulled Wix clear. It only took a meter's pulling to get the young man in a position where he could get himself back up to safe ground.
"I tried to hold him," Wix kept saying. "I really tried." And Stipock said yes, I know, yes, of course you did.
Then they heard Hoom's voice from below — not loud, but loud enough to be heard. Immediately they fell silent, and listened.
"Don't come down!" Hoom shouted. His voice echoed from the walls of the canyon.
"Where are you!" Stipock shouted.
"There's no way down here! Don't try!"
"Are you all right?"
"I think my back is broken! I can't move my legs at all!"
"How far down are you?"
"Don't come!" Hoom shouted, sounding more frantic. "It's too sheer! And the rocks are giving way under me — I won't be here long!" To Stipock's horror the boy began to laugh. "There's nothing under me from here! Five hundred meters, right down to the river!"
Dilna called out to him. "Hoom! Hang on! Please!"
"I already thought of that!" Hoom called back, and then they heard a distant scraping noise, and a cry from far below. Dilna gasped, but Hoom immediately called again, "I'm all right! I have hold of a rock! It seems stable!"
Stipock wracked his brain for an idea, a way of getting down to Hoom. But there was no rope any nearer than Heaven City , and to try to scale the cliff and bring up a man with a broken back without rope was inviting more deaths.
"I'm going down," Wix said softly.
"No you're not," Stipock answered.
"I'm going down, Stipock," Wix said. "I've got to help him!"
"Stay there, dammit!" Hoom shouted. "I don't want you to die with me!"
Wix was frantic. "I can't let him die!"
"Don't kill yourself for guilt," Stipock said coldly, and Wix turned to Dilna for support. "I tried to hold onto him," Wix insisted.
"I know it," she answered. "We all did."
And then they fell silent. They stood several meters from the edge. Waiting. For what? Stipock realized that the situation was impossible. They were waiting for Hoom to fall asleep, or lose his grip, or die of his injuries. At best they were waiting for him to die of thirst. If they had to stay there waiting, they'd all go crazy.
Hoom realized all that, too, and said so. "I'm going to let go!" he called out.
"No!" Dilna wailed, and the canyon shouted it back at her. "No! No!"
"I can't hold on forever! What should I wait for? Jason's flying ship?"
"Is Cammar anywhere near you?" Wix called, trying to keep Hoom from talking himself into dying.
"He's dead!" came the answer.
"Can you see him?" Wix called. There was a long wait before Hoom answered. "There's a lot of blood on this rock," Hoom said. "It isn't mine. There's nothing between here and the river." Hoom's voice quavered as he spoke.
Dilna began to vomit, retching loudly. The sound was terrible, and Stipock wanted to scream in his helplessness. Wix was crying, more in frustration than grief.
"Stipock!" Hoom called.
"Yes!"
"Tell them for me!"
"I will!" Stipock called back.
"Tell us what?" Wix asked, looking up in dread. "What?"
"That he knew. And that he forgives you both."
Wix and Dilna were silent now. Hoom called from below, "But you, Stipock! I'll never forgive you!"
Stipock felt a terrible pain, a wrenching of his bowels, and he breathed heavily. The boy couldn't mean it.
"I'll never forgive you for not teaching me more before I died!"
And, relieved, Stipock slowly sat down. But the feeling of guilt was still there. Because it was Stipock who had brought Hoom to this.
Hoom didn't say anymore. There was a sliding of rock. No scream, no cry. No sound of the body landing below. And in the deep silence after the sound of Hoom letting go, the gurgle of the river far below seemed remarkably loud.
Wix and Dilna just sat there, saying nothing, not touching. After a while Stipock went farther up the hill and looked for bushes he could use to make a fire. When he got it going, he came back to the two young people and led them up the hill to the fire. They came passively enough, but they didn't look him in the eye. Stipock could guess what they were thinking. Years of betrayal, and the fact that they hadn't stopped, had never stopped. Knowing that he knew that they had betrayed him. No wonder, Stipock thought, that they sit on opposite sides of the fire. Guilt couldn't keep them apart when Hoom was alive; but now that he's dead, it will, for a time at least, separate them more thoroughly than marriage had ever done.
Dilna and Wix both cried out in the night, at different times. Stipock also slept badly. The next day they backtracked, and found another way down the northwest slope of the mountains. They never found the river that had taken Dilna's husband and son, and were just as glad of that.
The forest swallowed them, and the going was slow, and at last Dilna was too pregnant to travel. They built a house, then, and hunted in the forest, trapping small animals and birds and laying in food for the winter, Wix and Stipock both leaving the house for days at a time, to make sure the winter would not catch them unprepared.
The snows in the forest here fell deep, deeper than they ever had in Heaven City. The trees were taller, too, and denser, and the darkness at noon in the middle of winter, even though the leaves had fallen from the trees, was dismal and depressing. But that winter Dilna's child was born. A son.
"You'll name it Hoom?" Stipock asked.
She shook her head. "Hoom told me he wanted a son named Aven." And there was little talk that day, though the snow confined them all indoors; they were thinking of death as the infant sucked pap from Dilna's breasts.
As night came, and they laid the logs for the night's fire, Dilna spoke from the bed where she lay, recovering from the birth. "I've been pregnant," she said, "six times. Six times, and Aven is all that I have now." As if in answer, the baby stirred and cried weakly. No one could think of anything to say to her.
And in the spring they set out again, following streams and rivers northward, trying to find a pass through the northern mountains that Stipock warned them of. And they found it soon — there was still snow on the ground as they hiked through the vast gap in the mountains, the peaks rising to the right and the left as they walked northward on the gentle hills.
It was nearing summer when they came to the Heaven River, the kilometers–wide torrent rushing westward to Heaven City . They stopped to build a small, crude boat, and two days after they launched it, they saw the shining metal of the Star Tower rise above the trees. Soon they saw boats ahead, plying back and forth across the river.
"Left bank? Or right?" asked Stipock, who was at the tiller.
"Left," Wix answered quickly.