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Then he passed one hill and looked on the base of another mostly cut away; on a gold, pale figure which stood in a niche beneath the hill. There had been no prior hint that such existed, no prelude nor preface for it, in paths of worn places or adjacent structure. “Is that it?” Herrin asked. “Is that where we’re going?”
“Come,” said Sbi.
Herrin started downslope, and his knees threatened to give with him and throw him into a fall he could not afford; he hesitated, and Sbi took his arm and steadied him, descended with him, sideways steps down the slick, dusty grass until they were in the trough of the hills, until he could look close at hand at the figure sculpted there, in the recess of living stone.
It was ahnit. It was not one figure but an embrace of figures, a flowing line, a spiral ... he moved still closer and saw ahnit faces simplified to a line which be would never have guessed, ideal of line and curve in a harmony his human eye would never have discovered, for it did not, as he would have done, try to find human traits, but made them ... grandly other, grandly what they were. They shed tranquility, and tenderness, and, in that embrace, that spiral of figures, the taller extended a robed arm, part of the spiral, but beckoning the eye into that curve, in the flow of drapery and the touch of opposing hands. It was old; on one side the wind had blurred the details, but the feeling remained.
Herrin reached to touch it, remembered the bandages in the motion itself, and with regret, not feeling the stone, stroked it like a lover’s skin. He looked up at alien form, at something so beautiful, and not his, and loss swelled up in his throat and his eyes. “Oh, Sbi,” he said, “Did you have to show me this?”
There was silence; he looked back. Sbi had joined hands on breast and bowed, but straightened then and looked at him, head tilted. “You made such a thing too,” said Sbi. “For all the years the city was plain and people walked without meeting ... but you found something else.”
“I createdsomething else.”
“No,” said Sbi. “Don’t you know yet what you did? It was always there. It was always real. Your skill found it.”
It offended him. He was acutely conscious of the presence above him, the alien pedestal on which he rested his hand. “So where does it exist to be found?”
Sbi folded upright hands to brow, indicating something inward, a graceful gesture.
“Then I created it,” said Herrin. “It wasn’t there before.”
“No,” said Sbi. “You only shaped the stone. You made nothing that was not before. There is one maker; but an artist only finds.”
“A god, you mean. You’re talking about an external event. A prime cause. You believe in that.”
Sbi made a humming sound. “You believe in Herrin Law. Is that more reasonable?”
Herrin shook his head confusedly, suspecting the ahnit mocked him. And the work above him oppressed him with its power. He looked up at it, shook his head hopelessly. “Who made this?” he asked.
“Long ago,” said Sbi. “Long dead. The name is lost. Few come here now, so close to your kind; the place goes untended and the grass grows. If humans came here, they couldn’t see it; not minds, not eyes. But you see us.”
“We share a reality,” Herrin said. “That’s what you saw ... that this ... is in common. What I made, and this.”
“What you found in the stone,” said Sbi. “What you found in Waden Jenks.”
“I was mistaken about Waden Jenks,” he said bitterly.
“Perhaps not,” said Sbi.
Pain welled up in him the more strongly. He shook his head a second time and walked back from the statue, the entwined figures which beckoned his eyes into the heart of them. He made a helpless gesture, shook his head a third time, seeing things in the statue he had not seen before, the delicate work of the hands which touched, the faces which looked one almost into the other, suggesting a motion caught in intent, not completion.
“It’s triangular,” he said. “There should be a third. It’s missing.”
“No,” said Sbi. “It’s here.”
His skin contracted. “Myself. The one who sees.”
“Whoever sees,” Sbi said. “You stand in the heart of them. You’ve become their child.”
“Child.” He looked at the faces, the embracing gesture, and the contraction became a shiver. They were alien. And not. “It’s good,” he said. And in despair: “I might have attained to this. Sbi, I would have. But it’s better than mine. Old as it is ... whatever it is ... better. Before the wind got to it. ...”
“It was a strong thought,” said Sbi, “and it will take very long to fade away entirely.”
“You just leave it here to be destroyed. Alone. For no one to see.”
“Humans have this land now. Only a few of us remain to watch. You walk past such things and don’t see them; you don’t see them.”
“What do you see? Sbi, when you look at this, do you see things I don’t?”
“Perhaps,” said Sbi. “Perhaps not. We’re alone in our discoveries. It’s only such things as this that bind you and me together, by making us see what we thought we alone had found.”
He went back, aware of the trap set up for the eye, and was drawn in all the same, into gentleness like Sbi’s. He flexed at his hand and had no movement, reached out again to touch the stone, the shaping of a dead and three-fingered hand. He passed his fingers over the stone and felt very little of it but pain.
“Better than I,” he said.
“At seeing us. But looking on it has reached something in you. It finds, Herrin Law.”
He looked aside, his knees aching and unsteady, went back to the hillside and dropped down. He absorbed the pain dully, holding his breath, settled, holding his side with his arm, looking away from the statue which dominated the place. His eyes shed moisture, passionlessly; he hurt and he was tired and empty until he looked back at the statue which still beckoned.
Sbi had come; Sbi sat down by him. He thought of thirst and hunger when Sbi was there, needs which had begun to be obsessive with him, because he was unbearably empty, and the tremors had come back.
I shall die,he thought with a certain fatigued remoteness; and remoteness failed him. He wept, wiped his eyes with a bandaged hand, simply sat there, and Sbi edged close and patted his knee. He flinched. “I can’t take from you anymore,” he said. “Sbi, it ... upsets me. I can’t do it. And I’m not sure I can walk anymore. Are we done? Is this the place? If you leave me here I’m going to die.”
Sbi said nothing. In time Sbi got up and walked away and Herrin watched him go, saying nothing, only despairing. There was only the statue then, aged, anomalous in the sea of hills and grass, giving no indication it had ever borne relationship to anything understandable. It offered love. It was only stone. He had sent Sbi away and Sbi had simply gone. The sun sank and the wind grew cold, and he listened to it in the grass and watched the change of light on the stone.
And then, at dark, a stronger whispering, and Sbi was back.
Herrin sat still, the wind cold on the tears on his face, and still did not hope, because whatever Sbi intended, Sbi’s care of him was not sufficient to keep him alive, a simple mistake, a lack of comprehension.
Sbi came, squatted down, knees shoulder high as usual, held forth a small dead animal. “I have killed,” said Sbi in a voice quivering and faint. “Herrin Law, I have killed a thing. Can you eat this?”
He considered the small furry animal, and looked from that to the distress in Sbi’s eyes, sensing that the ahnit had done something on his behalf it would not, otherwise, have done. It looked, if ahnit could shed tears, as if it would. “Sbi, if we can get a fire, I’ll try.”
“I can make one,” Sbi said, and set the little body down, stroked it as if in apology.
“It’s not,” Herrin asked in apprehension, “something of value to you.”