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“It was alive,” said Sbi, ripping up grasses and digging a bare spot. “I don’t wish to talk about it.”
Sbi worked, furiously, hands shaking in an agitation Herrin had never seen in the ahnit ... went off again for a prolonged time and came back again with sticks. Herrin watched in bewilderment as Sbi coaxed warmth, smoke, and then fire out of twirling wood, and then, comprehending, bestirred himself to push grass over for Sbi to add. Fire crackled in the night, a tiny tongue of brightness in the cleared circle.
“In this place,” Sbi mourned, and rose. “Eat. Please, when you are done, bury it, I don’t want to watch.”
Sbi fled. Herrin touched the small creature it had left, edged the limp, furry body close to the flames and suffered qualms himself, not knowing what to do with it but to push it into the fire and char it into edibility.
Oh, Sbi,he thought, trying not to inhale the stench or to think about what he was doing. Sbi had probably found a place remote from the smell and the memory. He swallowed the tautness in his throat and looked past the smoke to the statue under the moon, that mimed love. Sbi.
XXV
Waden Jenks: The University becomes your problem. We take the Outsiders in, and you instruct them. You’ll have your ambition, Keye. The University; and through it the Outsiders who come here.
Master Ly
Waden Jenks: I regret him.
Master Ly
Waden Jenks: No. I regret him. That’s different.
Master Ly
Herrin buried the remains, such as his crippled hands could not handle, and the skin and bones. He had a small store of meat, which he had stripped with his teeth—his fingers could not do it—and which he dried over the coals and hoped to keep. He felt sick in one sense, but better with something in his belly. The tremors had stopped. He dug with his booted heel and dumped the pitiful scraps into the pit, then smoothed the earth with the edge of his hand, soiling the bandage, which already was soiled, with grease. “Sbi,” he called, and after a time, “Sbi!”
Sbi returned, pausing before the statue in an attitude of—offering, Herrin thought, watching the gesture. Tribute, perhaps, to a forgotten artist; or to a god who believed ahnit into reality.
Eventually Sbi came to him and sank down again.
“I’m all right,” Herrin said. “Maybe I can walk now.”
Sbi moved close to him and put a rangy arm about him. “No. Rest.”
“For what, Sbi? Where do we go? To your own kind? Or is this where we stay?”
Sbi said nothing for a moment. “No. You tell me where you want to go.”
“Sbi, why are you doing this?”
“Tell me where you want to go.”
“Back to the city? Is that what you want me to say?”
“Tell me where you wantto go.”
He rested against Sbi and thought a while. “The river, higher up the river. There’s a town called Camus. There’s a valley, up in the hills; a farm. I’d like to go there, Sbi.”
“I know Camus,” Sbi said.
“There,” said Herrin.
“You came from this place.”
“You know a great deal about me.”
“Remember how long I’ve observed.”
“I came from that valley. Yes. I want to go back there.”
“All right,” Sbi said.
No argument, no discussion. “You want something,” Herrin surmised. “Is this it?”
“Go where you wish. I’ll help you.”
“Why?”
Sbi said nothing. But he had not expected answers from Sbi.
XXVI
Waden Jenks: I informed you on Camden McWilliams; if you’re not having success, don’t look to others.
Col. Olsen: The information was accurate beyond doubt?
Waden Jenks: Colonel, what you doubt is at your discretion.
Col. Olsen: Reasoning with you people is impossible.
Waden Jenks: You asked for information; I gave you precise past patterns. You see the whole situation. You complain to me about your lack of success. Hardly reasonable.
The pain grew less. There was a morning, a dewy, otherwise unpleasant morning when clothing was sodden, when the bandages were somewhat looser, and Sbi so carefully began to adjust the splinting, substituting slim green wands.
“They bend,” Herrin said, and clamped his lips against the pain as he tried to flex his right hand. “Sbi, they move.”
“Yes,” said Sbi, although the movement was more a tremor than voluntary. Sbi avowed to have seen it, and kept to his wrapping. “Try, whenever you think of it, try to bend the hands.”
“Not much hope, is there?” Herrin asked. “There’ll not be anything close to full use of them.”
“Bend them when you can.”
He nodded, sat patiently while Sbi worked on his bands. Winced sometimes, because the pain was very much still there when some jar set it off again. Sbi chewed a bit of grass ... incongruous to watch it disappear upward from stem to bearded head and vanish; Sbi did not much eat the stems, but chewed on them from time to time. Herrin had a bit of meat tucked away, but would not eat it in front of Sbi, and a handful of fire-parched grain which at least gave him no stomachache as the raw grain did.
“Here,” said Sbi, leaning forward, touched him mouth to mouth and transferred a quick burst of sugary fluid, moisture without which he could not survive. Sbi had developed a deftness about the process which he greatly appreciated, so matter-of-factly performed it failed to bother him as it might.
“It doesn’t hurt much,” Herrin said, trying the newly bandaged hands. “That’s good, Sbi. That’s good.”
“I hoped so,” Sbi said. Sbi plucked another heavy-headed bit of grass and stuck it in his mouth. “Come, are you ready?”
With that they broke their camp, no more than picking themselves up off the ground. They did not use fire often. Sbi had no particular use for it ... it crumbles, Sbi objected of parched grain; and: There’s always something, to the question what ahnit ate when there was no grain ripe. Not animals, Herrin reckoned, never that; he tried this and that as they walked ... and more than once Sbi stopped him before he picked some plant. “Deadly,” Sbi would say, or: “You won’t like that; very bitter.”
“Don’t you ever eat in the city?” Herrin wondered once.
“I fancy beer,” said Sbi, “and cake.”
Herrin thought of both and suffered. Of a sudden he thought of porridge, and cold mornings and warm beds; of sights and scents and sounds which came back together and had to do with home.
And that afternoon they came to the Camus valley, overlooking the town he remembered.
“It’s there,” he exclaimed; “it’s there, Sbi.”
And he started down the hill, tired as he was, remembering where a road was which led to home.
XXVII
John Ree: They say he’s in the city. One of the invisibles.
Andrew Phelps: (looking about) We shouldn’t talk about this.
John Ree: I’ll tell you: we’ve hunted. Apprentice Phelps, I’ve hunted.
Andrew Phelps: Amongthem?
John Ree: Wherever he might be. Wherever.
The house was there, as he recalled, bare boards one with the color of the earth, a corrugated plastic roof ... they did not even get the building slabs they had down in Camus. The windows were lighted in the evening. There was no better time to come home.
Herrin stopped on the hillside, in the midst of a step, and looked back at Sbi, who had stopped on the hillcrest. Ungainly, alien, robes flapping in the slight breeze; Sbi just stood, whether sad or otherwise Herrin could not tell. And then he thought of the midnight cloth he himself wore, the cloak, the bandages, which he had taken on him like a brand, which no one put off once on.