The Forlorn(83)

He held her small sobbing body for a long time in the soft firelight.





CHAPTER 15


The sleigh ride to the river had been exhilarating at first. Now it was just cold. They huddled deeper into the blankets and furs, but the knife edge of the wet-snow wind cut in somewhere, somehow. Beside Keilin, Beywulf muttered, "To think I used to like that song about dashing through the snow."

"At least you have some hair to keep it off. Think of Cap and S'kith," said Shael, only the tip of her nose protruding from her new fur parka.

"Hmph! And by the looks of you, you envy my beard and moustache. Not to worry, yours is coming on nicely, broad beam. A little more chicken manure on the inside . . ." There was a muffled thump.

"Ow, damn you! I've broken my nail," said Shael crossly, "Well, half ape, at least nothing else can be as cold or as miserable as this."

She was wrong. A river barge could be. It edged its way downriver through the chilly mountain valleys, with greenish ice slurry forming in the wake, and thin sheets of floe ice gunshot-cracking and scream-splintering in front of the heavy prow. Of course these sounds were loudest at night, making sleep uneasy, as the Nawleans wallowed her ponderous bulk downstream, racing the river freeze. Belowdecks, where hold space had been converted to make up two tiers of bunks for them, it was narrow, dark and windowless. The damp air did warm up faintly when they were all down there, but the heavy blankets still felt clammy.

Keilin found he simply couldn't take being shut in. The only real cover on deck was the steersman's hut from which they were expressly banned by its unpleasant occupant. Otherwise one could huddle against the cargo hatch edge or the gunwales, but neither were even headhigh on a sitting man. Rain, which would have been snow a hundred feet higher up, fell in a thin drizzle which was whipped across the deck by the icy winds from the surrounding mountains. Occasionally, for variety, there was sleet. Despite this Keilin stayed up on the flat deck, with his back to the cargo hatch. So did S'kith, although the bare-headed man plainly felt the cold even more badly than the skinny desert rat.

Keilin was worried about the man. S'kith usually asked him a steady stream of questions. These had dried up. Expression had recently begun to appear on the man's face, and rare smiles. Now there were no more of the odd looks of wonderment. Instead a sort of desperate unhappiness began to underpin the near-blank face. S'kith would simply sit in silence on the deck and stare morosely out into the darkness.

Finally Keilin had had enough of S'kith's brooding gloom. They were alone on the deck, shrouds of rain obscuring the dark, tree-covered banks. Below them the near-black water rushed and gurgled. Without quite knowing why he did it, Keilin took the ring with its core section out of his ankle pouch. He held it out to S'kith. S'kith took it, held it awhile against his face, and then returned it, all in silence. But it seemed to have eased the misery somewhat.

"What's wrong?" Keilin asked.

"I am . . . afraid. Afraid of going back to the hive. I am afraid of the dark, afraid of the smallness. Afraid of the horrible, endless . . . sameness most of all. You are free-born, friend. You don't—you can't—understand what it means just to have new things happen. You see," he sighed, "in the hive there is this . . . pattern. The pattern never changes, until you die. And it makes you—" he searched for words—"numb. Numb to everything. And you don't even know that you can't feel . . . You just exist . . . you don't think at all, you just do. And the worst of all is that you're scared by anything different. The sameness, the numbness is horrible, but you know it. And it is so, so secure you don't want to change it." He sighed again. "Changes . . . variety. Those were the hardest things to learn how to deal with when I escaped. But . . . I now have come to love the changes. I don't exist. I am alive. I feel. And now Cap is taking me back. I . . . the piece that is me, the alive person, not just some endlessly repeat-bred thing, will die there." It was the longest speech Keilin had ever heard S'kith make. It was also said with more expression and emotion than he'd known the man could muster. He wasn't finished yet either. He pointed at the hatch cover and shuddered. "Down there . . . that is very like the hive. And this . . . disappearing into the grayness out here is very like what will happen to me when I go back."

"So why don't you run away?" said Keilin simply. "Avoiding Cap wouldn't be that hard, for all he pretends to be God . . . it's a big world. You've learned enough to live in it now. You're a fantastically quick learner. You knew next to nothing a few months ago, but you've learned. You've come from being like a child of three to a teenager in very little time. I'll steal enough supplies for you to hide out for the time it takes to grow your hair and a beard. You've the money I gave you. Don't go back to the hive. You don't have to."