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There was a twisted pleasure in being so honest with her-self. By all the conventions, she should be
thinking only of David's unborn baby, herself no more than its vessel. But it was not real to her . . . not
yet . . . so far it was only sick-ness in the mornings and bad dreams at night. The reality was Magnus
Ryerson, animallike hairiness and a hoarse grumble at her for not doing the housework his way and
incomprehen-sible readings aloud his island and his sea and his language lessons!
For a moment her hands clawed together. If she could so destroy Magnus Ryerson!
She fought for decorum. She was a lady. Not a technic, but still a professor's daughter; she could read
and write, she had learned to dance and play the flute, pour tea and embroider a dress and converse with
learned men so they were not too bored while waiting for her father . . . the arts of gracious-ness. Her
father would call it contrasocial, to hate her hus-band's father. This was her family now.
But.
Her boots picked a way down the hillside, through snow and heather bushes, until she came out on a
beach of stones. The sea came directly in here, smashing at heaped boulders with a violence that shivered
through the ground. She saw how the combers exploded where they struck. Spindrift stung her skin.
Beyond the rocks was only a gray waste of galloping white-bearded waves, and the wind keening down
from the Pole. It rolled and boomed and whistled out there.
She remembered a living greenish blue of southern waters, how they murmured up to the foot of palm
trees under infi-nitely tall skies.
She remembered David saying wryly: "My people were Northerners as far back as we can trace
it Picts, Norse, Scots, sailors and crofters on the Atlantic edge that must be why so many of them
have become spacemen in the last sev-eral generations. To get away!"
And then, touching her hair with his lips: "But I've found what all of them were really looking for."
It was hard to imagine that David's warmth and tenderness and laughter had arisen in this tomb of a
country. She had always thought of the religion which so troubled him he first came to know her
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through her father, professor and student had sat up many nights under Australian stars while David
groped for a God not all iron and hellfire as an alien stamp, as if the legendary Other Race Out There
had once branded him. The obscurity of the sect had aided her: Christians were not uncommon even
today, but she had vaguely imagined a Protestant was some kind of Moslem.
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 re-shaping 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.
WHEN 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 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]