21 MIDWINTER: THE RETURN

“Make up this account for closing,” said the protostylarion, handing Rodvard a dossier which bore the endorsement: “Approved to expel the subject from the Myonessae for contumacious refusal to accept any choice—Tradit, I.”

Rodvard dragged weary feet to the bench, for his night had been sleepless, with this matter of Leece reaching a crisis. All week, she had striven to pretend in the presence of others that nothing was changed, but would neither bring his breakfast, nor allow him any opportunity to speak with her alone in the evening. A crisis—the sleepless night began when he had refused to walk with her and Vyana under planes still clinging to their last leaves, then felt unhappy over the look of a friend betrayed that came into her eyes. A crisis; for that look was a trap as grim as the one the witch had set for him. He did not really want the dark-browed Leece (he told himself), overall, at the price of permanent union she set upon her body. It would have been, it was, enough merely to talk with her and be gay companions, as he was with the other sisters. Only the moments when a contact of lips or body sent a devouring flame along his veins were different. Yet there was now upon him a compulsion to find the next move in the game and carry it through, as though he were involved in a complex dance and dared not miss a pace.
373

What is this, then? (he asked himself). Am I a mechanician’s instrument, or so weak I am not my own master? Is it that I owe her a duty, and by what sanction am I held thereto? The priest at the academy might have had an answer for that. He would have said that the sanction was of God, “who sends us all peace, so that even those misguided men who say there is no God must make an inner peace, through a claim to be true to some image of the Ideal, which they call themselves. So that God is not balked, but enters in them unawares, and they only make their own path harder by reaching Him through devious ways instead of simple.” He could remember the argument accurately, and how its force had once struck him. Thus the priest, then; but if the sanction was of God, did God (Rodvard now asked himself) urge him to this pursuit of Leece? No matter what; he knew that when he reached the Gualdis’ house that night, the intricate pavanne would continue, and he a part of it as before.

Leave then. No. Not in this land, where he was a public prisoner, required still to report on every tenth day, an irritating routine. For that matter, leave for where? Not Dossola, with the prosecution hanging over his head; not any other place. Dance out the dance.

The protostylarion’s step roused him from reverie. He opened the dossier and with a feeling of vertigo, perceived that it was from the couvertine Lolau: “—on the account of the Myonessan Lalette Asterhax.”
II

Without a knock the door opened, Leece slipped in and stood with her back to it, looking down. Rodvard began hastily to make good his jacket-laces.

“It was my fault,” she said in a thin voice, then hurriedly; “What I did was contrary to the law of love. Do you want me to bring your breakfast in the morning?”

Her eyes were veiled, but one could guess what lay behind them (and one must—one must tread the right measure). “Yes.”

“You are still angry with me.”

He ran across the room and seized her in his arms, so she let her dark head slide down against his neck. “What can I say?” kissing her ear and the side of her neck (yet at the same time feeling a revulsion almost physical, and all the time the thought of that other was at the back of his mind, not coming forward because he dared not let it).

A sudden tenseness was in her grip; she flung her head back and looked at him (out of eyes that spoke distrust). “Rodvard! What is wrong?”

“Nothing. We must hurry and go to supper or they will miss us.” A rivulet of perspiration coursed down his spine. She kissed him long and hard (with the doubt still there) and was gone.
374

Afterward it was the tall Vyana who went to walk with them. Leece took his hand; all gay, but casting glances that seemed to show an unasked question in her mind (so that Rodvard wondered whether she might not have some part of the Blue Star’s gift). He said to Vyana; “Tell me something. If you were in the Myonessae, how could I come to see you?”

Her face fell sober. “I am not a Myonessan yet. But if I were, it would not be easy unless you became at least a learner. The Myonessans have no contacts with the outer world save those they make themselves.”

“A strange rule,” he said, not daring to push the matter further lest he betray his thought.

Now Leece spoke, trying to justify the regimen under which the girls lived, but Vyana, being so near to the sisterhood, was doubtful, and Rodvard heard both of them with only part of his mind, considering what he must do. There was no question but he must do it, ah, no; the expelled of the Myonessae, he knew well, were shut away in gloomy prisons for “instruction”, it might be for years. The couvertine Lolau was—

“—do you not think so, Rodvard?” said Leece’s voice.

“I am sorry. I was thinking of a thing.”

All her attention and affection suddenly rushed at him; she pressed his hand hard. “I was only saying—” and in spite of that warm grip, his mind went off again under the babble. The Blue Star would perhaps let him make his way in, if the light were good—and they reached the door. Leece squeezed his hand again, possessively; he knew she would have sought a corner and kissed him, but he managed to avoid that, with a certain shame picking at him.

Inside he went rapidly upstairs, then stood tingling in his own room as outer steps went to and fro. His mind toiled at details—the lock of the street-door was a heavy one, usually turning with a grating sound, he must have a story ready to tell if someone woke and asked him questions. But before he could work out a tale the small sounds died to a single series of pat, pat, pat, and he had a moment of dreadful fear and excitement mingled that it might be Leece, coming to him that night.
375

This was his turning-point in life (he thought) and the choice was being made from outside himself. The steps went past; Rodvard released his breath, sat down and, trying to use up the time until all should be asleep, began to repeat to himself Iren Dostal’s ballad of the archer and the bear. But at the third stanza a rhyme somehow eluded him, and he nearly went mad trying to recall it, while at the same time the other half of his mind went round the problem of Leece-Lalette, Lalette-Leece, without once making a real effort toward the plan he must have. Then he tried to solve how the line of duty might be considered to lie, according to one or another system of philosophy; but all this yielded was the unsatisfactory conclusion that he did not know where duty or even true desire lay, only what he was going to do. Now he began to count boards in the floor, as he had counted the cask-staves of the ship, merely to pass time; and time passed. He cracked the door ajar, heard someone snore, and reached the odd thought that even the loveliest of girls sometimes snore. Tip, tap, and he was down the hall to the stairs. A board creaked there; he paused. The key grated even more harshly than he had anticipated, and again he stood breathless a minute, then was in the street.

A sense of freedom swelled through him as he looked up at the winter stars—this must be the right line, the glorious line, hurrah! even though the adventure failed. A silent street, down which advanced in the near distance a cloaked couple, picking their way along with a light-boy before. The checkered gleams from the window of his lantern caught the tree-trunks and half-reflected from the dull surfaces, seemed like weary fireflies. A one-horse caleche went past, its form dimly outlined against the darker shadows beneath the branches. Step on, Rodvard, the way is here. He stumbled in the dark over the edge of a cobble, turned a corner and another, wondering how the glass stood, and reached the couvertine Lolau at last.

He remembered it as the building he had passed on his first day in Charalkis, with a foreyard in which a dead tree stood. The lodge-box held no porter; its window was broken. Rodvard thought—now this is somehow the model of the Myonessae, if I could trace the resemblance, as his feet clicked on the pave up to the door, where one light burned behind a transom in a fan of glass. Summing his force, he knocked. No answer. He knocked again.

Far in the interior a step sounded, coming. The door was thrown back to show a fat beldame with a robe gathered round her, whose hand trembled slightly with palsy.

“What is it?” she said. The light was above and behind her, he could not see her eyes to use his jewel.

“I am from the office of account,” he said (depending upon sudden inspiration), “in the matter of the Demoiselle Asterhax.”

“A poor hour to be coming,” she grumbled. “Ay, ay, the Lalette. I will call the mattern. They will take her in the morning.”
376

She moved aside to let him enter, and as she did so, the light caught her face. (His glance, quickened by emergency, caught in those muddy eyes a green flash of mingled hate and greed.)

“Wait,” he said, and touched her wrist. “Perhaps it is not needed to rouse anyone.” (That covetousness—if he could use it.)

“What do you mean?”

“It is a simple matter; not official accounts.” He fumbled out a coin or two and pressed them in her hand.

The fat face moved into a leer. “Eh, eh, so that’s the story. Want to take her, do you? And poor Mircella will be blamed, maybe sent for instruction. It should be worth more.”

(Money again; he experienced a moment of panic.) “I am from the office of account,” he repeated. “I am to take her there to close her reckoning. You will have the perquisite of her possessions.”

“He, he, and you the best perquisite. It should be worth more.”

“Sh, someone will hear us.” He found another pair of coins. “This is all—if not, give back the rest and call your mattern.”

He turned; she clutched his arm, grumbling in her throat (and he could see she did not believe him in the least, but would be satisfied if given a story to tell). “Come. Come.”

Another stair-journey through a silent house, this time upward. The place had the indefinable perfume of many women. The guide shuffled along in a dark almost complete; Rodvard heard the chink of keys, then a tick against the lock and the door opened.

“Strike a light.” Rodvard felt a candle pressed into his hand; being forced to give his attention to it, Lalette saw him first when the light flared, he heard her gasp and looked past the little flame to see her standing with disheveled hair, so lovely beyond the imagined picture that he could not resist running across the room to kiss her astonished lips. She must have been sitting fully dressed in the dark.

“Rodvard! How did you come here?” The fat woman shuffled in the background, and he:

“No matter now, it can wait. We must go quickly.”

She stared at him like a sleepwalker. “Where?”

“Hurry.”

There were no more words between them at this time or place. Lalette turned in the feeble light to make a package, but the fat woman said; “Nah, my perquisite,” so she only snatched a cloak. The beldame addressed Rodvard; “Now you use your knife on the lock to show where it was picked, then leave it. Then they know my story is true, a man was here.”
377

He hacked at the brass plate that held the keyhole for a moment, and fortune favored by letting one of the screws come loose with a snap, and the fat woman clawed his arm to indicate that was enough. She led the way down the stair, Rodvard could see no eyes, and he and Lalette were suddenly out the door.
III

She turned to face him under the dead tree.

“You do not want me any more. How did you find me? Where did you come from?”

(He thought: out of one pattern-dance of compulsions and into another.) “I do want you or I would not have come. I could not help it. Did you not receive my letter?”

“I suppose you have some story to cover your utter desertion.”

“I swear I left with Dr. Remigorius a letter for you, telling how I was called to Sedad Vix on the most urgent of affairs; and then things happened. I will tell you.”

“Then it is true. You are one of the Sons of the New Day.” (The eyes were hidden, but the tone told clearly how deep was her anger and despair.)

“I have come for you,” he said, simply.

She uttered a bitter little laugh. “It is somewhat late, my friend. I am one of the licensed whores they call Myonessae, and now an attainted criminal.”

“I know—and so am I for bringing you from there.”

She took three steps in silence. “Where are you taking me?”

“A tavern.” (He had not thought, this was part of the plan he had been too excited to make.)

“Do you lodge in it?” (The voice was so small that he knew something lay behind the words.)

“I have been working in the office of account, and learned of your trouble there,” he said, inconsecutively.

She turned toward him in the dark street, where far down, someone walked with a light, the hand on his arm trembling a little. “Oh, Rodvard—they would have put me in that prison for instruction and then turned me into the street without an obula.”

“I know. See—that is what we are looking for.”
378

An inn it was, a palpable inn, beyond the corner, with light streaming from its windows. They entered through the public-room where a table of men with mugs before them all turned their heads like sunflowers. One of them whispered behind a hand, and there was a snicker. A lugubrious person in a dirty apron came to the inner door and said yah, he would give them welcome for the night. Supper? No, said they both, and a small girl with her hair in tight braids showed them to a room where there was only one chair and a bed where they would sleep together for the first time since the night in Dame Domijaiek’s room, now in a far country and long ago. (Rodvard thought: she is wearing her hair down as an unwedded girl, and that is why they snickered.) She sat on the edge of the bed, tossing her head back.

“Rodvard,” she said, “you have been unfaithful to me.”

“No!” (He answered in reaction merely, and the thought that crossed his mind was not of the maid Damaris, but of Leece, now perhaps herself sleepless, and waiting for the dawn, when—) “Your Blue Star is still bright.”

She did not move, only crossed her eyes in a spasm of pain. “I think perhaps it was another witch. I know one put a spell on you. Did you know I saved you from it? You can go to her, if you wish; even take the Blue Star. I do not want it any more.”

“Lalette! Do not talk so.”

He stepped to her on the bed, slipped his arm under both hers where she supported herself, leaning backward, and drove her down, his lips seeking hers. She met him passively, neither giving nor avoiding. “Lalette,” he breathed again.

Now she twisted in his arms. “Ah, men think there is only one way to resolve every problem with a girl. It was that I wished to get away from. I will go back.”

He released her then, and lay beside her, unspeaking for a moment. Then:

“And be sent for instruction and then turned out? It was that I came to save you from.”

“Oh, I am grateful. I will not go back, then, and you can have what you have bought.”

(There was a torture in it that he should at this moment think of Maritzl of Stojenrosek.) He double-jointed to his feet and began to pace the floor. “Lalette,” he said, “truly you do not understand. We are in real danger, both of us, and cannot afford bitterness. I have not been in this country long enough to know its laws, but I know we have broken more than one; and they are very intent after both of us, you as a witch and me with the Blue Star, even though they say witchery is not forbidden here. Now I ask your true help, as I have helped you.”

“Ah, my friend, of course. What would you have me do?”
379

She sat up suddenly, with a tear in the corner of her eye (which he affected not to notice), all kindliness; and they began to talk, not of their present emergency, but of their adventures and how strangely they were met there. He gave her a fair tale on almost all, except about Damaris and Leece. She interrupted now and again, as something he said reminded her of one detail or another, so that neither of them even thought of sleeping until the candle burning down and a pale window spoke of approaching day.

“But where our line lies now, I do not know,” he concluded.

Inconsequentially, she said; “Tell me truly, Rodvard, about the Sons of the New Day.” (Her face was toward him as she spoke; he was astonished to catch in her eye a complex thought, something about feeling herself no better than the group she considered thieves and murderers.)

“Well, then, we are not murderers and steal from none,” he said (as she, remembering the power of the jewel, lowered her head; for she had not told him of the fate of Tegval). “We are only trying to make a better world, where badges of condition are no more needed than here in Mancherei, and men and women too, do not obtain their possessions by being born into them.”

“That is a strange thing to say to one who was born into a witch-family,” she said. “But no matter now. What shall we do? I doubt if we can reach the inner border before they set the guards after us, and with the case of this captain against you, you cannot now return to Dossola. Or can you? We might get a ship that would take us to the Green Islands. I have a brother there somewhere.”

“Who’s to pay the passage? For I have little money. Much of my gain has been withheld to pay for the things I needed when I came.”

“And I no money at all. But did you come here from Dossola by paying? Can we not offer service?”

He (thought of the one-eyed captain and the service demanded then, but) took her hand. “You are right, and it is the only thing to try,” he said. “Come, before any pursuit fairly starts.”

They crept down the stairs, hand in hand, like conspirators. At the parlor Rodvard sacrificed one of his coins to pay for his night’s lodging. (The thought of Leece and what she would be doing at this hour was in his mind as) they stepped into a street from which the grey light had rubbed out all the night’s romance to leave the city drab and wintry.
380

A milk-vendor met them with his goats and gave a swirl of his pipes in greeting. There were few other passengers abroad, but more began to appear as they drew near the harbor area; carters and busy men, and hand-porters. Presently they were among warehouses and places of commerce. Beyond lay the quays and a tangle of masts. Here was a tavern, opening for the day; the proprietor said that a Captain ’Zenog had a ship at the fourth dock down, due to sail for the Green Isles with the tide. The place was not hard to find, nor the captain either, standing by the board of his vessel, strong and squat, like a giant beaten into lesser stature by the mallet of one still stronger.

“A Green Islands captain, aye, I am that,” he said. “I’ll take you there on the smoothest ship that sails the waters.”

Said Rodvard; “I do not doubt it. But we have no money and wish to work our way.”

Bluff heartiness fell away from him (and the glance said he was suspicious of something). “What can you do?”

“I am a clerical, really, but would take other labor merely to reach the Green Islands.”

Lalette said; “I have done sewing and could mend a sail here and there.”

The captain rubbed a chin peppered with beard. “A clerical I could use fair enough, one that could cast accounts.” He looked around. “Most of you Amorosians, though—”

Rodvard said joyously; “I am not of Mancherei, but Dossolan, educated there, and can cast up an account as easily—”

“There’d be no pay in it. The voyage merely,” said the man quickly.

“We will do it for that,” said Rodvard, and touched Captain ’Zenog’s hand in acceptance. The squat man turned. “Ohé!” he shouted. “Hinze, take these two to the port office and get them cleared for a voyage with us.”