Free The wind's twelve quarters - vol 2 by Ursula K. Le Guin Page A

closer together.
After a while they began to go back to their villages. Some looked back over
their shoulders at the hill, where nothing moved. The stars turned slowly
behind the black beehive of the dome, but it did not turn to follow them.
    About
an hour before daybreak a man rode up the steep zigzag, dismounted by the ruins
of the workshops, and approached the dome on foot. The door had been smashed
in. Through it a reddish haze of light was visible, very dim, coming from a
massive support-beam that had fallen and had smoldered all night inward to its
core. A hanging, sour smoke thickened the air inside the dome. A tall figure
moved there and its shadow moved with it, cast upward on the murk. Sometimes it
stooped, or stopped, then blundered slowly on.
    The
man at the door said: 'Guennar! Master Guennar!'
    The
man in the dome stopped still, looking towards the door. He had just picked up
something from the mess of wreckage and half-burnt stuff on the floor. He put
this object mechanically into his coat pocket, still peering at the door. He
came towards it. His eyes were red and swollen almost shut, he breathed harshly
in gasps, his hair and clothes were scorched and smeared with black ash.
    'Where
were you?'
    The
man in the dome pointed vaguely at the ground.
    'There's
a cellar? That's where you were during the fire? By God! Gone to ground! I knew
it, I knew you'd be here.' Bord laughed, a little crazily, taking Guennar's
arm. 'Come on. Come out of there, for the love of God. There's light in the
east already.'
    The
astronomer came reluctantly, looking not at the gray east but back up at the
slit in the dome, where a few stars burned clear. Bord pulled him outside, made
him mount the horse, and then, bridle in hand, set off down the hill leading
the horse at a fast walk.
    The
astronomer held the pommel with one hand. The other hand, which had been burned
across the palm and fingers when he picked up a metal fragment still red-hot
under its coat of cinders, he kept pressed against his thigh. He was not
conscious of doing so, or of the pain. Sometimes his senses told him, 'I am on
horseback', or 'It's getting lighter', but there fragmentary messages made no
sense to him. He shivered with cold as the dawn wind rose, rattling the dark
woods by which the two men and the horse now passed in a deep lane overhung by
teasel and briar; but the woods, the wind, the whitening sky, the cold were all
remote from his mind, in which there was nothing but a darkness shot with the
reek and heat of burning.
    Bord
made him dismount. There was sunlight around them now, lying long on rocks
above a river valley. There was a dark place, and Bord urged him and pulled him
into the dark place. It was not hot and close there but cold and silent. As
soon as Bord let him stop he sank down, for his knees would not bear; and he
felt the cold rock against his seared and throbbing hands.
    'Gone
to earth, by God!' said Bord, looking about at the veined walls, marked with
the scars of miners' picks, in the light of his lanterned candle. 'I'll be
back; after dark, maybe. Don't come out. Don't go farther in. This is an old
adit, they haven't worked this end of the mine for years. May be slips and
pitfalls in these old tunnels. Don't come out! Lie low. When the hounds are
gone, we'll run you across the border.'
    Bord
turned and went back up the adit in darkness. When the sound of his steps had
long since died away, the astronomer lifted his head and looked around him at
the dark walls and the little burning candle. Presently he blew it out. There
came upon him the earth-smelling darkness, silent and complete. He saw green
shapes, ocherous blots drifting on the black; these faded slowly. The dull,
chill black was balm to his inflamed and aching eyes, and to his mind.
    If
he thought, sitting there in the dark, his thoughts found no words. He was
feverish from exhaustion and smoke inhalation and a few slight burns, and in an
abnormal condition of mind; but perhaps