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

his mind's workings, though lucid and
serene, had never been normal. It is not normal for a man to spend twenty years
grinding lenses, building telescopes, peering at stars, making calculations,
lists, maps and charts of things which no one knows or cares about, things
which cannot be reached, or touched, or held. And now all he had spent his life
on was gone, burned. What was left of him might as well be, as it was, buried.
    But
it did not occur to him, this idea of being buried. All he was keenly aware of
was a great burden of anger and grief, a burden he was unfit to carry. It was
crushing his mind, crushing out reason. And the darkness here seemed to relieve
that pressure. He was accustomed to the dark, he had lived at night. The weight
here was only rock, only earth. No granite is so hard as hatred and no clay so
cold as cruelty. The earth's black innocence enfolded him. He lay down within
it, trembling a little with pain and with relief from pain, and slept.
    Light
waked him. Count Bord was there, lighting the candle with flint and steel.
Bord's face was vivid in the light: the high color and blue eyes of a keen
huntsman, a red mouth, sensual and obstinate. 'They're on the scent,' he was
saying. 'They know you got away.'
    'Why...'
said the astronomer. His voice was weak; his throat, like his eyes, was still
smoke-inflamed. 'Why are they after me?'
    'Why?
Do you still need telling? To burn you alive, man! For heresy!' Bord's blue
eyes glared through the steadying glow of the candle.
    'But
it's gone, burned, all I did.'
    'Aye,
the earth's stopped, all right, but where's their fox? They want their fox! But
damned if I'll let them get you.'
    The
astronomer's eyes, light and wide-set, met his and held. 'Why?'
    'You
think I'm a fool,' Bord said with a grin that was not a smile, a wolf's grin,
the grin of the hunted and the hunter. 'And I am one. I was a fool to warn you.
You never listened. I was a fool to listen to you. But I liked to listen to
you. I liked to hear you talk about the stars and the courses of the planets
and the ends of time. Who else ever talked to me of anything but seed corn and
cow dung? Do you see? And I don't like soldiers and strangers, and trials and
burnings. Your truth, their truth, what do I know about the truth? Am I a
master? Do I know the courses of the stars? Maybe you do. Maybe they do. All I
know is you have sat at my table and talked to me. Am I to watch you burn?
God's fire, they say; but you said the stars are the fires of God. Why do you
ask me that, "Why?" Why do you ask a fool's question of a fool?'
    'I
am sorry,' the astronomer said.
    'What
do you know about men?' the count said. 'You thought they'd let you be. And you
thought I'd let you burn.' He looked at Guennar through the candlelight,
grinning like a driven wolf, but in his blue eyes there was a glint of real
amusement. 'We who live down on the earth, you see, not up among the stars...'
    He
had brought a tinderbox and three tallow candles, a bottle of water, a ball of
peas-pudding, a sack of bread. He left soon, warning the astronomer again not
to venture out of the mine.
    When
Guennar woke again a strangeness in his situation troubled him, not one which
would have worried most people hiding in a hole to save their skins, but most
distressing to him: he did not know the time.
    It
was not clocks he missed, the sweet banging of the church bells in the villages
calling to morning and evening prayer, the delicate and willing accuracy of the
timepiece he used in his observatory and on whose refinement so many of his discoveries
had depended; it was not the clocks he missed, but the great clock.
    Not
seeing the sky, one cannot know the turning of the earth. All the processes of
time, the sun's bright arch and the moon's phases, the planet's dance, the
wheeling of the constellations around the pole star, the vaster wheeling of the
seasons of the stars, all these were lost, the warp on which his life was
woven.
    Here
there was no