Free The Land Across by Gene Wolfe Page A

leaned back. The upholstery felt as soft as a pillow.
    Volitain tapped my chest here and there. “Have you been spitting blood?”
    “Sure. From my tongue. I guess I bit it during the fight.”
    “That’s not uncommon. Does it hurt you to talk?”
    “Not much. No.”
    “Good.” Volitain straightened up. “I’ll stop asking you questions for the moment. Your face is bruised and cut. He kick you, eh? He does not seem to break the facial bones.”
    “I tried to protect it.”
    “Naturally. We always do. I will provide the local anesthetic and clean the worst. I see nothing here that needs stitches.”
    When he had finished patching me up, he said, “I take it you do not go back tonight?”
    I shook my head.
    “Where will you sleep?”
    “Here, if you’ll let me.”
    “I will not. I help if I can, but you cannot sleep here. My decision I will not defend with argument. This house is mine, and I decide. You must sleep elsewhere. Where will you go?”
    “To a hotel in that case.”
    “By this you sign a death warrant for Martya’s husband. His name…? I hear you say it.”
    “Kleon.”
    “Kleon will be shot. A moment ago you do not want that.”
    I was silent, trying to think.
    “A foreigner without luggage, with a bandaged face? They will ask for payment in advance, most polite. You will provide it. As soon as they show the room, they telephone the police.”
    “I was told there were no telephones here—no telephones in Puraustays.”
    “There are but few, yet the better hotels have them and the police. If the hotel does not have the telephone, a boy will run with a note. The police will pound on your door and soon after Kleon dies. Somewhere else?”
    “The Willows then.”
    “More reasonable—if you have the courage to sleep.”
    “I do,” I said. The honest truth was that I felt I could sleep anywhere.
    “That is very well. You are hungry?”
    I shook my head. “I’m too tired to be hungry.”
    “You ate last when?”
    “Lunch, I think it was.”
    “Thus you tire, my friend. Wait here.”
    I fell asleep as soon as he left the room.
    When Volitain woke me, he had lit every lamp. The windows were dark, though no darker than the coffee he had made for us—strong coffee with sugar but no cream, and a plate of rolls still hot from the oven.
    “Eat and drink,” he said. “For you are two blankets and a pillow. We must carry them. It is not far.”
    “Nothing is far,” I said, and got ignored. “Nothing but the hospital.”
    The rolls were dark and heavy. I smeared them with Volitain’s dark yellow butter and found them delicious. He had baked a dozen perhaps, or a baker’s dozen. He ate one. When we left, three were left on the plate.
    He had brought a tin lantern like the one Martya and I had bought earlier, and he carried the blankets—they were rolled up tight—slung on his right shoulder and tied beside his left hip. I carried the pillow, which was big and awkward but weighed less than a shoe. A blister on my foot had broken. I was vaguely aware of it, and the pain in my ankles and the throbbing of both legs. “Vaguely” is what I wrote because I do not know a better word. All three seemed like something happening to somebody else a long, long way away.
    My key turned easily in the lock I had oiled. “If you are wise,” Volitain said, “it is here you sleep. If you go farther into the house you may be lost.”
    I agreed because agreement was simpler.
    “I am going to take my lamp. This you see. I wish to leave it with you, but I myself have need of it.”
    He took off the blankets. I pulled them free of the string with which he had tied them, and together we spread them on the floor. I lay down on them and he pulled the free side over me. I think I was asleep before he had gone out the door.
    I woke shivering, I suppose three or four hours later. There was a fireplace near the place where I lay, and I remembered that there had been fireplaces in the big room beyond it—also