The Left Hand Of Darkness (Hainish Cycle #4) - Ursula K. Le Guin Page 0,107

from every break and hummock in the snow. The road lay all streaked with dark and bright. No one moved in all the snowy fields; but away off on the road a small figure came toward me with the flying, gliding gait of the skier. Long before I could see the face I knew it for Estraven.

‘What’s up, Therem?’

‘I’ve got to get to the border,’ he said, not even stopping as we met. He was already out of breath. I turned and we both went west, I hard put to keep up with him. Where the road turned to enter Sassinoth he left it, skiing out across the unfenced fields. We crossed the frozen Ey a mile or so north of the town. The banks were steep, and at the end of the climb we both had to stop and rest. We were not in condition for this kind of race.

‘What happened Thessicher—?’

‘Yes. Heard him on his wireless set. At daybreak.’ Estraven’s chest rose and fell in gasps as it had when he lay on the ice beside the blue crevasse. ‘Tibe must have a price on my head.’

‘The damned ungrateful traitor!’ I said, stammering, not meaning Tibe but Thessicher, whose betrayal was of a friend.

‘He is that,’ said Estraven, ‘but I asked too much of him, strained a small spirit too far. Listen, Genry. Go back to Sassinoth.’

‘I’ll at least see you over the border, Therem.’

‘There may be Orgota guards there.’

‘I’ll stay on this side. For God’s sake—’

He smiled. Still breathing very hard, he got up and went on, and I went with him.

We skied through small frosty woods and over the hillocks and fields of the disputed valley. There was no hiding, no skulking. A sunlit sky, a white world, and we two strokes of shadow on it, fleeing. Uneven ground hid the border from us till we were less than an eighth of a mile from it: then we suddenly saw it plain, marked with a fence, only a couple of feet of the poles showing above the snow, the pole-tops painted red. There were no guards to be seen on the Orgota side. On the near side there were ski-tracks, and, southward, several small figures moving.

‘There are guards on this side. You’ll have to wait till dark, Therem.’

‘Tibe’s Inspectors,’ he gasped bitterly, and swung aside.

We shot back over the little rise we had just topped, and took the nearest cover. There we spent the whole long day, in a dell among the thick-growing hemmen trees, their reddish boughs bent low around us by loads of snow. We debated many plans of moving north or south along the border to get out of this particular troubled zone, of trying to get up into the hills east of Sassinoth, even of going back up north into the empty country, but each plan had to be vetoed. Estraven’s presence had been betrayed, and we could not travel in Karhide openly as we had been doing. Nor could we travel secretly for any distance at all: we had no tent, no food, and not much strength. There was nothing for it but the straight dash over the border, no way was open but one.

We huddled in the dark hollow under dark trees, in the snow. We lay right together for warmth. Around midday Estraven dozed off for a while, but I was too hungry and too cold for sleep; I lay there beside my friend in a sort of stupor, trying to remember the words he had quoted to me once: Two are one, life and death, lying together … It was a little like being inside the tent up on the Ice, but without shelter, without food, without rest; nothing left but our companionship, and that soon to end.

The sky hazed over during the afternoon, and the temperature began to drop. Even in the windless hollow it became too cold to sit motionless. We had to move about, and still around sunset I was taken by fits of shuddering like those I had experienced in the prison-truck crossing Orgoreyn. The darkness seemed to take forever coming on. In the late blue twilight we left the dell and went creeping behind trees and bushes over the hill till we could make out the line of the border-fence, a few dim dots along the pallid snow. No lights, nothing moving, no sound. Away off in the southwest shone the yellow glimmer of a small town, some tiny Commensal Village of Orgoreyn,