"Domesticating?"
"Rendering you docile by a forced addiction to one of the orgrevy derivatives. That practice is not unknown in Karhide. Or they may have been carrying out an experiment on you and the others. I have been told they test mindchanging drugs and techniques on prisoners in the Farms. I doubted that, when I heard it; not now."
"You have these Farms in Karhide?"
"In Karhide?" I said. "No."
He rubbed his forehead fretfully. "They'd say in Mishnory that there are no such places in Orgoreyn, I suppose."
"On the contrary. They'd boast of them, and show you tapes and pictures of the Voluntary Farms, where deviates are rehabilitated and vestigial tribal groups are given refuge. They might show you around the First District Voluntary Farm just outside Mishnory, a fine showplace from all accounts. If you believe that we have Farms in Karhide, Mr. Ai, you overestimate us seriously. We are not a sophisticated people."
He lay a long time staring at the glowing Chabe stove, which I had turned up till it gave out suffocating heat. Then he looked at me.
"You told me this morning, I know, but my mind wasn't clear, I think. Where are we, how did we get here?" I told him again.
"You simply... walked out with me?"
"Mr. Ai, any one of you prisoners, or all of you together, could have walked out of that place, any night. If you weren't starved, exhausted, demoralized, and drugged; and if you had winter clothing; and if you had somewhere to go... There's the catch. Where would you go? To a town? No papers; you're done for. Into the wilderness? No shelter; you're done for. In summer, I expect they bring more guards into Pulefen Farm. In winter, they use winter itself to guard it."
He was scarcely listening. "You couldn't carry me a hundred feet, Estraven. Let alone run, carrying, me, a couple of miles cross-country in the dark-"
"I was in dothe."
He hesitated. "Voluntarily induced?"
"Yes."
"You are... one of the Handdarata?"
"I was brought up in the Handdara, and indwelt two years at Rotherer Fastness. In Kerm Land most people of the Inner Hearths are Handdarata." "I thought that after the dothe period, the extreme drain on one's energy necessitated a sort of collapse-"
"Yes; thangen, it's called, the dark sleep. It lasts much longer than the dothe period, and once you enter the recovery period it's very dangerous to try to resist it. I slept straight through two nights. I'm still in thangen now; I couldn't walk over the hill. And hunger's part of it, I've eaten up most of the rations I'd planned to last me the week."
"All right," he said with peevish haste. "I see, I believe you-what can I do but believe you. Here I am, here you are... But I don't understand. I don't understand what you did all this for."
At that my temper broke, and I must stare at the ice-knife which lay close by my hand, not looking at him and not replying until I had controlled my anger. Fortunately there was not yet much heat or quickness in my heart, and I said to myself that he was an ignorant man, a foreigner, ill-used and frightened. So I arrived at justice, and said finally, "I feel that it is in part my fault that you came to Orgoreyn and so to Pulefen Farm. I am trying to amend my fault."
"You had nothing to do with my coming to Orgoreyn."
"Mr. Ai, we've seen the same events with different eyes; I wrongly thought they'd seem the same to us. Let me go back to last spring. I began to encourage King Argaven to wait, to make no decision concerning you or your mission, about a halfmonth before the day of the Ceremony of the Keystone. The audience was already planned, and it seemed best to go through with it, though without looking for any results from it. All this I thought you understood, and in that I erred. I took too much for granted; I didn't wish to offend you, to advise you; I thought you understood the danger of Pemmer Harge rem ir Tibe's sudden ascendancy in the kyorremy. If Tibe had known any good reason to fear you, he would have accused you of serving a faction, and Argaven, who is very easily moved by fear, would likely have had you murdered. I wanted you down, and safe, while Tibe was up and powerful. As it chanced, I went down with you. I was bound to fall, though I didn't know it would be that very night we talked together; but no one is Argaven's prime minister for long. After I received the Order of Exile I could not communicate with you lest I contaminate you with my disgrace, and so increase your peril. I came here to Orgoreyn. I tried to suggest to you that you should also come to Orgoreyn. I urged the men I distrusted least among the Thirty-Three Commensals to grant you entry; you would not have got it without their favor. They saw, and I encouraged them to see, in you a way towards power, a way out of the increasing rivalry with Karhide and back towards the restoration of open trade, a chance perhaps to break the grip of the Sarf. But they are over-cautious men, afraid to act. Instead of proclaiming you, they hid you, and so lost their chance, and sold you to the Sarf to save their own pelts. I counted too much on them, and therefore the fault is mine."
"But for what purpose-all this intriguing, this hiding and power-seeking and plotting-what was it all for, Estraven? What were you after?"
"I was after what you're after: the alliance of my world with your worlds. What did you think?"
We were staring at each other across the glowing stove like a pair of wooden dolls.
"You mean, even if it was Orgoreyn that made the alliance-?"
"Even if it was Orgoreyn. Karhide would soon have followed. Do you think I would play shifgrethor when so much is at stake for all of us, all my fellow men? What does it matter which country wakens first, so long as we waken?"
"How the devil can I believe anything you say!" he burst out. Bodily weakness made his indignation sound aggrieved and whining. "If all this is true, you might have explained some of it earlier, last spring, and spared us both a trip to Pulefen. Your efforts on my behalf-"
"Have failed. And have put you in pain, and shame, and danger. I know it. But if I had tried to fight Tibe for your sake, you would not be here now, you'd be in a grave in Erhenrang. And there are now a few people in Karhide, and a few in Orgoreyn, who believe your story, because they listened to me. They may yet serve you. My greatest error was, as you say, in not making myself clear to you. I am not used to doing so. I am not used to giving, or accepting, either advice or blame."
"I don't mean to be unjust, Estraven-"
"Yet you are. It is strange. I am the only man in all Gethen that has trusted you entirely, and I am the only man in Gethen that you have refused to trust."
He put his head in his hands. He said at last, "I'm sorry, Estraven." It was both apology and admission.
"The fact is," I said, "that you're unable, or unwilling, to believe in the fact that I believe in you." I stood up, for my legs were cramped, and found I was trembling with anger and weariness. "Teach me your mindspeech," I said, trying to speak easily and with no rancor, "your language that has no lies in it. Teach me that, and then ask me why I did what I've done."
"I should like to do that, Estraven."
15. To the Ice
I WOKE.Until now it had been strange, unbelievable, to wake up inside a dim cone of warmth, and to hear my reason tell me that it was a tent, that I lay in it, alive, that I was not still in Pulefen Farm. This time there was no strangeness in my waking, but a grateful sense of peace. Sitting up I yawned and tried to comb back my matted hair with my fingers. I looked at Estraven, stretched out sound asleep on his sleeping-bag a couple of feet from me. He wore nothing but his breeches; he was hot. The dark secret face was laid bare to the light, to my gaze. Estraven asleep looked a little stupid, like everyone asleep: a round, strong face, relaxed and remote, small drops of sweat on the upper lip and over the heavy eyebrows. I remembered how he had stood sweating on the parade-stand in Erhenrang in panoply of rank and sunlight. I saw him now defenseless and half-naked in a colder light, and for the first time saw him as he was.
He woke late, and was slow in waking. At last he staggered up yawning, pulled on his shirt, stuck his head out to judge the weather, and then asked me if I wanted a cup of orsh. When he found that I had crawled about and brewed up a pot of the stuff with the water he had left in a pan as ice on the stove last night, he accepted a cup, thanked me stiffly, and sat down to drink it.
"Where do we go from here, Estraven?"
"It depends on where you want to go, Mr. Ai. And on what kind of travel you can manage."
"What's the quickest way out of Orgoreyn?"
"West. To the coast. Thirty miles or so."
"What then?"
"The harbors will be freezing or already frozen, here. In any case no ships go out far in winter. It would be a matter of waiting in hiding somewhere until next spring, when the great traders go out to Sith and Perunter. None will be going to Karhide, if the trade-embargoes continue. We might work our passage on a trader. I am out of money, unfortunately."
"Is there any alternative?"
"Karhide. Overland."
"How far is it-a thousand miles?"
"Yes, by road. But we couldn't go on the roads. We wouldn't get past the first Inspector. Our only way would be north through the mountains, east across the Gobrin, and down to the border at Guthen Bay."
"Across the Gobrin-the ice-sheet, you mean?"
He nodded.
"It's not possible in winter, is it?"