Anderson, Poul - The Enemy Stars by Anderson Poul

Author:Anderson, Poul
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf

12

Now, about winter solstice, day was a pale glimmer, low in the south among steel-colored clouds.

Tamara had been walking since the first light sneaked across the ocean, and already the sun was close to setting. She wondered if space itself could be blacker than this land. At least you saw the stars in space.

On Skula you huddled indoors against the wind, and the sky was a blind whirl of snow.

A few dry flakes gusted as she came down off the moor to the beach. But they carried no warmth with them, there was not going to be a snowfall tonight. The wind streaked in from a thousand kilometers of Atlantic and icebergs. She felt the cold snap its teeth together around her; a hooded cloak was scant protection. But she would not go back to the house. Not till day had drained from the world and it would be unsafe to remain outdoors.

She said to herself, drearily: I would stay here even then, except it might harm the child, and the old man would come looking for me. David, help me, I don’t know which would be worse!

She knew a twisted pleasure in being so honest with herself. By all the conventions, she should be thinking only of David’s unborn baby, herself no more than its vessel. But it was not real to her . . . not yet . . . so far it was sickness in the mornings and bad dreams at night. The reality was Magnus Ryerson, animal-like hairiness and a hoarse grumble at her for not doing the housework his way and incomprehensible readings aloud—his island and his sea and his bloody damned language lessons!

Tamara found herself voicing the curses. “Bloody damned English! Bloody damned English! You can take your language and you know what you can do with it!” She had heard the expression now and then—overheard it, rather, as a small girl peeping through doors while men talked—some of the coarser sort used such phrases, fish ranchers or coral miners or cattle guards. She was not sure what it was everybody knew could be done with it. Tear it into bits, probably, and fling it on the wind, into the ugly Northern ocean.

For a moment her hands clawed together. If she could so destroy Magnus Ryerson!

She fought for decorum. She was a lady. Not a technic, but still a professor’s daughter; she could read and write, she had learned to dance and play the flute, pour tea and embroider a dress and converse with learned men so they were not too bored while waiting for her father . . . the arts of graciousness. Her father would call it contrasocial, to hate her husband’s father. This was her family now.

But.

Her boots picked a way down the hillside, through snow and heather bushes, until she emerged on a

beach of stones. The sea came directly in here, smashing at heaped boulders with a violence that shivered through the ground. She saw how the combers exploded where they struck.

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