A Saucer of Loneliness Read Online Free PDF

below.
    “I wanted to help you with it,” she whispered.
    “Don’t you understand?” he cried. “No one builds here who
wants
to help!”
    She simply shook her head.
    She tried to breathe deeply and a long shudder possessed her.
    When it passed, she turned weakly and stood, her back partly arched over the edge of the parapet, her hands behind her to cushion the stone. She shook the hair out of her face; it fell away on either side like a dawnlit bow-wave. She looked up at him with an expression of such piteous confusion that his dwindling rage vanished altogether.
    He dropped his eyes and shuffled one foot like a guilty child. “Juby, leave me alone.”
    Something almost like a smile touched her lips. She brushed her bruised arm, then walked past him to the place where the scaffolding projected above the parapet.
    “Not that way,” he called. “Come here.”
    He took her hand and led her to the spiral staircase at the center of the tower. It was almost totally dark inside. It seemed like an age to her as they descended; she was alone in a black universe consisting of a rhythmic drop and turn, and a warm hard hand in hers, holding and leading her.
    When they emerged, he stopped in the strange twilight, a darkness for all the world but a dazzle to them, so soaked with blackness were their eyes. She tugged gently, but he would not release her hand. She moved close to see his face. His eyes were wide and turnedunseeing to the far slopes; he was frowning, yet his mouth was not fierce, but irresolute. Whatever his inward struggle was, it left his face gradually and transferred itself to his hand. Its pressure on hers became firm, hard, intense, painful.
    “Osser!”
    He dropped the hand and stepped back, shamed. “Juby, I will take you to … Juby, do you want to understand?” He waved at the tower.
    She said, “Oh, yes!”
    He looked at her closely, and the angry, troubled diffidence came and went. “Half a day there, half a day back again,” he said.
    She recognized that this was as near as this feral, unhappy man could come to asking a permission. “I’d like to understand,” she said.
    “If you don’t, I’m going to kill you,” he blurted. He turned to the west and strode off, not looking back.
    Jubilith watched him go, and suddenly there was a sparkle in her wide eyes. She slipped out of her sandals, caught them up in her hand, and ran lightly and silently after him. He planted his feet strongly, like the sure, powerful teeth of the mill-wheel gears, and he would not look back. She sensed how immensely important it was to him not to look back. She knew that right-handed men look back over their left shoulders, so she drifted along close to him, a little behind him, a little to his right. How long, how long, until he looked to see if she was coming?
    Up and up the slope, to its crest, over … down … ah! Just here, just at the last second where he could turn and look without stopping and still catch a glimpse of the tower’s base, where they had stood. So he turned, and she passed around him like a windblown feather, unseen.
    And he stopped, looking back, craning. His shoulders slumped, and slowly he turned to his path again—and there was Jubilith before him.
    She laughed.
    His jaw dropped, and then his lips came together in a thin, angry seal. For a moment he stared at her; and suddenly, quite against hiswill, there burst from him a single harsh bark of laughter. She put out her hand and he came to her, took it, and they went their way together.
    They came to a village when it was very late and very dark, and Osser circled it. They came to another, and Jubilith thought he would do the same, for he turned south; but when they came abreast of it, he struck north again.
    “We’ll be seen,” he explained gruffly, “but we’ll be seen coming from the south and leaving northward.”
    She would not ask where he was taking her, or why he was making these elaborate arrangements, but already she had