The Daughter of Odren Read Online Free PDF Page B

. . .”
    The valley was full of dimness now, not dark, yet nothing visible.
    Clay spoke again, louder. A deep groan broke across the words. The air quivered, rippled, waves of blackness ran through it. There was a cracking, splitting sound and a rattle of broken rock.
    Silence followed.
    She could see the stone, barely, grey in grey. Her brother stood close to it, motionless.
    He raised his hands up and outward. The sister shrank away seeing that remembered gesture. She crouched down in ungovernable fear.
    He spoke again, louder, clearly, still louder, and stepping forward put his hands on the stone, pushing and spreading as if to split it open. It groaned again and the groaning grew louder, deeper, with an intolerable shrieking, grinding noise in it. Clay drew back hastily, clenching and unclenching his hands. He stood staring as the hideous noise went on and on and the Standing Man shuddered and lurched and labored, growing dimmer in the dim light and seeming to lose outline, looming up, then shrinking down. Fragments dropped from it, shards of stone. The noise dulled at last to a kind of painful, toneless moaning. The Standing Man stood there, rocking or trembling, stone-shaped, man-shaped.
    â€œFather?” the young man said, his voice hoarse and faint.
    Weed stood up. She opened her mouth but said nothing. She saw a bulky body, but if it had a face she could not make out the features. The light of day was growing but the shape and the face were as if still in twilight.
    She spoke to it, a shrill, sharp cry—“Come free, Father! Come free!”
    The Standing Man rocked again. It leaned as if it was going to fall. The rumbling groan grew louder. Moving the way a boulder is moved by men with ropes and wedges and crowbars, heavily, jerking, it lurched a step or two forward on stiff, hardly separated legs. Clay drew farther back from it. It pivoted slowly. With short, dragging, clumsy, heavy steps it walked to the path, now visible in the pale twilight, and began to labor up out of the valley to the road that led to the great house of Odren. As it walked it made the continual groaning that was not like a sound made with breath but like rocks deep in the ground grinding and grating against each other in earthquake.
    â€œFather,” the young man said faintly. He started after it. Weed caught up with him, and seized his arm—“Stay back! stay back!” she whispered, and he obeyed.
    Side by side the son and daughter followed the Standing Man’s slow steps up the road to the house on the cliff top. The road lay plain in the dawn light. The fog had sunk below the edge of the cliff and lay out over the sea in dim levels.
    The groaning grew louder again, and louder, with a grinding shrillness in it, as they approached the house. Lurching and pivoting, the Standing Man came to the door, tormenting the air with its noise. It stood there. The door opened.
    The Lady of Odren stood in the doorway, a slight figure in a white nightgown, with loose grey hair.
    Ash the sorcerer stepped out past her, his hands raised, shouting words in the wizards’ tongue.
    The Standing Man ceased its awful groan. It stood silent. It turned around again, lurching, clumsy step by step. Its arms were short, blunt, with no hands. It was searching for something, turning its body that was all one piece with its head. No eyes were in the blank, pitted face, but it looked at Clay.
    The sorcerer came out of the house behind the stone figure, speaking. The figure moved toward Clay. The sorcerer followed it. Clay stood motionless, arms at his side, eyes fixed on the Standing Man as it approached him.
    Weed let go of Clay’s arm and started forward. She called in a sharp voice, “Mother!”
    Ash turned to look at her as she ran past him. The stone stopped and stood motionless. The sorcerer looked back at it and spoke again, controlling it with voice and gesture, ordering it to go forward toward Clay. Doing so, he