1The wife of Maidyoimanha was named Humaya, in this telling, for the old tellers do not give her name. She had not chosen any of it. Remember that. Her husband had stood up at the meeting stone and been brave, and by evening she was on a cart with two children and everything she owned, going nowhere.
2She did not hate Zarathustra. She was too tired to hate him. But she watched him, walking ahead beside his two horses, and she thought: it is a fine thing to have a truth. I have a boy with a cough.
3They went east and south, for word had not run so far in that direction. All that autumn they tried the camps and the walled houses of the kavis. Zarathustra asked for nothing but leave to winter and to speak. Some chiefs heard him an evening and sent him on in the morning with bread. Some would not hear him. The karapans of each place saw what he was sooner than the lords did, and whispered, and after the whispering the gate closed.
4Other things closed too. Men who had been of his own rank, priests and horse-owners who had known his father, would not be seen with him. The herdsmen would have fed him, but they feared their lords. The cows went one by one, sold for barley or lost on the passes, until there were six. The cart broke an axle in a river and was left. They put the loads on the oxen and the boys on the horses and went on.
5The first snow caught them in the hill country. By then the younger boy's cough had gone down into his chest. He was five years old. He rode in front of his mother on the grey horse, wrapped in every hide they had, and she could feel him burn through all of them.
6"There is a strong house ahead," said a shepherd they met. "Two days. A kavi's man holds it for his lord, and he keeps the gate of the pass. They call it the Winter Gate, for after the snows no one goes through but by his leave. He has a hall and a full byre. But I would not go there, if I were with that one." He nodded at Zarathustra. "The karapans went through ten days ago. They spoke of him at every well."
7There was no other road. They went on.
8They came to the Winter Gate on the second evening, in falling snow. It was a wall of stone across the narrow place, with a house behind it and smoke going up, and a smell of dung fires and cooking that made the children cry. The two horses stood with their heads down, shivering so that their harness rang. Humaya had not known before that a horse could shake like a person.
9Maidyoimanha beat on the gate. After a time a shutter opened and a man looked out, broad and well fed, with a lamp. He was the kavi's man. He looked at the oxen and the woman and the children, and his face was not hard.
10"Travellers," he said. "In this? You are fools or you are running. Which?"
11"We are five people and a sick child," said Maidyoimanha. "We ask a corner of your byre."
12"A byre you may have. I am no monster." The man raised his lamp higher. "Who is the tall one, in the priest's white?"
13And here Humaya's heart stopped. For the man had not yet heard the name. The lamp was poor and the snow was thick. One word would do it. A cousin. A singer for hire. Any name but the one.
14She saw Zarathustra look at the boy in her arms. She saw him know exactly what she knew. Then he said, "I am Zarathustra of the house of Spitama."
15The man at the shutter drew back as if from a bad smell.
16"The one who speaks against the gods."
17"Against the false ones. Yes."
18"Then I have been told about you. My lord's priests were here. They said that the house which shelters you will lose its luck, its cattle and its lord's favour, and I care most about the third." He was silent a moment. He truly was not a monster; she could see him not liking it. "The woman and the children I would take. But they will say I took your household. No. Go back down. There are caves."
19"The child will not live in a cave," said Maidyoimanha.
20"Then you should not have followed a man who makes enemies of everyone with a roof." The shutter closed. They heard the bar go down.
21They stood in the snow. No one spoke. Then Humaya turned on Zarathustra, and she said what she had been carrying since the meeting stone.
22"One word! Not even a word. You had only to be slow in answering. He would have let us in. Is your name worth more than my son? Is that your truth, that a child may freeze so your mouth stays clean? You say a man chooses. You chose. Look at what you chose!"
23He took it with his head down. The snow was settling on his hair. When she had finished he said, slowly, "You may be right. I do not know that I did well. I will tell you what I saw, and you will judge."
24"I saw a man who had been told about me. He had not my face yet, but he had my name, and by morning one of his herdsmen would have known me, for we have been seen on every road. Then he would have put us out, in a worse hour, and angry, with the boy weaker than tonight. And at the next gate, and the next, they would hear two things about us: that we speak against the gods, and that we lie about who we are. The first has closed some doors. The second would close them all. For why would anyone believe a word I say about the Wise Lord, if I will not say true about my own name?"
25"I do not care who believes you."
26"I know. But hear the rest. If I had lied, I would have had us one night. I think I would have lost us the winter." He lifted his hands and dropped them. "I may be wrong. I counted as far ahead as I could see. It was not far. It was snowing."
27She did not forgive him. But she noticed, even through her anger, that he had not said the gods would provide. He had not said the boy's life was in higher hands. He had counted, like a herdsman, and shown her the count, and said he might be wrong. No priest had ever spoken to her so.
28They turned back down the pass in the dark. It was the worst hour of her life. The boy had stopped coughing, which was worse than the coughing. The elder boy walked and did not complain, and that was terrible too.
29Half a mile below the gate there was a hut against the rock, with a goat pen. They had passed it going up and thought it empty. Now a line of light showed under the door. Maidyoimanha knocked, without hope.
30A woman opened. She was neither young nor old, with a strong plain face and a widow's cropped hair. She held a stick. She looked them over, and she looked longest at the child.
31"You have been to the gate," she said.
32"We were turned away."
33"Then he has had the word about someone. Which of you is it?"
34Humaya waited for the end. And Zarathustra said, again, "I am Zarathustra of the house of Spitama. The priests have told the kavi's man that whoever shelters me will lose his luck and his cattle. You should know it before you open the door wider."
35The widow looked at him for some time.
36"I have four goats," she said. "My luck died with my husband and I have no lord's favour to lose. And you are an odd sort of man, to stand in the snow and tell me why I should shut my door. Most who come begging in winter tell me they are the sons of chiefs." She stood aside. "Bring the little one to the fire. Not too near. Slowly, or the warmth will hurt him."
37Her name was Varda. Her hut was one room, shared with the goats. She had kept a fire in it for eleven winters without letting it out, and she laid the child beside it and rubbed his hands and feet with fat, and put warm milk into him a drop at a time. She did not sleep that night. Nor did Humaya. Toward dawn the boy coughed, a deep wet cough, and cried, and the widow said, "Good. Now he is fighting."
38They stayed in that hut until the thaw. Seven people, four goats, six cows in the pen and two horses under a lean-to of branches that the men built against the rock. The oxen were killed and eaten in the deep of the winter. The men cut wood and Humaya spun the widow's goat hair, and it was enough, barely.
39The kavi's man knew they were there. He could see their smoke. He sent down once to say that the widow would get no grain from the lord's store that year, and she sent back that she had never had any. He did not come himself. Humaya thought he was ashamed. She thought he had perhaps been glad, in his heart, that someone poorer had done what he could not afford to do.
40On the long nights Zarathustra spoke and the widow listened, with her spinning. She was not easily moved. She asked hard things. If the Wise Lord made a good order, why had her husband died under a rock-fall at twenty-six? He said he did not know. He said he did not think the rock had chosen, and that he was speaking only of the wrongs that are chosen; there were enough of those to fill a life. She nodded at that and went on spinning.
41It was in that hut, as this book imagines it, that he made the most sorrowful of his songs. The song itself is real and his people keep it. In it he does not sound like a man who is sure of winning. He asks where on the earth there is a place for him. A scholar has put its opening into our tongue so: "To what land shall I go to flee, whither to flee? From nobles and from my peers they sever me."
42And in another of his songs he tells of that very night: how the kavi's man at the Winter Gate refused him shelter, when he came there with his two horses shivering from the cold. In three thousand years of singing, his people have not let the shivering of those two horses be forgotten. He had not been able to see a beast suffer when he was a boy, and he could not as a man.
43Humaya heard him try the sad song over, low, by the fire, while the others slept. She had thought of him as a man made of certainty, like a post. Now she heard that he was afraid. He did not know where to go. He had given up his father's house and his priesthood and his name among his equals, and it had gained him one cousin, and a widow with four goats, and he was past forty.
44She lay and thought about the man at the gate and the woman in the hut. The man had a hall and a full byre, and he had been told a tale about luck, and he believed it, or found it easier to behave as though he did. The woman had nothing, and so no one had bothered to tell her any tale, and she had looked at a sick child and seen a sick child.
45Humaya did not become a singer of his songs that winter. But in the spring, when the boy was running about the goat pen and getting under everyone's feet, she said to her husband: "I still say he should have held his tongue at the gate." And then: "But I would not buy a cow from the man at the gate. And I would leave my sons with her." Maidyoimanha thought that was a good deal, coming from her.
46It was the widow who told them where to go. Traders came through the pass each spring as soon as it opened, and she sold them cheese, and she heard things.
47"There is a kavi beyond the mountains, toward the great river of the south," she said. "His name is Vishtaspa. He is young, and he holds more land than any three of the others. The traders say he is curious. He keeps wise men at his table and sets them to argue, and listens, and they say he does not always side with the one who flatters him. I would not swear to it. It is trader's talk."
48"It is the first thing I have heard in twelve years that sounds like a door," said Zarathustra.
49He left her one of the six cows, in calf, though she argued. At parting he asked what he could give her that was worth a winter.
50"Nothing," she said. "But when you stand before your curious king, and he asks who has taken up your teaching, do not make it sound better than it is. Tell him: a herdsman, and his wife who does not agree, and a goat-widow who has not made up her mind. If he is the man the traders say, that will do you more good than a hundred disciples."
51They went up through the Winter Gate on the first clear morning. The kavi's man stood on his wall and watched them pass under it, and did not call down, and they did not look up. On the far side the land fell away, brown and green and very wide, and the snow water was running down into it from every side.