CHAPTER 18

"I am always with them," he had explained to Akiva. But the images were transparent, easy to ignore, and their sound for the most part a hum like the drone of insects.

He enjoyed the feeling of being always at the doors of elsewhere. With a little concentration, he could leave this dying camp, the ragged youngsters slowly fishing, the hopeless labor at communal traps, the hills where men and women dragged themselves along the trails gleaning roots and worms and berries, and he could follow the tens and scores sent out in boats. He felt himself among them, that the eye-in-hand fixed to the spirit doll he gave each departing group was he, sitting in the bottom of the boat and singing, rowing on short rations, poring over the brave undetailed maps and drifting in ignorant optimism toward calamity.

Because many of them died. Crews rowed strong and singing over waterfalls they heard too late, and twice he leapt to his feet when he saw the rocks heave up and heard the screams. The first time three Itscriyite boys restrained him at their own peril. The second time Akiva held him and he shuddered like a hungry baby. While Akiva sang the funeral chant, Tiyar heard himself weeping, "My children, my children."

This time he was alone. He looked into his cup and saw the makeshift tent. Attracted by its order, he listened. It was the peace of despair, he knew, but in the early sunlight, with the straw doll gently swinging, tapping on the rushes they had bound and propped around the boat against whose other side the gentle waves were slapping, the sleepers mumbling in their rest, he savored their tranquility.

This group had landed near a town of occasional temple-goers, vaguely loyal to Pahid, who would not trade openly with them. Too sick and hungry to go farther, they remained, and every now and then a furtive act of charity kindled false hope like a grass fire that died fast, leaving them weaker than before. Once an Itscriyite left alone in the tent had turned to the spirit doll and cursed him from the back of her throat, wishing his entrails pulled out and trodden for having sent them to this place, or for seeing their misery, or for having made her live again and die. He kept listening, however, and one morning while he half-led, half-forced a pack of ravenous teenagers through their fighting drill he heard beneath the threats and yells and punches her whispered "Death, I forgive you." The whisper vanished, the last furl of a hem as the wearer shuts the door. He saw her often in memory as he saw everything these days, no image ever gone completely but all crammed into his view, jostling for attention like the hundred thousand incarnations of his constant thought that if things went on much longer they must starve. Already the raiding parties he pretended not to know about were their biggest source of sustenance.

The hunger itself was just another kind of training, helpful even, because he felt that he knew death now. Before when he spoke of killing people it was like sending them to another country, but now the hard emptiness of insides closing on nothing echoed in sympathy with the silent and still. The weakness in his stomach felt like remorse. Sometimes it caught him alone and made him cry to think of the people, now his, he could not save--then it deserted him and left him kneeling, wet-eyed, feeling nothing. He had been afraid his emotions were dead but it seemed he had only set them free. They wandered oblivious to his thoughts. While his mind chased round and round between banditry and starvation, emotions came and harried them and went as unpredictably as the great marsh cranes.

The spirit doll swung and tapped. Other, happier groups had begun to stir and a few ghostly voices to which he paid no attention were saying good morning. In this faraway tent the people were asleep. They lay on their backs, slightly swollen bellies in the air, all together in the middle of the tent away from the morning dew that ringed them.

He heard the footsteps and saw a man in the leather tunic of Pahid's army, slit across the back because it was too small for him, blackened over the chest with blood, probably taken from a corpse. The intruder grabbed the doll.

The creases in the man's face were full of dirt. Old sores showed where the dirt had worked beneath the skin. The whites of his eyes were yellow, the centers faded. He tossed the doll on the floor. Tiyar's followers woke. They rose slowly like stiffening autumn grasses and soon fell dead.

Another man entered. The two gathered all the cloth and pottery and the clever little carved utensils and played tug-of-war with the fishnet until it snapped. Tiyar smiled angrily. They would find no metal implements, at least, because this group had set off before Berthe's ore-smelting operation got underway. Perhaps they would kill themselves fooling with the pouch of poison barbs. He hoped so. One opened the pouch, but then a hand grabbed the spirit doll and he came face to face with a thirteen-year-old girl.

He knew her. She was one of the children who came from the Lir with Akiva after the first bombing left her orphaned, a clever girl who liked to tag along after Clark and ask questions. About a week before Pahid came, when they were eating well, she had run to Clark carrying a rag bright with her first menstrual blood and he congratulated her with a kiss after the manner of his planet. Clark ought to be home raising children, Tiyar thought with a sudden inexplicable sense of--what was it? quick now!--of envy. He shrugged. On the bridge at Ebur, threatening to kill Clark with his Puro, Tiyar had hated him as he had not thought he could hate anymore after Greyesar's training, hated him like a boy hating the men who have bought his mother, and then in the midst of that hatred, at the moment he fired the shot, patience spread across that empty hatred like a river. It turned his hand so that the shot went past Clark's ear and as he watched it flowing outward he looked down at the real water below them and felt that he could remain there as long as Clark held him, for age upon age. That was when his emotions first broke free.~*~

Now he envied the girl--Morgen, he thought her name was. He envied her name, her child's skeleton beneath the skin, the thick black hair that seemed to grow as she shriveled, the hard nails and freckles and the faithful companionship of hunger.

His muscles went tight when she turned the doll and he saw the men look at her. "Run, run!" he thought, but at the same time a wild laugh was forcing its way upward, the laugh that had taken root when Huey told them the Uchide's star was ascendant. He, Tiyar, would be a king. He need only live long enough to see the Viyatos toppled and the government of Paffir Eket would pass, through Sevit, to himself. And he would live, he knew, even if all the Daybreakers starved. He would do anything he must to survive; he only wondered occasionally how much that would be.

Even now his kingdom was growing. Itscriyites crossed the Ebur bridge by the dozens every day and they or the peasants they displaced still arrived daily in the marsh camp known as the City of Wisdom, where there was nothing to eat and adolescents sat like old men around the fires chewing bitter leaves and belching philosophically while Akiva and Berthe discoursed.

The girl leaned the doll against something. She took a little bone knife from her bosom and rushed on the closer man. Blood came to the surface of his beard like autumn scarlet to the apical leaves, but he pulled her off, hit her square in the head and dropped her. Tiyar's laugh sank below the surface unuttered. He watched with all his might.

There is no difficulty in raping an unconscious, half-grown girl. The man in the leather tunic had more trouble getting out of his armor. By the time she revived enough to turn her head and look at the spirit doll, he was on top of her with one heavy arm across her shoulders, her legs forced apart. She screamed. The other man chuckled, slapped his friend on the back, walked away and returned, fingers laced over his stomach, belly-laughing while the first sucked the girl's face in parody of a kiss. When the first one rolled off the girl and lay face up, smiling like one who had gulped a long draught, the other took his place. The two men traded jests and encouragements while the girl's screams degenerated into sobs and finally she was silent, staring at Tiyar.

He stared back. Sorrow, the most dangerous of his harridans, now came docile to his side, under control though his thoughts were racing in their track from starvation to banditry and round again, ignoring the new course open to them. Itscriyite bandits were everywhere now, murdering with abandon. By the time he let go his moral finery and started raiding in earnest, the cities and towns would be gone, the countryside denuded. It had come about as Pahid threatened, "They will be tortured by pity."~*~

The child's gaze wavered, she passed out and revived. Still she lay quiet as though taking part in a ritual. It was the initiation into barbarity. As he watched the transparent image, many ghostlier images flickered before him, mental pictures of the thousand rapes that must happen to girls and boys, women and men on this world and elsewhere with or without the cruelty of an unconsentual wedding, before mercy could be born. All this was part of that conception going on in the many wildernesses where civilization had died, and those claw marks in the earth beside her where the fingers raked the dirt were part of the hard labor of its rebirth. "When all suffering was past, they wept ten thousand years for what had gone before," Akiva would say. Envy came again without warning and took him.

Akiva was safe. Most of the time he sat in a muddy cave on the hillside, preparing for death. Nothing could touch him, he wanted nothing and expected nothing. He stood with the women, and men as thin as women, singing in reedy voices to the sun and instead of dragging round and round the same closed track his thoughts lifted and flew the swifter as he body grew light. He reveled in the clear perception of every hair on every blade of grass, while Tiyar watched the signs that must lead to blindness. Tiyar would have liked to revel and sing, as he had done sometimes in Merced as a soldier in the Armies of Daybreak, intoxicated by hope. He would have liked to be in that cave, with the others seeking purity in that cold water, but when he heard the mothers sing their wavering lullabye about the wind loving the grain he shrank back into the tent to think over and over of how there was no way out. Then he would despise his cowardice, jump up and go exhort them, bully them, compel them to train.

The girl scraped the ground again. Her fingers trailed blood in their tracks. Looking at the spirit doll, she muttered, "Oh my brother, thus did his friends see them drag away Verloring." Sorrow and frustration came as they ought to, but the wild laugh was with them and he stopped them just in time. Yes, he was dragged away and held captive, and no child would come set him free. Beyond the girl he saw Pimel at the door of his tent. He beckoned her to enter.

That was a rare honor. She smiled the smile of one about to devour something good, came in crouched and did not straighten up but crept, staring and smiling, to him. Passion had destroyed her other appetites; Pimel never complained of hunger. She wanted sensation more than food or rest. The plague in Itscriye really made little difference in her life since she was born to trouble anyhow; perhaps it made things easier. The burnt crust of a stultifying village crumbled around her and she stepped out happily. He wondered to have found this hot core in the dull mud of peasant life. Even the Itscriyites, stripped of everything, for the most part just flickered briefly with madness, then lay down to rot. How many could burn hard and ceaseless as this woman named Primrose? Yet there could be many in villages not ruined, their bright lusts deliquescing under straw-filled clothes and toil.

Tiyar switched off all the other transparent images except the one and fitted the headset onto Pimel. She sat still while he did it, though he could see the impulse to movement jerk her shoulders now and then, like the fluttering of a tame bird.

"Do you see it?" he asked.

She spoke in short bursts, each one a desert flower. "I see it! Two men on her. And blood. She fought them. She cut them. The worm is inside her. She struggles. Fight! Fight! To one side. To the other side. Bang!" Pimel's fist struck the ground. "She's out."

"Dead?"

"Here. Look." She pulled off the headset and gave it to him. When his fingers curved around the tube he hesitated, as he was always hesitating to do small things these days, and a dawn wind carried a handful of whithered grass into the tent where it laid it at his feet. Hunger had sharpened all their senses; he smelled the Middle Plains, still warm and fertile, in this wind.

He put on the headset. Both men were off the girl. One spoke in a backwoods dialect of which Tiyar caught only the obscenities, and they started fighting casually, mostly slapping, but after a few minutes they just draped arms across each other's shoulders and stood as if hung there, exhausted. He found himself smiling on those two men who had become brothers having eaten and drunk and rutted together. Suffering rarely moved Tiyar, but he found it easy to forgive these two because they were happy.

The men staggered away. The girl was breathing again and she groaned but lay still. Beyond her reach, a baby cried.

Pimel stood up. All her nut and wooden bracelets and necklaces and her tufts of feathers clicked and clattered and rustled into place. She loved ornamentation, and had actually learned a part of the alphabet to get Berthe to give her the pretty cord tied up with twigs and berries. They were working on making her an ironmonger now. She delighted in mixing and pouring the molten stuff but she also liked to drop the ingots into water and see them crack. There was no way to punish her because she loved everything. Scolded, she would try to incite real anger. Deprived of the sorry evening meal she would eat mud or run in the woods until she collapsed. They tried boredom, the only thing she seemed to dislike, but shut in a tent alone she happily tortured herself. She was like he, without ideology, the pitiless, turmoil-seeking heart of revolution.

A bit of dust sparked in the little warmer where he made his tea. Her gaze flew to it. "It's hot! Let me." Already her hands came near it, fingers spread. She liked to play with the controls and the shiny cooking surface as though it were a kitten that burned instead of scratching.

"No," he said, but she paid no attention. Pretending not to notice, he adjusted his headset and switched on the ghost images he had turned off for Pimel. He saw Daybreakers eating breakfast, setting to work, saying morning prayers. One group was receiveing a local herbalist, a rather drunken-looking woman whose red bracelet bore only the single berry for the first letter, Aghata. He wanted to enter one of those pictures, any one except where the girl lay dying. He wanted to speak to them, but none of the eye-in-hands could carry sound--he had known better than to make himself such a god.

Pimel dropped the heater with a sharp laugh and began to lick a new welt on her palm. "What do you see?" she demanded. "Pahid?"

"Not Pahid."

"He's coming again. Isn't he?" She tested the heating surface with her other palm, set the control expertly, emptied a little bag on the cooker, breathed the fumes so deep that she turned purple, and lay back to predict, "Pahid will come and burn us all. None of these tents and houses will be left. There will just be a heap of bones. Then the girl will come back with a dozen babies and found a city here."

"Do you pity her?"

"No! She cut them!"

Tiyar looked straight at Pimel. Their eyes reflected one another, magnifying the intensity of their looks like mirrors. "Yes. How many are never able to cut their enemies," he said.

She giggled and he stopped himself at the verge of asking her to kill Pahid. It would have been foolish to rely on her, and perhaps unnecessary. Pahid was marching through the north country, report had it, burning seed potatoes and persecuting old men and women who spun on wheels. Maybe one of them would do him in. He might return to the Middle Plains for the winter and then come here, but by that time they might all be gone.

He could hear them gathering outside to go through their useless ceremonial marching drill and point-swing-block with the weapons that no one would take into combat but that he had made them whittle out and use to vary the tedious endless practice becasue there was so little to farm, build, spin or eat and he must keep them in condition. Sometimes when he led them kicking, blocking, dodging, rolling up and down the mountain trails he would feel like falling down among the brush and laughing, heady not from his empty stomach but from a sudden apprehension that all this was only meant to give an artificial sense of purpose, to create the illusion that these were his followers when in fact they were here because they had nowhere to go. Those strange emotions would prey on him and he felt giddy from an empty heart.

When he came out of the tent they gathered around him, as eager as if he brought something real. Nowhere to go, he thought with a smile, that's why we continue living. That was why he had watched the girl while they raped her. Nowhere to go.

Fuego was coming up the rocky trail from the swamp, moving slowly and contriving to raise a cloud of dust from the sodden earth. A pot swung from a cord on his shoulder and bumped him every other step. That was their meal. Tiyar might have been annoyed--Fuego ought to balance the weight with another pot and use one of the water yokes they had around, and for that matter all the grass was dead so he need not follow the narrow path--but he watched sympathetically as the cord and the jar, Fea's symbols, bumped Fuego's knee. He ought to have net, knife and fire like Hath, like himself, Tiyar, who was carrying the mesh bag of darts and bone dagger in his belt. He wanted a metal blade, but the iron was too clumsy and they had no copper for bronze.

"Is this Ayekar?" he asked.

"Is it? I'll say it is!" Fuego answered, dropping the pot. "This is the food of the gods." Tiyar's contingent crowded around him and he doled out the dark molasses into their bowls. It was rendered wood, treated according to some process Fuego had learned from his tapes. Everyone got two handfulls a day to eat as a soup or drink in hot water and no one fought over it, not even the toughs he had made into foraging squads to keep them from bullying the rest. They were harrangued so much between Tiyar and Fuego that they could shout the Virtues of the Law in Paffir and Eyimalian, but when someone came back to the camp with a lucky find or a catch, Tiyar could see a squad leader's eyes glitter and hands reach out as though unconscious until the training reasserted itself and the hungry kid would shrink away.

"Look what I've got," Fuego was rattling on, pulling a string of fishhooks from under his jacket. "Barbed. A guy from out on the coast, Myosardia province, showed us how to make these. Fishhooks, spear tips, harrow teeth. We're going to be the trading tinkers. Look, jewelry, too." A little iron aghata berry lay in his palm. "No more carrying around leaves and twigs for the alphabet. They rot, they crumble, they get burnt. These things last for ever. We press them into clay, see, the top and the bottom, and then we have a mold that opens so we can save it. You should see the carding combs Pimel made. She can go in the next boat."

Pimel, still feeling the narcotic she had inhaled in Tiyar's tent, stuck her finger in a cup of hot molasses and licked it down. "Uhm," she murmured. "I'm not going back."

"Not back--" Fuego said. She walked away. The Itscriyites were returning with their bowls. A squad leader, a big-faced lad named Erkomt, pushed to the front and was jostled from behind. He tripped forward and caught himself with his free hand. Tiyar pulled him up by a cord around his neck. "What's this?" Fuego asked.

"I see what it is," Tiyar said. It was a necklace made of human teeth. He cut the cord so they fell on the ground, turned his bone dagger and hit Erkomt on the jaw with the handle. "I wonder how he made holes in the teeth," he remarked to Fuego.

"Needle," Erkomt managed, holding his sore cheek. His eyes were submissive, gaze low.

Tiyar hit him again. "Squad leader. I will yoke you to a plow with oxen until you decide you are a human being."

Someone laughed. Tiyar slapped her, too, and she fell backward. Now Pimel was at his side again, scrabbling in the dirt for the teeth. He gave her a push with his foot. "I said you will behave as a human being."

"This is how we behave," she told him. Breathless, she fondled the teeth, then as he struck her hand to knock them away she caught and stroked his fingers. He pulled back. Fuego was leading the drill.

"What are we to do?" Tiyar shouted. It was that night, it was dark, another day gone and no answer, the dead season that much closer but somehow no nearer to spring.

"Do?" Fuego looked as if the idea of worry had just been born right there. "We're building a city. We're building a new world."

Tiyar grasped him by the shoulders. For a moment everything worked together, he knew the thing to do was to shout, "Man, you are asleep!" He genuinely wanted to do this, but then suddenly he felt calm. He asked quietly, "Can we live on wood molasses all winter?"

"I don't know," Fuego answered.

Tiyar sat down. At a transparent crossroad, transparent figures were riding toward the city. The Eyimalian horses walked slowly; the world was too big for them. They meant Pahid was returning to the Middle Plains before the onset of winter. Tiyar watched the five of them gather in the crossroads and roll their eyes at the three ways in an extremity of hopelessness, seeing no water, no grass, no stable or sign of rest, nor any of the beauties they recalled from Eyimalia, and then the men astride them kicked and they moved on.

Fuego sang to himself as he poured woodchips into the vat from which, by means of a spout at the bottom, he drew off the pre-digested syrup it took all Tiyar's discipline to eat without protest. Fuego's cheer remained so impenetrable that Tiyar suspected him of liking the food. He was uncanny. He smiled with the brown stuff clinging to his teeth. Could it be a noble fraud? "Fuego, in all honesty, and for the love of true spirit, do you like that food?"

"Sure. Keeps your claws sharp."

"You have stopped losing weight."

Fuego smiled. "Gained. Before we lost the stores I was gaining steadily, and haven't lost much since. I really think we could live--" He had squatted down and brought his face near Tiyar, beaming with enthusiasm.

Tiyar said, "--on chemically treated wood, enriched by the insects and grubs you culture on--let us be honest--the bacteria that escape our digestion? We only die more slowly."

"That's the trick, isn't it?"

Tiyar smiled; near Fuego's shoulder a transparent woman sat eating a potato. Already those stones planted in the fields were having a good effect. Pahid found them everywhere among the lawful crop, robbing nourishment from grain sown at the command of Temple priests. That was the Viyatos' grain, the wheat and rye and corn meal that would go south to the Lir for taxes and then in hypercompressed form to Eyimalia. Farms planted the mandated areas with grain, but then they tossed potatoes in between the rows. Pahid's answer was to burn all the houses where he found potatoes, and often to kill the farmers who lived in them, but the peasants were old hands at hiding crops. In the parishes where potatoes grew, the little Verloringer missions were thriving. The woman eating a potato looked thin, but not nearly so thin as the women who passed before him in full flesh, going to bed their children down before Akiva began the evening prayer.

"Yes, old man, the trick is to die slowly, of course. But your cheerfulness astonishes me. Is it love?" Strange that he could question Fuego so intimately, but now that they worked in almost public opposition, they had grown friendly. There is never any shyness between enemies, Tiyar thought. He missed Paula Maxwell more than anyone.

"Fear rules the heart!" Fuego said, laughing. He pointed to the shoulder where he had had that motto tattooed in his fighting days. "Lovers make the world seem real. All kinds of love do that, they make things seem important. But a teacher makes your own self real. To be a lover and a student at once--I couldn't do it, except that Akiva...can teach love. I never knew it could be taught. I thought it was inherent. I never believed it could be transmitted, though I've been a student before. I was a student of Sevit. Sure, I only knew Sevit through books, but I knew him as well as I knew anyone. And Luz was my teacher. But until I met Akiva, I hardly knew what they were teaching me. Now I could go away forever tomorrow and not be sad, because he's taught me love."

"You speak like Holy Huey, in paradoxes. Are you about to tell me what he says: Once you are truly dead at heart you are immortal?" Tiyar asked. Though his tone remained almost flirtatious, sorrow again besieged his thoughts.

"No, can't say I am. When I was dead at heart I wasn't immortal, was I?"

"And now you are no longer dead. That is what interests me."

"When she came back with him...well, you could see she was the missing link between him and Neshar, of course. And between him and the Temple. I used to wonder how it could have happened, how he became so detatched and so passionate in this world. Everyone else, the whole Temple, is so caught up and so formal. The culture as a whole seemed to have very little respect for feeling. Marriage without friendship, children as property. And then he, who wants to make himself part of everything. You can't trip over a stone on the ground without his feeling it and thinking about it."

Tiyar shook his head.

"It was her, the break between him and the Temple. The link. I wonder what she's done with Pahid, how she changed him. She was so full of him when she came here. He converted her. She's been converted three times, and a real conversion is like dying, you know. The first night she was here, I still lived in that cave with the students, near Akiva's. So I was sitting outside, looking at the moonlight, meditating like a good student, jealous as a kid brother at a wedding, and I saw her. We all thought she was in with Akiva, but there she was leaning on a rock, crying because he'd made her start doubting Pahid and she didn't want to lose the Temple gods. She was between faiths. And Pahid had told her the Lir Temple gods would destroy the world. So I sat with her, rocking back and forth like we used to--Luz and I--when the other kids picked on her or when she came back from Daybreaker meetings upset about the state of the Outlander people. I understood then what the Pravelany meant when they talked about reincarnation. I'd always thought it was a metaphor for conflict, but it's a metaphor for love."

One of the two small foreign moons now rising silhouetted a bird's nest so high in the top of an uko tree that it seemed to be drifting. Tiyar imagined the birds crowded together inside, hiding their heads and feet from the cold wind that might blow the nest donw from its perch at any moment. If they saw their position as I do, they would creep on the ground like snakes, he thought. Among the ghostly images from the eye-in-hands a man sat up, yawned and lay down again.

"Let's go hear Akiva," Fuego said, starting off up the hill.

It was a short walk in bright moonlight, but when they came to the evergreens that led up to the rocky hilltop where Akiva's cave lay, Tiyar could have wished the distance were shorter. The ground sloped toward a little freshet where the moonlit water plunged and spouted. They crossed the wild stream haphazardly, stepping in the darker pools they couldn't see.

"What happened to the little bridges Krup made for us?" Tiyar asked.

"We've eaten them."

"Why?"

Fuego shrugged. "I didn't want to place too much burden on the living trees."

A semicircle of faces met them at the cave. "Don't look at me. Look out there!" Akiva was telling them. "Listen. Feel the emanations of godhood without and the echo of that same godhood in yourselves. That is the real hunger, the hunger of divinity within to rejoin the divine beyond this tomb, this flesh. To feel that echo is why we live. After that we can die," he finished mildly.

He learned that from Fuego, Tiyar thought. Fuego was bringing him to the people, like Fatayad reconciling Earth to mankind. Both would climb transcendant to heaven, leaving Tiyar with the mob. On him devolved the task of finding some way they could survive here until spring.

Voices sang in the forest. "Babyface, babyface, make us cry. Your papa set you free and your mama let you die." Tiyar's hand flew to the hormone detector, but at the same time that he located and counted them, making ready to fight, his heart was joining the song. They hated, simply, all the dull slow maddening forces that had brought them there--history, greed, the long blind struggle against an enemy so formless and all-encompassing that it seeped into themselves. He hated, too, and he almost hoped they would come out to stone him now, so he would at least have taught them defiance. But the song came no nearer and the men and women turned back to Akiva, thier arms around each other, a bony hand at rest on each shoulder.

"If you are ready, if you hear the voice of the wind in your own voices, if you see with the eyes of the moons as they see, if you feel that within you which you thought was a lone spirit pulled like tidal water to join its ocean, you are free. This is Ayekar. I welcome you." Akiva embraced each one, a true embrace, not merely formal.

"Wait. Is this your answer, to depeople the world? We are among her greatest beauties." Tiyar heard his voice speak, and it shook with emotion, terrified by the hollowness of his own words.

"Wait," Fuego echoed.

"Babyface, babyface, make us cry. Your papa set you free and your mama let you die," the far-off voices sang.

"Do you hear that song?" Berthe was asking. "We all know its real meaning. It comes from the days when the priests conquered us. They ruined the ancient cities on the Lir, built their temples and scattered the people to work the land for them. They supppressed the witches and replaced our medicine with temple magic. That's what it means by 'set you free.' But she will not die. Our earth sustains us, and we will protect her. Pahid threatens flood and storm and famine. He is nothing. He is a servant, like an ox. When we have torn down his temple, our earth will come face to face with the gods. He himself taught me so."

If they think an enemy believes it, then they believe it, Tiyar thought. The song grew louder. There were women singing, more women than men. They had come up behind the Itscriyites, singing their song, and had sung them down. These were Berthe's students. They arrived every few days by threes and fours, stayed as long as they dared, and took home artifacts to sell. The steady trickle of their proceeds was life to the camp, a weekly ration of nuts or meat or insects for each person on a rotating schedule that led to quarrels beyond number but that people cherished as the fruit of wisdom. When they saw the difference this ration made, how eyes lit, gestures quickened and faces drawn as leather suddenly beamed with gaiety, Tiyar and Fuego would look at each other and silently acknowledge how little either of them liked to be present for this. Either they or Berthe had to be there because of the bickering, though, so they both came, and in these looks they promised not to leave one another alone.

"We knew Ayekar in the years of light. Only we remember. False priests can never free the gods; it must be we only," Berthe recited.

"Berthe, there you are!" cried a voice out somewhere in the trees. A group of women and children, together with a heavy-laden mule, emerged from the wood, surrounded by an Itscriyite patrol squad. Erkomt, the same owner of the tooth necklace, led the patrol. Even the name sounded aggressive, insubordinating. Tiyar felt weary.

"Metaling!" Now came embraces. These women were always turning up in the dead of night. The one called butterfly would have been somewhat ugly even at her best, but now that she was covered with dirt and sores, haggard, her eyes red from fatigue and hair clumped in dirty heaps on her shoulders, she looked like the nightmare shadow of the little girl clinging to her arm. Tiyar found himself wondering which was real, as though the truth could not possibly encompass them both.

"And you brought the girlchild," Berthe was saying. "Did they tell you I found the boy? Everything--"

Erkomt suddenly planted himself between Berthe and the new arrivals. "I found them," he said, grinning.

"Good," Tiyar replied.

"I brought them right to you. I didn't even search them."

Tiyar looked at the mule. "Good," he repeated. "Now you may go."

Erkomt mimicked him.

Tiyar was about to strike, but Fuego raised his hands and nodded slightly toward the cave where Akiva stood. Akiva came out, stepping over the little fire before him, and walked straight toward Meteling. He did not notice Erkomt, who tried to shoulder his way between them and finally backed off, looking foolish.

"You remember me," she said.

Akiva knelt. "Simple heart," he whispered. "Yes, waking and sleeping. You separate us and bring us together again. I have kept my promise."

Someone gave Neshar a push. The boy hurried to his father, who held him forward, hands trembling.

Meta bent down to see. "We called him Sunshine, because he had to live in the dark. We hid him like the Infant Spring. I knew you would take care of him." Straightening, she laid her hands on Akiva's head. "When you came into our shrine you were like the wolves on the mountain in winter. Wild and cold, and lost. But I gave you the baby and you looked as though something was rekindled that had gone out."

Everyone watched as they introduced Neshar to Meta's daughter, Telinge. The two children scrutinized each other. Neshar extended his hands in a formal greeting and said, "I can read."

Telinge pulled a crust of bread from her tunic and set it in Neshar's hand, answering, "So can I."

A couple of women cheered, some applauded and everyone laughed, except Erkomt and his squad. They gathered around the pack mule. Telinge had real bread; there must be grain in those sacks. The bags of woven cloth, bulging around the seams, brought to all thier minds glorious pictures of opulence, sacks merging with their shadows in torchlight so no one could tell just where they ended.

Again Akiva walked past Erkomt without seeming to notice him. He took the mule's bridle. Erkomt put his hand on the rope.

"You're not yet ready to die, are you?" Akiva asked him gently.

Erkomt stared at him, angry, then the two men began to smile and at last they both let go of the rope. Erkomt laughed. "We're already dead! We are the dead." He waved his hands to the people around him. "We're in Ayekar! We're starving to death in Ayekar!"

"Babyface, babyface, make us cry," the squad answered.

So the beast was led off and the next day they all stood patiently in the old dining hall for a peice of real bread carefully weighed out on the scale a Verloringer merchant, now gone, had rigged up in the days of plenty. Erkomt's squadron went through the line twice, but were stopped on thier third attempt. Neshar and Telinge, now washed, sat with Klyne's boys. The girlchild and boychild, identical grey tunics pressed together, looked alike as Rani and Rania.

"We shared each other's milk when we carried them," Tiyar heard Meta say. Could that explain it? He didn't know enough about it to guess, but he imagined the pregnant Berthe's strength begetting a second child in the other woman as she suckled her, and the thought made him angry as though he personally had wanted to take part in Meta's conceiving and been left out. While Meta showed her red cord and told how Pahid had declared all the herbalist women anethema, but every peasant who saw the cord gave or promised something to the City of Wisdom, Tiyar hung his head and watched the ghost images.

More Eyimalian horses were heading for the Middle Plains. The girl whose rape he had watched now walked slowly eastward, looking for a road to lead home. Near him in real life, Itscriyites with short-cropped hair and tatoo scars, thorn necklaces supposed to look like wolves' teeth rattling in their shirts, gulped their food and stood around in fours and fives, backs toward each other. Raiding parties. He signed them to him.

"Pahid is coming. We can expect him in a few weeks." Shoulders hunched. They scuffed at the ground, sulking. "I haven't told anyone yet, but you must prepare to fight. This time we will free ourselves. And he will bring provisions for his army."

For a moment there was no answer.

Erkomt said, "We need weapons."

Tiyar knew that to outfit them with Puros would be inviting a Viyato holocaust, but he wondered for a moment whether they could get away with something less obvious, and again he missed Paula. She would have known, or talked him out of it. Instead he was trapped with a lingering temptation. Sunlight fell through a gap in the cieling to illuminate a woman's chin. She carried a wooden threshing tool strapped across her back from hip to shoulder, the handle up and the flared end of the flail doubled behind it like a crown.

"We can't go against Pahid with these," Erkomt was saying. "We need spears and long blades. Then we can do things. We can get out of here--"

"You may leave whenever you wish," Tiyar answered curtly. The woman he had been watching moved slightly, and the crown and handle clinked together. He looked down. Her feet were bare.

"We could go south, to the capital. As long as Pahid stays in the Middle Plains, the capital is empty. I want to take over the Lir Temple, sit in one of those high towers and feel it crashing down."

Tiyar shrugged. He clapped Erkomt's shoulder to show that the formal conference was at an end. The squad disbanded and its members began to walk around among those who were still eating. "You want to begin a long march in winter, barefoot, with no supplies. How would you live?" he asked.

"We could live as long as we kept on walking," insisted a small, sharp-faced youth whose long hair was beginning to fall out. "I'd keep walking until the minute I died, and I bet by then I'd be in the Lir Temple archive."

Lovers were embracing within sight of an eye-in-hand. Tiyar felt the merciless laugh sweep upward again like desert wind, mocking faith. It was the truth that must roughen the lovers' tender expressions, yet they also spoke truly when they called their fleeting love immortal, a truth they grasped only briefly before it was retaken by the wind. "I had hoped you would want to fight," he said. "You will have the best weapons I can give you. But for now--" The desert wind itself, the old bitter allure of power, echoed in him. He was fighting a temptation stronger than comfort to the ascetics; he was fighting the temptation to make these youngsters his personal guard, and at the same time he made this great thankless sacrifice, he knew he must continually nourish their fanaticism or they would devolve into utter banditry. He smiled at himself, thinking here is Tiyar Kituman, not famous in history as a tyrant. What an accomplishment. But fewer, probably, than had stood at the brink of power and gone forward were those who had gone so far and turned back. "For now, I will give you no new weapons, because I do not want to alarm the rest of the camp. Train and wait."

Tiyar walked away, both from Erkomt and from the smell of yeast and wood smoke, toward the heavy swamp air now softening a little in the sunlight. Squad members were still walking among those who had been last in line. He saw one stop behind an old woman who sat dipping her bread in water to save her gums. She looked sadly at the big handful, every crumb of which must now be given over, and then at Tiyar in aimless, groundless hope. He never indulged in personal rescue any more because the delusion of doing good was too comforting. If I stop them now, they will rob her twice this evening, he told himself, stepping out into the bracing sun-brightened mist.

It was some time that afternoon, they later realized, that Meta's daughter vanished. None of the several women who had arrived with Meta, nor any of Akiva's students nor the older children who took care of the younger ones saw her after mid-day, when the weaver at whose loom she had sat in the morning, watching the shuttle go back and forth and the intertwining colors moount, had gotten up and gone to train.

The loss interrupted another argument between Tiyar and Fuego about whether to send more people off in boats before spring came. "What we have founded here, the city of wisdom, must live," Tiyar had been saying. "If all the strongest are sent away, the rest will die and this all be forgotten."

"You know what you're doing? You're founding a sect, that's what. A religious community complete with periodic incursions from outside." Fuego, truly angry, stopped to press his palms together, then went on. "And that kind of community either falls apart or becomes a nuisance and is crushed. We've got to keep moving outward."

"And what shall your pilgrims eat?"

"What are we eating now?" Fuego shot back. Defeated, they both fell silent.

Akiva suddenly put his hand into the fire and took out a burning ember. He let it roll across his hands and fall, leaving the skin undamaged. "You see? Our divinity is a simple thing. We are always doing the impossible."

They stared like babies. Akiva was about to do the trick again, but a group of Berthe's friends, men and women, came hurrying to the cave at that moment. Someone asked, "Have you seen the girl-child?" Then they were all caught up in the searching and calling and trying to understand, from all the people who thought they had seen her or might have seen her or just wished they could believe they had seen her, where she might have been last.

Verloringers lit hden-knots and searched on the wooded hillsides until the greater moon set. As they tired and began dropping the torches, the brush would flare up now and then until a bunch of laughing Itscriyites came with buckets to douse it. Finally they gave up and staggered away to sleep. On his way back to his own tent, Tiyar passed Meta standing astride the furious little stream that divided Akiva's sanctum from the rest of the camp. She was staring at the water, her fingers twisting the cord by which an herb bag dangled from her girdle. When the wound-up cord began to double back on itself, she dropped it and let the bag flounce.

It must have been the lesser moon shining beyond her shoulder, but used as he was to this world, Tiyar could not rid himself of the illusion that it was the greater. For a while he wondered whether the whole thing were not a dream. He saw Erkomt step out of the shrubbery--how could a big clumsy youth approach unseen?--with his squad. The woman of the threshing tool was grinning. Erkomt said, "We're going to look all night for your daughter. Give us food." He grinned, too, an ugly contemptuous leer of pleasure in inflicting distress.

Meta saw in that grin that he knew where her daughter was, not lost but held for some kind of ransom and thus, for the moment, safe. She gathered Erkomt's hands together and kissed them.

The next day they demanded extra bowls of the rendered wood. Morning and evening, Meta gave up her issued ration together with grateful kisses and frequently some other gift of food she had brought with her or foraged in the marsh, and then she would go to Berthe or Fuego to study or fight or cry. The fiction that Erkomt's gang was searching for her daughter gave Meta comfort, because it allowed her to bring him these kisses and gifts for her child. Sometimes she seemed to believe it.

"I am in love with him," she confided to Fuego. "At night I dream of his body."

Fuego laughed. He began talking about what it would be like, how much of his clothes the boy would consent to take off, what he probably looked like under them, and whether he would know what to do, until both he and Meta were giggling and Berthe, who had joined them, stopped her ears.

Meta ran to her and pushed her hands down, saying, "Listen, you silly thing. I have an idea. We can play a game with Telinge. Let's put letters in her food."

Tiyar got wind of the scheme when the squad leaders made their reports. Erkomt liked to come with them and stand in the back of the group while the others recited the week's progress in their various endeavours for Tiyar, Fuego and anyone else who cared to listen. A silent challenge to their talk of community and tolerance, he sat when they sat and stood when they stood but offered no report, and when the time came to touch hands all round the others avoided him. He stood with his plams out and fingers splayed like talons, repelling everyone. This time Tiyar ambled up to him, easily closed his long hands over the extended fingertips and said, "All this week you have been a Seeker."

"Something's waiting for me at the head of the Lir, under the weeping moon," Erkomt said, paraphrasing a song about Itscriye.

The other squad leaders bristled. No one wanted to remember the dead province. He added, "Something's waiting for a lot of us. A lot of us are waiting to go."

"Bring me a map of the way and provisions. Then we will go," Tiyar said.

Erkomt strutted off just as though he had won the argument and Tiyar, watching him, read "Telinge," in the herbal language, stuck to his hem. He remembered when he saw Meta slide her hand into Fuego's that that was the missing girl's name.

Tiyar paced around them, thinking that perhaps he should be angry. In one of the eye-in-hand pictures, an herbal witch was coming to visit some Daybreaker missionaries. He liked this one, a comely woman who seemed stupid at first but on occasion proved surprisingly quick. She never yielded to such emotions as pity, even when one of the missionaries, her only friends in the world, took sick and died. The sun came up above the hden-trees on the hillside and struck him. He stopped pacing. There seemed to be a number of bright insects in the grass.

"We must not begin to play tricks on Erkomt," he said.

Meta looked up with a vapid expression.

"We don't want to be drawn into his games." He felt one knee give way and sat down to conceal the trembling that came at moments like these when the hunger they all felt always would suddenly capture his attention like the thought of mortality stopping one member of a crowd all hurrying somewhere, to leave the one standing deep in thought while the others rush on.

Instead of Tiyar, Fuego got angry. His face turned rosy red, full of new blood. He said in Eyimalian, "You have been playing games since--since we came here. Thanks to you, that boy is a squad leader and people look up to him. He believes and they believe and I think you yourself almost agree with them that this toy army of yours is what's keeping us safe from Pahid, when you know perfectly well that if Pahid only said one word to the Viyatos the incendiaries would drop down from heaven and flush us out the way they torch the sewers in Merced to keep down the rats."

"Clearly he wishes to prevent the Viyatos from interfering further, because of the destruction it might entail and for fear of losing his position as intermediary. He has said so to Berthe," Tiyar replied.

"So he'll kill us himself, then."

"Yes, perhaps." By now, Tiyar realized, the perhaps was a lie. He had watched enviously while they fattened the horses and heard the clang of nails in the beasts new shoes. "That is why I am training the squadrons to fight."

"Except that they're so weak they can barely hold onto their weapons and they have no sense of community so they'd rather rob children and old people than plan strategy and if they were faced with real soldiers the best that could happen would be that they'd run."

Tiyar had absently put one of the little insects in his mouth. It tasted bitter. "What do you propose?" he asked.

"We have been holding on to the idea of the city too long. It's time to go. We have to disperse in small groups and go back to the villages to work. Then when the time comes the priests won't be able to stop us. Not a rising but a welling up. They'll be surrounded and swept along."

"In the spring--" Tiyar began.

"No, now." Fuego was leaning toward him, his knees crunching in the stones. "You know that Akiva is ready to walk off into the forest with his students and die. He knows we can't keep ourselves through winter. And as a group of this size gets hungrier, it gets fractious. Your squads are already terrorizing people. We know that. They've got to be broken up, and we can't keep even the order we have now without them."

"They will not go! Can't you get that into your head, old man? We may tell them to disperse, but they will not do it." Tiyar squatted down to bring his face near Fuego's.

Fuego's round eyes shone with the water gathered in them. He laid his palms on Tiyar's wrists. Like Rani and the god of fate they stared at one another in horrified understanding. Finally he said, "Oh, Tiyar, then we're lost."

Once again Tiyar felt the laugh press near to the surface. He sprang up, the sunlight piercing almost through him so he saw the blood vessels in his eyeball superimposed on the sky, and shouted, almost singing, "No, we are not lost yet, Fuego. We are suffering the first pangs of victory." At that moment a cluster of sparrows on the one the distant hills took wing. The coincidence frightened him. Squads were assembling, so he hurried down to train.

The next day at evening, he asked Fuego casually, in Akiva's hearing, "Are you going with him to the forest, then?"

Fuego was adjusting the cooking stones to heat some water. "Me? No, I--I'm not ready for that yet. Berthe and I will go back to the Middle Plains. We'll live at Ma Zauber's and teach. They want to recover their history. A number of the families can remember back to the Eyimalian Conquest, and I think we may be able to gather stories from before that, maybe back to the time of the Rediscovery or farther. It's possible that at one time this planet was part of the old Federated System."

"I see why the problems of this winter rest so light upon you," Tiyar said quietly. "When do you go?"

Tiyar looked at Akiva, who rose to chant the earth's farewell to the sun. Other voices joined his, but when he finished he did not make a sermon as usual but sat down. Most of the others strolled thoughtfully away.

"I saw the weeping moon a few nights ago. Klyne stood beneath it, sharpening a knife," Akiva said.

Fuego returned to the stones. "Where's she gone?" he asked.

"I don't know. She may come back again."

"Are you waiting--?"

"For the impulse that comes from where things are true. Seeing her was a sign, but without direction. I was still hungry then and too concerned with that to feel."

"But now?" Fuego asked, sitting down beside him.

"I stopped eating then and have not been hungry since. Unless--"

"Start again. We've got enough to last a little longer."

"Unless this is hunger, this life, and I never felt it." Staring ahead, he fainted. Fuego caught him and gently pushed a lump of Restorose from the medical kits between Akiva's lips where it would dissolve against the inner cheek and flow directly to the blood. As soon as Akiva opened his eyes, Fuego popped the sticky bolus out of his mouth, wrapped a leaf around it and put it away in his pocket. He has kept it by him all this time, Tiyar reflected, and while crossing the fast mountain stream with a bowl to fetch some wood-molasses he envied Fuego the love, like a bright drop plunging through moonlight to darkness, that made him keep the sugar tablet while everyone, Akiva with them, starved. Fuego would have sat stolid and cheerful though a hundred murder images came before his eyes, while he, Tiyar, went ranting and trembling each time a ghost began to weep.

On the other side of the brook, Meta sprang out of the brush at his shoulder. Berthe took his hands. There were others behind them. He almost swung at the women, but then he collected himself and said, "What is it?"

"My daughter. Come on."

He followed, down to the marsh where they had started to build a city. Most of the buildings had been rendered down so they stumbled around in ruins until someone said, "Here," and they stopped by what was to have been a schoolhouse. Now Berthe lectured in a cave to old women while the children scoured the hills.

Tiyar activated the hormone sensor. There were people inside. Berthe's friends surrounded the building. He saw knife-blades shining.

They must have used a hidden entrance, because the door was swollen shut. He kicked it open quickly and shone a light inside. Erkomt's gang sat and lay among a heap of dirty grass as if they had been dropped there, limbs propped up or hanging down for no reason except that something happened to be or not be underneath them. They watched him, though not very closely. He noticed a smoky lamp, and that two of them were naked. They must have been doing something together, whatever it was, and that gave him hope. Orgies bespoke life, energy that must come from food and the prospect of more food later.

Erkomt came grinning out of the shadows to meet him. "Look what we found," he said.

Tiyar eyed him carefully before he moved the light to see where he pointed. The squad leader kept still. Now others were coming in with torches and he knew what Erkomt had "found" by Meta's scream of joy.

"Still living!" Tiyar said in Eyimalian.

The other man imitated him, "Still living."

"Where is it?" Meta demanded. "I have my girl now. Where are the other mules we brought with us?"

People were tearing apart the mat walls and digging at the floor. It was like Eyimalia on the Feast of the Blessed Child, when children ransacked the Pravelany graveyards looking for hidden toys and candy all the winter afternoon until their greed was sated or overcome by fear of the gaining darkness and they came back one by one to the temple. They found cornmeal, barley, bean paste, dried fruit, cheeses and vegetables and even a mound of sprouting potatoes. The squadron had stolen part of every gift that every pilgrim, student or more fortunate refugee brought in, and they had robbed whole towns in the Middle Plains. There was more than the gang could have eaten. They had been planning to sustain the whole camp on a march.

Cookfires sprang up as by magic. Erkomt retreated to a corner, still grinning. "You know how I got this," Tiyar thought he said. "It's yours now, but you know how I got it. I murdered for you." And Tiyar was ashamed in his gratitude.

People continued to haul out sacks and barrels. Tiyar was walled in by the provender. Watching people eat, he felt their happiness, a force like steam, seeking direction. Fuego appeared beside him. Tiyar said, "Now I have something with which to send you off!"

He scarcely knew whether he meant it or not, but suddenly it seemed that their comradeship, cemented by hunger and despair, could not survive the advent of sustenance and hope. They must part either now or after a quarrel. Fuego began packing that night and Tiyar said goodbye the next evening.

"While I'm gone, eat bread together," he told Tiyar and Akiva.

Then he went up the pass to the Middle Plains in a line of women following Berthe, their long shadows blue on the glistening frost. Tiyar turned to Akiva, thinking, he is alone as he was with Berthe and Fuego beside him, alone as Fuego has never been. There was no one left to speak Eyimalian. His tongue made silent words in his mouth. "Fuego is right," he said aloud. "We must eat together daily to remain friends of one another's friends."

Akiva nodded. They had a supper of cooked barley in public brotherhood, but Tiyar received no word of the prophet's acclaimed wisdom and Akiva gained no courage from Tiyar. They would probably never argue, but the peace they kept in each other's presence was really solitude. Akiva seemed content. He ate a full bowlful and instructed his followers to consider that they took food from the other creatures of light as they were themselves earth creatures and forms of the sun.

Pimel came to stand between Tiyar and the fire. Its heat carried her smell to him, at once revolting and sweet. She stood close enough to singe her bare legs and he smelled that, too.

"Did you eat? I ate something that burned inside," she said. "Look." A knife was tied to her forearm. "I made this for you."

"Very good. A strong blade. Sharp." He feinted at her. She avoided him, giggling. He flipped the knife to her, handle outward, and drew his own.

They were still playing when the greater moon rose. Akiva paused on the way to his cave and watched them, illuminated at first by the blue twilight. The sky, lit brighter than the moon, appeared to shimmer behind it, almost overwhelming the more distant body. In places where lunar valleys still lay in darkness, the vivid sky appeared as if it shone right through the moon. Tyiar and Pimel danced and feinted, their faces glowing softly, too, in light from so near the gound it seemed to emanate from things instead of falling on them. Night deepened, the transparent moon drew off the sky's light until it shone like a minor sun in the blackness and kept the stars at bay, and the two at their game occasionally stumbled, ashine with sweat.

Tiyar, his attention captured by his opponent, had the impression a crowd was gathering, but when he stepped in the fire and jumped out, causing Pimel to laugh, he took the opportunity to glance away and realized that no one was watching them. A few hden trees and the tall grasses, bending where the slope down to the marsh before them crested, made the sounds he had thought were whispers. Far away, voices were calling. Birds cawed in the marsh. Now Akiva, losing interest, turned his gaze downhill toward the black swamp. Tiyar was abandoned to the battle, still in play but the struggle to keep at it earnest. He was dancing in his sleep.

More voices called. A child ran past, shouting, "We're back!" Akiva turned back to face him, then looked away.

"Pahid stopped my blade with a look," came a woman's voice.

Tiyar dropped his knife. Pimel snatched it, fingered the edge and gave it back. That was all. The game was over. He sat down to shudder out his weariness, ashamed and grateful, and looked up for the first time at his deliverer.

Klyne smiled on him, bright in the full double light. The second moon had risen. He must have been hours fighting. And now she smiled above him like the third, the mythical weeper--he dashed his cheeks with the back of his hand and made himself sneeze. Luckily her boys, having raced around, returned to their mother, still shouting, "We're back! We're back!"

"I brought this for you," she said, unslinging a leather bag from her shoulder.

Neither of them moved. Akiva stared at the ground, plucking his sleeves, as she had on the night the ghosts came. He had no more idea now than then what she would say, well though he understood her.

She took his hand. "He lives. I held the blade right against his throat. I pricked the skin. I even stabbed him, on the arm, but he never bled. He said, give me the knife. And do you know, Father Akiva, I gave it to him? Then he cut off his own finger above the knuckle and handed the knife back. And do you know what else? Only a little drop of blood came out, then nothing."

Akiva's palm caressed her cheek. "And so you let him live?"

"Yes. I let him," she answered slowly. "He was like me."

Tiyar examined the finger she took from Pahid's leather bag with some amusement, although he could not have said why, and passed the trophy round to be admired by the Verloringers. Next she produced a thick scroll tied in silk ribbon, explaining, "He gave me this, too. Is it magic?"

It was the best map of Paffir Eket he had ever seen. Even by moonlight he could trace their path from the Lir to the Middle Plains, every detail correct, and the route to the capital and Lir Temple there. He had the provisions and the map. What he had told Erkomt was no promise but only the truth; they must go. Turning to the crowd, he shouted, "The time has come! Tomorrow we march on the chief temple of the Lir!"

He had no choice and no hope, and so there was no temptation. Power had closed his fist around itself. The laugh surged up and tore free, rebounding from the icy hillsides, echoing in the mouths before him.

Chapter 19

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