CHAPTER 21

"Still living?" That was Huey.

"Still living," Clark answered.

Greyesar was also there. In response to Huey's question he groaned, muttered, then finally snapped, "I'm not dead."

Clark noticed shadows. There was a window with green beyond it. Wool scratched his skin. "We're on Paffir Eket."

"The next best thing, I trust," Huey said.

Clark strained round to look. Instead of a woolen tunic like Clark's, Huey still had his jacket. The sleeves of explosive suit peeped out at the cuffs--Huey must have pulled it on in the last seconds before capture. They had left it on him because he had activated it. Clark experienced a moment of selfish fear that Huey might kill him by dying. "It sounds as though you're both OK," he said.

"Quite," answered Greyesar. But if one of them were hurt, he would surely lie.

A door opened. Clark's muscles cramped in anticipation of release. Twisting round again, he saw the guard enter backwards. First came a full-sized, muscular back and shoulder, one arm pulling something, then a small pair of legs and last a big head with dark hair cut short, face slack and beardless. The guard was dragging an iron pot. They won't even put it on wheels for him, Clark thought. Was the man only timid or could he really not lift it? Clark imagined him dragging it through streets and forests, wide-eyed and careful, staring at everything as he stared now, trying to guess how they would hurt him.

The guard scrutinized Huey and Greyesar, stepped toward Huey, backed away, sighed and stepped forward again. He went to the pot to ladle soup into a bowl that hung from the rim, set it down by Huey and backed away so fast he nearly tipped it over.

They would not be unchained. Clark stretched his limbs one at a time, moving slowly, glad no one could see his face. When the guard came near, he said hello to him in high and low Paffir and then in all the languages he knew how to say hello in, but got no answer. Greyesar clapped his hands, but the guard did not turn.

"I imagine he's deaf," Huey said. "Wasn't there a sign language..."

Clark shook his head. "Nobody's deaf any more. They cured that." The pain in his muscles eased. He let himself go limp. Humanity had scattered itself too thinly. Having won so much and lost it and won it back again, having in various worlds at times abolished war and abolished poverty, forged triumphs of universal love, the human race fell to half-forgotten diseases. When he opened his eyes again it was night.

The massive boredom of imprisonment had always frightened him most, but Clark found that the time passed, if not easily, without driving him absolutely mad. It was true that his dreams grew more vivid, and sometimes he found himself watching scenes of the farm of his childhood, of Reshebora, of his dead brother. Sometimes they all traded memories. He grew familiar with Huey's wild youth in the Outland and Greyesar's demanding education among the Uchide. At times they argued and demolished each other with sarcasm. Constant as breathing, their intimacy came to seem as necessary as air, and knowing their captors might separate them at any moment they teetered between dependence and mutual hatred. By the end of a week Clark could say, "The first thing I'll do when they unchain me is hug you both," and instead of just snorting, Greyesar was frightened.

"Do you know why they're keeping us together?" he asked. "So they can be sure that if they torture one of us, the others will talk."

Clark did not answer. He had made Greyesar love him against his will; he had already betrayed him. But then he remembered that Greyesar had committed his share of intimacies, and twisted round to say so. Huey must have guessed what Clark was thinking, because he intervened quietly, "Don't talk about what you'll do when they let you stand up, Clark. That's prisoner thinking. Think about getting out of here."

Clark knew he should appreciate this attempt to cheer him, but instead he felt more ashamed. He was becoming depressed, becoming the one they had to encourage. Weakest of the three, he would go crazy first. He thought of taking his life. Birth and death are the walls to our prison, Akiva had remarked. Looking at the earthwall to which his chain was bolted, Clark considered digging himself free, until he remembered the guard.

A thick hand pushed his soup into view. Clark pushed it away. It would just add to the stench around him if he continued to eat. Life makes filth, he thought. The guard's face, close to his, reflected sorrow. The guard was afraid. That was all. Most likely, no one had ordered that Clark be chained. No one wished it. The guard, a simple man probably bullied all his life, was just afraid to let them get up and Clark was caught in the machinery of fear. Shutting his eyes, he expected to die in silence.

The guard unlocked his chain.

After that, each of them walked freely for a few minutes every day, and when they were strong enough to reach the door, the jailor took each one outside to relieve himself in luxurious seclusion in the steep fenced-in meadow that surrounded their cave. Now they began to haggle in earnest over a plan of escape.

The fence was made of tubes through which a deadly poison ran. Now and then small animals brushed against it and the prisoners heard their cries. For days they calculated the difficulty of digging under it, of devising an arch to climb over it, of burrowing into the hillside or somehow convincing the guard to let them through the gate by which he entered. For a while they debated whether the man were really deaf or only mute or shamming. Clark, who only weeks before had been scheming to free a world, studied this one man acutely and burned with sympathetic rage. The Ketries had imprisoned him from childhood, neglecting him day by day. Most likely they had raised him to be a jailor. His awkward steps and timorous glances were as deliberately forged as chains and almost as effective. Slouching from pot to prisoner with his dripping bowl, stiffening when they smiled and judging all things by the fear they caused him, the guard was a symbol of the Ketries' ruthlessness and power. A prayer bell in reverse, he dragged their loftiest plans in the mud. He doesn't speak but we hear, Clark thought.

Huey lay singing to himself in the Outlander dialect. The guard grunted inharmoniously. Huey paused, then began again. The guard made another throaty sound.

"So he does hear," Clark said.

"Hear?" cried Huey. "He sings!"

All day Clark and Greyesar heard them pacing in the frosty grass, singing what sounded like nursery rhymes, then Huey returned and announced that the guard's name was Pre.

Pre could not remember his parents. He lived in a city with other men who fed and punished him, but that was as much of life as he could explain. When he brought the evening soup, he shared a bowl, and the next day he unchained them all together.

The three prisoners embraced. Human bodies so suddenly close excited them and they laughed and turned away, shrugging, then sat down together with Pre and ate. From then on they shared all their meals and Pre often spent whole days with them in the meadow. They surveyed the mesas interlaced by gulleys full of conifers and rangy finger-leaved trees beyond which, far to the north, a narrow road passed along a hillside and disappeared. Ox-drawn wagons were crawling south.

"They must take another route home, by the law of conservation of wagons," Huey said.

"Good," Pre remarked in Outlander.

Clark was startled. Could Pre have been taught Huey's archaic cosmology, too? He imagined lost races of Pres struggling on abandoned planets to fit reality to rules of balance, conservation and decay, until Huey explained that "good" was the Outlander word for physical things, and Pre had meant this road was the tax artery.

A few days after the first snow fell, they saw a black line like the entrails of Lir mud-fish creeping along the road. At first Clark hoped they were Daybreakers, so he would know he was near the capital and might hope for rescue, but then he made out the horses and knew the mob must be Pahid's. Now the desire to escape became passion, even though weeks of thin soup left them barely strong enough to weave winter mats from the straw Pre brought them.

Winter came suddenly. A cold wind moaned in the gorges, and the next morning icy snow capped all the peaks and mesas, filled the lattices of the fence and blew up through the window. They shivered while they waited for Pre. He did not come that day.

The next was colder. Pre still did not come.

The wind reminded them of unhappy voices. Hunched in the straw, they sang to each other all night. Singly or together when two knew the words, they went through anthems, hymns, love songs and children's rhymes. Sometimes when Clark's voice failed and Greyesar's thickened and choked, only Huey kept booming along with nonsense, tavern ditties and long ridiculous ballads about mating and drugs. At other times Huey trailed off in stentorian rasping and Clark heard his own voice come through, in the two or three notes still working, thin as a child's and pure. At last they had to stop and then, when night seemed to have taken hold completely, a chorus of birdsong heralded dawn. They waited for light, hardly breathing, and then fell to digging in the earth for worms and insects as though the morning song welcomed them into the avian kingdom.

Clark's fingers thrust unexpectedly into loosened dirt. He wondered if other prisoners had burrowed here. Little finger-trails led nowhere, then he found a small hole and at the bottom a metal ring. He yanked and it came free. The metal shone and then glistened and gleamed in the swelling light as he strained it toward the window, until he could almost read an inscription.

He managed to toss it to Greyesar, who said, "What luck. Maybe we can sell this." They fell to giggling. After a while Greyesar calmed himself, held up the ring and read, "Efirr Nije."

"Dead Mama take us," Huey remarked.

"What?" Clark was twisting his neck to see.

"It's a Shira ring. Sevit and Efirr were Shira. He must have taken it off and buried it when he realized what happened."

"Or when he found out Efirr was dead."

This idea was received in silence. Clark began to doze.

"We know where we are," Greyesar proclaimed suddenly, as though he had just remembered the map.

Huey yawned. "Time to escape." There was a clinking noise as he rubbed the links of his chain together, and in less than an hour acrid smoke crept over Clark's back toward the window and flew out like a living thing, heedless of its past. Clark and Greyesar scraped at their own bonds without success, cursing when their hands slipped on the dewey iron. Around noontime, Huey stood up.

"I heated a link of the accessories until it was amenable to suasion," he explained, showing Clark the twisted piece. He gathered up straw and made two little fires for them. After more cursing, pinching and cutting of fingers they got their chains off and climbed out the window.

Huey went off to a corner of the yard to stand with his index fingers pressed together before his face, so their shadow fell just between his eyes. Clark and Greyesar knew he was staring into the sun. Unwilling to see the mark between his eyes or to reproach him, they busied themselves finding worms and bugs in the dirt. Only when, after sunset, ignoring the food they offered, Huey heated a piece of chain in the fire and began striking it with a cold one, did Greyesar ask him what he was doing.

"I'm sharpening a blade to cut a hole in the fence," Huey replied, looking up with such finality that Greyesar, reaching out to touch him, nearly put his own hand in the fire. "Then I will lay my arm across the toxin supply line outside. You two will wait until my suit explodes, and climb over."

"You will hurt," Greyesar protested stupidly.

"Just for a minute, until I'm done with. I'll stop feeling a long time before the shirt goes off."

Greyesar said nothing. Huey went on with his work. They listened to the wind and the clank of iron. "Do you see an alternative?" he asked.

"No," Greyesar whispered. "When will you do it?"

"When the blade is sharp."

"How sharp?"

Huey shrugged. "Sharp enough to cut straw."

Greyesar chose a thin, flexible piece. It bent to the makeshift blade without breaking. He held it to the fire and watched the small flame sink closer to his fingertips. That done, he chose another with extreme deliberation.

Why doesn't anybody speak, Clark wondered, though he had nothing to say. He moved near them.

Tne next straw quivered and bent double, but when Huey released it the broken end still dangled from the piece in Greyesar's hand. Huey smiled kindly. The twilight had begun to fade and he had to hold the work close to the fire to see it. Greyesar peered in the straw for another.

It could have gone on all night. Clark bent close with a notion of helping Greyesar, and saw that the Eyimalian was threading strands of his own hair through the piece he selected. The trick must fail in time, but for the moment the hairs slipping against one another relieved the pressure of the blade. It could go on forever, Clark thought.

Pre stopped them. The door opened; he came in with his soup. For a moment it seemed that all this destruction of chains, the little escape to the courtyard and the greater one they had planned, was merely hunger, so that now, being fed, they would fall back into quiescence. Clark looked in the pot with mingled appetite and sorrow. Two leaves of an herb called Dreaming floated among the islands of glistening oil. It was a letter from Berthe's alphabet.

"This stuff is drugged," he said aloud. These three days had been just the old breeder's trick, starving the stock to be sure they would feed. While Pre mourned over the broken chains, they dumped their portions and puzzled about what was going on. Surely the Ketries would not bother with herbs, nor would their Outlander keepers try such a thing without orders. Perhaps they were to be moved, or abandoned. Perhaps Maxwell had heard of their capture and now somewhere a vast machinery was groaning that would set them free. Perhaps Tiyar had taken or ruined the capital or was fighting to disentrench Pahid and some feather of the Nightbird's wing from this brushed even their solitude, perhaps the guard had stayed away because he was busy digging moats or building earthworks or his caretaker had been felled by a random shot. For the first time in his life Clark's mind was exhausted. Letting the possibilities run on to what ends they would, he lay down in the straw as though sleeping.

He was lifted and dumped down, on top of Huey. Something fell on him in turn, then they began shaking and jolting. The cart that must be carrying them seemed to roll and tumble under the night. Clark managed to turn his face to the stars. They were heading toward Lir Temple.

Above him Greyesar whispered in Eyimalian, "Are you with us?"

Huey answered, "With us."

"Are you with us?"

Huey repeated, "With us."

The chant went on a long time. Clark chanted with them, trembling, eyes fixed on the distant sun of his homeworld, until his fear ebbed and he felt their strength in its place, and their whispering rang with joy. Now he would love these two all his life with transmuted battle fury; now to fight by their side would be an act of love at once deeply physical and wholly spirit, a love that transcended reason. On a whispered, "Now!" they leapt through the darkness, shouting.

It was almost a fair fight. Clark punched with his hands together, fell and rolled and got up again, again and many times, swinging blind, exhausted, almost hoping for the end. A foot pinned his neck. He lay flat and panting. The foot shifted to his back and he felt a blade at his nape, but then at the extreme moment Huey yelled in triumph and Clark rolled sideways and sprang up, again with all the force of a mortal life. His opponent fell and whacked his head on the cart in falling. Clark looked around. The three of them had won. One of the guards had fled, perhaps to fetch others. Huey robbed the two who remained while Greyesar hissed, "Come on!"

Deep in the woods they climbed trees and scrambled a distance above the ground, then went over rocks and along a thicketed hollow where there was no snow to betray their passing. After that they just ran up and down the hillsides in silly exuberance and at last, near sunrise, dug out a burrow and slept.

In the morning they set out for the capital, following Clark's memory of the map. "We should pay those guys extra when we get back," he remarked.

Greyesar said, "If enough people sell you enough worthless garbage, something is bound to be worth more than you paid for it sometime. Your assumption that we will get back, however, puzzles me."

"If you had been fat like me when we set off on this trip, you'd be more cheerful," Huey needled him, but when Greyesar began to stagger Huey more or less carried him, looking anxiously around, until at last he sighed in exasperation and, yanking a branch with elaborate indifference, brought down a honey-comb. "Endurance and luck," he explained. "We used to find them in the desert."

Greyesar kissed him on both cheeks, saying, "I forgive you for the last thousand times you called me a twit."

Clark remembered that trip as a boys' outing, full of play and sudden danger, bickering, intimate, safe. Fear and dependence had dragged on them for weeks and now, with that gone, years evaporated. They tussled and wandered, then reminded themselves of their work and hastened solemnly toward the capital. A heavy winter rain, beginning on the fourth day, slowed them, but they consoled themselves that anyone persuing them would probably go home altogether now and headed back toward the road, where they needed only walk and keep an eye out for streams and edible shrubs.

Fresh tracks suddenly appeared and led them off the road to an abandoned camp in a hollow where a little grassy bog sank down to a narrow stream. They found horse droppings and a few live coals in the churned mud, but nothing more, a sign that Pahid had disencamped leisurely, not rushing into battle or retreat. Wandering back to the road, they debated whether to follow or keep to their route, but since he appeared to have headed south toward the capital also, their choice made no difference.

Clark had grown so used to the steady walking he and Paula had called the slog that Huey and Greyesar surprised him now with their sore feet, aching legs and crankiness. He had forgotten that simply walking was different from their scientific exercise, that it was largely a matter of practice in maintaining a state of mind. Watching his friends struggle to keep their footing, to hold their tempers and even, sometimes, not to cry, he wondered how he could have learned it himself so easily.

Toward the end of a long chilly afternoon spent climbing a steep incline in a mist that penetrated every muscle, Greyesar shouted in pain. Huey offered a hand, but the Eyimalian spurned it.

"What's wrong?" he asked.

"Cramp. Find me a stick, Hugh."

"Shall we pass the night here?" Huey suggested.

"No. Get me that branch."

Huey was already tramping out a flat place to sleep.

"No. We're almost there."

"Almost where? Sit down. I don't want to have to carry you."

They argued for a while, Greyesar hiking almost to the top of the ridge, Huey fanning coals without success, until Greyesar sat down on a rock and cramped his other leg. Then they looked around for something to eat, found nothing, and finally as the sun went down they satisfied themselves with some of the more nearly digestable leaves from the forest carpet and burrowed in for the night, Greyesar between the other two to keep warm.

Now the fire, which had resisted all puffing and blowing and fanning, blazed up. Around midnight, Clark saw or dreamed that it had ignited the bark of a sapling and next he felt human footsteps. Something touched his head, and he saw a woman's face lit by firelight, looking at him sadly as at a fond memory. He was certain he knew her. She laid her hand on his lips. Warm musk enveloped him as she moved her body closer. Something soft like a baby pressed on his face, choking him. When he opened his mouth to protest it flowed in.

Shaken, he almost began to kick, but then he clenched his fists to calm himself and looked up to where her teeth and chin were outlined on the orange sky. It was her breast in his mouth. He suckled as she bade him, drawing in a mixture of sweat and warm milk, his body trembling around the nourishing flow. When she spoke he could feel the vibration in the base of his tongue.

"Do you understand yet? Here!" She covered his nose. He was suffocating. It was impossible, but he felt that in one or two minutes he must surely die.

"You will find us under a boulder that leans against a cliff, before you come to the city," she said, holding him down without effort. As he gasped he suckled involuntarily. She let go. "Now you can forgive like a woman." When she walked away he recognized the girl who had used to tag behind him in the marsh city, the one who had run to show him a cloth spotted with her first blood and receive a hug of congratulation.

The next thing he knew, Huey was shaking him awake. The trees were burning. Dream or real? he thought as they ran crosswise to the fire's path.

If it were a nightmare, he himself had dreamed it, finally taking the great social wrongs into his own body and mind, letting them touch him as Paula had let them, forgiving as she had forgiven Maxwell, not for his sake or hers but for forgiveness alone. And if it were real, a rough joke, her way to tell him she had been raped and a test of his understanding? There was no reason why he should have been so frightened. She could never have choked him without waking the others, even had she been able to hold him down. It was still his own nightmare that terrified him, fear of being drawn back like Paula, drawn back to a time before reason like Tiyar. All this was in preparation for meeting him, Clark thought as he climbed the last summit.

His thoughts were immediately dispelled by what he saw. The valley was a flaming river. Roaring clashes of hot air with cold and the noise of crashing trees made him start back as though he expected the whole valley to collapse.

Below lay the capital and origin of the Lir, opposite rose a cliff and beyond it hills and mesas, on one of which the landing field's distinctive cone-pits and acceleration tracks appeared to waver in the heat. At the left end of the valley, flames bursting over a wall of earth surged toward great stone buildings tottering with the shock of explosions. At the right end, inside the broken circle of fortifications, stone houses of the priestly class burned within until the unsupported walls and rooftops crumbled, sending out jets of sparks and flame. Between these two ends were rows of wooden huts and houses, the neighborhoods of the city, and it was these that truly blazed. Here flames shot up to the treetops and paved the surface of the walkways, while showers of hot embers erupted continually.

People were shouting in the valley, distant and quiet as rustling grass against the inferno they had created. A mob swirled like smoke among the trees around the temple. Clark descended into the forest, the others following, and quickly lost his way.

He ran downhill, looking for a streambed. At times he or one of the others tripped in the darkness or they scattered, fleeing the crash of a tree as it fell and then regrouping, shouting for one another.

Voices shouted back in low Paffir. Clark headed toward them. A stone shot by. He dropped to the ground. A woman ran past, stopped to look and ran on. Clark followed her. She zigzagged a while among the trees, then headed downhill.

"Pimel!" Clark shouted. The woman stopped. She raised her hand, and before Clark saw the slingshot a stone bruised his shoulder. She ran away.

"Peace!" Clark yelled in low Paffir, but his attackers were making too much noise to hear him. He darted back and forth among the trees until they lost him.

Now he was near the fire. Flaming branches dropped left and right, igniting the underbrush. Clark listened to the voices around him, all varieties of modern low Paffir, many with Itscriyite accents. The woman he had been following ran past again. She whistled.

"Tiyar!" he shouted. "Where is Tiyar Kituman?"

It was Klyne. She raised her hand again. "Who calls?"

"Me. Clarek. What's going on?"

"Oh. Some fighting." She stepped closer and smiled, then saw Greyesar. Her mouth jerked downward. "Clarek, you are a man who was born of a woman. Please, no more ghosts."

A woman! That was the second time--but in this desperate place such expressions must come often. "No, he isn't a ghost. He--where are Tiyar and Akiva? Where is Fuego?"

"Fuego is gone. Tiyar--" She pointed to a rock leaning against a cliffside. So it was real.

Firelight did not penetrate the bed of old boulders in the cliff's apron, nor did the noise of battle. The bone-colored light of two moons gave way to blackness when they rounded the leaning rock. Had she been trying to tell him Tiyar was dead? Huey and Greyesar dropped back, saw a pale shaft at the next turn and came on. Others were following.

Between the rock and the cliffside thousands of freshets had bored out a cathedral-high cavern. A gap in its ceiling filled the chamber with the bloodless light. Tiyar lay on a shelf padded with straw. His ribs were crushed. When he turned his head, moonlight flickered on the surface of his eyeballs.

"It's not as bad as it looks," he whispered. "Nor contagious."

Clark moved nearer. "What's going on outside?" he asked.

Tiyar made a slight gesture. "Skirmish. Pahid." No one else bothered to elaborate.

Akiva stepped swiftly toward them, his robe billowing, and laid his arm across Clark's shoulder to murmur, "He is going back to the dead, and we...we have done harm, but when he is gone we will return to the city of knowledge."

Clark put his hand on Tiyar's head. The skin was cold. Beside him, in shadow, Pimel leaned forward. Her fingers drew absently in the dirt. There was a ghastly detachment in her steady gaze.

"Tiyar, Greyesar Uchide is here with me," Clark said in high Paffir.

Tiyar rolled his eyes toward Clark with another flash of moonlight. "I am the Uchide here. Look at me, Resheborian. I am dying of a wound that would make your doctors laugh. You survive me..." He turned his head. "You bested me...with Greyesar, with Paula, with history. I will be forgotten as a monster and you remembered as the one who brought the new crop that sustains us...Fuego and Berthe sustain us. And you have bested me with Sevit. He will remember you."

"Let's carry him up to the landing field and see if we can hail a ship," Greyesar said.

"Privilege," Tiyar sneered. "Take Pimel. She will represent Paffir Eket before the Eyimalian lawyers...she is pregnant."

Pimel shuddered at her name. "I was asleep and you woke me up," she said harshly, thrusting her face out into the bluish light.

"Yes, you were asleep and I woke you." Tiyar's eyes closed, and he appeared to be fainting, but when Clark moved close he turned his hand to reveal a Puro and said, "Leave me here."

Now the chamber was full of silent people sitting on the floor and perched in the gaps and ledges all the way to the roof. More filed in, their bare feet brushing the stone.

"Tiyar!" they whispered together, as at a signal. The chamber reverberated in delicate sorrow, as if stone and stone, leaning together, mingled their tresses and wept.

Greyesar and Huey stepped forward. Tiyar's eyes flickered, closed again and re-opened, looking at Hugh. He had seen the explosive shirt. "Huey!" he breathed.

"Yes?"

"Hugh!"

"Yes?" Hugh took a step toward him. Greyesar pulled his arm.

"This world calls you."

Clark took Hugh's other arm and felt him trembling. Why didn't we get it off him in all these weeks, he accused himself. Pick out the biocloth with a knifepoint, undo the gadgets, sensors last, on a cliff or a gorge or a hillside where we could drop the thing over before it blew. We could have done it in a morning. But then we might still have needed him wired if we'd stumbled into the wrong camp. And he's waited all his life.

Tiyar motioned to someone and said in low Paffir, "Take him to Lir Temple. Show him what is there."

"Wait," Clark protested, but no one had moved.

"Say nothing. No lies. Show what is there."

"But that's a lie," Clark began. Huey shook his head. There was silence.

At length Tiyar whispered, "You mean transient. This room is a lie, this moonlight...In truth, the forest is burning. In truth the forest is always burning." He paused and spat blood. "Day is a lie in the universe of night. Life is a lie in death. Go to the Lir Temple, Hugh. Triumph!" He motioned with one hand to Pimel. She shook her head.

"Lir Temple is filled with bones," he went on. It was unbearable that he should speak so long. His pain oppressed them, demanding silence. "On top, the hair is still rotting. Underneath a white powder as deep as--" He raised his forearm, let it drop and lay still. "Sacrifices. You, Hugh, be the last."

"Last," Hugh echoed.

"But what good--" Clark interrupted.

"For rain, Hugh! Peasants from everywhere...sacrificed. For rain."

Clark looked desperately at Greyesar, but he was staring over all their heads as though frozen.

"Once I told the priests in a temple they would do better to tear it down and worship in mud with the pigs," Akiva said. "But if you want to destroy this temple, you would do better to spend your life weaving tapestry for its altars. If you think good and bad are buildings, you should do the opposite of every impulse, because you will always be wrong."

Clark tried to repeat this in Eyimalian, but after a few stammered words he lost the chain of reasoning and gave up. The crowd made a low sound. They were breathing in unison.

"I am a body. The world is a place. People suffer," Tiyar replied.

Klyne moved into the space between Greyesar, still looking at no one, and Huey. "We have too many dying already," she said. Clark translated, and Huey turned to her with a look as though he began to remember a different time. At that moment Greyesar's two hands came down on Hugh's shoulders in a precise fall, turned his body and guided him out of the cave.

They ran, first aiming for the landing field across the river and then simply downhill and finally anywhere away from the fire as they grew increasingly lost. The crash of the firebombs stopped, and either the stones were no longer flying or they went out of their range. Thick groundfog betrayed the morning, but they could make out no sun.

As the fog lifted, it began to rain. Clark was almost convinced they had wandered out of the Lir Valley altogether, following one of its tributaries, when they came to a camp on the shore.

Whose? They leaned against trees. Huts had been erected by the paling water now dappled with little rings around the raindrops, smooth at a distance, full of light. Swollen black rainclouds sank into the middle sky below the white upper cover shining with dawn.

Two figures came down from the huts to a long-needled tree at the riverside. The first, Clark decided, must be Akiva or Pahid. The second, clad in a rough-looking tunic, was too big for a native but small for an Eyimalian. A local hero? Fuego? Too thin.

Greyesar and Huey sat down. Clark edged out onto the mucky plain. He heard singing. That was the voice that had startled them in the dining hall by invoking Marlow Maxwell's name.

The rain stopped. The first man doffed his cloak, uncovering skin the color of granite, plunged waist-deep into the icy river, singing the while, and moved away upstream lest the water warm around him. Clark walked nearer. The clouds broke. The tree swayed, still dripping in the sunlight. Raising its head to the sky, the second figure shed its tunic. Bright droplets from the now-golden tree dropped thickly. Clark rushed forward and the figure spread its arms. It was Sevit Uchide.

"Clarkwell!" he shouted, dropping to his knees to embrace him. "Clarkwell, my intrepid darling, I so hoped you would be among them. And the other two of you? Not hurt?"

"No, no," he said quickly. "Resting. I mean--who? Or--Come on, let's switch clothes. I'll let Pahid catch me and you keep running. Friends will be right behind you. That is--"

Sevit was laughing. "How can you still be alive? You give yourself so freely. No, no, I understand. I thank you. My gratitude is inadequate to your generosity and your courage--really, Clarkwell, no joking. I'm serious. I know what he did to Paula, what you mean when you offer yourself in my place. He told me all that. But I don't need to escape him now." Standing up again, he called, "Pahid! They are here!" in high Paffir.

Pahid came back. "How did you get loose?" he demanded without any greeting.

Clark looked down, trying not to smile. "We overpowered the guard." Sevit laughed outright. He felt himself blushing.

Pahid clicked his tongue in disgust. "Babies. I should have sent more of them."

Sevit said, "No, this is fine. They have come here, freely and in good earnest, ready to deal with you as equals rather than vexing and trying to outwit you as they would if you tried to imprison them. Why are you worried? Everything has happened as I said, hasn't it?"

Pahid looked at him with the grudging agreement Clark recalled from university speeches, when Sevit used to field questions from the audience and win over the planted hecklers. Looking beyond him at the forest, Clark saw the other two creeping forward. He beckoned them.

"My cousin Greyesar!" Sevit cried in Eyimalian. "He has been getting me out of scrapes since I was a little boy. I'm flattered that you came looking for me, cousin."

Greyesar said, "Hi, Shortie," but evidently could think of nothing else.

Sevit extended his palm to Hugh. "And of course I recognize you, sir. My name is Sevit Uchide. I'm deeply honored that you have come."

Huey touched and smiled. "Actually, it was involuntary."

"You must all be hungry. I am Pahid's prisoner, of course, so my claim upon his hospitality is unquestionable, but if you will consent to be his guests for an hour he will gladly have food brought us," Sevit said.

"What we need is medicine for my other cousin, Tiyar Kituman," Greyesar told him. "We're going up to the landing field to see if we can signal any kind of ship."

"The equipment is taken," Sevit answered thoughtfully. "There was a small clinic there, but no longer...In any case, I understand it is a full day's climb, so you ought to have breakfast if you go." He translated his offer to Pahid, who nodded curtly and called to one of the men emerging from the huts with fishnets, baskets, axes and other tools for daily work.

Clark was trying to forge a question that would bring sense from all this, particularly the strange cordiality between Sevit and Pahid, at once shocking and eminently sensible. "How long have you known him?" he asked.

"Just a few weeks. I believe Marlow Maxwell was responsible for my being transferred to his care."

Old men were approaching with bread. Huey thanked them in Eyimalian, for lack of a better language. Greyesar quietly bit off a chunk the size of his palm and crammed it into his mouth. Clark watched him, wondering how he would chew it. Turning to the guards, Greyesar asked in high Paffir for water.

Clark burst out laughing. The old men studied him gravely, shaking their heads. They called a woman old enough to be their mother, who leaned close to him, smirked and went away. It must have been like this at the boundary of the two mansions in Eyimalia City, where between fights and expeditions and surrounded, like all children, by the inexplicable, the little Uchides picked up a few words of the Viyato tongue. "Were you surprised that you could understand Pahid?" he asked Sevit.

"I thought it was a dream. And he is a remarkable man, very courageous."

"He's a murderer, too. Has he told you how he restored order up north? He killed everyone who didn't have a house to hide in."

"Yes. We have been explaining things to one another. But you can tell me what has happened on Eyimalia. The Dagrov are gone now, I take it. So the Uchide and the Viyato come head to head?"

"He knew about that?"

"No. It was a guess. And this planet?"

Clark began to speak quickly. "If we can find a planetary representative, the commission might give Paffir Eket autonomy, but your family and the Viyato are both trying to get protectorship--"

"Commission? An Eyimalian committee must be convinced to grant autonomy to this world?" Sevit waved his hand toward the muddy field and the river. "Nonsense. This is a planet. Eyimalia's opinion on that fact does not matter."

"Well, of course, but--"

"What? They demand a representative of a world that does not even know itself as a world yet, to satisfy laws they have no authority to make. Nonsense. Besides, who could negotiate on this planet's behalf? Pahid would think he was speaking to gods."

"We have someone named Akiva--" Clark hesitated, trying to imagine how he would explain the situation to him. It seemed incredible now that he had ever expected it to be simple.

Greyesar said, "He spoke to us just now about destroying temples, I believe." Clark nodded, and Greyesar repeated Akiva's speech, in high Paffir. So he understood.

Huey was looking up at the hills across the river. "I suppose your plans require some means of transport, hm?"

They all looked up at the mesa where the field must be, now bright in the sun against a clearing sky. The clouds separated in firm clusters, white on the crests and pink on the rolling under-surface. "My ship is doubtless elsewhere. Still, we'll go up and have a look, shall we, Grey?"

Greyesar also changed the subject abruptly, not in annoyance but as one returning a bow. "Guess who's running the family these days, Shortie. Adelaide and Malenyk."

"Malenyk. I see." Sevit thought about this for a moment. "And--and Paula?"

He must have had some suspicion, Clark thought, or he would have asked after her at once. Pahid returned his stare coldly. Had he simply not guessed the relationship, or had some bizarre moral notion forbidden him to tell Sevit what had become of her? There was no knowing. Looking at the priest, Clark once again felt the familiar and always surprising awe of Sevit that used to seize him in the old days, while listening or reading his work or just chatting, seeing him kiss Paula or lift a cup. To look at Pahid and see a human being, to not merely guess at or touch his humanity but to grasp and hold it in mind and talk calmly with it while he was in the man's power, at the brink of the horrors with which the Lir Temple and the Viyatos and years of a life essentially mad had surrounded that human core, required a strength Clark could barely imagine.

"She's dead, Shortie," Greyesar answered.

"Dead--ah!" Huey and Greyesar each took one of Sevit's hands and watched sympathetically, as if he were taken with an allergy they did not suffer, while he laid his face on his knees and wept. "Tell me, Hugh," he whispered. "You lost so many--is it any help to mourn?"

"Sometimes."

Pahid got up and walked away.

Sevit looked after him. "When he buried his two sons, days passed before he could--before he could weep. But then, it was from losing the Middle Plains that he has never recovered, or perhaps before that, from Berthe. In origin, from being Pahid. He was born. He can never forgive us because he was born. A minor penalty quickly served, this life. He is being a coward." He stood up to call after Pahid, but Greyesar pushed him down.

All morning Sevit paced along the river, Clark beside him, while Huey and Greyesar set out for the landing field. A little after sunrise the thudding and sharp crack of catapulted stones on earth and rock began again, and sometimes wind eddies brought smoke or a blast of warm air that crusted the stiller pools with refrozen snow, until the noise climaxed in a roar of continuing crashes at midday. "I believe the city has fallen," Sevit said.

Clark listened. "So that's the end, then."

"It has fallen before, only to be retaken. In this valley there remain only people who have forgotten everything but fighting. All the rest are gone. You can see them walking downriver in the evenings, or setting off in rafts. Even since I met him, Pahid's army has dwindled by two thirds."

"Where did they go?"

"East, to the new Ayekar. I met a woman named Berthe travelling south from the Middle Plains surrounded by banners with alphabets, and drawings of leaves and roots, going to rebuild the city of knowledge."

"Akiva said he would go back--" Clark suggested.

"Yes, I would do so. And she is your planetary representative."

"Then you do think we need one?"

"She is one. Paffir Eket needs everything it can use to outwit the law-givers of our conceited worlds. Now the first generation is learning, but the sprout has not broken the earth, as Akiva would say. We will need to fight on Eyimalia and Reshebora. Malenyk will have to pay for his high-flown speeches by helping us, I think. Perhaps I will charge him a hundred casheeks a word to pay our legal fees. Otherwise, one of us will have to become a lawyer," Sevit mused, grinning. His expression collapsed. "Paula, the mathematician of havoc. What a lawyer she could have been; she loved order. Were you kind to each other?"

"We--"

"Lovers?"

"Well, yes."

Sevit took up Clark's hand and examined it, then pressed it between his own as if to absorb her touch. They paced in silence, the way they had often waited for her in the old days.

Late in the afternoon, Pahid came to find them. "Keep in sight," he growled.

"Has the city fallen?" Clark asked in high Paffir.

"They knocked down the wall. Temple's still there. I'll spend winter upriver. Rebuild in spring."

"Why?" Sevit asked him.

Pahid sat down on a flat rock that extended over the water and looked up at them, his face in shadow. "Why not?"

"A new capital is being built, and that is where Paffir Eket will need you. I told you, the old gods are not coming back. You can see that this is so. Only vanity would rebuild a city here where there is no one to live in it."

"Go to Berthe. Go to the heavenless sheep and make friends, walk barefoot to win her forgiveness--" he choked.

"I expect you to forgive her for learning from you, yes. Don't forget that I have forgiven you everything, even what Paula--" Sevit stopped, and they watched the sun set before anyone spoke.

Clark took the Shira ring out of his pocket.

"So you found that. When I heard you were in the same hut from which they had taken me, I wondered--no, don't hold it up to me. Pahid treats me well, and the man who could not speak was a faithful jailor, but before them came things I have never--how is Efirr Nije?"

"He's dead. He killed himself. I think it was to make me believe he was telling the truth. He told me he'd killed you and then he, probably as part of a deal with them, for your sake--" Clark tried to put the ring into Sevit's hand, but he turned his palm downward.

"What is that?" Pahid asked. Clark showed it to him. "You have a ring from Ather?"

"Efirr," Sevit corrected.

"Betrayed you?"

"Yes. No, he--what did he tell you, Clarkwell?"

"At first I was protecting everyone, then I was protecting Sevit, and finally I was protecting no one at all."

"Died for you?" Pahid insisted.

"Yes."

"And then you were here. They sent me to free you as Fey frees Verloring," Pahid said, looking into the water.

"Should I wear this ring?" Sevit asked him.

The priest turned his head to study them. Already, now that the rose of sunset had faded, his skin was turning blue. "Yes. He made us gods."

"I'm not a god."

"You were for that moment, idiot. For a human being to become a god for the time between two heartbeats transforms earth and heaven utterly. Look." He pointed upwrd. The two moons were rising in close proximity. "The last time they touched I was traveling in remote country, but still they flocked a dozen thick all round me, priests and peasants. And the time before that, at Lir Temple. My way from city to temple was laid in silk, piled to the knees with fresh flowers. The buildings decked with flags. We held a feast near here, by the river. They touched in mid-morning, but even so from Lir Temple you could see the Weeping Moon."

"Where?"

"He pointed to a rock-face on the mesa. "It appears there."

"But that's not real," Clark objected.

Pahid sneered.

As they looked at the rock-face, a shadow fluttered slowly down it like a descending flag and came toward them. They heard Greyesar's voice say, "Right there."

"Still living!" Huey called.

Greyesar said, "We found some abandoned machinery including a salvageable air cart, as you see, but the infirmary had been destroyed..." Already they were drifting away.

"Going to see Tiyar," Huey called.

"He's dead," Pahid muttered.

Sevit called, "He is dead."

"...to the funeral..." was all they heard of the answer. People were coming out of the camp behind them with torches. Two of them held up Pahid's gorgeously worked robe while a third helped him into it. Another old woman hung little bells all along the gown's edges. Clark strained to hear their ringing under the noise of feet and voices as they proceded along the increasingly bright Lir toward the temple, and to smell the cold earth and fresh uko beneath the acrid stink of ashes.

Around the temple, burnt trees poked up broken twigs, accusingly blackened and smoking, in the starry sky. Closer, even these rebukes were gone and they came to a silent black carpet strewn in places with rubble, softly and shadowlessly illuminated by the moons. There were people there, and beyond their murmur and the tinkling bells Clark heard a shrill warbling, too high for ordinary voices. At first he thought the Itscriyites had retreated from the valley and were shrieking on distant hillsides, perhaps massed to attack them.

Listening closely to the high song, Clark distinguished voices. It was the Daybreaker children, coming up from their camp downriver to see Akiva dance the moons. At the clearing their choir dissolved and they ran, yelling, through the ashes in search of their priest. Some hung their garlands on Pahid instead.

Akiva came directly from the Lir, cold water streaming down the cotton tunic someone had stolen somewhere for him, glistening on the leaves and berries the children hung along his limbs. He greeted Sevit by name.

At a signal from Pahid, the temple doors, enormous, weathered and creaking, carved with a mandala of angry gods, began to move. Shadows raced over insets depicting the same legends, as in other temples, but in a horrific tone the provinces had forgotten. Daughters of Autumn simpered evilly together while cramming the vernal Infant underneath a stone. Earth yanked Zatoye from his mother Fea's breast.

Fetid smoke billowed out from the black interior, where Clark thought he glimpsed fantastic altars heaped with human bones and a central pillar carved as an all-destroying Hath, knife bare, treading steps of fire. The wind rushed in, whirled around the altars and blew a cloud of white dust out over the blackened field and the people, clothing them in white snow, then the hinges recoiled. The doors escaped the old men holding them and swung shut. The crowd muttered, grouping around the two dust-whitened priests.

"Moontouch portent!" someone shouted, and the chant was taken up. "Moontouch portent! Moontouch portent!" they called.

Quick as a shadow, Greyesar stepped up behind Sevit and pulled him back.

"Let's go now," Huey said to Clark, and in seconds they were in the air cart, moving a little above the river's surface along a trail of moonlight.

"But Akiva--" Clark said.

"They'll come along afterward."

Clark looked back to the bone-whitened clearing, bright as a third moon, where the crowd was still shouting for a portent. Akiva pointed upward and they fell silent. The moons touched. The dancers leapt.

END

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