At Winter's End

3 The Place Without Walls

A scouring wind cut across the dry plains, lifting the thin sandy soil and whirling it into dark clouds. Here scarcely anything grew: it was as if the surface of the world had been cut clean by a great blade passing close across it, stripping away all topsoil and every seed.

To the right of the marchers, not far away, lay a line of low rounded hills, blue-gray and barren. To the left an endless flatland stretched away toward the horizon. There was a sharp edge to the air, and its flavor was an acrid one. Yet the day was significantly warmer than any that had preceded it. This was the third week of the march.

In the stillness of the afternoon came a strange grunting sound, a distant dull noise like none that anyone of the People had ever heard.

Staip turned to Lakkamai, who marched beside him. “Those hills are talking to us.”

Lakkamai shrugged and said nothing.

“They’re saying, Go back, go back, go back, ” said Staip.

“How can you tell that?” Lakkamai asked. “It’s just a noise.”

Harruel had noticed it too. He paused and turned, shading his eyes against the glare. After a moment he leaned forward into the wind and shook his head and laughed, and pointed to the hills.

“Mouths,” he said.

His eyes were extraordinarily keen. The other warriors shaded their eyes as he had done, but they saw only hills. “What do you mean, mouths?” Staip said.

“In front of the hills. Big peculiar animals sitting there, making that barking sound. They don’t have any bodies,” Harruel said. “Just mouths. Can’t you see?”

Koshmar by now had seen also. Coming to Harruel’s side, she said, “Look at those things. Do you think they’re dangerous?”

“They just sit there,” said Harruel. “If they don’t move from the spot they can’t hurt us, can they? But I’ll go over and check them out at closer range.” He turned. “Staip! Salaman! Come with me!”

“May I go too?” Hresh asked.

“You?” Harruel chuckled. “Yes. We’ll toss you in, and see what happens to you.”

“No,” said Hresh. “But may I come?”

“Keep back out of harm, if you do.”

They went loping across the plain toward the hills, the three warriors and Hresh, who was hard pressed to keep up with them. At close range the grunting, barking sound was oppressively loud, sending a shivering vibration through the ground, and it was clear to everyone now that Harruel was right about its origin. At the foot of the line of hills sat a row of perhaps a dozen immense blue-black hump-shaped creatures spaced equidistantly at wide intervals. They seemed to have no limbs or bodies at all, but were mere immobile giant heads with dull staring eyes. In a steady, regular rhythm they opened the vast caverns of their mouths and emitted their booming, croaking cries.

All across the plain, small animals were moving toward them as though gripped with hypnotic fervor by those dull flat sounds. One by one they strode or crawled or hopped or slithered unhesitatingly toward the great heads, and up over the rims of their dark red lower jaws, and into the black maw beyond.

“Keep back,” Harruel said sharply. “If we get too close we may be drawn in like that too.”

“I don’t feel any pull,” said Staip.

“Nor I,” said Salaman. “Just a little tickle, maybe. But — Hresh! Hresh, come back!”

The boy had edged forward until he had moved out in front of the warriors. Now he was walking out across the plain toward the heads in an odd jerky way, shoulders twitching, knees rising almost to his waist with each step. His sensing-organ was twisted around his body like a sash.

“Hresh!” Harruel yelled.

Hresh was no more than fifty paces from the nearest of the heads now, moving as if in a dream. The rhythm of the booming sounds picked up. The ground shook violently. With an angry toss of his head Harruel rushed forward and caught the boy around the middle, snatching him off the ground. Hresh stared at him with unseeing eyes.

“One of these days your curiosity will kill you,” Harruel said annoyance.

“What? What?”

“The boy’s in a daze,” Staip said. “That sound — it was sucking him right in—”

“I feel it too, now,” said Salaman. “It’s like a drum summoning us. Boom — boom — boom—”

Harruel looked back and stared in fascination and horror. Salaman was right: the sound had a kind of magnetic force, pulling in creatures from all over the plain to be devoured. Bending suddenly, Harruel snatched up a rock the size of his hand and hurled it furiously toward the gaping mouth. But it fell short by five or ten paces.

“Come,” he said, his voice loud, rasping. “Let’s get away from these things before it’s too late.”

Back toward the marchers they ran, Harruel carrying Hresh lest he be hypnotized a second time and go dashing off again to his doom. Behind them the sound of the great heads grew louder and more insistent for a time, then faded with distance.

When the men reached the tribe they found everything in chaos and confusion. A new attack of bloodbirds had commenced. The fierce white-eyed creatures had come suddenly out of the darkness to the east in a dense swarm and were whirling and shrieking above the tribe, darting down to thrust with their razor-keen beaks. Delim was struggling with one that had engulfed her entire head in its beating wings, and Thhrouk was fighting with two at once. Lakkamai, hurrying forward, pulled the bloodbird away from Delim and tore it in half. The woman crouched down, holding both hands to an eye streaming with blood. Harruel chopped the air with his spear, skewering one and then another. Koshmar cried encouragement, fighting among the others. The dull booming of the far-off mouth-creatures still could be heard, and the wild piercing cries of the bloodbirds above it.

The battle lasted ten minutes. Then the birds disappeared as quickly as they had come. Six of the tribe had been wounded, Delim the most seriously. Torlyri bandaged her eye, but she would not have the sight of it again. Harruel had sustained two deep gouges on his spear-arm. Konya too had been injured. Everyone was weary and dispirited.

And now night was coming on. The last light of the dying sun drenched the flatland in a flood of crimson.

“All right,” Koshmar said. “It’s too late to continue. We’ll pitch our camp here.”

Harruel shook his head. “Not here, Koshmar. We need to get farther away from those mouth-things. Can you hear them? The sound they make is dangerous. We’ll have people going to them in the night, walking right into their jaws like sleepwalkers, if we stay here.”

“Do you mean that?”

“We nearly lost Hresh,” Harruel said. “He was heading straight for one.”

“Yissou!” Koshmar contemplated the great heads on the horizon for a moment, frowning. Then she spat and said, “Very well. Let’s move on.”

They marched until it was too dark to go any farther. The booming of the great heads was only faintly audible here. Aching, sore of foot, blistered of soul, the People dropped down in relief in a place where a feeble stream seeped from the sand.

“It was a mistake,” Staip said quietly.

“Leaving the cocoon, you mean?” Salaman asked. “You think we should have stayed? Taken our chances against the ice-eaters?”

Harruel glowered at them. “We were right to make the Coming Forth,” he said firmly. “There is no question but that it was the right thing to do.”

“I meant coming this way,” said Staip. “Koshmar was wrong to bring us out into these miserable plains. We should have turned south, toward the sunlight.”

“Who knows?” Harruel said. “One way is as good as another.”

In the darkness there were strange sounds all night: hissings, cacklings, far-off shrillings. And always the distant throb of the giant heads, booming their song of hunger as they waited by the base of the barren hills for their helpless prey to come to them.

It was the fifth week of the journey. Torlyri, rising at daybreak as always so that she could make the sunrise-offering, rolled and stretched and clambered to her feet. The sun bathed her in a cheerful glow. Quietly she went out of the camp where everyone still lay sleeping, and searched until she found a suitable site for performing her offering, a little way to the west. It seemed a holy place: a sheltered declivity where thousands of small red-backed insects were industriously building an intricate turreted structure out of the sandy earth. She knelt beside it, said the words, named the Names, prepared the offering.

The dawn sunlight felt strong and warm and good. She had begun to notice, in the past few days, that the weather seemed to be growing more agreeable. At first she had awakened stiff and shivering in a cold mist every day, but now the morning air seemed softer and milder, though not yet soft, not yet mild.

It was a sign that stirred hope in her. Perhaps this really was the New Springtime, after all.

Torlyri had never been certain of that. Like all the rest of the tribe she had allowed herself to be swept along out of the cocoon by Koshmar’s insistent optimism. Out of love for Koshmar she had not voiced any strong opposition, but Torlyri knew that there were some within the tribe who would have preferred to remain in the cocoon. Going forth was a tremendous step. It was such a change that Torlyri could scarcely believe they had done it. The tribe had lived in its cocoon forever; or almost forever, which was the same thing. Hundreds of thousands of years, so poor old Thaggoran had always said! It was impossible for Torlyri to imagine what sort of span of time hundreds of thousands of years might be, or even a thousand years. A thousand years was forever. A hundred thousand years was a hundred times forever.

But they had obediently come marching out, after living a hundred times forever in their cocoon. Like people walking in their dreams they had followed Koshmar outside, into a world of sudden dangers.

Those ferocious snarling chittering rat-wolves: a lucky thing the tribe had had some warning of them, or they would have taken more lives than just two, that was certain. Then the bloodbirds — what a ghastly task that had been, beating them off! And the leathery-winged ones who followed them. And then after them, there had been—

There was no end, Torlyri knew, to the perils that lurked in these plains. And it was cold out here, even now, and dry and dishearteningly bleak, and there were no walls. There were no walls. The cocoon offered total security: here there was none at all.

What if they had come out of the cocoon too early?

True, it had been centuries since the last great cataclysm, according to Thaggoran. But this might just be one of the quiet intervals between one death-star and the next.

Minbain had expressed the same anxiety a day or two before, when she had come to Torlyri to have the communion of Mueri. It was the third time in a week that Minbain had asked for that communion. The march seemed harder on her than on most of the other women, perhaps because she was older, though there were others even older than Minbain who were bearing up well. But she was haggard and dejected, and full of uncertainties.

“Thaggoran used to tell us,” Minbain said, “that as much as five thousand years would go by in peace, in the time when the death-stars were falling. But that didn’t mean that it was all over. Always, after a time of no death-stars, a new death-star would come. How can we be sure that the world has seen the last of them?”

“Yissou the Protector has brought us forth,” said Torlyri soothingly, hating herself for the smoothness with which she spoke the comforting lie.

“And if it wasn’t the Protector who brought us forth?” Minbain asked. “If it was the Destroyer?”

“Peace,” Torlyri whispered. “Come close to me, Minbain. Let me ease your soul.”

But there was little repose for her own. Though she strived to hide it, she was as fearful as Minbain. There was no assurance that this was the true Time of Coming Forth. Torlyri believed that the gods did mean them well; but there was no comprehending the workings of the gods, who might in their great wisdom have led the tribe into fatal error. How could anyone know what was to come? Why, tomorrow or the next day or the day after that the terrible fire of a death-star’s tail might be seen streaming across the heavens, and then the whole world would shake with the force of the collision, and the sky would grow black and the sun would be hidden and all warmth would flee and all warmth-loving creatures that were unable to find shelter in time would perish. That had happened so often before, in the seven hundred thousand years of the Long Winter: how could they be certain it would not happen again? The tribe owed it to humanity to preserve itself until the world’s long nightmare was finally over.

It is possible that we are the only ones left anywhere, Torlyri thought.

The idea was frightening. Just one fragile little band of some sixty men and women and children standing between humankind and extinction! Can we dare take any risk of destruction, she wondered, if we are the sole remnant of our kind? It was as though they bore the burden of all the millions of years of humanity’s stay upon the earth: everything coming down to this one little band, these few frail stragglers wandering the bleak plains. And that was terrifying.

Still, the days were growing warmer.

It would have been folly for the People to huddle in their cocoon until the end of time, waiting for absolute knowledge that it was finally safe to emerge. The gods never gave you absolute knowledge of anything. You had to take your chances, and have faith. Koshmar believed it was safe to have come forth. The omens told her so. And Koshmar was the chieftain. Torlyri knew she could never see things with the clear, bold sight of Koshmar. That was why Koshmar was chieftain, and she a mere priestess.

She busied herself now with the sunrise-offering. Gradually she began to feel better. Yissou did protect and nourish. The gods had not betrayed them by allowing Koshmar to bring the People forth. All would be well. They had passed through great danger, and dangers aplenty still waited for them ahead: but all would be well. They dwelled in the protection of Yissou.

The Time of Going Forth had made the invention of a new sunrise rite necessary. No more the daily interchange of things from within the cocoon and things from without. Instead, now, Torlyri filled a bowl every evening with bits of grass and soil from whatever place they happened to have been spending the night at, and in the morning she waved it toward the four corners of the sky and invoked the protection of the gods, and then she carried that bowl’s contents onward to empty it that evening at the next campsite. That way Torlyri constructed a continuity of sacredness as the People made their way across the face of this unfamiliar world.

Creating that continuity seemed vital to her. With Thaggoran dead, it was as though the whole past had been lopped away, and the tribe orphaned, left now without ancestors or heritage. They were stumbling forward in the dark, guessing at all they must do. With their yesterdays so cruelly severed from them by the death of their chronicler, they must build a new skein of history stretching into the years to come.

When Torlyri was done with that morning’s rite she rose to return to camp. Unexpectedly something moved beneath her feet, in the earth. She looked down, scuffed at the sandy ground, felt it quiver in response to her probing. Putting down her bowl, she brushed away the surface soil and exposed what looked like a thick glossy pink cord buried a short distance underneath. It wriggled in a convulsive way as if annoyed. Gingerly she touched a fingertip to it, and it wriggled again, so vigorously that two arm’s lengths of it burst free of the ground and arched into the air like a straining cable. The head and the tail of the thing remained hidden.

“What a nasty worm!” came a voice from above. “Kill it, Torlyri! Kill it!”

She looked up. Koshmar stood at the top of the slope.

“Why are you here?” Torlyri asked.

“Because I didn’t want to be there,” Koshmar said, smiling in an oddly self-conscious way.

Torlyri understood. There was no mistaking that smile. Koshmar must want to twine, something that they had not done since leaving the cocoon.

In the cocoon there had been twining-chambers for such intimacies; here no privacy was to be found under the great open bowl of the sky. And in the tensions and strangeness of the trek twining somehow had seemed inappropriate. Still, twining was essential to the welfare of one’s soul. For Koshmar, apparently, it could be put off no longer. So she had followed Torlyri to the offering-place; and Torlyri was glad of it. Warmly she extended a hand to her twining-partner. Koshmar scrambled down the slope beside her.

The cable-creature in the ground was still writhing. Koshmar drew her knife. “If you won’t kill it, I will.”

“No,” Torlyri said.

“No? Why not?”

“It hasn’t harmed us. We don’t know what it is. Why don’t we just let it be, Koshmar, and go somewhere else?”

“Because I hate it. It’s a hideous thing.”

Torlyri stared strangely at her. “I’ve never heard you talk that way before. Killing for the mere sake of killing, Koshmar? That isn’t like you. Let it be. All right? To kill without need is a sin against the Provider. Let the creature be.” Something was troubling Koshmar deeply, that was clear. Torlyri sought to divert her. “Look over here, at the castle these insects have built.”

Indifferently Koshmar said, “How amazing.”

“It is! Look, they’ve made a little gate, and windows and passageways, and down here—”

“Yes, it’s wonderful,” said Koshmar without looking. She put her knife away; evidently she had lost interest in the cable-creature also. “Twine with me, Torlyri,” she said.

“Of course. Right here, do you think?”

“Right here. Now. It’s been a million years.”

“Yes. Yes, of course.”

Torlyri nodded. Tenderly she brushed her hand against her partner’s cheek and they lay down together. Their sensing-organs touched, withdrew, touched again. Then gently they wound their sensing-organs one about the other in the delicate and intricate movements of the twining, and they entered into the first stages of their joining.

One by one they achieved the levels of linkage, easily, readily, with the skill born of long knowledge of each other. They had been twining-partners since they were girls; they had never wanted anyone else, as though they had been born as the two halves of a single whole. For some it was difficult to attain twining, but never for Koshmar and Torlyri.

Still, there were little hesitations and missed connections this time that Torlyri did not expect. Koshmar was unusually tense and taut; her whole soul seemed rigid, like a bar of some pliant metal that has been left in a cold place. Perhaps it is simply that we have not twined for a long time, Torlyri thought. But more likely the problem was something more complex than mere abstinence. She opened herself to Koshmar and as their souls merged she strove to take from Koshmar whatever dark troublesome thing had invaded her soul.

It was a communion far more intimate than mere coupling, which was an act that Koshmar had always scorned and which Torlyri had tried two or three times over the years without finding much reward in it. Most members of the tribe coupled rarely, for coupling often led to breeding, and breeding was necessarily a rare event, since the need for replacement of tribesfolk was so infrequent in the cocoon. But twining — ah, twining, that was something else! Twining was a way of love, yes, and a way of healing, and in some instances a way also of attaining knowledge that could not be had by any other means; and it was much more besides.

Their bodies held each other and their souls held each other and together they floated down and down and down, through all the levels that led to their goal of warm dark union, drifting like feathers on warm gusts, weightless, effortlessly carried onward, passing without difficulty around the rocky scarps and jagged boulders of the soul, negotiating with pure simplicity the treacherous canyons and gullies of the mind. Until at last they were fully joined and they were at oneness within each other, each encompassing and enclosing the other, each fully open to the flow and rush of the other’s soul. Torlyri sought for the source of Koshmar’s anguish, but she could not find it; and then in the joyous union of twining she no longer could devote herself to anything but the twining itself.

Afterward they lay close together, warm, fulfilled.

“Is it gone from you now?” Torlyri asked. “The shadow, the cloud that was on you?”

“I think it is.”

“What was it? Will you tell me?”

Koshmar was silent for a while. She seemed to be struggling to articulate the anguish within her, which Torlyri had been able to perceive in their twining only as a dark, hard knot that could neither be penetrated nor understood nor made to uncoil.

After a time Koshmar dug her fingers lightly into Torlyri’s dense black fur and said, as if from a great distance, “Do you remember what the hjjk-man said, his last words to us? There are no humans, flesh-woman, is what he said.”

“I remember that, yes.”

“It remains in my mind, and it burns me, Torlyri. What could he have meant by that?”

Torlyri turned so that her eyes were close to Koshmar’s shining intense ones. “He was speaking mere idle mischief. He wished to trouble our souls, that’s all. He was impatient, he was bothered because we weren’t letting him pass. So he said something that he hoped would hurt us. It was only a lie.”

“He spoke the truth about the rat-wolves,” Koshmar pointed out.

“Even so. That doesn’t mean that anything else he said was true.”

“But what if it was? What if we’re the only ones, Torlyri?” Koshmar seemed to force the words from the pit of her chest.

The chilling thought echoed Torlyri’s own baleful speculations of a little while before. Somberly she declared, “The same thing has occurred to me, Koshmar. And also the thought of the responsibility that lies upon us to survive, if we sixty are the only humans left in the world. If all the others perished in the hardships of the Long Winter.”

“The responsibility, yes.”

“How heavily it must weigh on you, Koshmar!”

“But I am less troubled, now. I feel stronger, now that we have twined, Torlyri.”

“Are you?”

Koshmar laughed. “Perhaps all I needed was to twine with you, eh? I was so full of gloom, such foreboding, such a sense that I had committed some crazy folly and that the punishment for folly is always terrible — and I knew that I was the only one responsible, that I was the one who had decided that we had to leave the cocoon, that Thaggoran had had his doubts and so had you—” She shook her head. “As always you’ve cheered me, Torlyri. You’ve shared your strength with me and enabled me to go on. The hjjk-man was lying, eh? We’re not the only ones. And we’ll find the others and together we’ll rebuild the world. Isn’t that so? Of course. Of course. Who could doubt it! Ah, Torlyri, Torlyri, how much I love you!”

And she embraced Torlyri joyously. But Torlyri responded halfheartedly. In the last few moments she had felt some change come over her soul, darkening it with a grim heavy shadow, The uncertainties of the day before had returned. The fate of the People once again seemed to her to be precariously suspended above an infinite abyss. She was lost now in doubts and despairs, as if Koshmar’s anguish had passed from her to her twining-partner in their communion.

“Is your spirit troubled now?” Koshmar asked after a time, pulling back.

“Perhaps it is.”

“I won’t allow it. Have you raised up my soul at the expense of your own?”

“If I’ve taken your fears from you, it pleases me greatly,” said Torlyri. “But now, yes, I suppose that the fears that troubled you lie heavy on me.” She scooped handfuls of sandy soil and tossed them about irritably. At length she said, “What if we are the only humans, Koshmar?”

“What if we are?” said Koshmar grandly. “Then we will inherit the earth, we sixty! We will make it our kingdom. We will repeople it with our kind. We must be very wary, that is all, for we are a rare precious thing, if we are the only humans there are.”

Koshmar’s sudden buoyance was irresistible. Almost at once Torlyri felt the dark moment beginning to lift.

“Still,” Koshmar went on, “it’s the same either way, whether we are the only humans or just a few out of millions. We must always go warily, past all the perils this world holds for us. For above all else we have to guard and preserve one another, and—”

“Oh, look — look, Koshmar!” Torlyri cried suddenly.

She pointed to the insect-castle. The cable-creature had yanked itself completely free of the ground at one end. It was enormously long, three or four times the length of a man. Looping high and swooping down, it was striking again and again at the elaborate walls and turrets of the structure. Its featureless, eyeless face ended in a gaping maw, and once it broke the castle open it began to devour the small red insects and their shattered ramparts of earth as well in a series of voracious gulps that would soon leave no trace of the builders or their work.

Koshmar shivered. “Yes: perils on all sides. I told you I wanted to kill it.”

“But it hasn’t harmed you.”

“And the insects whose castle it has destroyed?”

Torlyri smiled. “You owe them no favors, Koshmar. Every creature must eat, even nasty cable-things. Come, let it finish its breakfast in peace.”

“There are times I think you are less gentle than you seem, Torlyri.”

“Every creature must eat,” said Torlyri.

Leaving Torlyri to complete the sunrise rite that she had interrupted, Koshmar returned to the place where the tribe lay encamped. It was well past the sunrise hour now, and all the tribesfolk were up and moving about.

She stood atop a low hillock and peered toward the west. It was good to feel the warmth of the morning sun on her back and shoulders.

The land that lay before them was flattening out into a broad shallow bowl without mountains, without trees, almost without features of any kind. It was very dry here, sandy soil, no lakes, no rivers, only the most trifling of streams. Here and there the rounded stumps of little hills could be seen. They looked as though they had been ground down, polished smooth, by some gigantic force, as indeed most likely they had. Koshmar tried to imagine how it had been, deep layers of ice lying everywhere on the land, ice so heavy that it flowed like a river. Ice cutting into mountains, turning them to rubble, sweeping them away during the hundreds of thousands of years of the Long Winter. That was what Thaggoran said had happened in the world while the tribe nestled in its cocoon.

Koshmar wished she had Thaggoran with her now. No loss could have been more painful. She had not realized how much she relied upon him until he was gone. He had been the mind of the tribe, and the soul of it, and its eyes also. Without him they were like blind folk, lurching this way and that, knowing nothing of the mysteries that surrounded them on every side.

She brushed the thought away. Thaggoran had been important but he was not indispensable. No one was. She had refused to let his death subdue her spirit. Thaggoran or no Thaggoran, they would go on, and on and on and on, until they had strung their path clear around the round belly of the world if necessary, for it was their destiny to move forward until they had achieved whatever it was that they had been called into the world to achieve. They were a special folk, this tribe. That she knew. And she was a special leader. Of that too Koshmar was certain. Nothing could dissuade her of that.

Sometimes these days of the march, when she wavered even a little, when fatigue and sun-glare and dry cold winds carried doubt and fear and weakness into her soul, she summoned up Thaggoran out of death in her mind and used him to bolster her resolve. “What do you say, old man?” she would ask. “Shall we turn back? Shall we find a safe mountain somewhere and carve a new cocoon for ourselves?”

And he would grin. He would lean close to her, his rheumy red-rimmed old eyes searching hers, and he would say, “You speak nonsense, woman.”

“Do I? Do I?”

“You were born to bring us from the cocoon. The gods require it of you.”

“The gods! Who can understand the gods?”

“Exactly,” old Thaggoran would say. “It’s not our place to try to understand the gods. We are here simply to do their bidding, Koshmar. Eh? What do you say to that, Koshmar?”

And she would say, “We will go on, old man. You could never talk me into turning back.”

“I would never try,” he would say, as he turned misty and transparent and faded from her sight.

Staring now into the west, Koshmar tried to read the omens in the hard, flat blue sky. To the north there was a line of soft white clouds, very high, very far apart. Good. The gray clouds, low and heavy, were the snow-clouds. She could see none of those now. These were harmless. To the south there was a line of swirling dust on the horizon. That could mean anything. High winds knifing into the dry soil, maybe. Or a band of huge heavy-hooved beasts thundering this way. Or an enemy army on the march, even. Anything. Anything.

“Koshmar?”

She swung around. Harruel had joined her on the hillock without her hearing him. He stood looming behind her, a huge, powerful broad-shouldered thick-wristed figure half again her size, casting an enormous shadow that stretched off to the side like a black cloak flung across the ground. His fur was a dark brick-orange, clustering in bunches at his cheeks and chin to form a savage heavy red beard that all but concealed his features, leaving only his cold blue-black eyes blazing through.

It angered Koshmar that he had come up to her that way, in silence, and that he was standing so close to her now. There was a certain lack of respect in his standing so close.

Coolly she said, “What is it, Harruel?”

“How soon will we be breaking camp, Koshmar?”

She shrugged. “I haven’t decided. Why do you ask?”

“People are asking me. They dislike this place. It seems too dry to them, too dead. They want to pick up and move along.”

“If people have questions, they should bring them to me, Harruel.”

“You were nowhere to be found. You were off with Torlyri, we supposed. They asked me. And I had no answer for them.”

She regarded him steadily. There was a tone in his voice that she disliked and that she had never heard before. With the sound of his voice alone he seemed to be implying criticism of her: it was a sharp, fault-finding tone. There was almost a challenge in it.

“Do you have some problem, Harruel?”

“Problem? What kind of problem? I told you: they were asking me when we were going to leave here.”

“They should have asked me.”

“I said, you were nowhere to be found.”

“Better yet,” Koshmar said, going on as if Harruel had not spoken, “they should have asked no one, but simply waited to be told.”

“But they did ask me. And I had nothing to tell them.”

“Exactly,” said Koshmar. “There was nothing you could have told them. All you needed to say was ‘We will leave here when Koshmar says we are going to leave here.’ Such decisions are mine. Or would you prefer to make them for me, Harruel?”

He looked startled. “How could I do that? You’re the chieftain, Koshmar!”

“Yes. You’d do well to keep that in mind.”

“I don’t understand what you’re trying to—”

“Let me be,” she said. “Will you? Go. Go, Harruel.”

For an instant there was something like fury in his eyes, mixed with confusion and, perhaps, fear. Koshmar was uncertain about the fear. She had always thought she could read Harruel with ease, but not now. He stood for a moment glowering at her, parting his lips and clamping them again several times as though considering and rejecting various angry speeches; and then, making a grudging gesture of respect, he turned ponderously about and stalked away. She stood watching him, shaking her head, until he had descended into the camp.

Strange, she thought. Very strange.

Everyone seemed to be changing out here under the pressures of life in this place without walls. She could see the changes in their eyes, their faces, the way they held their bodies. Some seemed to be thriving on the hardships. She had noticed Konya, who had always been a quiet and private man, suddenly laughing and singing in the midst of the group on the march. Or the boy Haniman, always so soft and lazy: yesterday he had gone running past her and she had barely recognized him, so vigorous had he become. And then there were some who were growing faded and weary on the march, like Minbain, or the young man Hignord, who went slouching along with their shoulders down and their sensing-organs trailing in the dust.

And now Harruel, swaggering around demanding to be told her schedule for the march, and behaving almost as though he felt he should take her place as chieftain. Big as he was, strong as he was, he had never before let Koshmar see any ambitions of that sort in him. He had always been courteous in his gruff way, obedient, dependable. Here in this land without walls something black and dour seemed to have entered his soul and of late he appeared barely able to disguise his wish to command the tribe in her stead.

Of course that could never be. The chieftain was always a woman: it had never been otherwise since the tribe had been founded, and that would never change. A man like Harruel was bigger and stronger than any woman could be, yes, but the tribe would scarcely trust a man as its leader no matter how strong he was. Men had no cunning; men had no sense of the long view of things; men, at least the strong ones, were too blunt, too hasty, too rash. There was too much anger in them, Yissou only knew why, and it kept them from thinking properly. Koshmar remembered Thekmur telling her that the anger flowed from the balls they carried between their legs, and went constantly to their brains, making them unfit to rule. That was in the last weeks of Thekmur’s life, not long after she had formally named Koshmar to be her successor. And Thekmur had probably learned her knowledge of men at close range, for she had often known men in the way of women, which Koshmar had never done herself.

Gods, she thought. Is that it? Does Harruel desire me?

It was a startling and horrifying idea. She would have to watch him closely. Something plainly was on Harruel’s mind that had never been there before. If he could not be chieftain himself, perhaps he meant to make himself the chieftain’s chieftain. Which she would never permit; but she needed Harruel, needed his great strength, needed his bravery, needed his anger, even. This would take some careful thinking.