Beneath the skylight, to one side, hang three gla.s.s globes, like those which formed the spheres of the clocks. One has a bubble; one is infinitesimally thicker on the bottom than on the top; and the third has the beginnings of engravings upon it, one of which contains an eyelash-fine line imperfectly curved. These are inadequate to become parts of clocks, but sorcerers are thrifty and do not willingly discard even broken apparatus after having invested so much of their time and themselves in its making.

Today the two clocks look like soap bubbles. Freshly dusted this morning, they sparkle as they move in harmony with the different pulses they measure, until the sun that falls on them is briefly interrupted by the graceful flight of a folded piece of paper.

The paper glider whisshed as it landed on the gold-inlaid black-topped table in front of a dark-haired, young-looking man in a finely pleated blue-green silk shirt. He was folding another paper glider out of a sheet of closely-scribbled paper decorated on both sides with large, definitive X's. He launched this vessel with a flick of his wrist and watched it spiral up and up and then plunge nose-down into the floor from about five meters' alt.i.tude.

38.'Elizabeth "Bah," he said, and collected an armada of paper from the floor and doorway. Returning to his table, he smoothed them out again and put his head in his hands.

"I am a charlatan," he grumbled, and pushed the whole stack of papers away. "I ought to hang out a shingle and go into business, peddle love potions and wart removers to benighted villagers," he went on to the empty room. "I've studied geomancy, hydrology, pyromancy, lithology, astronomy, mathematics, alchemy, logic, and botany - I've learned them all and more, all the pillars of the Great Art. None has mastered the Art as I have; none has travelled as far as I, and I believe there is none living who has stood to both Fire and Stone. But look at me! Were this insoluble the cosmos could not exist. I find no error. None! The cosmos does exist - this is the base of philosophy, truth fundamental, a sine qua non! - and thus I'm in error. But where?" he cried, and slapped the papers with his hand.

The clocks moved.

The sorcerer glared at the clocks. It was the clocks which had first caused this unexpected detour in his programme of research, which had begun years previously with an ungen-tlemanly but necessary violation of hospitality. They were wrong: a tiny, tiny error, like all errors of the sort, had c.u.mulatively thrown them off by varying orders of magnitude, and they were useless. He trusted his craftsmanship enough to say that the clocks were capable of keeping time correctly; the error's root was that the forces they measured were not behaving as they ought. They were being bent and distorted, rather than flowing in the prescribed currents.

Understanding that there was an error and then calculating how great it was and how it increased had occupied him in his lonely octagonal tower for nearly twenty years. He had been confident, as he began, that he would discover some simple fault in his calibration or calculation, but there were no mistakes: the clocks ran correctly and the times they kept were wrong.

It was remarkable that they ran at all, but he wanted them to be right. He had come here to live in peace and quiet, to Sorcerer and a QentUman 39.occupy himself with building ingenious devices and elegant apparatus and using them, to invent new ways of doing and new things to do, and now he was confounded by a flaw in the very foundation of his premise. He could ignore the flaw and develop his skills further-it did not affect most of his activities-but the idea of leaving the problem unsolved galled him. Arrogantly, yet accurately, he believed himself uniquely talented and blessed with ability in all the worlds, and since only he knew of this problem then only he could solve it. Indeed, he ardently desired to solve it.

It defied solution.

The checking and re-checking of his figuring was making him a little mad, feeding the righteous anger he was beginning to feel at the Universe for not operating the way he thought it should. He had gotten back into the habit of pacing agitatedly, a habit he had been glad to lose somewhere after his childhood; he granted the most trivial of doubts and possibilities serious consideration day and night; he could no longer divert himself with music, books, or poetry. Now he went up and down beside his table, from window to blackboard, not really thinking of anything but his own vexation.

When both clocks chimed at once, it was too much; he flung himself out of the workroom and stomped down a flight of stairs, through a library to a door which led to another flight of stairs. At the bottom were some pegs on which hung a few pieces of clothing and a bench with a couple of pairs of boots under it. He doffed his slippers, donned a nondescript grey-brown coat and tough brown boots with thick soles, and went out through the door beside the pegs. The commotion in his head had grown too cacophonous to be contained in the tower.

Outside, it was a fine day, brisk as late spring was apt to be. The nameless long-thorned flowers which grew in abundance at the base of the tower and some little distance up its sheer sides were setting buds. Seemingly blowing in the breeze, they drew back from him and from the doorway, clearing a path through their thicket of tough vines and 40.finger-long thorns. The sorcerer stood for a moment on his doorstep, inhaling and looking around, and then set off in no particular direction.

He returned as the shadows were filling the valleys. The stairway was dark, but lights leapt up in iron sconces when he opened the door and crossed the threshold. He sat on the bench and put on his slippers again slowly, hung up the coat, and then shuffled into the kitchen, tired after a daylong trek up hill and down dale but still-still with the same load of mind-bending, world-distorting problems he had had before.

However, he thought, at least it would be easier to sleep when he was this tired. He hadn't cheated; he'd rambled all day, drunk water from a stream when he was thirsty and jogged on, ascending, circling, and descending the straight-shouldered mountain nearest to his tower in its bowl-like dell. He rummaged in his cupboards for dried fruits and vegetables, bread, a cheese, and ate an uninteresting but filling supper.

When he had cleaned up the kitchen and put everything away, he started out and tripped on a small three-legged stool which was hidden in the shadow of the table. He was a tall man, but agile, and he would have recovered but for the stool's getting under his other foot as well. It rolled; he staggered and grabbed the table with an "Ow!" of surprise, and his head struck the side of the stove as he was thrown backward.

The lights in the kitchen burned tirelessly.

Upstairs in the workroom, the clocks whirled and spun slowly.

The man on the floor groaned to himself and rolled onto his side, holding his head. There was blood on his hand- he'd cut the scalp, and he was glad it hadn't been an eye he'd hit on the iron stove. With crabbed, uncomfortable movements he rose and saw the stool. One kick sent it crashing into the opposite wall.

"Oohhhhh . . ." sighed its victim, and tottered to a trapdoor in the floor. Beneath it in a hidden drawer was ice, chips of which he dropped into the dishrag and held to his Sorcerer and a QentUman 41.head as, one-handed, he closed the icebox again. When he had risen, the stool came in for another kick back toward the door. He started toward it for a third and picked it up instead, an incendiary spell on his tongue.

It had been a long, difficult spring, the culmination of long, increasingly frustrating years. He was a little mad, but only a little, and the idea of taking vengeance on the stool suddenly appeared to him to be as ludicrous as it was. He laughed and shook his head, then hefted the stool to toss it in the corner. It landed, rolled, and lay on its side. He gave it a small kick to upend it and turned to leave the kitchen, still cooling his bruised head.

Then he stopped and looked at the stool carefully.

He bent and picked it up again, staring at it, a frown coming onto his face.

"Three," he said.

The melting ice and blood began to run down his neck into his collar.

"Three," he whispered reverently, and set the stool carefully in its proper place beneath the table.

The blackboards were covered with smudgy numbers, lists, and diagrams drawn freehand over everything else. The table was clear save for a few small, oddly-shaped counters, placed on certain parts of the engraving which covered its top, and a trio of instruments. Papers and books were stacked on every other flat surface-beside the clocks, on the windowsills, on the shelves, on a chair. A delicate scale made of some fine-spun transparent stuff clearer than gla.s.s stood in the center of the table; a thing that looked like a windmill growing out of a compa.s.s of the same delicate crystal stood a foot or so away from it. Its feathery vanes were spinning lethargically. Another, identical device was on the other side of the table, pointing in a different direction, also moving but more slowly. They would have been invisible but for the reflected light flashing from them as they turned.

The clocks twirled and processed in degrees.

The workroom was empty. On the bed in the next room, 42.Elizabeth the tower's occupant, half-undressed, lay on his back snoring softly. His previously clean-shaven face had acc.u.mulated a short beard. His mouth was slightly open, and his hands were slack on his chest, where the laces of his shirt lay untied in his fingers.

A partly-eaten apple had rolled onto the floor at his feet. The exposed white flesh had become brown; the peel was curled around the bitten area.

A square of sun progressed along the wall and across the carpet and then along the wall again before he moved.

"Uff," he exhaled, and drew his legs up onto the bed, crawled to the pillows, and lay down with his face in them. From the workroom, the soft chimes of a clock sounded. He chuckled before falling asleep again to descend into an old dream.

He walked away from the burning Well in its eight-sided white wall and wandered in dream-fashion through gardens, until he came to the Royal Tombs and found himself standing in the ivy-choked arch that led to one. He ascended the mossed and crumbling stair behind the arch and found at the top a great tomb.

A tall man, bearded, by his bearing powerful yet clothed austerely, emerged from the tomb's grapevine-overgrown portico. The grapes were ripe and purple. 'Though we meet at my tomb, I am not dead," he said.

The dreaming sorcerer nodded.

Now the stranger walked toward the dreamer, down the weedy walkway of the tomb's approach, and stood before him. "I lay upon thee this geas," he said, and he moved his hands and spoke slowly, and the force of the Well flowed into his words so that they became one with the world. "Seek me until we meet, and when we meet shall thou tell me thy name and lineage that I will know thee."

The sorcerer looked into the man's eyes, which were bright grey like clouds, not cold but kind and grave, and the geas fell, settling on his life and altering it.

"Safe journey," the man said. "That which brought thee here will bear thee safely away."

Sorcerer and a Qentieman 43.Something tugged the sorcerer deeper into sleep, deeper than dreams, and he sighed and turned unknowing.

When the sorcerer rose from his bed, he bathed and dressed, then went down to his kitchen and prepared a hero's breakfast. Having eaten well and tidied the room, he climbed up to his bright workroom again and stood, arms folded, contemplating the table.

The twin vaned compa.s.ses, which he had designed and built in his fury of enlightened insight, still pointed in two different directions. However, the lines along which they pointed intersected in an area nearly devoid of the markings etched into the table's glossy black surface.

"I have you at last," he whispered to the table, uncrossing his arms and leaning over the place where the lines intersected. "There: wherever there might be."

The sorcerer took from a shelf a single-dish scale with a polished ball of flawless rock crystal suspended where the pan would be. This he placed on the table, changing the location by fractions of millimeters many times, until he was satisfied, crouching at eye-level to the tabletop and squinting at the vaned compa.s.ses, sighting from it to them. He straightened and reached for one of the compa.s.ses, touching it lightly. A golden line sprang from it, running back to the center of the diagram, where the scale swayed and steadied itself, and more lines sprang out from the counters placed here and there on the lines, finally hitting the second compa.s.s. A new line arced from both compa.s.ses now and struck the crystal sphere, which bobbed, and the sorcerer reached into the lacework of the spell and adjusted the sphere's placement again and again until the ball filled with light of its own and a new network of lines sprang into being over the old, very pale and fine.

He took his hand away and looked at the tabletop, which lit the room now, and then opened a gla.s.s-fronted cabinet to take out a long slender sliding-rule with six moving bars and peculiar scales engraved on it. With this he sat by the 44.*ECiza&etk "Wittey table for a long time, calculating, writing in a leather-bound book.

One of the clocks chimed with an almost apologetic note. He snorted softly and murmured "You're next" to it but did not look up.

Thus he pa.s.sed the day and the night, then slept awhile and worked again, measuring and calculating and plotting in his book, seized by an inspiration of genius and knowledge and revelling in the possession. This phase of his labors bore him through the waxing and waning of summer in the mountains around his tower. In the autumn, he found his apparatus to be inadequate to his vision and pa.s.sed the winter, and many seasons following, designing and building a subst.i.tute for his tabletop covered with fine lines. It required that he leave the solitude of his tower several times to travel and obtain materials. He was exacting about the composition and purity of everything he used and could tell at a glance what were the qualities of a stone or spool of wire.

The old table was retired to the kitchen with honors; for the sorcerer loved kitchens and respected them. A new, larger, more detailed-and round-table took its place. The sorcerer sat looking at it, pleased, for some little while when he had it arranged; and when he had looked his fill, when he had fully savored his accomplishment in its creation, he rose and left the table, left the cunning whirling clocks which were now correct and now were three in number, left the gla.s.sed cases stuffed full of the tools of his trade, and, wearing his long sea-green caped cloak, he locked the tower behind him and set out on a great journey whose ending he could still only dimly forecast.

THE SORCERER STARTED ACROSS A LOW-ARCHED Stone-and- plank bridge, lifting his hat to wipe his forehead, and stopped halfway to the other side. Sweet-noted bubbling Sorcerer and a Qentteman 45.dawnsong pealed from the thick-grown forest around and above the bridge's stream; early sun glowed through pale new greenery that fringed the branches over the stream, which was at spring flood, chuckling and gurgling around boulders. The water was deep and the current swift, catching and discarding flotsam as it pushed along the rocks. The steep banks were impenetrably thicketed to the brink, chewed by the turbulence so that knots of roots and stones hung half-exposed over the water, festooned with trailing white- and purple-flowered weeds. A red-headed bird whizzed out of a tree to sit on a slender branch, doughtily repeating his high-pitched spring challenge. The sorcerer gazed at the sight with a pang of appreciation, forgotten hat in hand, leaning a little on his black staff.

"It is just as well to stop, sometimes," he murmured.

As he stood, filling his eyes with the moving water and light, he heard the rhythmic, disorganized sound of a troop of horses approaching from the direction he'd just come from. The sorcerer put his hat on slowly. Brigands? As he travelled, he'd been warned many times against the gangs of armed robbers who peregrinated through these Pariphal Mountains south of Ascolet, but he had yet to encounter any.

They came around a shallow curve and down the slope that led to the river and pulled up, forming into ranks as they did. Twelve threes, armored and dressed uniformly: uncommonly well-accoutered brigands.

"Hey! You!" yelled a man in a red cloak in the center of the front rank. "Move!"

The sorcerer's heart sped with instant rage; no one commanded him thus, like a lackey, a peasant. He half-turned toward the mounted men.

"Get your b.l.o.o.d.y a.s.s off that bridge," shouted the red-cloaked man.

"You find something objectionable in other travellers using a public bridge?" retorted the sorcerer, drawing force up through his staff, flexing his hand around it.

"Captain," said a slight rider beside Red, "there's no need to quarrel-"

46.'EtizaBetA "We're wasting precious time, your ladyship. Get moving, tourist, or be over-ridden!"

The sorcerer's eyes hardened. He shifted his grip on his staff and muttered quickly as he brought it down hard on the bridge, stepping back from the center toward the bank.

The piers shivered. The stones of which they were built tumbled down into the stream, and the thick wooden planks fell with them. The rumbling and crashing of the wood buried the outraged shout of the commander and the growls of his men.

The sorcerer stood on a small platform of wood remaining on the opposite bank, three planks still fixed to the first stone pier of the bridge. The stream's banks were sheer and the water deep, turbulent around the boulders. It would be difficult to cross without the bridge.

"Shocking that the Emperor's gold buys such shoddy work," he observed, the fires of anger and power still in him. His staff hummed in his hand, a note only he could hear through his palm.

The hors.e.m.e.n were tense and silent.

The red-cloaked man urged his horse forward a couple of steps, moving, trying to see under the traveller's dark-grey hat. He raised his right hand.

The other lifted his staff, waved negligently, and scattered the rocks up- and downstream with splashes and cracking sounds. For good measure, the sorcerer threw a geas of repulsion on the debris of the stream for as far as he could in each direction. It would be impossible to stack them now. Any new bridge must be built of other stones.

The red-cloaked captain swallowed. He stared across at the man in the sea-colored winter cloak, who chuckled and turned and walked quickly away into the wood.

"Otto," whispered the woman.

"Son of a b.i.t.c.h!" Otto lowered his hand, realizing he had nearly exposed himself to great awkwardness, a fool's mistake, in his anger. He chided himself. It wasn't time for that. Too many explanations.

"Who could that have been?" she asked.

"We'll have to ford here." He sat staring at the stones for Sorcerer and a (jentCeman 47.three breaths, then turned and called the order to move ahead, adding, "Watch your footing!"

They didn't see the man on the road after picking their way across the stream, which at once relieved and worried Otto. He had simultaneous urges to kill him for wrecking the bridge and delaying them (though it was some comfort to think that Ocher too would be delayed by the missing bridge) and to grab him and ask how the h.e.l.l he'd done it. On the third hand, if there could be one, Otto thought he could live the rest of his life happily without running into him because he'd challenge the b.a.s.t.a.r.d if he did- "Otto," the lady said.

"Thinking."

"Ocher will believe you destroyed the bridge."

"Let him. It'll occupy his six brain cells with something new."

"But he'll file a complaint against you. On the Emperor's road, that's a crime against the Crown." She was genuinely worried.

"Well, in that case I have a lot of witnesses to say 1 didn't do it. Including you, my lovely abductee." He grinned rea.s.suringly.

She laughed. Ottaviano laughed with her, but not long nor hard. It was a bad start to the day.

The summer had been dry, after a dry spring and a warm, snowless winter. Prospero had left the weather to itself, for in the preceding seven years he had done much weather-working, and it was tasking to constrain the natural patterns for very long. He had other things to occupy him, drilling and instructing his army of men, taking them step by step through formations and maneuvers. The drought was no great inconvenience; the river still ran, and his folk got from it their drinking water without difficulty. Nonetheless, he used the occasion to have teams of men sink wells, pounding through the soil and rock, in certain auspicious locations where he divined that water would be easily reached. They toiled unwillingly until their first bubbling water-strike, which delighted and heartened them so that 48.'Etizabetfi 'Wittey Sorcerer and a (jentteman 49.Prospero was hard-put to dissuade them from driving holes all through the forest and the cleared fields.

The fields by the riverside (where a few years before trees had reached over the water) were brown early in the season; crops must be irrigated by hand and with quickly-built pumps, and Prospero released men from laboring on the first stone building of the town to aid the women and children in watering the sapling orchards and the fields of grain.

Seven years had his people dwelt by the riverside; seven years of changes had they wreaked under his command, and seven years of change had worked on them. There were long-houses now, communal places where the folk lived together; in the beginning Prospero had tried to segregate the s.e.xes and had given it up, though men and women labored at different tasks in different places. He was amused by his own dismay at the easy manners of his people, for they coupled without inhibition when the notion struck, and that was often. Though some were pair-bonded from the beginning, the idea of matrimony made little headway here. They had not even a word for it in their rippling, lilting, Spring-born tongue. They all appeared to be mostly free of jealousy, which was well, because few were inclined to fidelity and none to chast.i.ty.

The first child was born less than a year after Prospero's night of Spring-fed sorcery, and so many others hard after that Prospero could not recall which of the many it had been, nor who the mother was. The place had teemed with smug, big-bellied women and then with squalling infants. This occasioned delay in Prospero's plans; he ruefully adjusted them to accommodate the nurturing of a sizable population of children. The men who were not paired to women were largely uninterested in the infants, although many of them were visibly annoyed by rebuffs from the preoccupied mothers.

Prospero had not expected a sudden crop of brats, but indeed that was the natural consequence of the vigorous amorous activity. After the initial explosion, births came in a more even scattering, most frequently in autumn. None of the children wanted for sustenance or attention, and the score or so whose mothers had died in childbed and soon after-for with births came the first deaths-were adopted and nursed by foster-mothers, without need of Prospero urging it.

In the third year, Prospero became aware that many of the women had formed into close, clan-like a.s.sociations, based around the farms, and that some of these groups mostly spurned the company of men-though not all, for the women bore children still. The men lived in a military structure Prospero had shaped, gradually imposing more and more organization on them as he taught them the use of weapons and supervised them in the heavy clearing work of preparing land for the women to farm. Yet some of the women's clan-groups included men who worked the fields and gathered wild food with the women, and Prospero gave up trying to comprehend the shifts among the settling population.

He cared not, Prospero decided, what their s.e.xual customs were, so long as they did his bidding in more important things; their nature was still half-b.e.s.t.i.a.l, and so he glanced over the grappling in furrow and forest without censure. As long as they avoided violence and none were forced, as long as they accepted his rule and served his plan, they might a.s.sociate in whatever ways pleased them. Prospero's only qualm was for what Freia's reaction might be when she returned and was exposed to the cooing and rutting. Surely such unbridled and flagrant activity would stir her own covert desires. Though he had no ready plans for her marriage, he would not have her make her own. She was his own blood, after all, of n.o.ble and particular genesis, not to be squandered on the first lubber who might catch her eye and tumble her. Therefore he spoke of her to them as different and other, an object of reverence as Prospero himself was, aloof and untouchable; no playfellow, but a mistress, a lady.

For himself, his attention was focused on other matters- although he sought without success for the woman who had been his last-made creature. She had gone wandering, as some of the folk had; she returned briefly in the third year, SO -=>.

in the arms of another woman, and Prospero shrugged to himself wryly and pushed her from his thoughts. A voluptuous blonde called Dazhur, his first-shaped female creature, made no secret of her interest in bedding Prospero; his courteous refusal piqued her vanity and heated her desire, and she displayed herself invitingly to him whenever possible. But Prospero was cautious of such entanglements, and Dazhur's l.u.s.t came to naught though she sought year in and year out to slake it.

Seven years had pa.s.sed, and Freia had not returned from her hunt. On full-moon nights Prospero Summoned visions of her in a golden basin full of the Spring's water, to watch her as she cooked her meat, paddled in dark waters, or slept curled beneath sky or bough, all unaware of his spying. Healthy and solitary, she roamed through mountains and in thick, saturated tropical forest: far north of the Spring. She would return. Prospero could wait. She had bolted before when their opinions diverged and, drawn back to him by her own nature, she had always returned, had always reconciled herself to his will.

Freia was seldom iri his thoughts, but occasionally, as today, everything brought her to mind and he wished she would return; seven years was as long as her longest journey before this, surely long enough. The weather was oppressive. Her abandoned gardens withered in the drought. He had neglected to have them weeded or watered: the folk did not come to the isle unless he bid them.

Prospero walked through crumpled plants and flaccid leaves in a searing red dawn, uneasily sniffing a hot, dry wind. It was a wild wind, none of his calling, and it smelled of cinders and smoke. There had been great numbers of wood-elk about for the past few days, other beasts too, and bloated corpses had floated by in the river. Prospero suspected fire, struck by one of the hail-throwing thunderstorms in the mountains and borne through the wood on the wind, high Elements allied against the lowest.

The wind sucked the moisture from his lips and eyes. He wiped them. Perhaps he should raise a storm of his own to Sorcerer and a (jentkman 51.batter the wild ones down, to counter them before they reached here. Such raisings had frightened Freia, and he recalled with melancholy fondness how she would rush to his arms for comfort when he returned to the cave from the Spring's hilltop, having stirred a fine storm to blast and blow. Then he must hold her, but he would stand in the open doorway, mentally critiquing the storm's thunders and lightnings whilst soothing her terror.

Prospero reached the stones at the upstream end of the island and sat on one. Someday he would have a proper boathouse here, with proper boats, not this clutter of crude canoes and coracles; proper civilized gardens, too, green and groomed, not the wilderness resulting from Freia's desire to plant some of everything and her inability to keep it all tidy. Coo! shade he'd have, and fountains; grapes and roses on arbors, and soft lawns.

Prospero mopped his neck; he wore only a thin shirt on his back, but he was sweltering. The water was busy this morning. As he sat, a quartet of the native spotted otters came out of the water nearby, looked insouciantly at him, and poured their long bodies into some hiding-place among the stones. Logs had piled up at this end of the island and were snagging flotsam in their limbs and roots. Prospero saw a tree-trunk, its roots wrenched from the earth, floating silently past in the hot morning light, and another, and dark shapes he knew to be animal corpses. Yes, there must have been fire, far upriver, and now the river bore the debris to the sea.

"Papa," he heard, a panting voice at the water's edge where the otters had been, accompanied by a splash and a slosh.

"Freia?" Prospero jumped to his feet, some part of him unsurprised.

"Papa," she said again. Freia it was, dripping wet and sagging onto the ground. She wore only her scant hunting tunic, no leggings, not even an arm-brace, and she was barefoot; and as Prospero made his way to her he saw that she was bone-tired and somewhat singed. There were blis- 52.'Elizabeth ters on her left arm and a long angry burn on her left thigh, and her legs were laced with scratches. Her hair was burnt unevenly on the left and back.

"How now, Puss," was all he said, and he bent over her, half-lifted her to her feet. She nodded, wobble-kneed, and let him lead her from the water. He patted her shoulder. "Wert caught in the fire?"

"I couldn't get away. I ran and ran. It's horrible. Papa, Papa, it's ali flames, all the wood, and the animals run, and the poor little Satyrs, and the birds cannot fly fast enough - " She coughed, shaking her head. "The river is full of death," she said. "I thought I could float with the logs, but the flames falling, and the animals - " Freia sat down again, on a long rock this time, shivering in spite of the heat.

Prospero sat beside her. " Tis a dry season," he said, "and some lightning-strike in the mountains hath sparked the blaze. It will devour until it meeteth its own flank, and there die, self-poisoned." An infelicitous metaphor: he thought of Panurgus, of the flash of fire and blood as he was wounded, dismissed the thought.

"Please, Papa, please, 'make it stop?"

" Twere best I not tamper overmuch with it," Prospero said. "There's a natural rhythm to these things best left unchallenged. Such fires are not unknown; they've come beforetimes, though thou hast never seen them, and they serve to scour the forest of deadwood and choking brush, making place for new growth. I'll not hinder it, Freia. I know it pains thee, but I'll not stop the fire 'less it threatens us here."

She stared at him. "Why won't you stop it? How can you let it burn all the forest away?" and she coughed again.