The head is more or less coffin-shaped. All four legs are extended, and their rocky toes splayed. The sandspit that forms the tail curves out to sea, then north, to shelter Tail Bay, which is where we keep our logs. A lengthy ridge of granite gives the lizard a spine. Its highest peak, near the tail, is called the Tor. The spring that turns our mill originates there, giving us a long and very useful fall. Our house is set back some distance from the sea, but the mill stands with its feet in the bay to make it easier to hook and drag out logs.

Let me see. What else?

The Lizard's head looks to the north. Our mill and our house are on the weather side of the island, their site dictated by the stream. On the lee side is a fishing village that is also called Lizard; it consists of six houses, those of our nearest neighbors. Lizard Island lies well north of New Viron, a day's sail in good weather.

That night, as I walked along the shingle, I recalled the whole island as I had glimpsed it from the lander twenty years before. How small it had appeared then, and how beautiful! A green and black lizard motionless upon the blue and silver sea. It came to me then, with a force that seemed to snatch away my heart, that if only we could build an airship like General Saba's I might see it so again.

And be again, if only for an instant, young. What would I not give to be the boy I was once more, with a young Nettle at my side?

Time for court. More this evening, I hope.

A difficult case, and I must settle each case that comes before me on the basis of custom and common sense, having no knowledge of the law and no law books-not that Vironese law would have any force here.

I was leading up to my departure, and how Sinew came out to speak with me as I walked back up the Tail, leaping from one floating log to the next with energy and dexterity that I could only envy. When he reached me, panting, he asked whether I was still thinking of going. I told him that I no longer had to think about whether I would go-that I had been thinking of how to go and what to take with me, and when to leave.

He grinned, and actually rubbed his hands together like a shopkeeper. "I thought you would! I was thinking it over in bed. You know how you do? All of a sudden I saw it didn't make sense to wonder, even. You'd already decided, you were just trying to make it easy for Mom and me. Want to know how I knew?"

"Because you saw me take the oath. So did everyone else, I imagine." Promises meant very little to Sinew, as I had reason to know; but I supposed that he understood how seriously I take mine.

"You know I've read your book?"

I told him I knew he said he had.

"When you and Mom were coming here, you were only doing it because Silk had told you to. But when he didn't go, you went anyway. I remembered that, and as soon as I did, I knew you were really leaving."

"This isn't the same thing at all."

"Yes, it is. You were supposed to come here because some god wanted it, that boss god in the Long Sun Whorl. The old Proloctor and that witchy lady want you to bring him here, and that's really it, not the maize or even needlers. You're just the same here as you were up there, just exactly like Mom is."

I shook my head. "The principal thing is to find Silk and get him to govern New Viron, assuming that he's still alive. The maize, and the kinds of skills necessary to make glasses and needlers, as well as many other things, are very important, though not central. As for bringing Great Pas, no one so much as mentioned it. If anyone had, he would have been laughed at. It would be much more sensible to talk about bringing back Lake Limna."

"But that's what it comes down to." Still grinning, Sinew stepped closer, so close I could feel his breath on my face. "Silk got made a part of this Pas, didn't he? That girlfriend of Pas's invited him to."

"I don't know that, and neither do you."

"Well, he went off with the flying man and wouldn't let you tag along. That's what you and Mom said."

I shrugged. "That's what we wrote, because it was all we knew. I don't know anything more now than I did when we wrote it."

"Of course he did! You know he did. Who wouldn't? So if you bring him, we'll have a boss who's the partner of this very powerful god up there. You say you couldn't bring a god back, and naturally you couldn't. But if this god Pas really is a god he could come here anytime or go anyplace else."

I said nothing.

"You know I'm right. Are you taking the sloop? We'll have to build another one if you do. The old boat never was big enough."

"Yes," I said.

"See, you're going. I knew you were. What are you going to say at breakfast? Raise your hands?"

I sighed, having only a moment before definitely deciding to take the sloop. "I had intended to ask each of you individually what I ought to do, beginning with Hide and ending with your mother. I hoped that all of you would have concluded by that time that I must go as I promised, as I have, no matter how badly I'm needed here." I turned away with a feeling of relief, and resumed my walk along the Tail.

He loped beside me like an ill-bred dog. "What if she said you had to stay?"

"She wouldn't, and I was hoping that none of you would. But if any of you did, I was going to explain myself again to that person and try to persuade him. I say 'him' because it would surely be Hide or Hoof or you. Not Nettle."

I saw his pleasure by starlight. "I like it. Mom can go live with Aunt Hop. Me and the sprats can take care of things here."

"Your mother will stay right here to take care of things, including you. You'll have to run the mill and make any repairs. She'll handle most of the buying and selling, I imagine, if you and she are wise."

For a moment I thought that he would object violently, but he did not.

"You know the machinery and the process," I told him, "or at least you've had ample opportunity to learn them. The bleach we've got should last you six months or more, if you're careful, and I hope to be back before then. Don't waste it. Be careful about extending credit, too, and doubly careful about refusing to extend it. Never buy a log you haven't seen, or rags that you haven't handled." I laughed, pretending a warmth of feeling that I did not feel. "It cost me a lot to learn that, but I'm giving it to you for nothing."

"Father...?"

"If there's anything you need to know about the mill or the various papers we make, ask me now. There won't be time in the morning."

Together we walked back to the tip of the Tail, where I had given my oath, until we stood at last at the place where soil and stone vanished altogether and the last of the coarse seagroats with them, and there was only sand and shells, with here and there a stick of driftwood cast up by the unresting waves. At last I took out my needier and offered it to him, telling him that there were only fifty-three needles left in it, and that he would be wise not to waste any.

He would not accept it. "You'll need it yourself, Father, traveling to-to..."

"Pajarocu. It's a town, but nobody seems to know where it is. Inland, perhaps, though I hope not. They say that they've refitted a lander there so they can cross the abyss to the Whorl again, and they've invited New Viron to send a passenger."

"You."

"I knew Silk better than anybody else." Honesty compelled me to add, "Except for Maytera Marble, Magnesia as she's called now." I offered him my needier again.

"Keep it, I said. You'll need it."

"And Maytera Marble is unable to make the journey, they say. She was already very old when we came, twenty years ago." For a few seconds I tried to frame an argument; then I recalled that no argument of mine had ever changed his mind, and said, "If you don't take this now, I'm going to throw it into the sea."

I cocked my arm as though to make good my threat, and he was on me like a snow cat, clawing for the needier. I let him take it, stood up, and brushed off sand. "When it isn't on my person, I've kept it in the mill. Since you boys never go in there unless you're made to, it seemed safe. It has been. You might want to do the same thing. You wouldn't want Hoof and Hide to get hold of it."

He frowned. "That's good. I will."

I could have shown him how a needier is loaded and fired, but experience had taught me that trying to teach him anything only made him resentful. Instead, I said, "I may need it, as you say. But I may not, and I'd much rather know that you and your mother and brothers are safe. Besides, a traveler with a weapon like that might be killed for it, as soon as anyone knew he had it."

Sinew nodded thoughtfully.

"Conjunction in two years. You remember the last one, the storms and the tides. Any logs you've got in here then will be a danger to you. And of course there will be-" I searched for a word. "Strangers. Visitors. Very plausible ones, sometimes."

The reality of conjunction seemed to dawn upon him then. "Don't go, Father!"

"I must. Not just because I've sworn to; I wouldn't be the first man to break his oath. And certainly not because of Marrow and the others-I'd hurt them far more than they hurt me before it was over-but because I couldn't live with myself if I didn't. You and your mother can run the mill as well as I could, and nobody else would have anything like as good a chance of persuading Silk to join us. At supper tonight we agreed that we were sinking into savagery here on Blue, that we'd soon be fighting off the inhumi with the bows and spears we use for hunting now. You may be confident that we could survive as savages and.even regain what we lost, eventually. No doubt-"

The stubborn head shake I had come to know so well.

"I don't think so either. There were people here before, or something very like people. They had a civilization higher than ours, but something wiped them out. If it wasn't the inhumi, what was it?"

"That's another thing I wanted to talk to you about." There was a pause, perhaps while Sinew collected his thoughts, perhaps only while he moistened his mouth. "You're trying to bring Pas, all the gods from the Long Sun."

"No," I said.

He ignored it, or did not hear it. "That's good, because gods could help us if they would. But they had gods of their own, the Vanished People who were here first. They might help us, too. There's a place on Main, way up on Howling Mountain a little before the trees stop. I found it almost a year ago. Maybe I should have told you."

I see that I said I had three reasons for not accompanying our five visitors as they proposed. The first (as I indicated) was that I wanted to take leave of my family, and get them to agree to my going, insofar as possible. Nettle would agree because she loved me and Sinew because he hated me, I felt sure; and with their support I had hoped to persuade the twins that it was necessary.

The second was that I wanted to sail my own boat in search of Pajarocu, and not the boat Marrow had offered to let me have, however good it might be. I did not intend to disparage his offer, as he may have thought; it was a generous one, and one that would have resulted in a serious loss if I had accepted it. He showed me that boat, the Sealily Sealily, when I spoke with him in town, and I would guess that it was nearly as fast as my own, and rather more capacious and seaworthy.

"I'd never been on the water till we came down here," Marrow told me, "and I haven't been but twice now. If you'd come by the shop or my booth and told me someday I'd be having boats built for me, I'd have thought you was cracked. I thought Auk the Prophet was cracked when I talked to him up there, and it would have been the same with anybody who said someday I'd want boats. You didn't put that in your book, about Auk. That I'd thought he was cracked as old eggs. But I did."

I told Marrow that Auk was, that he had fractured his skull in the tunnels.

"Used to see him at sacrifice," Marrow said, leaning heavily on his big carved stick. "Old Patera Pike's manteion. The wife and I used to go now and then because he traded with us, him and the sibyls. Maytera Rose that was, and young Maytera Mint, only they sent Maytera Marble to do their buying. Shrike wouldn't go, just sent his wife. They traded with him anyhow because she went all the time. Gone now, both of 'em. I guess you remember Pike's manteion?"

I did. I do. The plain shiprock walls, and the painted statue of Lord Pas (from which the paint was peeling) will remain with me until the day I die, always somewhat colored by the wonder I felt as a small boy at seeing a black cock struggling in the old man's hands after he had cut its throat, its wings beating frantically, beating as if they might live after all, live somehow somewhere, if only they could spray the whole place with blood before they failed.

My own bird has flown. Only this lone black feather remains with me, fluttering above this sheet (a sheet that for all I know or all that anyone here knows may have been made in my own mill) spraying the whorl of Blue with the black ink that has done so much good and so much harm. If it had not been for our book, Marrow and the rest would have chosen someone else, beyond argument. As it was, our book-The Book of Silk, or as others would have it, The Book of the Long Sun The Book of the Long Sun-spread over this whorl more rapidly than Nettle and I had dared hope. Silk- "Silk has become an almost mythic figure," I began to write. The truth is that he has become a mythic figure. I hear rumors of altars and sacrifices. Disciples who have never seen him promulgate his teachings. If it had not been for our book, Hari Mau and the rest would have chosen someone else, or no one.

Heretofore I have written whatever crossed my mind, I fear. In the future, I will attempt to provide you (whoever you may be) with a connected narrative. Let me say at the outset, however, what readers I hope for.

First of all for Nettle, my wife, whom I have loved from boy- hood and will always love.

Second, my sons Hoof and Hide. Should he see it, Sinew will read no further, I suppose, than he must to learn that I am its author; and then, unless he is greatly changed, he will burn it. Burning The Book of Horn The Book of Horn will smell foul, but if it is to burn, no whiff has yet reached me. Sinew is on Green in any event, and is unlikely to see it. (For so many years I feared that he would try to murder me, but in the end it was I who would have murdered him. He may burn my book if he chooses.) will smell foul, but if it is to burn, no whiff has yet reached me. Sinew is on Green in any event, and is unlikely to see it. (For so many years I feared that he would try to murder me, but in the end it was I who would have murdered him. He may burn my book if he chooses.) Third, our descendants, the sons and daughters of our sons and their children. If a dozen generations have passed, be assured that you are one; after a dozen generations it cannot be otherwise.

How difficult it is to touch the spirits of these people, although I doubt that they are worse than others. Two farmers quarreled over a strip of land. I rode out with them and saw it, and it is of no value save for cutting firewood, and of little for that. Each said he had claimed it since landing, and each said his claim was undisputed until a few months ago. I had each tell me the price he would charge the other to lease it for ten years, then awarded it to the one who would charge the least, and ordered him to lease it, there and then, for the price he had specified. Since the leaseholder's price had been more than twice as much, he was getting a great bargain, and I told him so. He did not appear to agree.

This is a stopgap at best, however. The whole situation regarding the ownership of land is confused or worse. It must be reformed, and a rational system as secure from corruption as we can make it set in place.

That I intend to do. My principles: that possession long unchallenged need only be recorded, but that unused property is the property of the town. Now to begin.

I have already given more than I should of our conversation at supper. I will say nothing more about it, although when I close my eyes and lean back in this chair it seems that I smell the brown rolls, fresh from the oven, see the honey dyeing with dark gold its earthenware dish, and taste a vanished summer in the wine. I cut our meat that night, and ate as I had for years, yet if I had known then what I know now-if I had let my imagination carry me forward beyond the next few days-I would have clasped my wife to me, embracing her until it was time to go.

She will have found another husband by this time, I hope. A good man. She was always a sensible woman. (Which is, now that I come to think of it, what His Cognizance the inhumu used to say of Molybdenum.) I wish both well, and wish him better luck with Hoof and Hide than I had with Sinew.

He was my right hand in the lander, as well as on Green, and he threw me his knife. I see I have not yet written of that.

Before I left he begged me not to go, exactly as I had predicted at dinner. He was shocked, I believe, that I was going to leave that night while Nettle and the twins slept; and to confess the truth, so was I. I had not intended to go until morning.

Have I said how closely Sinew resembled me? Perhaps not. There was something devilish about it. The twins, with their large eyes and too-regular features, resemble Nettle's mother, or so I have always thought, while Nettle herself resembles her father. But Sinew looks as I did when we left Main and built the mill. We lived in a tent on the beach in those days, and he was only a squalling toddler, although he had already taken her from me to a certain extent. The twins had not been born, or even thought of.

I left that night, not so much when Sinew and I had finished talking as when I was tired of his talking to me. I took little with me; even then I was not under the illusion that I would be welcomed back to the whorl I had left, or provided with any sort of transport. If I had known then how long it would be before I set foot in the whorl in which I was born, I would have taken more, perhaps, although so much was stolen as it was, and I was able to bring precious little beyond my two knives from Pajarocu, and nothing at all from Green, not even Seawrack's ring.

I brought two changes of clothing, and a warm blanket.

A copy of our book, which I meant to read during calms and the like, not so much to relearn the facts we had set down as to gently persuade my memory to dwell upon our conversations, and the conversations I had with Nettle, Moly, and others about him. You that read will not credit it, but I do not believe I have forgotten anything that Nettle and I put into our book, or that I ever will.

Three bales of our best white paper to trade, and some other valuables I hoped might be exchanged for food.

I had been afraid that Sinew would wake up the rest of the family, that he would wake Nettle, particularly, and that seeing her I would lack the resolution to go. He did not, but stood upon our littie floating wharf and waved (which rather surprised me) and then, when the distance seemed too great to throw anything and score a hit, flung something that missed my head by half a cubit and dropped rattling into the boat.

That, too, surprised me; but nothing could have been more like him than to try to hurt me in some way when I could not defend myself; and it soon occurred to me that he could have drawn my needier and killed me. It was my humiliation he intended; however much he may have wanted to kill me, he would not have dared to shoot. A stone or a shell (I thought) had served his purpose better.

When I had rounded the Tail and could safely tie the sheet, I groped in the bilgewater to find out what his missile had been; there I found his hunting knife, next to his bow his most prized possession, still in the turtle-skin sheath he had made for it. In his own mind at least he had squared accounts, I felt sure; it is onerous to be indebted to someone you hate.

There would be no point in describing my trip down the coast to New Viron in detail. It had been foolhardy of me to leave when I did, but no harm came of it. Until shadeup, I kept the sloop under short sail and dozed at her tiller, not yet having confidence enough to tie it in position and lie down, as I was later to do almost routinely, though from time to time I toyed with the notion of furling both sails and snatching a few hours of real sleep. Mostly I looked at the stars, just as I had before Sinew joined me on the Tail. The Long Sun Whorl in which Nettle and I were born was only a faint gleam when it could be seen at all. For that faint speck I was bound (as I imagined then) in a lander that had somehow been repaired and resurrected. I could not help thinking how much more I would have liked to sail there. Before shadeup, the Long Sun Whorl would touch the sea in the southwest; why should I not sail to meet it? It was an attractive idea, and when I was sleepy enough seemed almost possible.

Once some monstrous, luminous creature four or five times the size of the sloop glided beneath it, for there are fish in the sea that could swallow the great fish that swallowed Silk's poor friend Mamelta, as everyone knows; but although the loss of boats that fail to return is conventionally laid to them, I think carelessness and weather are the true culprits in almost every instance. I do not deny that they can sink boats much bigger than my old sloop, or that they occasionally do.

At one moment it was night. At the next, day.

That was how it seemed to me. I had slept, leaning on the tiller, and not wakened until the light of our Short Sun struck me full in the face.

There were bottles of water (mixed with a little wine to keep it sweet) in one of the chests, and a box of sand for a fire aft of the mast. I baited a hook with a morsel of dried meat and fished for my breakfast, which was my lunch by the time I caught it. If I had not hung Sinew's hunting knife on my belt, I would have split and gutted it with the worn little pocketknife that came with me from Old Viron. As it was, I used his, vaguely conscious that he might ask if it had been helpful someday and wanting to tell him that it had been; gestures like that had become a habit, however futile. It was a good knife, made here on Blue by Gadwall the smith from a single bar of steel which supplied the blade, the stubby guard, and the grip. I remember noticing how sharp it was, and realizing that the bulbous pommel might be almost as useful for pounding as the blade for cutting. I have Hyacinth's azoth now (locked away and well hidden); but I would almost rather have Sinew's knife back, if he would give it a second time.

Here in landlocked Gaon, people would think it queer that we who came from a city so remote from any sea that we had scarcely heard rumors of them should build our new town on the coast. But Viron had been a lakeshore city in the beginning, and it was Lake Limna that left Viron, and not Viron that had left the lake. When we landed here, it seemed natural to us to direct our lander to the shore of our bay, since we thought the water we saw was potable and might be used for irrigation. We were disappointed, of course. But the sea has given us food in abundance-much more, I believe, than even a large lake could have supplied. Even more important, it has been better than the best road for us, letting us move ourselves and our goods faster and better than pack mules or wagons ever could. Gaon is greatly blessed by its cold, clear River Nadi; but I do not believe New Viron would exchange the sea for it.

When Nettle and I decided to build our mill, after trying farming without much success, it was obvious that we would have to have a location to which logs could be floated. We tramped up and down the coast in search of a suitable spot until at last it occurred to me that we would never find it as long as we searched by land for a place to which logs could be floated by sea. That was when I built our first boat, a sort of pointed box with one ludicrously short mast and a tendency to drift off to leeward that would have been quite funny if it had not been so serious. Eventually Tamarind, whose husband had been a fishmonger and knew something of fishermen and their boats in consequence, showed me how to rig a leeboard that could be dropped when necessary and pulled up for shallows. After that, with a taller mast stepped farther forward, we used that boxy little boat for years.

From it, we first landed on Lizard. There was a fishing village there already (if four very modest cottages make a village) at the back of East Bay, which was far from the best part of the island to our way of thinking. We claimed the Tor and everything west of it, with the Prolocutor's support; and since nobody else wanted it, we made our claim good. The land is sparse and sandy (except for our garden, where the soil has been improved with kitchen waste); but there is the Tor with its spring, which gives us water to drink and turns our mill, and Tail Bay, more than half enclosed by the Tail, to which the woodcutters bring the logs we need.

I can see everything as I write. I believe that I could draw a good map of it on this paper now, showing where the house and mill stand, the Tor, the West Foot, and the rest of it; but what good would such a map be? No matter how accurate, it could not take me there.

It has been a good place for us, with plenty of space for barking and chipping the logs we haul out with block and tackle, although it is somewhat dangerous because it is so remote. I must not forget that the twins are older now. Between birth and twenty, a year is an immensity.

Not long after I finished my fish, the sun was squarely overhead. I have never become completely accustomed to a sun that moves across the sky. We speak here of the Long Sun we left and this Short Sun to which we have come; but it seems to me that the difference implied by the change of shape is small, while the difference between this sun which moves and that one which does not is profound. At home, that part of the sun that was directly overhead always appeared brightest; to east and west it was less bright, and the farther you looked the dimmer it became. At noon, the sun here does not look very different; but the Long Sun is fixed, and seems to speak of the immortality of the human spirit. This Short Sun is well named; it speaks daily of the transitory nature of all it sees, drawing for us the pattern of human life, fair at first and growing ever stronger so that we cannot help believing it will continue as it began; but losing strength from the moment it is strongest.

What good are its ascension and domination, when all its heat cannot halt its immutable decline? Augurs here (such augurs as there are) still prattle of an immortal spirit in every human being. No doctrine could be less convincing. Like certain seeds from the landers, it was grown beneath another sun and can scarcely cling to existence in the light of this one. I preach it like the rest, convincing no one less than myself.

When I left home, I had promised myself that by noon I would tie up at the wharf in New Viron, having supposed, or hoped at least, that the west wind would last. It had been weakening since midmorning, and while I washed my fork and little, red-brown plate, it died away altogether. I lay down in the shade beneath the foredeck and slept.

Less than two hours had passed, I believe, when I woke. The shadow of the mainsail was slightly larger and had moved a trifle; otherwise everything was the same. For half a minute, the sloop rose a hand's breadth upon the oily water, and for the next half minute descended again. Halfway to the horizon, one of the snake-necked seabirds skimmed the water hunting fish, a creature capable of soaring almost to the stars that rarely rose higher than a donkey's ears.

It was only then, after I had truly slept, that the full weight of my decision fell upon me. The leaders (self-appointed, you may be sure) who had come to speak to us had believed (or had pretended to believe) that my absence from my family, and the house and mill that Nettle and I had ^uilt together, would be merely temporary, like a trip to Three Rivers. I would discover the location of Pajarocu without difficulty, board a lander just as we had boarded the one that had brought us there and revisit the Long Sun Whorl, find Silk (again without difficulty), easily persuade him to accompany me, procure samples of maize and other seeds, learn all I could about the manufacture of this and that-or still better, find someone skilled who would come with us-and return home. They had spoken of it as something that might with a little good luck be accomplished in a few months. On the sloop that day I realized that I might as well have volunteered to fly to Green by flapping my arms and wipe out every inhumu there. One would be no more difficult than the other.

The enormity of the oath I had taken so lightly back on the Tail had not yet sunk in, and would not until Babbie and I were sailing alone, north along the coast. If I had been able to reach New Viron, I would have gone to Marrow and the rest and declared that I had changed my mind, gone back to the sloop, and gone back to Lizard at once. But I could no more give up my errand than I could continue it. The reefs and rocks of the mainland waited immobile to my left. The horizon ducked away from my eyes to starboard. Nothing moved except the white bird, which flew back and forth with a slow, sad motion that seemed so weary that every time two wings rose I felt that it was about to fall into the sea, and the Short Sun, which crept down to the empty horizon as remorselessly as every man creeps toward his grave.