"There'll be less brush for me to deal with." I had been forced to cut our way with Sinew's knife in half a dozen places. "And if I try to hike through the brush next to it, I'm liable to lose it every chain or two. The people that Krait met lived alongside it, he said. If I lose it and find it again upstream of their camp, I'll miss them completely."

She nodded again. "Maybe they'll give us something to eat."

"Exactly. We need food, more clothing and blankets, or even hides. Something to keep us warm. Boots or shoes for you, if we can get them."

I stood up, and stepped into the river, finding the water that had been so refreshing unpleasantly cold, and pulled off my tunic. "This is something I should have done as soon as you swam out to the sloop," I said. "Here, take it. Put it on, and please don't argue with me."

She began to protest, but fell silent when she saw that she was only making me angry. "Women in New Viron never let strangers look at their breasts," I explained. "Allowing it would be like sing- ing that song you're trying to forget. Do you understand?"

In a whisper so soft I could scarcely hear her, she said, "You're not a stranger."

"I know, and there are exceptions. This is best, just the same. Put it on."

"You'll be cold. I was."

I told her that I had been getting chilled anyway when I was wearing my tunic, which was not particularly warm. After that, we waded upstream for two or three leagues before the water became so frigid that we had to get out and try to trace the river from one side after all.

Shadelow (I still have no other name by which to call it) is a colder continent than ours, from what I saw of it. Even places we would consider southern are colder than New Viron, and much colder than this town of Gaon. I would think that it must be due to the western winds, or to unfavorable currents in the sea.

It was nearly dark by the time we reached the lean-to Krait had visited. It belonged to a family of four-a husband and wife, a boy of twelve or thirteen, and a plump little girl whom I judged to be eight or nine. The man was away hunting when we arrived, and the boy was spearing fish in the river. His mother called out to him when she saw us, and he came at a run, brandishing his barbed spear. Seawrack and I smiled and tried to show by signs (since the woman seemed not to understand the Common Tongue) that we were friendly.

The girl had been Krait's victim. She lay on her back beside their fire, deathly pale beneath her deep tan and only occasionally opening her eyes; I do not believe she spoke the whole time we were there. Remembering what Silk had told me about Teasel, and what Teasel herself had told Nettle and me later, I tried to show her mother by signs that she should be kept very warm and given a great deal of water, at last fetching a soft greenbuck skin myself and covering her with it. The boy was-or rather, seemed to be-more intelligent, bringing water in a gourd as soon as I pointed to his sister and pretended to drink from my hand.

Soon the father returned carrying two big gray-and-red birds he had killed with arrows. He proved to speak the Common Tongue fairly well, and asked us many questions about Babbie, having never seen a hus before. When I told him that Babbie could understand what we were saying, he explained (with some difficulty, but very earnestly) that it was true of every animal. "He listen. No talk. Sometimes talk. Long time the shearbear, he talk me."

It was an animal I had never heard of; I asked him what the shearbear had said.

He shook his head. "No tell."

"Change blood," his wife explained, making Seawrack blink with surprise.

That sounded as if it might be significant, so I asked her about it.

"He-pen-sheep cut arm, shearbear cut same." She crossed her arms to illustrate the mingling of their blood, then pointed upward. Her husband and son pointed upward as well, he with his bow and the boy with his fishing spear. I pointed upward with my slug gun, and they nodded approval, at which Seawrack too pointed upward as the woman had.

They invited us to join their meal, and we accepted eagerly. After we ate, I traded two silver pins for a soft skin smaller than the one with which I had covered their daughter, saying that I was cold.

He-pen-sheep (who was naked to the waist himself) cut a slit in the middle of it for my head and cut away a long, thin strip that he tied around my waist as one would tie a trouser cord, making a rough but warm leather tunic with half sleeves of the skin. "You stay," he urged me. "She-pick-berry make together for you."

Neither Seawrack nor I understood "make together," so he brought out a pair of beautifully made hide boots and pointed out the stitching. Too eagerly, perhaps, I offered them a silver necklace if She-pick-berry would make a pair for Seawrack, since the pair that he had shown us would have been much too large for her. After some discussion we agreed that the boots could be undecorated, and I offered another pin in addition to the necklace.

She-pick-berry then made the boots in something less than an hour, folding and cutting soft leather around Seawrack's feet, punching holes in it with one of the pins she had gotten from me already, and sewing it quickly with a big bone needle. They were very simple in construction, one piece forming the sides and the sole, another the front and top, and a third the back.

Pretending ignorance, I asked He-pen-sheep what had happened to his daughter.

"Inhumu bite." He indicated the inner part of his own thigh.

Seawrack told him that an inhumu had bitten Babbie some days ago, although it had not attacked us.

He nodded solemnly. "Afraid Neighbor-man." When I asked what a Neighbor-man was, he laughed and pointed to the ring Seawrack had given me. "You Neighbor-man."

"Many Neighbor here," his wife told Seawrack. She paused to moisten the sinew with which she sewed, running it through her mouth. "Build many fire. Neighbor-man," she pointed to me, "come, talk Neighbor."

I indicated the wilderness of sand and scrub through which we had walked for most of the day. "Are there many Neighbors down there?"

Without looking up from her sewing, she nodded emphatically. "Many Neighbor. Many fire."

Her son displayed both palms. "No kill Neighbor."

His father laughed again. "He no kill. Change blood Neighbor," to which he added what seemed to be several sentences in a tongue that I had never heard before.

"Neighbor kill you?" I suggested.

He shook his head. "Kill inhumu."

By that time the Short Sun had set; She-pick-berry was finishing her sewing by firelight. The ground had begun to rise here; the soil was darker and not so sandy, and the trees much taller. I climbed a likely-looking one, gaining enough height to see that the fires Seawrack and I had watched two nights before had been re-kindled, and were more numerous if anything. It seemed strange that we had not come across the ashes of one at least during our long hike through the scrub. For some time I stood upon a convenient limb, surveying them and speculating, before I climbed down again.

We stretched ourselves upon the ground to sleep in daisy-petal fashion, our feet toward the fire and our heads outward. If I had been warm and comfortable, I might very well have nodded off quickly, and slept the night away in spite of the resolution I had formed while I had stood in the tree. As things were, I shivered, huddled with Seawrack, and reviled myself through chattering teeth for not trading for the greenbuck hide and letting the exsanguinated child freeze for me.

Seawrack, as I ought to mention here, went to sleep at once; but hers was a troubled slumber, in which she trembled and twitched without waking, and sometimes spoke. I could not understand most of what she said, which seemed to me to be in several rather different languages. Once I thought she was cajoling someone or something; and once I overheard her say quite distinctly: "Yes, Mother! I'm coming, Mother!" After a time, it occurred to me that she might begin to sing in her sleep, crooning the song I had heard when she sat naked on the wave-swept rocks; when it did, I got to my feet without waking her, as I had intended all along.

The night was silent, cold, and clear. I made sure of Sinew's hunting knife and picked up my slug gun, then scanned the sky for Krait-as everyone knows, inhumi are prone to return to places in which they have been successful. He was not to be seen, only the bright stars, very cold and far, and baleful Green low upon the eastern horizon.

The scrub trees of the peninsula had been troublesome by day; now they were nightmarish, raking my face with spiky limbs the moment I ceased to guard it with my hand or the slug gun. Every so often I was obliged to stop and chop my way through some tangle by touch alone; it must have taken me a full two hours to travel half a league.

At one point I stopped and looked behind me, footsore, exhausted, and sorely tempted to return to the fire and lie down again, and was irrationally cheered to find that it was still in sight, although it looked as remote as the stars. Save for Pig, Patera Silk and you, Nettle, I have seldom found a lot to love about my fellow human beings, even when I liked them; but at that moment I must have felt the way that Silk himself habitually did. The chill wind, the twisted, useless little trees, and the impoverished soil I trod were hostile, foreign things scarcely better than Krait and possibly worse. We six had faced them in the day now past and would face them again in the day to come; and it was our glory that we faced them together.

The feeling faded as soon as I turned my eyes away, but it has never disappeared completely. It is good to live as I do here: in a palace, with important work to do and plenty to eat. It is good-but those who live as I do here cannot ever know the feeling I experienced that night in the scrub when I looked back up the slope and saw the lonely scarlet glow that was She-pick-berry's humble fire. There are worse things for the spirit, Nettle, than fatigue and sore feet, a little hunger and a little cold.

Yesterday Barsat reported finding a house of the Vanished People, as the Neighbors seem to be called on this eastern side of the sea wherever the Common Tongue is spoken. Today he and I rode out to see it, escorted by Hari Mau, Mota, Ram, and Roti. It was a dismal place, roofless, and empty of everything except twigs and dead leaves; but Barsat informed me that it was happy now. Naturally I asked what he meant.

"It didn't like me," he said. "As soon as I came in, I had to go back out."

The others laughed at that, and I asked Barsat why he had gone inside at all, which may not have been an altogether fair question since we had gone in as a matter of course.

"I was hoping to find something I could sell," he told me frankly. "Was that wrong, Rajan?"

I shook my head.

"They can afford to laugh." He shot Hari Mau and his three friends a glance compounded of envy and admiration. "We poor men like to laugh too, but we don't have much to laugh about."

I began to explain that I was almost as poor as he, that my palace belonged to the town, which could tell me to leave whenever it wished, and so on; but before I could finish, we heard a single clear note sounded in another room. It was as though a bell had been struck.

Going to investigate, I discovered this chalice (at any rate, it is an object that seems more or less like a cup), which appears to be of silver or some shining alloy. It was standing on the only section of clear floor that I saw in the whole place, looking for all the whorl as if it had been set down there a moment before. I picked it up and tried to give it to Barsat. He reached for it but would not take it, although he hunted very industriously through the litter of leaves and twigs for something else.

My point, such as it is, is that I could not feel the happiness of the house, assuming it existed-as I believe it did. Nor could I feel any such emotion in the ruins on the island, the place where I fell into the pit through my eagerness to run down the greenback. Nor did I receive any gift at all there, save Krait's rescue.

I must have spent three or four hours, if not longer, laboriously picking my way through the scrub. At last I hung my slug gun on the stub of a broken branch and sat down under one of the little trees with my back to the trunk, weary to the bone. Soon I let my eyes close (which they were only too willing to do) and abandoned myself to disappointment. I had hoped to reach the closest of the fires I had seen from my perch in the tree and catch a glimpse of the mysterious "Neighbors" about whom I had thought so much. I had also hoped to kill some animal that would furnish us with food. As I slumped there, I knew that both my hopes had been without foundation; I had exhausted myself and abandoned the comfort of the fire for nothing. I believe that I slept then, for a few minutes at least, and very likely for an hour or more.

A tap on my shoulder woke me. The face that looked into my own was invisible in the darkness, but I took no note of that, thinking that mine must be equally impossible to see. In much of the account I have written, I have set down my own words or the words others spoke to me. It a few cases I have been quite certain (at the time I wrote, if not subsequently) that I recalled them precisely. In most others, I have merely re-created them as you and I re-created so many of the verbal exchanges we put into our book, relying upon my knowledge of the speakers, and of the gist of what they had said. But we have come to a very different matter.

The tall, shadowed figure before me said, "Get up." To which I replied, "I'm sorry. I didn't mean any harm." Those are the exact words that he spoke, and the exact words with which I answered him. Everything the Neighbors said to me, and every reply I made, has remained in my memory from that night to this, as fresh as though it had been said only a few seconds ago. I do not know why this should be true, but I know that it is.

As for the reason I answered as I did, I can only say that upon awakening (if I had in fact been sleeping as sleep is generally accounted) I felt in a confused fashion that I had been trespassing, that this flat land with its covering of scrub was his, and that he might be understandably angry at finding I had ventured on it.

"Come with me," he said, and he helped me to stand up, grasping both my hands while lifting me under the arms. I ought to remember how his hands felt, I am sure-but I do not. My mind was on other things, perhaps.

He strode off through the trees, then turned to me and took my hand again to make certain that I was following him. I trotted after him, and in that way we walked some considerable distance, he always a stride in advance. I am what is ordinarily called a tall man now, and I believe that I must be about as tall as Silk was when you and I were young; but the Neighbor was a good deal taller, and a great deal taller than I was then, taller even than Hammerstone, though far more slender.

I trotted, as I have already written, because I could not keep pace with the Neighbor's four long legs by walking. But the branches of the twisted trees no longer raked my face, and I am quite certain that there was no place where I was forced to get out Sinew's knife and cut my way through. If there were anything in the whorl that could have convinced me that the entire episode was a dream, it would be that. It was not a dream however. I knew even then (exactly as I know now) that it was nothing of the kind.

I had hurried after the tall figure of the Neighbor so promptly that I had left my slug gun dangling from the low limb on which I had hung it, but I do not believe I was conscious of that at the time. I would not have been greatly disturbed, I think, if I had been.

By the time we reached their fire, I was panting and sweating despite the cold. There were more shadowy figures seated around it; they wore dark cloaks (or so it seemed to me at the time) and soft-looking hats with wide brims and low crowns. Most were sitting upright, but one lay at full length. He may have been dead; I do not believe he spoke or moved while I was there, and it is conceivable that he was not one of them at all but a fallen log or something of the sort, and that I only imagined that there was a sixth or a seventh who was lying down. If this sounds impossibly vague, you must understand that the fire did not illuminate him, or them, in the way I would have expected.

"Do you know who we are?" the shadowed figure who had come for me asked.

I replied, "My friend He-pen-sheep calls you his Neighbors."

One of the seated Neighbors inquired, "Who and what do you yourself think we are?"

I said, "I'm from New Viron, a town on the eastern shore of the sea, and I believe that you're the Vanished People. I mean, I believe that you're some of the people we call the Vanished People in New Viron."

Another said, "Then you must tell us who the Vanished People are." All this was in the Common Tongue.

"You are the people whose whorl this was before our landers came to it," I said. No one replied, so I continued, fumbling now and then as I tried to find the right words. "The Whorl Whorl up there," I pointed, "that was our whorl. This whorl, which we call Blue now, was your whorl. But we thought something had-had happened to you, because we never see you. Sometimes we find things you made, like that place on the island to the south, though I never did until I found that one. My son Sinew says that he and some other young men found an altar of yours in the forest, a stone table on which you used to sacrifice to the gods of this whorl." up there," I pointed, "that was our whorl. This whorl, which we call Blue now, was your whorl. But we thought something had-had happened to you, because we never see you. Sometimes we find things you made, like that place on the island to the south, though I never did until I found that one. My son Sinew says that he and some other young men found an altar of yours in the forest, a stone table on which you used to sacrifice to the gods of this whorl."

I waited for one of them to speak.

"Since you haven't really vanished at all, we're-I'm very glad that you've let me live here with my family. Thank you. Thank you very much."

They said nothing, and after a while the one who had brought me to their fire indicated by a gesture, a motion of his fingers as if he were drawing words from my mouth, that I should go on talking.

I said, "I'm seeing you here tonight, I realize that, and I'm happy that you gave me this chance to express my gratitude. But I've never seen any of you before in twenty years, and most of us think that you're all dead. I'll try to tell them that's a mistake when I get back home."

As I spoke, I was reminded of Patera Remora's long, foolish face, and the dark and dusty little sellaria in which we had con- versed, and I said, "I think perhaps our Prolocutor has seen you. He seems to know something, anyway. I hadn't realized it until now."

They remained silent.

I said, "We think your gods are still here. To tell the truth, we're afraid that they are. I've encountered one myself, your sea goddess. I don't know what you call her." As I spoke I looked from shadowy face to shadowy face. That was when I realized that they were not made even slightly more visible by the fire. The fire was there. I could see its light on my hands and feel its heat on my cheeks. I do not doubt that its light was shining on my face, as firelight always does; but it did not light them.

Lamely I finished, "Seawrack calls her the Mother. I mean the girl-the young lady that I call Seawrack. I mean, she used to."

The Neighbor to my left said, "That is one of her names." He had not spoken before.

"We're here now," I said, "we human men and women and children who came out of the Whorl Whorl."

All of them nodded.

"And we're taking your whorl, or trying to. I don't blame you for being angry with us for that, but our gods are driving us out, and we have no place else to go. Except for me, I mean. I'm trying to get back to the Whorl Whorl, but not to stay. To bring back Patera Silk. Would you like me to tell you who Patera Silk is?"

The Neighbor who had awakened me said, "No. Someone you care about."

I nodded.

"Most of what you have said, we might say. This whorl of yours was ours. We, the remnant of our race, have abandoned it, giving it to no one and making no provision to keep it for ourselves. We found a way to leave and we left, seeking a new and a better home."

He turned from me, his face lifted to the western stars. "Some of you call the place where we are the Neighbor Whorl. It does not matter what we call it, or what we once called this one. This whorl is yours now. It is called Blue. It belongs to your race."

I stammered my thanks. I could set down everything I said, but there is really no way to describe how clumsily and haltingly I said it.

"We have brought you here as the representative of your race," he told me when I had finished. "You, here tonight, must speak for all of you. We have a question to ask. We cannot make you answer it, and if we could we would not. You will oblige us greatly by answering, even so. You say that you are grateful to us."

"For a whorl? For Blue? It's a godlike gift, like Pas giving us the Whorl. In a hundred years we couldn't repay you. Or a thousand. Never."

"You can. You yourself can repay us tonight, simply by answering. Will you?"

I said, "I'll try. I will if I can. What is the question?"

He looked around at the others. All those sitting upright nod- ded, I believe, although I cannot be sure. "Let me remind you again," the Neighbor who had brought me to their fire said, "that you will speak for your entire race. Every man of your blood. Every woman, and every child."

"I understand."

"I chose you, and I did so because I hoped to incline your race's judgment in our favor by choosing someone apt to be well disposed toward us." By a trifling gesture he indicated the ring that Seawrack had given me before we left the sloop. "If you wish to hold my choosing such a person against us, there is nothing to prevent you."

I said, "Certainly not."

"Thank you. Here is our question. Nearly all of us have abandoned this whorl, as I told you. Tonight we give it to you who call yourselves human, as I have also told you. Do you humans, the new possessors, object to our visiting it from time to time, as we are doing tonight?"

"Absolutely not," I said. Realizing that the words I had used could be understood in a sense opposite to the one that I intended, I added, "We have no objection whatsoever."

"From this whorl we sprang. You spoke of a hundred years, and of a thousand. There are rocks and rivers, trees and islands here that have been famous among us for many thousands of years. This is one such place. I ask you again, may we visit it, and the others?"

Trying to sound formal, I responded, "Come whenever you wish to, and stay for as long as you wish. Our whorl is your whorl."

"I ask a third time, and I will not ask again. You must answer for all your human kind. Guests are frequently awkward, embarrassing, and inconvenient. Your ways are not ours, and ours are not yours. They must often seem foreign, barbaric, and irrational to you. May we come?"

I hesitated, suddenly fearful. "Will you come as the inhumi do, to do us harm?"

There was stir among those seated around the fire. I could not be certain whether it was of amusement or disgust. "No," the Neighbor who had brought me said, "We will not come to do you harm, and we will help you against the inhumi when it lies in our power." The rest nodded.