I had been of two minds about that elephant. To begin with, on Green I had seen that even the largest animals can penetrate thick cover, as the wallowers we hunted here had. (If elephants can be domesticated, why not wallowers? We must try it.) Their size and strength let them force the heaviest growth, while their leathery skins protect them from all but the worst scratches.

On the other hand you have warts, as my father used to say, the wart in this case being that these large animals are too big to pass between big, solid trunks growing close together. Fortunately this forest has only a few large trees, and a great many bushes and saplings.

It seemed that the elephant had little experience of such places, but he learned his business quickly. After the first hour or so, he was going faster than Darjan, so that Darjan, whom we had brought along to guide us, was in danger of being trodden flat. I had told Mahawat to watch me and go where I did, but the elephant learned how to do that before Mahawat did, keeping the tip of one trunk touching my headcloth and padding along behind me with surprisingly little noise. We had struck the tent before setting out; but Evensong and my guards had a rough time of it just the same, having to lie flat on the platform and fend off the limbs and twigs any way they could.

I had intended to stop at the edge of the forest and wait for one of the Hannese trains of mules and pack horses to pass, then attack it from behind; but in that I had not counted on the elephant. He was so happy to see an open space that he ran past us and out onto the road before Mahawat could get him stopped.

I got back up then, very glad of a chance to sit down after all the walking I had done, and told Mahawat he would have to get us back under the trees where we could not be seen. Mahawat agreed, but the elephant did not. When he realized that we wanted him to go back into the forest, he rebelled, charging up the road like an eight-legged talus while trumpeting with both trunks in a way that I found frightening myself and that absolutely terrified poor Evensong. I suppose I have heard as many women scream as most men have, and I may even have heard more than most men, having heard a good many wounded Trivigaunti troopers when Nettle and I fought for General Mint; but Evensong's scream is in a class by itself. It is louder and shriller than the scream of any other woman I have ever met with, and it lasts two or three times longer.

Nettle, I know that you will never read this, nor would I wish you to; but I am going to pretend you will. Try to imagine us, my six guards, Evensong, Mahawat, and me (with Darjan lost in the dust behind us), holding on to anything and everything in reach and every one of us about to fall off, as we rounded a turn in the road and found ourselves among three or four hundred Hannese lancers.

A few days ago I wrote that our elephants could not be induced to charge the enemy. I was wrong. This one did, and you have never seen so many shaggy little ponies thrown into such a state of abject panic. Perhaps no one has.

When I think back on it, it seems miraculous that even one of us escaped alive. Riders were being thrown left and right, and few of those who stayed in their saddles seemed to have slug guns or needlers. The road turned again, but my elephant kept running in a straight line, into a sort of cleft between two masses of rock. Before long his sides were scraping and Mahawat got him back under control. A handful of horsemen tried to follow us in, but a few shots from my guards quickly put an end to that. Eventually we found our way onto a gende slope dotted with brambles. It became lower and wetter, trees took the place of the brambles, and we were back in the familiar "impassable" forest.

By that time all of us were very glad to be there, even my elephant.

Morning, but dark as night with pounding rain. No one came to awaken me-or what is more likely, Pehla did but the guard at my door would not admit her. Very late morning, I ought to have said. I have slept twelve hours at least.

I would like some tea and something to eat, but I wanted to read over what I wrote last night first, and make a few corrections. (I seldom correct anything, as you will have seen, but in this case there were far too many simple errors in spelling and the like. I have recopied one whole sheet, and thrown the old one away.) But before I tell the guard I am awake and send him for some breakfast, I cannot resist speculating a little. Was what we did of any real value? If it simply shows the enemy that the "impassable" forest is indeed passable, it may have been worse than useless. If it teaches us (and compels them) to watch that flank, it will have been well worth doing. I must see that it does, and that further raids are organized and carried out.

What, you will ask, became of Trooper Darjan? The truth is that I do not know. By the time we had gotten clear of the enemy horsemen, I had forgotten him utterly; and I seem to have been too fatigued last night to spare him a thought, although I was stupidly determined to write down everything before I slept. Silk would have remembered him for the rest of his life.

I stopped writing this long enough to scribble a note to Hari Mau asking about Darjan. I called him "my guide." Hari Mau should be able to tell me whether he returned safely.

I also asked about the men's comfort. We knew the rainy season would begin soon and tried to make provision for it. Now that it has begun, I must see that the waterproof cloaks are actually handed out to the men who need them, that they get the meals and hot tea and so on. I will set out for the front this afternoon, assuming I am well enough.

The winter wheat should have been planted before this; now it is too late. Not much was. The shortages will only get worse, although three boadoads of food from Bahar arrived yesterday. Two to the troopers, one sold in the market to help raise money for I more.

We must have an animal of some sort tonight. I meant to take I our milch cow, but with the gardener there I cannot risk it. I should have diought of this sooner. I will have to find something else today if we are to do it tonight. Not my horse, because I cannot spare him. Not the elephant, eidier. We could not control him, and Mahawat sleeps in his stall with him in any case.

No, someone else will have to find a suitable animal for me. I will be too busy, and everything I do is noticed.

Breakfast.

Chandi brought in my breakfast tray, solicitous of my health while trying very hard to keep a scratched cheek turned away from me. I asked her how it happened, expecting her to say she fell. (How long has it been since I thought about old Generalissmo Oosik? Not since Nettle and I wrote, I am sure.) She surprised me by saying she had bent to pick a rose in the garden and the bush scratched her. There is a variety there that blooms almost constantly, so her story was not as absurd as one might think. It was original and imaginative, too.

But not true. She has been fighting with a sister-wife, and I can guess which. I told her to send Pehla in to me, and she went, pale and silent. Chandi thinks she used to be my favorite, so it is easy to see what happened.

Back again. (I almost wrote home home.) Two days of rain, wet and mud. My wound throbs and my right ankle hurts, but dry and comfortable otherwise. Evening-nearly eight by the big clock.

Saw the men. It is not as good as I had hoped. I sent a third of them home. Hari Mau objected so violently that I was afraid I was going to have to put him under arrest. He says that if the enemy attacks we are done. I told him the truth, that the enemy will not attack again until the rains end, that in this weather two boys and a dog could hold off a hundred men.

The men I sent home are to come back in a week. (I imagine that at least half will have to be dragged back.) When they return, we will send home another third. I told the men, or at least I told as many as I could reach.

Spoke to the head gardener again before I left. I tried to give him money and asked him to buy a goat. He said a cow would be better, and he would find one. You never know with these people.

Chicken for my supper, chopped up and mixed with fruit and pepper in the usual way. Since I see it like that twice a week at least, it should not have reminded me of anything, but it made me think of the meat pudding we got in the market at Wichote, and I should be writing about that anyway instead of all this day-to-day stuff. Just imagine what this record would be like if I had written about everything in the same way that I have been setting down these daily doings of mine. "I got a splinter in my finger today-left, index-while scraping the third cargo chest on the starboard side, and Seawrack kissed it for me."

No, it really could not be like that, because we would still be a hundred pages at least from Seawrack, the bat-fish, and the floating isles. Back with Mucor and Maytera, in all likelihood.

At any rate, we-I-bought a species of pudding there on market day. I had never seen one like it before, and the woman selling them said they were good (naturally) so I took a chance and traded a silver earring for one. It was dried meat pounded to powder and mixed with fat and dried berries of several kinds (two black, one red and deliciously tart, and one green and fruity as I remember). Not bad-tasting, but a moderate slice of it left me feeling overfull for two days, and it was too much like what we had been eating, the breakbull meat Seawrack had smoked.

That night-I shall never forget it-Krait woke me. Or it might be better to say that by trying to approach me while I slept he stirred up Babbie enough to wake me. "I've found it," he told me. "Pajarocu."

I started to reply, but he laid a finger to his lips and motioned toward the stern.

"It's a long way. It will take ten days or more."

My heart sank. I had been thinking that Seawrack and I would have another month of travel at least. "The lander's still there?"

"Yes." He looked around cautiously at the other boats as he spoke, his reptilian eyes gleaming in the Greenlight; and I wondered why he should be afraid that the people on them might hear him, when I knew that Seawrack could not. "They still have quite a few empty places, too. About half, a woman told me, even though their town is full of men who have come to make the trip."

"What sort of a town is it? A real town like New Viron? Or is it more like this?" By a gesture I indicated the huts at the water's edge.

He grinned. "It's more like one of ours, Father dear. You won't like it."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Why should I tell you and have you call me a liar to my face?"

"You are a liar, Krait. You know that much better than I do."

He shrugged and looked angry.

"Did you talk to He-hold-fire?"

"No. Just to whoever was still awake and willing to trade a bit of gossip with me." He watched me silently, weighing me in scales that I could not even imagine. "Are we going to take Seawrack with us?"

I hedged. "Let's hear what she has to say. I don't think she wants to go."

"She wants to do what you want her to do. Why force her to guess what it is you want?"

"Then I won't. I won't take Babbie, either. This whole continent seems to be covered with trees." I was thinking of Babbie living the natural life of his kind in the forest. I did not know whether there were wild hus on Shadelow, but it certainly seemed like a place where he could live happily.

"Was it like this around Pajarocu?"

"More so. The trees are bigger up the river. Bigger and older, and not so sleepy."

"Then I'll let him go. Free him. Why shouldn't he be happy?"

"I should've told you we can't take him anyway. No animals. You could sell him to somebody there, perhaps."

I shook my head. Babbie was my friend.

"Seawrack's going to be the problem. I don't think you realize it yet, Horn, but she is."

I wanted to say that she had not been a problem until he came, that she had helped me in all sorts of ways, but it would have been such an obvious opening for him that at the last moment I did not speak.

"An aid and a comfort." He grinned again, fangs out. "Don't jump like that. I can't read your mind. I read your face."

"You saw the truth there," I told him. "How do we get to Pajarocu?"

"I know something about human ways, as you've seen. But you, being human, not only know them but understand them. Or so I assume."

"Sometimes," I said.

"Sometimes. I like that. Have I ever told you how much I like you, Horn?"

I nodded. "More often than I've believed it."

"I do. The thing that I like is that I can never tell when you're being truthful. Most of you lie constantly, as Seawrack does. A few of you are practically always truthful, this Silk you like to talk about would seem to have been one of those. Both are boring, but you aren't. You make me guess over and over."

I asked what his own practice was, although I knew.

"The same as yours. That's another reason to like you. Seriously now, you need to think about your woman, not as I would but as you would. She's a human being, exactly as you are. Don't settle for an easy answer and put it out of your mind."

"I do that too much."

"I'm glad you know it."

I sat on the gunwale. "What is it you're trying to get me to say? That I need your advice?"

"I doubt that you do. I merely think that you haven't thought as much as you should about the situation she'll face, left alone in Pajarocu."

"She'll have Babbie to protect her."

"So much for a life of woodsy freedom. You wanted to know how to get there. Up the river, right at the first fork and left at the second. I know that's not what your map shows, but I followed the rivers to get back here. That's it, and a long fly it was."

"Do you think they'll let three of us, all supposedly from New Viron, have places on the lander?"

Krait nodded. "It's barely half full, I told you that, and they'll want to go before winter, since nobody's likely to come after the bad weather sets in. The ones who are there already are getting impatient, too. If they wait much longer, they'll be losing more than they gain."

Evensong came. This time I watched her slip through my window. When peace returns (if it does) I'm going to have another sentry in the garden. Or bars on these windows. Bars would be more practical, I suppose, but I cannot forget how I hated the bars on the windows of my manse.

I told her that it would be hours yet, and I wanted to get a few hours sleep before we went out. She said she did, too, but her sister-wives would not let her. She asked who would wake us when it was time, and I told her I would wake myself.

As I now have. We will go soon. I will wake Evensong and give her the note I have prepared, a blank piece of paper with a seal. She will leave by the window, bring her note to the sentry at my door, and demand to be admitted. He will refuse. I will open my door (pretending that their voices have awakened me), look at her paper, get dressed, and leave with her. We will meet the head gardener at the lower gate.

Just writing those words made me think of the garden at my manteion at home. We sprats said Patera Pike's garden, and then almost without a pause to catch breath, Patera Silk's. With barely another pause, we are old, the garden a ruin (I sat there for a while just the same), and that spot, in which some nameless much earlier augur had made his garden, a hundred thousand leagues away or some such ridiculous number. "Do you imagine that a man of your age will find another woman as young as she is?" Krait asked me. He wanted her on the lander, of course; I know that now. "Or one as beautiful?" Trying to be gallant, I told him there were no other women as beautiful as Seawrack.

Nor are there.

Evensong is as young-I would not be surprised if she were a year or two younger. Nettle was never beautiful or even pretty, but my heart melted each time she smiled. It would melt again if I could see her smile tonight.

I must have a needier, and get it without taking it from someone who will use it against the enemy.

We cannot surrender. I cannot. Because I could not leave Pig blind, these people were able to bring me here, and so ended any chance of success I might have had. You could argue that I owe them nothing, and in a sense I believe that it is true; but to say that I owe them nothing is one thing, and to say that they deserve to be despoiled, raped, and enslaved is another and a very different thing.

All this time I have tried to be Silk for them. I have thought of Silk day and night-what would he do? What would he say under these circumstances? On what principles would he make his decision? Yet to every such question there is just the one answer: he would do what was right and good, and in doubt, he would side against his own interests. That is what I must do.

What I will do. I will try to be what he tried to be. He succeeded, after all.

I have been pacing up and down this big bedroom. This palatial bedroom my oppressors built for me. Pacing in my slippers, so as not to wake Evensong or let the guard at my door know I am awake. When I came here I was a prisoner-a prisoner who was respected, true. I was treated with great kindness and even reverence by Hari Mau and his friends, but I was a prisoner just the same. I knew it, and so did they.

Let me be honest with myself, tonight and always. With myself most of all. That has changed, had changed even before the war. I am their ruler, their calde. I could leave here at any time, simply by putting a few things into saddlebags, mounting, and riding away. No one would lift a finger to stop me. Who would dare?

I said I could; but I cannot. A prisoner is free to get away if he can. I am no prisoner, and so I cannot. I said I owed them nothing; let that stand. Better-I owe this town and its collective population nothing, because I was taken from the Whorl Whorl against my will. But what about the individuals who make up the town? Do I owe Hari Mau and my troopers nothing? Men I have bled with? against my will. But what about the individuals who make up the town? Do I owe Hari Mau and my troopers nothing? Men I have bled with?

What about Bahar? (I take one example where I might have a hundred.) He was one of those who forced me to come here. At my order he bought a boat, boarded it, and left his native place, reminding me forcefully of a man named Horn I used to know. I have not the slightest doubt that he has been working at his task, and doing it as well as it can be done. Three boatloads of good, simple, cheap food so far, and it would not surprise me if three more docked tomorrow. At my order he went without a word of protest, leaving his shop to his apprentices. Do I owe Bahar nothing?

Say I do. It is wrong, but say it.

What about my wives? Pehla and Alubukhara are with child. I have lain beside every one of them, and whispered words of love that to many men mean nothing at all. Am I, their husband, to be numbered among those men?

I say that I am not I say that I am not. Neither were the teachings I tried to pass along to my sons things that I myself did not believe. I am a bad man, granted. Sinew always thought so, and Sinew was right. I am no Silk, but am I as bad as that? I left Nettle, but I did not leave her to be raped and murdered.

Lastly, Evensong and all the people of Han. Say that she counts only as a wife, that she means no more to me than Chandi. Does she mean less? She has a mother and a father, brothers and sisters, two uncles and three aunts, all of whom she loves. They are at the mercy of a tyrant, and if Gaon loses or surrenders they will remain at his mercy.

If we win, there will be no difficulty about getting a needier, or anything.

I have been writing here, I see, about that town on the river. It seems so very long ago.

Where did I put Maytera's eye? In the top drawer at the back, to be sure. Should I put it in a saddlebag now? How happy she will be!

And my robe. I must have my robe and the corn. Where is that?

Found it-back of wardrobe. I put Olivine's eye in the pocket. On Green I learned the secret the inhumi wish nobody to know. I promised not to reveal it, but who will ever read this, besides me? Although I swore, I did not swear not to reveal my oath. I can threaten them as well as save them, and I will do both.

We must win this war.

Then I will go home.

-13-

BROTHERS.

After writing those words, "Then I will go home," I threw away the last of Oreb's quills. I am writing with the gray feather of a goose now, like other men. And there is so much to write about before the great day comes-the day when I can leave this place-that I hardly know how to begin.