Captives of the Flame

by Samuel R. Delany

  CHAPTER VIII

  There was a roaring in the air. Let cried out and ran forward. Thenshadow. Then water. His feet were slipping on the deck as the rail swungby. Then thunder. Then screaming. Something was breaking in half.

  Jon and Arkor got him out. They had to jump overboard with theunconscious Prince, swim, climb, and carry. There were sirens at thedock when they laid him on the dried leaves of the forest clearing.

  "We'll leave him here," Arkor said.

  "Here? Are you sure?" Jon asked.

  "They will come for him. You must go on," he said softly. "We'll leavethe Prince now, and you can tell me of your plan."

  "My plan ..." Jon said. They walked off through the trees.

  * * * * *

  Dried leaves tickled one cheek, a breeze cooled the other. Somethingtouched him on the side, and he stretched his arms, scrunched hiseyelids, then curled himself into the comfortable dark. He was nappingin the little park behind the palace. He would go in for supper soon.The leaf smell was fresher than it had ever.... Something touched him onthe side again.

  He opened his eyes, and bit off a scream. Because he wasn't in the park,he wasn't going in to supper, and there was a giant standing over him.

  The giant touched the boy with his foot once more.

  Suddenly the boy scrambled away, then stopped, crouching, across theclearing. A breeze shook the leaves like admonishing fingers before heheard the giant speak. The giant was silent. Then the giant spoke again.

  The word the boy recognized in both sentences was, "... Quorl ..."

  The third time he spoke, he merely pointed to himself and repeated,"Quorl."

  Then he pointed to the boy and smiled questioningly.

  The boy was silent.

  Again the giant slapped his hand against his naked chest and said,"Quorl." Again he extended his hand toward the boy, waiting for sound.It did not come. Finally the giant shrugged, and motioned for the boy tocome with him.

  The boy rose slowly, and then followed. Soon they were walking brisklythrough the woods.

  As they walked, the boy remembered: the shadow of the plane out ofcontrol above them, the plane striking the water, water becoming amountain of water, like shattered glass rushing at them across the sea.And he remembered the fire.

  Hadn't it really started in his room at the palace, when he pressed thefirst of the concealed micro-switches with his heel? The cameras wereprobably working, but there had been no bells, no sirens, no rush ofguards. It had tautened when he pushed the second switch in the jeweleddolphin on his bedpost. It nearly snapped with metallic panic when hehad to maneuver the girl into position for the retina photograph._Nothing_ had happened. He was taken away, and his mother stayed quietlyin her room. What was supposed to happen was pulling further andfurther away from the reality. How could anybody kidnap the Prince?

  His treatment by the boy who told him about the sea and the girl whotaught him to fall pulled it even tighter. _If_ the Prince _were_kidnaped, certainly his jailors should not tell him stories of beautifulmornings and sunsets, or teach him to do impossible things with hisbody.

  He was sure that the girl had meant him to die when she had told him toleap from the roof. But he had to do what he was told. He always had.(He was following the giant through the dull leaves because the gianthad told him to.) When he had leapt from the roof, then rolled over andsprung to his feet alive, the shock had turned the rack another notchand he could feel the threads parting.

  Perhaps if he had stayed there, talked more to the boy and girl, hecould have loosened the traction, pulled the fabric of reality back intothe shape of expectation. But then the man with the black hair and thescarred giant had come to take him away. He'd made one last volitionaleffort to bring "is" and "suppose" together. He'd told the man the storyof the mine prisoners, the one cogent, connected thing he rememberedfrom his immediate past, a real good "suppose" story. But the man turnedon him and said that "suppose" wasn't "suppose" at all, but "is." Athread snapped here, another there.

  (Over the deck of the boat there was roaring in the air. He had criedout. Then shadow. Then water. His feet were slipping and the rail swungby. Then thunder. Then screaming, his screaming: _I can't die! I'm notsupposed to die!_ Something tore in half.)

  The leaves were shaking, the whole earth trembled with his tired,unsteady legs. As they walked through the forest, the last filamentwent, like a thread of glass under a blow-torch flame. The last thing toflicker out, like the fading end of the white hot strand, was the memoryof someone, somewhere, entreating him not to forget something, not toforget it no matter what ... but what it was, he wasn't sure.

  Quorl, with the boy beside him, kept a straight path through theforest. The ground sloped up now. Boulders lipped with moss pushed outhere and there. Once Quorl stopped short; his arm shot in front of theboy to keep him from going further.

  Yards before them the leaves parted, and two great women walked forward.Everything about them was identical, their blue-black eyes, flat noses,broad cheek ridges. Twin sisters, the boy thought. Both women also borea triplex of scars down the left sides of their faces. They paid noattention to either Quorl or the boy, but walked across into the treesagain. The moment they were gone, Quorl started again.

  Much later they turned onto a small cliff that looked across a greatdrop to another mountain. Near a thick tree trunk was a pile of brushand twigs. The boy watched Quorl drop to his knees and being to move thebrush away. The boy crouched to see better.

  The great brown fingers tipped with bronze-colored nails gently revealeda cage made of sticks tied together with dried vines. Something squeakedin the cage, and the boy jumped.

  Quorl in a single motion got the trap door opened and his hand inside.The next protracted squeak suddenly turned into a scream. Then there wassilence. Quorl removed a furry weasel and handed it to the boy.

  The pelt was feather soft and still warm. The head hung crazily to theside where the neck had been broken. The boy looked at the giant's handsagain.

  Veins roped across the ligaments' taut ridges. The hair on the joints ofthe fingers grew up to edge of the broad, furrowed knuckles. Now thefinders were pulling the brush back over the trap. They crossed theclearing and Quorl uncovered a second trap. When the hand went into thetrap and the knot of muscle jumped on the brown forearm(Squeeeeee_raaaaa_!), the boy looked away, out across the great drop.

  The sky was smoke gray to the horizon where a sudden streak of orangemarked the sunset. The burning copper disk hung low in the purple gap ofthe mountains. A fan of lavender drifted above the orange, and thenwhite, faint green.... The gray wasn't really gray, it was blue-gray. Hebegan to count colors, and there were twelve distinct ones (not athousand). The last one was a pale gold that tipped the edges of the fewlow clouds that clustered near the burning circle.

  A touch on the shoulder made the boy turn back. Quorl handed him thesecond animal, and they went back into the woods. Later, they had builta small fire and had skinned and quartered the animals on thescimitar-like blade that the giant wore. They sat in the diminishingshell of light with the meat on forked sticks, turning it over theflame. The boy watched the gray-maroon fibers go first shiny with juice,and then darken, turn crisp and brown. When the meat was done, Quorltook a piece of folded skin from his pouch and shook some white powderonto it. Then he passed the leather envelope to the boy.

  The boy poured a scattering of white powder into his palm, thencarefully put his tongue to it. It was salt.

  When they had nearly finished eating the forest had grown cooler andstill. Fire made the leaves around them into flickering shingles on thedarkness. Quorl was cleaning the last, tiny bone with big, yellow teethwhen there was a sound. They both turned.

  Another branch broke to their left. "Tloto," Quorl called harshly,followed by some sort of invective.

  It moved closer, the boy could hear it moving, closer until the boy sawthe tall shadow at the edge of the ring of light.

  With
disgust--but without fear, the boy could see--Quorl picked up astick and flung it. The shadow dodged and made a small mewing sound.

  "Di ta klee, Tloto," Quorl said. "Di ta klee."

  Only Tloto didn't _di ta klee_, but came forward instead, into thelight.

  Perhaps it had been born of human parents, but to call it human now ...It was bone naked, hairless, shell white. It had no eyes, no ears, onlya lipless mouth and slitted nostril flaps. It sniffed toward the fire.

  Now the boy saw that both the feet were clubbed and gnarled. Only twofingers on each hand were neither misshapen or stiffly paralyzed. Itreached for Quorl's pile of bones, making the mewing sound with itsmouth.

  With a sudden sweep of his hand, Quorl knocked the paraplegic claw awayand shouted another scattering of indifferent curses. Tloto backed away,turned to the boy, and came forward, its nostril slits widening andcontracting.

  The boy had eaten all he could and had a quarter of his meat still left.It's only a head or two taller than I am, he thought. If it's from thisrace of giants, perhaps it's still a child. Maybe it's my age. He staredat the blank face. It doesn't know what's going on, the boy thought. Itdoesn't know what's supposed to be happening.

  Perhaps it was just the sound of the word in his head that triggered offthe sudden panic. (Or was it something else that caught in his chest?)Anyway, he took the unfinished meat and extended it toward Tloto.

  The claw jumped forward, grabbed, and snatched back. The boy tried tomake his mouth go into a smile. But Tloto couldn't see, so it didn'tmatter. He turned back to the fire, and when he looked up again, Tlotowas gone.

  As Quorl began to kick dirt onto the coals, he lectured the boy,apparently on Tloto and perhaps a few other philosophical concepts. Theboy listened carefully, and understood at least that Tloto was not worthhis concern. Then they lay down beside the little cyst of embers, theglowing scab of light on the darkness, and slept.

  When the giant's hand came down and shook his shoulder, it was stilldark. He didn't jump this time but blinked against the night and pulledhis feet under him. It had grown colder, and dark wind brushed his neckand fingered his hair. Then a high sound cut above the trees and fellaway. Quorl took the boy's arm and they started through the dark treesquickly.

  Gray light filtered from the left. Was it morning? No. The boy saw itwas the rising moon. The light became white, then silver white. Theyreached a cliff at last, beyond which was the dark sea. Broken rockspilled to ledges below. Fifty feet down, but still a hundred feet abovethe water, was the largest table of rock. The moon was high enough tolight the entire lithic arena as well as the small temple at its edge.

  In front of the temple stood a man in black robes who blew on a hugecurved shell. The piercing wail sliced high over the sea and the forest.People were gathering around the edge of the arena. Some came incouples, some with children, but most were single men and women.

  The boy started to go down, but Quorl held him back. They waited. Fromsounds about them, the boy realized there were others observing from theheight also. On the water, waves began to glitter with broken images ofthe moon. The sky was speckled with stars.

  Suddenly a group of people were led from the temple onto the platform.Most of them were children. One was an old man whose beard twitched inthe light breeze. Another was a tall stately women. All of them werebound, all of them were near naked, and all except the woman shiftedtheir feet and looked nervously about.

  The priest in the black robe disappeared into the temple, and emergedagain with something that looked to the boy from this distance for allthe world like a back-scratcher. The priest raised it in the moonlight,and a murmur rose and quieted about the ring of people. The boy saw thatthere were three close prongs on the handle, each snagging on theluminous beams of the moon, betraying their metallic keenness.

  The priest walked to the first child and caught the side of her head inhis hand. Then he quickly drew the triple blade down the left side ofher face. She made an indefinite noise, but it was drowned in the risingwhisper of the crowd. He did the same to the next child who began tocry, and to the next. The woman stood completely still and did notflinch when the blades opened her cheek. The old man was afraid. Theboy could tell because he whimpered and backed away.

  A man and a woman stepped from the ring of people and held him for thepriest. As the blade raked the side of his face, his high senile whineturned into a scream. The boy thought for a moment of the trappedanimals. The old man staggered away from his captors and no one paid himany more attention. The priest raised the shell to his mouth once more,and the high, brilliant sound flooded the arena.

  Then, as they had come, silently the people disappeared into the woods.Quorl touched the boy's shoulder and they too went into the woods. Theboy looked at the giant with a puzzled expression, but there was noexplanation. Once the boy caught sight of a white figure darting attheir left as a shaft of moonlight slipped across a naked shoulder.Tloto was following them.

  * * * * *

  The boy spent his days learning. Quorl taught him to pull the gut ofanimals to make string. It had to be stretched a long time and thengreased with hunks of fat. Once learned it became his job; as didchanging the bait in the traps; as did cutting willow boughs to makesleeping pallets; as did sorting the firewood into piles of variouslysized wood; as did holding together the sticks while Quorl tied themtogether and made a canopy for them, the night it rained.

  He learned words, too. At least he learned to understand them._Tike_--trap, _Di'tika_--a sprung trap, _Tikan_--two traps. Oneafternoon Quorl spent a whole six hours teaching words to the boy. Therewere lots of them. Even Quorl, who did not speak much, was surprised howmany had to be learned. The boy did not speak at all. But soon heunderstood.

  "There is a porcupine," Quorl would say, pointing.

  The boy would turn his eyes quickly, following the finger, and then lookback, blinking quietly in comprehension.

  They were walking through the forest that evening, and Quorl said, "Youwalk as loud as a tapir." The boy had been moving over dry leaves.Obediently he moved his bare feet to where the leaves were damp and didnot crackle.

  Sometimes the boy went alone by the edge of the stream. Once a wild pigchased him and he had to climb a tree. The pig tried to climb after himand he sat in the crotch of the branch looking quietly down into thesquealing mouth, the warty gray face; he could see each separate bristlestand up and lie down as the narrow jaw opened and closed beneath theskin. One yellow tusk was broken.

  Then he heard a mewing sound away to his left. Looking off he sawslug-like Tloto coming towards his tree. A sudden urge to sound pushedhim closer to speech (_Stay away! Stay Back!_) than he had been sincehis arrival in the woods. But Tloto could not see. Tloto could not hear.His hands tightened until the bark burned his palm.

  Suddenly the animal turned from the tree and took off after Tloto.Instantly the slug-man turned and was gone.

  The boy dropped from the tree and ran after the sound of the pig'scrashing in the underbrush. Twenty feet later after tearing through anet of thick foliage, he burst onto a clearing and stopped.

  In the middle of the clearing, the pig was struggling half above groundand half under. Only it wasn't ground. It was some sort of muckpoolcovered by a floating layer of leaves and twigs. The pig was going underfast.

  Then the boy saw Tloto on the other side of the clearing, his nostrilsquivering, his blind head turning back and forth. Somehow the slug-manmust have maneuvered the animal into the trap. He wasn't sure how, butthat must have been what had happened.

  The urge that welled in him now came too fast to be stopped. It had toomuch to do with the recognition of luck, and the general impossibilityof the whole situation. The boy laughed.

  He startled himself with the sound, and after a few seconds stopped.Then he turned. Quorl stood behind him.

  (Squeeeee ... Squeeee ... _raaaaaaa_! Then a gurgle, then nothing.)

  Quorl was smiling too, a puzzled smile.<
br />
  "Why did you--?" (The last word was new. He thought it meant laugh, buthe said nothing.)

  The boy turned back now. Tloto and the pig were gone.

  Quorl walked the boy back to their camp. As they were nearing the streamQuorl saw the boy's footprints in the soft earth and frowned. "To leaveyour footprints in wet earth is dangerous. The vicious animals come todrink and they will smell you, and they will follow you, to eat. Supposethat pig had smelled them and been chasing you, instead of running intothe pool? What then? If you must leave your footprints, leave them indry dust. Better not to leave them at all."

  The boy listened, and remembered. But that night, he saved a large pieceof meat from his food. When Tloto came into the circle of firelight, hegave it to him.

  Quorl gave a shrug of disgust and flung a pebble at the retreatingshadow. "He is useless," Quorl said. "Why do you waste good food on him?To throw away good food is a--." (Unintelligible word.) "You do notunderstand--." (Another unintelligible word.)

  The boy felt something start up inside him again. But he would not letit move his tongue; so he laughed. Quorl looked puzzled. The boy laughedagain. Then Quorl laughed too. "You will learn. You will learn at last."Then the giant became serious. "You know, that is the first--sound Ihave heard you make since coming here."

  The boy frowned, and the giant repeated the sentence. The boy's faceshowed which word baffled him.

  The giant thought a minute, and then said, "You, me, even Tloto, are_malika_." That was the word. Now Quorl looked around him. "The trees,the rocks, the animals, they are not _malika_. But the laughing sound,that was a _malika_ sound."

  The boy thought about it until perhaps he understood. Then he slept.

  He laughed a lot during the days now. Survival had come as close toroutine as it could here in the jungle, and he could turn his attentionto more _malika_ concerns. He watched Quorl when they came on otherforest people. With single men and women there was usually only anexchange of ten or twelve friendly words. If it were a couple,especially with children, he would give them food. But if they passedanyone with scars, Quorl would freeze until the person was by.

  Once the boy wandered to the temple on the arena of rock. There werecarvings on much of the stone. The sun was high. The carvingsrepresented creatures somewhere between fish and human. When he lookedup from the rock, he saw that the priest had come from the temple andwas staring at him. The priest stared until he went away.

  Now the boy tried to climb the mountain. That was hard because thefooting was slippery and the rocks kept giving. At last he stopped on ajutting rock that looked down the side of the mountain. He was far fromany place he knew. He was very high. He stood with hand against theleaning trunk of a near rotten tree, breathing deep and squinting at thesky. (Three or four times Quorl and he had taken long hunting trips: onehad taken them to the edge of a deserted meadow across which was acrazily sagging farmhouse. There were no people there. Another had takenthem to the edge of the jungle, beyond which the ground was gray andbroken, and row after row of unsteady shacks sat among clumps ofslithering ferns. Many of the forest people living there had scars andspent more time in larger groups.) The boy wondered if he could see tothe deserted meadow from here, or to the deadly rows of prison shacks. Ariver, a snake of light, coiled through the valley toward the sea. Thesky was very blue.

  He heard it first, and then he felt it start. He scrambled back towardfirmer ground but didn't scramble fast enough. The rock tilted, toreloose, and he was falling. (It pierced through his memory like a whitefire-blade hidden under canvas: "... knees up, chin down, and rollquick," the girl had said a long time ago.) It was perhaps twenty feetto the next level. Tree branches broke his fall and he hit the groundspinning, and rolled away. Something else, the rock or a rotten log, bitthe ground a moment later where he had been. He uncurled too soon,reaching out to catch hold of the mountain as it tore by him. Then hehit something hard; then something hit him back, and he sailed off intodarkness in a web of pain.

  Much later he shook his head, opened his eyes, then chomped his jaws onthe pain. But the pain was in his leg, so chomping didn't help. He movedhis face across crumbling dirt. The whole left side of his body ached,the type of ache that comes when the muscles are tensed to exhaustionbut will not relax.

  He tried to crawl forward, and went flat down onto the earth, biting upa mouthful of dirt. He nearly tore his leg off.

  He had to be still, calm, find out exactly what was wrong. He couldn'ttear himself to pieces like the wildcat who had gotten caught in thesprung trap and who had bled to death after gnawing off both hind legs.He was too _malika_.

  But each movement he made, each thought he had, happened in the blurringgreen haze of pain. He raised himself up and looked back. Then he laydown again and closed his eyes. A log the thickness of his body layacross his left leg. Once he tried to push it away but only bruised hispalm against the bark, and at last went unconscious with the effort.

  When he woke up, the pain was very far away. The air was darkening. No,he wasn't quite awake. He was dreaming about something, something soft,a little garden, with shadows blowing in at the edge of his vision swiftand cool, a little garden behind the--

  Suddenly, very suddenly, it struck him what was happening, the slowingdown of thoughts, his breathing, maybe even his heart. Then he wasstruggling again, struggling hard enough that had he still the strength,he would have torn himself in half, knowing while he struggled thatperhaps the wildcat had been _malika_ after all, or not caring if hewere less, only fighting to pull himself away from the pain, realizingthat blood had begun to seep from beneath the log again, just a tinytrickle.

  Then the shadows overtook him, the dreams, the wisps of forgetfulnessgauzing his eyes.

  * * * * *

  Tloto nearly had to drag Quorl halfway up the mountain before the giantgot the idea. When he did, he began to run. Quorl found the boy; justbefore sunset. He was breathing in short gasps, his fists clenched, hiseyes closed. The blood on the dirt had dried black.

  The great brown hands went around the log, locked, and started to shiftit; the boy let out a high sound from between his teeth.

  The hands, roped with vein and ridged with ligament, strained the logupward; the sound became a howl.

  The giant's feet braced against the dirt, slid into the dirt, and thehands that had snapped tiny necks and bound sticks together with gutstring, pulled; the howl turned into a scream. He screamed again. Thenagain.

  The log coming loose tore away nearly a square foot of flesh from theboy's leg. Then, Quorl went over and picked him up.

  This is the best dream, the boy thought, from that dark place he hadretreated to behind the pain, because Quorl is here. The hands werelifting him now, he was held close, warm, somehow safe. His cheek wasagainst the hard shoulder muscle, and he could smell Quorl too. So hestopped screaming and turned his head a little to make the pain go away.But it wouldn't go. It wouldn't. Then the boy cried.

  The first tears through all that pain came salty in his eyes, and hecried until he went to sleep.

  * * * * *

  Quorl had medicine for him the next day ("From the priest," he said.)which helped the pain and made the healing start. Quorl also had madethe boy a pair of wooden crutches that morning. Although muscle andligament had been bruised and crushed and the skin torn away, no bonehad broken.

  That evening there was a drizzle and they ate under the canopy. Tlotodid not come, and this time it was Quorl who saved the extra meat andkept looking off into the wet gray trees. Quorl had told the boy howTloto had led him to him; when they finished eating, Quorl took the meatand ducked into the drizzle.

  The boy lay down to sleep. He thought the meat was a reward for Tloto.Only Quorl had seemed that night full of more than usual gravity. Thelast thing he wondered before sleep flooded his eyes and ears was howblind, deaf Tloto had known where he was anyway.

  * * * * *<
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  When he woke it had stopped raining. The air was damp and chill. Quorlhad not come back.

  The sound of the blown shell came again. The boy sat up and flinched atthe twinge in his leg. To his left the moon was flickering through thetrees. The sound came a third time, distant, sharp, yet clear andmarine. The boy reached for his crutches and hoisted himself to hisfeet. He waited till the count of ten, hoping that Quorl might suddenlyreturn to go with him.

  A last he took a deep breath and started haltingly forward. The faintmoonlight made the last hundred yards easy going. Finally he reached avantage where he could look down through the wet leaves onto the arenaof stone.

  The sky was sheeted with mist and the moon was an indistinct pearl inthe haze. The sea was misty. People were already gathered at the edge.The boy looked at the priest and then ran his eye around the circle ofpeople. One of them was Quorl!

  He leaned forward as far as he could. The priest sounded the shell againand the prisoners came out of the temple: first three boys, then anolder girl, then a man. The next one ... Tloto! It was marble-whiteunder the blurred moon. Its clubbed feet shuffled on the rock. Its blindhead ducked right and left with bewilderment.

  As the priest raised the long three-pronged knife, the boy's hands wenttight around the crutches. He passed from one prisoner to the next.Tloto cringed, and the boy sucked in a breath as the knife went down,feeling his own flesh part under the blades. Then the murmur died, theprisoners were unbound, and the people filed from the rock back into theforest.

  The boy waited to see which way Quorl headed before he started throughmoon-dusted bushes as fast as his crutches would let him. There weremany people on the webbing of paths that came from the temple rock.There was Quorl!

  When he caught up, Quorl saw him and slowed down. Quorl didn't look athim, though. Finally the giant said, "You don't understand. I had tocatch him. I had to give him to the old one to be marked. But you don'tunderstand." The boy hardly looked at all where they were going, butstared up at the giant.

  "You don't understand," Quorl said again. Then he looked at the boy andwas quiet for a minute. "No, you don't," he repeated. "Come." Theyturned off the main path now, going slower. "It's a ... custom. Animportant custom. Yes, I know it hurt him. I know he was afraid. But ithad to be. Tloto is one of those who--." (The word was some inflectionof the verb to know.) Quorl was silent for a moment. "Let me try to tellyou why I had to hurt your friend. Yes, I know he is your friend, now.But once I said that Tloto was _malika_. I was wrong. Tloto is more than_malika_--he and the others that were marked. Somehow these people knowthings. That was how Tloto survived. That's how he knew where you were,when you were hurt. He knew inside your head, he heard inside your head.Many are born like that, more of them each year. As soon as we find out,we mark them. Many try to hide it, and some succeed for a long time. Canyou understand? Do you? When Tloto showed me where you were, he knewthat I would know, that he would be caught and marked. Do youunderstand?"

  Again he paused and looked at the boy. The eyes still showed puzzledhurt. "You want to know why. I ... we.... Long ago we killed them whenwe found out. We don't any more. The mark reminds them that they aredifferent, and yet the same as we. Perhaps it is wrong. It doesn't hurtthat much, and it heals. Anyway, we don't kill them any more. We knowthey're important...." Suddenly, having gone all through it with thisstrange boy, it seemed twisted to the giant, incorrect. Then he gave theboy what the boy had been sent to the forest to get, what the Duchesshad found and knew was necessary. "I was wrong," Quorl said. "I'm sorry.I will speak to the priest tomorrow."

  They walked until the dawn lightened the sky behind the trees. OnceQuorl looked around and said, "I want to show you something. We are verynear, and the weather is right."

  They walked a few minutes more till Quorl pointed to a wall of leaves,and said, "Go through there."

  As they pressed through the dripping foliage, bright light burnishedtheir faces. They were standing on a small cliff that looked down themountain. Fog the color of pale gold, the same gold the boy had seen sorarely in the sunset, rolled across the entire sky. The center flamedwith the misty sun, and way below them through the fog was the shatteredtraces of water, the color of magnesium flame on copper foil, withoutedge or definition.

  "That's a lake that lies between this mountain and the next," Quorlsaid, pointing to the water.

  "I thought...." the boy started softly, his tongue rough against the newlanguage. "I thought it was the sea."

  Beside them appeared the crouching figure of Tloto. Drops from the wetleaves burned on his neck and back, over the drying blood. He turned hisblank face left and right in the golden light, and with all his knowingcould communicate no awe.