— A marvellous sight! The canyon walls reared up two hundred feet and more; the light where it came slanting in from the south to burst against the opposite wall was blinding after the Stygian dark of the river; despite that Nathan knew the surface must be mainly desert, still he saw the silhouettes of palms crowding the canyon's rim. And so Open-to-the-Sky was an astonishing place.
Thyre elders met them where the worn-smooth granite of the river path met the rudimentary paving of the access road into the community. Nathan would have preferred to speak for himself from the onset, but by now well-versed in their code of conduct, he let Atwei act on his behalf; it was Thyre custom to open proceedings through an intermediary. His own name had been known in advance but theirs, of course, were secret. No introductions of that sort were necessary.
Nathan found himself greeted by a good deal of gravity, tempered with (he suspected), a small measure of scepticism; while Atwei, acting as his aide and spokeswoman — his dupe? perhaps his colleague in deception and blasphemy? — suffered an initially cool reception indeed.
As they passed through the lower levels of the colony and climbed a walled pathway to the Cavern of Long Dreams, a Thyre mausoleum one quarter of the way up the cliff, something of the stiffness and formality went out of The Five and they conversed with Nathan in cordial if restrained monotones. He continued to sense their hesitancy, however, and suspected there were those among them who thought he had somehow made fools of their colleagues in Place-Under-the-Yellow-Cliffs. Once inside the tomb he felt more at ease, and commenced to verify his credentials in very short order.
The Five had worked out a series of questions for Nathan to ask their dead ancestors, whose answers would permit of no deception or obfuscation. The dead, for their part, had heard faint rumours of the Necroscope's coming from the Ancients of Place-Under-the-Yellow-Cliffs, and immediately recognized the purpose of these opening questions: that they were designed to detect any charlatanry in Nathan. For which reason, once rapport was established and they felt the Necroscope's warmth, the response of the dead was accurate and not without a measure of Thyre sarcasm directed at the elders themselves.
The most 'junior' of The Five, perhaps irritated by Nathan's dry and very un-mystical delivery of answers allegedly from beyond the grave, brought about an early interruption by asking: 'Perhaps you could tell us why our ancestors converse so readily with you but not with their own kind?'
At which Nathan lost patience. This one reminded him of Petais, and he wasn't about to go through all of that again! He might have answered in his own way, without prompting, but a voice in his head cautioned him against it and in a moment supplied the perfect answer:
'Quatias, your father Tolmia begs you to remember a time in your childhood — you were five? — when you lost your way in the desert just a mile from Open-to-the-Sky. All you had to do was climb a dune and you would have seen the oasis clearly, you were that close. But no, you were only a child and afraid; you sat down and cried. Be sure not to lose your way again, in the maze of your own doubts, now that you are even closer to a great truth.'
Quatias opened his mouth, closed it and made a strangled sound in the back of his throat. Finally, in a broken voice, he said: 'Only my father Tolmia could have known….hought… said… that which you just said. Wherefore I no longer doubt. Nathan, please tell him that I love him very much!'
'He knows,' Nathan answered, all anger fled in a moment. 'And he loves you in return, even as he did in life.'
Shortly after that the initial session broke up. Shaken, The Five must now reconsider things, think how best to employ Nathan — if they still had his good will. So they made to go off to their council chambers and discuss his awesome talent. But before he let them go:
'I want you to know,' he told them, 'that the girl Atwei is my dear friend. She was my nurse and brought me to health when I was sick. Now, I understand why you had doubts, about both of us. Of course you did and I don't hold it against you. But that is over now, and you should know: he who dishonours Atwei dishonours me.'
He couldn't know it, but from that time forward she would be part of his expanding legend. Atwei of the Thyre, friend of Nathan…
And so, as in Place-Under-the-Yellow-Cliffs, once again Nathan became a bridge between two worlds: that of the living, and the darkness of those who had continued beyond it. But before that there were certain priorities: for instance, Shaeken's inventions.
In accordance with the Ancient's wishes, he passed on to the artisans of Open-to-the-Sky detailed drawings of his water wheel, ram, and hoist, all of which were of especial relevance here. Once constructed, Shaeken's Hydraulic Hoist should provide effortless irrigation for the oasis high overhead; and so the Thyre would prosper.
Then, as soon as these technical details had been passed on and understood, for five more sunups Nathan channelled all of his energies to the task of communication between the living and the dead. And as in Place-Under-the-Yellow-Cliffs, so now the results of his work were uniformly beneficial; exactly as before, word of the Necroscope spread abroad and emissaries from Thyre colonies further down the river came to see him.
But now that the work was no longer new to him it became… simply work. Despite that it was satisfying in its way and the number of his friends among the dead grew apace, Nathan no longer took pleasure in it. Also, time seemed to pass by ever more swiftly, and he felt he should be elsewhere, doing other things.
It was time to move on.
Atwei sensed it in him. She may even have read it in his supposedly 'inviolate' mind. But seeing how she was saddened, Nathan made no complaint…
One day they went up to the oasis, and there in the living sunlight Nathan saw how pale he had grown. He was pensive and gave voice to an idle thought. 'Why are you so brown,' he asked her, 'when you spend so much time in the deeps and the dark?'
'But before you,' Atwei answered, simply, 'I spent a good deal of my time in the light. The Thyre are desert folk, after all, and most of our work is done on the surface. Also, I was born brown. But why are you so pale, when you were born in the woods and the sunlight?'
He shrugged. 'So, we're different.'
'Are we so different, Nathan?'
He looked at her and wondered, Are we? And almost before he realized it, he knew — he heard — what she was thinking: If I were Szgany, or he were Thyre, we would be lovers. He would lie in my arms and I would feel him pulsing within me. And I would stroke his back, while my thighs squeezed him for his juice.
Telepathy, or… did she do it deliberately? No, never the last, for she was Thyre and it would be unseemly. And now, as Atwei's thoughts continued, she too was pensive. But Nathan is right: we are different. And I must love him as if he were my brother.
Then… his look must be curious, wondering; she noticed it and quickly looked away. In order to save her embarrassment, he immediately acted as if nothing had happened, as if he knew nothing. In any case her mind was covered now; she had drawn a blanket over it, and he must assume that she suspected. But at the same time, suddenly, there came a second flash of inspired understanding as a riddle was solved. From the beginning he'd wondered how the Thyre, the living Thyre, knew and understood his tongue so well. And now he knew the answer: When Nathan talked to the Thyre dead it was in deadspeak, but behind their mental voices and pictures he'd always sensed echoes of their spoken tongue, too. And now he saw how easy it was for a telepath to be a linguist. When thoughts are backed up by the echoes of words, a language is quickly learned. That was how it worked for the living Thyre: they had not stolen the Traveller language from his mind, not directly (they had always traded with the Szgany and so knew something of his tongue from the first). No, they'd not stolen it but read it in his expressions, seen it in his eyes, and — despite certain taboos and 'unspoken rules' — heard it in the echoes of his thoughts!