ir dam had created a sizable but shallow lake near the valley's center, and there was thick growth along the margins of the lake. We penetrated the bogs looking for frogs one day and made another discovery. There, hidden from view by the dense growth encouraged by the shallow water, was an island. We gained the dry ground and walked through a lovely glade shaded by tall trees, and suddenly there was something ahead. I pushed Mar into cover behind a tree and waited for movement. Then I went forward, crawling from tree to tree, and saw a low mound of strange material, with no eyes and no mouths on the side from which I approached. Now if there was so huge a dragon in the center of my valley that was something entirely different. I crawled closer and saw that creepers and underbrush concealed a thing much like the shape of the dragons on the hills around the valley, but as I circled it I still saw no eyes or mouths. Not until I was all the way to the other side did anything come into view, and then it was a plate much like the plates on dragons or on the dragon's cave far to the east where the small dragons ate grass, mended broken eyes and put out fires. I had often thought of that wondrous cave and the treasures therein and my greed sent me forward to examine the plate close up. It was sunken into the skin of the thing. I threw stones at it and nothing happened. I went back for Mar. Mar did not feel adventurous and wanted to leave. I reminded her of the treasures—I still used the dragonskin knives—we'd left in the dragon's cave to the east. I stood before the plate and nothing happened. I felt it with my hands. It was cold and bloodstained. When I touched a place, a sort of pimple at the height of my head, there was a hum and I leaped away. The plate swung inward slowly, making a creaking noise like a moving dragon, letting dirt and roots tumble inward as it opened. We watched for a long time, and the plate began to close, but was prevented from closing entirely by the dirt and roots which blocked it at the bottom. I ventured forward and peered within. It was black inside. I touched the pimple again and the plate swung open and the sun came out inside. I was startled, but remembered the same magic in the dragon's cave to the east. I peered in. Inside was a cave, round, clean, the air smelling fresh, well lighted. I stuck my head in farther, looking for treasures, and saw disappointingly little. The floor was smooth and warm to my feet, but the room was without treasures, barren. The walls were of the same material as the floor and felt warm to the touch. In fact, the entire cave was pleasantly warm with the temperature of a fine day at the start of the growing season. I tried to get Mar to join me, but she refused. I stepped inside. The plate closed behind me, but I was not concerned, for the dirt and roots blocking it left enough space for me to escape. The sun stayed out, lighting the cave. I put my hands on a pimple on the inside of the plate and it swung open. Since there were no treasures, we left the place, but it remained in my thoughts as the days grew chill and Mar's belly swelled. We awoke one morning to find a covering of snow. «I will see the warm cave again,» I told Mar. She went with me. The place was the same, the plate still blocked by dirt and debris. A breath of pleasantly warm air came from the opening. Inside it was the same, and the temperature was delightful, a pleasant warmth after the cold of the outdoors. I cleared away the dirt and roots from the plate and experimented with it repeatedly. It always opened to the pressure of my hand from within or without. «I will sleep here,» I said. «No,» she said. «Just me, at first, to be sure that it is safe in the night.» «If you will be so foolish I will come with you,» she said, and I could not convince her to spend the night in our hidehouse. We slept. An amazing thing happened. The sun shown brightly until we were cuddled in our sleepskins and our eyes closed, and then it dimmed until there was only a glow, as on a night of the full moon, but if we arose the sun came out again. After a while we tired of testing the magic and slept, warm and comfortable. Not even Mar, after that night, protested when we moved into the cave on the island in the middle of the swimmer's lake. I left the hidehouse, flap closed, in case of future need, but moved our food supplies and possessions into the cave. The first big snow of the winter came, and we had no need for fire, except in the outdoors, where I built a lean-to against the side of our cave for cooking. We did not make the mistake of building a fire in the cave, remembering the white rain which fell and clung to us in the other cave far to the east. Soon Mar was coming and going with confidence, the plate always opening when a hand was placed on the pimple inside or out. With no need to gather firewood for warmth, only for cooking. I had little to do except hunt in the snow for fresh meat, which remained plentiful. Inside it was cozy and we were never wet and we played the game of feeling baby kick. I would place my ear on Mar's belly and my son would oblige by punching a knee or an elbow against the skin, and I'd find myself laughing in delight. I had only one concern, and that was the lack of a woman to aid when the time came. Mar said not to worry. She had aided in the delivery of many babies and would tell me what to do, doing most of it herself. I wanted to journey out the dragon's hole and find a family and borrow a midwife for the necessary length of time, and she protested. «It is our valley,» she said. «Ours and ours alone. I don't want others here.» To while away the long winter days I started the construction of wings. In that remote place, flying from the top of one of the hills into the center of the valley, I estimated, could be done without attracting a killbird. Mar had never seen wings and was fascinated but fearful when I told her my plans to celebrate the birth of our son with a praise, a flight dedicated to God and the gods of man. It was a long project. The hollowed wood had to be properly dried. The hides had to be scraped and scraped to a thinness. But there was plenty of room inside our house. (We had come to think of it as ours and were quite at home there.) Snow lay deep in the valley, and I had to chop holes in the ice to get water. I carried it in a pouch made of leather. Mar's time was near. I began to spend more and more time with her inside the house, and thus quite often I became bored as she napped to prepare herself for her trial. One day, out of sheer idleness, I began to measure the distance around the house, using my hands, counting as I palmed my way along the wall, my hands at the height of my face. It was then that I noticed, for the first time, little protrusions on the wall at a height just above my eyes. They were spaced here and there and were, I decided, much like those which caused our plate to open and close. Of course, Eban the curious had to investigate. I put my palm on a protrusion and pushed, leaping back with a cry of alarm when a plate opened in the seamless hide and left me expecting to see the eyes of a dragon or worse inside. Mar was still sleeping. I lived. I crept back and looked into the hole and saw a curious bowllike thing of some hard material. I felt it and as I extended my hand over it a stream of water gushed and gurgled into the bowl. After I recovered from my shock I tried it again. It was wondrous. The water was warmer than the waters of summer, as warm as the water of the hot spring of the mountains from which the family of Strabo had moved into the Valley of Clean Waters. I tasted the water and it was good, but warm. Not really pleasant for drinking. It was, however, lovely for washing. I dawdled my hands into an accumulation of it in the bowl and when I took my hands out the water drained away with a gurgle and a rash of warm air came, startling me, but drying my hands when I had courage to go back and try again. So. Our house had hidden treasures after all. I moved to the next protrusion, pushed it, watched a plate slide back into the skin, and there was a fountain of clear water jetting into the air and falling back into a bowl. I tested this water and it was icy, like the waters of a mountain stream, and quite delicious. Unable to contain myself any longer, I woke Mar and showed her the wonders, coaxing her into washing and drying her hands at the bowl and tasting the cool water of the fountain. The next plate was much larger, almost as large as the plate which gave access to our house. It opened into a small cave which contained things we did not understand. There was a strangely shaped chair which had a hole in it and contained water, and there was a little cave closed off by eyes which moved as I touched them to reveal a place of hard material. I stepped in and was immediately wet thoroughly by a rain of water which came from above, and before I could leap out there was a rain of some sweet-smelling slick stuff which I could not get off my face, clothing, hands. Since I was wet and since the water still rained in the small cave, I stepped back inside. The water was warm as summer, and after another spraying of the slick, sweet-smelling stuff the water cleansed me and my clothing. The warm air which blew from all around after the water stopped dried me, but not my clothing, so I left off my exploration to put on another skin and then went on to the next protrusion. This was the most wonderful of all. As I pushed the pimple I heard a hum and a section of the wall slid away to reveal a small and lighted cave. Chair things were placed around a flat surface which stood on legs, and when I climbed onto one of the chair things to better see the surface of the flat thing, which was shiny and rather pretty, a delightful aroma filled the cave, a plate opened and out came a thing with steaming bowls atop. The aroma was both meaty and something else. I put my finger into one bowl and licked it. The taste was strange, but when I used one of the eating things, made of dragonskin and shaped much like the spoons which the old men carve for family use out of wood, it was edible and interesting. We went no further that day. After the bowl with the hot and delicious liquid there came from the plate a dish of meat which was so well cooked, so delicious, that I ate much, and Mar overcame her nervousness to join me. The good things which issued from that plate kept us there until my belly protruded almost as much as Mar's and she could eat not another bite, not even the delicious things which were white and light and tasted as sweet as the stickiness of the stinging bees. As long as we sat and waited the magic continued, and when I could eat no more I went outside into the snow, put my finger down my throat, voided my stomach, and went back to begin again. Not since I was a child and ate myself to sickness on finding a bee tree did I do such sinful gluttony, but the supply seemed to be never-ending and the variety was amazing, although some things I could not stomach, mainly the soft and strange-tasting things which I suspected—and checked carefully for the warning tingles—were products of vegetation. Glutted, sated, we slept. We ate the next morning and all that day, and only then did I move to the next and, I found, the last visible protrusion on the wall of our house. I pushed it, not knowing what wonders to expect, and the plate opened, as had all the others, to reveal only a white eye on the wall of the small cave, a hard chair thing, and in front of the chair thing and below the eye, a flat but solid thing which was rooted on the floor. I was disappointed. I explored the remainder of the walls and found nothing of interest. Only then did I come back to the last little cave and push and probe. I could, I thought, break the eye. I tapped it with my hardax, and it was strong. There seemed to be something over the eye, unlike the eyes of, for example, dragons or the cave of the giants to the east. I tried harder, and no matter how hard I hit the eye I could not dent or break the strong, clear material which protected it. To think about it, I climbed up into the chair thing, and immediately there was a hum and the eye came to life and I scrambled for my own life. The eye glowed and there appeared in it a series of little lines, running from one side to the other. When I determined that there was no danger, I went back and sat in the chair, and the lines appeared and faded. On close examination the lines were made up of individual little things, looking somewhat like strange bugs. But they did not move. Only the lines changed from time to time. Then, after a while, the lines went away and a star appeared. The star was in the middle of the eye, and then the flat thing in front of the chair came to life, showing in a glow of color a bunch of things, stars, dots, circles, squares. The star on the eye glowed and faded, as did the star which was one of the things on the flat surface. I reached out and touched the glowing star on the flat surface, and the star on the eye faded to be replaced by a circle, and a circle glowed on the flat surface. I touched the circle there, and the circle went away to be replaced. Mar wanted to try. It was a fun game. A thing would appear in the eye and on the flat surface, and when you touched the thing on the flat surface the thing in the eye would go away and be replaced with another image. We played for a long time, and then the pictures went away. A single line appeared on the eye. I pushed my finger at the single line which matched it on the flat surface, and two lines appeared. I pushed my finger at the two lines, and three, and so on until we'd counted to twenty in this manner. Now one line appeared on the eye again. I pushed one line. But the next thing was not two lines but a thing with curve at the top and a flat line at the bottom. There was nothing like it on the flat surface. However, the two-line picture was glowing, and I pushed it and the curved thing went away to be replaced with a thing with two curves and the three lines glowed on the flat surface. I didn't like that game as well, but played it, finding that it passed the cold winter day, but when the pictures on the eye started switching into random appearances of the things with curves and different shapes I found that I could not remember how many lines to push to cause them to go away until, after a while, the flat surface would glow. Mar, who counted only on her fingers and toes, found the game boring, but as the days passed I found myself returning to it. I came to the realization, at last, that the eye was trying to tell me something. For example, the thing with double curves was a sign for three, only instead of having to make three slash marks you only had to make the one double-curved mark. It was interesting and opened up an entirely new line of thinking to me. As the winter deepened around us and game became scarce and the creek was frozen down to within a couple of hands of the bottom, we played our games with the eye and ate at the magic cave and drank our cool water from the magic fountain and Mar's belly told her it was time. She instructed me and prepared herself, and all through one long night she groaned with the pains, and then it was indeed time, for she was heaving and moaning and telling me how to help, and I saw the bulge of something between her legs, and she cried out, strained. I held the outcoming thing, wet and sticky, gingerly, and then with one great heave it was over and I held a squirming bundle of muck and wetness in my hands, frightened, not knowing what to do in spite of all Mar's careful teachings. She took it from me, cleaned away the muck, hung the little thing by its heels and patted it, and there was a sound which caused me to laugh for joy, the protesting, feeble cry of the newborn. Then I was examining it with a beating heart, looking for the terror, finding only perfect little tiny feet and hands and the shriveled little sign that it was, indeed, a son. Then, suddenly, Mar tensed and moaned and I knew more fear, for I remembered the time she'd helped a woman deliver and one of the babies had been a monster. But the second came quickly, and I cleaned it myself, Mar resting from her labors. I bit the cord which held it to its mother and spanked the little rump, and the little girl baby bawled louder than her brother had. Two perfect and lovely little babies with skulls of a thickness which pleased me and perfectly shaped heads. Gods of man, the joy of it. Chapter Six There was no joy in me, however, when I aborted my flight of praise to God. I had carried my wings to the top of