“Good night, Naxa.”
“The gods were walking among the stars,” Naxa said, “and they came to Hyle, and Kreshe put out his hand—”
“I’ll put out my hand and break your head,” a new voice said. Kilarion’s, it was. “Shut up and let us sleep, will you?”
This time Naxa relented. There was no more talk of demon-stars out of him that night.
I drifted off to sleep soon afterward. But in a little while I felt someone getting in beside me.
“Hold me, Poilar. I’m freezing. I can’t stop shivering.”
It was Thissa. The traveler-spell had drained her more deeply perhaps than she had expected, and her entire body was trembling. I took her in my arms and almost at once, because I had gone so long without a mating, I began to slip into the Changes. In mating there is comfort, in mating there is unity and harmony, the transcending of self into something higher and deeper, and in a time of dark fear or of great stress we turn naturally to one another and enter the sexual state. It happened without my willing it, without my even wanting it. I felt the familiar stirring at the base of my belly, the shifting of the flesh as my hard maleness emerged from its dormancy.
Thissa felt it too. Softly she said, “Please, not now—I’m so tired, Poilar.”
I understood. She had not come to me for Changes. She had a strange self-sufficiency, that woman: many Witches do. I forced myself back toward the neuter state, but it was difficult for me. My control kept breaking, my body slid again and again toward readiness. But I could tell that Thissa was in the state without breasts just now and I knew that if I touched her between the thighs I would find no aperture waiting for me. She was utterly neuter and intended to stay that way. I had no choice but to respect that. I struggled for control, and attained it, finally. We lay together calmly. Her head was against my chest, her legs were entwined with mine. She sobbed from weariness, but it was a soft, easy sobbing.
She said, after a time, “Someone here will die tomorrow.”
“What? Are you sure?”
“I saw it in the fire.”
I was silent a moment. “Do you know who it will be?”
“No. Of course not.”
“Or how?”
“No,” she said. “The fire was too low, and I was too weary to conjure it up again.”
“We’ve only begun our climb. It’s too soon for deaths.”
“Death comes whenever it pleases. This will be only the first of many.”
I was silent again for a long time. Then I said, “Will it be me, do you think?”
“No. Not you.”
“You’re sure of that, are you?”
“There’s too much life in you, Poilar.”
“Ah.”
“But it will be one of the men.”
“Jaif? Dorn? Talbol?”
She put her hand over my lips. “I told you, I wasn’t able to see. Not clearly. One of the men. Let’s sleep now, Poilar. Just hold me. Hold me. I’m so cold.”
I held her. After a time I felt the tension leave her body as she drifted off into sleep. But I remained wide-awake myself, thinking of the death that was marching toward us even at this moment. Perhaps the gods had chosen Muurmut: I would shed no tears for him. But what if it was Traiben, despite all his hunger to see things and understand them? I would not be able to bear the death of Traiben. Then I thought of this one, and that one, and still another. I lay like that for hours, or so it seemed. Overhead the stars grew even brighter and harder. I feared them: poison-stars, demon-stars, death-stars. Ysod, Myaul, Selinune, Hyle. I felt myself shriveling beneath their furious light.
Then Thissa was awake again.
“Go ahead,” she said, in a soft voice different from the one she had used before. “You can if you want to.”
She had become fully female. Her slim body, which had been nothing but cool smooth skin and fragile bones, was fuller, more womanly now. I felt soft round breasts against my chest. My hand slipped downward and there was an aperture, and it was warm and moist and throbbing.
Why this act of kindness? Thissa was altogether exhausted, and I knew from years gone by that she was not fond of mating even at the best of times. Had she lied to me, and was I the one who would die tomorrow, and this her way of sending me off to my death with a warm tender memory fresh in my mind? That was a somber thought, almost somber enough to discourage me from the mating. Almost. But my desires were stronger than my fear. She opened to me and our bodies joined; and though I could feel that disconcerting strangeness which her body emanated, as I had on earlier occasions when we had been lovers—an odd troubling tingling sensation which came from her in moments like this, somewhat like the throbbing sensation which certain strange fishes give off when you graze against them in the river—she brought me quickly to pleasure, quickly, quickly.
Afterward she said, “You are not the one who will die, Poilar. I’m certain of that.”
Had she read my mind?
No, not even the House of Witches can do that, I told myself. Except for those Witches who are also santha-nillas, and santha-nillas are very few and far between.
I lay awake a little while longer, staring up at Hyle and Selinune. Then one of the moons—I think it was Tibios—came into the sky and its brightness dulled the terrible glare of the stars, for which I was grateful. I closed my eyes and fell into a troubled sleep, and then, I suppose, into a much deeper one: when I awoke we were long into morning and everyone else was up and about. Thissa smiled shyly at me from the other side of the stream. I realized they had not wanted to wake me; and I felt more and more certain that I was the one who had been singled out for death this day, and that all of them knew it, and that was why I had been allowed to sleep. But of course that was not so.
The death—our first death on Kosa Saag—came with great suddenness when it came. That was about midmorning, when we were well up above our campsite of the night before, crossing a narrow plateau that was bordered on one side by what looked like a lake of pitch and on the other by a steep shoulder of the Wall. The day was very warm. Ekmelios blazed right into our faces and there was no hiding from him. In places the ground was cracked open and narrow little columns of yellow-and-green light, something like marshlight, were rising from it. The air in these places had a dark, oily smell. Some of these small lights had broken free of the ground and were wandering about by themselves, easy as ghosts. We kept well away from them.
As we passed through a grove of small waxy-looking trees with thick crowns of glossy white leaves, a band of rock-apes abruptly appeared as if they had risen straight out of the earth, screaming and chattering, and started tormenting us with pebbles, rocks, gobbets of mud, anything that their gnarled little hands could lift and throw.
These apes of the Wall were like cruel caricatures of men, miniature figures no more than knee-high to us, and gnarled and hairy and hideous. Their arms and legs were short and crooked, their noses were flat and huge, their eyes were immense, their feet turned outward and upward like huge hands. Yellow fangs jutted from their mouths. Reddish fur covered their squat little bodies and they had great tufts of it, like beards, around their necks. No wonder they hated us and bedeviled us so: for we were what they would have wanted to be, if the gods had not chosen to make them ugly.
At a distance they were nothing more than nuisances. But here, no more than twenty or thirty paces from us, they were dangerous. Their missiles fell upon us in thick clouds. There was not one of us who was not hit and bruised. The safety-spell that Thissa had cast for us in the forest had no power out here. We shouted at them in our fiercest way, and Narril and Thuiman pulled ropes from their packs and began to crack them like whips to frighten them off. That worked for a time; but then the apes saw how little harm the ropes could do and they returned, noisier and more bothersome than ever.