And so aeons had passed while he existed as a statue of matter harder than anything in the universe. He could have been in that form when the sun blew up and shattered the Earth and sent him tumbling among the great fragments outward through space and toward the stars. For all he knew, that very event had happened, and he had drifted for millions, maybe trillions and trillions of years, while galaxies died and new ones formed. Or all matter in the oscillating universe rushed back to form a primal atom and then blew again and he was hurled at speeds half the speed of light out, and then was caught in newly forming matter, perhaps was the nucleus of a planet. Perhaps he was inside a new star and was ejected during an unimaginably vast eruption into space and was caught by the gravity field of a planet and was sucked down and had burned up tons of air in his fall and smashed deep into the earth. And there he lay while the primeval freshwater oceans changed to saltier matter. And the continents split and floated away from each other, drifting on the face of the earth. And he was lifted up with the formation of new mountain ranges and was exposed by earthquakes, by volcanic eruptions casting him out, by erosion of wind and water many, many times. And after innumerable burials and exposures, he at last came into the hands of the Wufea. And they set him up on a granite throne. And, at last, whether due to the action of the lightning stroke only, or its combination with the naturally decaying effects of the matter-freezer, he had turned from "stone" into flesh in a microsecond. So swiftly that his heart, interrupted in its beat for God knew how many aeons, had continued the systole or diastole, not even knowing that it had been silent and frozen for ages.
His fantasy, he thought, was a vivid one, and contained certain truths, but he did not think that he was in a new universe. He thought that he was still on Earth, no matter how ancient it was. It was too much of a coincidence that this planet had a moon so much like the moon he had known or that it had horses and rabbits and many insects exactly like those he had known.
Being born from stone was enough of a shock. It could have unhinged the minds of many men, and Singing Bear was not sure that he would be able to stay in one mental piece. But after the shock wore off, the loneliness began to hurt.
It was painful enough to know that all your contemporaries and their grandchildren for hundreds of thousands of generations were dust. But to know that you were the only human being alive was almost unendurable.
He could not be sure that he was the only human being on Earth, and this uncertainty kept him from plunging into despair. There was always hope.
At least, he was not the only sentient alive. He did have many people to talk to, even if the speakers were so alien that they often repelled him, and the language contained concepts he could not quite understand, and their attitudes were sometimes puzzling or infuriating.
Their attitude toward his supposed godhood made any intimacy or warmth difficult. Awina was the only exception. She regarded him with awe, but she also had an overwhelming warmth and humour.
Not even a god could be immune to that nor could Awina overcome it. She was continually saying that she should not have said such and such and would Wuwiso forgive her? She did not mean to be so nosy or so chummy and so forth. Ulysses would then assure her that he found nothing in her attitude that needed forgiving.
Awina was seventeen years old and should have been married a year ago. But her mother had died, and her father, forty years old and the chief priest, had put off forcing a marriage. He was exerting his authority close to the breaking point, because the unwritten law was that all healthy females should be mated by sixteen at the latest. Aytheera was a pleasant enough man when he got his way and was well-liked for a priest, and he succeeded in keeping his daughter in his house. Nevertheless, he could not have done so for much longer. She would have had to accept a mate and then have moved out to his longhouse. Though the chief priest had many privileges, he could not marry again. Why, no one knew. That was the custom, and custom was not often broken without immediate punishment.
Now, though he could not keep his daughter close to him all the time, Aytheera had another excuse for objecting to her marriage. She was the stone god's handmaiden, and as long as the god wanted her to serve him, she would. Did anyone in the tribe object?
No one did openly. So Awina stayed with the god until bedtime and then returned to her father's house. She sometimes complained that her father kept her up late talking and that she did not get enough sleep. When Ulysses said he would put a stop to that, she begged that he not say anything.
After all, what was a little loss of sleep compared to keeping her old father happy?
Meanwhile, Ulysses became more proficient in the Wufea speech. Its sound combinations were easy for him to master except for certain slight vowel variations used to indicate tenses "and attitudes toward tenses. He also took lessons from the Wagarondit captives in their language. This was entirely unrelated to Wufea as far as he could determine, though a scholar with access to written records (which did not exist, of course) might have traced them back to a common ancestor. After all, what tyro would suspect that Hawaiian and Indonesian and Thai were descended from the same parent? But Wagarondit contained a number of difficult phones for him. Its structure reminded him of the Algonquian languages, although of course this was only a superficial resemblance.
The trade language, Ayrata, seemed to be unrelated to either of the other two. Its sounds were simple for him, and its syntax was as uncomplicated and as regular as Esperanto. He asked Awina where it came from, and she said that the Thululiki had introduced it. Gutapa was the Wufea pronunciation of the word used by the Thululiki; she could not pronounce this. The Thululiki's own speech was beyond her; they had introduced Ayrata "all over the world." Everybody could speak some Ayrata, and trade and war councils and peace treaties were all conducted in Ayrata.
Ulysses listened to her description of the Thululiki and decided that they were beings out of her mythology. Such things could not exist.
He had also found out by then that the Wagarondit were being saved for the great annual
festival of the confederacy of the Wufea. Then the prisoners would be tortured and finally sacrificed to him. For the first time, he learned where the blood on the disc below his throne had come from.
"How many days until the festival of the stone god?" he said.
"One moon exactly," she replied.
He hesitated and then said, "And what if I forbid the torture and the killings? What if I said that the Wagarondit should be let loose?"
Awina's eyes opened widely. It was noonday, and her pupil was a black slit against the blue iris. She opened her mouth then and ran her pink rough tongue across her black lips.
She said, "Pardon, Lord. But why would you do that, what you said?"
Ulysses did not think she would understand if he tried to define concepts of mercy and compassion. She had those traits; she was very tender and empathetic and compassionate, as far as her own people went. But to her the Wagarondit were not even animals.
He could not despise her for that attitude. His own people, the Onondaga and the Senaca, had felt the same way. And so had his other ancestors, the Irish, the Danes, the French, the Norwegians.
"Tell me," he said. "Is it not true that the Wagarondit also claim me as their god? Were they not making that great raid so they could carry me off to their temple?"
Awina looked slyly at him. She said, "Who should know better than you, Lord?"
He waved his hand impatiently and said, "I've told you more than once that some of my thoughts were changed to stone, too. I do not remember some things as yet, though doubtless it will all come back to me. What I'm getting at is that the Wagarondit are as much my people as the Wufea."