"What?" Awina said, and then, in a lower tone, "My Lord?"
She was shaking.
"When a god finally speaks, he does not always say what his people expect to hear," Ulysses said. "If a god said only what everyone else knows, why have a god? No, a god sees much farther and much more clearly than mortals. He knows what is best for his people, even if they are so blind they can't see what will be good for them in the long run."
There was silence. A fly buzzed in the room, and Ulysses wondered that that pest had survived. If mankind had been intelligent enough, he would. and then he thought, well, mankind wasn't intelligent enough. Even in 1985 it looked as if starvation and pollution, mankind's progeny, would kill off man. It looked now as if all of humanity might be dead, except for one accidental survivor, himself. Yet here was the common housefly, as prosperous as his distant cousin, the cockroach, which also infested the village.
Awina said, "I do not understand what my Lord is getting at, or why the ancient sacrifices, which seemed to satisfy my Lord for so many generations, and against which he never once opened his mouth. "
"You should pray that you will be able to see, Awina. Blindness can lead to death, you know."
Awina closed her mouth and then ran the tip of her tongue over her lips. He was finding out that cloudy statements threw them into a panic, that they imagined the worst.
"Go tell the chiefs and the priests that I want to hold a conference," he said. "Within the time it would take a man walking slowly to go all the way around the village. And tell the workers to quit hammering away on this building while we are holding the conference."
Awina, shouting, ran out of the temple and inside five minutes every official who was not out hunting was inside the temple. Ulysses sat on the hard, cold granite throne and told them what he wanted. They looked shocked, but none dared object. Aytheera did say, "Lord, may I ask what you eventually intend to do with this alliance?"
"For one thing, I intend to stop this useless warfare. For another, I intend to take both Wufea and Wagarondit, the best warriors of both peoples, on an expedition against Wurutana."
"Wurutana!" they murmured in awe and no little dread.
"Yes, Wurutana! Are you surprised? Did you not expect the ancient prophecies to be fulfilled?"
"Oh, yes, Lord," Aytheera said. "It is just that, now the time is here, we find our knees shaking and our bowels turning to water."
(To the Wufea, the seat of courage was in the bowels.)
"I will be leading you against Wurutana," Singing Bear said. He wondered just what Wurutana was and what he was supposed to do to combat it. He had tried to get as much information as he could about it without letting them know how ignorant he was. He did not think that he should be using his excuse of "petrified" thoughts in the case of Wurutana. That was permissible with other, lesser, things, but Wurutana was so important that he would not have forgotten the slightest detail about it. That, at least, seemed to be the attitude of the Wufea.
"You will send a messenger to the nearest Wagarondit village and tell them that I am coming," he said, leaving it up to them to work out the practical method of approaching a deadly enemy. "You will tell them that I am coming to visit and that we will be bringing the Wagarondit prisoners, safe if not exactly unharmed, and will release them there. And the Wagarondit will release any Wufea prisoners they might have. We will hold a big conference and then go to the other Wagarondit villages and hold meetings there. Then I will pick out the Wagarondit warriors I want to accompany us, and we will go across the plains against Wurutana."
There was plenty of light inside the temple. Both big doors were open, and a big hole at one end had not yet been closed. The light showed the expressions beneath the short sleek fur on their faces and their sidewise glancing at each other. Their eyes, blue, green, yellow, orange, looked sinister and cat-like. Their tails thrashed from side to side, additionally betraying their agitation.
They had expected him to lead them in a war of extermination against the Wagarondit. Now he was proposing peace, and, worse, they would have to share their god with their ancient enemy.
Singing Bear said, "Your real enemy is Wurutana, not the Wagarondit. Now go and do as I have ordered."
A week later, he walked out through the northern gates on the hard-packed path between the fields of corn and the gardens. The old people, the younger warriors left behind to guard the village, the females and the cubs followed them, shouting and waving. Behind him were three Wufea musicians — like the spirit of '76, he thought — a drummer, a flutist, and a standard-bearer. The drum was made of wood and hide. The flute was hollowed out from the bone of some great animal. The standard was a tall spear with feathers sticking out at right angles to the shaft and the mounted heads of an eagle-like bird, a big lynx-like cat, a giant rabbit, and a horse. These heads represented the four clans, or phratries, of the Wufea. The clans resided in every village, and it was the clan system which had bound the various Wufea tribes together. As he understood it, the treaties of peace and union were between the clans of the villages, not between each tribe. Thus, for a while, the rabbit clans of each village had not fought against each other, but the lynx and the horse clans had. Then these had made peace, and the eagle clans, which had been neutral, had also agreed to join the others. Only then had the Wufea villages presented a united front against the Wagarondit. Ulysses did not understand the system; it seemed very complicated and actually non-survival, but the Wufea thought their system was the only natural one.
Behind the standard-bearer and the musicians, who played atonal music, were the chief priest and two lesser priests. These wore feathered bonnets, massive beads, and brandished wands. After them came a group of twenty-five young warriors, also decked out in feathers, beads and with chevrons of green, black, and red painted across their faces and their chests. Behind them was a band of sixty older warriors. All warriors were armed with stone knives, tomahawks and assegais, and carried bows and quivers of arrows. They were aching to try their new weapons on the Wagarondit. That is, the younger warriors were. The older ones only concealed their scorn for the new weapons when Ulysses was within hearing distance. But he heard better than they thought.
To one side, parallel with the younger warriors, were the dozen Wagarondit. They carried weapons too, and looked very sullen for men who should have been happy. They had been assured by Singing Bear that their people would not disgrace them because they had allowed themselves to be taken prisoner. At first, the prisoners had protested. They said that they would not be allowed to go to the Happy Warground (Ulysses' interpretation of a subtle phrase).
Ulysses had told them that they had no choice. Moreover, things were different now. He, the stone god, had decreed that theycould go to the Happy Warground after they died. That is, unless they persisted in their stupid protests. They shut up but still could not emotionally accept the new order of things.
The procession walked swiftly across the rolling hills, following a path which war parties and hunting parties had used for generations. There were many huge evergreens and birches and oaks along here but not so many that they constituted a forest. There were birds: bluejays, crows, ravens, sparrows, an emerald-and-honey hummingbird; the fox-red or sable-black winged squirrels; a flash of grey which was a fox; the pointed bright-eyed head of a weasel-like creature looking around the trunk of a tree fifty feet above them; a red rat scuttling across a fallen log; and, high on a hill some fifty yards to their right, a brown colossus that sat up and stared. This was a bear that was totally vegetarian and would not bother anybody as long as he was left alone. He ate corn and the produce of gardens if these were left unguarded, but he could be run off easily enough.