Whoever these people were, they were ugly in my eyes. Even the younger men had dark beards as bristly as thistle patches, but they were all bald—males lost their hair at adolescence and most of the women went bald later, although I did not notice that then. The men wore black leather; the women, dresses in gaudy patterns that merely stressed their wearers’ toadlike squatness.
Around me, thirty or forty slaves lay or sat within the paddock, some sleeping, some just staring at nothing. They were all scabby and dirty, more like dry weeds than people. The mad ones were still wailing, or else another group had taken over their religious duties; insanity was never absent from the compound. Then I was astonished to notice a man with hair as fair as my own. I walked over and sat down beside him.
He was older than I was, thin and wiry. His legs and back were a network of fine red and white scars. There was gray in the flaxen tangle of his beard. His tan showed that he had worn no clothes for a long time—my loins and buttocks were sunburned to blisters where my pagne had formerly provided protection. He turned to look at me with dulled blue eyes.
“Knobil,” I said and held out a hand.
He hesitated and then responded. “Orange.”
I blinked. “Orange what?”
He winced and looked away. “Orange-brown-white.”
“Sir—”
“Just ‘Orange,’ please. Even that is a mockery. I should not use it.”
“I was a herdman,” I said, “and then a pilgrim, and then a seamen. Now I am a slave?”
He nodded. “And that is the end of your story.”
“Tell! I don’t know who these people are, or why they want us.”
“They call themselves miners. Everyone else calls them ants. Don’t let them hear you say that, though.”
“Ants or miners, I intend to escape.”
He shook his head. “I expect somebody will try soon. Wait and see what happens before you try it yourself.”
“What happens?”
“They usually tie him up by his thumbs and have one of the panthers shuck him.”
“Shuck him?”
“Peel him, in strips. Did you ever watch a cat sharpen its claws?”
I had never even heard of cats, although later I met them. They are very like small versions of the panthers, without the third eye. Cats are said to be useful for catching small vermin, but I never liked them.
Being ripped to death had no appeal, either. “Does no one escape?”
Orange shook his head again. “Panthers are deadly and impossibly quick. Compared to a panther, you move like a snortoise. They can see body heat and watch you even when there is no light in the mine. They patrol the tunnels, guard the captives, catch game… Ants depend on panthers like seafolk depend on great ones.”
“Can they talk?”
“No. But they understand very complicated orders. They are very well trained. Don’t try it, Knobil—not until you’re ready to die.” He sighed as if he were reaching that point himself.
I was thinking that over when he added, “And don’t ever anger the ants or draw attention to yourself. They like to execute someone every now and again. It’s a good example. And entertainment. Anything but utter humility is savagely punished. You showed too much purpose in the way you came over to me. Look cowed!”
I grunted, trying not to show my dismay. This man was an angel? Then I caught his eye. For a moment the glazed, waxy look was missing. It flicked back again like a lid on a basket.
“Notice that there aren’t quite enough hides to go around?” he asked softly. “They watch who sleeps under cover and who doesn’t. You’re allowed to enjoy the women if you want—if you have any strength left after your shift, that is. But if you start getting possessive, then that’s noticed, too. Don’t go to the same one every time. Any slave who begins to gather status is marked.”
That was better! An angel would be an obvious leader, so he was merely being cautious.
“You mean there’s no way out except death?” I asked.
He hesitated, glanced at my hair, and then nodded. “That’s right.”
“What do the angels think about this slavery?”
“Ah!” He sighed. “There is a very remote chance that Heaven will raid the nest and release the slaves…this is a small tribe. But there are never enough angels, friend Knobil. Ants get their name because they keep slaves. The life of a mineworker is nasty and usually short, so why send your own sons into the pit when you can send someone else’s? Any traveler is fair game. In fact, ants are notorious for all sorts of violence. Sometimes one tribe will attack another and try to take its mine—that wouldn’t help us, though. There would just be more slaves. No ant army ever ends its march with fewer people than it started with, either.”
What, I asked, was an ant army?
For a while he did not reply, then he lay down. Puzzled, I copied him. “We re noticed, Knobil,” he mumbled, staring at the sky and barely moving his lips. “Friendships are dangerous. You mustn’t come near me now for a while—four or five tours, at least. So listen and I’ll explain.
“You know that every tribe, every people, moves west? That’s the law of nature. Herders and ranchers drift around, but overall they move west. Traders come and go, but even a trader ends his life farther west than he began it. Seafolk move north to warm seas or estuaries. They go south to round the capes and headlands—or sometimes across them if they must—but in the end they’re moving west like the rest of us. Forest springs up before Noon and withers a month or so west of Dusk, so you could say that the forests move, also, and so do the people who live in them. Even Heaven moves.”
I had known that the herdfolk stayed ahead of the sun…
“What happens if you get east of the sun, then?” I asked the sky.
He grunted as if surprised at my ignorance. “The sun goes away. You’re left with cold and dark and snow. Half of the world is black and covered with ice, Knobil.”
Angels were always talking about this “ice” thing—Brown had, too. I tried in vain to imagine a sky without a sun.
“The ants are different. Nature didn’t spread ores around evenly, like forest or grass. The ants have kept more of the old wisdoms—reading and writing, and even a few arcane things that the saints have forgotten, or so they say. The ice of Darkside and the floods of Dawn destroy everything. Nothing made by human hand can last from one cycle to the next, and the world is always born anew. The landscape is changed, the workings buried or stripped away, but the ants keep records that tell them where the nests were in the last cycle. Each tribe has its own list, I suppose. They probably try to steal one another’s, which may be why they like to move to a mine site as close to Dawn as they can get, right up in the wetlands, to take possession early.”
Orange could have had no idea how little of his lecture I was understanding, but I let him talk.
“And they’ll stay at a mine as long as possible—unless they know of a better one thawing out, of course. They say that an ant can be born and live and die all in the same place—the sun low in the east when he is born, passing high overhead as he grows, and low in the west when he is a very old man.”
To a herdman, accustomed to an unchanging sun, that idea was utter insanity. I wondered if captivity had driven this ex-angel mad.
“So, when a tribe of ants does move,” he continued, “it may cross almost the whole length of Dayside. A child could be conceived after its parents left one home, and be walking and talking before they reached their next. That’s an ant army—a nest on the move. There can be two or three hundred of them, or more. The opportunities for pillage are not always overlooked—slaving, too, if they get the chance.”