Helliconia Spring

Yuli

This is how Yuli, son of Alehaw, came to a place called Oldorando, where his descendants flourished in the better days that were to come.

Yuli was seven years old, virtually a grown man, when he crouched under a skin bivouac with his father and gazed down the wilderness of a land known even at that time as Campannlat. He had roused from a light doze with his father’s elbow in his rib and his harsh voice saying, “Storm’s dying.”

The storm had been blowing from the west for three days, bringing with it snow and particles of ice off the Baffiers. It filled the world with howling energy, transforming it to a grey-white darkness, like a great voice that no nun could withstand. The ledge on which the bivouac was pitched afforded little protection from the worst of the blast; father and son could do nothing but he where they were under the skin, dozing, once in a while chewing on a piece of smoked fish, while the weather battered away above their heads.

As the wind expired, the snow arrived in spurts, twitching in feather-like flurries across the drab landscape. Although Freyr was high in the sky—for the hunters were within the tropics—it seemed to hang there frozen. The lights rippled overhead in shawl after golden shawl, the fringes of which seemed to touch the ground, while the folds rose up and up until they vanished in the leaden zenith of heaven. The lights gave little illumination, no warmth.

Both father and son rose by instinct, stretching, stamping their feet, throwing their arms violently about the massive barrels of their bodies. Neither spoke. There was nothing to say. The storm was over. Still they had to wait. Soon, they knew, the yelk would be here. Not for much longer would they have to maintain their vigil.

Although the ground was broken, it was without feature, being covered with ice and snow. Behind the two men was higher ground, also covered with the mat of whiteness. Only to the north was there a dark grim greyness, where the sky came down like a bruised arm to meet the sea. The eyes of the men, however, were fixed continually on the east. After a period of stamping and slapping, when the air about them filled with the foggy vapour of their breath, they settled down again under the skins to wait.

Alehaw arranged himself with one befurred elbow on the rock, so that he could tuck his thumb deep into the hollow of his left cheek, propping the weight of his skull on his zygomatic bone and shielding his eyes with four curled gloved fingers.

His son waited with less patience. He squirmed inside his stitched skins. Neither he nor his father was born to this kind of hunting. Hunting bear in the Barriers was their way of life, and their fathers’ before them. But intense cold, exhaled from the high hard hurricane mouths of the Barriers had driven them, together with the sick Onesa, down to the gentler weather of the plains. So Yuli was uneasy and excited.

His ailing mother and his sister, together with his mother’s family, were some miles distant, the uncles venturing hopefully towards the frozen sea, with the sledge and their ivory spears. Yuli wondered how they had fared in the days-long storm, if they were feasting even now, cooking fish or hunks of seal meat in his mother’s bronze pot. He dreamed of the scent of meat in his mouth, the rough feel of it meshed in saliva as it was gulped down, the flavour… Something in his hollow belly went whang at the thought.

“There, see!” His father’s elbow jabbed his biceps.

A high iron-coloured front of cloud rose rapidly in the sky, dimming Freyr, spilling shade across the landscape. Everything was a blur of white, without definition. Below the bluff on which they lay stretched a great frozen river—the Vark, Yuli had heard it called. So thickly covered in snow was it that nobody could tell it was a river, except by walking across it. Up to their knees in powdery drift, they had heard a faint ringing beneath their heels; Alehaw had pawed, putting the sharp end of his spear to the ice and the blunt end to his ear, and listened to the dark flow of water somewhere beneath their feet. The far bank of the Vark was vaguely marked by mounds, broken here and there by patches of black, where fallen trees lay half-concealed by snow. Beyond that, only the weary plain, on and on, until a line of brown could be made out under the sullen shawls of the far eastern sky.

Blinking his eyes, Yuli stared at the line and stared again. Of course his father was right. His father knew everything. His heart swelled with pride to think that he was Yuli, son of Alehaw. The yelk were coming.

In a few minutes, the leading animals could be discerned, travelling solidly on a wide front, advancing with a bow wave preceding them, where their elegant hoofs kicked up snow. They progressed with their heads down, and behind them came more of their kind, and more, without end. It appeared to Yuli that they had seen him and his father and were advancing directly upon them. He glanced anxiously at Alehaw, who gestured caution with one finger.

“Wait.”

Yuli shivered inside his bearskins. Food was approaching, enough food to feed every single person of every tribe upon whom Freyr and Batalix ever shone, or Wutra smiled.

As the animals drew nearer, approaching steadily at something like a man’s fast walking pace, he tried to comprehend what an enormous herd it was. By now, half of the landscape was filled with moving animals, with the white-and-tan texture of their hides, while more beasts were appearing over from the eastern horizon. Who knew what lay that way, what mysteries, what terrors? Yet nothing could be worse than the Barriers, with its searing cold, and that great red mouth Yuli had once glimpsed through the scudding wrack of cloud, belching out lava down the smoking hillside…

Now it was possible to see that the living mass of animals did not consist solely of yelk, although they made up the greater part. In the midst of the herd were knots of a larger animal, standing out like clumps of boulders on a moving plain. This larger animal resembled a yelk, with the same long skull about which elegant horns curled protectively on either side, the same shaggy mane overlying a thick matted coat, the same hump on its back, situated towards its rump. But these animals stood half as tall again as the yelk which hemmed them in. They were the giant biyelk, formidable animals capable of carrying two men on their backs at the same time—so one of Yuli’s uncles had told him.

And a third animal associated itself with the herd. It was a gunnadu, and Yuli saw its neck raised everywhere along the sides of the herd. As the mass of yelk moved indifferently forward, the gunnadu ran excitedly to either flank, their small heads bobbing on the end of their long necks. Their most remarkable feature, a pair of gigantic ears, turned hither and thither, listening for unexpected alarms. This was the first two-legged animal Yuli had seen; below its long-haired body, two immense pistonlike legs propelled it. The gunnadu moved at twice the speed of the yelk and biyelk, covering twice as much ground, yet each animal remained where it was in relation to the herd.

A heavy dull continuous thunder marked the approach of the herd. From where Yuli lay against his father, the three species of animal could be distinguished only because he knew what to look for. They all merged with one another in the heavy mottled light. The black cloud-front had advanced more rapidly than the herd, and now covered Batalix entirely: that brave sentinel would not be seen again for days. A rumpled carpet of animals rolled across the land, its individual movements no more distinguishable than currents in a turbulent river.

Mist hung over the animals, further shrouding them. It comprised sweat, heat, and small winged biting insects able to procreate only in the heat from the burly- hoofed flock.

Breathing faster, Yuli looked again and—behold!—the creatures in the forefront were already confronting the banks of the snowbound Vark. They were near, they were coming nearer—the world was one inescapable teeming animal. He flicked his head to look in appeal at his father. Although he saw his son’s gesture, Alehaw remained rigidly staring ahead, teeth gritted, eyes clenched against the cold under his heavy eye ridges.

“Still,” he commanded.

The tide of life surged along the riverbanks, flowed over, cascaded over the hidden ice. Some creatures, lumbering adults, skipping fauns, fell against concealed tree trunks, dainty legs kicking furiously before they were trampled under the pressure of the march.

Individual animals could now be picked out. They carried their heads low. Their eyes were staring, white-rimmed. Thick green trails of saliva hung from many a mouth. The cold froze the steam from their upthrust nostrils, streaking ice across the fur of their skulls. Most beasts laboured, in poor condition, their coats covered with mud, excrement, and blood, or hanging loose in strips, where a neighbour’s horns had stabbed and torn them.

The biyelks in particular, striding surrounded by their lesser brethren, their shoulders enormous with grey-bunched fur, walked with a kind of controlled unease, their eyes rolling as they heard the squeals of those who fell, and understood that some kind of danger, towards which they were inevitably to progress, threatened ahead.

The mass of animals was crossing the frozen river, churning snow. Their noise came plain to the two watchers, not solely the sound of their hoofs but the rasp of their breath, and a continued chorus of grunts, snorts, and coughs, a click of horn against horn, the sharp rattle of ears being shaken to dislodge ever persistent flies.

Three biyelks stepped forth together on the frozen river. With sharp resounding cracks, the ice broke. Shards of it almost a metre thick reared up into view as the heavy animals fell forward. Panic seized the yelk. Those on the ice attempted to scatter in all directions. Many stumbled and were lost under more animals. The cracking spread. Water, grey and fierce, jetted into the air—fast and cold, the river was still flowing. It rushed and broke and foamed, as if glad to be free, and the animals went down into it with their months open, bellowing.

Nothing deterred the oncoming animals. They were as much a natural force as the river. They flowed ever on, obliterating their companions who stumbled, obliterating too the sharp wounds opened in the Vark, bridging it with tumbled bodies, until they surged up the near bank.

Now Yuli raised himself on to his knees and lifted his ivory spear, his eyes blazing. His father seized his arm and dragged him down.

“See, phagors, you fool,” he said, giving his son a furious, contemptuous glare, and stabbing ahead with his spear to indicate danger.

Shaken, Yuli sank down again, as much frightened of his father’s wrath as by the thought of phagors.

The yelk herd pressed about their outcrop of rock, lurching by on either side of its crumbling base. The cloud of flies and stinging things that sang about their twitching backs now enveloped Yuli and Alehaw, and it was through this veil that Yuli stared, trying to get a sight of phagors. At first he discerned none.

Nothing was to be seen ahead but the avalanche of shaggy life, driven by compulsions no man understood. It covered the frozen river, it covered the banks, it covered the grey world back to the far horizon, where it tucked itself under the dun clouds like a rug under a pillow. Hundreds of thousands of animals were involved, and the midges hung above them in a continuous black exhalation.

Alehaw dragged his son down and indicated a spot to their left with one shaggy eyebrow. Half-hidden beneath the skin that served as their bivouac, Yuli stared at the advance. Two giant biyelks were lumbering towards their coign of vantage. Their massive white-furred shouldiers were almost on a level with the ledge. As Yuli blew the midges away from before his eyes, the white fur resolved itself into phagors. Four of them, two riding on each biyelk, clung tight to the hair of their mounts.

He wondered how he had missed sighting them before. Though they merged with their giant steeds, they exhibited the presence of all who ride while others travel on foot. They clustered an top of the biyelks’ shoulders, directing their moody bull faces ahead towards the higher ground where the herd would stop and graze. Their eyes glared out under upward-curving horns. Every now and again, one would shoot out his white milt, curving it up the slot of his powerful nostrils, to remove plaguing midges.

Their clumsy heads pivoted above the bulk of their bodies, which were completely covered with long white hair. The creatures were all white, except for their pink-scarlet eyes. They rode the striding biyelks as if they were part of them. Behind them, a crude leather carrier holding clubs and weapons swung to and fro.

Now that Yuli was alert to the nature of the danger, he discerned other phagors. Only the privileged rode. The rank and file of their nation went on foot, proceeding at a walking pace matching that of the animals. As he watched, so tense he dared not even brush the flies from his eyelids, Yuli saw a group of four phagors pass within a few metres of where he and his father lay. He would have had no difficulty in spearing the leader between the shoulder blades, had Alehaw given the command.

Yuli looked with particular interest at the horns that passed him, two by two. Smooth though they appeared in the dull light, the inner and outer edges of each horn were sharp from base to tip.

He coveted one of those horns. Horns of dead phagors were used as weapons in the savage recesses of the Barriers. It was for their horns that learned men in distant towns—couched in dens remote from storm—referred to phagors as the ancipital race: the species with two sharp edges.

The leading ancipital strode along dauntlessly. Lack of an ordinary knee joint made his an unnatural-looking stride. He marched mechanically as he must have done for miles. Distance was no obstacle.

His long skull was thrust forward in typical phagor fashion, low between his shoulders. On either arm he wore hide straps, to which were attached outward- pointing horns, their extremities tipped with metal. With these, the creature could prod away any animal that walked too close to him. Otherwise, he was unarmed; but to a nearby yelk, a bundle of possessions had been tied, a bundle including spears and a hunting harpoon. Adjacent animals also involuntarily carried baggage belonging to the other phagors in the group.

Behind the leader were two more males—so Yuli assumed—followed by a female phagor. She was of slighter build, and carried some kind of bag tied round her middle. Under her long white hair, pinkish dugs swung. On her shoulders rode an infant phagor, clutching uncomfortably at its mother’s neck fur, its head clamped down on her head. Its eyes were closed. The female walked automatically, as though in a daze. It was a matter for conjecture for how many days she and the others had been walking, or how far.

And there were other phagors, spread thinly round the outskirts of the moving concourse. The animals took no notice of them, accepting them as they accepted the flies, because there was no alternative to acceptance.

The noise of the drumming hoofs was punctuated by laboured breathing and coughing and breaking wind. Another sound rose. The phagor who led the small group was emitting a kind of hum or growl, a rough noise delivered over a vibrating tongue which varied in pitch; perhaps it was intended to cheer the three who followed. The sound terrified Yuli. Then it was gone, and the phagors too. More animals streamed by and eventually more phagors, continuing stanchlessly. Yuli and his father lay where they were, occasionally spitting flies from their mouths, waiting for the time to strike and win the meat they desperately needed.

Before sunset, the wind got up again, blowing as before off the ice-caps of the Barriers, into the faces of the migratory army. The attendant phagors matched with their heads down, eyes slitted, and long trails of saliva fanned from the corners of their mouths and froze across their chests, as fat freezes when thrown out on the ice.

The atmosphere was iron. Wutra, god of the skies, had withdrawn his shawls of light and shrouded his domain with overcast. Perhaps another battle had been lost to him.

From under this dark curtain, Freyr became visible only when it reached the horizon. Blankets of cloud rumpled back to reveal the sentinel smouldering in a perspective of golden ashes. It shone out with spirit over the wastes—small but bright, its disc no more than a third as large as that of its companion star, Batalix, yet Freyr’s light was greater, fiercer.

It sank into the eddre of the ground and was gone.

Now was the time of dimday, which prevailed in summer and autumn, and which almost alone distinguished those seasons from even less merciful times. Dimday suffused a dazed half-light across the night sky. Only at times of New Year would Batalix and Freyr rise and set together. At present their lives were solitary, hidden frequently behind cloud which was the billowing smoke from Wutra’s war.

In the manner of day’s turning to dimday, Yuli read the weather omens. Driving winds would soon be conjured up with snow on their breath. He recalled the rhyme they chanted in Old Olonets, the tongue of magic, of past things, of red ruin, the tongue of catastrophe, fair women, giants, and rich food, the tongue of an inaccessible yesterday. The rhyme had been recalled in the croupy caves of the Barriers:

As if responding to the changing light, a general shudder passed across the mass of yelk, and they stopped. Groaning, they settled where they were upon the trampled ground, tucking their legs beneath their bodies. For the enormous biyelk, this manoeuvre was not possible. They stood where they were and slept, ears across eyes. Some of the phagor groups gathered themselves together for companionship; most simply flung themselves down indifferently and slept where they fell, jamming their backs against the flanks of supine yelk.

Everything slept. The two figures sprawled on the rock ledge dragged their sheltering skin over their heads and dreamed, empty-bellied, with their faces buried in their folded arms. Everything slept, except for the mist of biting and sucking insects.

Things that were capable of dreams struggled through the uneasy mirages that dimday brought with it.

In general, the view, with its lack of shadow and constant level of suffering, might have appeared to anyone scrutinising it for the first time to represent not so much a world as a place awaiting formal creation.

At this stage of quiescence, there was a motion in the sky hardly more energetic than the unfolding of the aurora which had hung above the scene earlier. From the direction of the sea came a solitary childrim, sailing through the air some metres above the prostrate mass of living things. It looked to be no more than a great wing, glowing red like the embers of a dying fire, beating with a steady lethargy. As it passed over the deer, the animals twitched and heaved. It skimmed over the rock where the two humans lay, and Yuli and his father twitched and heaved, like the yelk seeing strange visions in their sleep. Then the apparition was gone, heading on lonely for the mountains in the south, leaving behind it a trail of red sparks to die in the atmosphere like an echo of itself.

After a while, the animals woke and rose to their feet. They shook their ears, which bled from the attentions of the gnats, and again started forward. With them went the biyelks and gunnadus, scuttling here and there. With them too went the phagors. The two humans roused, and watched them go.

Throughout another day the great progress continued, and blizzards raged, plastering the animals with snow. Towards evening, when wind was blowing tattered cloud across the sky and the cold held a whistling edge, Alehaw sighted the rear of the herd.

The rear was not as tight as the vanguard had been. Stragglers from the herd trailed back several miles, some limping, some coughing pitifully. Behind and beside them scurried long furry things with bellies near the ground, waiting the chance to nip a fetlock and bring a victim crashing down.

The last of the phagors marched past the ledge. They did not walk at the rear, either from respect for the low-bellied carnivores or because the going was difficult over such trampled ground, piled with scumble.

And now Alehaw rose, motioning his son to do likewise. They stood, clutching their weapons, and then slithered down to level ground.

“Good!” said Akhaw.

The snow was strewn with dead animals, in particular round the banks of the Vark. The break in the ice was plugged with drowned bodies. Many of those creatures who had been forced to lie down where they stood had frozen to death as they rested, and were now turned to ice. The lumps of which they composed the red core were unrecognizable in shape after the blizzard.

Delighted to be able to move, young Yuli ran and jumped and cried aloud. Dashing to the frozen river, he skipped dangerously from one unidentifiable lump to another, waving his hands and laughing. His father called him sharply to heel.

Alehaw pointed down through the ice. Black shapes moved, obscurely seen, partly defined by trails of bubbles. They streaked the turbid medium in which they swam with crimson, boring up beneath the frozen layers to attack the banquet provided for their benefit.

Other predators were arriving by air, large white fowl coming in from the east and the sullen north, fluttering heavily down, brandishing ornate beaks with which they bored through the ice to the flesh underneath. As they devoured, they fixed on the hunter and his son eyes heavy with avian calculation.

But Alehaw wasted no time on them. Directing Yuli to follow, he moved to where the herd had stumbled across fallen trees, calling and waving his spear as he went, to frighten off predators. Here dead animals were readily accessible. Although badly trampled, they still preserved one part of their anatomies intact, their skulls. It was to these that Alehaw addressed his attention. He prized open the dead jaws with the blade of a knife, and adroitly cut out their thick tongues. Blood spilled over his wrists onto the snow.

Meanwhile, Yuli climbed among the tree trunks, collecting broken wood. He kicked the snow away from one fallen trunk, contriving a sheltered place in which he could make a small fire. Wrapping his bowstring round a pointed stick, he rubbed it to and fro. The crumbled wood smouldered. He blew gently. A tiny flame sprang up, as he had seen it do often under the magical breath of Onesa. When the fire was burning well, he set his bronze pot on it, and piled snow in to melt, adding salt from a leather pocket he carried in his furs. He was ready when his father brought seven shiny tongues in his arms, and slipped them into the pot.

Four of the tongues were for Alehaw, three for Yuli. They ate with grunts of satisfaction; Yuli trying to catch his father’s eye and smile, to show satisfaction; but Alehaw, kept his brows knit as he chewed, and his gaze down at the trampled ground.

There was work still to be done. Even before they had finished eating, Alehaw got to his feet and kicked the smouldering embers aside. The scavenger birds nearby rose momentarily, and then settled again to their feast. Yuli emptied the bronze pot and secured it to his belt.

They were almost at the place when the great herd of animals reached the western limit of its migration. Here, on higher ground, they would seek out lichen under the snow, and graze on the strands of shaggy green moss that wrapped the larch forests about. Here, too, on a low plateau, some of the animals would reach their due term and bring forth their young. It was to this plateau, no more than a mile off, that Alehaw and his son made their way through the grey daylight. In the distance, they saw groups of other hunters, heading in the same direction; each group deliberately ignored the others. No other group consisted of two people only, Yuli noted; that was the penalty his family paid for being not of the plain, but of the Barrier. For them, everything was more arduous.

They walked bent double, up the incline. The way was strewn with boulders, where an ancient sea had once withdrawn in the face of encroaching cold—but of that aspect of affairs they knew and cared nothing; only the present was of importance to Alehaw and his son.

On the lip of the plateau they stood, shielding their eyes against biting cold in order to peer forward. Most of the herd had disappeared. All that remained of its still active numbers were occasional swarms of flying insects and the pungent smell. It had left behind on the plateau those of its members who were propagating.

Among these fated individuals were not only yelk but the flimsier gunnadu and the bulky bodies of giant biyelk. They lay inert, covering a wide area, dead or almost dead, sometimes with sides heaving. Another party of hunters was moving closer among the dying animals. Grunting, Alehaw, gestured to one side, and he and Yuli moved over in the direction of a broken cluster of pines, near which a few yelk lay. Yuli stood over one to watch his father kill the helpless beast, already labouring its way into the grey world of eternity.

Like its monstrous cousin, the biyelk, and the gunnadu, the yelk was a necrogene, giving birth only through its death. The animals were hermaphrodite, sometimes male, sometimes female. They were too crudely designed to have within them the apparatus of mammals such as ovaries and wombs. After mating, the spurted sperm developed within the warm interior into small maggotlike forms, which grew as they devoured the stomach of their maternal host.

A time came when the maggot-yelk reached a main artery. It could then spread in its numbers like seed in the wind throughout the host animal, causing death within a short while. This event occurred unfailingly when the great herds reached the plateau at the western limit of their range. So it had done throughout ages that no one could count.

Even while Alehaw and Yuli stood over the beast, its stomach collapsed like an old bag. It threw up its head and died. Alehaw plunged in his spear, in ceremonial fashion. Both men dropped to their knees in the snow, and with their daggers ripped up the belly of the animal.

The maggot-yelk were within, no bigger than a fingernail—almost too small to see but collectively delicious to taste, and highly nourishing. They would help Onesa in her illness. They died on exposure to the freezing air.

Left to themselves, the maggot-yelk would live in safety inside the skins of their hosts. Within their little dark universe, they would not hesitate to devour each other, and many were the bloody battles fought in aorta and mesenteric arteries. The survivors grew through successive metamorphoses, increasing in size as they decreased in numbers. At length, two or possibly three small rapid-moving yelks would emerge from throat or anus, to face the starveling world oubide. And this emergence would be achieved just in time to avoid death by trampling, as the herds moved slowly into position on the plateau for their return migration northeastwards towards far Chalce.

Dotted over the plateau, among the animals simultaneously procreating and dying, stood thick stone pillars. The pillars had been set there by an earlier race of men. On each pillar was carved a simple device: a circle or a wheel with a smaller circle at its centre. From the centre circle, two opposed curved spokes radiated to the outer one. Nobody present on the sea-sculpted plateau, animal or hunter, attended to these decorated pillars in the least degree.

Yuli was engrossed with their catch. He tore off strips of hide, weaving them crudely into a bag, into which he scraped the dying maggot-yelk. Meanwhile his father was dissecting the carcass. Every bit of the dead body could be utilised. From the longest bones, a sledge would be built, lashed together with strips of hide. Horns would serve as runners, to ease their having to pull the sledge all the way home. For by then the little carriage would be loaded high with good solid joints of shoulder and rib and rump, covered over with the rest of the skin.

Both worked together, grunting with effort, their hands red, breath in a cloud above their heads where midgets gathered unnoticed.

Suddenly, Alehaw gave a terrible cry, fell backwards, tried to run.

Yuli looked round in dismay. Three great white phagors had crept from a place of concealment among the pines, and stood over them. Two sprang on Alehaw as he got up, and clubbed him to the snow. The other struck out at Yuli. He rolled aside, yelling.

They had completely forgotten about the dangers of phagors, and had neglected to keep any watch. As he rolled and sprang and avoided the swinging club, Yuli saw the other hunters nearby, working calmly on the dying yelk just as he and his father had been doing. So determined were they to get on with the work, to build their sledges and be off—so near was starvation—that they continued about their business, glancing up at the fight only now and again. The story would have been different had they been kin of Alehaw and Yuli. But these were plainsmen, squat unfriendly men. Yuli yelled to them for help, without avail. One man nearby hurled a bloody bone at the pbagors. That was all.

Dodging the swinging cudgel, Yuli started to run, slipped, and fell. Up thundered the phagor. Yuli fell into an instinctive defensive pose, resting on one knee. As the phagor dived at him, he brought up his dagger in an underarm movement and sank it into the broad gut of his attacker. He watched with shocked amazement his arm disappear into stringy stiff pelage and that coat immediately belch into thick gold gore gushing everywhere. Then the body smote him, and he went rolling—rolling then by volition, rolling out of harm’s way, rolling into what shelter offered itself, rolling panting behind an upthrust shoulder of dead yelk, from where he looked out on a world suddenly turned enemy.

His assailant had fallen. Now he picked himself up, nursing that golden patch in his gut with enormous horned paws, and staggering mindlessly, crying “Aoh, aoh, aohhh, aohhhh…” He fell head first and did not move again.

Behind the fallen body, Alehaw had been beaten to the ground. He lay crumpled, but the two phagors immediately seized him and one of them arranged him over his shoulders. The pair looked about, stared back at their fallen comrade, glanced at each other, grunted, turned their backs on Yuli, and began to march away.

Yuli stood up. He found his legs, bound inside his fur trousers, were shaking. He had no idea what to do. Distractedly, he skirted the body of the phagor he had killed—how he would boast of that to his mother and uncles—and ran back to the scene of the scuffle. He picked up his spear and then, after some hesitation, took his father’s spear as well. Then he set off to follow the phagors.

They were trudging ahead, making heavy weather of getting uphill with their burden. They soon sensed the boy following them, and turned now and again, halfheartedly trying to drive him off with threats and gestures. Evidently they did not think him worth expending a spear on.

When Alehaw recovered consciousness, the two phagors stopped, set him on his feet, and made him walk between them, encouraging him with blows. Uttering a series of whistles, Yuli let his father know that he was nearby; but whenever the older man ventured to look over his shoulder, he received a clout from one of the phagors that sent him reeling.

The phagors slowly caught up with another party of their own kind, consisting of a female and two males; one of the latter was old and walked with a stick as tall as himself, on which he leaned heavily in his progress uphill. Every now and again, he stumbled in the piles of yelk droppings.

Eventually, the scatters of scumble appeared no more, and the smell died from their nostrils. They were moving along an upward path the migratory herd had not taken. The winds had dropped, and spruce trees grew on the slope. There were now several knots of phagors climbing up the hillside, many of them bowed beneath carcasses of yelk. And behind them trailed a nine-year-old human being, fear in his heart, trying to keep his father in sight.

The air grew thick and heavy, as if under enchantment. The pace was slower, the larches closer, and the phagors were forced to bunch more closely. Their rough song, scraped across their horny tongues, sounded loudly, a hum that on occasions rose to a scalding crescendo and then died again. Yuli was terrified, and fell further behind, darting from tree to tree.

He could not understand why Alehaw did not break from his captors and run back downhill; then he could grasp his spear again, and together the two of them would stand side by side and kill all the shaggy phagors. Instead, his father remained captive, and now his slighter figure was lost among the crowding figures in the twilight under the trees.

The humming song rose harshly and died. A smokey greenish light glowed ahead, promising a new crisis. Yuli sneaked forward, running doubled up to the next tree. Some kind of building stood ahead, fronted by a double gate, which opened slightly. Within, the faint fire showed. The phagors were shouting, and the gate opened more. They began to crowd in. The light was revealed as a brand, which one of their kind held aloft.

“Father, Father!” screamed Yuli. “Run, Father! I’m here.”

There was no answer. In the murk, which the torch further confused, it was impossible to see whether or not Alehaw had already been pushed inside the gate. One or two phagors turned indifferently at the shouts, and shooed Yuli away without animosity.

“Go and zzhout at the wind!” one cried in Olonets. They wanted only full-grown human slaves.

The last burly figure entered the building. Amid more shouting, the gates closed. Yuli ran to them crying, banging against their rough wood as he heard a bolt being shot home on the other side. He stood there for a long while with his forehead against the grain, unable to accept what had happened.

The gates were set in a stone fortification, the blocks of which were crudely fitted into each other and patched with long-tailed mosses. The edifice was no more than an entrance to one of the underground caves in which the phagors, as Yuli knew, had their existence. They were indolent creatures, and preferred to have humans working for them.

For a while, he ranged round about the gate, climbing up the steep hillside, until be found what he expected to find. It was a chimney, three times his height and of impressive circumference. He could climb it with ease, because it tapered towards the top and because the blocks of stone of which it was made were crudely set together, allowing plenty of foothold. The stones were not as freezingly cold as might have been expected, and free of frost.

At the top, he incautiously stuck his face over the lip, and was immediately jerked backwards, so that he lost his hold and fell, landing on his right shoulder and rolling in the snow.

A blast of hot, foetid air, mixed with wood smoke and stale exhalation, had erupted at him. The chimney was a ventilator for the phagor warrens below ground. He knew he could not climb in that way. He was shut out, and his father was lost to him forever.

He sat miserably in the snow. His feet were covered by skins, laced in place up the legs. He wore a pair of trousers and a tunic of bear fur, stitched in place by his mother with the fur next to his skin. For additional warmth, he had on a parka with a fur hood. Onesa, during a period when she was feeling well enough, had decorated the parka with white scuts of an ice rabbit round the shoulders, three scuts to each shoulder, and had embroidered the neck with red and blue beads. Despite which, Yuli presented a forlorn sight, for the parka was stained with the remains of food and fat drippings, while dirt caked the fur of his garments; they smelt strongly of Yuli. His face, a light yellow or beige when clean, was wrinkled brown and black with dirt, and his hair straggled greasily about his temples and collar. He had a flat-nostrilled nose, which he began to rub, and a broad, sensuous mouth, which began to pucker, revealing a broken front tooth among its white neighbours, as he started to cry and punch the snow.

After a while, he rose and walked about among the forlorn larches, trailing his father’s spear behind him. He had no alternative but to retrace his steps and try to return to his sick mother, if he could find his way back through the snowy wastes.

He realised also that he was hungry.

Desperately forsaken, he started a hullabaloo at the closed gates. There was no kind of response. Snow began to fall, slowly but without cease. He stood with fists raised above his head. He spat, the gob landing on the panels. That for his father. He hated the man for being a weakling. He recalled all the beatings he had received from his father’s hand—why had his father not beaten the phagors?

At last, he turned away through the falling snow in disgust, and began to walk downhill.

He flung his father’s spear away into a bush.

Hunger battled with fatigue and got him back as far as the Vark. His hopes were immediately dashed. None of the dead yelk remained undevoured. Predators had arrived from every corner and torn away their meat. Only carcasses and piles of bare bones by the river awaited him. He howled in wrath and dismay.

The river had frozen over and snow lay on the solid ice. He scraped the snow away with his foot and stared down. The bodies of some of the drowned animals still remained in the ice, he saw one where the head of the yelk hung down into the dark current below. Large fish ate at its eyes.

Working strenuously with his spear and a sharp horn, Yuli bored a hole in the ice, enlarged it, and waited, standing above it with spear poised. Fins flashed in the water. He struck. A blue-flecked fish, its mouth open in amazement, shone at the spearpoint as he pulled it forth dripping. It was as long as his two hands outstretched and placed thumb to thumb. He roasted it over a small fire and it tasted delicious. He belched, and slept for an hour, propped between logs. Then he started to trek southwards, along a trail the migration had all but obliterated.

Freyr and Batalix changed sentry duty in the sky, and still he walked, the only figure moving in the wilderness.

“Mother,” cried old Hasele to his wife, before he even got back to his hut, “Mother, see what I found by the Three Harlequins.”

And his ancient crone of a wife, Lorel, lame since childhood, hobbled to the door, stuck her nose out in the biting cold air, and said, “Never mind what you found. There’s gentlemen from Pannoval waiting to do business with thee.”

“Pannoval, eh? Wait till they see what I found by the Three Harlequins. I need help here, mother. Come, it’s not cold. You waste your life stuck in that house.”

The house was rude in every extreme. It consisted of piles of boulders, several of them taller than a man, interspersed with planks and timbers, and roofed over with hides on top of which turfs grew. The interstices of the boulders were stuffed with lichen and mud, to make the interior windproof, while spars and whole tree trunks propped the edifice at many points, so that the whole affair most resembled a defunct porcupine. To the main structure, additional rooms had been added in the same spirit of improvisation which had prompted the original. Bronze chimneys thrust up into the sour sky, smoking gently; in some rooms, pelts and hides were dried, in others sold. Hasele was a trader and trapper, and had made enough of a living so that now, towards the end of his life, he could afford a wife and a sledge pulled by three dogs.

Hasele’s house perched on a low escarpment which curved away eastwards for several miles. This escarpment was strewn with boulders, in some places split, in others piled one on top of the other. These boulders provided shelter for small animals, and so made good hunting grounds for the old trapper, who was no longer inclined to wander as far afield as he had done in the days of his youth. On some of the more monumental piles of stone, he had bestowed names, the Three Harlequins being one. At the Three Harlequins, he dug in salt deposits for the mineral he needed to cure his hides.

Smaller stones littered the escarpment, each subtending from its eastern side a raked cone of snow, its size varying according to the nature of the stone, pointing precisely away from the point from which the west wind whistled off the distant Barriers. This had once been a beach, belonging to a long-vanished sea coast, the north coast of the continent of Campannlat, when times had been more favourable.

To the eastern side of the Three Harlequins grew a little thicket of thorn bushes, taking advantage of the shelter of the granite to thrust forth an occasional green leaf. Old Hasele valued these green leaves in his pot, and set snares all round the bushes in order to keep off animals. Unconscious and entangled in the sharp twigs lay the youth he had discovered, whom he now dragged with Lorel’s aid into the smokey sanctuary of his hut.

“He’s no savage,” said Lorel admiringly. “See here how his parka is decorated with beads, red and blue. Pretty, ain’t they?”

“Never mind that. Give him a mouthful of soup, mother.”

She did so, stroking the lad’s throat until the soup went down, when her patient stirred, coughed, sat up, and whispered for more. As Lorel fed him she looked down, pursing her lips, at the swollen cheeks and eyes and ears, where countless insect bites had caused blood to flow and mat beneath his collar. He took more soup, then groaned and slumped back again into a coma. She held him to her, putting an arm round him, under his armpit, rocking him, remembering ancient happinesses to which she could no longer give a name.

Guiltily looking round for Hasele, she found he had padded off already, eager to do business with the gentlemen from Pannoval.

She laid the youth’s dark head down, sighing, and followed her husband. He was sipping spirits with the two large-built traders. Their parkas steamed in the warmth. Lorel tugged at Hasele’s sleeve.

“Maybe these two gentlemen will take this sick youth you’ve found back with them to Pannoval. We can’t feed him here. We’re starving as it is. Pannoval is fat and rich.”

“Leave us, mother. We’re negotiating,” Hasele said, in a lordly way.

She hobbled out the back of the building, and watched as their captive phagor, shuffling under his chains, secured their dogs in the snow kennel. She looked beyond that bowed back to the gritty grey landscape to the miles of desolation that faded into a desolate sky. From somewhere out in that wilderness, the youth had come. Perhaps once or twice a year, people, alone or in pairs, straggled dying from the ice deserts. Lorel could never gain any clear impression of where they came from, only that beyond the desert were mountains colder still. One fugitive had babbled of a frozen sea that could be crossed. She made the holy circle over her dry breasts.

In her younger days, it had teased to have no clearer picture. Then she had gone wrapped to stand on the escarpment and stare northwards. And childrims flew overhead, waving their solitary wings, and she had fallen to her knees with a dazed impression of men—massed and holy, rowing the great flat wheel of the world to some place where the snow did not always fall or the wind always blow. She went indoors crying, hating the hope the childrims brought her.

Though old Hasele had dismissed his wife in a lordly way, he took note of what she said, as he always did. When his deal with the two gentlemen from Pannoval was concluded, and a small pile of precious herbs and spices and wool fibres and flour balanced against the skins the men would load on their sledge, Hasele raised the question of their taking the sick youth with them back to civilization. He mentioned that the youth wore a good decorated parka, and therefore—just possibly, gentlemen—might be someone of importance, or at least the son of someone important.

Rather to his surprise, the two gentlemen agreed that they would be very happy to take the youth with them. They would have to make a small charge of an extra yelk skin, to cover the youth and defray the extra expense. Hasele muttered a bit, and then gave in with a good grace; he could not afford to feed the boy if he lived and, if he died—it never pleased him to feed human remains to his dogs, and the native habit of mummification and aerial burial was not his way.

“Done,” he said, and went to fetch the least good skin he could quickly lay his hands on.

The youth was awake now. He had accepted more soup from Lorel, and a warmed leg of snow rabbit. When he heard the men coming, he lay back and closed his eyes, one hand tucked inside his parka.

They surveyed him only casually, then turned away. Their plan was to load the sledge with their acquisitions, spend some hours here being entertained by Hasele and his wife, getting drunk, sleeping it off, and then set out on the challenging journey south to Pannoval.

All this was done, and a fine noise was made as Hasele’s spirits were consumed. Even when the gentlemen slept on a pile of skins, their snores were loud. And Lorel secretively tended Yuli, feeding him, bathing his face, smoothing his thick hair, hugging him.

In early dimday, when Batalix was low, he was gone from her, still feigning unconsciousness as the gentlemen lifted him on to their sledge, cracked their whips, scowled to achieve some fortification between their hangovers and the brow- clamping cold, and were off.

The two gentlemen, whose lives were hard, robbed Hasele and any other trapper they visited to the maximum extent that the trappers allowed themselves to be robbed, knowing as they did so that they would themselves be robbed and cheated when, in their turn, they had to trade in the skins. Cheating was one of their methods of survival, like wrapping up well. Their simple plan was, as soon as they were out of sight of Hasele’s ramshackle edifice, to slit the windpipe of their newly acquired invalid, to pitch his body into the nearest snowdrift, and to see to it that only the good decorated parka—together possibly with the under tunic and trousers—reached the safety of the market in Pannoval.

They halted the dogs and braked the sledge. One of them drew a gleaming metal dagger and turned back towards the prostrate figure.

At which moment the prostrate figure rose up with a yell, hurling the skin that had covered him over the gentleman’s head, kicking him ferociously in the stomach, and running furiously into the distance, taking a zigzag course to avoid any speeding spears.

When he considered himself far enough away, he turned, crouching behind a grey stone, to see if he was followed. In the dull light, the sledge had already disappeared from view. There was no sign of the two gentlemen. Save for the whistle of the west wind, all was still. He was alone in the frozen waste, some hours before Freyr-rise.

A great horror came upon Yuli. After the phagors had taken his father to their underground lair, he had wandered for more days than he could count through the wilderness, dazed by cold and lack of sleep, crazed by insects. He had completely lost his way, and was close to death when he collapsed into the thorn bush.

A little rest and nourishment had quickly restored his health. He had allowed himself to be loaded onto the sledge, not because he at all trusted the two gentlemen from Pannoval, who smelt all wrong to him, but because he could not bear the old crone who insisted on touching him in a way he disliked.

Now, after that brief interlude, here he was, in the wilds again, with a sub-zero wind plucking at his ears. He thought once more of his mother, Onesa, and of her illness. The last time he had seen her, she had coughed, and blood bubbled out of her mouth. She had looked upon him in such a ghastly way as he left with Alehaw. Only now did Yuli realise what that ghastly look meant: she had never expected to see him again. It was useless seeking to get back to his mother if she were a corpse by now.

Then what?

If he was to survive, there was only one possibility.

He rose, and at a steady jog trot followed in the wake of the sledge.

Seven large horned dogs of the kind known as asokins pulled the sledge. The leader was a bitch called Gripsy. They were known collectively as Gripsy’s team. They rested for ten minutes in every hour; at every other rest period, they were fed foul-smelling dried fish from a sack. The two gentlemen took it in turn to trudge beside the sledge and to lie on it.

This was a routine Yuli soon understood. He kept well back down the trail. Even when the sledge was out of sight, as long as the air was still his keen nose could detect the stink of men and dogs running ahead. Sometimes he drew near to watch how things were done. He wanted to see how to handle a dog team for himself.

After three days’ continuous travelling, when the asokins were having to take longer rests, they reached another trapper’s post. Here the trapper had built himself a small wooden fort, decorated with horns and antlers of wild animals. Lines of skins flapped stiffly in the breeze. The gentlemen stayed here while Freyr sank from the sky, pale Batalix also died, and the brighter sentinel rose again. The two gentlemen screamed with the trapper in their drunkenness, or slept. Yuli stole some hardtack from the sledge and slept fitfully, rolled in a skin, in the sledge’s lee side.

On they went.

Two more stops were made, interspersed with several days’ journeying. Always Gripsy’s team drove roughly southward. The winds became less chill.

At last, it became apparent that they were getting close to Pannoval. The mists towards which the team pulled proved solid stone.

Mountains rose from the plain ahead, their flanks deeply covered with snow. The plain itself rose, and they were working through foothills, where both gentlemen had to walk beside the sledge, or even push it. And there were stone towers, some with sentries who challenged them. The sentries challenged Yuli too.

“I’m following my father and my uncle,” he called.

“You’re lagging behind. The childrims will get you.”

“I know, I know. Father is anxious to get home to Mother. So am I.”

They waved him on, smiling at his youth.

At last, the gentlemen called a halt. Dried fish was thrown to Gripsy and her team, and the dogs were staked out. The two gentlemen picked a snug little corrie on the hillside, covered themselves with furs, applied alcohol to their insides, and fell asleep.

As soon as he heard their snores, Yuli crept near.

Both men had to be disposed of almost at the same time. He would be no match for either in a fight, so they must have no warning. He contemplated stabbing them with his dagger or bashing their brains in with a rock, either alternative had its dangers.

He looked about to see that he was not watched. Removing a strap from the sledge, he crept close to the gentlemen, and managed to tie a strap round the right ankle of one and the left ankle of the other, so that whoever jumped up first would be impeded by his companion. The gentlemen snored on.

While undoing the strap from the sledge, he noticed a number of spears. Perhaps they had been for trade and had not sold. He did not wonder at it. Removing one from its confining strap, he balanced it and judged that it would throw badly. For all that, the head was commendably sharp.

Returning to the corrie, he nudged one of the gentlemen with his foot until the gentleman rolled with a groan onto his back. Bringing the spear up as if he were about to transfix a fish, Yuli transfixed the gentleman through his parka, his rib cage, and his heart. The gentleman gave a terrible convulsive movement. Expression horrible, eyes wide, he sat up, grasped at the shaft of the spear, sagged over it, and then slowly rolled back with a long sigh that ended in a cough. Vomit and blood seeped from his lips. His companion did no more than stir and mutter.

Yuli found that he had sunk the spear so fiercely it had driven through the gentleman and into the ground. He returned to the sledge for a second spear and dealt with the second gentleman as he had with the first—with equal success. The sledge was his. And the team.

A vein throbbed at his temple. He regretted the gentlemen were not phagors.

He harnessed up the snarling and yelping asokins and drove them away from the spot.

Dim shawls of light rippled in the skies overhead, to be eclipsed by a tall shoulder of mountain. There was now a distinct path, a track that broadened mile by mile. It wound upwards until it negotiated a towering outcrop of rock. Round the base of the rock, a sheltered high valley was revealed, guarded by a formidable castle.

The castle was partly built of stone and partly hacked out of the rock. Its eaves were wide, to allow snow to avalanche from its roofs to the road below. Before the castle stood an armed guard of four men, drawn up before a wooden barrier which barred the road.

Yuli halted as a guard, his furs decorated with shining brasses, marched up.

“Who’re you, lad?”

“I’m with my two friends. We’ve been out trading, as you see. They’re away behind with a second sledge.”

“I don’t see them.” His accent was strange: not the Olonets to which Yuli was accustomed in the Barriers region.

“They’ll be along. Don’t you recognise Gripsy’s team?” He flicked the whip at the animals.

“So I do. Of course. Know them well. That bitch is not called Gripsy for nothing.” He stepped to one side, raising his sturdy right arm.

“Let her up, there,” he shouted. The barrier rose, the whip bit, Yuli hollered, and they were through.

He breathed deep as he got his first sight of Pannoval.

Ahead was a great cliff, so steep that no snow clung to it. In the cliff face was carved an enormous representation of Akha the Great One. Akha squatted in a traditional attitude, knees near his shoulders, arms wrapped round his knees, hands locked palms upward, with the sacred flame of life in his palms. His head was large, topped with a knot of hair. His half-human face struck terror into a beholder. There was awe even in his cheeks. Yet his great almond eyes were bland, and there was serenity as well as ferocity to be read in that upturned mouth and those majestic eyebrows.

Beside his left foot, and dwarfed by it, was an opening in the rock. As the sledge drew near, Yuli saw that this mouth was itself gigantic, possibly three times taller than a man. Within, lights could be seen, and guards with strange habits and accents, and strange thoughts in their heads.

He squared his young shoulders and strode forward boldly.

That was how Yuli came to Pannoval.

Never would he forget his entry into Pannoval, and his passing from the world under the sky. In a daze, he steered the sledge past guards, past a grove of beggarly trees, and stopped to take in the roofed expanse before him under which so many people lived out their days. Mist compounded with darkness, as he left the gate behind, to create a sketchy world with forms but no outlines. It was night; the few people moving about were wrapped in thick clothes which in their turn were wreathed by nimbi of fog, encircling them, floating about their heads, moving after them in slow swirls like threadbare-cloak trails. Everywhere was stone, stone carved into walls and divisions, stalls, houses, pens, and flights of steps—for this great mysterious cave tipped away up towards the interior of the mountain, and had been hewn over the centuries into small level squares, each separated from the next by step and flanking walls.

With forced economy single torches fluttered at the head of each flight of steps, their flames oblique in a slight draught, illumining not the concourse but the misty air, to which their smoke contributed further opacity.

Ceaseless action of water through long eons had carved out a number of linked caves in the rock, in various sizes and on various levels. Some of these caves were inhabited, and had become regularised by human endeavour. They were named, and furnished with the necessities of rudimentary human life.

The savage halted, and could proceed no farther into this great station of dark until he found someone to accompany him. Those few outsiders who, like Yuli, visited Pannoval, found themselves in one of the larger caves, which the inhabitants knew as Market. Here much of the necessary work of the community was carried out, for little or no artificial light was required, once one’s eyes had become accustomed to the dimness. By day the place rang with voices, and with the irregular knock of hammers. In Market, Yuli was able to trade the asokins and the goods on the sledge for things necessary to his new life. Here he must stay. There was nowhere else to go. Gradually he became accustomed to the gloom, to smoke, to smarting eyes, and to the coughing of the inhabitants; he accepted them all, along with the security.

It was his fortune to fall in with a decent fatherly trader called Kyale, who, with his wife, ran a stall in one of the small squares of Market. Kyale was a sorrowful man with a downward-turning mouth partly concealed by blackish moustaches. He befriended Yuli for reasons Yuli could not understand, and protected him from swindlers. He also went to some trouble to introduce Yuli to this new world.

Some of the echoing noises of Market were attributable to a stream, the Vakk, which ran through the rear end of Market, deep in its own chasm. This was the first free-flowing stream Yuli had ever seen, and it remained for him one of the wonders of the settlement. The splashing waters filled him with pleasure and, with his animistic faith, he regarded the Vakk as almost a living thing.

The Vakk had been bridged, so that access was gained to the end area of Market, where increasing steepness of the ground necessitated many steps, which culminated in a wide balcony housing a huge statue of Akha, carved from the rock. This figure could be seen, its shoulders rising from shadows, even from the far side of Market. Akha held in his outstretched hands a real flame, which a priest replenished at regular intervals, appearing from a door in Akha’s stomach to do so. The people of Akha presented themselves to the feet of their god regularly; there they offered up all manner of gifts to him, which were accepted by the priests, unobtrusive in black-and-white-striped robes. The supplicants prostrated themselves, and a novice swept the ground with a feathery brush, before they dared gaze hopefully up at the black stone eyes high above them in the web of shadow, and retreat to less holy ground.

Such ceremonials were a mystery to Yuli. He asked Kyale about them, and received a lecture that left him more confused than before. No man can explain his religion to a stranger. Nevertheless, Yuli received a strong impression that this ancient being, repsesented in stone, fought off the powers raging in the outer world, particularly Wutra, who ruled the skies and all the ills associated with the skies. Akha was not greatly interested in humans; they were too puny for his concern. What he wanted was their regular offerings, to keep him strong in the struggle with Wutra, and a powerful Akhan ecclesiastical body existed to see that Akha’s desires in this respect were carried out, in order that disaster did not descend on the community.

The priesthood,in alliance with the militia, had the governance of Pannoval; there was no one overall ruler, unless one counted Akha himself, who was generally supposed to be out prowling the mountains with a celestial club, looking for Wutra and such of his dreadful accomplices as the worm.

This was surprising to Yuli. He knew Wutra. Wutra was the great spirit before whom his parents, Alehaw and Onesa, offered prayers in time of danger. They had represented Wutra as benevolent, the bringer of light. And, as far as he recalled, they never mentioned Akha.

Various passages, as labyrinthine as the laws issued by the priesthood, led to various chambers adjoining Market. Some of these chambers were accessiible, some forbidden of entry to common folk. About the forbidden regions, people were reluctant to talk. But he soon observed wrongdoers being dragged off there, hands tied behind their backs, winding up dark stairways into the aularian shadows, some to the Holies, some to a punishment farm behind Market called Twink.

In due course of time, Yuli traversed a narrow passage choked with steps which led to a large regularised cave called Reck. Reck also contained its enormous statue of Akha, here seen with an animal hanging on a chain about his neck, and dedicated to sport; Reck was the site at which mock battles, displays, athletic contests, and gladiatorial combats were held. Its walls were painted crimson and sang-de-boeuf, with swirling decorations. Much of the time Reck was almost empty, and voices boomed through its hollow spaces; then citizens with an especial bent for holiness came and wailed up into the high-vaulted dark. But on the glowing occasions of the games—then music sounded, and the cavern was crowded to overflowing.

Other important caverns opened from Market. At its eastern side, a nest of small squares or large mezzanines led up between flights of steps impeded by heavy balustrades to an extensive residential cavern called Vakk, after the stream that surfaced here, sunk deep in its gurgling ravine. Over Vakk’s great entrance arch was much elaborate carving, with globular bodies entwined between flowing waves and stars, but much of it had been destroyed in some forgotten roof-fall.

Vakk was the oldest cavern after Market, and was filled with “livings,” as they were called, dating back many centuries. To one arriving on its threshold from the outer world, viewing—or rather, guessing at—its mounting and confused terraces that climbed back into obscurity, Vakk in the uncertain light was a daunting dream where substance could not be distinguished from shadow, and the child of the Barrier felt his heart quail in his chest. A force like Akha was needed to save anyone who trod in such a thronged necropolis!

But he adapted with the flexibility of youth. He came to look on Vakk as a prodigal town. Falling in with guild apprentices of his own age, he roamed its muddle of livings which were clustered on many floors, often leading one from another. Cubicle was stacked on cubicle in profusion, the furniture in each fixed because carved from the same rock as floors and walls, all in one flowing line. The story of rights of ways and privacies in these organic warrens was complex, but always related to the guild system of Vakk, and always, in case of dispute, to be settled by the judgement of a priest.

In one of these livings, Tusca, Kyale’s kindly wife, found Yuli a chamber of his own, only three doors from where she and Kyale lived. It was roofless and its walls curved; he felt as if he had been set down within a stone flower.

Vakk sloped steeply, and was dimly lit by natural light—more dimly than Market. The air was sooty with the exhalations of fat lamps, but clerics collected tax on every lamp, which had numbers stamped on their clay bases, so that they were used sparingly. The mysterious fogs which afflicted Market had less power in Vakk.

From Vakk, a gallery led direct to Reck. There were also, on lower ground, ragged arches leading to a high-roofed cavern called Groyne, which had good clean air, although the inhabitants of Vakk thought the inhabitants of Groyne rather barbarous, chiefly because they were members of more lowly guilds, slaughterers, tanners, diggers of chert and clay and fossil wood.

In the honeycombed rock adjoining both Groyne and Reck was another large cavern full of habitations and cattle. This was Prayn, which many avoided. It was being energetically extended by the sappers’ guild when Yuli arrived. Prayn collected all the night soil from the other suburbs and fed it to swine and noctiferous crops, which thrived on heat. Some of the farmers in Prayn bred as a sideline a strain of bird called a preet, which had luminous eyes and luminescent patches on its wings. Preets were popular as cage birds; they added a little brightness to the livings of Vakk and Groyne—though they also were the subject of taxes collected by priests for Akha.

“In Groyne they are gruff, in Prayn pretty tough,” went a local saying. But Yuli found the people lifeless, except when roused by the games, rare exceptions being those few traders and trappers living in Market in terraces of their own guild, who regularly had occasion to be blessed by Akha and sent on business in the outside world, as had been the case with the two gentlemen of his acquaintance.

From all the major caverns, and from smaller ones, paths and tunnels led into the blind rock, some ascending, some descending. Pannoval was full of legends of magical beasts that came in from the primordial dark of the rock, or of people who were spirited away from their livings into the mountain. Best to stay put in Pannoval, where Akha looked after his own with his blind eyes. Better Pannoval, too, and taxes, than the cold glare of outside.

These legends were kept alive by the sayers’ guild, members of which stood on every stairway, or waited on terraces, and spun fantastic tales. In this world of nebulous gloom, words were like lights.

To one other section of Pannoval, which figured largely in people’s whispered discourse, Yuli was not allowed to make his way. That was the Holies. The Holies could be reached by gallery and stair from Market, but it was guarded by the militia, and set apart by repute. No one went voluntarily through its winding approaches. In the Holies lived the militia, forever guarding the law of Pannoval, and the priesthood, forever guarding its soul.

All these arrangements were so magnificent to Yuli that he could not see their meanness.

It took Yuli little time to find how closely the people were governed. They expressed no surprise in a system to which they had been born; but Yuli accustomed to open spaces and the easily comprehended law of survival, was astonished at the way in which their every movement was circumscribed. Yet they thought themselves uniquely privileged.

With his legitimately acquired stock of skins, Yuli planned to purchase a stall next to Kyale, and set up shop. He discovered that there were many regulations that forbade anything so simple. Nor could he trade without a stall—unless he had a special licence—and for that he would have to have been born a member of a hawkers’ guild. He needed a guild, an apprenticeship, and certain qualifications—a kind of exam—that only the priesthood could confer. He also needed a two-part certificate from the militia, together with insurance and references. Nor would he be able to trade until he owned a living. Yet he could not possess the room Tusca had rented for him until he was fully accredited with the militia. He was unable to meet even the most elementary qualification: a belief in Akha and a proof of regular sacrifices to the god.

“It’s simple. First you, as a savage, must attend a priest.” That was the dictum of a sharp-faced militia captain before whom Yuli had to appear. He confronted Yuli in a little stone room, the balcony of which was a metre or so above one of Market’s terraces, and from which one might survey the whole animated scene.

The captain wore a floor-length cloak of black and white over the customary skins. On his head he wore a bronze helmet displaying the holy symbol of Akha, a kind of two-spoked wheel. His hide boots came halfway up his calf. Behind him stood a phagor, a black and white woven band tied round its hairy white brow.

“Pay attention to me,” growled the captain. But Yuli found his eyes ever drifting towards the silent phagor, wondering at its presence.

The ancipital stood with an air of taciturn repose, ungainly head thrust forward. Its horns were blunt; they had been sawn short, and their cutting edges dulled with a file. Yuli saw that it had a leather collar and thong about its throat, half-concealed under white hair, a sign of its submission to man’s rule. Yet it was a threat to the citizens of Pannoval. Many officers appeared everywhere with a submissive phagor beside them; the phagors were valued for their superior ability to see in the dark. Ordinary people went in fear of the shambling animals that spoke basic Olonets. How was it possible, Yuli wondered, for men to form liaisons with the same beasts who had imprisoned his father—beasts that everyone in the wilds hated from birth?

The interview with the captain was dispiriting, and worse was to come. He could not live unless he obeyed the rules, and they appeared interminable; there was nothing for it—as Kyale impressed upon him—but to conform. To be a citizen of Pannoval, you had to think and feel like a Pannovalian.

So he was consigned to attend the priest in the alley of livings where he had his room. This entailed numerous sessions at which he was taught a ritualised history of Pannoval (“born from Great Akha’s shadow on the eternal snows …”) and forced to learn many of the scriptures by heart. He also had to do whatever Sataal, the priest, told him to do, including the running of many tedious errands, for Sataal was lazy. It was no great consolation to Yuli to find that the children of Pannoval went through similar courses of instruction at an early age.

Sataal was a solidly built man, pale of face, small of ear, heavy of hand. His head was shaven, his beard plaited, in the manner of many priests of his order. There were twists of white in the plaits. He wore a knee-length smock of black and white. His face was deeply pocked. It took Yuli some while to realise that, despite the white hairs, Sataal was not past middle age, being only in his late teens. Yet he walked in a round-shouldered way suggesting both age and piety.

When he addressed Yuli, Sataal spoke always kindly but remotely, keeping a gulf between them. Yuli was reassured by the man’s attitude, which seemed to say, This is your job and mine, but I shall not complicate it by probing into what your inner feelings are. So Yuli kept quiet, applying himself to the task of learning all the necessary fustian verses.

“But what do they mean?” he asked at one point, in bewilderment.

Sataal rose slowly in the small room, and turned about, so that his shoulders loomed black in a distant source of light, and all the rest of him flowed into encompassing shadow. A dull highlight gleamed on his pate as he inclined his head towards Yuli, saying, admonishingly, “Learning first, young fellow, then interpretation. After learning, then less difficulty in interpretation. Get everything by heart, you hardly need it by head. Akha never enforces understanding from his people, only obedience.”

“You said that Akha cares nothing for anyone in Pannoval.”

“The important point, Yuli, is that Pannoval cares for Akha. Now then, once again:

“But what does it mean?” Yuli asked again. “How can I learn it if I don’t understand it?’

“Repeat it, son,” said Sataal sternly. ” Whoso laps …”

Yuli was submerged in the dark city. Its networks of shadows snatched at his spirit, as he had seen men in the outer world catch fish with nets under the ice. In dreams, his mother came to him, blood flying from her mouth. Then he would wake, to lie in his narrow cot staring up, far up, far beyond the confines of his flower-shaped room, to the roof of Vakk. Sometimes, when the atmosphere was fairly clear, he could see distant detail, with bats hanging up there, and stalactites, and the rock gleaming with liquid that had ceased to be liquid; and he wished he could fly away from the traps he found himself in. But there was nowhere else to go.

Once, in midnight desperation, he crawled through to Kyales home for comfort. Kyale was annoyed at being woken, and told him to go away, but Tusca spoke to him gently, as if he were her son. She patted his arm and clutched his hand.

After a while, she wept softly, and told him that indeed she had a son, a good kind lad of about Yuli’s age, Usilk by name. But Usilk had been taken from her by the police for a crime she knew he had never committed. Every night, she lay awake and thought of him, concealed in one of those terrifying places in the Holies, guarded by phagors, and wondered if she would ever see him again.

“The militia and the priests are so unjust here,” Yuli whispered to her. “My people have little to live on in the wilds, but all are equal, one with another, in the face of the cold.”

After a pause, Tusca said, “There are people in Pannoval, women as well as men, who do not learn the scriptures and think to overthrow those who rule. Yet without our rulers, we should be destroyed by Akha.”

Yuli peered at the outline of her face through the dark. “And do you think that Usilk was taken … because he wanted to overthrow the rulers?”

In a low voice she replied, holding tightly to his hand, “You must not ask such questions or you’ll meet trouble. Usilk was always rebellious—yes, perhaps he got among the wrong people…”

“Stop your chatter,” Kyale called. “Get back to your bed, woman—and you to yours, Yuli.”

These things Yuli nursed in himself all the while he went through his sessions with Sataal. Outwardly, he was obedient to the priest.

“You are not a fool, even if you are a savage—and that we can change,” said Sataal. “Soon you shall progress to the next step. For Akha is the god of earth and underground, and you shall understand something of how the earth lives, and we in its veins. These veins are called land-octaves, and no man can be happy or healthy unless he lives along his own land-octaves. Slowly, you can acquire revelation, Yuli. Maybe, if you are good enough, you could yourself become a priest, and serve Akha in a greater way.”

Yuli kept his mouth shut. It was beyond his ability to tell the priest that he needed no particular attentions from Akha: his whole new way of life in Pannoval was a revelation.

The days followed one another peacefully. Yuli became impressed with the never varying patience of Sataal, and began disliking his instruction periods less. Even away from the priest, he thought about his teaching. All was fresh and curiously exciting. Sataal had told him that certain priests, who undertook to fast, were able to communicate with the dead, or even with personages in history; Yuli had never heard of such things, but hesitated to call them nonsense.

He took to roving alone through the suburbs of the city, until its thick shadows took on for him colours of familiarity. He listened to people, who often talked of religion, or to the sayers who spoke at street corners, who often laced their stories with religion.

Religion was the romance of the darkness, as terror had been of the Barriers, where tribal drums warded off devils. Slowly, Yuli began to perceive in religious talk not a vacuum but a core of truth: the way in which people lived and died had to be explained. Only savages needed no explanation. The perception was like finding an animal’s trail in the snow.

Once he was in a malodorous part of Prayn, where human scumble was poured into long trenches on which the noctiferous crops grew. Here, the people were pretty tough, as the saying had it. A man with short-cropped free-flowing hair, and therefore neither a priest nor a sayer, ran up and jumped onto a scumble barrow.

“Friends,” he said, standing before them. “Listen to me for a moment, will you? Just stop your labours and hear what I have to say. I speak not for myself but for the great Akha, whose spirit moves inside me. I have to speak for him although I put my life in danger, for the priests distort Akha’s words for their own purposes.”

People stopped to listen. Two tried to make a joke at the young man’s expense, but the others stood in submissive interest, Yuli included.

“Friends, the priests say that we have to sacrifice to Akha and nothing more, and he will then keep us safe in the great heart of his mountain. I say that is a lie. The priests are content and do not care how we the ordinary people suffer. Akha tells you through my lips that we should do more. We should be better in ourselves. Our lives am too easy—once we have made sacrifices and paid taxes, we care nothing. We merely enjoy, or go to the games. You hear so often that Akha cares nothing for us and everything for his battle with Wutra. We must make him care—we must become worthy of his care. We must reform ourselves! Yes, reform! And the easy- living priests must reform themselves also…”

Someone called to say that the militia were coming.

The young man paused. “My name is Naab. Remember what I say. We too have a role in the great war between Sky and Earth. I will be back to speak if I can—speak my message to all Pannoval. Reform, reform!—Before it is too late …” As he jumped down, there was a surge among the crowd that had gathered. A great tethered phagor rushed forward, with a soldier at the other end of his leash. It reached forward and grabbed Naab’s arm with its powerful horned hands. He gave a cry of pain, but a hairy white arm went round his throat and he was led away in the direction of Market and the Holies.

“He shouldn’t have said such things,” a grey man muttered, as the crowd dispersed.

Yuli followed the man on impulse, and grasped his sleeve.

“The man Naab said nothing against Akha—why should the militia take him away?”

The man looked furtively about. “I recognise you. You’re a savage, or you wouldn’t ask such stupid things.”

For answer, Yuli raised his fist. “I’m not stupid or I would not ask my question.”

“If you weren’t stupid, you’d keep quiet. Who do you think has power here? The priesthood, of course. If you speak out against them—”

“But that’s Akha’s power—”

The grey man had slipped away into the dark. And there in that dark, that ever watchful dark, could be felt the presence of something monstrous. Akha?

One day, a great sporting event was to be held in Reck. It was then that Yuli, acclimatised to Pannoval, underwent a remarkable crystalisation of emotion. He hurried along to the sports with Kyale and Tusca. Fat lamps burned in niches, leading the way from Vakk to Reck, and crowds of people climbed through the narrowing rock passages, struggled up the worn steps, calling to one another, as they filed into the sports arena.

Carried along by the surge of humanity, Yuli caught a sudden view ahead of the chamber of Reck, its curved walls flickering with light. He saw but a slice of the chamber to begin with, trapped between the veined walls of the passage along which the rabble had to pass. As he moved, so into that framed distant view moved Akha himself, high above the heads of the crowd.

He ceased to listen to what Kyale was saying. Akha’s gaze was on him; the monstrous presence of the dark was surely made visible.

Music played in Reck, shrill and stimulating. It played for Akha. There Akha stood, broad and horrible of brow, its large stone eyes unseeing yet all-seeing, lit from below by flares. Its lips dripped disdain.

The wilderness held nothing like this. Yuli’s knees were weak. A powerful voice inside him, one he scarcely recognised as his own, exclaimed, “Oh, Akha, at last I believe in you. Yours is the power. Forgive me, let me be your servant.”

Yet alongside the voice of one longing to enslave himself was another, speaking simultaneously in a more calculating manner. It said, “The people of Pannoval must understand a great truth which it would be useful to get to comprehend by following Akha.”

He was astonished at the confusion within himself, a war that did not lessen as they entered the chamber and more of the stone god was revealed. Naab had said, “Humans have a role in the war between Sky and Earth.” Now he could feel that war alive within him.

Tle games were intensely exciting. Running races and spear throwing were followed by wrestling between humans and phagors, the latter with their horns amputated. Then came the bat shoot, and Yuli emerged from his pietistic confusions to watch the excitement. He feared bats. High above the crowd, the roof of Reck was lined with the furry creatures, dangling with their leather wings about their heads. Archers came forward and shot in turn at the bats with arrows to which were attached silken threads. The bats, when hit, fell fluttering down, and were claimed for the pot.

The winner was a girl. She were a bright red garment tight at the neck and long to the ground, and she pulled back her bow and shot more accurately than any man. And her hair was long and dark. Her name was Iskador, and the crowd applauded her wildly, none more so than Yuli.

Then there were the gladiatorial combats, men against men, men against phagors, and blood and death filled the arena. Yet all the time, even when Iskador was tensing her bow and her lovely torso—even then, Yuli thought in terms of great joy that he had found an amazing faith. The confusions within would be banished by greater knowledge, he assumed.

He recalled the legends he had listened to round his father’s fire. The elders had spoken of the two sentinels in the sky, and of how the men on earth had once offended the Cod of the Skies, whose name was Wutra. So that Wutra had banished the earth from his warmth. Now the sentinels watched for the hour when Wutra returned, to look again with affection on the earth, and see if the people behaved better. If he found they did, then would he remove the frost.

Well, Yuli had to acknowledge that his people were savages, just as Sataal claimed; how else would his father have allowed himself to be dragged away by phagors? Yet there must be a germ of truth in the tales. For here in Pannoval was a move reasoned version of the story. Wutra was now merely a minor deity, but he was vengeful, and he was loose in the skies. It was from the skies that peril came. Akha was the great earth god, ruling underground, where it was safe. The Two Sentinels were not benign; being in the sky, they belonged to Wutra, and they could turn against mankind.

Now the memorised verses began to make sense. Illumination shone from them, so that Yuli muttered with pleasure what had previously given him pain, gazing upon Akha’s face as he did so:

Next day, he went humbly to Sataal and told the man that he had been converted.

The pale heavy face of his priest regarded him, and Sataal drummed his fingers on his knees.

“How were you converted? Lies fly about the livings these days.”

“I looked at Akha’s face. For the first time I saw it clear. Now my heart is open.”

“Another false prophet was arrested the other day.”

Yuli smote his chest. “What I feel inside me is not false, Father.”

“It’s not so easy,” said the priest.

“Oh, it is easy, it is easy—now everything will be easy!” He fell at the priest’s feet, crying his delight.

“Nothing’s so easy.”

“Master, I owe you everything. Help me. I want to be a priest, to become as you.”

During the next few days, he went about the lanes and livings noticing new things. No longer did he feel himself encased in gloom, buried underground. He was in a favoured region, protected from all the cruel elements that had made him a savage. He saw how welcome the dim light was.

He saw too how beautiful Pannoval was, in all its chambers. In the course of their long habitation, the caves had been decorated by artists. Whole walls were covered with painting and carving, many of them illustrating the life of Akha and the great battles he had fought, as well as the battles he would fight when again enough humans had faith in his strength. Where the pictures had grown old and faint, new ones had been painted on top of them. Artists were still at work, often perched dangerously on top of scaffolding that reached towards the roof like the skeleton of some mythical long-necked animal.

“What’s the matter with you, Yuli? You attend to nothing,” Kyale said.

“I’m going to be a priest. I’ve made up my mind.”

’They’ll never let you—you from outside.”

“My priest is speaking to the authorities.”

Kyale pulled at his melancholy nose, slowly lowering his hand until the tugging operations were taking place at one end of his moustache, as he contemplated Yuli. By now, Yuli’s eyesight had so adjusted to the dimness that every nuance of expression on his friend’s face was clear. When Kyale moved without a word to the back of his stall, Yuli followed.

Again grabbing his moustache for security, Kyale placed his other hand on Yuli’s shoulder. “You’re a good lad. You remind me of Usilk, but we won’t go into that… Listen to me: Pannoval isn’t like it was when I was a child, running barefoot through the bazaars. I don’t know what’s happened, but there’s no peace any more. All this talk of change—nonsense, to my mind. Even the priests are at it, with wild men ranting about reform. I say, let well enough alone. Know what I mean?”

“I know what you mean, yes.”

“Well, then. You may think that it would be soft, being a priest. So it might. But I wouldn’t recommend it at present. It’s not as—as secure as it used to be, if you follow me. They’ve become restive. I hear they often execute heretical priests in the Holies. You’d do better here indentured to me, making yourself useful. Understand? I’m speaking to you for your own good.”

Yuli looked down at the worn ground.

“I can’t explain how I feel, Kyale. Sort of hopeful … I think things ought to change. I want to change myself, I don’t know how.”

Sighing, Kyale removed his hand from Yuli’s shoulder. “Well, lad, if you take that attitude, don’t say I didn’t warn you…”

Despite Kyale’s grumpiness, Yuli was touched that the man cared about him. And Kyale passed on the news of Yuli’s intentions to his wife. When Yuli went to his little curved room that evening, Tusca appeared in his doorway.

“Priests can go anywhere. If you become an initiate, you’ll have the run of the place. You’ll come and go in the Holies.”

“I suppose so.”

“Then you may find what has happened to Usilk. Try to, for my sake. Tell him I still think of him. And come and tell me if you can find any news of him.”

She put a hand on his arm. He smiled at her. “You are kind, Tusca. Don’t your rebels who want to bring down the rulers of Pannoval have any news of your son?”

She was frightened. “Yuli, you will change in all ways when you’re a priest. So I’ll say no more, for fear of injury to the rest of my family.”

He lowered his gaze. “Akha strike me if I ever harm you.”

On the next occasion when he appeared before the priest, a soldier was also present, standing behind Sataal in the shadows with a phagor on a leash. The priest asked Yuli if he would give up everything he possessed to walk in the path of Akha. Yuli said that he would.

“Then it shall be done.” The priest clapped his hands, and off marched the soldier. Yuli understood then that he had now lost his few possessions; everything but the clothes he wore and his knife which his mother had carved would be taken by the military. Speaking no further word, Sataal turned, beckoning with one finger, and began to walk towards the rear of Market. Yuli could do nothing but follow, pulse beating fast.

As they came to the wooden bridge spanning the chasm where the Vakk leaped and tumbled, Yuli looked back, beyond the busy scene of trade and barter, out through the far archway of the entrance, catching a glimpse of snow.

For some reason, he thought of Iskador, the girl with the dark hair flowing. Then he hurried after his priest.

They climbed the terraces of the worship area, where people jostled to leave their sacrifices at the feet of the image of Akha. At the back were screens, intricately painted. Sataal whisked past them, and led into a narrowing passage, up shallow steps. The light became rapidly dimmer as they turned a corner. A bell tinkled. In his anxiety, Yuli stumbled. He had reached the Holies sooner than he had bargained for.

Just for once in crowded Pannoval, nobody else was about. Their footsteps echoed. Yuli could see nothing; the priest ahead of him was an impression, nothing, blackness within blackness. He dared not stop or reach out or call—blind following was what was now demanded of him and he must treat all that came as a test of his intentions. If Akha loved chthonic darkness, so must he. All the same, the lack of everything, the void that registered itself on his senses only as a whispered noise, assaulted him.

They walked forever into the earth. So it seemed.

Softly, suddenly, light came—a column of it appearing to strike down through a stagnant lake of darkness, creating on its bed a circle of brightness towards which two submerged creatures advanced. It silhouetted the heavy figure of the priest, black and white garb swirling about him. It allowed Yuli some sense of where he was.

There were no walls.

It was more frightening than total darkness. He had already grown so accustomed to the confines of the settlement, to having a cliff, a partition, a fellow’s back, a woman’s shoulder, always within jostling distance, that agoraphobia seized him. He went sprawling, uttering a gasp as he fell to the paving.

The priest did not turn. He reached the place where the illumination fell and marched steadily on, shoes clack-clacking, so that his figure was lost almost immediately behind the misty shaft of light.

Desperate at being left, the youth picked himself up and ran forward. As the shaft of light impaled him, he stared up. High above him was a hole through which ordinary daylight shone. Up there were the things he had known all his life, the things he was renouncing for a god of darkness.

He saw ragged rock. Now he could comprehend that he was in a chamber larger than the rest of Pannoval, and higher. At a signal—perhaps the tinkling bell he had heard—someone somewhere had opened a high door onto the outside world. As warning? As temptation? Or merely as a dramatic trick?

Maybe all three, he thought, since they were so much more clever than he, and he hurried on after the priest’s disappearing figure. In a moment, he sensed rather than saw that the light behind him faded; the high door had closed. He was again in unbroken darkness.

They at last reached the far side of the gigantic chamber. Yuli heard the priest’s steps slow. Without faltering, Sataal had reached a door, on the panel of which he rapped. After some delay, the door opened. A fat lamp floated in the air, borne above the head of an ageing woman who sniffed continuously. She allowed them to pass into a stone corridor before fastening the door behind them.

Matting covered the floor. Several doors confronted them. Along both walls, hip high, ran a narrow band of carving, which Yuli wanted to look at more closely but did not dare to; otherwise the walls were undecorated. The sniffing woman knocked at one of the doors. When response came, Sataal pushed it open and motioned Yuli in. Bowing, Yuli passed his mentor’s outstretched arm and marched into the room. The door closed behind him. That was the last he saw of Sataal.

Tle room was furnished with detachable furniture of stone, covered with coloured rugs. It was lit by a double lamp standing on an iron holder. Two men sat at a stone table, and looked up without smiling from some documents. One was a militia captain, his helmet with its wheel insignia resting on the tabletop by his elbow. The other was a thin grey priest with a not unfriendly face, who blinked as if the mere sight of Yuli’s face dazzled him.

“Yuli of the Outside? Since you have come this far, you have taken one step on the way to becoming a priest of Great Akha,” the priest said in a reedy voice. “I am Father Sifans, and first of all I must ask you if you have any sins that destroy your peace of mind, to which you wish to confess.”

Yuli was disconcerted that Sataal had left him so abruptly, without even a whispered farewell, though he understood that he must now give up such worldly things as love and friendship.

“Nothing to confess,” he said sulkily, not looking the thin priest in the eye.

The priest cleared his throat. The captain spoke.

“Youth, look at me. I am Captain Ebron of the North Guard. You entered Pannoval on a sledge teamed by asokins called Gripsy’s team. It was stolen from two renowned traders of this city named Atrimb and Prast, both of Vakk. Their bodies were found not many miles from here, with spears through them, as if they had been done to death in their sleep. What say you about this crime?”

Yuli stared at the floor.

“I know nothing of it.”

“We think you know everything… Had the crime been committed within the territory of Pannoval, it would carry the penalty of death. What do you say?”

He felt himself shaking. This was not what he had expected.

“I have nothing to say.”

“Very well. You cannot become a priest while this guilt lies on you. You must confess the crime. You will be shut up until you speak.”

Captain Ebron clapped his hands. Two soldiers entered and grasped Yuli. He struggled for a moment, to test their strength, had his arms sharply wrenched, and allowed himself to be led away.

Yes, he thought, the Holies—full of priests and soldiers. They’ve got me properly. What a fool I am, a victim. Oh, Father, you abandoned me…

It was not even as if he had been able to forget about the two gentlemen. The double murder still lay heavy inside him, although he always tried to rationalise it by reminding himself that they had attempted to kill him. Many a night, as he lay on his cot in Vakk, staring up at the distant vault, he saw again the gentleman’s eyes as he sat up and tried to pull the spear from his entrails.

The cell was small and damp and dark.

When he recovered from the shock of being alone, he felt cautiously about him. His prison was featureless except for an ill-smelling gutter and a low shelf on which to sleep. Yuli sat on it and buried his face in his hands.

He was given plenty of time to think. His thoughts, in the impenetrable darkness, took on a life of their own, as if they were the figments of delirium. People he knew, people he had never seen, came and went about him, engaged in mysterious activities.

“Mother!” he exclaimed. Onesa was there, as she had been before her illness, slender and active, with her long serious face that readily broke into a smile for her son—though it was a guarded smile with lips scarcely parted. She bore a great bundle of twigs on her shoulder. A litter of little horned black piglets walked before her. The sky was a brilliant blue; both Batalix and Freyr shone there. Onesa and Yuli stepped along a path out of a dark larch forest and were dazzled by the brightness. Never had there been a blue like that; it seemed to tint the piled snow and fill the world.

Ahead was a ruined building. Although it had been solidly built in the long past, weather had broken it open like an old tree fungus. Before it stood a flight of shallow steps, now ruined. Onesa flung down her twigs and sprang so eagerly up the steps that she almost skipped. She raised her gloved hands as she went, and even offered a snatch of song to the crisp air.

Rarely had Yuli seen his mother in such spirits. Why did she feel like that? Why not more often? Not daring to put these questions direct, yet longing to have some personal word from her, be asked, “Who built this place, Mother?”

“Oh, it’s always been here. It’s as old as the hills…”

“But who built it, Mother?”

“I don’t know—my father’s family, probably, long ago. They were great people, with stores of grain.”

This legend of his mother’s family’s greatness was well-known to him, and the detail of the store of grain. He marched up the ruined steps, and pushed open a reluctant door. Snow scattered in a cloud as he shouldered his way inside. There was the grain, golden, piles of it, enough for them all for ever more. It started running towards him in a river, great piles of it cascading down, over the steps. And from under the grain, two dead bodies heaved to view, struggling blindly towards the light.

He sat up with a great cry, sprang to his feet, stood up, paced to the cell door. The could not understand where these alarming visions came from; they seemed not to be a part of him.

He thought to himself, Dreams are not for you, dodger. You’re too tough. You think of your mother now, yet you never showed her affection. You were too afraid of your father’s fist. You know, I really believe I hated my father. I believe I was glad when the phagors carried him off—weren’t you?

No, no… It’s just that my experiences have made me hard. You’re hard, dodger, hard and cruel. You killed those two gentlemen. What are you going to be? Better to confess to the murders and see what happens. Try and love me, try and love me…

I know so little. That’s it. The whole world—you want to find out. Akha must know. Those eyes see everything. But me—you’re so small, dodger—life’s no more than one of those funny feelings when the childrim flies overhead.

He marvelled at his own thoughts. Finally he cried for the guards to open his door, and found that he had been incarcerated for three days.

For a year and a day, Yuli served in the Holies as a novice. He was not allowed to leave the halls, but dwelt in a monastic nocturne, not knowing whether Freyr and Batalix swam separately or together in the sky. A wish to run through the white wilderness gradually left him, erased by the penumbral majesty of the Holies.

He had confessed to the murder of the two gentlemen. No punishment followed.

The thin grey priest with the blinking eyes, Father Sifans, was the charge-father over Yuli and other novices. He clasped his hands and said to Yuli, “That unhappy incident of the murders is now sealed behind the wall of the past. Yet you must never allow yourself to forget it, lest, in forgetting, you come to believe that it never happened. Like the many suburbs of Pannoval, all things in life are interwoven. Your sin and your longing to serve Akha are of a piece. Did you imagine that it was holiness that led a man to serve Akha? Not so. Sin is a more powerful mover. Embrace the dark—through sin you come to terms with your own inadequacy.”

“Sin” was a word often on Father Sifans’ lips at one period. Yuli watched it there with interest, with the absorption pupils devote to their masters. The way the lips moved was something he imitated to himself later, alone, using the movements to repeat all that he had to learn by heart.

While the father had his own private apartment to which he withdrew after instruction, Yuli slept in a dormitory with others of his kind, in a nest of dark within the dark. Unlike the fathers, they were allowed no pleasures; song, drink, wenches, recreation were forbidden, and their food was of the most spartan kind, selected from the offerings made by supplicants of Akha daily.

“I can’t concentrate. I’m hungry,” he complained once to his charge-father.

“Hunger is universal. We cannot expect Akha to fatten us. He defends us against hostile outside forces, generation by generation.”

“Which is more important, survival or the individual?”

“An individual has importance in his own eyes, but generations have priority.”

He was learning to argue the priest’s way, step by step. “But generations are made up of individuals.”

“Generations are not only the sum of individuals. They contain also aspirations, plans, histories, laws—above all, continuities. They contain the past as well as the future. Akha refuses to work with individuals alone, so individuals must be subdued—quenched, if necessary.”

Slyly, the father taught Yuli to argue. On the one hand, he must have blind faith; on the other, he needed reason. For its long journey through the years, the entombed community needed all defences, needed both prayer and rationality. The sacred verses claimed that at some time in the future, Akha, in his lonely battle, might suffer defeat and the world undergo a period of intense fire descending from the skies. The individual must be quenched, to avoid the burning.

Through the entombing halls went Yuli, with all these ideas declaiming themselves in his head. They stood his understanding of the world upside down—but therein lay much of their attraction, since every revolutionary new insight only emphasised his previous ignorant state.

Among all the deprivations, one sensory delight stole upon his bewilderment to soothe him. The priests found their way through the dark labyrinth by wall-reading, an arcane mystery in which Yuli was soon to be initiated. There was also another directional clue, intended to delight. Music. At first, Yuli in his innocence imagined that he heard the sound of spirits overhead. He could make nothing of the tickling line of melody played on a one-stringed vrach. He had never seen a vrach. If not a spirit, could it be the wail of wind through a crevice somewhere in the rock?

His delight was so secret that he asked no one about the sounds, not even his fellow novices, until walking one day unexpectedly with Sifans into a religious service. Choirs were important, and monody even more so, with a single voice launched into the hollows of the dark; but what Yuli came to love most were the interventions by inhuman voices, those of the instruments of Pannoval.

Nothing similar was ever beard in the Barriers. The only music the besieged tribes there knew was a prolonged drumming, on a drum made of hide; clacking, of animal bones struck together; and clapping, of human hands, accompanied by a monotonous chant. It was the luxurious complication of the new music that convinced Yuli of the reality of his still awakening spiritual life. One great tune in particular took him by storm, “Oldorando,” which had a part for an instrument that soared about all others, then dived into their midst, finally to retreat into a secure melodic refuge of its own.

Music became almost an alternative to light for Yuli. When he talked to his fellow novices, he found that they felt little of his exhilaration. But they—he came to realise—all carried a much greater central commitment to Akha himself than he. Most of the novices had loved or hated Akha from birth; Akha was nature to them as he was not to Yuli.

When he wrestled with such matters during the sparse hours allotted to sleep, Yuli felt guilt that he was not as the other novices. He loved the music of Akha. It was a new language. But was not music the creation of men, rather than of …

Even when he choked off the doubt, another doubt sprang up. How about the language of religion? Wasn’t that also the invention of men—perhaps pleasant, ineffectual men like Father Sifans?

“Belief is not peace but torment, only the great War is peace.” That part of the creed at least was true.

Meanwhile, Yuli kept his own council, and fraternised only superficially with his fellows.

They met for instruction in a low, damp, foggy hall named Cleft. Sometimes they went in utter darkness, sometimes in the glow of wicks carried by the fathers. Each session ended with the priest pressing his hand to the novice’s forehead, gesturing at his brain, an action at which the novices laughed later in their dormitory. Priests’ fingers were rough, from the wall-reading by which they navigated briskly about the labyrinths of the Holies even in the most pitchy blackness.

Each novice sat in a curiously shaped dock, built of clay bricks, facing his instructor. Each dock was decorated in individual low-reliefs, to make their identification in the dark easier. Their instructor sat opposite and above them, astride a clay saddle.

When only a few weeks of the novitiate had lapsed, Father Sifans announced the subject of heresy. He spoke in a low voice, coughing as he did so. Worse than nonbelief was to believe wrongly. Yuli leaned forward. He and Sifans had no light, but the charge-father in the next box did, a fluttering flame which served to throw a foggy orange nimbus about Sifans’ head and shade his face. The old man’s white- and-black gown further disintegrated his outlines, so that he merged with the dark of the chamber. Mist rolled about them, trailing anyone who walked slowly by, practising wall-reading. Coughs and muttering filled the low cavern; water dripped ceaselessly, like small bells.

“A human sacrifice, Father, did you say a human sacrifice?”

“The body is precious, the spirit expendable. One who has spoken against the priesthood, saying they should be more frugal to aid Akha … You are far enough on with your studies to attend his execution. … Ritual from barbarous times …”

The nervous eyes, two tiny points of orange, flickered in the dark like a signal from a remote distance.

When the time came, Yuli walked through the lugubrious galleries, nervously trying to wall-read with his fingers. They entered the largest cavern in the Holies, called State. No light was allowed. Whispering filled the air as the priesthood assembled. Yuli surreptitiously took hold of the hem of Father Sifans’ gown in order not to lose him. Then a voice of a priest, declaiming the history of the long war between Akha and Wutra. Night was Akha’s, and the priests were set to protect their flock through the long night’s battle. Those who opposed the guardians must die.

“Bring forth the prisoner.”

There was much talk of prisoners in the Holies, but this one was special. The tramp of the militia’s heavy sandals could be heard, a shuffling. Then brightness.

A shaft of light blazed down. The novices gasped. Yuli recognised that they stood in the vast chamber through which Sataal had led him, a long while ago. The light source was as before, high above the multitude of heads; it appeared blinding.

At its base stood a human figure, tied to a wooden framework, legs and arms spread. It was in the upright position, and naked.

Even as the prisoner gave a cry, Yuli recognised the dense impassioned face, square, and framed by short-cropped hair. It was the young man he had once heard speak in Prayn—Naab.

His voice and message were also recognisable. “Priests, I am not your enemy, though you treat me like one, but your friend. Generation by generation, you sink into inaction, your numbers grow less, Pannoval dies. We are not just passive votaries of Great Akha. No! We must fight with him. We must also suffer. In the great war between Sky and Earth, we must play our part. We must reform and purify ourselves.”

Behind the bound figure were militiamen in gleaming helmets, guarding him. Others arrived, bearing smoking brands. With them marched their phagors, checked by leather leads. They halted. They turned inward. They hoisted their brands high above their heads, and the smoke rose in leisurely braids upwards. Forward creaked a stiff cardinal, bowed under black-and-white garb and an elaborate mitre. He struck a golden staff against the ground three times, crying shrilly in the Priestly Olonets, “Have done, have done, have done… O Great Akha, our Warrior God, appear to us!” A bell tinkled.

A second pillar of the brilliant white light, solidifying rather than banishing the surrounding night. Behind the prisoner, behind the phagors and the soldiers, Akha appeared, reaching upwards. A murmur of expectation came from the crowd. It was a skeletal scene, the militia and the massive white beasts all but transparent, Akha chalky in the column of fight, the whole embedded in obsidian. In this representation, the semihuman head of the god thrust forward, and his mouth was open. The eyes were as sightless as ever.

“Take this unsatisfactory life, O Great Akha, and use it for Thy satisfaction.”

Functionaries moved smartly forward. One began to crank at a handle set in the side of the frame holding the prisoner. The frame began to creak and shift. The prisoner cried softly once, as his body was forced to bend backwards. As the hinges on the framework opened, his body arched back, exposing his helplessness.

Two captains marched forward with a phagor between them. The great beast’s blunted horns had been capped with silver and reached almost to the height of the soldiers’ eyebrows. It stood in the ungainly customary stance of a phagor, head and prow of chest thrust forward, its long white hair stirring slightly in the draught that blew through State.

Music sounded again, drum, gongs, vrachs, drowning out Naab’s voice, and the sustained warble of a fluggel rising high above them. Then everything stopped.

The body was bent double now, legs and feet twisted somewhere out of sight, head right back, exposing throat and thorax, gleaming pale in the column of light.

“Take, O Great Akha! Take what is already Thine! Eradicate him.”

At the priest’s scream, the phagor stepped a pace forward and bent down. It opened its shovel mouth and applied rows of blunt teeth to either side of the proffered throat. It bit. It raised its head, and a great morsel of flesh came up with it. It moved back into place between the two soldiers, swallowing noncommittally. A trickle of red ran down its white front. The rear column of light was cut off. Akha disappeared back into his nourishing darkness. Many of the novices fainted.

As they jostled out of State, Yuli asked, “But why use those devilish phagors? They’re man’s enemy. They should all be killed.”

“They are the creatures of Wutra, as their colour shows. We keep them to remind us of the enemy,” said Sifans.

“And what will happen to the—to Naab’s body?”

“It will not be wasted. Every item is of some application. The whole carcass may go for fuel—perhaps to the potters, who always need to fire their kilns. I really don’t know. I prefer to keep myself aloof from administrative details.”

He dared say no more to Father Sifans, hearing the distaste in the old priest’s voice. To himself, he said over and over again, “Those evil brutes. Those evil brutes. Akha should have no part of them.” But the phagors were all over the Holies, padding patiently along with the militia, their noctilucent eyes peering here and there under their craggy brows.

One day Yuli tried to explain to his charge-father how his father had been caught and killed by phagors in the wild.

“You do not know for sure they killed him. Phagors are not always entirely evil. Sometimes Akha subdues their spirit.”

“I’m sure he’s dead by now. There’s no way of being certain, though?”

He heard the father lick his lips as he hesitated, and then leaned towards Yuli in the blackness.

“There is a way of being sure, my son.”

“Oh, yes, if you mounted a great expedition from Pannoval north—”

“No, no … other ways, more subtle. You will one day understand the complexities of Pannoval more fully. Or perhaps you won’t. For there are entirely other orders of the priesthood, warrior mystics, of which you do not know. Perhaps I had better say no more…”

Yuli urged him on. The priest’s voice sank still lower, until it was almost lost under the splash of a water drip near at hand.

“Yes, warrior mystics, who forswear the pleasures of the flesh and in return gain mysterious powers …”

“That’s what Naab advocated, and was murdered for it.”

“Executed after trial. The superior orders prefer us, the administrative orders, to remain as we are… But they … they communicate with the dead. If you were one of them, you could speak with your father after death.”

Into the dark, Yuli stammered his amazement.

“There are many human and divine capacities which can be trained, my son. I myself, when my father died, fell into a fast through sorrow, and after the passage of many days saw him clear, suspended in the earth which is Akha’s as if in another element, with his hands over his ears, as if he heard some sound he disliked. Death is not an end, but our extension in Akha—you recall the teaching, my son.”

“I’m still angry with my father. Perhaps I have difficulty because of that. He was weak at the end. I wish to be strong. Where are these—these warrior mystics of whom you speak, Father?”

“If you do not believe my words, as I sense, it is pointless my telling you anything further.” The voice held a nicely calculated shade of petulance.

“I’m sorry, Father. I’m a savage, just as you say… You think the priesthood should reform itself, as Naab claimed, don’t you?”

“I take a middle way.” He sat leaning forward tensely for a while, blinking as if there was more to be said, and Yuli heard his dry eyelids flutter. “Many schisms divide the Holies, Yuli, as you will come to see if you take your orders. Things are less easy than they were when I was a boy. Sometimes it seems to me …”

The water drops went splash-splash-splash and someone coughed distantly.

“What, Father?”

“Oh … you have heretical thoughts enough, without my planting more. I can’t imagine why I talk to you. That’s the end of instruction for today, boy.”

Talking not to Sifans, who liked to proceed by equivocation, but to his fellows, Yuli gradually learnt something of the power structures that held the community of Pannoval together. The administration was in the hands of the priests, and they worked with the militia, one reinforcing the other. There was no final arbitrator, no great chief, like the chiefs in the tribes of the wilderness. Behind each order of the priesthood lay another. They faded off into the metaphysical darkness, in obscure hierarchies, none finally with the power to command all the others.

Some orders, went the rumour, lived in more distant caverns in the mountain chain. In the Holies, habits were lax. Priests might serve as soldiers and vice versa. Women came and went among them. Under all the prayer and learning was confusion. Akha was elsewhere. Somewhere—somewhere there was greater faith.

Somewhere along the receding chain of command, thought Yuli, must be Sifans’ order of warrior-mystics, who could commune with the dead and perform other amazing acts. The rumours, really no more to be listened to than the drip of water down a wall, whispered of an order elsewhere, set above the inhabitants of the Holies, who were referred to, when they were referred to at all, as the Keepers.

The Keepers, according to the whisper, were a sect to which admission was by election. They combined the dual role of soldiering and priesthood. What they kept was knowledge. They knew things unknown even in the Holies, and that knowledge gave them power. By keeping the past, they laid claim to the future.

“Who are these Keepers? Do we see them?” Yuli asked. The mystery excited him, and as soon as he heard of them he longed to be part of the mysterious sect.

He was speaking again to Father Sifans, almost at the end of his term. The passage of time had matured him; he no longer mourned his parents, and the Holies kept him busy. He had discovered recently in his charge-father an intense relish of gossip. The eyes blinked faster, the lips trembled, and the morsels slipped out. Every day, as the two men worked together in the prayer hall of their order, Father Sifans allowed himself a small ration of revelation.

“The Keepers can mix among us. We do not know who they are. Outwardly, they look no different from us. I might also be a Keeper, for all you know…”

Next day, after prayer, Father Sifans beckoned Yuli with a mittened hand and said, “Come, since your novice term is nearly up, I’ll show you something. You recollect what we were talking about yesterday?”

“Of course.”

Father Sifans pursed his lips, squeezed his eyes together, raised his little sharp nose like a shrew’s towards the ceiling, and nodded his head sharply a dozen times. Then he set off at a stiff mincing pace, leaving Yuli to follow.

Lights were rare in this section of the Holies and, in some places, forbidden entirely. The two men moved now with assurance through total darkness. Yuli kept the fingers of his right hand extended, lightly touching a carved skein unwinding on the wall of the corridor. They were passing through Warrborw, and Yuli was now wall-reading.

Steps were indicated ahead. Two of the luminous-eyed preets fluttered in a wicker cage, punctuating the junction between the main passage, a side one, and the steps. Yuli and his old charge-father progressed steadily upwards, clack-clack- clack, up stairs, along passages punctuated by more stairs, avoiding by habit others who walked in the limestoned dark.

Now they were in Tangwild. The wall-scroll on the rock under Yuli’s fingers told him so. In a never repeating design of intertwined branches sported small animals which Yuli considered must have been figments of some long dead artist’s imagination—animals that hopped and swam and climbed and rolled. For some reason, Yuli imagined them all in vivid colours. The band of wall-scroll carving ran for miles in all directions, never more than a hand-span wide. This was one of the secrets of the Holies; nobody could get lost in the labyrinthine dark once he had memorised the various patterns that identified the sectors and the coded signs signalling turns or steps or corridor divisions, all woven into the design.

They turned into a low gallery which the resonance of sound told them was otherwise unoccupied. Here, the wall-scroll was of quaint men squatting with out- turned hands among wooden huts. They must be outside somewhere, Yuli thought, enjoying the scenery beneath his palm.

Sifans halted, and Yuli bumped into him. As he apologised, the old man rested against the wall.

“Be silent and let me enjoy a good pant,” he said.

In a moment, as if regretting the severity of his tone, he said, “I’m getting old. On my next birthday, I shall be twenty-five. But the death of an individual is nothing to our Lord Akha.”

Yuli feared for him.

The father fumbled about the wall. Moisture ran down the rock and soaked everything.

“Hah, yes, here …”

The charge-father opened a small shutter, permitting light to blaze in upon them. Yuli had to shield his eyes for a moment. Then he stood by Father Sifans and looked out.

A grunt of astonishment escaped him.

Below them lay a small town, built on a hill. Crooked lanes ran up and down, sometimes fronted by quite grand houses. They were intersected by alleys, where riotous building concocted a maze of dwellings. To one side, a river ran in a chasm, and livings perched dangerously on its very edge. People, tiny as ants, moved among the lanes and jostled inside roofless rooms. The noise of their traffic rose faintly to where the men stood peering down.

“Where are we?”

Sifans gestured. “That’s Vakk. You’ve forgotten it, haven’t you?”

He watched with some amusement, his nose screwed up, as Yuli stared down, open-mouthed.

How simple he was, he thought. He should have recognised it was Vakk without having to ask, like a savage. He could see the far archway leading to Reck, faint as ice in the distance. Nearer, squinting, he made out familiar livings and the alley where his room had been, and the home of Kyale and Tusca. He recalled them—and the beautiful black-haired Iskador—with longing, but his feelings were muted, because there was no point in yearning for a bygone world. Kyale and Tusca would have forgotten him, as he had them. What chiefly struck him was how bright Vakk appeared, for he remembered it as a place of deep shadow, lacking all colour. The difference marked how greatly his sight had improved during his stay in the Holies.

“You recollect that you asked me who the Keepers were,” said Father Sifans. “You asked if we saw them. Here is my response.” He indicated the world below them. “The people down there do not see us. Even if they look upward, they are still unable to spot us. We are superior to them. So are the Keepers superior to mere members of the priesthood. Within our fortress there is a secret fortress.”

“Father Sifans, help me. Is that secret fortress … is it friendly towards us? Secrecy is not always friendly.”

The father blinked his eyes. “The question should be rather, Is the secret fortress necessary to our survival? And the answer to that is, Yes, whatever it costs. You may find that a strange answer, coming from me. I am for the middle way in everything but this. Against the extremities of our life, against which Akha seeks to defend us, extremes are called for.

“The Keepers keep Truth. According to the scriptures, our world has been withdrawn from Wutra’s fire. Many generations ago, the people of Pannoval dared to defy Great Akha and went to live outside our sheltering holy mountain. Towns like Vakk which we see before us were built under the naked skies. Then we were punished by fire, which Wutra and his cohorts sent down. A few survivors lived to return to our natural home, here.

“This is not merely scripture, Yuli. Forgive the blasphemy of that ‘merely.’ This is scripture, I should say. It is also a history that our people have lived. The Keepers in their secret fortress keep that history, and many things that still survive from the period of naked skies. I believe they see uncloudedly what we see clouded.”

“Why are we in the Holies not considered fit to know these things?”

“Enough to know them as scripture, a parable. Myself, I believe that the naked knowledge is kept from us, first, because those in power always prefer to hoard knowledge, which is power, and second, because they believe that armed with such knowledge we might again attempt to return to the outside world of naked skies at such time as Great Akha banishes the snows.”

Yuli thought with racing thoughts. Father Sifans’ frankness astonished him. If knowledge was power, where stood faith? It occurred to him that he was possibly being tested, and was aware of the priest awaiting his answer with alert interest. Playing safe, he brought in the name of Akha again.

“Surely, if Akha banishes the snows, that is his invitation to return to the world of skies? It is not natural for men and women to be born and die in darkness.”

Father Sifans sighed. “So you say—but you were born under the skies.”

“I hope to die there, too,” Yuli said, with a fervour that surprised himself. He feared that his unpremeditated response would provoke his charge-father’s anger; instead, the old man placed a mittened hand on his shoulder.

“We all desire conflicting desires…” He struggled with himself—either to speak or to stay silent—then said calmly, “Come, we will return, and you shall lead the way. Your reading of the wall-scrolls is becoming excellent.”

He closed the shutter on Vakk. They regarded each other as the night rushed back. Then they returned through the dark sleeve of the gallery.

Yuli’s initiation as a priest was a great event. He fasted for four whole days, and came light-headed before his cardinal in Lathorn. With him went three other young men of Yuli’s own age, also due to take all the vows of a priest, also to sing for two hours, standing in stiff clothes and unaccompanied by music, the liturgies memorised for the occasion.

Their voices rose thinly in the great dark church, hollow as a cistern.

A solitary candle stood between them and the figure of the seated cardinal. The old man remained motionless throughout the ceremony; perhaps he slept. A breeze blew the candle flame fluttering in his direction. In the background stood the three charge-fathers who had sponsored the young men to priesthood. Yuli could see Sifans dimly, his nose wrinkled upwards like a shrew’s in pleasure, nodding to the chant. No militia were present, or phagors.

At the end of the initiation, the stiff old figure decked out in its black and whites and chains of gold rose to its feet, raised its hands above its head, and intoned a prayer for the initiates:

“… and grant finally, O Ancient Akha, that we may move ever more deeply into the caverns of thy thought until we discover within ourselves the secrets of that illimitable ocean, without bound or dimension, which the world calls life, but which we privileged few know to be Everything that is beyond Death and Life…”

Fluggels began to play, swelling music filled Lathorn and Yuli’s heart.

Next day, he was given his first task, to go among the prisoners of Pannoval and listen to their troubles.

For newly ordained priests there was an established procedure. They served first in the Punishment area, and then were transferred to Security before being allowed out to work among the ordinary people. In this process of hardening off, they were fortified in the distancing between them and the people implied in their ordination.

Punishment was full of noise and burning brands. It also had its quota of warders, drawn from the militia, and their phagors. It was situated in a particularly wet cavern. A light rain fell most of the time. Anyone who looked up could see the beads of moisture swinging downwards on a crooked path, teased by wind from stalactites far overhead.

Warders wore heavy soles to their boots, which sounded on the pavements. The white-coated phagors which accompanied them wore nothing, able to rely on their natural protection.

Brother Yuli’s job was to work duty spells with one of the three guard lieutenants, a coarse thick man called Dravog, who walked as if he were crushing beetles and spoke as if he were chewing them. He constantly beat his leggings with his stave, making an irritating drumming noise. Everything that concerned the prisoners—including the prisoners themselves—was meant to be banged. All movements were executed to gongs, any delay was punished by application of a stave. Noise was the order of the day. The prisoners were a sullen lot. Yuli had to legitimise any violence and frequently patch its victims.

He soon found himself opposed to Dravog’s mindless brutality, while the unremitting hostility of the prisoners eroded his nerves. The days spent under Father Sifans had been happy even if he had not always appreciated that at the time. In these harsh new surroundings, he missed the dense dark, the silences, the piety, and even Sifans himself, with his cautious friendliness. Friendship was not a quality Dravog recognised.

One of the sectors of Punishment was a cavern called Twink. In Twink, squads of prisoners worked at demolishing the rear wall to enlarge the work space. The toil was endless. “They’re slaves, and you’ve got to beat them to keep them going,” Dravog said. The remark gave Yuli an uncomfortable glimpse into history—probably much of Pannoval had been opened up in this way.

The rubble from the excavation was carried away in clumsy wooden carts, which needed the efforts of two men to shift. The carts trundled to a place somewhere in the warrens of the Holies where the Vakk ran far below ground level and a deep pit waited to receive the rubble.

Twink contained a farm worked by the prisoners. Noctiferous barley was grown for bread, fish were farmed in a pool fed by a stream which poured from the rock. A quota of larger fish was culled every day. Diseased fish were dug into long banks where enormous edible fungi grew. Their pungent odour cut across the senses of anyone entering Twink.

Nearby, in other caverns, were more farms, and chert mines. But Yuli’s movements were almost as circumscribed as those of the prisoners; Twink formed the limit of his beat. He was surprised when Dravog, in conversation with another warder, mentioned that one of the side passages leading from Twink would take him into Market. Market! The name conjured up a jostling world he had left behind in a different life, and he thought nostalgically of Kyale and his wife. “You’ll never be a proper priest,” he told himself.

The gongs were struck, the wardens shouted, the prisoners strained their grudging bodies. The phagors shambled back and forth, sticking their milts up their slotted nostrils, and occasionally exchanging a grunted word with each other. Yuli hated their presence. He was watching four prisoners under the eye of one of Dravog’s warders trawl in the fish pool. To do this, the men were forced to get into the freezing water up to their stomachs. When their net was full, they were allowed to climb out and drag the catch onto the bank.

The fish were gout. They were a pale strawy white, with blind blue eyes. They struggled hopelessly as they were dragged from their natural element.

A rubble cart was passing, pushed by two prisoners. One of its wheels struck a stone. The prisoner shouldering the nearside shaft staggered and fell. As he went, he struck one of the fishers, a youth stooping to get a hold on the end of the net, who plunged head first into the water.

The warder began to shout and struck about him with his stave. His phagor hopped forward and grasped the prisoner who had slipped, lifting him off his feet. Dravog and another warder came running up in time to beat the young prisoner about his head as he dragged himself from the pool.

Yuli grasped Dravog’s arm.

“Leave him alone. It was an accident. Help him out.”

“He’s not allowed in the pool on his own,” Dravog said savagely, elbowing Yuli out of the way and striking again.

The prisoner climbed out with blood and water pouring from his head. Another warder rushed up, his brand hissing in the rain, his phagor behind him, eyes pink in the shadows. He shouted, sorry to have missed the excitement. He joined with Dravog and the other warders in booting the half-drowned prisoner back to his cell in the next cavern.

When the commotion had died and the mob disappeared, Yuli cautiously approached the cell, in time to hear a prisoner in the adjoining cell call, “Are you all right, Usilk?”

Yuli went to Dravog’s office and collected the master key. He unlocked the cell door, took a fat lamp from a niche in the passage, and entered.

The prisoner sprawled on the floor in a pool of water. He was supporting his torso with his arms, so that the outline of his shoulder blades stuck painfully through his shirt. Head and cheek were bleeding.

He turned a sullen look at Yuli, then, without change of expression, let his head droop again.

Yuli looked down at the soaked and battered skull. Tormented, he squatted by the man, setting the lamp down on the filthy floor.

“Scumb off, monk,” the man growled.

“I’ll help you if I can.”

“You can’t help. Scumb it!”

They remained in the same positions, without moving or speaking, and water and blood mingled in the puddle.

“Your name’s Usilk, I believe?”

No response. The thin countenance remained pointing down at the floor.

“Is your father’s name Kyale? Living in Vakk?”

“Leave me alone.”

“I know—I knew him well. And your mother. She looked after me.”

“You heard what I said…” With a sudden burst of energy, the prisoner flung himself on Yuli, beating at him rather feebly. Yuli rolled over and disengaged himself, jumping up like an asokin. He was about to fling himself into the attack when he paused. With an effort of will, he controlled himself and pulled back. Without a word more, he collected the lamp and left the cell.

“A dangerous one, that,” Dravog said to him, permitting himself a sly grin at the priest’s expense, seeing his flustered appearance. Yuli retreated to the brothers’ chapel, and prayed in the dark to an unresponsive Akha.

There was a story Yuli had heard in Market, a story not unknown to the ecclesiastics in the Holies, about a certain worm.

The worm was sent by Wutra, wicked god of the skies. Wutra put the worm into the labyrinth of passages in Akha’s holy mountain. The worm is large and long, its girth being about equal to that of a passageway. It is slimy, and it slides along noiselessly in the dark. Only its breathing can be heard, issuing from its flabby lips. It eats people. They are safe one moment; the next, they hear the evil breathing, the rustle of long whiskers, and then they are swallowed.

A spiritual equivalent of Wutra’s worm was now at large in the labyrinths of Yuli’s thought. He could not prevent himself seeing, in the thin shoulders and blood of the prisoner, the gulf that lay between preachments and practice in Akha. It was not that the preachments were so pious, for mainly they were practical, stressing service; nor was it that life was so bad; what troubled him was that they were at odds.

There returned to his memory something that Father Sifans had said to him. “It is not goodness and holiness that lead a man to serve Akha. More often it is sin such as yours.” Which implied that many among the priesthood were murderers and criminals—little better than the prisoners. Yet they were set over the prisoners. They had power.

He went about his duties grimly. He smiled less than he had. He never felt happy working as a priest. The nights be spent in prayer the days in thought—and in trying, when possible, to forge some sort of contact between himself and Usilk.

Usilk shunned him.

Finally, Yuli’s time in Punishment was completed. He entered a period of meditation before going to work with the Security Police. This branch of the militia had come under his notice while working in the cells, and he found within himself the ghost of a dangerous idea.

After only a few days in Security, Wutra’s worm became ever more active in his mind. His task was to see men beaten and interrogated and to administer a final blessing to them when they died. Grimmer and grimmer he became, until his superiors commended him and gave him cases of his own to handle.

The interrogations were simple, for there were few categories of crime. People cheated or stole or spoke heresy. Or they went to places that were forbidden or plotted revolution—the crime that had been Usilk’s. Some even tried to escape to Wutra’s realm, under the skies. It was now that Yuli realised that a kind of illness gripped the dark world; everyone in authority suspected revolution. The illness bred in the darkness, and accounted for the numerous petty laws that governed life in Pannoval. Including the priesthood, the settlement numbered almost six and three quarter thousand people, every one of whom was forced into a guild or order. Every living, guild, order, dormitory, was infiltrated by spies, who themselves were not trusted, and also had an infiltrated guild of their own. The dark bred distrust, and some of its victims paraded, hangdog, before Brother Yuli.

Although he loathed himself for it, Yuli found he was good at the work. He felt enough sympathy to lower his victim’s guard, enough destructive rage to tear the truth out. Despite himself, he developed a professional’s taste for the job. Only when he felt secure did he have Usilk brought before him.

At the end of each day’s duty, a service was held in the cavern called Lathorn. Attendance was compulsory for the priesthood, optional for any of the militia who wished to attend. The acoustics of Lathorn were excellent: choir and musicians filled the dark air with swelling veins of music. Yuli had recently taken up a musical instrument. He was becoming expert on the fluggel, a bronze instrument no bigger than his hand, which he at first despised, seeing other musicians play enormous peetes, vrachs, baranboims, and double-clows. But the tiny fluggel could turn his breath into a note that flew as high as a childrim, soaring up to the clouded roof of Lathorn above all conspiring melody. With it, Yuli’s spirit also flew, to the traditional strains of “Caparisoned,” “In His Penumbra,” and, his favourite, the richly counterpointed “Oldorando.”

One evening, after service, Yuli left Lathorn with an acquaintance, a shriven fellow priest by the name of Bervin, and they walked together through the tomblike avenues of the Holies, to run their fingers over new carvings even then being created by the three Brothers Kilandar. It chanced that they encountered Father Sifans, also strolling, reciting a litany to himself in a nervous undertone. They greeted each other cordialy. Bervin politely excused himself, so that Yuli and Father Sifans could parade and talk together.

“I don’t enjoy my feelings about my day’s work, Father. I was glad of the service.”

As was his fashion, Sifans responded to this only obliquely.

“I hear marvellous reports of your work, Brother Yuli. You will have to seek further advancement. When you do, I will help you.”

“You are kind, Father. I recall what you told me”—he lowered his voice—“about the Keepers. An organisation for which one can volunteer, you said?”

“No, I said one could only be elected to the Keepers.”

“How could I put my name forward?”

“Akha will aid you when it is necessary.” He sniffed with laughter. “Now you are one of us, I wonder … have you heard a whisper of an order above even the Keepers?”

“No, Father. You know I don’t listen to whispers.”

“Hah, you should. Whispers are a blind man’s sight. But if you are so virtuous, then I will say nothing of the Takers.”

“The Takers? Who are they?”

“No, no, don’t worry, I will say not a word. Why should you bother your head with secret organisations or tales of hidden lakes, free of ice? Such things may be lies, after all. Legends, like Wutra’s worm.”

Yuli laughed. “Very well, Father, you have worked me up to sufficient interest. You can tell me everything.”

Sifans made tsking noises with his thin lips. He slowed his step, and sidled into an alcove.

“Since you force me. Very regrettable … You may remember how the rabble lives in Vakk, its rooms all a huddle, one on top the next, without order. Suppose this mountain range in which Pannoval lives is like Vakk—better, like a body with various interconnected parts, spleen, lungs, vitals, heart. Suppose there are caverns just as large as ours above us and below us. It’s not possible is it?”

“No.”

“I’m saying it is possible. It’s a hypothesis. Let us say that somewhere beyond Twink there exists a waterfall, falling from a cavern above ours. And that waterfall falls to a level below ours, some way below. Water plays where it will. Let us say that it falls into a lake, the waters of which are pure and too warm for ice to form on them… Let us imagine that in that desirable and secure place live the most favoured, the most powerful, the Takers. They take everything of the best, the knowledge and the power, and treasure it for us there, until the day of Akha’s victory.”

“And keep those things from us …”

“What’s that? Fillips, I missed what you said, Brother. Well, it’s just an amusing story I tell you.”

“And does one have to be elected to the Takers?”

The father made little clicking noises with his tongue. “Who could penetrate such privilege, supposing it existed? No, my boy, one would have to be born to it—a number of powerful families, with beautiful women to keep them warm, and perhaps secret ways to come and go, even beyond Akha’s domains… No, it would need—why, it would need a revolution to get near such a hypothetical place.”

He stuck his nose in the air and giggled.

“Father, you tease the poor simple priests below you.”

The old priest’s head went to one side, judicially. “Poor you are, my young friend, and will most like remain so. Simple you are not—and that is why you will always make a flawed priest, as long as you continue. That is why I love you.”

They parted. The priest’s declaration troubled Yuli. Yes, he was a flawed priest, as Sifans said. A music lover, nothing more.

He washed his face in icy water as his thoughts burned. All these hierarchies of priesthoods—if they existed—led only to power. They did not lead to Akha. Faith never explained precisely, with a verbal precision to rival the precision of music, how devotion could move a stone effigy; the words of faith led only to a foggy obscurity called holiness. The rcalisation was as rough as the towel on which he dried his cheeks.

Lying in the dormitory far from sleep, he saw how old Sifans’ life had been stripped from the old man, real love had been starved from him, until he was left only with teasing ghosts of affection. He did not really care—had perhaps ceased to care a while ago—whether those beneath him had faith or not. His hints and riddles expressed a deep-rooted dissatisfaction with his own life.

In sudden fear, Yuli told himself that it would be better to die a man in the wilderness than a dry mouth here in the shadowy safeties of Pannoval. Even if it meant leaving behind his fluggel and the strains of “Oldorando.”

The fear made him sit up, casting off his blanket. Dark winds, the restless inhabitants of the dormitory, blew about his head. He shivered.

With a kind of exultation matching the exultation he had experienced on entering Reek long ago, he whispered aloud, “I don’t believe, I believe nothing.”

Power over others he believed. He saw it in action every day. But that was purely human. Perhaps he had actually ceased to believe in other than human oppression during that ritual in State, when men had allowed a hated phagor to bite the words from young Naab’s throat. Perhaps Naab’s words might still triumph, and the priests reform themselves until their lives held meaning. Words, priests—they were actual. It was Akha that was nothing.

Into the moving dark be whispered the words, “Akba, you are nothing!”

He did not die, and the winds still rustled in his hair.

He jumped up and ran. Fingers unwinding the wall-scroll, he ran and ran until he was exhausted, and his fingertips raw. He turned back, panting. Power he wanted, not subjection.

The war in his mind was stilled. He returned to his blanket. Tomorrow, he would act. No more priests.

Dozing, he started up once again. He was back on a frozen hillside. His father had left him, taken by the phagors, and he flung his father’s spear contemptuously into a bush. He recalled it, recalled the movement of his arm, the hiss of the spear as it embedded itself among the tattered branches, the knife-sharp air in his lungs.

Why did he suddenly recollect that insignificant detail?

Since he had no powers of self-analysis, the question remained unanswered as he drifted into sleep.

The morrow was the last day of his interrogation of Usilk, interrogations were permitted for only six days consecutively, then the victim was allowed to rest. Rules in this respect were strict, and the militia kept a suspicious eye on the priesthood in all these matters.

Usilk had said nothing useful, and was unresponsive alike to beating and cajolery.

He stood before Yuli, who was seated on an inquisitorial chair carved elaborately from a solid chunk of timber; it served to emphasise the difference between the state of the two men, Yuli outwardly at ease, Usilk half-starved, ragged, shoulders bowed, face wan and without expression.

“We know that you were approached by men who threaten the security of Pannoval. All we wish is their names and then you can go free, back to Vakk”

“I did not know them. It was a word in the crowd.”

Both question and answer had become conventional.

Yuli rose from his chair and walked round the prisoner, giving no sign of his emotions.

“Usilk, listen. I feel no enmity for you. I respect your parents, as I told you. This is our last session together. We shall not meet again, and you will certainly die in this miserable place, for no reason.”

“I have my reasons, monk.”

Yuli was surprised. He had expected no response. He lowered his voice.

“We all have reasons… I will put my life in your hands. I am unfit to be a priest, Usilk. I was born in the white wilderness under the skies far to the north of Pannoval, and to the wilderness I wish to return. I will take you with me, I will help you to escape. That’s true speaking.”

Usilk raised his gaze to Yuli’s. “Scumb off, monk. That trickery won’t work on me.”

“It’s true speaking. How can I prove it? You wish me to blaspheme against the god to whom I made my vows? You think I can say these things lightly? Pannoval has shaped me, yet something in my inner nature makes me rebel against it and its institutions. They bring shelter and content to the multitude, but not to me, not even in the favoured role of priest. Why not, I cannot say, except that it is how I am made…”

He choked back his flow of words.

“I’ll be practical. I can get a spare monk’s cassock for you. When we go from this cell later, I will help you slip into the Holies and we will escape together.”

“Scumble on your tricks.”

Yuli fell into a rage. It was all he could do to stop himself attacking and beating the man. He flew in fury to the instruments hanging on the wall, and lashed at his chair with a whip. He seized the fat lamp that stood on the table and thrust it under Usilles eyes… He hit himself on the chest.

“Why should I lie to you, why betray myself? What do you know, after all? Nothing, nothing worth having. You’re just a thing, snatched up from Vakk, your life without meaning or importance. You have to be tortured and killed, because that is your destiny. Fine, go ahead with it, enjoy feeling your strength die day by day—it’s the price you pay for pride, and for being a cretin. Do what you will, die a thousand times. I’ve had enough. I can’t bear the torment. I’m off. Think of me as you lie in your own scumble—I’ll be out, free, free, under the sky where Akha’s power can’t reach.”

He shouted these words, careless who heard him, blazing before the beaten pallor of Usilk’s face.

“Scumb off, monk.” Just the same sullen phrase he had used all week.

Jumping back a pace, he brought up the whip and struck Usilk with the stock across his broken check. All his force and rage went behind the blow. His glaring gaze saw by the lamp’s uncertain light exactly where on the cheek under the eye and across the bridge of Usilk’s nose the stock struck. He stood with whip half- raised, watching as Usilk’s hands came up towards the injury, how his knees buckled. He swayed and fell to the floor, resting on knees and elbows.

Still clutching the whip, Yuli stepped over the body and quitted the cell.

In his own confusion, he was scarcely aware of the confusion round him. Warders and militia were running here and there in an unexpected manner—the normal progress through the dark veins of the Holies was a funereal walking pace.

A captain came along briskly, holding a flaring torch in one hand and shouting orders.

“You’re one of the priest-interrogators?” he demanded of Yuli.

“What of it?”

“I want all these rooms cleared of prisoners. Get them back to their cells. The injured are going to be put in here. Look sharp.”

“Injured? What injured?”

The captain roared his annoyance. “Are you deaf, Brother? What do you think all the shouting’s been about this last hour? The new borings in Twink have collapsed, and many good men are buried. It’s like a battlefield down there. Now, get moving and get your prisoner back in his cell, fast. I want this corridor cleared in two minutes.”

He moved on, shouting and cursing. He was enjoying the excitement.

Yuli turned back. Usilk still lay crumpled on the floor of the interrogation room. Stooping, he seized him under the shoulders and dragged him into an upright position. Usilk moaned and appeared semiconscious. By levering one of the prisoner’s arms over his shoulder Yuli could persuade him to walk after a fashion. In the corridor, where the captain still roared, other interrogators were removing their victims, hustling excitedly, nobody exactly looking displeased at this interruption to routine.

They headed into the dark like shadows. Now was his chance to disappear, while the excitement was on. And Usilk?

His rage was dying, his guilt reftming. He was aware of wishing to show Usilk that he was sincere in his earlier offer of help.

The decision was made. Instead of heading towards the prison cells, he turned towards his own quarters. A plan grew in his mind. First, he had to revive Usilk, to prepare him for escape. It was useless to think of taking him to the brothers’ dormitory, where they would be discovered; there was a safer place.

Wall-reading, he turned off before the dormitories, propelling Usilk up a winding stair, off which, in a warrenlike arrangement, the chambers of some of the fathers led. The band of carving under his hand kept him informed of where he was, even when the darkness grew so intense that phantasmal crimsons drifted through it like submerged weeds. At Father Sifans’ door, he tapped and entered.

As he had calculated, there was no response. At this time of day, Sifans should be engaged elsewhere. He pulled Usilk in.

He had stood outside this door many times, but had never entered it. He was at a loss. He helped Usilk to sit, leaning with his back against a wall, and groped about for the lamp bracket.

After some blundering against furniture, he found it, and spun the chert wheel attached to the bracket. A spark flew, a tongue of light grew, and he lifted the lamp from its socket and looked about him. Here were all Father Sifans’ worldly goods, few in number. In one corner stood a small altar with a statue of Akha, greasy with handling. There was a place for ablutions. There was a shelf supporting one or two objects, including a musical instrument, and a mat on the floor. Nothing more. No table or chairs. Lost in shadow was an alcove which Yuli knew without looking would contain a cot where the old father slept.

He moved into action. With water from the basin, piped from the rock, he washed Usilk’s face and tried to revive him. The man drank a little water, puking as he did so. On the shelf in a tin was some doughy barley bread; Yuli fed some to Usilk and ate a chunk himself.

He shook Usilks shoulder gently. “You’ll have to forgive my temper. You provoked it. I’m only a savage at heart, not fit to be a priest. Now you see that I spoke truth—we are going to escape from here. With a rockfall in Twink, it should be easy to get away.”

Usilk merely moaned.

“What do you say? You’re not that bad. You’ll have to move for yourself.”

“You will never trick me, monk.” He looked at Yuli through slitted eyes.

Yuli squatted down beside him. The movement made Usilk flinch away. “Look, we have already committed ourselves. I have committed myself. Try and understand. I’m asking nothing from you, Usilk—I’m just going to help you get out of here. There must be some way to escape through the north gate dressed as monks. I know an old trapper woman called Lorel, not many days journeying north from here, who will allow us shelter while we grow used to the cold.”

“I’m not moving, man.”

Smiting his forehead, Yuli said, “You’ll have to move. We are hiding in a father’s room. We can’t stay here. He’s not a bad old boy, but he’d surely report us if he discovered us.”

“Not so, Brother Yuli. Your not-so-bad old boy is a grave of secrets.”

Jumping up, Yuli turned and stood face to face with Father Sifans, who had emerged quietly from the alcove. He put forward a papery hand in a protective gesture, fearing attack.

“Father …”

The gesture became one of reassurance as Father Sifans blinked at him in the wan light.

“I was resting. I was in Twink when the roof fell in—what a mess! Fortunately, I was not in great danger, but a piece of rock flew and hit my leg. I can advise you that there will be no escape through the north gate; the guard have closed it and declared a state of emergency, just in case the worthy citizens do something unwise.”

“You’re going to report us, Father?” From the olden days, the days of his adolescence, he had kept one possession, the bone knife which his mother had carved in her well days. His hand crept beneath his cassock and grasped the knife as he asked his question.

Sifans sniffed. “Like you, I shall do something unwise. I am going to advise you on the best route to take to leave our country. I am also going to advise you not to take this man with you. Leave him here, I’ll see to him. He’s close to death.”

“No, he’s tough, Father. He’ll recover quickly when the idea of freedom really sinks in. He’s been through much, haven’t you, Usilk?”

The prisoner stared up at them, across a blackened cheek which had already swollen enough to close one eye.

“Also, he is your enemy, Yuli, and will remain so. Beware of him. Leave him to me.”

“It’s my fault he is my enemy. I will make amends and he will forgive me when we are safe.”

The father said, “Some men do not forgive.”

As they stood regarding each other, Usilk made clumsy movements to rise to his feet, and stood gasping, resting his forehead against the wall.

“Father, I hardly can ask you this,” Yuli said. “For all I know, you are a Keeper. Will you come with us to the outer world?”

The eyes blinked rapidly. “Before my initiation, I felt I could not serve Akha, and I attempted once to leave Pannoval. But I was caught, because I was always one of the docile kind, and not savage like you.”

“You never forget my origins.”

“Oh, I envied savagery. I still do. But I was defeated; my wish was subverted by my nature. I was caught and treated—well, as to how I was treated, let me merely say that I also am a man who cannot forgive. That was long ago. Since then I have gained promotion.”

“Come with us.”

“I will remain here and nurse my injured leg. I always have my excuses, Yuli.”

Taking a stone from the floor, the father drew a sketch on the wall for Yuli, explaining an escape route to him. “It is a long journey. You must travel beneath the Quzint Mountains. You will find yourself at last not in the north but the more clement south. Stay well, and prosper.” Spitting on his hand, he erased the marks on his wall and tossed the stone into a corner.

Finding nothing to say, Yuli put his arms round the old man, so that his frail arms were pinned to his side, and hugged him. “We’ll go at once. Farewell.”

Usilk said, speaking with difficulty, “You must kill this fellow, kill him now. Or, as soon as we leave, he will give the alarm.”

“I know him and I trust him.”

“It’s a trick.”

“You and your damned tricks, Usilk. I won’t let you touch Father Sifans.” This was said in some agitation, as Usilk came forward and Yuli put out a detaining arm to keep him from the old priest. Usilk struck at his arm, and for a moment the two wrestled together, until Yuli pushed him off as gently as possible.

“Come on, Usilk, if you’re fit enough to struggle. Let’s go.”

“Wait. I see I’ll have to trust you, monk. Prove yourself true by freeing a comrade of mine. His name’s Scoraw and he worked with me at the fish pool. He’ll be in Cell 65. Also fetch a friend of mine from Vakk.”

Stroking his chin, Yuli said, “You’re in no position to dictate anything.” Every delay meant danger. Yet he saw that it was necessary to make some gesture to placate Usilk, if they were to agree at all. Sifans’ plan made it clear that they had a dangerous journey ahead.

“All right, Scoraw. I remember the man. He was your revolutionary contact?”

“Are you still trying to interrogate me?”

“Very well. Father, may Usilk stay here with you while I collect this Scoraw? Good. And who is the man in Vakk?”

A kind of smile moved briefly over Usilk’s broken face. “Not a man, a woman. My woman, monk. Name of Iskador, queen of archery. Lives at the Bow, Bottom Alley.”

“Iskador … yes, yes, I know her—I knew her once by sight.”

“Get her. She and Scoraw are tough. We’ll see how tough you are later, monk…”

The father tweaked at Yuli’s sleeve, and said softly to him almost inserting his nose into Yuli’s ear. “My apologies, I have chanigged my mind. I do not dare to be left alone with this surly and stupid person. Please take him with you—you have my assurances I shall not leave my room.” He clutched fiercely at Yuli’s arm.

Yuli clapped his hands together. “Very well. Usilk, we go together. I’ll show you where you can steal a habit. Put it on, go and collect Scoraw. I will go down into Vakk and collect your girl, Iskador. We will meet at the inner corner of Twink, where there are two passages leading off, so that we can escape if necessary. If you and Scoraw do not come, I shall have to leave without you, knowing you have been captured. Is that clear?”

Usilk grunted.

“Is that clear?”

“Yes, let’s move.”

They moved. They left the shelter of Sifans’ small room and launched themselves into the thick night of the corridor. Fingers to wall-scroll, Yuli led on, forgetting in his excitement even to bid farewell to his old mentor.

The people of Pannoval at this time were hardheaded. They had no great thoughts, except to keep their stomachs fed. Yet they had a kind of small change in stories, which were bartered about by storytellers from time to time.

At the great entrance, by the guardhouses, before a visitor to Pannoval came among the terraces of Market, trees grew—small in number and stunted, but definitely green trees.

They were properly prized for their rarity, and for their habit of yielding an occasional harvest of wrinkled nuts called roofers. No tree managed to crop every year, but every year one tree or other had a few lime-coloured roofers dangling from its outer twigs. Most of the roofers had maggots in them; but the dames and children of Vakk and Groyrie and Prayn ate the maggots along with the flesh of the nut.

Sometimes the maggots died when the nut was cracked. The poor little story had it that the maggots died of shock. They believed that the interior of their nut was their whole world, and the wrinkled case that contained it the sky. Then, one day, their world was cracked open. They saw with horror that there was a gigantic world beyond their world, more important and brighter in every way. It was too much for the maggots and they expired at the revelation.

Yuli thought of the maggots in the roofer nuts as he left the gaunt shadows of the Holies for the first time in more than a year, and returned, dazzled, to the busy world of ordinary life. At first, the noise and the light and the bustle of so many people reduced him to a state of shock.

All the challenge and temptation of that world was epitomised by Iskador, Iskador the beautiful. The image of her face was fresh in his mind, as if he had seen her only yesterday. Confronting her, he found her even more beautiful, and could only stutter before her.

Her father’s living had several compartments and was part of a small factory for making bows; he was the grand bowmaster of his guild.

Rather haughtily, she allowed the priest in. He sat on the floor and drank a cup of water, and slowly managed to tell her his tale.

Iskador was a sturdy girl of no-nonsense appearance. Her flesh was milky white, contrasting with her flowing black curly hair and her hazel eyes. Her face was broad, with high cheekbones, and her mouth wide and pale. All her movements were energetic, and she folded her arms over her bosom in a businesslike way as she listened to what Yuli had to say.

“Why doesn’t Usilk come here and tell me all this rigmarole?” she asked.

“He is collecting another friend for the journey. He could not come into Vakk—his face is a bit bruised at present, and would excite unwelcome attention.”

The dark hair hung down on either side of the face, framing it with two wings. Now the wings were flicked impatiently aside with a toss of the head, as Iskador said, “Anyhow, I have an archery contest in six days, which I want to win. I don’t want to leave Pannoval—I’m happy enough here. It was Usilk who was always complaining. Besides, I haven’t seen him for ages. I’ve got another boyfriend now.”

Yuh stood up, flushing slightly.

“Fine, if that’s how you feel. Just keep quiet about what I’ve told you. I’ll be off and take your message to Usilk.” His nervousness before her made him more brusque than he intended.

“Wait,” she said, coming forward with extended arm, a well-shaped hand reaching out towards him. “I didn’t say you could go, monk. What you tell me is pretty exciting. You’re meant to plead on Usilk’s behalf, begging me to come along with you.”

“Just two things, Miss Iskador. My name is Yuli, not ‘monk.’ And why should I plead on Usilk’s behalf? He’s no friend of mine, and besides …”

His voice tailed off. He glared angrily at her, cheeks colouring.

“Besides what?” There was a hint of laughter in her question.

“Oh, Iskador, you’re beautiful, that’s what besides, and I admire you myself, that’s what besides.”

Her manner changed. She put her hand up so as to half-hide her pale lips. “Two ‘that’s what besides’ … both rather important. Well, Yuli, that does make a bit of difference. You’re not unpresentable yourself, now I come to look at you. How did you get to be a priest?”

Sensing the turn of the tide, he hesitated, then said boldly, “I killed two men.”

She seemed to spend a long while regarding him from under her thick eyelashes.

“Wait there while I pack a bag and a strong bow,” she said at last.

The collapse of the roof had sent an anxious excitement through Pannoval. The event most dreaded in popular fancy had occurred. Feelings were somewhat mixed; with dread went a relief that only prisoners and warders and a few phagors had been buried. They probably deserved everything that Great Akha sent them.

At the rear of Market, barriers were drawn up, and the militia were out in force to keep order. Rescue teams, men and women of the physician’s guild, and workers, were moving back and forth at the scene of the disaster. Throngs of onlookers pressed forward, some quiet and tense, others merry, where an acrobat and a group of musicians encouraged them to be cheerful. Yuli pushed through the melée with the girl behind him, and people gave way to a priest out of long custom.

Twink, where the disaster had occurred, had an unfamiliar look. No onlookers were allowed, and a line of brilliant emergency flares was set up to assist the rescuers. Prisoners fed powder into the flares to maintain their brightness.

The scene was one of grim action, with prisoners digging and other ranks behind waiting to take over when they rested. Phagors had been set to hauling away the rubble carts. Every so often, a shout went up; then digging became more feverish, and a body would emerge from the earth, to be passed to waiting physicians.

The scale of the disaster was impressive. With the collapse of a new boring, part of the roof of the main cave had fallen in. There had been more than one subsidence. Most of the floor was piled high with rock, and the fish and fungus farm had largely been obliterated. The source of the original weakness that led to the disaster was a subterranean stream, which now gushed from its course, adding a flood to the other difficulties.

The rock fall had almost buried the rear passages. Yuli and Iskador had to scramble over a pile of debris to get there. Fortunately, this action was concealed from enquiring eyes by a still larger pile of debris. They climbed through without being stopped. Usilk and his comrade Scoraw were waiting in the shadows.

“The black and white suits you, Usilk,” Yuli commented sarcastically, referring to the priestly disguise both prisoners wore. For Usilk had come eagerly forward to clutch Iskador. Perhaps displeased by his battered face, she kept her distance, appeasing him by holding his hands.

Even in his disguise, Scoraw still looked the prisoner. He was tall and thin, with the droop to his shoulders of a man who has spent too long in a cell too small. His hands were large and scarred. His glance—at least during this encounter—was indirect; flinching from meeting Yuli’s eyes, he took little sips of sight when Yuli’s attention was elsewhere. When Yuli asked him if he was prepared for a difficult journey, he merely nodded, grunted, and shrugged a bag of possessions further on to his shoulder.

It was an inauspicious start to their adventure, and for a moment Yuli regretted his impulse. He was throwing away too much to consort with two characters like Usilk and Scoraw. First, he perceived, he must assert his authority, or they would meet nothing but trouble.

Usilk evidently had the same thought in mind.

He pushed forward, adjusting his pack. “You’re late, monk. We thought you’d backed out. We thought it was another of your tricks.”

“Are you and your mate up to a hard journey? You look ill.”

“Best to get going and not stand about talking,” Usilk said, squaring his shoulders and pushing forward between Iskador and Yuli.

“I lead, you cooperate,” Yuli said. “Let’s get that clear, then we’ll all agree together.”

“What makes you think you’re going to lead, monk?” Usilk said jeeringly, nodding to his two friends for support. With his half-closed eye, he looked both sly and threatening. He was feeling pugnacious again, now that the prospect of escape was offered.

“Here’s the answer to that,” Yuli said, bringing his bunched right fist round in a hard curve and sinking it into Usilk’s stomach.

Usilk doubled up, grunting and cursing.

“Scumb you, you eddre …”

“Straighten up, Usilk, and let’s march before we’re missed.”

There was no more argument. They moved after him obediently. The faint lights of Twink died behind them. But at Yuli’s fingertips went a wall-scroll, serving as his sight, teasingly formed of beads and chains of tiny shells, spinning out like a melody played on a fluggel, leading them down into the enormous silences of the mountain.

The others did not share his priestly secret, and still relied on light to get about. They began to beg him to go more slowly, or to let them light a lamp, neither of which he would do. He seized on the opportunity to take Iskador’s hand, which she gave gladly, and he walked in a steady delight to feel her flesh against his. The other two contented themselves with clinging to her garment.

After some while, the passages branched, the walls became rougher, and the repeating pattern gave out. They had reached the limits of Pannoval, and were truly alone. They rested. While the others talked, Yuli kept clear in his mind the plan that Father Sifans had sketched for him. Already, he regretted that he had not embraced the old man and bidden him farewell.

Father, you underdood much about me, I believe, for all your odd ways. You know what a lump of clay I am. You know that I aspire to good but cannot rise above my own dull nature. Yet you did not betray me. Well, I did not knife you either, did I? You must keep trying to improve yourself, Yuli—you’re still a priest, after all. Or am I? Well, when we get out, if we get out … And there’s this wonderful girl … No, no, I’m not a priest, old father, bless you, never could be, but I did try and you helped. Fare you well, ever…

“Get up,” he called, jumping to his feet and assisting the girl to hers. Iskador rested a hand lightly on his shoulder in the dark before they set off again. She did not complain about being tired when Usilk and Scoraw began to do so.

They slept eventually, huddled together at the foot of a gravelly slope, with the girl between Usilk and Yuli. Night fears got to them; in the dark, they imagined that they heard Wutra’s worm slithering towards them, its jaws open and its slimy whiskers trailing.

“We’ll sleep with a light burning,” Yuli said. It was chill, and he held the girl tight, falling asleep with one cheek against her leather tunic.

When they woke, they nibbled frugally on the food they had brought. The way became much more difficult. There had been a cliff fall, and they crawled for hours on their bellies, nose to toe, each calling to the other unashamedly, in order to keep in touch in the overmastering night of the earth. A freezing wind whistled through the slot they had to work their way through, icing their hair to their heads.

“Let’s go back,” Scoraw begged, when at last they could stand, bent-backed, and draw in breath. “I prefer imprisonment to this.” Nobody answered him, and he did not repeat the suggestion. They could not go back now. But the great presence of the mountain silenced them as they proceeded.

Yuli was hopelessly lost. The rock collapse had thrown him out of his reckoning. He could no longer remember the old priest’s map and was almost as helpless without the repeating pattern at his fingers as the others. A whispering noise grew and he strove to follow it. Bars of evil and unidentifiable colour drifted before his staring eyes; he felt that he was pressing through solid rock. His breath broke from his open mouth in sharp gasps. By mutual consent, they rested.

The way had been leading downhill for hours. They staggered on, Yuli with one hand to the side, one arm raised above his face, so that he did not strike his head against rock, as he had already done on several occasions. He felt Iskador clutching his habit; in his present state of fatigue, the touch was merely an annoyance.

With his mind rambling, he began to believe that the way he breathed controlled the diseased colours he saw. Yet that could not be entirely correct, for a kind of luminosity was creeping into view. He plunged on, ever down, squeezing his swollen lids tight together and then releasing them. Blindness was descending upon him—he was seeing a faint milky light. Looking round, he seemed to see Iskadoes face as in a dream—or a nightmare, rather, for her eyes were staring, her mouth gaping, in the ghostly disc of her face.

At his gaze, her awareness returned. She stopped, clutching at him for support, and Usilk and Scoraw barged into them.

“There’s light ahead,” Yuli said.

“Light! I can see again…” Usilk grasped Yuli’s shoulders. “You scumbing villain, you have brought us through. We’re safe, we’re free!”

He laughed greatly, and rushed ahead, arms outstretched as if to embrace the source of the light. In joy, the others followed, stumbling down the rough ground through a light that never was before, unless over some unknown northern sea where icebergs swam and clashed.

The way levelled out, the roof withdrew. Pools of water lay at their feet. They splashed through, and the path led up again steeply, until they were reduced to a walk, and the light grew no stronger, though there were now fierce noises all round.

Suddenly, they were at the end of the way, and stood daunted on the lip of a fissure. Light and noise surrounded them.

“Akha’s eyes,” gasped Scoraw, and stuck a fist between his teeth.

The fissure was like a throat, leading down into the belly of the earth. They could look up at the gullet, some way above. From the brink of the gullet, a river burst and plunged down into the fissure. Just below where they stood, the force of the falling water struck rock for the first time. Its energy created the intense drumming they had heard. It then cascaded into depths where it was lost to view. The water was white even where it did not foam, and shot through with livid greens and blues. Although it radiated the dim light in which they rejoiced, the rocks behind it seemed no less bright: they were coated in thick whirls of white and red and yellow.

Long before they had finished gazing upon this spectacle, and looking at the white ghosts of each other, they were drenched by spray.

“This isn’t the way out,” Iskador said. “This is a dead end. Where now, Yuli?”

He pointed calmly to the far end of the ledge on which they stood. “We go by that bridge,” he said.

They made their way carefully towards the bridge. The ground was slimy with ropey green algae. The bridge looked grey and ancient. It had been built of chunks of stone carved from the rock nearby. Its arch curved up, then stopped. They saw that the structure had collapsed, and was no more than a stub of a bridge. Through the milky light, another stub could be seen dimly on the far side of the chasm. There had once been a way across, but no more.

For a while, they stood staring across the gulf, not looking at one another. Iskador was the first to move. Bending, she set her bag down and pulled her bow from it. She tied a thread to an arrow of a kind she had used when Yuli saw her prize-winning performance, a long time ago. Without a word, she placed herself at the edge of the chasm, a foot firm an the edge, and raised the bow. She drew back her arm as she did so, squinting along it almost casually, and let fly.

The arrow seemed to curl through the spray-laden light. It reached its zenith over an outcrop of rock, glanced against the rocky wall above the waterfall, and fell back, its power spent, until it clattered at Iskador’s feet.

Usilk clapped her shoulder. “Brilliant. Now what do we do?”

For answer, she tied stout cord to the end of the thread, and then picked up the arrow and drew in the thread. Soon the leading end of the cord ran over the projecting ledge, and travelled back down to nestle in her hand. She then produced a rope on which she made a noose, drew that over the projection too, slipped the other end of the rope through the noose, and pulled the whole thing tight.

“Do you wish to go first?” she asked Yuli, passing him the rope end. “Since you are our leader?”

He looked in her deepset eyes, wondering at her cunning, and the economy of her cunning. Not only was she telling Usilk that he was not the leader, she was telling him, Yuli, to prove that he was. He chewed this over, finding it profound, then grasped the rope and squared up to the challenge.

It was alarming but not too dangerous, he estimated. He could swing across the chasm and then, walking against vertical rock, climb to the level of the lip over which the waterfall poured. As far as they could see, there was space to climb in and avoid being swept away by the water. The possibilities that followed could be assessed only when he was up there. He certainly was not going to show fear in front of the two prisoners—or Iskador.

He launched himself rather too hurriedly across the abyss, his mind in part on the girl. Striking the opposite cliff rather clumsily, his left foot slipped on green slime, he jarred against the wall with his shoulder, swung into spray, and lost his grip on the rope. Next second, he was falling down the chasm.

Amid the roar of water came their united cry—the first time they had genuinely done something in unison.

Yuli struck rock, and clung there with every fibre of his being. He squeezed his knees up under his body, fought with his toes, and gripped the rock.

His fall had been no more than two metres, though it jarred every bone in his body, and had been broken by a boulder protruding from the cliff. It afforded him little more than a foothold, but that was enough.

Casping, he crouched in his awkward position, scarcely daring to move, his chin almost on a level with his boots.

His anguished gaze fell on a blue stone lying below his eyes. He focused on it, wondering if he was going to die. The stone would not come sharp. He felt that he might have reached out over the ledge where he crouched and picked it up. Suddenly his senses told him the truth of the matter—he was not looking at a nearby stone but a blue object far below. Vertigo seized him, paralysing him; accustomed to the plains, be had no immunity against such an experience.

He closed his eyes and clung. Only Usilk’s shouts, coming from a long way off, forced him to look again.

Distantly below lay another world, to which the fissure in which he crouched served as a kind of telescope. Yuli had a view no bigger than his hand into an enormous cavern. It was illuminated in some way. What he had taken for a blue stone was a lake, or possibly a sea, since he had a glimpse only of a fragment of a whole whose size he could not attempt to guess. On the shore of the lake were a few grains of sand, now interpretable as buildings of some kind. He lay in a cataplexy, staring senselessly down.

Something touched him. He could not move. Someone was speaking to him, clutching his arms. Without will, he allowed himself to cooperate in sitting up with his back against the rock, and locking his arms about his rescuer’s shoulders. A bruised face, with damaged nose, slashed cheek, and one closed black and green eye swam before his vision.

“Hang on tight, man. We’re going up.”

He managed then to hold himself against Usilk, as the latter worked his way slowly upwards and eventually hauled them, with enormous labour, over the rock lip from which the waterfall poured. Usilk then collapsed, flat out, panting and groaning. Yuli looked down for Iskador and Scoraw, just visible on the other side of the fissure, faces upturned. He also looked more sharply down, into the fault; but his vision of another world had disappeared, eclipsed by spray. His limbs trembled, but he could control them sufficiently to help the others to join him and Usilk.

In silence, they clutched each other thankfully.

In silence, they picked their way amid the boulders on the side of the rushing stream of the waterfall.

In silence, they went on. And Yuli kept silence over the vision of the other world he had glimpsed. But he thought again of old Father Sifans; could it have been a secret fortress of the Takers, momentarily revealed to him amid the wilderness of rock? Whatever it was, he took it inside himself and was mute.

The warrens in the mountain seemed endless. Without light, the party of four went in fear of crevasses. When they judged it to be night, they found a suitable nook to sleep, and huddled together for warmth and company.

Once, after climbing for hours along a natural passage strewn with boulders from a long-vanished stream, they found a niche at shoulder height into which all four could sctamble, to tuck themselves away from the chill wind that had been blowing in their faces all day.

Yuli went to sleep immediately. He was roused by Iskador shaking him. The other men were sitting up, whispering apprehensively.

“Can you hear?” she asked.

“Can you hear?” Usilk and Scoraw asked.

He listened to the wind sighing down the passage, to a distant trickle of water. Then he heard what had disturbed them—a continuous rasping noise, as of something moving fast against the walls.

“Wutra’s worm!” Iskador said.

He clutched her firmly. “That’s just a story they tell,” he said. But his flesh went cold, and he grasped his dagger.

“We’re safe in this niche,” Scoraw said. “If we keep quiet.”

They could only hope he might be right. Unmistakably, something was approaching. They crouched where they were, peering nervously into the tunnel. Scoraw and Usilk were armed with staves, stolen from the warders of Punishment, Iskador had her bow.

The noise grew louder. Acoustics were deceptive, but they thought it came from the same direction as the wind. There was a rasping element to the noise now, and a rumble as of boulders being thrust heedlessly aside. The wind died, blocked perhaps. A smell assailed their nostrils.

It was a ripe aroma of festering fish, of scumble, of rotten cheese. A greenish fog permeated the passage. Legend said Wutra’s worm was silent, but now it approached with a roar, whatever it might be.

Moved more by terror than courage, Yuli peered from their lair.

There it was, coming fast. Its features could hardly be discerned behind the bank of green luminescence it pushed along in front of it. Four eyes, banked two and two, whiskers and fangs gigantic. Yuli pulled his head back in horror, choking. It was approaching irresistibly.

Next moment, they all four had a sight of its face in profile. It plunged by, eyes glaring insanely. Stiffish whiskers brushed their furs. Then their vision was blocked by scaley ribs, rippling by, blue-lit, scouring dust in upon them, choking them with filth and stink.

There were miles of it, then it was past. Clutching each other, they peered out of their hiding place to see the end of it. Somewhere at the beginning of the boulder- strewn passage was a wider cave through which they had come. A convulsion was taking place down there; the green luminescence, still visible, rippled.

The worm had sensed them. It was turning round and coming back. For them. Iskador stifled a cry as she realised what was happening.

“Rocks, fast,” Yuli said. There was loose rock they could throw. He reached towards the sloping back of the niche. His hand shuck something unsuspected and furry. He drew back. He struck his chert wheel. A spark flew and died—living long enough for him to see that they were keeping company with the mouldering remains of a man, of which only bones and his enveloping furs remained. And there was a weapon of sorts.

He struck a second spark.

“It’s a dead shaggy!” Usilk exclaimed, using the prisoner’s slang for phagor.

Usilk was right. There was no mistaking the long skull, from which the flesh had dried, or the horns. Beside the body was a staff capped by a spike and a curved blade. Akha had come to the aid of those threatened by Wutra. Both Usilk and Yuli reached out and grabbed the shaft of the weapon.

“For me. I’ve used these things,” Yuli said, wrenching at it. Suddenly, his old life was back, he recalled facing a charging yelk in the wilderness.

Wutra’s worm was returning. Again the scraping noise. More light, livid and green. Yuli and Usilk ventured a quick look out of the niche. But the monster was unmoving. They could see the blur of its face. It had turned and was facing back in their direction, but did not advance.

It was waiting.

They chanced a look in the other direction.

A second worm was bearing down on them from the direction the first had come. Two worms … suddenly, in Yuli’s imagination the cave system was crawling with worms.

In terror, they clung to each other, as the light grew brighter and the noise nearer. But the monstrous creatures would be concerned only with each other.

Following a wave of foetid air, the head of the monster plunged by, four eyes glaring as it stared to its front. Bracing the lower half of his newly acquired spear against the side of the niche, Yuli thrust the point out beyond the rock, hanging on with both hands.

It pierced the churning side of the worm as it charged forward. From the long opening tear in its body, a thick jamlike substance gushed, and flowed down the full extent of its body. The monster was slowing before its whiskered tail had passed the shelf where the four humans sprawled.

Whether the two worms had been intending to fight or mate would never be determined. The second worm never reached its target. Its forward motion petered out. Waves of crudely telegraphed pain caused the body to ripple, the tail to lash. Then it was still.

Slowly, its luminescence died. All was quiet, save for the sough of the wind.

They dated not move. They scarcely dared change their position. The first worm was still waiting somewhere in the darkness, its presence indicated by a faint green glow, scarcely discernible over the body of the dead monster. Afterwards, they agreed that this was the worst part of their ordeal. Each supposed in his or her private thoughts that the first worm knew where they were, that the dead worm was its mate, and that it was only waiting for them to stir to plunge forward and be revenged.

Eventually the first worm did move. They heard the slither of its whiskers against the rock. It slid cautiously forward as if expecting a trap, until its head loomed over the body of its dead adversary. Then it began to feed.

The four humans could no longer stay where they were. The sounds were too terrifyingly suggestive. Jumping clear of the spilt ichor, they regained the passage, and scampered away into the dark.

Their journey through the mountain was resumed. But now they stopped frequently and listened to the sounds of the dark. And when they had need to speak, they spoke in low tremulous voices.

Occasionally, they found water to drink. But their food gave out. Iskador shot down some bats, but they could not bring themselves to eat the creatures. They wandered in the labyrinth of stone, growing weaker. Time passed, the security of Pannoval was forgotten: all that remained of life was an endless darkness to be traversed.

They began to come upon bones of animals. Once, they struck a chert and discovered two human skeletons sprawling in an alcove, one with an arm about the other; time had robbed the gesture of any gentleness it might once have possessed: now there was only bone to scrape against bone, and terrifying grin to respond to the skull’s grin.

Then, in a place with a colder airflow, they heard movements, and found two red-furred animals, which they killed. Close by was a cub, mewling and poking up its blunt nose at them. Tearing the cub apart, they devoured it while the flesh was still warm and then, in a sort of raging paroxysm of awakened hunger, devoured the two parents as well.

Luminescent organisms grew on the walls. They found signs of human habitation. The remains of a shack and something that might have been a boat sprouted a crop of fungi. Nearby, a chimney in the cavern roof had encouraged a small flock of preets. With her unfailing bow, Iskador downed six of the birds, and they cooked them in a pot over a fire with fungi and a pinch of salt for flavour. That night, as they slept together, unpleasantly vivid dreams visited them, which they attributed to the fungi. But when they set off next morning, they came after only two hours of walking to a low wide cavern into which green light filtered.

In one corner of the cave, a fire smouldered. There was a crude pen, inside which were three goats, their eyes bright in the twilight. Three women sat nearby on a pile of skins, an ancient crone with white hair, and two younger women. The latter ran off squealing when Yuli, Usilk, Iskador, and Scoraw appeared.

Scoraw ran forward and jumped in with the goats. Using an old utensil lying nearby as a pail he milked the goats into it, despite the unintelligible cries of the crone. There was little milk to be had from the animals. What there was, they shared before moving on, casting the utensil down behind them as they left before the men of the tribe returned.

They entered a passage that turned sharply and had been barricaded. Beyond lay the mouth of the cave and, beyond that, open country, mountainside and valley, and the brilliant light of the realm ruled by Wutra, god of the skies.

They stood close together, for now they felt the bonds of unity and friendship, regarding the beautiful prospect. When they regarded each other, their faces were full of merriment and hope, and they could not keep from shouting and laughing. They skipped about and hugged one another. When their eyes were accustomed sufficiently to the brightness they could shield their brows and gaze up to where Batalix flitted among thin cloud, his disc a pale orange.

The time of year must be near the spring equinox, and the time of day noon, for two reasons: Batalix was vertically overhead, and Freyr was sailing below her to the east. Freyr was several times the brighter, spilling its light over snow-covered hills. Fainter Batalix was always the faster sentinel, and would soon be setting while Freyr lingered still at zenith.

How beautiful the sight of the sentinels was! The seasonal pattern of their dance in the heavens returned fresh to Yuli’s mind, making him open heart and nostrils. He leaned on the carefully wrought spear with which he had killed the worm and let his body fill with daylight.

But Usilk laid a detaining hand on Scoraw, and lingered in the mouth of the cave, looking out apprehensively. He called to Yuli, “Wouldn’t we do better to stay in these caves? How are we supposed to live out there, under that sky?”

Without removing his eyes from the landscape ahead, Yuli sensed that Iskador stood halfway between him and the men at the cave mouth. Without looking back, he answered Usilk.

“Do you remember that story they told in Vakk, about the maggots in the roofer nuts? The maggots thought their rotten nut was the whole world, so that when the nut cracked open, they died of shock. Are you going to be a maggot, Usilk?”

To that Usilk had no answer. But Iskador had. She came up behind Yuli and slipped her hand into the crook of his arm. He smiled and his heart sang, but he never ceased staring hungrily ahead.

He could see that the mountains through which they had come would provide shelter southward. Stunted trees no higher than a man grew sparsely, and grew upright, which indicated that the chill west wind of the Barriers no longer had power here. He still retained his old skills, learnt from Alehaw long ago. There would be game in the hills and they could live sensibly under the sky, as the gods intended.

His spirit rose, swelling until he had to fling his arms out wide.

“We will live in this sheltered place,” Yuli said. “The four of us will stay united, whatever else happens.” From a snowy fold of hillside, distantly, merging into the evening sky, smoke rose. He pointed ahead. “People live there. We’ll force them to accept us. This shall be our place. We’ll rule them, and teach them our ways. From now on, we live under our own laws, not other people’s.”

Squaring his shoulders, he set off down the slope, among a shallow stand of trees, and the others followed, Iskador first, walking proudly, then the others.

Some of Yuli’s intentions worked out, and some did not.

After numerous challenges, they were accepted in a small settlement sheltering under a protective fold of mountain. The people lived on a squalidly primitive level; because of their superior knowledge and their boldness, Yuli and his friends were able to impose their will on the community, to rule it, and to enforce their own laws.

Yet they never became truly integrated, because their faces looked different, and the Olonets they spoke went with a different lilt from the local variety. And they discovered that this settlement, because of its advantages, always lived in fear of raids from a larger settlement some way off on the banks of a frozen lake. Indeed, these raids were made more than once during the years that followed, with great suffering caused, and loss of life.

Yet Yuli and Usilk became cunning, and maintained their cunning because they were outsiders, and built ferocious defences against the invaders from Dorzin, as the larger settlement was called. And Iskador taught all the young women how to make bows and use them. They came to perform with great skill. The next time the invaders arrived from the south, many died with arrows in their chests, and then there were no more attacks from that direction.

Yet inclement weather beat upon them, and avalanches rolled down from the mountains. There was no end to storms. Only in cave mouths could they grow a few maggoty crops or sustain a few mangey animals to give them milk and meat, so that their numbers never grew, and they were always hungry, or seized by illnesses that could be ascribed only to the malignant gods (of Akha, Yuli allowed no mention).

Yet Yuli took the beautiful Iskador for his woman, and loved her, and looked every day on her broad strong face with comfort. They had a child, a boy they called Si, in memory of Yuli’s old priest in Pannoval, who survived all the pains and dangers of childhood, and grew up wild.

Usilk and Scoraw also married, Usilk to a small brown woman named Isik, curiously like his own name; Isik, despite her stature, could run like a deer and was intelligent and kind. Scoraw took a girl named Fitty, a capricious lady who sang beautifully and led him a hell of a life, and produced a baby girl who died after one year.

Yet Yuli and Usilk could never agree. Although they united in the face of common danger, Usilk at other times displayed hostility to Yuli and his plans, and tricked him when he could. As the old priest had said, some men never forgive.

Yet a deputation came from the larger settlement of Dorzin, which had suffered losses following an outbreak of disease. Having heard of Yuli’s reputation, they begged him to rule them in place of their dead leader. Which Yuli did, to be away from the vexation of Usilk, and he and Iskador and their child lived by the frozen lake, where game was plentifut and administered the laws firmly.

Yet even in Dorzin there were almost no arts to relieve the monotony of their hard life. Though the people danced on feast days, they had no musical instruments beyond clappers and bells. Nor was there any religion, except for a constant fear of evil spirits and a stoic acceptance of the enemy cold, and sickness, and death. So that Yuli became at last a real priest, and tried to instill in the people a feeling for their own spiritual vitality. Most men rejected his words because, although they had welcomed him, he was an outsider, and they were too sullen to learn new things. But he taught them to love the sky in all its moods.

Yet life was strong in him and Iskador, and in Si, and they never let die the hope that better times were emerging. He kept the vision he had been granted in the mountains, that there was possibly a way of life more enjoyable than the one immediately granted, more secure, less subject to the chances and the elements.

Yet he and his beautiful Iskador grew older for all that, and felt the cold more with the passing years.

Yet they loved the lakeside place where they lived and, in memory of another life and another set of expectations, called it by the name of Oldorando.

This is as far as the story of Yuli, son of Alehaw and Onesa can go.

The story of their descendants, and what befell them, is a far greater tale. All unknown to them, Freyr drew nearer to the chilly world: for there was truth buried in the obscure scriptures Yuli rejected, and the sky of ice would in due process of time become a sky of fire. Only fifty Helliconian years after the birth of their son, true spring would visit the inclement world that Yuli and his beautiful Iskador knew.

A new world was already poised to be born.

Embruddock

And Shay Tal said:

You think we live at the centre of the universe. I say we live in the centre of a farmyard. Our position is so obscure that you cannot realise how obscure.

This I tell you all. Some disaster happened in the past, the long past. So complete was it that no one now can tell you what it was or how it came about. We know only that it brought darkness and cold of long duration.

You try to live as best you can. Good, good, live well, love one another, be kind. But don’t pretend that the disaster is nothing to do with you. It may have happened long ago, yet it infects every day of our lives. It ages us, it wears us out, it devours us, it tears our children from us. It makes us not only ignorant but in love with ignorance. We’re infested with ignorance.

I’m going to propose a treasure hunt—a quest, if you like. A quest in which every one of us can join. I want you to be aware of our fallen state, and to maintain constant alertness for evidence as to its nature. We have to piece together what has happened to reduce us to this chilly farmyard; then we can improve our lot, and see to it that the disaster does not befall us and our children again.

That’s the treasure I offer you. Knowledge. Truth. You fear it, yes. But you must seek it. You must grow to love it.