Priam's Lens

SEVEN The Stealers of Souls

Littlefeet was feeling both proud and sad after his confirmation into adulthood. The tattoos that now colorfully adorned his thighs were the marks of equality with all the grown men of the tribe, and he delighted most of all in showing off to those of his age who still hadn’t gone the final steps as well as to those close to him who were in every way his extended family. Still, the mystique of the act, often talked about, regularly bragged about, and that held a kind of aura even when secretly observed, was now gone, as was the sense of the girls—women—as some kind of very different creatures. He had pleasant memories, even good feelings, when he thought of Spotty, and he wanted to see her again. That was certainly possible, but the Sisters did everything they could to break up or interrupt any real friendships between the sexes. Loyalty had to be first and foremost to the tribe as a whole, and every woman was wife and sister, every child one of your own. It was general policy, when possible, to pair off the young men with different young women each time, for no more than a year or so, so that such personal attachments didn’t have a chance to flower.

Too, the women were virtually never left alone, even when gathering plants nearby or getting water well within the security perimeter. It was common for them to move only in groups of five or more, usually with one old and experienced woman, frequently one of the Sisters, so that the rules were observed. Of course, the rules were not always obeyed, as almost everybody except Mother Paulista seemed to know, but it took some patience and planning to get around them. If a boy and a girl wanted to be together, they would arrange to go off in groups at the same time, so that, even if officially paired with the wrong girl or the wrong boy, well, swaps were made to make it right.

For much of the next year, Littlefeet was able to meet and even lie with Spotty more times than not, and Big Ears was able to do the same with his own girl, Greenie, a tall and very muscular young woman whose most unusual attribute were her nearly perfect green eyes. Few eyes in the Family were anything other than shades of brown, just as the hair was almost uniformly black until it turned gray or white.

So it was one day that Littlefeet and Spotty were lazing in the grass by the side of a small stream, oblivious to the small flies that darted about.

“You are getting a big tummy,” he noted.

She laughed. “Silly! That is where the baby is growing!”

He was kind of bowled over by that. Pregnant women were the norm in this society, since there was so much infant death and even old age was not very old, but the idea that Spotty would be a mother was, well, weird. Mothers were old, like his had been. Spotty was his age.

He was suddenly overcome with some very strange feelings he couldn’t understand or cope with. “Was it—is it growing from my seeds?” Biology wasn’t a fine point of education, but planting seeds into fertile soil was an easy concept to grasp.

She was uncomfortable with the question. “I—urn, have you planted your seeds in other women and not just me?”

He grew suddenly sheepish. “Yeah, two. I mean, it don’t always work but you got to go. It’s duty!”

She nodded. “Well, me too. So I don’t know whose seed it is, but it’s most probably yours.”

He felt a real rush of anger. How dare she lie with other guys? He knew it was a stupid thought, that she had no more control over that sort of thing than he did, but it bothered the hell out of him anyway. To keep some self-control, something a warrior always had to do, he tried to refocus the conversation.

“So when’s it gonna be born? Do you know?”

“In a month, maybe two. The Sisters keep track, but I’m guessing based on what I see in the other girls. You know most everybody my age is growing a baby? Maybe first time’s the thing, huh?”

“What’s it—feel like?”

She sighed. “Well, it’s kinda hard to say. I mean, you start off being sick and throwing up every morning for a while, but the blood time stops and so do the cramps so it kinda evens out. Then you feel okay but you start eating like two people. Things start to taste funny and smell funny and you feel kinda fat and clumsy. But you also feel—good about it, about yourself. It’s our main job. At least one of my babies, maybe more, will be new warriors and mommies and keep the Family going. That’s kinda neat.”

Now, for the first time, the real meaning of manhood hit him. Not fatherhood, but continuity and duty. It was her job and duty to bear as many babies as she could so that the Family would go on. It was his job, and those of the other young men, to protect the women who had this burden—even with their lives. He suddenly felt a sense of responsibility that had eluded him up to now, and at that moment, not before, he truly became an adult.

He didn’t like it. All that wishing about growing up he now saw as foolish. Now he was there, and he wanted to be a kid again, but that part of his life was over forever.

Only a few weeks later, when the Family moved in the traditional patterns it still thought random, camping at the outermost part of their lands, up against the tall and always snow-clad mountains to the south, it was brought home double.

Only at these boundaries was there an overlap with other Families. There was always some contact, and a mixing of families and seeds kept things from becoming too stagnant, the genes too inbred. The number of humans was still relatively small, but large areas were still required to furnish a totally gatherer-based society with sufficient food and essentials such as gourds, sticks, stones that could be sharpened, all that. That was why the overlaps were only at the perimeters.

They had expected to meet the Kuros Family at or near the traditional spot in the small valley that ran into the tall mountains, but the advance scouts saw no sign of them. That wasn’t always a true sign—after all, part of survival was keeping yourself unseen—but the scouts were looking for specific signs and patterns from experience. Littlefeet was one of the point men for the scouts, since he was so small and wiry he could cover great distances while making himself next to invisible. He traveled armed only with a crude knife he’d made himself, a hollow reed, and a small number of thorns dipped in one of the natural poisons the women could distill from certain grasses found near the Titan groves. It was an effective blowgun, although only at very short range. Speed and stealth were the weapons of a point man. If he had to fight, his usefulness was already compromised.

Cautiously entering the valley by full morning’s light, after having spent the night alone in a thick grove, he smelled the death smell first, long before he saw the scene.

They were Kuros for sure. The tattoos alone suggested that. Not the whole Family—that would have been far too much to bear—but a large number of men ranging from his age to as old as Father Alex. A squad of warriors, perhaps a dozen strong, the advance guard to scout the details and determine the camp setup, allowing for defensive positions, water access, and all the rest of those details. They had spears and blowguns and long knives and it hadn’t done them much good.

A dozen men! Why, the whole Kuros Family probably numbered only a couple of hundred, so this would be a devastating blow. But what had struck them down? Why had they died?

After doing the most cautious and detailed scouting of his entire life, he finally moved in to examine the bodies. They hadn’t been killed by Hunters, at least not by any Hunters Littlefeet had heard of. The bodies were barely touched. There was some blood, but it was dried on the corners of their mouths or even coming from their eyes. There appeared to be no hard blows, no evident wounds or penetrations.

They had died together, not in a defensive formation, and, guessing from their expressions, quite suddenly. They never knew what hit them, and that worried Littlefeet the most.

He wasted little time scouting for the cause after that. He might come back with a few others to find this out, but first the Family had to be stopped from coming in here, and, second, a detail would have to be dispatched to find the bulk of the Kuros clan, which certainly couldn’t be all that far away.

This was something else new in a people whose universe was increasingly static. New things could kill.

Even as he made his way back toward his own people, he couldn’t help but remember the strange body back at the big rock. Maybe he was cursed to find the unusual.

Mother Paulista would simply blame it all on the demons and scratch off another area as taboo, but it was beside the point if this was demon work. This was death by an unknown agent in a place where the Families had been coming and meeting for longer than Littlefeet had been alive. It was all well and good to proclaim that the demons ran the world and you had to flee from them, but the only way to put everywhere off-limits was to kill off the whole family.

Father Alex agreed and didn’t like it at all. “I don’t want you going back there, though,” he told the young man. “I’m going to dispatch some older men who have some experience with strange deaths to do that, and I’ll send Big Ears and a couple of others to locate the Kuros Family. You want to take a more daring single scout mission?”

“Yes, Father?”

“There are ancient tracks up through those mountains, where once people came simply to relax and enjoy the beauty of nature. Most are in bad shape, but where they exist they certainly show a way to climb. I want you to go up as far as you can, up to the edge where the water is white solid, as high as it is possible and still view our own lands, and to study all that you can see from there. Every detail. Everything is important, even the obvious. You must use all your mental training to memorize every last detail and be able to describe it here, perhaps even draw it in basic terms. I need to know what changes are being made, if any. I need to know if these things are the harbingers of evil. Take what food you will need with you. It is unlikely that there will be anything to eat up there, although water should be plentiful. Avoid contact with anyone, even a Kuros. You don’t know who might be the slave and pet of the demons.”

It sounded exciting. He’d never done anything like this before, and the stories of what the land looked like from high up were also hard to figure. “Yes, Father. I shall go, and I shall return as soon as I can after getting this information.”

“Start now. It is a long journey and it is mostly straight up. And one warning. If you are so high that you can see the city of the demons, do not stare at it for long. Understand? If you stare at it, they will know, and they will most certainly come for you. Treat the city as you would the sun. Acknowledge it, but never stare. Remember this!”

“I will, I swear!”

He put together a pack of mostly dried grain and sugar bars, the kind of food that was filling and gave energy without taking up too much bulk or quickly going bad. His pack was a large, squat gourd into which vines had been double and triple sewn, so that you could carry things in it while it hung on your back. He did not like it, although everyone, male and female, carried the things of the Family from one camp to the next in similar fashion. That was in a slow and methodical march; this kind of work was quick. Both the weight and the shape of the thing would throw him off. Still, he knew that he’d be far more uncomfortable if he found himself way up there with nothing at all to eat. It was said that starvation was among the ugliest ways to go.

He also realized that Father Alex had more knowledge, or at least suspicions, of what was going on than he was letting on, but Littlefeet also understood that the good Father would tell only when it was in the interest of the Family to tell, and that he might just be sitting on the information in order to keep Mother Paulista from screwing things up before he had enough evidence to lay out his case for action.

It was fairly easy to see the tracks of the ancient ones from afar, a bit harder to find where they began when you got close enough to start needing them. Nearly a century of rain, wind, and total neglect had made them somewhat treacherous, too, but nature didn’t erase trails cut through solid rock so easily or in so short a time.

By the end of the first day, in fact, he was higher than he’d ever been before and quite surprised and taken in by the view. Things looked so much smaller down there, yet paradoxically, the world looked ever so much bigger.

He spotted the Kuros camp before sunset, but only because he knew where it was and some of the landmarks. It was amazingly well hidden from the air. Some of the seemingly stupid and needless precautions they took every time they set up now became obvious works of clever and foresighted minds. Knowledge of territory and scent would allow Big Ears and the others to find what was left of the Kuros, but he sure as hell couldn’t spot them from here.

Before it became impossible to see, he found a nook where two rock slabs joined just above the old trail and was able to wedge himself in there. He had thought of staying near the small waterfall farther down, guaranteeing himself a water source, but the noise had been deafening. He wanted to be able to hear anybody or anything else that might be up here before they knew about him.

The rock was cool and hard compared to grass and soft earth, but he actually slept pretty well.

He didn’t worry much about mysterious killers coming to get him. The kind of life he’d been born and raised into indoctrinated all of them with a sense of fatalism; it was all God’s will, and what would be would be. However, that didn’t mean you threw all caution to the winds, or forgot the old rule about God helping those who first helped themselves.

Still, his fears were basic: pain, crippling, loss, that kind of thing. Of the dangers he was wary and careful, but fear would only get in the way of what might need to be done. He had never killed anybody, and few things larger than birds and other tiny creatures, but he would defend himself. If Hunters wished to eat his heart and liver, they would find it a costly meal.

The next day he continued on up, finding the going a bit tougher as he climbed. Parts of the trail had been filled in or knocked off by landslides or were too treacherous to trust. For those, he had to cling perilously to what foot-holds he could find and get around or across.

The wind was an unexpected enemy as well, not only for being strong enough sometimes to blow him off the side of a cliff but also because it was in many instances chilly, and he had never before in his life truly experienced cold.

The air temperature was dropping as well, and he found that it was more tiring to do things he always took for granted; he found himself short of breath for no reason. There was some kind of malevolence in these mountains he did not understand. The malevolence wasn’t as personal as the Hunters nor as all-powerful as the demonic Titans, but he became convinced that it changed all the rules for its own amusement. It wanted to see how tough it could make things for him.

He was up very high by the middle of the second day, and he was beginning to feel downright cold. For the first time he understood the old stories and scriptures about coats and dresses and other kinds of clothing. It must have been cold in those places, like it was here.

The idea of seeing solid water up close no longer seemed so romantic, but it certainly was close. It was okay while the sun was up, but almost as soon as it went down, or even when clouds came over, the temperatures seemed to drop like a stone loosened by his foot as he climbed.

Exhausted, cold, gasping for air, before sundown that day he reached a point that was so high up that he did not believe he was still on the world. In fact, he managed to make it to the edge of the white stuff, the solid water, which was showing at least in patches here and there. He was so fascinated by it—by putting his hand in it and feeling how terribly cold it really was, by letting it melt in his mouth and proving to himself that the stories were true: this was in fact water—that he managed to ignore the temperature for some time. After a while, though, he knew he’d have to make a decision. Stay overnight up here and he might well turn to solid water himself, or so he feared. But to take his observations and then descend to where there was some shelter might require more time than he had. He had no choice but to chance it, and hope that one night up here would not harm him.

He searched around for someplace to stay and rest until the dawn, and he finally discovered, just a bit farther up, what proved to be a small cave. It didn’t look totally natural, and it actually had a warm feel to it, but he managed to squeeze in and discovered that, indeed, it felt warm and very, very wet. It was also quite dark. He had already encountered a number of odd and unusual small animals and insects up here, some of whom had seemed very unfriendly; they would probably also find the cave a nice place, but he had to chance it. Warm was warm. Still, he found himself waking up often and brushing off things he could not see, many of which scurried away in the dark.

It was a long time until morning.

Morning, in fact, brought little relief and not much comfort, except that he’d determined that this was as far as he would or could come. Today he would observe as Father Alex had asked him to do, even with a pounding headache and feeling a little dizzy, and then he’d make his way down as fast as he safely could. He found his body was covered with small bites, most of which itched something fierce but none of which seemed to have a poison that might cause him any long-term harm. Some clearly couldn’t get through his tough, leathery skin.

Emerging from the warm, moist cave, though, he found himself suddenly in a dawn only a few degrees above freezing, and this made him feel frozen all over. He ate two of the bars, tried to rub some circulation back into his limbs, and then found a ledge that seemed designed for the purpose Father Alex had in mind. In fact, it absolutely looked as if somebody had built it, probably the ancients who had used this trail in those faraway times. They wanted a place to stop and relax and view the spectacular panorama in front of them. He had the same objective, but while the beauty wasn’t lost on him, he wasn’t wearing what they almost certainly had been, and that made a lot of difference in landscape appreciation. All he wanted now was down, but until he got what he came for, that was a direction he could not go.

The valley that had been so vast when they’d camped in it seemed almost like a small crack, with a series of waterfalls going off the sides of the mountain and feeding, perhaps creating, the river that in turn had carved it. He could follow the river, which tradition named the Styx, from its meandering reflection in the rapidly rising sunshine.

The plain was also smaller than it seemed, although certainly it stretched far enough. He could see the larger rivers and other basic landmarks, including the rock where the ghost might still wait, although it looked like a tiny speck, and then way beyond.

The grasslands spread out in all directions. There were a few groves of trees here and there, but mostly the plain was treeless. Grass and grains much taller than a man covered it all. When the wind came in, the grass blew and seemed like a vast sea—not grass at all but water whose waves gently traversed the horizon, were in constant motion. He knew that down in those grasses were bushes and small trees that got no direct sun energy but produced various fruits and vegetables. Others were all over in between the grasses just growing wild in the ground, but they were evident only as slightly darker patches on the grassland quilt.

In the center of the plain, in the one area where people did not go, were the demon flowers. They were certainly pretty, particularly from up here, and as tall as the grasses, and with enormous flowers of golds and purples and reds and even silvers. They too, moved in unison, as if pushed by the winds, but, curiously, not as the grasses nearby moved. Rather, it was almost as if those flowers were blown by a different wind, a demon wind only they could feel.

He realized that the three Families that the plain supported had a system wherein they went round and round the demon garden in a series of overlapping circles until they reached common outer boundaries like the valley, after which they began to spiral back. Each of the three Families met the two others at some point without ever traversing the center or the same groves. It struck him that the so-called randomness of Family movements was anything but. They were as predictable as the times of the moons. If the demons were not stupid, which they certainly were not, and the Hunters were in any way competent, which they certainly were, then at any time at all the Families were, in fact, vulnerable targets. They hid well, but what is the good of hiding if your enemies know exactly where you are?

And with that it struck him that the Families had to be something different than they thought they were. If the demons and the Hunters, the forces of evil, could get them at any time, then they were being allowed to survive. Or, perhaps, they were simply ignored unless they got in the way of whatever the others happened to be doing.

The grassland plain was vast, but, off in the distance on both sides, he could see other mountain ranges, and he understood then that it was actually a kind of bowl. Only a three-sided bowl, though, for directly in front of him, almost at the horizon even at this height, was the great ocean, and to the far western side, probably where the distant ranges met the sea, was the city of the demons.

You couldn’t miss it. Even from this far away, countless kilometers if he’d had any way to measure or truly under-stand the measurement, the eerie and huge place throbbed and radiated with energy and light. Unlike the sun, you could look at it, but what you saw made little sense. Bright, throbbing, an elongated egg shape from the look of it, with a single dark line dividing it into two equal halves horizontally. Smaller versions flanked it, and in back two bloblike towers rose.

Father Alex had said not to look, but it was difficult not to, even though the danger was most certainly there. How could they, so very far away, possibly know if one little man was staring at their city?

But they did know. They, or something of them. As he stared, finding it harder and harder to take his eyes off the distant alien-looking city, which had to be enormous to be so clear from this vantage point, he found himself almost going into a trance; the chill and the lack of oxygen and the fatigue just seemed to drain away. Not that they were gone—they just didn’t seem to matter anymore.

And suddenly he saw that there was far more out there than had ever been apparent. Thin lines that looked to be made of nothing solid, of nothing he could comprehend, all over the sky, above him, below him, creating a complex but highly geometric three-dimensional grid that linked up with the distant city on the one hand and with certain points in the high mountains on either side and behind him somewhere. He had never seen them before, and did not understand why he had not, nor what they could possibly be, but they covered everything, the whole of creation.

He didn’t actually feel their presence, either; nothing rummaged in his mind, possibly because it already knew that there was nothing of interest to it there. But, slowly, without his even realizing it, it was as if a part of him was being drawn out, as if scum were skimmed off the top of standing water, or more like the wisps of cloud that made Littlefeet who he was just breaking off and lazily drifting out over the edge and above the plain toward that distant strange sight.

As if something cared not about his body but was skimming off his soul.

A thick cloud broke off and away behind him and slowly drifted overhead, darkening the lookout and dropping the temperature. It continued on, sinking as it went until he suddenly found himself in a chill fog unable to see the distant place. It felt like a connection had been broken, and at once the discomfort was all too real.

Still, he felt not fear or anger but confusion. It was odd; he couldn’t seem to remember who he was, or where he was, or why he was there. It was as if the humanity had been drained from him, leaving him only basic animal reasoning. He was tired and he was cold. He carefully made his way back toward the trail, which some remaining instinct said was the safe way to go, and then he started down, just wanting out of there, down from there, and out of the cold, wet cloud.

He had no idea then or later how he got down; everything was a total blur. When they found him, wandering near the base of the mountain near the entrance to the valley, he was dazed, confused, and didn’t seem to recognize anyone.

Father Alex rushed to him as soon as he heard. The scouts who discovered the boy were quite right not to bring him back into the camp; no matter how well they knew him, they dared not risk the entire Family on what might have been a possession, conversion, or some other kind of trap using him. Besides, there were still a dozen unexplained dead men not far away.

“Littlefeet!” Father Alex snapped. “Look at me! Look at me! Look directly into my eyes. Look only at me! Look!” He reached out and his powerful hands forced the young man’s head to face him. “Now speak! Speak! Say anything at all! Who am I? What is my name?”

Littlefeet’s field of vision filled with nothing but the ruddy-faced bearded man’s stern face and penetrating eyes. He was unable to turn away because of the strength of the priest’s hands; he had to stare directly into them and listen to the shouting. Something inside him told him that he was in no danger here; that these were friends. Kin. Family…

“I—I—” he tried, but then he simply collapsed, limp, unconscious on the ground. Father Alex let him fall, then checked to be sure that Littlefeet had simply passed out and wasn’t dead.

“Bind him,” he instructed the warriors who stood close by, watching none too comfortably. “Run a spear through the bindings on his hands and feet and we’ll carry him suspended that way. I do not want him unbound until I can get him to come around. Give him food, drink, whatever, but he is not to be unbound, understand?”

They didn’t like it, but they did as they were told.

Littlefeet did not protest; he was sleeping the sleep of the dead, and it was more than two days before he awoke.

He came around and discovered that he was bound, and he struggled, but they had done a good job. His arms were behind his back, bound together at the wrists with strong, tough vines; his feet were also brought back and bound, then hands and feet had been tied together. They had varied this now and again to ensure that circulation wasn’t cut forever, but otherwise he was on his side and unable to move more than his head and neck.

They had moved in the patterns, he’d sensed. This was not where he had left them nor where they had found him, but, nonetheless, they were where they were supposed to be.

The guard went and fetched Father Alex right away, even though it was dark and the priest was actually settling down for the night. He wasted no time making it over to Littlefeet.

“Can you talk?” the priest asked him gently.

“T—tma al-ka? Taalk! Talk…” he managed. It was hard to speak; the words would not come.

Father Alex sat the young man up against a rock and, with the aid of the guard, retied him so that his arms and legs were no longer bound together, but were still bound. It was then a long, patient night drawing him out, bit by bit.

In many ways, Father Alex thought, it was as if the boy—to him, Littlefeet was still a boy, no matter what the Family said—had suffered a brain seizure. Knowledge of medicine was pretty well faded, but he understood that much, and had seen its effects. He’d also seen this sort of thing before, with a more troubling cause—the one he rightly suspected had done it here.

Littlefeet was slowly regaining conversational abilities, but on a limited basis, having to think out each word as if doing so for the first time. It gave him a kind of pidgin that was useful for communication on some level, but it wasn’t normal by any means. Father Alex knew that the lasting effects went in different ways depending on a lot of factors. Littlefeet might always have some problems, they might go away quickly or slowly over time, or he might suffer a second stroke and either die or be as good as dead. A lot depended on getting the sufferer back to some kind of activity quickly.

Even so, it was morning before a tired but satisfied priest had him to where progress was clear.

“What is your name?”

“No—no can think name.”

“You are Littlefeet. Can you say that?”

“Li—Li’1… No.”

It was tough on him, and he could see the young man was going through inner agony.

“Name,” Littlefeet repeated. “No names in head. Like all gone. Know you, know me, know them, no names.” Over the next couple of days he was allowed a limited freedom, always under guard but no longer bound, and was able to physically recover to some extent.

“Some of it is venom,” Mother Paulista said after examining him. “He was bit repeatedly by rock spiders and some other things I cannot imagine. It is likely he got a terrible fever from it. Such fevers are known to damage minds.”

Father Alex accepted that this was the probable cause of much of it, but not all. Littlefeet had become conversant enough to tell, in somewhat broken sentences, what he had seen up there, high in the mountains, and once he’d gotten past water as a white solid and warm, wet caves and the like, he’d told of looking out over the vastness of the world.

“You looked at the demon city, didn’t you?” the priest pressed. “You looked even though you were warned not to, and it started to steal something from you.”

Littlefeet nodded. “Yes. Steal what be me.” He paused. “Steal names. My name. Your name. All names.”

Memory was coming back, not as a flood but in bits and pieces, and there were whole experiences that were quite firm, from his first night of manhood to scouting the rock, but while the faces were there the names did not come back, and when he heard the names, it was as if he’d never heard them before even if they were constantly repeated, and as soon as the person left his sight, the name vanished from his mind.

“What did you see up there? What did you see that made you upset?” the priest pressed, knowing that Littlefeet had several times made references to intangible threats.

“Shapes. Dancing Fam’lies.” He brought up his right hand and started tracing with his index finger. “Dance here and here and here and here, till you get here. Then you dance and dance backward to here.”

“Who is dancing? Or what?”

“Us. We dance. Fam’lies dance. Fam’lies dance now. Everybody know but the dancers…”

There was something here, the priest knew, enough to discuss it with both the male and female elders of the Family, but what did it mean? Littlefeet had given up a part of himself but he had gained some kind of information, perhaps insight, that the Family as a whole did not have. This, too, had happened before, but just what wisdom had been imparted wasn’t clear.

“The other thing he speaks about often is lines. Pretty lines,” the priest told the gathering of elders. “Lines in the air that crisscross. I had him try drawing what he meant, and he came up with this.” Taking a stick, Father Alex wiped a dirt area clear and then drew a set of intersecting lines.

“A grid, that is what it was called,” said Perry, the oldest and therefore senior of the guard. He might have been as old as the priest, and looked even older. “We still use it, in a sense, to know where things are from season to season.”

“These are on the ground?” Mother Paulista asked, confused.

“No, no, Mother! In our heads. We learn the grids as you learn the scriptures, and teach it to our next generations. It does not even resemble a grid at this point, but we use these kinds of dirt drawings to show where we go the next time, and the next, and where the water is, and so on. Our scouts use this knowledge to find the best places.”

“I don’t think he means on the ground,” Father Alex agreed. “I think he means that he saw some kind of grid that went up to the sky as well as from horizon to horizon. It’s not there now, or, most likely, we can’t see it, but he is convinced of its reality.”

“Stuff and nonsense! Fever delirium, that’s all it is!” Paulista huffed.

“Perhaps not. Perhaps the demons use this grid somehow, and if you are high enough up there it becomes visible because you are looking at it from a different, downward angle. It could be any number of things, but the fact that he saw a grid, I think, is real. Others have reported this in times past, although not quite so clearly. The question is, what is it for and does it threaten us?”

“It can’t!” argued not only Mother Paulista but many others, including Perry. “It surely would have been there since the Great Fall, and it has meant nothing to us or our survival even if it has been there all this time!”

Father Alex was not so sanguine. All the Families in a dance, a whirling dance to here, then they stop and dance backward…

According to a grid? A dance was a structured thing, whether done for pleasure or in ritual. It had to be. Something Perry said about the grid they memorized and passed on…

If it was random, why did they need a grid? And if it wasn’t…?

He decided for now not to press that point, but he was beginning to see what Littlefeet was getting at. We’re all afraid of becoming pets, of becoming animals wandering the garden, just another bunch of animals in the demon groves. What if they already were? What if they were and didn’t even realize it?

The more he thought about it, the more obvious it became, and the more frightening. This was suddenly so obvious, since it was so much of a ritualistic pattern in how and when and where they moved and camped, that it was incredible that nobody had seen it until now. Others had climbed, and others had also experienced the kind of terrible insight that Littlefeet had, but not that kind of information.

Why not?

Littlefeet had learned it at the cost of forgetting all names, even his own. What if that wasn’t an effect of fever? Even Mother Paulista, who was always so keen to ascribe every bad thing to demonic plots and faithlessness among the people, had dismissed this as nonsense and the ravings of fever.

Had the ability of most of the people to follow this logic somehow been stolen from them in the night? Was there information, memory, certain processes that they were blind to?

That was a discomforting thought, but also a dead end. If you had been somehow influenced not to think of certain things or to see certain things, then how would you ever know?

And, if that were so, why did he see it now? He hadn’t been up there.

Not in twenty years, anyway…