The Eye of the Heron

11

Vera had meant to stay awake to see them off, but she had fallen asleep by the fire, and the soft knock at the door did not waken her. Southwind and Luz looked at each other; Southwind shook her head. Luz knelt and hastily, as silently as she could, laid a fresh square of peat behind the coals, so the house would stay warm through the night. Southwind, made awkward by her heavy coat and backpack, stooped and touched Vera’s gray hair with her lips; then she looked around the house, a bewildered, hurried look, and went out. Luz followed her.

The night was cloudy but dry, very dark. The cold of it woke Luz from her long trance of waiting, and she caught her breath. There were people around her in the dark, a few soft voices. “Both there? All right, come on.” They set off, past the house, through the potato field, toward the low ridge that lay behind it to the east. As Luz’s eyes became accustomed to the dark she made out that the person who walked beside her was Lev’s father, Sasha; sensing her gaze in the darkness he said, “How’s the pack?”

“It’s all right,” she said in a bare whisper. They must not talk, they must not make any noise, she thought, not yet, not till they were clear of the settlement, past the last village and the last farm, across Mill River, a long way. They must go fast and silently, and not be stopped, O Lord God please not be stopped!

“Mine’s made of iron ingots, or unforgiven sins,” Sasha murmured; and they went on in silence, a dozen shadows in the shadow of the world.

It was still dark when they came to Mill River, a few kilometers south of where it joined the Songe. The boat was waiting, Andre and Holdfast waiting with it. Hari rowed six across, then the second six. Luz was in the second lot. As they neared the eastern shore the solid blackness of the nightworld was growing insubstantial, a veil of light dimming all things, a mist thickening on the water. Shivering, she set foot on the far shore. Left alone in the boat, which Andre and the others had already pushed off again, Hari called out softly, “Good luck, good luck! Peace go with you!” And the boat vanished into the mist like a ghost; and the twelve stood there on the ghostly, fading sand.

“Up this way,” said Andre’s voice out of the mist and pallor. “They’ll have breakfast for us.”

They were the last and smallest of the three groups to leave, one group a night; the others were waiting farther on among the rugged hills east of the Mill, country where only coney trappers went. In single file, following Andre and Holdfast, they left the riverbank and set off into the wild land.

She had been thinking for hours and hours, step after step, that as soon as they stopped she would sink right down on the dirt or the mud or the sand, sink down and not move again till morning. But when they stopped she saw Martin and Andre, up at the front, discussing something, and she went on, step after step, till she came up with them, and even then did not sink down, but kept standing, to hear what they were talking about.

“Martin thinks the compass isn’t reading true,” Andre said. With a dubious look, he held the instrument out to Luz, as if she could judge its inaccuracy at a glance. What she saw was its delicacy, the box of polished wood, the gold ring, the glass, the frail burnished needle hovering, trembling between the finely incised points: what a beautiful thing, miraculous, improbable, she thought. But Martin was looking at it with disapproval. “I’m sure it’s pulling east,” he said. “Must be iron-ore masses in those hills, deflecting it.” He nodded toward the east. For a day and a half they had been in a queer scrubby country that bore no ringtrees or cottonwools but only a sparse, tangled scrub which grew no more than a couple of meters high; it was not forest, but not open country; there was seldom any long view. But they knew that to the east, to their left, the line of high hills they had first seen six days ago went on. Whenever they came up on a rise in the scrublands, they saw the dark red, rocky skyline of the heights.

“Well,” Luz said, hearing her own voice for the first time in hours, “does it matter much?”

Andre chewed his lower lip. His face looked bone weary, the eyes narrowed and lifeless. “Not for going on,” he said. “So long as we have the sun or some stars at night. But for making the map … .”

“What if we turn east again. Get over those hills. They aren’t getting any lower,” Martin said. A younger man than Andre, he looked far less tired. He was one of the mainstays of the group. Luz felt at ease with Martin; he looked like a City man, stocky, dark, well muscled, rather curt and somber; even his name was a common one in the City. But for all Martin’s comfortable strength, it was to Andre that she turned with her question.

“Can’t we mark the trail yet?”

Unwilling to make any trail that could be followed, they had tried to map their course. A map could be brought back to Shantih by a few messengers, after a couple of years, to guide a second group to the new colony. That was the only reason for making it that they ever spoke of. Andre, the map maker of the northern journey, was in charge of it, and he felt his responsibility as a heavy one, for the unspoken purpose of the map was always in their minds. It was their one link to Shantih, to humankind, to their own past lives; their one assurance that they were not simply wandering lost in the wilderness, aimless, without goal and, since they could mark no trail, without hope of return.

At times Luz clung to the idea of the map, at times she was impatient with it. Martin was keen on it, but his keenest care was that they keep their trail covered; he winced, Italia remarked, when anybody stepped on a stick and broke it. Certainly they had left, in the ten days of their journey, as little mark of their going as sixty-seven people could leave.

Martin was shaking his head at Luz’s question. “Look,” he said, “our choice of route has been so obvious, the easiest way, right from the start.”

Andre smiled. It was a dry crack of a smile, like a crack in tree bark, and narrowed his eyes to two lesser cracks. That was why Luz liked to be with Andre, drew strength from him, that humorous patient smile, like a tree smiling.

“Consider the options, Martin!” he said, and she saw what he was imagining: a party of City men, Macmilan’s bullies, guns and whips and boots and all, standing on the bluffs of the Songe, looking north, east, south, over the gray rusty-ringed rising falling rain-darkened unending trackless voiceless enormous wilderness, and trying to decide which, of a hundred possible directions, the fugitives had chosen.

“All right,” she said, “let’s cross the hills, then.”

“Climbing won’t be much harder than slogging through this scrub,” Andre said.

Martin nodded. “Turn east again here, then?”

“Here as well as anywhere,” said Andre, and got out his grubby, dog-eared sketch map to make a note.

“Now?” Luz asked. “Or camp?”

They usually did not camp till near sundown, but they had come a long way today. She looked around the shoulder-high, thorny, bronze-colored bushes, which grew spaced a meter or two apart so that millions of pointless winding trails led around and between and amongst them. Only a few of the group were visible; most of them had sat right down to rest when the halt was called. Overhead was a lead-gray sky, featureless, one even cloud. No rain had fallen for two nights, but the weather was getting colder every hour.

“Well, a few more kilos,” Andre said, “and we’d be at the foot of the hills; might find some shelter there. And water.” He looked at her judgingly, and waited for her judgment. He, Martin, Italia, the other pathfinders, often used her and a couple of the older women as representatives of the weak, the ones who could not keep the pace the strongest would have kept. She did not mind. She walked each day right to the limit of her endurance, or beyond it. The first three days of the journey, when they had been hurrying, afraid of pursuit, had exhausted her, and though she was growing tougher she never could make up that initial loss. She accepted this, and saved all her resentment for her backpack, that monstrous and irascible, knee-bending, neck-destroying load. If only they didn’t have to carry everything with them! But they could not push carts without making, or leaving, paths; and sixty-seven people could not live off the wilderness while traveling, or settle in it without tools, even if it were not late autumn getting on to winter … .

“A few more kilos,” she said. She was always surprised when she said things like that. “A few more kilos,” as if it were nothing at all, when for the last six hours she had longed, craved to sit down, just to sit down, just to sit down for a minute, a month, a year! But now they had spoken of turning east again she found she also craved to get out of this dreary maze of thorn-scrub, into the hills, where maybe you could see your way ahead.

“Few minutes’ rest,” she added, and sat down, slipping off her pack straps and rubbing her aching shoulders. Andre promptly sat down too. Martin went off to talk with some of the others and discuss the change of course. None of them was visible, they had all vanished in the sea of thorn-scrub, taking their few minutes’ rest already, flat out on the sandy, grayish soil littered with thorns. She could not see even Andre, only a corner of his pack. A northwest wind, faint but cold, rustled the little dry branches of the bushes. There was no other sound.

Sixty-seven people: no sight of them, no sound of them. Vanished. Lost. A drop of water in the river, a word blown off on the wind. Some small creatures moved a little while in the wilderness, not going very far, and then ceased to move, and it made no difference to the wilderness, or to anything, no more difference than the dropping of one thorn among a million thorns or the shifting of a grain of sand.

The fear she had come to know these ten days of their journeying came up like a small gray fog in the fields of her mind, a chill creep of blindness. It was hers, hers by inheritance and training; it was to keep out her fear, their fear, that the roofs and walls of the City had been raised; it was fear that had drawn the streets so straight, and made the doors so narrow. She had scarcely known it, living behind those doors. She had felt quite safe. Even in Shantih she had forgotten it, stranger as she was, for the walls there were not visible but were very strong: companionship, cooperation, love; the close human circle. But she had walked away from that, by choice, and walked out into the wilderness, and come face to face at last with the fear that all her life had been built upon.

She could not simply face it, but had to fight it when it first began to come upon her, or it would blot out everything, and she would lose the power of choice entirely. She had to fight blindly, for no reason stood against that fear. It was a great deal older and stronger than ideas.

There was the idea of God. Back in the City they talked about God to children. He made all the worlds, and he punished the wicked, and sent good people up to Heaven when they died. Heaven was a beautiful house with a gold roof where Meria, God’s mother, everybody’s mother, tenderly waited for the souls of the dead. She had liked that story. When she was little she had prayed to God to make things happen and not happen, because he could do anything if you asked him; later she had liked to imagine God’s mother and her mother keeping house together. But when she thought of Heaven here, it was small and far away, like the City. It had nothing to do with the wilderness. There was no God here; he belonged to people, and where there were no people there was no God. At the funeral for Lev and the others they had talked about God, too, but that was back there, back there. Here there was nothing like that. Nobody had made this wilderness, and there was no evil in it and no good; it simply was.

She drew a circle in the sandy dirt near her foot, making it as perfect as she could, using a thorny twig to draw it with. That was a world, or a self, or God, that circle, you could call it anything. Nothing else in the wilderness could think of a circle like that —she thought of the delicate gold ring around the compass glass. Because she was human, she had the mind and eyes and skillful hand to imagine the idea of a circle and to draw the idea. But any drop of water falling from a leaf into a pool or rain puddle could make a circle, a more perfect one, fleeting outward from the center, and if there were no boundary to the water the circle would fleet outward forever, fainter and fainter, forever larger. She could not do that, which any drop of water could do. Inside her circle what was there? Grains of sand, dust, a few tiny pebbles, a half-buried thorn, Andre’s tired face, the sound of Southwind’s voice, Sasha’s eyes which were like Lev’s eyes, the ache of her own shoulders where the pack straps pulled, and her fear. The circle could not keep out the fear. And the hand erased the circle, smoothing out the sand, leaving it as it had always been and would always be after they had gone on.

“At first I felt that I was leaving Timmo behind,” Southwind said, as she studied the worst blister on her left foot. “When we left the house. He and I built it … you know. I felt as if I was walking away and finally leaving him forever, leaving him behind. But now it doesn’t seem that way. It was out here he died, in the wilderness. Not here, I know; way back up north there. But I don’t feel that he’s so terribly far away as I did all autumn living in our house, it’s almost as if I’d come out to join him. Not dying, I don’t mean that. It’s just that there I only thought about his death, and here, while we’re walking, all the time, I think about him alive. As if he was with me now.”

They had camped in a fold of the land just under the red hills, beside a lively, rocky stream. They had built their fires, cooked, and eaten; many were already stretched out in their blankets to sleep. It was not dark yet, but so cold that if you weren’t moving about you must either huddle to the fire or wrap up and sleep. The first five nights of the journey they had not built fires, for fear of pursuers, and those had been miserable nights; Luz had never known such a pure delight as she had felt at their first campfire, back in a great tree-ring on the south slope of the badlands, and every night that pleasure came again, the utter luxury of hot food, of warmth. The three families she and Southwind camped and cooked with were settling down for the night; the youngest child—the youngest of the whole migration, a boy of eleven—was curled up like a pouchbat in his blanket already, fast asleep. Luz tended the fire, while Southwind tended her blisters. Up and down the riverbank were seven other fires, the farthest no more than a candle flame in the blue-gray dusk, a spot of hazy, trembling gold. The noise of the stream covered any sound of voices round the other fires.

“I’ll get some more brushwood,” Luz said. She was not avoiding an answer to what Southwind had said. No answer was needed. Southwind was gentle and complete; she gave and spoke, expecting no return; in all the world there could be no companion less demanding, or more encouraging.

They had done a good day’s walk, twenty-seven kilometers by Martin’s estimate; they had got out of that drab nightmare labyrinth of scrub; they had had a hot dinner, the fire was hot, and it was not raining. Even the ache in Luz’s shoulders was pleasant (because the pack was not pulling on them) when she stood up. It was these times at the day’s end, by the fire, that counterweighed the long dreary hungry afternoons of walking and walking and walking and trying to ease the cut of the pack straps on her shoulders, and the hours in the mud and rain when there seemed to be no reason at all to go on, and the worst hours, in the black dark of the night, when she woke always from the same terrible dream: that there was a circle of some things, not people, standing around their camp, just out of sight, not visible in the darkness, but watching.

“This one’s better,” Southwind said when Luz came back with an armload of wood from the thickets up the slope, “but the one on my heel isn’t. You know, all today I’ve been feeling that we aren’t being followed.”

“I don’t think we ever were,” Luz said, building up the fire. “I never did think they’d really care, even if they knew. They don’t want to think about the wilderness, in the City. They want to pretend it isn’t there.”

“I hope so. I hated feeling that we were running. Being explorers is a much braver feeling.”

Luz got the fire settled to burning low but warm, and squatted by it simply soaking the heat up for some while.

“I miss Vera,” she said. Her throat was dry with the dust of walking, and she did not use her voice often these days; it sounded dry and harsh to her, like her father’s voice.

“She’ll come with the second group,” Southwind said with comfortable certainty, winding a cloth strip around her pretty, battered foot, and tying it off firmly at the ankle. “Ah, that feels better. I’m going to wrap my feet tomorrow like Holdfast does. It’ll be warmer, too.”

“If it just won’t rain.”

“It won’t rain tonight.” The Shantih people were much weather-wiser than Luz. They had not lived so much within doors as she, they knew what the wind meant, even here, where the winds were different.

“It might tomorrow,” Southwind added, beginning to wriggle into her blanket-bag, her voice already sounding small and warm.

“Tomorrow we’ll be up in the hills,” Luz said. She looked up, to the east, but the near slope of the stream valley and the blue-gray dusk hid that rocky skyline. The clouds had thinned; a star shone out for a while high in the east, small and misty, then vanished as the unseen clouds rejoined. Luz watched for it to reappear, but it did not. She felt foolishly disappointed. The sky was dark now, the ground was dark. No light anywhere, except the eight gold flecks, their campfires, a tiny constellation in the night. And far off there, days behind them in the west, thousands and thousands of steps behind them, behind the scrubland and the badland and the hills and the valleys and the streams, beside the great river running to the sea, a few more lights: the City and the Town, a tiny huddle of yellow-lit windows. The river dark, running in darkness. And no light on the sea.

She reset a log to smolder more slowly, and banked the ashes against it. She found her sleeping bag and wriggled down into it, next to Southwind. She wanted to talk, now. Southwind had seldom spoken much of Timmo. She wanted to hear her talk about him, and about Lev; she wanted for the first time to speak about Lev herself. There was too much silence here. Things would get lost in the silence. One should speak. And Southwind would understand. She too had lost her luck, and known death, and gone on.

Luz said her name softly, but the warm blanket-bundle next to her did not stir. Southwind was asleep.

Luz settled down cautiously, getting herself comfortable. The river beach, though stony, was a better bed than last night’s in the thorny scrubland. But her body was so tired that it felt heavy, unwieldy, hard; her chest was hard and tight. She closed her eyes. At once she saw the hall of Casa Falco, long and serene, the silver light reflected from the Bay filling the windows; and her father standing there, erect, alert, self-contained, as he always stood. But he was standing there doing nothing, which was not like him. Michael and Teresa were off in the doorway, whispering together. She felt a curious resentment toward them. Her father stood with his back to them, as if he did not know they were there, or as if he knew it, but was afraid of them. He raised his arms in a strange way. She saw his face for a moment. He was crying. She could not breathe, she tried to draw a long breath but could not; it caught; because she was crying—deep shaking sobs from which she could scarcely gasp a breath before the next came. Racked with sobs, lying shaken and tormented on the ground in the enormous night, she wept for the dead, for the lost. Not fear now, but grief, the grief past enduring, that endures.

Her weariness and the darkness drank her tears, and she fell asleep before she was done weeping. She slept all night without dreams or evil wakings, like a stone among the stones.

The hills were high and hard. The uphill going was not bad, for they could zigzag up across the great, open, rusty slopes, but when they got to the top, among the rimrock piled like houses and towers, they saw that they had climbed only the first of a triple or quadruple chain of hills, and that the farther ridges were higher.

In the canyons between the ridges ringtrees crowded, not growing in rings but jammed close and shooting up unnaturally high toward the light. The heavy shrub called aloes crowded between the red trunks, making the going very difficult; but there was still fruit on the aloes, thick rich dark flesh wrinkled about a center seed, a welcome addition to the scanty food in their packs. In this country they had no choice but to leave a trail behind them: they had to cut their way with brush hooks to get on at all. They were a day getting through the canyon, another climbing the second line of hills, beyond which lay the next chain of canyons massed with bronze trees and crimson underbrush, and beyond it a formidable ridge, steep-spurred, rising in bare screes to the rock-capped summit.

They had to camp down in the gorge the next night. Even Martin, after cutting and hacking their way forward step by step, by mid-afternoon was too tired to go on. When they camped, those who were not worn out from path-making spread out from the camp, cautiously and not going far, for in the undergrowth you could lose all sense of direction very easily. They found and picked aloes, and several of the boys, led by Welcome, found freshwater mussels in the stream at the bottom of the gorge when they went for water. They had a good meal that night. They needed it, for it was raining again. Mist, rain, evening grayed the heavy vivid reds of the forest. They built up brushwood shelters and huddled by fires which would not stay alight.

“I saw a queer thing, Luz.”

He was a strange fellow, Sasha; the oldest of them all, though tough and wiry, better able to keep up than some of the younger men; never out of temper, totally self-reliant, and almost totally silent. Luz had never seen him take part in a conversation beyond a yes or no, a smile or head shake. She knew he had never spoken at the Meeting House, never been one of Elia’s group or Vera’s people, never been a choice-maker among his people, though he was the son of one of their great heroes and leaders, Shults who had led the Long March from the streets of the City Moskva to the Port of Lisboa, and on. Shults had had other children, but they had died in the first hard years on Victoria; only Sasha, last-born, Victoria-born, had lived. And had fathered a son, and seen him die. He never talked. Only, sometimes, to her, to Luz. “I saw a queer thing, Luz.”

“What?”

“An animal.” He pointed to the right, up the steep slope of brush and trees, a dark wall now in the fading light. “There’s a bit of a clearing up there where a couple of big trees went down and cleared some room. Found some aloes at one end of it and was picking them. Looked over my shoulder—felt something watching. It was at the far end of the clearing.” He paused a minute, not for effect but to order his description. “It was gathering aloes too. I thought it was a man at first. Like a man. But it wasn’t much bigger than a coney, when it went down on all fours. Dark-colored, with a reddish head—a big head, seemed too big for the rest of it. A center eye, like a wotsit, looking at me. Eyes on the sides too, I think, but I couldn’t see it clear enough. It stared a minute and then it turned and went into the trees.”

His voice was low and even.

“It sounds frightening,” Luz said quietly, “I don’t know why.” But she did know why, thinking of her dream of the beings who came and watched; though she had not had the dream since they were in the scrublands.

Sasha shook his head. They were squatting side by side under a rough roof of branches. He rubbed the beaded rain off his hair, rubbed down his bristling gray mustache. “There’s nothing here will hurt us,” he said. “Except ourselves. Are there any stories in the City about animals we don’t know of?”

“No—only the scures.”

“Scures?”

“Old stories. Creatures like men, with glaring eyes, hairy. My cousin Lores talked about them. My father said they were men—exiles, or men who had wandered off, crazy men, gone wild.”

Sasha nodded. “Nothing like that would come this far,” he said. “We’re the first.”

“We’ve only lived there on the coast. I suppose there are animals we’ve never seen before.”

“Plants too. See that, it’s like what we call white-berry, but it’s not the same. I never saw it until yesterday.”

Presently he said, “There’s no name for the animal I saw.”

Luz nodded.

Between her and Sasha was silence, the bond of silence. He did not speak of the animal to others, nor did she. They knew nothing of this world, their world, only that they must walk in it in silence, until they had learned a language fitting to be spoken here. He was one who was willing to wait.

The second ridge climbed, in a third day of rain. A longer, shallower valley, where the going was easier. About midday the wind turned, blowing down from the north, scouring the ridges free of cloud and mist. All afternoon they climbed the last slope, and that evening in a vast, cold clarity of light they came up among the massive, rusty rock-formations of the summit, and saw the eastern lands.

They gathered there slowly, the slowest still struggling up the stony slope while the leaders stood waiting for them—a few tiny dark figures, to the climbers’ eyes, against an immense bright emptiness of sky. The short, sparse grass of the ridge top glowed ruddy in the sunset. They all gathered there, sixty-seven people, and stood looking out over the rest of the world. They said little. The rest of the world looked very large.

The shadows of the ridge they had been climbing stretched a long way across the plain. Beyond those shadows the land was gold, a hazy, reddish, wintry gold, dimly streaked and mottled with courses of distant streams and the bulk of low hills or ringtree groves. Far across that plateau, at the very edge of the eyes’ reach, mountains rose against the tremendous, colorless, windy sky.

“How far?” someone asked.

“A hundred kilometers to the foothills, maybe.”

“They’re big … .”

“Like the ones we saw in the north, over Lake Serene.”

“It may be the same range. It ran southeastward.”

“That plain is like the sea, it goes on and on.”

“It’s cold up here!”

“Let’s get down over the summit, out of the wind.”

Long after the high plains had sunk into gray, the keen small edge of sunlit ice burned there at the edge of vision in the east. It whitened and faded; the stars came out, thick in the windy blackness, all the constellations, all the bright cities that were not their home.

Wild bog-rice grew thick by the streams of the plateau; they lived on that during the eight days of their crossing. The Iron Hills shrank behind them, a wrinkled rusty line drawn down the west. The plain was alive with coneys, a longer-legged breed than those of the coastal forests; the riverbanks were pocked and hollowed with their warrens, and when the sun was out the coneys came out, and sat in the sun, and watched the people pass with tranquil, uninterested eyes.

“You’d have to be a fool to starve here,” Holdfast said, watching Italia lay her snares near a glittering, stony ford.

But they went on. The wind blew bitter on that high, open land, and there was no wood to build with, or to burn. They went on until the land began to swell, rising toward the foothills of the mountains, and they came to a big river, south-running, which Andre the map maker named the Grayrock. To cross it they must find a ford, which looked unlikely, or build rafts. Some were for crossing, putting that barrier too behind them. Others were for turning south again and going on along the west bank of the river. While they deliberated, they set up their first stopping-place camp. One of the men had hurt his foot in a fall, and there were several other minor injuries and troubles; their footgear needed mending; they were all weary, and needed a few days’ rest. They put up shelters of brushwood and thatchleaf, the first day. It was cold, with gathering clouds, though the bitter wind did not blow here. That night the first snow fell.

It seldom snowed at Songe Bay; never this early in the winter. They were no longer in the soft climate of the western coast. The coastal hills, the badlands, and the Iron Hills caught the rain that came in on the west winds off the sea; here it would be dryer, but colder.

The great range toward which they had been walking, the sharp heights of ice, had seldom been visible while they crossed the plain, snowclouds hiding all but the blue foothills. They were in those foothills now, a haven between the windy plain and the stormy peaks. They had entered a narrow stream valley which wound and widened till it opened out on the broad, deep gorge of the Grayrock. The valley floor was forested, mostly with ringtrees and a few thick stands of cottonwools, but there were many glades and clearings among the trees. The hills on the north side of the valley were steep and craggy, sheltering the valley and the lower, open, southern slopes. It was a pleasant place. They had all felt at ease there, putting up their shelters, the first day. But in the morning the glades were white, and under the ringtrees, though the bronze foliage had kept the light snow off, every stone and leaf of withered grass sparkled with thick frost. The people huddled up to the fires to thaw out before they could go gather more firewood.

“Brushwood shelters aren’t what we need in this kind of weather,” Andre said gloomily, rubbing his stiff, chapped hands. “Ow, ow, ow, I’m cold.”

“It’s clearing off,” Luz said, looking up through a broad gap in the trees, where their side-valley opened out into the river gorge; above the steep farther shore of the Grayrock, the Eastern Range glittered hugely, dark blue and white.

“For now. It’ll snow again.”

Andre looked frail, hunched there by the fire that burned almost invisible in the fresh morning sunlight: frail, cold, discouraged. Luz, much rested by the day without walking, felt a freshness of spirit like the morning light; she felt a great love for Andre, the patient, anxious man. She squatted down beside him by the fire, and patted his shoulder. “This is a good place, isn’t it,” she said.

He nodded, hunched up, still rubbing his sore, red hands.

“Andre.”

He grunted.

“Maybe we should be building cabins, not shelters.”

“Here?”

“It’s a good place … .”

He looked around at the high red trees, the stream rushing loudly down toward the Grayrock, the sunlit, open slopes to the south, the great blue heights eastward. “It’s all right,” he said grudgingly. “Plenty of wood and water, anyhow. Fish, coneys, we could last out the winter here.”

“Maybe we should? While there’s time to put up cabins?”

Hunched up, his arms hanging between his knees, Andre mechanically rubbed his hands. She watched him, her hand still on his shoulder.

“It would suit me,” he said at last.

“If we’ve come far enough …”

“We’ll have to get everybody together, agree … .” He looked at her; he put his arm up around her shoulders. They squatted side by side, linked, rocking a little on their heels, close to the quivering half-seen fire. “I’ve had enough running,” he said. “Have you?”

She nodded.

“I don’t know. I wonder …”

“What?”

Andre stared at the sunlit fire, his face, drawn and weatherbeaten, flushed by the heat.

“They say when you’re lost, really lost, you always go in a circle,” he said. “You come back to where you started from. Only you don’t always recognize it.”

“This isn’t the City,” Luz said. “Nor the Town.”

“No. Not yet.”

“Not ever,” she said, her brows drawn down straight and harsh. “This is a new place, Andre. A beginning place.”

“God willing.”

“I don’t know what God wants.” She put out her free hand and scratched up a little of the damp, half-frozen earth, and squeezed it in her palm. “That’s God,” she said, opening her hand on the half-molded sphere of black dirt. “That’s me. And you. And the others. And the mountains. We’re all … it’s all one circle.”

“You’ve lost me, Luz.”

“I don’t know what I’m talking about. I want to stay here, Andre.”

“Then I expect we will,” Andre said, and thumped her between the shoulders. “Would we ever have started, I wonder, if it hadn’t been for you?”

“Oh, don’t say that, Andre—”

“Why not? It’s the truth.”

“I have enough on my conscience without that. I have—If I—”

“This is a new place, Luz,” he said very gently. “The names are new here.” She saw there were tears in his eyes. “This is where we build the world,” he said, “out of mud.”

Eleven-year-old Asher came toward Luz, who was down on the bank of the Grayrock gathering freshwater mussels from the icy, weed-fringed rocks of a backwater. “Luz,” he said when he was near enough not to have to speak loudly. “Look.”

She was glad to straighten up and get her hands out of the bitter cold of the water. “What have you got there?”

“Look,” the boy said in a whisper, holding out his open hand. On the palm sat a little creature like a shadow-colored toad with wings. Three gold pinhead eyes stared unwinking, one at Asher, two at Luz.

“A wotsit.”

“I never saw one close up before.”

“He came to me. I was coming down here with the baskets, and he flew into one, and I put out my hand and he got onto it.”

“Would he come to me?”

“I don’t know. Hold out your hand.”

She put her hand beside Asher’s. The wotsit trembled and for a moment blurred into a mere vibration of fronds or feathers; then, with a hop or flight too quick for the eye to follow, it transferred itself to Luz’s palm, and she felt the grip of six warm, tiny, wiry feet.

“O you are beautiful,” she said softly to the creature, “you are beautiful. And I could kill you, but I couldn’t keep you, not even hold you … .”

“If you put them in a cage, they die,” the child said.

“I know,” Luz said.

The wotsit was now turning blue, the pure, azure blue of the sky between the peaks of the Eastern Range on days, like this day, of winter sunlight. The three gold pinhead eyes glittered. The wings, bright and translucent, shot out, startling Luz; her hand’s slight movement launched the little creature on its upward glide, out over the breadth of the river, eastward, like a fleck of mica on the wind.

She and Asher filled the baskets with the heavy, bearded, black mussel shells, and trudged back up the pathway to the settlement.

“Southwind!” Asher cried, tugging his heavy basket along, “Southwind! There’s wotsits here! One came to me!”

“Of course there are,” Southwind said, trotting down the path to help them with their load. “What a lot you got! Oh, Luz, your poor hands, come on, the cabin’s warm, Sasha brought a new load of wood in on the cart. Did you think there wouldn’t be wotsits here? We’re not that far from home!”

The cabins—nine so far, three more half-built—stood on the south bank of the stream where it widened out into a pool under the branches of a giant single ringtree. They took their water from the little falls at the head of the pool, bathed and washed at the foot of it where it narrowed before its long plunge down to the Grayrock. They called the settlement Heron, or Heron Pool, for the pair of gray creatures who lived on the farther shore of the stream, untroubled by the presence of the human beings, the smoke of their fires, the noise of their work, their coming and going, the sound of their voices. Elegant, long-legged, silent, the herons went about their own business of food gathering on the other side of the wide, dark pool; sometimes they paused in the shallows to gaze at the people with clear, quiet, colorless eyes. Sometimes, on still cold evenings before snow, they danced. As Luz and Southwind and the child turned aside toward their cabin, Luz saw the herons standing near the roots of the great tree, one poised to watch them, the other with its narrow head turned back as it gazed into the forest. “They’ll dance tonight,” she said, under her breath; and she stopped a moment, standing with her heavy load on the path, still as the herons; then went on.