The Telling

SEVEN

It was not a city with banners and golden processions, a temple with drums and bells and the chanting of priests. It was very cold, very dark, very poor. It was silent.

Food, bedding, oil for lamps, stoves and heating devices, everything that made it possible for anyone to live at the Lap of Silong had to be brought up from the eastern hill country on the backs of minules or human beings, little by little, in tiny caravans that would attract no attention, during the few months when it was possible to reach the place at all. In the summer thirty or forty men and women stayed there, living in the caves. Some of them brought books, papers, texts of the Telling. They stayed to arrange and protect all the books already there, the thousands and thousands of volumes brought over the decades from all over the great continent. They stayed to read and study, to be with the books, to be in the caves full of being.

Sutty moved in her first days there through a dream of darkness, strangeness. The caves themselves were bewildering: endless bubble chambers interconnecting, interfacing, dark walls, floors, ceilings all curved into one another seamlessly, so disorienting that sometimes she felt she was floating weightless. Sounds echoed so they had no direction. There was never enough light.

Her group of pilgrims set up their tents in a great vaulted chamber and slept in them, huddled into them for warmth as they had done during their trek. In other caves were other little constellations of tents. One maz couple had taken a three-meter, almost perfectly spherical hollow and made a private nest of it. Cookstoves and tables were in a large, flat-floored cave that received daylight through a couple of high vents, and everybody met there at mealtimes. The cooks scrupulously shared out the food. Never quite enough, and the same few things over and over: thin tea, boiled bean meal, dry cheese, dried leaves of spinach-like yota, a taste of hot pickle. Winter food, though it was summer. Food for the roots, for endurance.

The maz and the students and guides staying there this summer were all from the north and east, the vast hill countries and plains of the continent’s center, Amareza, Doy, Kangnegne. These maz were city people, far more learned and sophisticated than those of the little hill city Sutty knew. Trained in a profound and still unbroken intellectual and bodily and spiritual discipline, heirs to a tradition vaster, even in its ruin and enforced secrecy, than she had ever conceived, they had an impersonality about them as well as great personal authority. They did not play the pundit (Uncle Hurree’s phrase), but even the mildest of them was surrounded by a kind of aura or field — Sutty hated such words yet had to use them — that kept one from informal approach. They were aloof, absorbed in the telling, the books, the treasures of the caves.

The morning after the newcomers’ arrival, the maz named Igneba and Ikak took them to and through what they called the Library. Numbers daubed in luminous paint over the openings corresponded to a chart of the caves that the maz showed them. By going always to a lower number, if you lost your way in the labyrinth — and it was quite easy to do so — you would always return to the outer caves. The man, Igneba Ikak, carried an electric torch, but like so much Akan manufacture it was unreliable or defective and kept failing. Ikak Igneba carried an oil lantern. From it once or twice she lighted lamps hanging on the walls, to illuminate the caves of being, the round rooms full of words, where the Telling lay hidden, in silence. Under rock, under snow.

Books, thousands of books, in leather and cloth and wooden and paper bindings, unbound manuscripts in carved and painted boxes and jewelled caskets, fragments of ancient writing blazing with gold leaf, scrolls in tubes and boxes or tied with tape, books on vellum, parchment, rag paper, pulp paper, handwritten, printed, books on the floors, in boxes, in small crates, on rickety low shelves made of scrap wood from the crates. In one big cave the volumes stood ranked on two shelves, at waist height and eye level, dug into the walls right around the circumference. Those shelves were the work of long ago, Ikak said, carved by maz living here when it was a small umyazu and that one room had been all its library. Those maz had had the time and means for such work. Now all they could do was lay plastic sheeting to keep the books from the dirt or bare rock, stack or arrange them as best they could, try to sort them to some degree, and keep them hidden, keep them safe. Protect them, guard them, and, when there was time, read them.

But nobody in one lifetime could read more than a fragment of what was here, this broken labyrinth of words, this shattered, interrupted, immense story of a people and a world through the centuries, the millennia.

Odiedin sat down on the floor in one of the silent, gleam-lit caves where the books stretched away from the entrance in rows, like rows of mown grass but dark, vanishing into darkness. He sat down between two rows on the stone floor, picked up a small book with a worn cloth cover, and held it in his lap. He bowed his head over it without opening it. Tears ran down his cheeks.

They were free to go into the book caves as they wanted. In the days that followed, Sutty went back and back, wandering with the small, keen beam of an oil lamp to guide her, settling down here and there to read. She had her noter with her and scanned into it what she read, often whole books she didn’t have time to read. She read the texts of blessings, the protocols of ceremonies, recipes, prescriptions for curing cold sores and for living to a great age, stories, legends, annals, lives of famous maz, lives of obscure merchants, testimonies of people who lived thousands of years ago and a few years ago, tales of travel, meditations of mystics, treatises of philosophy and of mathematics, herbals, bestiaries, anatomies, geometries both real and metaphysical, maps of Aka, maps of imaginary worlds, histories of ancient lands, poems. All the poems in the world were here.

She knelt at a wooden crate filled with papers and worn, handmade books, the salvage of some small umyazu or town, saved from the bulldozer and the bonfire, carried here up the long hard ways of the Mountain to be safe, to be kept, to tell. By the light of her lamp on the rock floor she opened one of the books, a child’s primer. The ideograms were written large and without any qualifiers of aspect, mood, number, and Element. On one page was a crude woodcut of a man fishing from a humpbacked bridge. THE MOUNTAIN IS THE MOTHER OF THE RIVER, said the ideograms beneath the picture.

She would stay in the caves reading till the words of the dead, the utter silence, the cold, the globe of darkness surrounding her, grew too strange, and she made her way back to daylight and the ’ sound of living voices.

She knew now that all she would ever know of the Telling was the least hint or fragment of what there was to know. But that was all right; that was how it was. So long as it was here.

One maz couple was making a catalogue of the books in their Akan version of Sutty’s noter. They had been coming up to the caves for twenty years, working on the catalogue. They discussed it with her eagerly, and she promised to try to link her noter with theirs to duplicate and transfer the information.

Though the maz treated her with unfailing courtesy and respect, conversations were mostly formal and often difficult. They all had to speak in a language not their own, Dovzan. Though the Akans spoke it in public in their lives ’down below,’ it was not the language in which they thought, and not the language of the Telling. It was the tongue of the enemy. It was a barrier. Sutty realized how much closer she had drawn to people in Okzat-Ozkat as she learned their Rangma speech. Several of the maz of the Library knew Hainish, which was taught in the Corporation universities as a mark of true education. It wasn’t of much use here, except perhaps in one conversation Sutty had with the young maz Unroy Kigno.

They went out together to enjoy the daylight for an hour and to sweep footsteps away. Since the helicopter had come so close, the first aircraft that had ever done so, the people of the Library took more care to sweep away paths or tracks in the snow that might lead an eye in the sky to the entrances of the caves. Sutty and Unroy had finished the rather pleasant job of throwing the light, dry snow about with brooms, and were taking a breather, sitting on boulders near the minules’ stable.

"What is history?" Unroy asked abruptly, using the Hainish word. "Who are historians? Are you one?"

"The Hainish say I am," Sutty said, and they launched into a long and intense linguistico-philosophical discussion about whether history and the Telling could be understood as the same thing, or similar things, or not alike at all; about what historians did, what maz did, and why.

"I think history and the Telling are the same thing," Unroy said at last. "They’re ways of holding and keeping things sacred."

"What is sacredness?"

"What is true is sacred. What has been suffered. What is beautiful."

"So the Telling tries to find the truth in events … or the pain, or the beauty?"

"No need to try to find it," said Unroy. "The sacredness is there. In the truth, the pain, the beauty. So that the telling of it is sacred."

Her partner, Kigno, was in a prison camp in Doy. He had been arrested and sentenced for teaching atheist religion and reactionary antiscience dogma. Unroy knew where he was, a huge steel-mill complex manned by prisoners, but no communication was possible.

"There are hundreds of thousands of people in the rehabilitation centers," Unroy told Sutty. "The Corporation gets its labor cheap."

"What are you going to do with your prisoner here?"

Unroy shook her head. "I wish he’d been killed like the other one," she said. "He’s a problem we have no solution to."

Sutty agreed in bitter silence.

The Monitor was being well looked after; several of the maz were professional healers. They had put him in a small tent by himself and kept him warm and fed. His tent was in a big cave among seven or eight tents belonging to guides and minule hostlers. There was always somebody there with an ear and an eye, as they put it. In any case there was no danger of his trying to escape until his wrenched back and badly damaged knee mended.

Odiedin visited him daily. Sutty had not yet brought herself to do so.

"His name is Yara," Odiedin told her.

"His name is Monitor," she said, contemptuous.

"Not any longer," Odiedin said drily. "His pursuit of us was unauthorised. If he goes back to Dovza, he’ll be sent to a rehabilitation center."

"A forced labor camp? Why?"

"Officials must not exceed their orders or take unauthorised action."

"That wasn’t a Corporation helicopter?"

Odiedin shook his head. "The pilot owned it. Used it to bring supplies to mountain climbers in the South Range. Yara hired him. To look for us."

"How strange," Sutty said. "Was he after me, then?"

"As a guide."

"I was afraid of that."

"I was not." Odiedin sighed. "The Corporation is so big, its apparatus is so clumsy, we little people in these big hills are beneath their notice. We slip through the mesh. Or we’ve done so for many years. So I didn’t worry. But he wasn’t the Corporation police. He was one man. One fanatic."

"Fanatic?" She laughed. "He believes slogans? He loves the Corporation?"

"He hates us. The maz, the Telling. He fears you."

"As an alien?"

"He thinks you’ll persuade the Ekumen to side with the maz against the Corporation."

"What makes him think that?"

"I don’t know. He’s a strange man. I think you should talk with him."

"What for?"

"To hear what he has to tell," Odiedin said.

She put it off, but conscience pushed her. Odiedin was no scholar, no sage like these maz from the lowlands, but he had a clear mind and a clear heart. On their long trek she had come to trust him entirely, and when she saw him crying over the books in the Library, she knew she loved him. She wanted to do what he asked her to do, even if it was to hear what the Monitor had to tell.

Maybe she could also tell the Monitor a little of what he ought to hear. In any case, sooner or later she’d have to face him. And the question of what to do about him. And the question of her responsibility for his being there.

Before the evening meal the next day, she went to the big cave where they had put him. A couple of minule handlers were gambling, tossing marked sticks, by lantern light. On the inner wall of the cave, a pure black concave curve ten meters high, the figure of the Tree had been incised by the dwellers here in centuries past: the single trunk, the two branches, the five lobes of foliage. Gold leaf still glittered in the lines of the drawing, and bits of crystal, jet, and moonstone winked among the carved leaves. Her eyes were well used to darkness now. The glow of a small electric light in a tent close under the back wall seemed as bright as sunlight.

"The Dovzan?" she asked the gamblers. One nodded with his chin toward the lighted tent.

The door flap was closed. She stood outside a while and finally said, "Monitor?"

The flap opened. She looked in cautiously. The small interior of the tent was warm and bright. They had fixed the injured man a bed pad with a slanted back support so he need not lie entirely flat. The cord of the door flap, a hand-crank-powered electric lamp, a tiny oil heater, a bottle of water, and a small noter lay within his reach.

He had been terribly bruised in the crash, and the bruising was still livid: blue-black-green all down the right side of his face, the right eye swollen half shut, both arms spotted with great brown-blue marks. Two fingers of his left hand were lightly splinted. But Sutty’s eyes were on the little device, the noter.

She entered the tent on her knees, and kneeling in the narrow clear space, picked up the device and studied it.

"It doesn’t transmit," the man said.

"So you say," Sutty said, beginning to play with it, to run it through its paces. After a while she said, ironically, "Apologies for going through your private files, Monitor. I’m not interested in them. But I have to test this thing’s capacities."

He said nothing.

The device was a recorder notebook, rather flashily designed but with several serious design flaws, like so much Akan technology-undigested techshit, she thought. It had no sending or receiving functions. She set it back down where he could reach it.

That alarm relieved, she was aware of her embarrassment and intense discomfort at being shut in this small space with this man. She wanted nothing but distance from him. The only way to make it was with words.

"What were you trying to do?"

"Follow you."

"Your government had ordered you not to."

After a pause he said, "I could not accept that."

"So the cog is wiser than the wheel?"

He said nothing. He had not moved at all since opening the door flap. The rigidity of his body probably signified pain. She observed it with no feeling.

"If you hadn’t crashed, what would you have done? Flown back to Dovza and reported-what? Some cave mouths?"

He said nothing.

"What do you know about this place?"

As she asked the question, she realised that he had seen nothing of it but this one cave, a few hostlers, a few maz. He need never learn what it was. They could blindfold him — probably no need even for that: just get him out, get him away as soon as he could be moved. He had seen nothing but a travelers’ resting place. He had nothing to report.

"This is the Lap of Silong," he said. "The last Library."

"What makes you think that?" she said, made angry by disappointment.

"This is where you were coming. The Office of Ethical Purity has been looking for it for a long time. The place where they hide the books. This is it."

"Who are ’they,’ Monitor?"

"The enemies of the state."

"O Ram!" she said. She sat back, as far from him as she could get, and hugged her knees. She spoke slowly, stopping after each sentence. "You people have learned everything we did wrong, and nothing we did right. I wish we’d never come to Aka. But since in our own stupid intellectual hubris we did so, we should either have refused you the information you demanded, or taught you Terran history. But of course you wouldn’t have listened. You don’t believe in history. You threw out your own history like garbage."

"It was garbage."

His brown skin was greyish where it wasn’t black-and-blue. His voice was hoarse and dogged. The man is hurt and helpless, she thought with neither sympathy nor shame.

"I know who you are," she said. "You’re my enemy. The true believer. The righteous man with the righteous mission. The one that jails people for reading and burns the books. That persecutes people who do exercises the wrong way. That dumps out the medicine and pisses on it. That pushes the button that sends the drones to drop the bombs. And hides behind a bunker and doesn’t get hurt. Shielded by God. Or the state. Or whatever lie he uses to hide his envy and self-interest and cowardice and lust for power. It took me a while to see you, though. You saw me right away. You knew I was your enemy. Was unrighteous. How did you know it?"

"They sent you to the mountains," he said. He had been looking straight forward, but he turned his head stiffly now to meet her eyes. "To a place where you would meet the maz. I did not wish any harm to you, yoz."

After a moment she said, "Yoz!"

He had looked away again. She watched his swollen, unreadable face.

He reached out his good hand and began to pump the hand crank of his lamp up and down. The little square bulb inside it immediately brightened. For the hundredth time in a corner of her mind Sutty wondered why the Akans made their lightbulbs square. But the rest of her mind was full of shadows, anger, hate, contempt.

"Did your people let me go to Okzat-Ozkat as a decoy? A tool of your official ideologues? Were they hoping I’d lead them here?"

"I thought so," he said after a pause.

"But you told me to keep away from the maz!"

"I thought they were dangerous."

"To whom?"

"To… the Ekumen. And my government." He used the old word, and corrected it: "The Corporation."

"You don’t make sense, Monitor."

He had stopped cranking the lamp. He looked straight ahead again.

"The pilot said, There they are,’ and we came up alongside the path," he said. "And he shouted, and I saw your group on the path. And smoke, behind you, smoke coming out of the rocks. But we were being thrown sideways, into the mountain. Into the rocks. The helicopter was thrown. Pushed."

He held his injured left hand with his right hand, stiffly. He was controlling his shivering.

"Catabatic winds, yoz," Sutty said after a while, softly. "And very high altitude for a helicopter."

He nodded. He had told himself the same thing. Many times, no doubt.

"They hold this place sacred," she said.

Where did that word come from? Not a word she used. Why was she tormenting him? Wrong, wrong.

"Listen, Yara — that’s your name? — don’t let rotten-corpse superstition get hold of you. I don’t think Mother Silong pays any attention to us at all."

He shook his head, mute. Maybe he had told himself that, too.

She did not know what else to say to him. After a long silence, he spoke.

"I deserve punishment," he said.

That shook her.

"Well, you got it," she said finally. "And you’ll probably get more, one way or another. What are we going to do with you? That has to be decided. It’s getting on into late summer. They’re talking of leaving in a few weeks. So, until then you might as well take it easy. And get walking again. Because wherever you go from here, I don’t think you’ll be flying on the south wind."

He looked at her again. He was unmistakably frightened. By what she had said? By whatever guilt had made him say, "I deserve punishment"? Or merely because lying helpless among the enemy was a frightening job?

He gave his stiff, painful, single nod and said, "My knee will be healed soon."

As she went back through the caves, she thought that, grotesque as it seemed, there was something childlike about the man, something simple and pure. Then she said to herself, Simplistic, not simple, and what the hell does pure mean? Saintly, holy, all that stuff? (Don’t Mother-Teresa me, girl, Uncle Hurree muttered in her mind.) He was simpleminded, with his ’enemy of the state’ jargon. And single-minded. A fanatic, as Odiedin had said. In fact, a terrorist. Pure and simple.

Talking with him had soured her. She wished she had not done it, had not seen him. Anxiety and frustration made her impatient with her friends.

Kieri, with whom she still shared the tent, though not lately the sleeping bag, was cheerful and affectionate, but her self-confidence was impervious. Kieri knew all she wanted to know. All she wanted of the Telling was stories and superstitions. She had no interest in learning from the maz here and never went into the caves of books. She had come for the mere adventure.

Akidan, on the other hand, was in a state of hero worship fatally mixed with lust. The guide Shui had gone back to her village soon after they came to the caves, leaving Akidan in his tent alone, and he had immediately fallen in love with Maz Unroy Kigno. He stuck to her like a minule kid to its mother, gazed at her with worshiping eyes, memorised her every word. Unfortunately, the only people under the old system whose sexual life was strictly regulated were the maz. Lifelong monogamy was their rule, whether they were or were not with their partner. The maz Sutty had known, as far as she could see, lived by this rule. And Akidan, a gentle-natured young man, had no real intention of questioning or testing it. He was simply smitten, head over heels, a pitiful victim of hormone-driven hagiolatry.

Unroy was sorry for him but did not let him know it. She discouraged him harshly, challenging his self-discipline, his learning, his capacity to become a maz. When he made his infatuation too clear, she turned on him and quoted a well-known tag from The Arbor, "The two that are one are not two, but the one that is two is one…" It seemed a fairly subtle reproof, but Akidan turned pale with shame and slunk away. He had been miserable ever since. Kieri talked with him a good deal and seemed inclined to comfort him. Sutty rather wished she would. She didn’t want the seethe and sway of adolescent emotions; she wanted adult counsel, mature certainty. She felt that she must go forward and was at a dead end; must decide and did not know what was to be decided.

The Lap of Silong was wholly cut off from the rest of the world. No radios or any kind of communicators were ever brought there, lest signals be traced. News could come only up the northeastern paths or along the long, difficult way Sutty’s party had come from the southeast. This late in the summer, it was most unlikely that anyone else would arrive; indeed, as she had told the Monitor, the people here were already talking of leaving.

She listened to them discuss their plans. It was their custom to depart a few at a time and take different ways where the paths diverged. As soon as they could do so, they would join with the small caravans of summer-village people going down to the foothills. Thus the pilgrimage, the way to the caves, had been kept invisible for forty years.

It was already too late, Odiedin told her, to go back the way their group had come, on the southeast trail. The guides from the deep village had left for home promptly, and even so expected to meet storm and snow on Zubuam. The rest of them would have to go down into Amareza, the hill region northeast of Silong, and work their way around the end of the Headwaters Range and back up through the foothills to Okzat-Ozkat. On foot it would take a couple of months. Odiedin thought they could get lifts on trucks through the hill country, though they would have to split up into pairs to do so.

It all sounded frightening and improbable to Sutty. To follow her guides up into the mountains, to follow a hidden way through the clouds to a secret, sacred place, was one thing; to wander like a beggar, to hitchhike, anonymous and unprotected, in the vast countrysides of an alien world, was another thing altogether. She trusted Odiedin, yes, but she wanted very badly to get in touch with Tong Ov.

And what were they going to do with the Monitor? Let him loose to run and blab to the bureaus and the ministries about the last great cache of banned books? He might be in terminal disgrace, but before his bosses sent him off to the salt mines, they’d hear what he had to report.

And what would she say to Tong Ov when and if she ever did talk to him again? He had sent her to find Aka’s history, its lost, outlawed past, its true being, and she had found it. But then what?

What the maz wanted of her was clear and urgent: they wanted her to save their treasure. It was the only thing clear to her in the obscure turmoil of her thoughts and feelings since she had talked to the Monitor.

What she herself wanted — would have wanted, if it had been possible-was to stay here. To live in the caves of being, to read, to hear the Telling, here where it was still complete or nearly complete, still one unbroken story. To live in the forest of words. To listen. That was what she was fitted for, what she longed to do, and could not.

As the maz longed to do and could not.

"We were stupid, yoz Sutty," said Goiri Engnake, a maz from the great city of Kangnegne in the center of the continent, a scholar of philosophy who had served fourteen years in an agricultural labor camp for disseminating reactionary ideology. She was a worn, tough, abrupt woman. "Carrying everything up here. We should have left it all over the place. Left the books with whoever had the books, and made copies. Spent our time copying, instead of bringing everything we have together where they can destroy it all at once. But you see we’re old-fashioned. People thought about how long it takes to copy, how dangerous it is to try to print. They didn’t look at the machines the Corporation started making, the ways to copy things in an instant, to put whole libraries into a computer. Now we’ve got our treasure where we can’t use those technologies. We can’t bring a computer up here, and if we could, how would we power it? And how long would it take to put all this into it?"

"With Akan technology, years," Sutty said. "With what’s available to the Ekumen, a summer, maybe."

Looking at Goiri’s face, she added, slowly, "If we were authorised to do so. By the Corporation of Aka. And by the Stabiles of the Ekumen."

"I understand."

They were in the ’kitchen,’ the cave where they cooked and ate. It was sealed to the extent that it could be kept habitably warm, and was the gathering place, at all hours, for discussions and conversations. They had eaten breakfast and were each nursing along a cup of very weak bezit tea. It starts the flow and reunites, Iziezi murmured in her mind.

"Would you ask the Envoy to request such authorisation, yoz?"

"Yes, of course," Sutty said. After a pause, "That is, I would ask him if he considered it feasible, or wise. If such a request indicated to your government that this place exists, we’d have blown your cover, maz."

Goiri grinned at Sutty’s choice of words. They were of course speaking in Dovzan. "But maybe the fact that you know about it, that the Ekumen is interested in it, would protect the Library," she said. "Prevent them from sending the police here to destroy it."

"Maybe."

"The Executives of the Corporation hold the Ekumen in very high respect."

"Yes. They also hold its Envoys completely out of touch with everybody on Aka except ministers and bureaucrats. The Corporation has been given a great deal of useful information. In return, the Ekumen has been given a great deal of useless propaganda."

Goiri pondered this, and asked at last, "If you know that, why do you allow it?"

"Well, Maz Goiri, the Ekumen takes a very long view. So long that it’s often hard for a short-lived being to live with. The principle we work on is that withholding knowledge is always a mistake — in the long run. So if asked to tell what we know, we tell it. To that extent, we’re like you, maz."

"No longer," Goiri said bitterly. "All we know, we hide."

"You have no choice. Your bureaucrats are dangerous people. They’re believers." Sutty sipped her tea. Her throat was dry. "On my world, when I was growing up, there was a powerful group of believers. They believed that their beliefs should prevail absolutely, that no other way of thinking should exist. They sabotaged the information storage networks and destroyed libraries and schools all over the world. They didn’t destroy everything, of course. It can be pieced back together. But… damage was done. That kind of damage is something like a stroke. One recovers, almost. But you know all that."

She stopped. She was talking too much. Her voice was shaking. She was getting too close to it. Far too close to it. Wrong.

Goiri looked shaken too. "All I know of your world, yoz …"

"Is that we fly around in space ships bringing enlightenment to lesser, backward worlds," Sutty said. Then she slapped one hand on the table and the other across her mouth.

Goiri stared.

"It’s a way the Rangma have of reminding themselves to shut up," Sutty said. She smiled, but her hands were shaking now.

They were both silent for a while.

"I thought of you … of all the people of the Ekumen, as very wise, above error. How childish," Goiri said. "How unfair."

Another silence.

"I’ll do what I can, maz," Sutty said. "If and when I get back to Dovza City. It might not be safe to try to get in touch with the Mobile by telephone from Amareza. I could say, for the wiretap-pers, that we got lost trying to hike up to Silong and found an eastern path out of the mountains. But if I turn up in Amareza, where I wasn’t authorised to go, they’ll ask questions. I can clam up, but I don’t think I can lie. I mean, not well… And there’s the problem of the Monitor."

"Yes. I wish you would talk to him, yoz Sutty."

Et tu, Brute? said Uncle Hurree, his eyebrows sarcastic.

"Why, Maz Goiri?"

"Well, he is — as you call it — a believer. And as you say, that’s dangerous. Tell him what you told me about your Earth. Tell him more than you told me. Tell him that belief is the wound that knowledge heals."

Sutty drank the last of her tea. The taste was bitter, delicate. "I can’t remember where I heard that. Not in a book. I heard it told."

"Teran said it to Penan. After he was wounded fighting the barbarians."

Sutty remembered now: the circle of mourners in the green valley under the great slopes of stone and snow, the body of the young man covered with thin, ice-white cloth, the voice of the maz telling the story.

Goiri said, "Teran was dying. He said, ‘My brother, my husband, my love, my self, you and I believed that we would defeat our enemy and bring peace to our land. But belief is the wound that knowledge heals, and death begins the Telling of our life.’ Then he died in Penan’s arms."

The grave, yoz. Where it begins.

"I can carry that message," Sutty said finally. "Though bigots have small ears."