may all go free, if you will gather in your people from the logging camps in South Sornol, Kushil, and Tieshwel, and make them all stay together here. You may live here where the forest is dead, where you grow your seed-grasses. There must not be any more cutting of trees.'
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Gosse's face had grown eager: 'The camps weren't attacked?'
'No.'
Gosse said nothing.
Selver watched his face, and presently spoke again: 'There are less than two thousand of your people left living in the world, I think. Your women are all dead. In the other camps there are still weapons; you could kill many of us. But we have some of your weapons. And there are more of us than you could kill. I suppose you know that, and that's why you have not tried to have the flying ships bring you fire-throwers, and kill the guards, and escape. It would be no good; there really are so many of us. If you make the promise with us it will be much the best, and then you can wait without harm until one of your Great Ships comes, and you can leave the world. That will be in three years, I think.'
'Yes, three local years—How do you know that?'
'Well, slaves have ears, Mr. Gosse.'
Gosse looked straight at him at last. He looked away, fidgeted, tried to ease his leg. He looked back at Selver, and away again. 'We had already 'promised* not to hurt any of your people. It's why the workers were sent home. It did no good, you didn't listen—'
'It was not a promise made to us.'
'How can we make any sort of agreement or treaty with a people who have no government, no central authority?'
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'I don't know. I'm not sure you know what a promise is. This one was soon broken.'
'What do you mean? By whom, how?'
'In Rieshwel, New Java. Fourteen day sago. A town was burned and its people killed by yumens of the Camp in Rieshwel.'
'It's a lie. We were in radio contact with New Java right along, until the massacre. Nobody was killing natives there or anywhere else.'
'You're speaking the truth you know,' Selver said, 'I the truth I know. I accept your ignorance of the killings on Rieshwel; but you must accept my telling you that they were done. This remains: the promise must be made to us and with us, and it must be kept. You'll wish to talk about these: matters with Colonel Dongh and the others.'
Gosse moved as if to re-enter the gate, men turned back and said in his deep, hoarse voice, 'Who are you, Selver? Did you—was it you that organised the attack? Did you lead them?'
'Yes, I did.'
'Then all this blood is on your head,' Gosse said, and with sudden savagery, 'Lyubov's too, you know. He's dead—your 'friend Lyubov.' '
Selver did not understand the idiom. He had learned murder, but of guilt he knew little beyond the name. As his gaze locked for a moment with Gosse's pale, resentful stare, he felt afraid, A sickness rose up in him, a mortal chill. He tried to put it away from him, shutting his eyes a moment. At last he said, 'Lyubov is my friend, and so not dead.'
'You're children,' Gosse said with hatred. 'Children, savages. You have no conception of reality. This is no dream, this is real! You killed Lyubov. He's dead. You killed the women—the women—you burned them alive, slaughtered them like animals!'
'Should we have let them live?' said Selver with vehemence equal to Gosse's, but softly, his voice singing a little. ' To breed like insects in the carcase of the World? To overrun us? We killed them to sterilise you. I know what a realist is, Mr. Gosse. Lyubov and I have talked about these words. A realist is a man who knows both the world and his own dreams. You're not sane: there's not one man in a thousand of you who knows how to dream. Not even Lyubov and he was the best among you. You sleep, you wake and forget your dreams, you sleep again and wake again, and so you spend your whole lives, and you think that is being, life, reality! You are not children, you are grown men, but insane. And that's why we had to kill you, before you drove us mad. Now go back and talk about reality with the other insane men. Talk long, and well!'
The guards opened the gate, threatening the crowding yumens inside with their spears; Gosse reentered the compound, his big shoulders hunched as if against the rain.
Selver was very tired. The head woman of Berre and another woman came to him and walked with him, his arms over their shoulders so that if he stumbled he should not fall. Tne young
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hunter Greda, a cousin of his Tree, joked with him, and Selver answered light-headedly, laughing. The walk back to Endtor seemed to go on for days.
He was too weary to eat. He drank a little hot broth and lay down by the Men's Fire. Endtor was no town but a mere camp by the great river, a favorite fishing place for all the cities that had once been in the forest round about, before the yumens came. There was no Lodge. Two fire-rings of black stone and a long grassy bank over the river where tents of hide and plaited rush could be set up, that was Endtor. The river Menend, the master river of Soraol, spoke ceaselessly in the world and in the dream at Endtor.
There were many old men at the fire, soine whom he knew from Broter and Tuntar and His own destroyed city Eshreth, some whom he did not know; he could see in their eyes and gestures, and hear in their voices, mat they were Great Dreamers; more dreamers than had ever been garnered in one place before, perhaps. Lying stretched out full length, his head raised on his hands, gazing at the fire, he said, 'I have called the yumens mad. Am I mad myself?'
'You don't know one time from the other,' said old Tubab, laying a pine-knot on the fire, 'because you did not dream'either sleeping or waking for far too long. The price for that takes long to pay.'
'The poisons the yumens take do much the same as does the lack of sleep and dream,' said Heben, who had been a slave both at Central and at Smith Camp. 'The yumens poison themselves in order to dream. I saw the dreamer's look in them after they took the poisons. But they couldn't call the dreams, nor control them, nor weave nor shape nor cease to dream; they were driven, overpowered. They did not know what was within them at all. So it is with a man who hasn't dreamed for many days. Though he be the wisest of his Lodge, still he'll be mad, now and then, here and there, for a long time after. He'll be driven, enslaved. He will not understand himself.'
A very old man with the accent of South Soraol laid his hand on Selver's shoulder, caressing him, and said, 'My dear young god, you need to sing, that would do you good.'
'I can't. Sing for me.'
The old man sang; others joined in, their voices high and reedy, almost tuneless, like the wind blowing in the water-reeds of Endtor. They sang one of the songs of the ash-tree, about the delicate parted leaves mat turn yellow in autumn when the berries turn red, and one night the first frost silvers them.
While Selver was listening to the song of the Ash, Lyubov lay down beside him. Lying down he did not seem so monstrously tall and large-limbed. Behind him was the half-collapsed, fire-gutted building, black against the stars. 'I am like you,' he said, not looking at Selver, in that dream-voice which tries to reveal its own
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untruth. Selver's heart was heavy with sorrow for hisfriend. *Tvegotaheadache,'Lyubovsaidin his own voice, rubbing the back of his neck as he always did, and at that Selver reached out to touch him, to console him. But he was shadow and firelight in the world-time, and the old men were singing the song of the Ash, about the small white flowers on the black branches in spring among the parted leaves.
The next day the yumens imprisoned in the compound sent for Selver. He came to Eshsen in the afternoon, and met with them outside the compound, under the branches of an oak tree, for all Selver's people felt a little uneasy under the bare open sky. Eshsen had been an oak grove; this tree was the largest of the few the colonists had; left standing. It was on the long slope behind Lyubov's bungalow, one of the six or eight houses that had come through the night of the burning undamaged. With Selver under the oak were Reswan, the headwoman of Berre,
