'Do you weave and shape, direct and follow, start and cease at will?'
'Sometimes, not always.'
'Can you walk the road your dream goes?'
'Sometimes. Sometimes I am afraid to.'
'Who is not? It is not altogether bad with you, Seiver.'
'No, it is altogether bad,' Seiver said, 'there's nothing good left,' and he began to shake.
Torber gave him the willow-draught to drink and made him lie down. Coro Mena still had the headwoman's question to ask; reluctantly he did so, kneeling by the sick man. 'Will the giants, the yumens you call them, will they follow your trail, Seiver?'
'I left no trail. No one has seen me between Kelme Deva and this place, six days. That's not the danger.' He struggled to sit up again. 'Listen, listen. You don't see the danger. How can you see it? You haven'd done what I did, you have never dreamed of it, making two hundred people die. They will not follow me, but they may follow us all. Hunt us, as hunters drive coneys. That is the danger. They may try to kill us. To kill us all, all men.'
'Lie down—'
'No, I'm not raving, mis is true fact and dream. There were two hundred yumens at Kelme
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Deva and they are dead. We killed them. We killed them as if they were not men. So will they not turn and do the same? They have killed us by ones, now they will kill us as they kill the trees, by hundreds, and hundreds, and hundreds.'
'Be still,' Torber said. 'Such things happen in the fever-dream, Seiver. They do not happen in the world.'
'The world is always new,' said Coro Mena, 'however old its roots. Seiver, how is it with these creatures, then? They look like men and talk like men, are they not men?' - 'I don't know. Do men kill men, except in madness? Does any beast kill its own kind? Only the insects. These yumens kill us as lightly as we kill snakes. The one who taught me said that they kill one another, in quarrels, and also in groups, like ants fighting. I haven't seen that. But I know they don't spare one who asks life. They will strike a bowed neck, I have seen it! There is a wish to kill in them, and therefore I saw fit to put them to death.'
'And all men's dreams,' said Coro Mena, crosslegged in shadow, 'will be changed. They will never be the same again. I shall never walk again that path I came with you yesterday, the way up from the willow grove that I've walked on all my life. It is changed. You have walked on it and it is utterly changed. Before this day the thing we had to do was the right thing to do; the way we had to go was the right way and led us home. Where is our home now? For you've done what
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you had to do, and it was not right. You have killed men. I saw mem, five years ago, in the Lemgan Valley, where they came in a flying ship; I hid and watched the giants, six of them,, and saw them speak, and look at rocks and plants, and cook food. They are men. But you have lived among them, tell me, Selver: do they dream?'
'As children do, in sleep.**
'They have no training?'
'No. Sometimes they talk of their dreams, the healers try to use mem in healing, but none of mem are trained, or have any skill in dreaming. Lyubov, who taught me, understood me when I snowed him how to dream, and yet even so be called the world-time 'real* and the dream-time, 'unreal,'as if that were the difference between them,'
'You have done what you had to do,' Coro Mena repeated after a silence. His eyes met Selver's, across shadows. The desperate tension lessened in Selver's face; his scarred mouth relaxed, and belay back without saying more. In a little while he was asleep.
'He's a god,' Coro Mena said.
Torber nodded, accepting the old man's judgment almost with relief.
'But not like the others. Not like the Pursuer, nor the Friend who has no face, nor the Aspen-leaf Woman who walks in the forest of dreams. He is not the Gatekeeper, nor the Snake. Nor the Lyreplayer nor the Carver nor the Hunter, though
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he comes in the world-time like them. We may have dreamed of Selver these last few years, but we shall no longer; he has left the dream-time. In the forest,.through the forest he comes, where leaves fall, where trees fall, a god that knows death, a god that kills and is not himself reborn.'
The headwoman listened to Coro Mena's reports and prophecies, and acted. She put the town of Cadast on alert, making sure that each family was ready to move out, with some food packed, and litters ready for the old and ill. She sent young women scouting south and east for news of the yumens. She kept one armed hunting-group always around town, though the others went out as usual every night. And when Selver grew stronger she insisted that he come out of the Lodge and tell his story: how the yumens killed and enslaved people in Sornol, and cut down the forests; how the people of Kelme Deva had killed the yumens. She forced women and undreaming men who did not understand these things to listen again, until they understood, and were frightened. For Ebor Dendep was a practical woman. When a Great Dreamer, her brother, told her that Selver was a god, a changer, a bridge between realities, she believed and acted. It was the Dreamer's responsibility
to be careful, to be certain that his judgment was true. Her responsibility was then to take that judgment and act upon it. He saw what must be done; she saw that it was done.
'All the cities of the forest must hear,' Coro Mena said. So the headwoman sent out her young
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runners, and headwomen in other towns listened, and sent out their runners. The killing at Kelme Deva and the name of Selver went over North Island and oversea to the other lands, from voice to voice, or in writing; not very fast, for the Forest People had no quicker messengers than footrun-ners; yet fast enough.
They were not all one people on the Forty Lands of the world. There were more languages than lands, and each with a different dialect for every town that spoke it; there were infinite ramifications of manners, morals, customs, crafts; physical types differed on each of the five Great Lands. The people of Sornol were tall, and pale, and great traders; the people of Rieshwel were short, and many had black fur, and they ate monkeys, and so on and on. But the climate varied little, and the forest little, and sea not at all. Curiosity, regular trade-routes, and the necessity of finding a husband or wife of the proper Tree, kept up an easy movement of people among the towns and between the lands, and so there were certain likenesses among all but the remotest extremes, the half- rumored barbarian isles of the Far East and South. In all the Forty Lands, women ran the cities and towns, and almost every town toad a Men's Lodge. Within the Lodges the Dreamers spoke an old tongue, and this varied little from land to land. It was rarely learned by women or by men who remained hunters, fishers, weavers, builders, those who dreamed only small dreams outside the Lodge. As most writing was in
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this Lodge-tongue, when headwomen sent fleet girls carrying messages, the letters went from Lodge to Lodge, and so were interpreted by the Dreamers to the Old Women, as were other documents, rumors, problems, myths, and dreams. But it was always the Old Women's choice whether to believe or not.
Selver was in a small room at Eshsen. The door was not locked, but he knew if he opened it something bad would come in. So long as he kept it shut everything would be all right. The trouble was that there were young trees, a sapling orchard, planted out in front of the house; not fruit or nut trees but some other kind, he could not remember what kind. He went out to see what kind of trees they were. They all lay broken and uprooted. He picked up the silvery branch of one and a little blood ran out of the broken end. No, not here, not again, Thele, he said: O Thele, come to me before your death! But she did not come. Only her death was there, the broken birch tree, the opened door. Selver turned and went quickly back into the house, discovering that it was all built above ground like a yumen house, very tall and full of light. Outside the other door, across the tall room, was the long street of the yumen city Central. Selver had the gun in his belt. If Davidson came, he could shoot him. He waited, just inside the open door, looking out into the sunlight. Davidson came, huge, running so fast that Selver could not keep him in the sights of the gun
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as he doubled crazily back and forth across the wide street, very fast, always closer. The gun was heavy. Selver fired it but no fire came out of it, and in rage and terror he threw the gun and the dream away.
Disgusted and depressed, he spat, and sighed.
