'A bad dream?'* Ebor Dendep inquired.
'They're all bad, and all the same,' he said, but the deep unease and misery lessened a little as he answered. Cool morning sunlight fell flecked ' and shafted through the fine leaves and branches of the birch grove of Cadast. There the headwo-man sat weaving a basket of blackstem fern, for she liked to keep her fingers busy, while Selver lay beside her in halfdream and dream. He had been fifteen days at Cadast, and his wound was healing well. He still slept much, but for the first time in many months he had begun to dream waking again, regularly, not once or twice in a day and night but in the true pulse and rhythm of dreaming which should rise and fall ten to fourteen times in the diurnal cycle. Bad as his dreams were, all terror and shame, yet he welcomed them. He had feared that he was cut off from his roots, that he had gone too far into the dead land of action ever to find his way back to the springs of reality. Now, though the water was very bitter, he drank again.
Briefly he had Davidson down again among the ashes of the burned camp, and instead of singing over him this time he hit him in the mouth with a
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rock. Davidson's teeth broke, and blood ran between the white splinters.
The dream was useful, a straight wishfulfil-ment, but he stopped it there, having dreamed it many times, before he met Davidson in the ashes of Kelme Deva, and since. There was nothing to that
dream but relief. A sip of bland water. It was the bitter he needed. He must go clear back, not to Kelme Deva but to the long dreadful street in the alien city called Central, where he had attacked Death, and had been defeated.
Ebor Dendep hummed as she worked. Her thin hands, their silky green down silvered with age, . worked black fern-stems in and out, fast and neat. She sang a song about gathering ferns, a girl's song: I'm picking ferns, I wonder if he'll come back. . . . Her faint old voice trilled like a cricket's. Sun trembled in birch leaves. Selver put his head down on his arms.
The birch grove was more or less in the center of the town of Cadast. Eight paths led away from it, winding narrowly off among trees. There was a whiff of woodsmoke in the ah*; where the branches were thin at the south edge of the grove you could see smoke rise from a house-chimney, like a bit of blue yarn unravelling among the leaves. If you looked closely among the live-oaks and other trees you would find houseroofs sticking up a couple of feet above ground, between a hundred and two hundred of mem, it was very hard to count. The timber houses were three-
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quarters sunk, fitted in among tree-roots like badgers' setts. The beam roofs were mounded over with a thatch of small branches, pinestraw, reeds, earthmold. They were insulating, waterproof, almost invisible. The forest and the community of eight hundred people went about their business all around the birch grove where Ebor Dendep sat making a basket of fern. A bird among the branches over her head said, **Te-wheC' sweetly. There was more people-noise than usual, for fifty or sixty strangers, young men and women mostly, had come drifting in these last few days, drawn by Selver's presence. Some were from other cities of the North, some were those who had done the killing at Kelme Deva with him; they had followed rumor here to follow him. Yet the voices calling here and there and the babble of women bathing or children playing down by the stream, were not so loud as the morning birdsong and insect-drone and under-noise of the living forest of which the town was one element.
A girl came quickly, a young huntress the color of the pale birch leaves. 'Word of mouth from the southern coast, mother,'' she said. * 'The runner's at the Women's Lodge.'
'Send her here when she's eaten.' the head-woman said softly. 'Sh, Tolbar, can't you see he's asleep?'
The girl stooped to pick a large leaf of wild tobacco, and laid it lightly over Selver's eyes, on which a shaft of the steepening, bright sunlight had fallen. He lay with his hands half open and his
scarred, damaged face turned upward, vulnerable and foolish, a Great Dreamer gone to sleep like a child. But it was the girl's face that Ebor Dendep watched. It shone, in that uneasy shade, with pity and terror, with adoration.
Tolbar darted away. Presently two of the Old Women came with the messenger, moving silent in single file along the sun-flecked path. Ebor Dendep raised her hand, enjoining silence. The • messenger promptly lay down flat, and rested; her brown-dappled green fur was dusty and sweaty, she had run far and fast. The Old Women sat down in patches of sun, and became still. Like two old grey-green stones they sat there, with bright living eyes.
Selver, struggling with a sleep-dream beyond his control, cried out as if in great fear, and woke. He went to drink from the stream; when he came back he was followed by six or seven of those who always followed him. The head woman put down her half-finished work and said, 'Now be welcome, runner, and speak.'
Hie runner stood up, bowed her head to Ebor Dendep, and spoke her message: 'I come from Trethat.
My words come from Sorbron Deva, before that from sailors of the Strait, before mat from Broter in Sornol. They are for the hearing of all Cadast but they are to be spoken to the man called Selver who was born of the Ash in Eshreth. Here are the words: There are new giants in the great city of the giants in Sornol, and many of these new ones are females. The yellow ship of
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fire goes up and down at the place that was called Peha. It is known in Sornol that Selver of Eshreth burned the city of the giants at Kelme Deva. The Great Dreamers of the Exiles in Broter have dreamed giants more numerous than the trees of the Forty Lands. These are all the words of the message I bear.'
After the singsong recitation they were all silent. The bird, a little farther off, said, 'Whet-whet?' experimentally. '
'This is a very bad world-time,' said one of the Old Women, nibbing a rheumatic knee.
A grey bird flew from a huge oak that marked the north edge of town, and went up in circles, riding the morning updraft on lazy wings. There was always a roosting-tree of these grey kites near a town; they were the garbage service.
A small, fat boy ran through the birch grove, pursued by a slightly larger sister, bom shrieking in tiny voices like bats. The boy fell down and cried, the girl stood him up and scrubbed his tears off with a large leaf. They scuttled off into the forest hand in hand.
'There was one called Lyubov,' Selver said to the head woman. 'I have spoken of him to Com Mena, but not to you. When that one was killing me, it was Lyubov who saved me. It was Lyubov who healed me, and set me free. He wanted to know about us; so I would tell him what he asked, and he too would tell me what I asked. Once 1 asked how his race could survive, having so few
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women. He said mat in the place where they come from, half the race is women; but the men would not bring women to the Forty Lands until they had made a place ready for them.'
* * Until the men made a fit place for the women ? Well! they may have quite a wait,' said Ebor Dendep. 'They're like the people in the Elm Dream who come at you rump-first, with their heads put on front to back. They make the forest into a dry beach'—her language had no word for 'desert'—'and call that making things ready for the women? They should have sent the women first. Maybe with them the women do the Great Dreaming, who knows? They are backwards, Selver. They are insane.'
'A people can't be insane.'
' 'But they only dream in sleep, you said; if they want to dream waking they take poisons so that the dreams go out of control, you said! How can people be any madder? They don't know the dreamtime from the world-time, any more than a baby, does. Maybe when they kill a tree they think it will come alive again!'
Selver shook his head. He still spoke to the headwoman as if he and she were alone in the birch grove, in a quiet hesitant voice, almost drowsily. 'No, they understand death very well. . . . Certainly they don't see as we do, but they know more and understand more about certain things than we do. Lyubov mostly understood what I told him. Much of what he told me, I
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couldn't understand. It wasn't the language that kept me from understanding; I know his tongue, and he learned ours; we made a writing of the two languages together. Yet there were things he said I could never understand. He said the yumens are from outside the forest. That's quite clear. He said they want the forest: the trees for wood, the land to plant grass on.' Selver's voice, though still soft, had taken on resonance; the people
