Taita was at a loss for an appropriate reply. Although he had never attempted to hide it from her, she was not yet of an age at which he could discuss with her his mutilation. That time would come all too soon. He thought of remonstrating with Imbali, then decided against it.
As the only female in their band, she was as good an instructress as any.
He smoothed over the moment with a noncommittal reply, but afterwards he felt a keener awareness of his own inadequacy. He began to take pains to keep his body covered from her sight. Even when they swam together in the stream beyond the village he did not remove his tunic. He had believed himself resigned to his imperfect physical state, but that was changing each day.
It could not be much longer before Onka arrived to escort Meren to the mysterious sanatorium in the Cloud Gardens, and Taita exerted all his powers of persuasion to make him agree to undergo the treatment, but Meren was capable of immutable obstinacy and stood firm against all blandishments.
Then one evening Taita was awakened by the sound of soft groans from Meren's chamber. He lit the lamp and went through to find him doubled over on his sleeping mat with his face buried in his hands.
Gently Taita lifted away his hands. One side of his face was horribly swollen, the empty eye socket a tight slit, and his skin was burning. Taita applied hot poultices and soothing ointments, but by morning the old injury was little improved. It seemed more than coincidence that Onka arrived before noon that same day.
Taita reasoned with Meren: 'Old friend, there seems nothing that I can do to cure you. Your choice is to endure this suffering, which I now believe will lead before too long to your death, or you can allow the Jarrian surgeons to try where I have failed you.'
Meren was so weak and feverish that he resisted no longer. Imbali and Fenn helped him to dress, then packed a small bag of his possessions.
The men led him out and helped him into the saddle. Taita bade Fenn a hasty farewell, and commended her to the care of Hilto, Nakonto and Imbali before he mounted Windsmoke. They left Mutangi on the road to the west. Fenn ran beside Windsmoke for half a league, then stopped beside the road and waved them out of sight.
Once again they headed towards the triple peaks of the volcanoes but before they reached the citadel they took a fork that led in a more northerly direction. Finally they entered a narrow pass into the mountains, and climbed up it to a height from which they could look down on the citadel far to the south. From this distance the council hall where they had met the oligarchs seemed tiny. They went on up the mountain path. The air grew colder and the wind moaned sadly along the cliffs.
Higher they climbed, and higher still. White hoarfrost formed on their beards and eyebrows. They huddled into their capes and continued to climb upwards. By now Meren was swaying drunkenly in the saddle.
Taita and Onka rode on each side to support him and prevent him falling.
Suddenly the mouth of a tunnel appeared in the cliff face ahead behind gates of heavy wooden beams. As they approached, the gates swung open ponderously to allow them through. From a distance they saw that there were guards at the entrance. Taita was so concerned by Meren's condition that, at first, he paid them little heed. As they drew closer he saw that they were of short stature, barely half as tall as a normal man but with massively developed chests and long, swinging arms that reached almost to the ground. Their stance was hunchbacked and bow-legged. Suddenly he realized that they were not humans but large apes. What he had taken to be brown uniform coats were pelts of shaggy fur. Their foreheads sloped almost straight back above beetling eyebrows, and their jaws were so over-developed that their lips did not close fully over their fangs. They returned his scrutiny with a close-set implacable stare. Quickly Taita opened the Inner Eye and saw that their auras were rudimentary and bestial, their murderous instincts balanced on a knife edge of restraint.
'Do not look into their eyes,' Onka warned. 'Do not provoke them.
They are powerful, dangerous creatures, and single-minded in their guard duties. They can rip a man to pieces as you would dismember the carcass of a roasted quail.' He led them into the mouth of the tunnel and immediately the heavy gates boomed shut behind them. Flaming torches were set in brackets on the walls and the hoofs of the horses clattered on the rocky footing. The tunnel was only wide enough to allow two horses to pass side by side, and the riders were forced to stoop in the saddle so that the roof cleared their heads. The rock around them was murmurous with the sounds of running subterranean rivers and seething lava pipes.
They had no means of measuring the passage of time or the distance they travelled, but at last they were aware of a nimbus of natural light ahead. It grew stronger and they approached another gate similar to the first that had sealed the tunnel entrance. This gate also swung open before they reached it, to reveal another contingent of apes. They rode past them, blinking in the brilliant sunshine.
It took some time for their eyes to adjust, and then they looked around in wonder and awe. They were in an enormous volcanic crater, so wide that it would have taken even a swift horse half a day to traverse it, from one vertical wall to the other. Not even a nimble mountain ibex could have climbed those lava walls. The bottom of the crater was a concave green shield. In its centre lay a small lake of milky sapphire-tinted water.
Tendrils of steam drifted over the surface. A flake of ice melted from Taita's eyebrow and tapped his cheek as it fell. He blinked, and realized that the air in the crater was as balmy as that of an island in a tropical sea. They shed their leather capes and even Meren's condition seemed to improve in the warmer air.
'It is the water from the furnaces of the earth that heat this place.
There is no cruel winter here.' With a sweep of his arms Onka encompassed the hauntingly lovely forest that surrounded them. 'Do you see the trees and plants that flourish all around? You will find them nowhere else in the world.'
They rode on along the well-defined pathway, with Onka pointing out the remarkable features of the crater. 'Look at the colours of the cliffs,'
he invited Taita, who craned his neck to gaze up at the mighty walls.
They were not grey or black, the natural colours of volcanic rock, but covered with a motley of soft blue and ruddy gold streaked with azure.
'What seem to be multicoloured rocks are mosses as long and thick as the hair of a beautiful woman,' Onka told him.
Taita dropped his gaze from the cliffs, and looked over the forests in the basin below. 'Those are pine trees,' he exclaimed, at the towering
