'Uramm,' he said.
'If it was within my power I would give her to you.'
'Don't be stupid,' he said.
'I know. You Drinkers have your own odd ways, but I wish that I could give her to you, put her in your bed. I wouldn't mind being your slave, and slave to your mate, not if it would make you happy.' He turned. There was total darkness in the room, but as his fingertips touched her cheeks he felt the wetness of tears.
'I understand. She is so beautiful, and she was the love of your youth. Just let me stay with you, Duwan, and serve you. That's all I ask.'
'You ask too little, small fool,' he said, for, suddenly, as if a cloud of steam had been wafted away by an errant breeze, leaving everything dearly visible, he felt the warmth and softness of her and drew her to him so fiercely that the breath was forced from her lungs. 'You are more beautiful.'
By Du, it was true. Jai had longer legs, a more sweetly proportioned body, and her face—he pictured it in his mind, and it was smiling and sunny and so dear that he kissed it and kissed it until, forgive him, Du, they were one.
Manoo the Predictor had said that the first feeble beams of Du would light the southern sky after a dozen more sleep periods. Duwan was at the forge, fashioning iron, barbed arrowheads. He looked up as someone entered, and nodded respectfully to his father.
'You spend much time making weapons,' the Elder said.
'Yes.'
'You'll go with the first light of Du?'
Duwan was surprised. He had not stated his intentions, not even to Jai.
'Don't you think we have known this?' his father asked. 'Did you not say that you gave your word to a friend?'
Duwan tried to play it lightly. 'Perhaps, if you try, father, you can talk me out of this foolishness.'
The elder man laughed. 'Yes, your task must seem impossible.' Duwan finished sharpening the point of an arrowhead and put it aside. He looked at his father. 'If I go to my death I must go. Perhaps, after much time, I can train some few of them to fight.'
'We can but try,' his father said.
Duwan snapped his head around to look into his father's eyes. 'We?'
'There was a Duwan with the Great Alon, when he led the Drinkers into the snows. He, too, made a promise. He, too, promised to return. He made this promise to Alon, it is said, before the great one hardened, here in this lightless place. It is time a Duwan kept that promise, and I will not let you do it alone.'
'But mother—'
'She will go with me, of course. Will not your mate go with you?' Duwan grasped his father's right arm. 'We can go into the west,' he said. 'For I will not lead two Duwans to death.' His father nodded.
Four Drinkers, two of them females, would not be able to carry much. By the time the southern horizon was showing lightness at times, preparations were complete. Jai had accepted Duwan's decision without comment. She practiced her swordplay with Belran's young warriors. She had colored again, and they had, for the same reasons that had made sense during the last winter, abstained.
Duwan felt that he was no longer a part of the Drinkers of the valley. Somehow, what he had done and what he had seen in the Land of Many Brothers had made him a different Drinker. His own people seemed as alien to him as the Enemy now, and although he did not enjoy that feeling, he accepted it. There had been times when he'd suffered through periods of self pity and of condemnation for the Drinkers. Now it no longer seemed to matter. Each Drinker was the master of his own fate, and he had chosen his. He had made up his mind, after his father's decision to join him, to avoid Enemy population centers, to travel into the relatively unpopulated areas of the mid-continent, and there to live out his life with Jai, no longer withholding himself from her during her fertile period. There he would see his mother and his father, when the time came, return to the earth, and he would live near them in their fixed, honorable, immortal state to protect them from any chance enemy.
Only one thing troubled him, and that came to a head as Du's faint presence made a smear of light in the far south. His grandmother. He had promised her that he would personally plant her in a warm, sunny place in the south, and it was becoming more and more evident that she was entering the last stages of the hardening disease. She could not possibly make the hard, long journey to the south, or so at least Duwan thought. His grandmother had other ideas. She was not senseless, not yet. She noted the preparations, and she prepared her warmest garments and nothing else. Duwan saw her placing garments into a small, neat pack one day, as he and his father were making
