Sundrinker

'Well, all is quiet now,' Hata said.

'Yes. It is winter,' Elnice said. 'What of the spring?' She looked at the old adviser. 'What are your suggestions, old one?'

'Slow change,' he said. 'Little by little we must require more of our own people, our idlers. We must make it a requirement that each of our young learn a trade. We must limit the breeding of the pongs, allowing only enough of their young to survive to maintain a solid pool of breeding stock. Slowly, without letting it be known to the general population of pongs, we begin to reduce their numbers. This can be done easily in the cities. A pong, or an entire family, simply disappears. It happens often. Pongs are sold or traded. It will take years, perhaps ten, to make a significant reduction in the pong population without causing panic among them, without disrupting our economy.'

'So be it,' Elnice said. 'Will you assume responsibility for starting this program?'

'I will, High Mistress,' the old adviser said. 'There is one other thing. You have begun to dismantle the army you put together. That process should be halted. Instead, you should build several forces, not as large as a conqforce, and train them well, have them ready to move instantly to any trouble spot in the land. As soon as the weather permits, the strongest force should be sent west to comb the hills. I would also suggest that you send emissaries to the western land, across the great, inland mountains, to see if there has been trouble there, to warn them if there was not.'

'They would laugh at us,' Hata said heatedly, 'if they knew we had lost warriors to pongs.'

The old adviser shrugged. 'A small blow to pride, considering what is at stake.'

'Let them laugh,' Elnice said. 'What I want to know is how this Duwan came to be a leader. He was pong. I saw the pores in the bottom of his feet. How did a pong rise above his station and influence thousands?'

'You killed the only possible way of knowing that in the canyon,' Hata said.

'He could not have spread the word alone,' Elnice said. 'I want spies sent into the pens. I want to know who among them carries the messages of sedition.' She rose. 'Hata, begin to build the armies. You, yourself, will lead the force to the west in the spring. I want a daily count on the number of pongs put to death not only in Arutan but in all other cities. Upon consideration, I think it wise to exterminate the entire pong population of Kooh, and all surrounding settlements. If not all at once, at a rate in multiples to the exterminations in the other areas, for the pongs of Kooh saw an attack force kill masters in their city. That news must not spread.'

'It will be done,' Hata said, his eyes on Elnice's shapely backside as she swept from the conference room.

So it was that when Tambol came to Kooh, in the dead of winter, he came to terror and death. The days were filled with fear and wailing as entire families were taken from the pens to disappear forever. Not a day passed without several public executions in the square for offenses that, in the past, would have brought nothing more than a mild lashing. Tambol was shocked to find that fully a quarter of the population of one pen had already disappeared, or had been killed quickly—there were so many executions that peeling was too time consuming.

A sense of panic filled Tambol. Many of those whom he had taught personally were gone. Only a few real believers remained, and they were filled with fear and doubting, so that his urgings for hope, for action, went unheeded. When the edict came down to the pens that there was to be no breeding, there was a general wail of despair.

'It is evident,' Tambol told a selected group, 'that the Devourers' intent is to wipe out all knowledge of what happened here. They are going to kill all of you, so that no one will be able to tell others that here pongs fought and killed their masters. There is only one thing to do. We must help as many as possible to escape. This will be possible in the confusion, for so many are being killed that a few more who do not return, for example, from their work outside the city walls will not be missed.' Singly and in groups of two to five, those who saw the hopelessness of staying in Kooh began to move toward the west. In their desperation, knowing that they faced certain death if they stayed in Kooh, they ate as Tambol had instructed them to eat. Most lived to survive the winter march, and many found the valley where they were welcomed by the growing force under the command of Duwan the Elder.

If the Master was dead, and Tambol began to believe that he was, his dream was still alive, not burning brightly as it had burned when an army marched and slew the enemy, but flickering, nevertheless. Winter had also come to the northern canyon where Duwan had made his last stand. The snows were deep there, and, although the canyon floor was shielded from the worst of the cold winds, the stream was frozen and the tall and other fixed brothers were laden with snow and ice. Jai had accumulated firewood and food in the cave where she had wintered with Duwan before they had made the trek to the valley of the Drinkers. There she had her memories. She had intended to leave the valley before the snows, but another change, a puzzling one, had kept her there. When the change first began she had screamed out in horror. She had noticed it first on the second day after Duwan's death. She'd spent the night in the cave, shivering with loss and the cold, too tired to build a fire, and she'd made her way to where he was standing, planted in the earth, shortly after sunrise to see that things, living things, were attacking his thighs just above where they disappeared into the earth. The things seemed, actually, to be growing in his dead flesh, absorbing the congealing liquids that had seeped from his exposed cells. She screamed and reached out to jerk them away, but she could not bring herself to touch that mass of horror. That was Duwan, his remains, but it was not the Duwan she'd loved. His orange eyes, now burned to a dull rust by the heat of the sun, were no longer the eyes into which she'd loved to gaze, picking out the little individual flecks of color.

She could not see the things growing, but by the end of the second day they had extended upward a full handspan on his thighs. She was led to remember the think vines, the living green that could be directed by the minds of the valley Drinkers to form their huts. She had seen Duwan's grandmother and many others of the valley oldsters return to the earth. In fact, as chance would have it, Elnice of Arutan had chosen an opening in the very grove where Sema the elder grew. Was this, Jai wondered, the earth reclaiming her own? Was Duwan to become one of those whisperers?