She lay on the cold earth before him and watched as, little by little, his peeled flesh was taken by the thick growth of tendrils. The growth spread as it reached upward, and there formed a moss-like fuzz, an all-covering blanket that gradually began to obliterate the shape of separate legs and arms.
With the coming of the first serious snow Duwan's body was no longer recognizable. It was a fuzzy mass, rounded to a point at the top, an odd growth, but a part of the earth, so much so that birds landed there to preen themselves and once she saw a small ground creature standing on its rear legs nibbling at the moss-like covering. Then the snow began to hide the mass, drifting against it, lodging on it, and soon there was a white pillar standing there in the grove.
She had conflicting emotions. She felt a need to be away from the reminder of her sorrow, but, when she thought of going, the emptiness inside her grew and engulfed her so that she would go into her cave, curl into her bed of boughs by the fire and weep until she fell asleep. Then the snows were too deep, the weather too cold, to consider traveling, so she settled in and would not leave the cave for days, for she could supply her need for water by eating the snow that drifted into the entrance. In the quiet winter nights, with the cold so brittle that the smallest sound seemed to reverberate throughout the entire canyon, she relived every moment she'd had with Duwan and as she remembered there were the whispers, indistinct, distant but comforting. To her knowledge she was the only one, other than valley Drinkers, who could hear them now that Duwan was dead. The whisperings renewed her speculation about what had happened to Duwan. Had the earth claimed him? Other dead bodies moldered, rotted, were eaten by scavengers. (It was more pleasant in the valley since the snows, for the grisly reminders of death were, at least temporarily, covered by a blanket of pure white.) Was he, like the ancestors and those oldsters from the valley, alive? She could not understand how. His heart had stopped. When Sema the elder and the others went back to the earth they had been living, if hardening. No, she told herself, he was dead, deprived even of that doubtful existence as a tall brother.
She had not yet accepted that aspect of being a Drinker. To think of half-burying oneself in the earth to become a tree seemed almost as horrible as being killed and left to become a part of the earth through decay. But now that Duwan was of the earth, she began to wonder, and, as she heard the confused, indistinct whispers, she told herself that, when her time came, she would return to the canyon and join Duwan there, to be by his side for—how long? Forever? Did the tall brothers die? She'd seen them killed by Devourers, cut for their wood. How could anything, even a tree, live forever?
'What follows forever?' she asked, aloud.
'Eternity,' came the answer, clearly.
She jumped, startled. She came to her knees on her bed of boughs and looked around. The fire had burned low. She threw on dead branches and the light flickered. The entrance was almost totally blocked by snow.
'Who?' she asked. 'Is it you, Sema? Speak to me. Tell me of Duwan.' Silence. Massed whisperings.
With the morning she went to the green pillar that had been Duwan and brushed away snow with a fresh bough. The moss-like covering was denser, and seemed to glow with life. She touched it. It was not unpleasant to the touch.
'Duwan,' she whispered. 'Do you live? If you live tell me, and I will join you now.'
The silence activated her pain and in a frenzy she began to dig away at the snow until she reached the frozen earth and broke fingernails trying to dig a hole into which she would plant herself.
'Peace, daughter,' the voice said inside her mind. 'It is not your time. Rest. You will go with the coming of the change of seasons.' She kept her vigil through the coldest months. There was no change. The green pillar did not grow. Was that to be his last and final form? She asked and received no answer.
'You're hateful,' she told the whisperers, one night when she'd called and called and prayed to Duwan's Du without answer. 'You can speak. You can tell me, and you won't. You are cruel. I will leave this place with the first thaw.'
When it came, the change of season, it came suddenly. She awoke one morning to find that she was not, as usual, shivering with the cold. There was a sound of dripping water. Since the cave was dark, lit only by the fire and a slit for ventilation at the top of the newly banked snow, the coming of morning meant nothing to her, and she slept, often, until midday. She saw a trickle of melt water running down the inside of the snowbank at the entrance to wet the dry floor of the cave. She pushed an opening through the snow and looked out to see a wet, bright, dripping world. A mass of snow fell from the laden bough of a tree and made a wet, soggy sound. She went to the green pillar. Its snow covering was melting, too, exposing the rich, dark green color. The sun had a hint of warmth. She bared her arms and drank of it. Soon, she told herself, she would set out for the west.
There was little preparation to be done for leaving. She would carry only Duwan's swords. They had been cast aside by the enemy and she'd stored them in the cave, keeping them bright during the winter by rubbing them with sand.
On a day that dripped a new layer of melting snow, snow deposited by what she felt would be the last of the late winter storms, she buckled Duwan's swords to her hips and emerged from the cave to take one last look at the valley and the green pillar. The sun was just beginning to light the top of the canyon's sides. She walked to the pillar and stood there, remembering.
'I go now, Duwan,' she said. 'I will come back, someday.'
'It is not yet time,' the voice in her mind said. Anger flooded her. 'Now? Now you speak?'
