'In the end, Grandmother, all living things were one, and they combined to overcome the enemy. Tall brothers dropped limbs upon them in the forests. Vines writhed and tripped their warriors at crucial times. The grass bled of its substance and made itself slick under their feet, and even the tiny spores of the green, living things flew into their eyes to impede their vision.'
For one moment it seemed that all the whisperings combined into one long, hissed sound. 'Soooooooooo.'
In the cave, Jai nestled against him, he talked to her gently, telling her of his love, begging her to forgive the years when he could not devote himself to her, and she, weeping happily, turned her face to him.
'A Duwan fighting to free our land, a Duwan to occupied with his duties that he has time only to speak to me once a year is better than any other,' she said. 'But now we are here, alone, and the first snow will come soon. I will be selfish and keep you to myself for a long, long winter.'
'That is a threat that I will face gladly,' he said.
'And you will not think, and this is an order, my master, about crossing the western mountains to free the slaves there. Nor will you think of going to the north to bring your valley Drinkers to join us. Is that agreed?'
'Well, perhaps I will not think of those things too often.'
'There is,' she whispered, 'another matter that I want you to consider.' She pulled up her tunic and placed his hand on her budpoint. He felt the sweet heat and smiled. Then he jerked his head down and looked at her in the flickering firelight to see that she was blooming.
'It's early yet,' he said.
'That's so our son will be well formed by spring and you will not be tempted to drag me on a long trek to the north.'
'Humm,' he said, drawing close so that his nostrils were filled with the flowery smell of her.
Author's Note: All writers of imaginative fiction are familiar with the difficulty of creating environments or lifeforms that bear as little as possible resemblance to the endlessly astounding variety of life on our own planet. When I first conceived the idea of having the Drinkers convert sunlight directly into energy, I felt that I had come up with, at least, a new slant on life. Then, in recent months, I read of the work of the Chemist Pill-Soon Song and others at Texas Tech, who, it was reported at the annual meeting of the American Society of Photobiology, had discovered a blue-green protozoan,
