Quatias opened his mouth, closed it and made a strangled sound in the back of his throat. Finally, in a broken voice, he said: 'Only my father Tolmia could have known….hought… said… that which you just said. Wherefore I no longer doubt. Nathan, please tell him that I love him very much!'
'He knows,' Nathan answered, all anger fled in a moment. 'And he loves you in return, even as he did in life.'
Shortly after that the initial session broke up. Shaken, The Five must now reconsider things, think how best to employ Nathan — if they still had his good will. So they made to go off to their council chambers and discuss his awesome talent. But before he let them go:
'I want you to know,' he told them, 'that the girl Atwei is my dear friend. She was my nurse and brought me to health when I was sick. Now, I understand why you had doubts, about both of us. Of course you did and I don't hold it against you. But that is over now, and you should know: he who dishonours Atwei dishonours me.'
He couldn't know it, but from that time forward she would be part of his expanding legend. Atwei of the Thyre, friend of Nathan…
And so, as in Place-Under-the-Yellow-Cliffs, once again Nathan became a bridge between two worlds: that of the living, and the darkness of those who had continued beyond it. But before that there were certain priorities: for instance, Shaeken's inventions.
In accordance with the Ancient's wishes, he passed on to the artisans of Open-to-the-Sky detailed drawings of his water wheel, ram, and hoist, all of which were of especial relevance here. Once constructed, Shaeken's Hydraulic Hoist should provide effortless irrigation for the oasis high overhead; and so the Thyre would prosper.
Then, as soon as these technical details had been passed on and understood, for five more sunups Nathan channelled all of his energies to the task of communication between the living and the dead. And as in Place- Under-the-Yellow-Cliffs, so now the results of his work were uniformly beneficial; exactly as before, word of the Necroscope spread abroad and emissaries from Thyre colonies further down the river came to see him.
But now that the work was no longer new to him it became… simply work. Despite that it was satisfying in its way and the number of his friends among the dead grew apace, Nathan no longer took pleasure in it. Also, time seemed to pass by ever more swiftly, and he felt he should be elsewhere, doing other things.
It was time to move on.
Atwei sensed it in him. She may even have read it in his supposedly 'inviolate' mind. But seeing how she was saddened, Nathan made no complaint…
One day they went up to the oasis, and there in the living sunlight Nathan saw how pale he had grown. He was pensive and gave voice to an idle thought. 'Why are you so brown,' he asked her, 'when you spend so much time in the deeps and the dark?'
'But before you,' Atwei answered, simply, 'I spent a good deal of my time in the light. The Thyre are desert folk, after all, and most of our work is done on the surface. Also, I was born brown. But why are you so pale, when you were born in the woods and the sunlight?'
He shrugged. 'So, we're different.'
'Are we so different, Nathan?'
He looked at her and wondered, Are we? And almost before he realized it, he knew — he heard — what she was thinking: If I were Szgany, or he were Thyre, we would be lovers. He would lie in my arms and I would feel him pulsing within me. And I would stroke his back, while my thighs squeezed him for his juice.
Telepathy, or… did she do it deliberately? No, never the last, for she was Thyre and it would be unseemly. And now, as Atwei's thoughts continued, she too was pensive. But Nathan is right: we are different. And I must love him as if he were my brother.
Then… his look must be curious, wondering; she noticed it and quickly looked away. In order to save her embarrassment, he immediately acted as if nothing had happened, as if he knew nothing. In any case her mind was covered now; she had drawn a blanket over it, and he must assume that she suspected. But at the same time, suddenly, there came a second flash of inspired understanding as a riddle was solved. From the beginning he'd wondered how the Thyre, the living Thyre, knew and understood his tongue so well. And now he knew the answer: When Nathan talked to the Thyre dead it was in deadspeak, but behind their mental voices and pictures he'd always sensed echoes of their spoken tongue, too. And now he saw how easy it was for a telepath to be a linguist. When thoughts are backed up by the echoes of words, a language is quickly learned. That was how it worked for the living Thyre: they had not stolen the Traveller language from his mind, not directly (they had always traded with the Szgany and so knew something of his tongue from the first). No, they'd not stolen it but read it in his expressions, seen it in his eyes, and — despite certain taboos and 'unspoken rules' — heard it in the echoes of his thoughts!
And he knew, too, why suddenly he understood large parts of the Thyre tongue when he heard it spoken all around him — because he had learned it the same way! And Atwei was right: he would be a telepath, in time.
But all of this coming at once… it was a shock, a revelation to Nathan! Especially Atwei's feelings for him. And it was that more than anything else — the way she felt about him — which served to convince him that indeed the time had come to move on, while yet she thought of him as a brother…
In the Cavern of Long Dreams, alone with the mummied dead and sharing their thoughts, Nathan spoke to Ethloi the Elder, who knew numbers. They were firm friends from the moment he mentioned Shaeken's name, for in life Ethloi and Shaeken had been colleagues.
How may I help you? Ethloi was eager to assist in any way he could.
'I have dreams,' Nathan told him. 'I dream of numbers. I have always thought they had meaning, and so did Shaeken. You are the expert, or so I'm told. Perhaps you can fathom them.'
An expert in maths? Is there such a thing? Ethloi seemed vague on the subject. Shaeken required maths to calculate the numbers of cogs in his wheels, it's true, but his was a practical application. I was able, through trial and error, to help him somewhat. Not a lot. As for me: I only know that like yourself, I too have dreamed of numbers, in death as in life. They are some of the several things I continue to explore, but not in depth. For since all such knowledge is useless fno one may confirm or deny my findings, because no one understands them), how may I determine if the things I know have value? There is no source of reference. And as for helping you… we do not even know that Szgany and Thyre numbers are the same. Explain to me your system.
The Szgany system?'
Yes.
'Do you mean, how do we count? But surely all creatures count the same?'
Not so. A bird has only two numbers: the number One and a number larger than One. If it has an egg in its nest it has an egg. If it has two eggs, three, or four, it has more than one. So how do the Szgany count?
'We count in fives, the number of fingers on a hand,' Nathan told him. 'We make gates,' (he showed the other a picture), 'like so:'
I, II, III, III The Thyre have the same system, Ethloi replied, but as for me, I count in Tens! The picture he displayed to Nathan's mind was of two gates struck through.
Nathan frowned. 'But that is simply a count of the fingers on two hands. Is there a difference?'
Oh, yes, the other answered. The difference is simplicity! Now look:
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20.
The numbers he showed to Nathan were not these but symbols of his own, which had these values. Nathan studied them a while — sufficient that he understood that the last of these numbers was the equivalent of four gates — and shook his head. 'A different shape for every number? Simplicity? But this seems to me a complicated thing.'
Ethloi was frustrated (a great many mathematicians are), and sighed. But in a moment: Now tell me, he said, how do you divide?
'Divide?'
How many of these: I I, are there in this.'J.-H'T + I?
'I I I,' Nathan answered at once.
And how many of these: J-H' T in this: III?
Again Nathan frowned. 'There are only parts,' he shrugged.
And again Ethloi sighed. As I supposed: you cannot divide.
It was Nathan's turn to be frustrated, and: 'I know enough to divide a large orange between friends,' he
