my father and we lads were hunters. When sent out alone. I often stayed away for days on end, and afterward tied about having had a long chase. They doubted me, since they had seen what I could do when we fared together. Thus year by year I grew more estranged, and chafed more.
“Then once by myself, on the western side of the mountain and high enough that I could see a gleam where the ocean was, I found a daur. I had glimpsed a few dauri before, though barely. They came to our parts less seldom than to most of South Valennen. Maybe it was because here was wilderness, thinly peopled by mortals; maybe because here were more of the plants they live on though we cannot; maybe they had a landmagic to work here. Who knows? I don’t, not to this day.
“But there the small uncanny thing was, trapped beneath a tree which had blown over in a storm the night before. Its arms and legs moved feebly, in ripples under a skin which, at hot noontide, had gone from purple to white. The petals on the branch—the branch where a head should have grown—the petals clenched and unclenched, as if they gasped, and the tendrils below them writhed. From the belly three eyes stared, dark as holes. But the hole itself had been punched by a sharp-ended bough; thin ichor trickled out.
“For a two-pulse beat I wanted to flee, and for another I wanted to slay. However, I held fast. And a thought came to me: We fear them, and sometimes set out offerings, because they are unknown to us. Not because they are evil; there are few stories about their doing harm, which may all be false, and there are some about their having done things jointly with mortals, which may all be true. Would it not be wonderful to have the friendship of a daur?
“I lifted the tree off him, not too heavy for me, I bore him to a cave nearby, treated his wound as best I was able, made him a bed of lia. For days thereafter I brought him water, and food of his kind. I say ‘him’ but know not if ‘her’ would be right, or ‘it,’ or what. Nor do I know if we became friends as mortals do. Who can tell what a daur thinks, deep in his belly or petals or wherever his soul abides, if he has a soul? I do know we lost shyness of each other and began to swap a few words. I could not utter his trills and squeals well, though I did better than he did at my speech. Yet we learned the meaning of certain signs and noises.
“When he was healed, he gave me no treasure or magical power as I had hoped. He only made me understand that he wished me to come back whenever I could. I went home mightily thoughtful. Of course I said naught to anybody of what had happened.
“I did return often. Most times nobody met me, but now and then I would go off with a whole little band of those beings. They used no metal, and gave me tools of stone, useless to my size and shape of hand but finely chipped and perhaps lucky to carry. For my part, I guided them around—remember, they did not live here, they just came south over the Desolation Hills and along the Worldwall on brief trips—and I helped them catch the small game which could not nourish me, and gave them bones from my larger kills to make into tools. I think that must be one thing they sought. Animals in the Starklands are all dwarf, as I would learn long afterward.
“Meanwhile I began courting a female. In rashness I boasted to her at last of my comradeship with the dauri. Less bold than I’d supposed, she fled from me in terror. Soon two of her brothers sought me out and accused me of trying to cast a spell on her. Anger kindled anger till they were stretched dead. Parents on both sides were quick to compose the quarrel, before a feud could start.
I’ve since wondered if that’s not the real reason fathers have absolute power over sons and grandsons, mothers over daughters and granddaughters, till the age of sixtyfour—not ‘upbringing,’ not ‘rightness,’ not the word of a god, whatever we believe today—but simply that before this law, too many young were getting slain.
“Regardless, my father saw he had best give me leave to depart. I went right blithely. For the next hundred years or such, there were more exciting things to do than run on Mount Fang with the dauri. I was a hunter, and brought skins to Tarhanna for trade. When I heard that the outlanders paid better for phoenix wood, I became a lumberjack. We would raft our logs down to Port Rua, and thus I got to know that town. What its soldiers, sailors, and merchants told me about South-Over-Sea fired me and I took to the water myself.
“At first I was a buccaneer. But that was a poor trade in those days. We dared raid no island that held a legionary post, and most did. Soon I shipped as a deckhand on a Sehalan freighter.
“Long I wandered the lands of the Gathering, taking what work I found, until I joined a legion. I liked that, but when my octad was over I didn’t re-enlist; for I had grown thoughtful. No, I went to Sehala itself and lived on my savings while I read books—I had learned to read; it’s not a wizard’s art, whatever you’ve heard— and hearkened to wise folk.
“You will understand. Year by year the Burner was brightening.
“They grew troubled in Sehala. Always civilization had gone under, in flood, storm, famine, breakdown, and the onset of wild people driven out of countries still more ruined. Nevertheless, they had hope. In the last two cycles, legionary organizations had saved something, more the second time than the first. Aye, several of the legions are that old, the Zera among them. They have outlived nations, and brought new ones to speedier birth and growth. Moreover, this time the humans had come, those aliens of whom you surety know rumors—
“Yes, I have met humans, though not to talk with at any length. But another evening, Kusarat. You have asked about the dauri and me.
“Legionary records showed that the Cruel Star would stand straight above Valennen, In the past, said those records, most Valenneners—belike our forebears didn’t call themselves Tassui—most had perished. Dim and broken word-things bespoke northerners who in still earlier ages, before any legions were founded, overran the Fiery Sea and parts of Beronnen. Their names are lost; their descendants are part of today’s civilization; but they themselves lived through Fire Time. They lived!
“I thought: If the Gathering keeps its might, there can be no such invasion of it now; and most of my people will die. I cared for them still. What quarrels I had had among them I saw as lovers’ quarrels.
“I thought: But the Gathering will at best be much weakened. If Valennen meanwhile is strengthened, united, knowingly led—Do you see? And before you say it, I will. Yes, of course I want to be he who shapes the whole next cycle. I want the humans to come to me while I live, not to Sehala, and deal with me in wonders, And when I am dead, I want my memory to stand, my skull enshrined for an oracle, till the next Fire Time after this, and beyond. That is no more than soldier’s pay for saving a folk.
“Therefore I came home.
“You have heard the rest: how I cleared new land at Ulu; how I built wealth and power through trade with the Gathering, and reaving of those places from which the Gathering withdrew; how lesser families who saw worsening years ahead came to me, gave oath in return for land and leadership, learned from me how to fight with the head as well as the hands. They are the bone of my strength.
“But the spirit in it—”
“Kusarat, I will say frankly, I have hunted out word about you, because you are an Overling of weight. Thus I know I can speak to you more openly than to some. You are no back-country huddler who gulps down every cackle of old wives’ gossip about the gods. When I say that our shortsighted, wrangling Tassui cannot be brought together by force alone, not to save their very fives— that only an Otherness can melt them to an ingot from which I may forge a sword—you will understand.
“I sought my dauri again.
“Long and long was that search. Yet they do make ever more treks to mortal realms, in ever greater numbers, as the Stormkindler draws nigh. Their Starklands dry out worse than our grounds do; and meanwhile, as the waxing heat kills off our kind of life, their kind—which can better take it—moves in, to nourish them. Thus in the end, it matters not how, I found me a daur. We spoke what little we could. Later I met more dauri and we spoke further.
“I do not know if he I saved was among them, nor even if they had heard that tale. I tried to find out, and failed. What I did have was a slight command of their speech and knowledge of their ways, to show I had formerly been friendly with their sort. I worked hard to add to this.
“For… in Fire Time, it is not only mortals who seek what allies they can get.
“They are leery of us. And frankly again, too much closeness might make my followers not leery enough of them. I needed a sigil, a Thing, which I could bear for a mark of their favor while they mainly kept away from the Tassui. But I could not make this clear; they are so utterly sundered from us. Or if they understood me, perhaps they did not know what would serve. After all. I myself was blind as to what there might be. A token of stone or bone was no use; I could have fashioned that myself.
“The upshot was that they took me into their homeland.
“You have heard that I went. You may have heard that I came back in mummy skin and bones a-rattle, and
