not successful. The huri used its tiny hands to scour fine crimson wounds in Eisen Zwei’s withered cheeks and buckled forehead. Then it flapped out of the old man’s grasp and rose to tree level.

I feared it would dive upon me in my borrowed perch, but it skirted the perimeter of the clearing, dipping, banking, silently cawing. Its imaginary screams curdled my blood. Meanwhile, Eisen Zwei fell sideways across his pallet and died.

The Asadi chieftain was dead. He died just at sunset.

I waited for his people to flee into the Wild, to leave his brittle corpse for an Earthman’s astonished scrutiny. They did not flee. Even though the lethal twilight was gathering about them, they stayed. The attraction of the old man’s death out-weighed their fear of exposing themselves in an open place to the mysteries of darkness.

In my arboreal lookout I realized I had witnessed two things I had never before seen among the Asadi: Death and a universal failure to repair.

DESIGNATION

The Ritual of Death and Designation had passed into its second stage before I truly comprehended that stages existed. I ignored my hunger and put away the thought of sleep.

The Asadi converged upon the old man’s corpse. Those of smallest size were permitted to crowd into the center of the clearing and lift the dead chieftain above their heads. The young, the deformed, the weak, and the congenitally slight of stature formed a double column beneath the old man’s outstretched body and began moving with him toward the northern end zone.

Arranged in this fashion, they forced a new revelation upon me. These were Asadi whose manes were a similar texture and color: a stringy, detergent-scum brown. They bore the corpse of Eisen Zwei with uncomplaining acquiescence. The larger, sleeker specimens of Asadi – those with luxuriant silver, silver-blue, or golden manes – formed single columns on each side of their lackluster counterparts; and together these two units, like water inside a moving pipe, flowed toward the north—

The one direction that Eisen Zwei had not entered from on the day he brought those three dressed-out carcasses into the clearing.

Driver ants in Africa use just this sort of tubular alignment when they wish to move great distances as a group: the workers inside the column, the warriors without. And nothing on that immense dark continent is more feared than driver ants on the march. With, of course, the singular and noteworthy exception of Humankind.

Almost too late I realized that the Asadi would be out of the clearing and beyond my reach unless I got out of The Bachelor’s tree. Nearly falling, I scrambled down. As if viewed through a photographer’s filter, the foliage through which the mourners marched gave off a soft gauzy glow. I ran. I found that I could keep up with very little effort, so cadenced and funereal was the step of their procession. I slowed to a walk behind it.

Trudging in the wake of the mourners, incorrigibly hangdog in his pariahhood, was The Bachelor. Meanwhile, the twilight reverberated with the footfalls and leaf nudgings of a host of single-minded communicants.

I saw the huri flying above the part of the procession where its master was being borne forward on the shoulders of the smaller Asadi. Avoiding branches, the huri turned an inadvertent cartwheel in the air, righted itself, and landed on Eisen Zwei’s bony chest. Here it did a little preening dance, for all the world like an oil-coated rooster wooing a hen. Then the column snaked to the left, the Wild closed off my view of the marchers, and darkness began drifting in like black confetti.

How long we trudged, I have no idea. An eternity of infinitesimal moments. I won’t attempt to estimate. Say only, quite a long time. Finally our procession flowed into another clearing.

There in the clearing, rising against the sky like an Oriental pagoda, loomed the broad and impervious mass of something built, something made. All three moons were up, and the solid black bulk of this structure was spotlighted in the antique-gold claret shed by the three moons together. Even before those of us at the end of the procession were out of the jungle, we could see the lofty, winglike roofs of this sudden artifact and its high, deep-violet windows. Was I the only one whose first inclination was to plunge back into the nightmare forest? I don’t believe so.

As we approached, members of both the inner and the outer columns began to sway from side to side, marching and swaying at once. The Bachelor’s head, in fact, moved in wide arcs; his whole marching body trembled as if from the paroxysms of ague. If he had been punished for once leading me to this place, perhaps he trembled now from fear. On the other hand, if the Asadi wished this temple kept inviolate, wouldn’t they somehow punish me if they discovered my presence?

I almost bolted back the way the Asadi had led me, but the pagoda had captured my imagination and I resisted the impulse to run. However, I did have the good sense to climb a tree on the edge of the clearing fronting the pagoda. From this vantage I watched the proceedings in relative safety.

Grey shadows moved in the deep shadow cast by the Asadi temple. And suddenly two violently green flames burned in the iron flambeaux on either side of the top step of the immense tier of stone steps leading to the temple’s ornate doorway! The torchlighters – formerly the moving grey shadows – came back down the steps. Once again I was stunned with wonder and disbelief. This sophisticated use of both flambeaux and a starting agent I couldn’t even guess at destroyed a multitude of my previous conclusions about the Asadi. Fire! They understood fire!

By this time the four columns of Asadi had ranged themselves in parallel files before the stairway of the ancient pagoda, and six slightly built menials bore the corpse of Eisen Zwei – now an uncanny apple green in

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