And Lutha lay in my lap, hurting. Grief is not only in the mind. A spirit does not agonize in separate space. It takes the body with it!
“He called my name,” she wept. “Oh, Saluez! He called my name!”
Eventually she wept herself into exhaustion. Despite everything, all our capacity for wonder or outrage or grief wore itself out. No one had the energy to weep another tear, to ask another unanswerable question. I made tea. Snark brought me some herbs to put in it, soothing things, she said. Her own face was wet and weary, but when I offered a cup, she would not take it. She would keep watch, she said, though what good watching could do she did not say.
In the night I heard Lutha moving. I said her name. She mumbled something about a stone in her bed. In a moment she was quiet again.
Gray light came and I woke. Around me on the sand the others lay in blanketed hummocks, Snark among them. Evidently she had decided it would do no good to keep watch. Against the far wall, another hummock showed where the ex-King of Kamir had been laid. Beside me, Lutha moved uncomfortably, whining again about the stone beneath her.
Quietly, thinking to ease her, I reached under her covering to remove what troubled her, encountering instead a warm softness, not Lutha, something else alive.
My first thought was the cats. I had never felt a cat, but presumably a cat would feel soft and warm and alive. Then I had a less pleasant thought, something to do with the serpents that had driven us from our rock pile.
Shuddering, I drew it away from Lutha’s side, waking her. Her eyes came open as I held the thing at arm’s length, thrust it into the light….
And dropped it as Lutha screamed, a sound that might have waked the bones in Snark’s jar. It waked all those around us, who within moments were babbling as wildly as I.
It was Leely! Leely, the size of my foot! Leely no bigger than a small cat, a whole Leely in miniature, exactly like himself but tiny, tiny.
Mitigan cursed, brushing his hands across his blanket, bowling another Leely onto the sand. Two Leelies, three, four. A dozen Leelies from among our blankets, all piping in reedlike voices, “Dananana.”
Poracious held Lutha while she came apart. I, too, felt the seams between reality and madness fail, felt myself rip into pieces, then saw all the pieces, a row of them on the edge of a precipice, teetering into hysteria, ready to tumble!
“Lutha!” Leelson, who had taken Poracious’s place. “Lutha, Saluez, think! It’s all right. It’s all right!”
There was Snark beside the stove, holding out crackers to the Leelies. There were dozens of them. Some no larger than my thumb.
What was all right? This? This was all right?
“It’s the healing,” Leelson shouted at us, slapping Lutha gently to get her attention. “It’s regenerative, that’s all. A whole organism from any fragment. Lutha. It’s all right.”
“It’s not,” she howled. “It’s not all right.”
Several of the Leelies came running across the sand to stand pulling at Lutha’s trousers, caroling, “Dananana,” over and over, then running back to the others to make a bird twitter of tiny voices, among which we heard, “Lutha Lutha mother love.”
I think perhaps Lutha fainted. Or perhaps she simply abdicated responsibility for living. She let go, fell down, and stopped, quit even being aware that life was going on around her, ignoring all our attempts to arouse her.
Leelson said, “Let her alone.”
“Good. Let me alone,” she agreed in a far-off voice.
We did let her alone. The Leelies didn’t. They liked her. She was their Lutha Lutha mother love. They liked me. I was their Saluez of the shadow. They wandered all over both of us, like tiny explorers setting out across a new land, while I sat there, my hands twitching as I tried to decide whether to pick them off or let them be. Hysterically, I told myself to await the jab of a flag driven into my thigh, a voice claiming this new continent!
Under her breath, Lutha was counting. She stopped at the count of one hundred ten.
“One hundred ten?” I asked.
“That’s how many of them I’ve counted,” she said in a high, cracked voice. “One hundred ten.”
More had come in from among the stones. The smallest ones were half the size of my little finger. The largest was three times the size of the one I had found first. I found myself saying, that one is leg-sized. That one is arm-sized. That one grew out of a few drops of blood. They clustered around us like grapes, dangling from Lutha like pendant fruit, eager, joyous. They felt no pain. They knew no fear. They had no worry about what had happened to him, them. It didn’t matter what had happened to him, them, or how they had come to be.
Lutha said brokenly, “God, what kind of mind could have designed such a thing!”
After a time they seemed to find new centers for their attention. A dozen broke away to cluster around a slightly larger one, and that group wandered off. Then, gradually, another dozen, or a score. The groups wavered across the floor, disappearing into holes, reappearing again, vanishing at last. Finally there was only one left. The largest one.
“This is how big he was when he was born,” raved Lutha, “this big. Just this big. The same size …”
Leelson sat down beside her, his face very white. “Are you all right?”
“I suppose,” she said.
“You understand what’s happened here.”
Her face twisted. I knew she was cursing him, cursing all Fastigats who would not assume anything, who had to spell everything out, letter by letter. Still, she shook herself, gripped her hands tightly together, and answered his stupid question with reasonable self-control.
“I understand it intellectually, Leelson. Not in
