'Sinper Ou has a lion crest,' the girl said. 'Do you think him petty?' 'Yes,' Benabe said, grinning, 'tell us, Kelis. Do you think the magnificent, rich Sinper Ou is a petty man?'
Kelis cleared his throat. He was not yet used to the many ways Shen caught him off guard, but he had come to believe she meant no mischief by it. He could not say the same about Benabe, but Shen's questions were asked because she wished to know the answers. She received whatever answer he gave with the same focused interest. In fact, he had already changed the way he spoke to her. He called her 'child,' but increasingly he did not think of her as kin to others of her age. Are other children like her? he wondered. Have I not noticed, or is she just different? He said, 'I do not think Father Ou knows lions as I do.'
'Lions were not always the ruffians they are now,' Naamen said. He sat cross-legged on the other side of the fire, chewing on peppergrass to clean his teeth. Whatever import hung at the edges of Kelis's interactions with the girl did not seem to affect him at all. He spoke lightly, falling into the heightened delivery of a storyteller. Shen sat up to listen. 'When the Giver was yet on earth, lions and laryx and all other animals had peace together. They all knew that-'
'Hush,' Kelis said. 'She has heard these tales before. She should sleep now.'
'No,' Shen protested, 'tell me. I want to hear it in Naamen's voice.' 'Go ahead,' Benabe said. 'You've got a good voice for tales.' Grinning with triumph, the young man continued. 'They were the Giver's creations. They felt his love and knew he shared it equally among them. That was a time of wonder.'
He described the wonders in imaginative detail, drawing scenes with both his normal arm and his stunted one. All sorts of animals bounded along in the Giver's wake, singing to praise him. All creatures were newly minted and glistened with the freshness of creation. Everything was just born, and in those first days no creature thought of eating another. Instead, they leaped in the air to pull ripe fruit down from the trees. Shiviths raced with gazelles for the pure joy of it. Elephants fenced with rhinoceroses like playful friends. Eagles lifted mice into the air cupped gently in their talons, so that the small creatures might have the joy of seeing from the heights. Lions wrestled with laryx in brotherly competition.
'Can you see these things?' Naamen asked.
'I can,' Shen answered.
'Well, good that you have eyes to imagine it, for it did not last.'
Naamen explained that Elenet, the first man, was born into this. For a time he shared in the rejoicing, but soon he learned enough of the Giver's tongue that he became vain. He tried to make his own creations, but because he was not the Giver, nothing he tried came out right. It was always twisted. Wanting to make warmth, he made the sun burn too strongly. Fleeing, he sang to cool himself and froze portions of the world in ice. To warm himself, he made fire, not noticing until later that fire consumes all it touches. To put out the fire, he lifted water from the rivers and created storms. To quell the storms, he blew the sky clean and found he had created deserts.
'You see?' Naamen asked. 'Everything he did created chaos; nothing he intended came into being as he intended. Wanting to make himself immortal he opened the door to disease. He created death the moment he thought to fear it and to escape it.'
'Nobody had died before that?' Shen asked.
'No,' Naamen said, 'this is the time of the first generation of everything. There was first nothing, and then there was life. It might always have been so, if Elenet had not acted so wrongly.'
But he had acted wrongly, and the Giver lost faith in his creatures. He turned away and abandoned his creations, fearing that any of them might be the next to betray him. In no time at all the world changed. The goodness that was the Giver went with him, and the world was left a different place. Creatures who had been friends began to squabble. Strong ones took to bullying weak ones. And it was not long before some creatures began to feast on the flesh of others. Eagles pressed their talons into the mice that had been their friends. Snakes used their stealth to hunt. Lions ate anything they wished. Fearing that they would all vanish, the hunted creatures learned how to mate and make children, but then the hunters learned these things, too. Painful and dangerous as it was, they had their own young, whom they taught to hunt as well.
Elenet fled from this chaos, though nobody knows to where. In his absence the lions announced that they were supreme of the creatures of the land. The laryx, hearing this, cackled with laughter, for they disdained the lions and thought themselves supreme. That is why lions and laryx still shout at one another today. The lions roar their supremacy; the laryx shout back in hysterics at the lions' foolishness.
'Their blood feud goes on,' Naamen said, 'and perhaps always will. At least until the Giver returns and sets the world right again.'
The storyteller bowed his head, indicating that his tale was concluded. Shen had lain with her head in the crook of her arm. For a moment Kelis suspected she had fallen asleep, but then she said, 'I thought the Santoth made the laryx with the touch of their eyes-when they were angry, I mean, because of being banished.'
'That is sometimes said,' Kelis admitted.
'But Naamen said laryx were there in the first days.'
Naamen said, 'Sometimes two things are said that don't agree. Which is true? Or are both true? I cannot say. I just speak what was spoken to me.'
The girl yawned. 'I will have to ask the stones. They will tell me the truth.'
Shen said this with childish matter-of-factness, with no hint that any might find the notion fantastic or unlikely or frightening. It returned Kelis to the whirl of his worried thoughts. This was no normal hunting trip or ramble or night camped under the stars to tell old tales. For the second time in his life he was going in search of the banished sorcerers, the God Talkers, the Santoth-the ones Shen referred to as the stones. They were beings he had seen only once, on one furious, horrible afternoon. It was a glorious event in that it marked Hanish Mein's military defeat, but it was wrapped in the emotion of Aliver's death and remembered in scenes so terrible he prayed he would never see their like again.
Even so, he was trying now to find these same sorcerers. Nobody could say why, save that a girl swore it had to be done. He was taking that child, a woman, and a youth with him; and he was doing so covertly, so that the queen he was sworn to serve would not know of the existence of a niece, one who might challenge her own child for the throne.
Benabe's voice interrupted his thoughts. 'What do they want with my girl? Can you tell me?' She lay alongside her now-sleeping daughter, propped on an elbow and gazing at Kelis. Her face was lit more by the stars than by the weak glow of the dying fire. Seen thus, in highlight and shadow, she could have been either very old or very young. Either way, she had a beauty that artists would want to capture in stone.
'Me? Cousin, I don't have that wisdom.'
Benabe exhaled and looked out at the dark expanse of the plains around them. The lion had stopped its roaring, but in its place a thousand tiny creatures chirped and whirred and rustled and yapped.
'Shen hasn't trembled since we left Bocoum,' Benabe said. 'Usually, she falls every couple of weeks. I have always hated those moments. It can strike her anywhere, anytime. One moment she is walking; the next she is flailing on the ground, eyes back in her head and mouth sucking, sucking the air. It happens more when she is agitated.'
'She doesn't seem agitated,' Naamen said.
'No, she doesn't,' Benabe said, sounding almost bitter, almost resigned. 'We're walking across a continent into a desert to meet sorcerers who should have died two hundred years ago and she's never seemed happier, never healthier. It's like when she wakes up from trembling. Her face goes so calm, peaceful. She smiles and is… happy. Me, each time my heart is pounding. Each time I think the fit has destroyed her, but each time it fills her with more joy than I ever have. I should love them for that, but sometimes I hate them instead.' She brought her gaze to study Kelis, then Naamen, and then Kelis again. 'I don't know if I am doing right to let her go. Kelis, you've seen them. Tell me that they are good.'
In answer, he adjusted his cloak, snugging it tighter around his torso. He forced a yawn and held it long, and then adjusted his position as if on the verge of sleeping. 'There is nothing to fear,' he said, hoping the lie would be enough to end the conversation.
The next afternoon Kelis noticed something strange on the southern horizon. He said nothing about it, not that day or the next. But on the third day Naamen tried to make eye contact with him as they walked. He shot concerned glances that Kelis did not return. Kelis was glad that his companion did not voice his thoughts, for he still hoped he might awake the next morning and find the shapes had been but clouds, mirages, tricks the heated vapors
