morning's flock seemed less numerous or vigorous than the first. They were not true birds, Kelis knew. They were sorcery, like everything in these mountains, beautiful yet malformed.
It may have been the strangeness of the mountain terrain, the fatigue of their daily marches, or the workings of the magic so obviously woven in the world around them, but Kelis found his dreams becoming more vivid, crystal clear in a manner they had not been in many years. Often he relived episodes from recent days, altered in some way. Thus, the walk that took up his days stretched into the sleeping hours. In one dream the crumpled bodies of those birds rose from the ground and tried to fly again, their heads swinging wildly from their broken necks, wings crooked and shattered. They danced, leaping again and again, only to twirl back to earth, tiny bones snapping and feathers littering the ground. Another night he started awake, thrashing his arms and legs as he fought to escape the trees that had suddenly reached out their warped limbs and grabbed him.
And then came a night-long dream of a real evening from years before: the womanhood ceremony he and Aliver had participated in just after earning manhood rights themselves. He relived the entire evening in slow detail. As one of the newly established males, he danced with the other young warriors from all the central villages-Aliver among them-in the slow procession that wound them around and around the circle of admiring young women. The drums beat a steady rhythm, into which darted the plucked metallic bursts of thumb instruments. It was a long ceremony, and it was here again in his dream. He relived each step, each jump, each clap and smile and toss of his head, all done at the same time as the other men. They glistened with sweat, each lean from running and training, all chiseled to the perfection the Giver first sang into being.
Aliver may have been lighter hued, but in the contours of his body and his movements he was the same as any of the Talayans. Kelis knew where he was each moment of the dance. He took pleasure in it, at times feeling like he and Aliver danced for each other. Their eyes met often, both flashing smiles when they did so. He knew that Aliver's joy was in the ceremony itself, in anticipation of what was to come and in joy at so completely belonging, but to Kelis there was more to it. Part of the joy for him was in the awareness that-should Aliver wish it-anything could happen between them. No intimacy would be too much, no pleasure one Kelis would turn away from. It was an attraction he felt for no other man, and yet something about it felt right, full and complete and sublime in a manner different from his attraction to women. It could lead to anything.
But not that night. Nor on any night thereafter. That evening progressed on a tide propelled by the collective will of the village. At some point the music changed tempo, announcing the time of choosing had come. In an instant the new women swarmed in on the men, grabbing them by the wrist, shouting out their choices with voices and laughter. Aliver became the center of a swirling chaos of young beauties. Kelis himself was pulled in two different directions for a time, until one girl won the tugging match by grasping his tuvey band and swirling away with him. Benabe won Aliver, perhaps with the aid of his acquiescence. What a beauty she was then! Kelis could see it as clearly as any man. Aliver was as eager as she was, eager enough that he left the group at her urging, without so much as a glance of leave-taking to Kelis.
Perhaps that was the night Benabe conceived. Perhaps, while he made love to one woman, thinking of a man, that man planted the seed that would be Shen in another woman. Perhaps-if Thaddeus Clegg had not arrived soon after to recall Aliver to the fight that would eventually take his life-Kelis might have watched Aliver and Benabe wed and would have been near them as Shen entered the world and grew. He awoke with this thought, and during the few quiet minutes left before the others stirred he tried to believe he could have lived satisfied with that. And then he had a different thought.
Perhaps Shen is my daughter as well. That would explain why she scared him so, and why he already loved her more than his own life. For that was the truth. What he had said to Benabe was neither a comfort nor a vain boast. Though he had only known the girl a few weeks, it already seemed that protecting her was the single task of meaning in his life.
And then, with an abruptness that meant it took but a few minutes to descend to the plains again, the mountains ended one morning. The four travelers wove through the foothills and trod once more across a flat landscape, one devoid of shade, unpeopled, and as barren as the far south Kelis had first approached with Aliver years before. Even the hardy acacia trees were but stunted, infrequent versions of their normal grandeur. It was there that they came upon the man. Naamen saw him first and indicated it with a grunt. The group of four stopped and stared.
The man stood as still as a statue, garbed in a robe the same sand color as the land around him. He clasped his hands together at his waist and seemed to carry nothing, no supplies, no weapons or staff, not even a skin of water. He was hooded, but the sun reflecting off the sand lit his face from beneath. He stared straight at them, as if he had been waiting for them to arrive at just that spot on the world. Kelis raked his eyes across the landscape, searching for others, for signs that would explain the man. Featureless desolation stretched out in all directions. He focused on the figure again. Was he a mirage they were all seeing, a sign they had journeyed away from sanity?
Shen walked forward. Benabe whispered her name. Kelis half formed a protest himself, but he held it behind his teeth. He strode to keep pace with the girl. As she neared him, the man finally moved. He fell forward onto his knees and into a bow that pressed his forehead to the ground. Once there, with his arms stretched out to either side and his palms flat against the parched earth, the man did nothing more.
Shen glanced back at the others, her expression one of amused perplexity. She knelt and touched her fingertips to the man's shoulder. She intoned the traditional words of Talayan greeting. 'Old friend, the sun shines on you, but the water is sweet.'
'The water is cool, Your Majesty, and clear to look upon,' the man answered, speaking his words to the earth. 'You are loved.'
In those few words Kelis recognized the speaker's voice.
'I know,' Shen said, as if she heard such greetings regularly. 'Did the stones send you to tell me so?'
'The stones?' The prostrate man sounded confused for a moment, but then his voice picked up with the rhythms of practiced formality. 'The Santoth called you, and you came. That is a blessing. Come with me, Princess. I will take you to them. They have much to tell you.'
Before he knew it, the man's name whispered through Kelis's lips. 'Leeka Alain?'
The man raised his head, turned, and looked at Kelis. For a moment Kelis thought himself mistaken. The man's face was nothing like the craggy one he remembered on the general. And then it was. And a moment later it was not. His features appeared as fixed and solid as anybody else's, but his face contained more than a single man's features. It was ancient and cracked and eroded with the wear of ages, and yet it was also a face of clear green eyes and a once-broken nose and lips that glistened with moisture when his tongue wet them.
'They don't call me that here,' the man said, 'but that was my name before.'
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
The breakneck speed at which the league clipper careened into Acacia's main harbor would have been reckless even in the light of day. At night, it was madness. But league pilots were nothing if not adept at all things nautical, and the officer at the helm of the Rayfin carved a wild course through the anchored vessels, passed the trading floats. He hooked the vessel around the inner watchtower and dropped sails only when momentum alone was more than enough to place it skimming along a fortunately unoccupied section of league-owned pier. He shouted for the messenger to disembark before they had even halted. The man did not need the encouragement. He leaped from a height and ran with all the haste he had been ordered to show.
A scant ten minutes later, Sire Dagon sat bleary eyed, wearing a robe loosely wrapped about his gaunt frame. Mist so clouded his head that his servants had to carry him-against his muted protests-and prop him up in his chair. Even sitting there, with the bay windows thrown open to a chill breeze and lamps on high, he as yet floated on the chorus of angelic voices he conducted during his mist dreams. His head swirled with song, his body light as a silken puppet and able to dance in midair, only now being tugged back down to earth. Blinking, he asked the messenger what could possibly merit the interruption at such a delicate hour.
'I came in haste,' the man said.
