the tidal defenses, and the way in which the houses along the canals had been built well above the mean water level. When tides ravaged through Zenicce tragedy could result, so the barrages, defenses, and gates were kept always in good repair, a charge on the Assembly.
Akhram told me that a great dam stood at the seaward end of the Grand Canal that connected this inner sea with the outer ocean. There were closable channels through the dam. The dam faced both ways. It had been constructed, so Akhram said, by those men of the sunrise — he said sunrise, not suns-rise -
in the distant past as they had faced and leveled the canal itself, so as to control the tidal influx and efflux from the inner sea.
“We are an inward-facing people, here on the inner sea,” he said. “We know that outside, in the stormy outer ocean, there are other continents and islands. Sometimes ships sail through the regulated openings in the Dam of Days. Vallia, Wloclef from whence come thick fleeces of the curly ponsho, Loh from whence come fabulous, superbly cut gems and glassware of incredible fineness: these places we know as they trade with us. Donengil, also, in South Turismond. There are a few others; otherwise, we remain willingly confined to our inner sea.”
Later I was allowed to visit the observatories and watch the Todalpheme at work. Much of what they did with ephemeris and celestial observation was familiar to me; but much was strange, beyond my comprehension, for they used what seemed almost a different kind of logic. They were as devoted to their work as monks to theirs. But they laughed and were free and easy. They showed a certain respect for my own understanding of the movements of heavenly bodies and the predictable movements of bodies of water, with tides and currents and winds and all the hazards thereto attached.
This inner sea was practically tideless. There was little wonder in this, of course (the Mediterranean tides never exceed two feet), and these dedicated men spent their lives calculating tide tables so that they might warn the custodians at the gates of the dam to be ready when the outer ocean boiled and seethed and roared in with all its power. I gathered there was no other navigable exit from the inner sea.
“Why do you live here, on the inward end of the Grand Canal?” I asked. Akhram smiled in a vague way and swung his arm in a gesture that encompassed the fertile soil, the orchards, the smooth sea. “We are an inward- facing people. We love the Eye of the World.”
When Akhram referred to the dam he called it the “Dam of Days.” I realized how much it meant. If the outer ocean got up into a real big tide and swept in through the narrow gut of the Grand Canal, it would sweep like a great broom across the inner sea.
That great Dam of Days had been built in the long-ago by a people now scattered and forgotten, known only by the monuments in stone they had built and which time had overthrown, all except the Grand Canal and the Dam of Days.
I saw a stir in the fields. People were running. Faintly, cries reached up. Akhram looked over and his face drew down into a stern-lined visage of agony and frustrated anger.
“Again they raid us,” he whispered.
Now I could see mail-clad men riding beasts, swooping after the running farm people. I saw a man stagger and go down with a great net enveloping him. Girls were snatched up to saddlebows. Little children, toddlers even, were plucked up and flung screaming into ready sacks. The long sword I had found by the thorn-ivy was below, in the room I had been assigned. I started off along the parapet. When I emerged by the massive lenken door it was just closing. A frightened rabble crowded in, the last just squeezing through the little postern cut in the main doors. I lifted the sword.
“Let me out,” I said to the men bolting and barring the doors.
I wore the green-striped material taken from the dead Chulik. I had been unable to don the hauberk or coif; my shoulders are broader than most. I held the sword so the men at the doors could see it.
“Do not go out,” they said. “You will be killed or captured-”
“Open the door.”
Akhram was there. He put a hand on my arm.
“We do not ask visitors for their names or their allegiances, friend,” he said. He stared up at me, for I am above middle height. “If they are your hereditary foes, you may go freely forth and be killed for your convictions. But I take you for a stranger. You do not know our ways-”
“I know slaving when I see it.”
He sighed. “They are gone by now. They sweep in, when we do not expect them, not at dawn or sunset, and take our people. We, the Todalpheme, are inviolate by nature, law, and mutual agreement; for, if we were killed, then who would give warning when the great tides were coming? But our people, our loyal people who care for us, are not inviolate.”
“Who are they?” I asked. “The slavers?”
Akhram looked about him on the frightened mob of peasant folk in their simple clothing, some with the pitchforks still in their hands, some with infants clinging to their skirts, some with blood upon their faces.
“Who?” asked Akhram.
The man who answered, a full-bodied man with a brown beard to his waist and a seamed and agricultural face, spoke in a tongue I had difficulty in following. It was not Kregish, the universal Latin of Kregen, and it was not the language of Segesthes, spoken by my Clansmen of Felschraung and Longuelm, and by the Houses and free men and slaves of Zenicce.
“Followers of Grodno,” Akhram said. He looked weary, like a civilized man who sees things with which civilization should be done. Then, quickly, as he saw me open my mouth to ask, he spoke. “Grodno, the green-sun deity, the counterpart to Zair, the red-sun deity. They are, as all men can tell, locked in mortal combat.”
I nodded. I remembered how men said the sky colors were always in opposition.
“And the city of these people, these slavers, these followers of Grodno?”
“Grodno lies all to the northern side of the inner sea; Zair to the south. Their cities are many and scattered, each free and independent. I do not know from which city these raiders came. I said, lifting the sword again: “I shall go to the cities of Grodno, for I believe-”
I did not say any more.
Suddenly I saw, planing high in the air and descending in wide hunting circles, the gorgeous scarlet plumage of a great bird of prey, a raptor with golden feathers encircling its neck and its black feet and talons outstretched in wide menace. I knew that bird, the Gdoinye, the messenger or spy of the Star Lords. As I saw it so I felt that familiar lassitude, that sickening sense of falling, overpower me, and I felt my knees give way, my sword arm fall, my every sense reel and shiver with the shock of dissociation.
“No!” I managed to cry out. “No! I will not return to Earth! I will not. . I will stay on Kregen. . I will not return!”
But the blue mist encompassed me and I was falling. .
CHAPTER THREE
North or south. . Grodno or Zair. . green or red. . Genodras or Zim. . Somewhere a conflict was being fought out. I did not know then and even now I must in the nature of things be unaware of all that passed as I sank down in a stupor in the courtyard of the tidal buildings of Akhram with the frightened rabble of peasantry about me and the massive lenken door fast shut with its bronze bolts and bars. I was aware of a vast hollow roaring in my head. This perturbed me, for on my previous transplantations from Kregen to Earth, or from Earth to Kregen, the thing had been done and over with in mere heartbeats.
I seemed detached from myself. I was there, in that courtyard with the kindly concerned face of Akhram bending over me. And, also, I was looking down on the scene from a goodly height and the scene eddied around like a whirlpool, like that whirlpool into which I had plunged in my leaf boat going down the River Aph. I shuddered at the thought that I might be seeing that scene from the viewpoint of the Gdoinye, the scarlet and golden bird of prey.
As I looked, both upward and downward, simultaneously, I saw a white dove moving smoothly through the
