11

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.” Marjorie was kneeling in the confessional at the side of the chapel, the evening light falling upon her face The chapel was dusk dim, the light near the altar making a watchful eye in the shadow. “I have resented my daughter. And my husband.

She was alone in the chapel except for Father James. Rigo was closeted in the winter quarters with Hector Paine. Stella and Tony and Father Sandoval had ridden the mares down to the village to visit Sebastian Mechanic and his wife, Dulia, who was, said Sebastian, the best cook on any six planets. Since the reception, Eugenie had scarcely put her nose outside her house and was there now. As Marjorie had come through the gardens to the chapel she had heard Eugenie singing, a slightly drunken lament with no particular burden of woe. The blues, Marjorie recalled having read somewhere, needed no proximate motivation. Any common grief would do. The ancient song, though not particularly melodic, had entered Marjorie’s ear and now turned there, playing itself over persistently, hating to see the evening sun go down.

“I have lost patience with Stella,” she said. Father James needed no explanation for this. He knew them all far too well to need explanation. “I have had angry words with Rigo....” Words about the Hunt, words about his risking his neck and more than his neck. “I have doubted God....”

Father James woke up at this. “How have you doubted?”

If God were good, Rigo and I would be in love, and Rigo would not treat me as he does, she thought. If God were good, Father Sandoval would not treat me as a mere adjunct to my husband, sentencing me to obedience every time I am unhappy. I haven’t done anything wrong, but I’m the one who is being punished and it isn’t fair. She longed for justice. She bit her lip and said none of this, but instead dragged false scent across the trial. “If God is truly powerful, he would not let this plague go on.”

There was silence in the confessional, silence lasting long enough for Marjorie to wonder whether Father James might not really have fallen asleep. Not that she blamed him. Their sins were all boring enough, repetitive enough. They had enough capital sins roiling around to condemn them all. Pride, that was Rigo’s bent. Sloth, Eugenie’s trademark. Envy, that was for Stella. And she, Marjorie, boiling with uncharitable anger toward them all. Herself, who had always tried so hard not to be guilty of anything!

“Marjorie.” Father James recalled her to herself. “I cut my hand upon a grass blade a few days ago, a bad cut. It hurt a great deal. Grass cuts do not seem to heal easily, either.”

“That’s true,” she murmured, familiar with the experience but wondering what he was getting at.

“It came to me suddenly as I was standing there bleeding all over the ground that I could see the cut there between my fingers but I could not heal it. I could observe it, but I couldn’t do anything about it even though I greatly desired to do so. I could not command the cells at the edges of the wound to close. I was not, am not privy to their operations I am too gross to enter my own cells and observe their function. Nor can you do so, nor any of us.

“But suppose, just suppose, that you could create ... oh, a virus that sees and reproduces and thinks! Suppose you could send it into your body, commanding it to multiply and find whatever disease or evil there may be and destroy it. Suppose you could send these creatures to the site of the wound with an order to stitch it up and repair it. You would not be able to see them with your naked eye. You would be unable to know how many of them there were in the fight. You would not know where each one of them was or what it was doing, what agonies of effort each was expending or whether some gave up the battle out of fatigue or despair. All you would know is that you had created a tribe of warriors and sent it into battle. Until you healed or died, you would not know whether that battle was won.”

“I don’t understand, Father.”

“I wonder sometimes if this is what God has done with us.”

Marjorie groped for his meaning. “Wouldn’t that limit God’s omnipotence?”

“Perhaps not. It might be an expression of that omnipotence. In the microcosm, perhaps He needs—or chooses—to create help. Perhaps He has created help. Perhaps he creates in us the biological equivalent of microscopes and antibiotics.”

“You are saying God cannot intervene in this plague?” The invisible person beyond the grating sighed. “I am saying that perhaps God has already done his intervening by creating us. Perhaps He intends us to do what we keep praying He will do. Having designed us for a particular task, he has sent us into battle. We do not particularly enjoy the battle, so we keep begging him to let us off. He pays no attention because He does not keep track of us individually. He does not know where in the body we are or how many of us there are. He does not check to see whether we despair or persevere. Only if the body of the universe is healed will he know whether we have done what we were sent to do!” The young priest coughed. After a moment, Marjorie realized he was laughing. Was it at her, or at himself? “Do you know of the uncertainty principle, Marjorie?”

“I am educated,” she snorted, very much annoyed with him.

“Then you know that with very small things, we cannot both know where they are and what they are doing. The act of observing them always changes what they are doing. Perhaps God does not look at us individually because to do so would interrupt our work, interfere with our free will... .”

“Is this doctrine, Father?” she asked doubtfully, annoyed, wondering what had come over him.

Another sigh. “No, Marjorie. It is the maundering of a homesick priest. Of course it isn’t doctrine You know your way around the catechism better than that.” He rubbed his head, thankful for the seal of the confessional. Even though Marjorie needed to take herself far less seriously, Father Sandoval would not appreciate what he had just said…

“If the plague kills us all, it will be because of our sins,” she said stubbornly. “Not because we didn’t fight it well enough. And our souls are immortal.”

“So Sanctity says. So the Moldies say,” he murmured. “They say we must all be killed off so our souls can live, in the New Creation.”

“I don’t mean we’re excused from fighting the plague,” she objected. “But it’s our sins that brought it on us.”

“Our sins? Yours and mine, Marjorie?

“Original sin,” she muttered. “Because of the sin of our first parents.” First parents very much like Rigo and Stella, passionately acting out whatever moved them, without thought. Even laughing, perhaps, as they tore the world apart. Never sober and reverent as they ought to be. Never peaceful. She sighed.

“Original sin?” the young priest asked, curious. At one time he had believed it without question, but he wasn’t sure anymore. There were some other catechetical things he wasn’t sure of, either. His doubt about doctrine should signal some crisis of faith, he thought, but his faith was as strong as it had ever been, even though his acceptance of details was wavering. “So you believe in original sin?”

“Father! It’s doctrine!”

“How about collective guilt? Do you believe in that?”

“What do you mean?”

“Are the bons guilty, collectively, for what happened to Janetta bon Maukerden?”

“Is that a doctrinal question?” she asked doubtfully.

“How about the Sanctified?” he asked. “Are they collectively guilty of condemning their boy children to prison? Young Rillibee, for example. Was he sent into servitude because of collective guilt, or because of original sin?”

“I’m an Old Catholic. I don’t have to decide where Sanctity went wrong, so long as I know it did!”

He kept himself from laughing. Oh, if only Marjorie had more humor. If Rigo had more patience. If Stella had more perception. If Tony had more confidence—And if Eugenie had more intelligence. Never mind their sins, just give them more of what they needed.

He sighed, rubbing the sides of his forehead to make the sullen ache go away, then gave her both absolution and a reasonable penance. She was to accept that Rigo would ride to hounds and she was to try not to judge him harshly. Father Sandoval had been sentencing Marjorie to affectionate support for years. Father James thought affectionate support was probably a bit much Marjorie, repentant but weary, ready to grit her teeth over yet another session of affectionate support, was surprised enough by the penance to accept it. She wouldn’t judge Rigo, but she needn’t support him, either. It was not until later, as evening drew on, that she remembered what Father James had said about thinking viruses and guilt and sin. Once she began considering the questions he had asked, she could not get them out of her mind.

In the chapel, meantime, Father James knelt to beg forgiveness for himself. It had been wicked of him to challenge Marjorie’s faith when what he was really wanting was to shore up his own. He was not at all sure that being nonjudgmental about Rigo was a good thing for Marjorie to do. If what the bons were doing was sinful, then Rigo had no business doing it at all. Rigo had convinced himself he was joining the bons in their obsession out of a sense of duty. Father James thought ego was the more likely reason, and Father Sandoval was too set in his ways to offer anything but cliches. Father James wished for Brother Mainoa to talk with. Or the younger one, Lourai. He had a feeling they shared a good many things besides their age.

In the night, a rhythmic thunder.

Marjorie woke and went walking through the halls of the residence, encountering Persun Pollut, himself stalking nervously from place to place, pulling his long ears, twisting his beard into tails.

“What is it?” she whispered. “I’ve heard it before, but never so close as this.”

“The Hippae, they say,” he murmured in return. “In the village, that’s what they say. Often in the spring they hear this sound, many times during the lapse. It woke me, so I came up here to the big house see that all of you were all right.”

She laid a hand on his arm, feeling the shivering of his skin beneath the fabric. “We’re fine. What are they doing, the Hippae?”

He shook his head. “I don’t think anyone knows. Dancing, they say. Sebastian says he knows where. Someone told him where, but he doesn’t like to talk about it.”

“Ah.” They stood together, looking out the tall windows across the terrace, feeling the beat of the thunder through the soles of their feet. A mystery. As all of Grass was a mystery. And she, Marjorie, was doing nothing about it.

She was still thinking of viruses, considering what a thinking virus might do, one whom God did not observe or command but merely allowed to do what it was created for.

“Ask Sebastian to come see me, will you, Persun?”

‘”Tomorrow,” he promised, “When it gets light.”

Far across the grasses, beyond the port and Commons, beyond the swamp forest, the same sound beat upon the ears of all those at Klive. The bon Damfels family was wakeful, listening. Some were more than merely wakeful.

In a long, dilapidated hallway in the far reaches of the vast structure, Stavenger bon Damfels dragged his struggling Obermum down a long, dusty hallway. One of his hands was twisted into Rowena’s hair, the other held her by the collar of her gown, half throttling her. Blood from her forehead dripped onto the floor.

“Stavenger.” She choked, clinging to his legs. “Listen to me, Stavenger.”

He seemed not to hear her, not to care whether she spoke. His eyes were red and his mouth was drawn into a lipless line. He moved like an automaton, one leg lurched forward, then the other drawn up to it, heaving at her with both hands as though he lifted a heavy sack.

“Stavenger! Oh, by all that’s holy, Stavenger! I did it for Dimity!”

Behind the struggling pair, hiding themselves around corners and behind half-open doors. Amethyste and Emeraude followed and cowered. Since they had seen Stavenger strike Rowena down in the gardens—he either not noticing his daughters behind a screening fountain of grass or not caring if they saw—they had followed him and their mother. The corridor they had come to was ancient, littered, untended and untenanted. The five-story wing that held it had not been used for at least a generation. Above them, the ceiling sagged in wide, shallow bubbles, stained with water which had leaked through the rotted thatch and permeated the three floors above. The portraits on the walls were corrupted with mold, and the stairs they had climbed were punky with rot.

“He doesn’t know what he’s doing,” Amy whispered, tears running down her face and into the corners of her mouth. She licked them away and said again, “He’s gone crazy. He doesn’t know!”

“He does,” Emmy contradicted, pointing to the light she carried. “There haven’t been any lights in this old place since before we were born, but there’s everlights all along the hall. He got them out of the garage, just like I got this one. He put them here before. He planned it.”

Amy, looking at the dim lanterns set here and there on rickety tables or hung on doorknobs, nodded unwillingly. “Why! Why is he doing this to her?”

“Shhh,” her sister cautioned, pulling them both back into the shadow. Stavenger had stopped at the end of the corridor to thrust Rowena through an open door, pulling it closed behind her and locking it. The key ground in the lock with a rusty finality. He thrust it into his pocket and then stood there, as though listening. “Rowena.” A voice like metal—harsh and hideous. No sound from beyond the door.

“You’ll never go there again! Never to Opal Hill again! Never consort withfragrasagain! Never betray me again!” Silence.

He turned and took up the nearest lamp, then came down the corridor toward them, gathering up the everlights as he came. Slowly he plodded, his face expressionless, passing the door behind which his daughters trembled, leaving the place in darkness, going away as though forever.

They waited, listening for the sound that came at last, the heavy thunder of the door closing, two stories below.

Behind the locked door at the end of the corridor rose the sound of a woman’s howling, an interminable, grief-driven wail of pain and betrayal.

With trembling fingers, Emeraude turned on the everlight she carried and the two of them ran to the door, stumbling over warped floorboards, kicking up small, choking clouds of dust.

The door was heavy and thick, made of wood from a swamp-forest tree and hung by great metal hinges in a solid frame. Only a few doors at the estancia were this heavy, this immovable. The main door of the house. The door of Stavenger’s private office. The treasury door. What had this room once been, to have needed all this weight of wood?

They knocked, called, knocked again. The howl went on and on.

“Find Sylvan!” Emeraude urged her sister in a frantic whisper “He’s the only one who can help, Amy.”

Amethyste turned haunted eyes on her sister, babbling, “I thought I’d ask Shevlok—“

Emmy shook her, demanding her attention. “Shevlok’s useless. He’s done nothing but drink since Janetta showed up at that party. He isn’t even conscious most of the time.”

“If the lapse would get over—“

“If the lapse would get over, he’d go hunting all day and be drunk all night. Find Sylvan!”

“Emmy ...”

“I know! You’re scared to death of Papa. Well, so am I. He’s like ... he’s like one of the Hippae, all shining eyes and sharp blades so you can’t come near him. I keep thinking he will knock me down and trample me to death if I open my mouth. But I’m not going to leave Mama bleeding in there, penned up like that with no food and no water. I won’t let her die like that, but you know Papa will if we let him.”

“Why did Papa—“

“You know perfectly well why. Mama went to Opal Hill, she talked to the people who found Janetta. She’s got the idea that... that...” Emeraude struggled for words, choking on them, eyes bulging as she tried to say what she was not permitted to say.

“Never mind,” her sister said, shaking her. “I know. I’ll find Sylvan. You stay here and tell him what happened, in case I don’t have a chance to explain.”

“Take the light. I’ll wait here.”

Amy sped down the stairs, shuddering away from the banister, which creaked and sagged outward beneath her hand. This ruin was connected to the main house by the old servants’ quarters and the aircar garage. The connecting door was locked, had been locked by their father when they had followed him here, he with that wild, mad look in his eyes, dragging Rowena as though she had been a sack of grain. He had locked the door again when he went out, but there was a broken window nearby which gave onto a long drying yard and the summer kitchens. The girls had come through that. It was almost midnight. The servants would long ago have gone to bed. Even if one or two of them lingered in the kitchens, their sympathies would be with Rowena more than with Stavenger.

A Stavenger who was at this moment in the main hallway screaming unintelligibly at Figor, ranting and threatening so that the whole household had wakened to hear him. Figor, wisely, was saying nothing while allowing the storm to pass. Other family members, wakened by the uproar, stayed out of the way. The great building hummed with murmuring voices, clattered with doors opening and closing, and was yet quiet, silent except for the bellowing voice.

Amy ignored the noise. At this hour, Sylvan would be in his room, or in the library, or in the gymnasium, two floors below. The library was closest, and she found him there in a secluded corner, eyes fixed on a book, fingers in his ears. She knelt beside him and pulled the fingers away.

“Sylvan, Papa has beaten Mama and locked her in the old wing. Emmy’s waiting there. Mama’s got no food, no water, Sylvan. Emmy and I think he means to leave her there....”

She was talking to the chair. Sylvan was up and gone.

In the first light of morning Sebastian Mechanic came to the estancia, where he found Marjorie having a very early breakfast. In answer to her request, he pointed a direction, though unwillingly, suggesting to her that going out into the grasses alone was not a good idea. He did not like the look of her. Her eyes were haunted and she was too thin. Some deep tiredness seemed to oppress her. Despite her appearance of weariness, perhaps illness, she was sensible enough to agree with him that it would be foolish to go into the grasses. She told him she had simply been curious, then asked after his wife and family and made small talk with disarming patience and charm.

When he, assured that she had been merely inquisitive, had gone back to his work, Marjorie went out to the stables and saddled Don Quixote. It was not part of her intention to tell anyone where she was going, though she did leave a message with one of the grooms.

“If I’m not back by dark,” she said, “but not before then, tell my husband or son I’d like him to come look for me in the aircar. I’m carrying a beacon, so I should be easy to find.” The personal beacon was strapped to her leg under her trousers. Any sharp blow would set it off. If she were thrown from a horse, for example. Or if she struck it sharply with her fist. She was carrying a trip recorder of the type used by cartographers, which would serve as a direction finder. She had a laser knife with her as well, to clear her way through tall grass if that became necessary. She showed both of these to the stableman, telling him what they were for. She wanted everything about her journey to speak of purpose. She wanted no one to suppose that she had planned not to come back. It was a risk, that’s all. Still, if something happened to her, it would solve Rigo’s problem. And Stella’s. And her own. Resolutely, she did not think of Tony.

Quixote pawed the soil, flickers of movement running up his twitching hide from fetlocks to withers and down again. Not nerves, not precisely. Something more than that. It was a kind of agitation Marjorie was unfamiliar with, and she stood for a long time stroking his legs, talking to him, trying to imagine what had brought him to this state. He leaned into her, as though for support, yet when she mounted him he trotted out into the grasses as though for a ride on any ordinary day. He meant by this that he trusted her. Though he might die of it, he trusted her. He could not quite keep the nervous quiver from his skin, however, and the message eventually reached her after they had traversed some little distance. She flushed, ashamed to be using him in this fashion when his own nature spoke so strongly against it. She stroked him. expressing her own trust. “Father James says God has made viruses of us, Quixote, but I suppose one virus may still love another, or have another kind of virus as a friend. I won’t put you into a trap, my friend. I won’t let you get close enough for that.” And myself? she thought. Shall I put myself in danger?

Suicide was forbidden, but much glory was given to martyrs. If she killed herself, would God even notice? According to what Father James had said, God probably did not know which of His viruses were involved in doing His work. To God, she had no name. No individuality. If she killed herself, would He even know? Did it matter if He knew? When He had created her, had He also created a mechanism for saving her soul? Did viruses even have them?

Still, there had been all those years of being taught it was wrong to take one’s own life. She would not feel right about getting herself purposely killed off. She could take a calculated risk, however. If she died, it would be accidentally, and Don Quixote would survive. Fleet as the wind, Quixote. Without her on his back he could outrun the devil himself. So she told herself before she stopped thinking about it. devoting most of her energy to not thinking of it. She could not help wondering about Rigo’s reaction if she didn’t return. “That silly fool.” he would say. “That silly woman who never loved me as she ought.”

She did love him. Or. she wanted to love him. Wanted to love him and wanted to love Stella with a desire that poured out hurtfully until she was exhausted from the flow of it. At home, she had known about Eugenie, and the one before Eugenie, but they had not been nearby. At home, Stella had had distractions and friends. Here, both Stella and Eugenie beat at her like huge trapped birds, pecking at her. Their frustrations hammered at her. She had not expected to feel weak, to be sleepless, to feel the threat of death always at her back. Each day on Grass had taken a little more of her strength, a little more of her purpose. Lately she had felt no hope, she who had always lived from disappointment to disappointment on a childlike, hopeful optimism which she could now barely remember.

She rode past the little arena where the horses were exercised, a place that lay just outside the grass gardens of Opal Hill, though it seemed remote because of the topography. Now, for the first time, Marjorie was leaving the close confines of that area which those who defined such things considered to be the estancia. The gardens were behind her. The prospects that the gardens overlooked were behind her. She was entering upon the wild grasses, the surface of the planet, the part into which men and their works and their creatures were not allowed to intrude. She rode, eyes forward, not thinking about anything very much except that she was unhappy enough that if the Hippae were to be found, out here in the grass, perhaps she would learn something useful about them or they would kill her, and she did not at that moment much care which.

The howl, when it came, made Don Quixote tremble, ears up, stopping dead still. Marjorie sat, scarcely breathing, aware that the howl had come from behind her. In that instant she remembered Janetta bon Maukerden and realized that the Hippae, if they found her, might do less—or more—than kill her. She had considered that they might kill her and had accepted that. She had not considered the range of alternatives which might result from her behavior, and she was abruptly both shamed and terrified.

They had been following a kind of trail, a winding path of short grasses among the taller ones. She urged Don Quixote off this easy way and into the taller grass, dismounting to tug stems into line to hide the way she had come.

“They’ll smell you,” she told herself, trying to quell her alarm by moving slowly and deliberately. The wind was blowing toward her from the direction the howl had come. That one would not smell her. Some other one might. It would be wise to return. Overwhelmed with the stupidity of what she had been doing, she told herself that returning would be the best possible thing to do.

She opened the trip recorder, watching it as she guided the stallion in a shallow turn which ended with him headed back toward the embassy, still hidden in tall grass, now traveling toward whatever it was she had heard. He went only a little way, then stopped. Something howled again, quite close, between them and the embassy.

The horse turned and walked quietly on his own trail. When Marjorie attempted to guide him, he ignored her. After one brief spasm of panic, she sat quietly, letting him alone. So. So, he knew something she didn’t. Smelled something she couldn’t. Felt something she couldn’t. She sat still, not bothering him, trying to say an act of contrition, unable to remember phrases she had known since childhood. The words didn’t fit, anyhow. How could she be heartily sorry for having offended God when, for all she knew, she was doing exactly what God intended!

The stallion moved up and down hills, along the sides of ridges, always walking, not hurrying, ears alert, as though someone were whispering his name. When he slowed at last, it seemed to be in response to other sounds, ahead of them. When he stopped, he went down on his side all at once, without the signal. She drew her leg from beneath his upcurved body and stood up, staring at him. He flattened himself, ears still alert, watching her.

“All right,” she whispered. “So now what?”

He made no sound, but his skin quivered, flicked, as though stung by flies. Danger. All around them.

Marjorie felt it, could see it on the horse’s skin, could smell it. The trip recorder said that they had come in the general direction Sebastian had indicated. A repetitive sound, not loud but persistent, made Don Quixote move his head about, seeking its source. It was not the violent thunder of the previous night, but rather an organized series of moans and cries, rhythmic both in occurrence and volume. Quixote’s nostrils dilated, his skin jerked as though from a terrible itch. The wind had gusted toward them, bringing the sound clearly and a smell ... a smell of something totally strange. Not a stink. Not a perfume. Neither attractive nor repellent. Marjorie got out her laser knife and cut armfuls of grass, laying these across Don Quixote’s body, hiding him, perhaps hiding his smell. Then she fell to her belly and crawled through the taller grasses toward the sounds the wind brought, down from a low ridge to the south. As she crested the ridge, she lay quiet, peering through the grass stems.

Toward the smell the wind brought. She breathed it in, lungs full. The sky dilated and she fell simultaneously upward toward it and downward, crushing herself.

Under her chin her arm flattened, becoming no thicker than a sheet of paper.

Something stepped painlessly on her head, smashing it.

Her body vanished. She tried to move a finger and could not.

Hounds. A shallow, grassy bowl of hounds, seated hounds, crouched hounds, gray and algae green and muddy violet, heads back and lips drawn to reveal lengthy fangs and a double row of teeth down each side of the massive jaws from which the grunting, rhythmic chorus came. Their hides danced, plunged, were jabbed at erratically from within, as though they had swallowed living things which fought to gain release. Blank, white orbs of eyes stared at the sky. The open, falling sky.

The smell. The shallow bowl of earth was full of the smell. She lay at the edge of that bowl. Her tongue lolled on her lower teeth, dripping.

There, across the bowl, an abrupt, vertical wall, the wall pierced with tall, evenly spaced openings through which the morning light intruded to reveal a cavern beyond. Hippae moved there, one or two, in a pattern, weaving, prancing, feet high, heads back, barbs clashing.

Among the crouching hounds, heaps of pearly spheres the size of her head. Migerers there, moving the spheres, shifting them so that all lay in the sun evenly, turning them over, holding them up in horny forepaws and listening to them. What were they then? Eggs?

There, also, in the bowl outside the cavern, some dozens of the sluglike peepers, only the rippling movement of their hides betraying that they were living things.

The smell seemed to press her down. She was two-dimensional, a limp cloth lying flat behind the grasses, a cloth with eyes.

The hounds were large, very large. As large as draft horses, though not so long in the leg. The peepers were huge ones, twice the usual size. Within the cavern, a myriad of tattered shapes danced on the air, dark batlike creatures with a fringe of fangs. One of them landed on the back of a hound’s neck, fastening itself there. After a time it detached and began its jerking, erratic flight once more.

One of the hounds began to pant, then to howl. The howling faded into a whining cry, then the panting began once more. On the sunlit soil, the peepers drew themselves into spherical masses, all wrinkles smoothed away. So familiar. She had seen it before. Somewhere. Somewhen.

Gradually, all sound ended. The creatures seemed frozen in their immobility. The violent motion inside the hides of the hounds ceased. There was quiet, long quiet.

A Hippae emerged from the cavern, pacing slowly, feet raised high at every step, nostrils flared, lips opening to emit breathy barks, warning sounds. After a time, the other Hippae came out to confront the first, neck swollen, jaw pulled back against the arching neck, eyes roiling wildly as it joined in the brusque, hostile sounds.

They backed away from one another, turning their heads, bowing their necks, the wicked neck barbs bristling to one side like a fan of sabers as they moved back, back, the distance widening between them. Then they charged one another, each array of barbs passing through the other, to gouge long wounds along the other’s ribs and flanks. Long streaks of blood appeared on their sides, and they pawed the ground with razorlike hooves, hammering at it before they turned to charge again. Again the flashing barbs and the streaks of blood. Marjorie cowered, mentally, as they thrust at one another, rearing high, hooves flashing.

Until, at last, one of the Hippae fell to his knees and was slow to rise to all four feet again.

The other animal backed away to the front of the cave and rummaged there. It turned its back on its enemy, kicked backward, sending black missiles flying. What was it kicking at its defeated opponent? Black things. Powdery black things that broke when they landed. Like puffballs, bursting into clouds of black dust when they struck. Kicking dead bats at one another. The thing Sylvan had said....

Silent. A game. The game. In silence.

The victorious Hippae tossed its head, sought with its teeth for new missiles from around the entrances to the cavern, laid them out in the open, then turned to kick back once more. One of the missiles struck the head of the kneeling beast, covering it in black dust. The defeated one bowed low, struggled to its feet, and departed, walking up the bank of the hollow and away.

It had had the pace and finish of ritual. A ritual battle. Now over.

And then sound. The wind was blowing from behind her. One of the swollen peepers ripped open. Protruding from the torn skin of the peeper was the triangular, fanged head of a hound. The peeper skin ripped further. Two hound forelegs emerged, and then, very gradually, the entire beast.

It looked small and ridiculously fragile as it staggered to its feet and stumbled through one of the vertical openings into the cavern, carefully avoiding the heaped eggs. Marjorie heard the sound of lapping from within. After a long pause, the creature emerged once more with dripping jaws, already more sure upon its feet, already sleek, its body distended with moisture. The Hippae stood upon the edge of the hollow, whistling. The young hound climbed to meet it, nibbling, as it went, at the low, blue grasses which grew there. Even as Marjorie watched, the beast seemed to enlarge in size, gaining both stature and bulk. After a time it went away, slowly though purposefully. The wind was blowing harder.

Another ripping sound drew her eyes across the hollow. As a hound had emerged from the torn skin of a peeper, so now a Hippae was emerging from the torn skin of a hound. Metamorphosis. Through the sundered skin of one of the huge hounds a row of barbs protruded, tiny blades which slit the skin, allowing the Hippae head to emerge. The process stopped when the head was out, its eyes closed and unseeing. All was silent.

What was she doing? The wind was strong now, blowing the smell away. What was she doing? Lying there? Flat? Only her eyes had dimension. Only her eyes.

They hurt. She blinked, noticing that they were dry, aching. She hadn’t blinked, Not for a long, long time. The skin on the back of her neck itched, as though something were watching her. She turned, trying to see through the curtaining grasses. Something was out there. She couldn’t see it or hear it, but she knew it was there. She wriggled back down the slope, stumbled through the grasses to find Quixote where he lay as she had left him but with his head up, ears erect and swiveling, nostrils twitching. The sun was falling toward the horizon. Tall grasses feathered the hollows with long, ominous shadows. She urged him up and mounted, letting him have his head, trusting in his ability to bring them both home if they were ever to come there again.

The stallion moved by a route more direct than the one they had taken in the morning, though still moving as though someone called his name. He was as aware as she that darkness was not far off, more aware than she of the threat abroad in the grasses. Quixote could smell what she could not, Hippae, many of them, not far away but upwind from them. They had been coming closer for the past hour, moving this way and that, as though searching. Quixote leaned into his stride, eating the prairie with his feet, returning to Opal Hill in a long curve which took him as far from the approaching Hippae as he could get, gradually lengthening the distance between them. Out there, somewhere, something approved of him. Something told him he was a good horse.

They arrived at the stables just at dusk. The stableman she had entrusted with her message was waiting for her, his eyes on the horizon as though to judge whether she had returned by sundown or not. “Message, Lady,” he told her eagerly. “Your son’s been looking for you. A message came for you, private. From bon Damfels’ place, he thinks.”

She stood beside the horse, trembling, unable to speak. “Lady? Are you all right?”

“Just... just tired,” she mumbled. She felt dizzy, unfocused, unsure what had happened to her. It was like a dream. Had she really gone out alone? Into the grasses alone? She looked into the horse’s eyes, finding there an unhorselike awareness which for some unaccountable reason did not surprise her. “Good Quixote,” she said, running her hands down his neck. “Good horse.”

She left him with a final pat and went up the path as quickly as she could, still stumbling. Tony was watching for her from the terrace. “Where’ve you been? You tell me not to go out there alone and then you go off for a whole day. Honestly, mother! You look awful!”

Carefully, she decided not to respond to this. No matter how she looked, she felt ... better. More purposeful. For the first time since her arrival in this place, purposeful. “The stableman said something about a message?”

“From Sylvan, I think. He’s the only one who calls you ‘The honorable lady, Marjorie Westriding.’ It’s keyed for you. I couldn’t read the thing.”

“What on earth?”

“What on Grass, more likely. Come on.”

“Where’s your father?”

“Still on that damned machine.” There was a catch in his voice, as though either grief or anger lurked just below the surface.

“Tony. There’s nothing you can do about it.” “I keep feeling I ought to—“

“Nonsense.Heought to stop this nonsense. If you took part in it, too, everything would be worse than it already is.”

“Well, there’s no way to interrupt him, and he’s got another hour or two.”

She sat down at the tell-me, letting the identity beam flick across her eyes. The message began on the screen:private. for the intended recipient only.

“Tony, turn your back.”

“Mother!”

“Turn. If he’s said something embarrassingly personal, I don’t want you seeing it.” she said, wondering as she said it why she should think Sylvan would be that personal.

She pressed the release and saw the message in its entirety.

please HELP. NEED TRANSPORT FOR SELF, MOTHER, TWO OTHER WOMEN TO COMMONER TOWN. CAN YOU BRING AIRCAR QUIETLY TO BON DAMFELS VILLAGE? SIGNAL PRIVATE.

“Turn around. Tony. It’s all right.”

The boy read, stared, read once more. “What’s going on?”

“Evidently Sylvan needs to get Rowena away from Klive but can’t do it on his own. He has to do it secretly. The implication of that is that he has to keep it from someone, probably Stavenger”

“Do you think Stavenger bon Damfels found out that Rowena came here to ask about Janetta?”

“Possibly. Or maybe she’s had a fight with Stavenger and is afraid. Or you make up some other story. Your plot is as likely to be true as mine is.”

“I’m pretty good with the aircar by now.”

“So’s Persun Pollut. I need you to stay here and explain to your father if he asks where I am, which he probably won’t.” The bitterness in her voice was clear to the boy.

He flushed, wanting to help her but not knowing how. “Why don’t you let me take them. Or send Persun alone.”

“I’ve got to talk to Sylvan. I saw something today....” She described the cavern and its occupants in a rapid, excited whisper while he stared, asking no questions. “Metamorphosis, Tony! Like butterfly from caterpillar. The eggs must be Hippae eggs. They hatch into peepers. I didn’t see that, but it’s the only thing that makes sense. The peepers metamorphose into hounds, and the hounds into Hippae. A three-stage metamorphosis. I don’t think the Grassians even know,” she concluded. “No one’s said a word about the peepers metamorphosing into hounds and the hounds into mounts. Not even Persun.”

“How could they live here for generations and not know?”

She started to tell him the truth, started to say, “Because the Hippae kill anybody who spies on them.” She knew it for truth, knew she had escaped only by chance. Or, remembering the way Don Quixote had moved, as though guided, for some other reason. She did not want to admit her own fool hardiness. “The taboos would prevent their finding out, Tony. They’ve got taboos against scarring the grasses by driving vehicles. They have no friendly mounts, like horses, so if they wanted to explore, they’d be limited to walking. There may be a taboo against that, as well. Something deep, psychological. Not merely custom. They may think it is only custom, but it’s more than that. They may think they are free to do what they like, but they aren’t.”

“You mean they think they decided not to scar the grasses, but really—“

“Really, they had no choice. That’s what I mean, yes. I think the Hippae have been directing them for ... for God knows how long. I have a hunch that anyone who goes out on foot into the grasses to explore ends up dead. I had feelings when I was out there today ... Don Quixote had feelings. He was terribly frightened, moving as though he were walking on eggshells. Besides, Asmir gave us quite a list of disappearances.”

“And you were out there alone!” He shook his head. “Mother, damn it. What were you thinking of?” Then, looking into her shamed face, “For the love of God, Mother!”

“Tony, I made a mistake. You’re not to say anything to your father that you know anything about the plague or that I was out riding today. In his present state of mind, he might blow up and start bellowing. I can’t take much more of that. And then, too, Stella would be sure to find out.”

“I know.”

“If he wants to know where I am, tell him I’ve helped take Rowena to Commons. Don’t mention Sylvan unless it comes up. Rigo’s become very strange about Sylvan. I don’t know why.”

Tony saw that his mother did not, in fact, know why, though Tony himself had a very good idea what was disturbing Rigo Yrarier. While Marjorie had been dancing with Sylvan at the reception, Tony had been up on the balcony near his father and had seen his father’s face.

It was full dark when Persun Pollut dropped the Opal Hill aircar at the edge of the bon Damfels village as silently as a fallen leaf.

Sylvan was waiting with Rowena and two commoner women. Rowena’s face was bandaged, one arm was bound up. The two women half-carried her aboard. Marjorie wasted no time with questions or comments but told Persun to ascend immediately and get them to town as quickly as possible. Rowena bon Damfels obviously needed medical care.

“I cannot thank you enough, Lady Westriding,” Sylvan said in an oddly formal tone much at variance with his disheveled look. “There was no way I could get one of our aircars away from the estancia without causing great difficulty. I apologize for my appearance. It was necessary to break down a few doors this evening, and I haven’t had a chance to change since.”

“Your father locked her up?”

“Among other barbarities, yes. I doubt that he even remembers he did so. The Hunt is set very deep into my father, with all its little ways.”

“Where are you taking her, Sylvan?”

“I don’t think father will suspect she’s left the place. If he misses her and remembers what he did, he’ll probably think she escaped and went out into the grasses. He may look for her, but I doubt it. Meantime, these women have relatives in Commoner Town who will keep her hidden, keep her safe.”

“Are your sisters safe?”

“For the moment. Since both have lovers, I have urged them both to get pregnant as quickly as possible. Pregnant women are not expected to ride.” His voice was flat, without feeling. “If there were any way to manage it, I would take them to Commoner Town as well. They would not be content to stay in hiding, however, and I’m afraid hiding is the only way they could avoid being brought back.”

“They are welcome at Opal Hill, Sylvan.”

“That would mean the end of Opal Hill, Marjorie.” He reached out to her, touched her arm, for the moment moved from his own troubles by her concern. “You were only allowed there as a feint, a distraction, to keep Sanctity from doing something intrusive. Our ... our masters do not want you on Grass. They do not want any outsiders on Grass.”

“They allow Commons! They allow the port!”

“They can’t get at Commons or the port. That may be all that has kept the town safe thus far. I don’t know. I don’t know what to do. All of us bons are so ... so hypnotized. A few of the younger ones, like me, a few who haven’t hunted for a few years, we can talk about things; but even with us, when we start to get close to—“ He choked. When he was able to. he said, “It’s better in Commoner Town. Whenever I’ve been there, I’ve been struck with how clear everything is. I can think anything I please and nothing binds on me. I can talk about anything there.”

“Are you going to stay in town?”

“I can’t. Father might suspect about mother if I did. He might come after her. He might start something between the estancias and the town. That could only mean ... well, loss of life. Tragedy.” He fell broodingly silent, his eyes on his mother’s bandaged face. “Why did you and your family really come here?”

“I think Sanctity told you about the ... the disease.”

“Your plague, yes,” he said impatiently. “We know about that.” His face betrayed that he did not think it terribly important. Marjorie stared at him, wondering what he had been told, what he was being allowed to believe.

“It isn’t ‘our’ plague, Sylvan, any more than it is your plague. It is a human plague. If it goes on for a few more decades, there will be no more human life.”

He stared at her, unable to believe what she was telling him. “You’re exaggerating.”

She shook her head. “I’m not. Only another lifetime, Sylvan, and you here on Grass may be all the human life left in the universe. We’ll be like the Arbai. Gone.”

“But we here ... we haven’t heard....”

“There doesn’t seem to be any plague here. Or there’s something that stops it. You wouldn’t let us send in any scientists or researchers, but you did say you’d allow an embassy. Those idiots at Sanctity thought you would accept us because of the horses, so we came, Rigo and I, to find out what we could and to talk sense to you, if you’d allow it.”

“We wouldn’t allow it. I should have known. That’s why the Hunt masters picked those who came to your reception so carefully. No one among them who could be swayed. All old riders. Except me. And they don’t know about me.”

“Swamp forest coming up below,” called Persun. “Where do you want me to land?”

Marjorie looked at Sylvan, and he at the two women. They conferred quietly, then asked that the car set down at the port.

Sylvan agreed. “The hospital is at the Port Hotel. Besides, we’re less likely to be noticed there at this time of night.”

They dropped quietly, allowed the women to depart, then took off again for Klive.

As they approached the estancia, Marjorie leaned forward to put her hand on Sylvan’s arm. “Sylvan. Before you go, I have to tell you something. I came just to tell you.”

She poured the story of her day’s discovery at him, watching him twitch with discomfort and run his finger around his collar. She wondered whether this was something he was allowed to believe or whether counterbeliefs had been given him.

“Peeper to hound,” he choked at last. “Hound to mount. That’s interesting. It could explain why they hate the foxen so much. Foxen eat peepers.”

“How do you know?”

“When I was a rebellious child, I found out I could stay away from the Hippae if I made my mind a blank. A little talent I have, or had then, that no one else seems to have. I used to sneak off into the grasses sometimes for hours at a time. Not very far, you understand, just farther than anyone else dared to go. If I was near a copse, I’d find a tree and climb it, then lie there with a glass and spy on all that went on. I’ve seen the foxen eat peepers. Peepers are easy to catch. They’re nothing but a gut with some flesh around it and rudimentary legs along the sides. I’d like to see how they change.”

“If you can get to Opal Hill before the lapse is over, I can show you where the cavern is.”

“Getting to Opal Hill,” he said, choking on his words, “would be the least of it, Marjorie. Going out into the grass would be worse. Much worse. I’m not a child anymore. I’m not as good at it as I once was. If there were any Hippae within miles of me, I’m not sure I’d be allowed to return.”

The aircar dropped once more. Sylvan took her hand and pressed it, then thanked Persun Pollut as he left, disappearing into the dark. The car returned to Opal Hill and landed in the gravel court, where Marjorie bid Persun good night and set out for the side door which was closest to her own quarters. As she approached, she heard the thunder begin once more, off in the grasses, a sound the more ominous for having no cause, no reason attributable to it. It threatened without leaving any possibility of reply.

Rigo’s voice, coming demandingly from behind her, startled her into a tiny scream, abruptly choked off. “May I ask where you have been?”

“I went with Persun Pollut to take Rowena bon Damfels to Commons, Rigo, where she could get medical care. Her son and two serving women were with her. We dropped him back at the bon Damfels village and came straight home.”

Looking into her wide eyes, innocent of any attempt to deceive him, he tried to sneer, tried to say something cutting, but could not quite. “Rowena?”

“Stavenger had beaten her—badly, I’m afraid.”

“For what?” he asked in astonishment. To beat a woman had always been, in Rigo’s philosophy, to abandon honor.

“For coming here to ask about Janetta,” she said. “Rowena and Sylvan came here to ask about Janetta. They hoped ... hope that Dimity may turn up alive. Dimity. Rowena’s youngest daughter. Sylvan’s sister. The girl who disappeared. That’s why they were here.”

“I didn’t seeRowenahere,” he said, his emphasis reminding her that he had seen Sylvan.

“When they were here, Rowena started sobbing. She left the room for a few moments, Tony took her to my room.”

“Leaving you with her son. And what did you two talk about?” He felt his habitual anger surging just below the surface. What had they talked about, Sylvan and Marjorie? What had she shared with him that she would not share with her husband!

She sighed, wearily rubbing at her eyes, which infuriated him further. “I tried to tell you before, Rigo, but you don’t want to hear about the Hippae. You didn’t want to listen.”

He stared at her for a long, cold moment, trying not to say what, eventually, he could not keep himself from saying. “No. I do not want to hear any of Sylvan’s fairy tales about the Hippae.”

She swallowed painfully, trying not to let the frustration show on her face. “Are you interested in hearing what Brother Mainoa of the Green Brothers may have to tell you about the same subject?”

He wanted more than anything else to hurt her enough that she would cry. He had seldom seen her cry.

“Brother Mainoa?” he sneered. “Are you having an affair with him, too?”

She stared at him in disbelief, noting his heightened color, his fiery eyes, like Stella’s eyes. He was saying the kinds of things Stella liked to say, wanting to hurt, not minding that he knew they were not true.

Before he had spoken, she had almost cried, out of weariness if for no other reason, but his words burned all that away. Flames came up around her, red and hot and crackling. It was an unfamiliar feeling, an anger so intense that there was no guilt in it at all. The words came out of her like projectiles, fired without thought, without needing to think.

“Brother Mainoa is about the age of my father,” she said in a clear, cold voice which she could scarcely hear over the flame noises in her head. “An old man, rather unsteady on his feet. He has been here for many, many years. He may have some clue which would be valuable to us in the task we were sent here to do. But do not trouble yourself about Brother Mainoa...”

“Perhaps when you have ridden to the Hunt and proven your manhood as you so constantly need to do—and if you return— perhaps then we can discuss what we are here for.”

He tried to interrupt her, but she held up her hand, forbidding him, her face like fiery ice. “In the meantime you may be assured that I have never had an ‘affair’ with anyone. Until now, Rigo, I had left the breaking of our vows to you,”

He had never heard her speak in that way. He had never known she could. Tonight he had wanted only to crush her self-control, believing it stood as a barrier between them. He had wanted their growing coldness to be burned away by anger so she would come to him, as she always did, apologizing, asking his forgiveness....

Instead he had provoked an anger he could neither calm nor encompass. She turned and went away from him and he saw her go as though she were leaving him forever.

It was not only at Opal Hill and at Klive that matters boiled and suppurated on that night of the lapse. Far from either place, in the kitchen court of Stane, the estancia of the bon Maukerden’s, a door opened upon the night to spill slanted light onto the court, throwing a sharp wedge of brilliance into which the Obermum Geraldria stepped to make a stump of shadow. She was a stocky pillar of a woman, her hair tumbled around her heaving shoulders as she wept hopelessly into the towel she held to her face. After a time she lifted reddened eyes to stand peering into the night, unable to see anything both because of the darkness and of the tears that filled her eyes and dripped unregarded from her heavy jaws. At the far end of the kitchen court was a gate opening on the path to Maukerden village. She walked heavily to the gate, opened it, then beckoned toward the open door.

Two figures emerged, so slowly as to seem reluctant. One was Geraldria’s serving maid, Clima. The other was the Goosegirl, Janetta bon Maukerden, swaying beneath a voluminous cloak as though to the sound of music she alone could hear, her face utterly tranquil in the yellow light. Clima wept, Geraldria wept, but the Goosegirl showed no sign that she saw or cared that either of the women grieved.

The Obermum held the gate open as Clima approached. “Take her to the village, Clima. As soon as you can, take her to Commoner Town. See if Doctor Bergrem ... see if Lees Bergrem can help her. I should have let her go before. I thought she’d learn to recognize us.” Geraldria pressed the sodden towel to her face once more, muffling the sounds she could not seem to keep from making. When the spasm had passed, she fished in a pocket for the credit voucher she had put there earlier. “This will get you whatever you need. If you need more than this one, let me know. Tell Doctor Bergrem ... tell the doctor to send her away from Grass if that will help.”

Clima pocketed the card. “The doctor could maybe come here, mistress. Maybe they’d come here.” She caught at the Goosegirl’s arm to keep her from dancing away, tugging her through the gate and onto the path.

“The doctor said she needed her machines, the things she has at the hospital. Besides, the Obermun won’t. Won’t have it. Won’t have her.”

“Not her fault ...” Words muffled by tears.

Geraldria cried, “Dimoth says yes. He says it was Janetta’s fault. He says it wouldn’t have happened otherwise. Vince agrees with him.”

Clima spoke indignantly. “That’s not true! Not my Janetta.”

“Shhh. Take her.” Darkness fell onto the path as she shut the gate, peering over it at the two of them outside. “Take her away, Clima. I cannot bear it any longer. Not with the Obermun saying the things he says.” She fled toward the house, shutting the door behind her.

Clima took the girl by the hand and urged her down the path, the light of the torch making a puddle before them on a route as well known to Clima as the rooms in her own house. She had gone only far enough to be hidden from the house by the grasses when someone stepped out of them behind her and pulled a sack over her head and down her body, knocking her down in the process and leaving her to writhe helplessly for the moment, her hands frantically seeking the rope her assailant had knotted at her ankles. She had been too surprised to shout.

She wriggled herself upright and fumbled at the rope, wrenching at the knot with hasty fingers. She heard the sound of an aircar taking off from the grasses to one side of the path, where no aircar was supposed to be. The knot came loose at last and she stripped the sack off, turning her torch around her in bright searching spokes.

She called, went scrambling among the grasses, even brought back several men from the village to help her look, but the girl was gone.

Suddenly, the lapse was over. The Hunt began again. For Rigo, riding the simulacrum took every moment of his waking time. For Stella, though they did not know it, it continued to take every hour that the rest of them slept. Superbly conditioned by their previous horsemanship, both Rigo and Stella took less time than the bons might have expected. The day soon came that Rigo announced he would attend the Hunt at the bon Damfels estancia, two days hence.

“I expect you all to be there.” he said grimly to his family. “You, Marjorie. Tony. Stella.”

Marjorie did not reply. Tony nodded. Only Stella burbled with excitement. “Of course, Daddy. We wouldn’t miss it for anything.”

“I’ve ordered a balloon-car so that you can follow the Hunt.”

“That’s very thoughtful of you,” said Marjorie. “I’m sure we will all enjoy that very much.”

Stella cast a sidelong look, disturbed by her mother’s voice. The words, the phrasing—all had been as usual, and yet there had been something chill and uncaring in that voice. She shivered and looked away, deciding it would not be a good time to twit her mother about the Hunt. Besides, there was too much to do. Stella was determined to ride when her father rode, but obtaining the proper garb had not been easy. She had forged orders over the name of Hector Paine and sent them to Commons, intercepting the deliveries when they arrived. She now had everything she needed, the padded trousers, the special boots, narrowed at the toe to catch between the ribs of the mount. Her own coat and hunt tie would serve, her own gloves and hat. All of them were ready to be hidden in the aircar and transported to the bon Damfels estancia. This would be one of the last Hunts at Klive. Within a few days, the Hunt would move to the bon Laupmons’.

Since the lapse was over, Marjorie judged that the cavern of the Hippae would no longer be guarded- Very early the following morning, while all the family still slept, she took the trip recorder from the previous journey and rode Quixote across the long loops they had made on the previous trip. She found the ridge, the shallow declivity, and the cavern- There was no smell except the smell of the grasses-There was no sound. Perhaps the thunder had been their mating frenzy, if Hippae had mates. Or, perhaps the frenzy was merely reproductive frenzy, like the mindless thrashing of fish. In the shallow hollow, nothing remained except pieces of dry and brittle shell. The eggs had hatched. The cavern was empty except for piles of powdery clots near the entrance. She looked at these, recognizing them at last as dead bats, those same flitterers she had seen before in the cavern. These were what the conquering Hippae had kicked at the defeated one. She stepped over the dusty bodies as she walked into the cavern, noting its similarity to the one at Opal Hill. Both had the same rubble pillars, the same tall openings, the same spring at one side.

There was one notable difference. The earthen floor of this cavern was incised with a pattern, a pattern cut by the hooves of the mounts, an interlaced pattern as complex as those she remembered seeing as a child, carved on prehistoric Celtic monuments. Moved by an inexplicable impulse, Marjorie drew out the trip recorder and walked the design from one end to the other, every curl and weave of it, seeing the pattern emerge on the tiny screen in its entirety. It would do no good to ask Rigo what he thought it might mean. Perhaps, however, she could ask Brother Mainoa when she saw him again. When she had looked at everything, recorded everything, she returned to Opal Hill without incident, feeling, so she told herself, a certain viral satisfaction.

The day of Rigo’s first Hunt arrived inevitably, and Marjorie steeled herself to observe the Hunt. She wore one of her Grassian outfits, a flowing, many-layered gown, the skirts of each loose dress slightly shorter than the one beneath to reveal the silky layers of the gowns below, the outer coat a stiff brocade ending at the knees and elbows so that the extravagantly ruffled hems and sleeves of the undergown could show. It was similar to the dresses she had seen on pregnant women or on matrons who no longer rode. She let her hair fall into a silken bundle down her back rather than drawing it up in its customary high, golden crown. At her dressing table, she used a good deal of unaccustomed makeup, particularly about the eyes. She die not try to explain to herself why she did this, but when she went down the hall toward the graveled court where Rigo waited, she looked like a woman going to meet a lover—or to meet other women who might wonder if her husband loved her. Rigo saw her and quivered. She did not look like Marjorie. She was a stranger. He chewed his lips, shifting from foot to foot, caught between a desire to reach out to her and a determination to take no notice.

Persun brought the aircar around, Tony came breathlessly from the house, adjusting his clothing, then Stella ran out in a gown similar to her mother’s, though not as complexly layered. She had seen what Marjorie planned to wear and had dressed herself accordingly. The individual layers were loose and easy to remove. It suited her to have something that would come off quickly. She would not have a lot of time in which to change.

There was mercifully little conversation as they went. Marjorie sat next to Persun as he drove, and the two of them conducted a stilted practice conversation in Grassan. “Where is the Master of the Hunt?”

“The Master of the Hunt is riding down the path.”

“Have the hunters killed a fox?”

“Yes, the hunters have killed a fox today.”

“It sounds like toads gulping,” said Stella, with a sniff. “Why would anyone invent such an ugly language?”

Marjorie did not answer. In her mind she was so far from the present location that she did not even hear. There was a fog around her, penetrable only by an act of will. She had separated herself from them. “What is the Obermum serving for lunch?” she asked in a schoolgirl voice.

“The Obermum is serving roast goose,” came the reply.

Someone’s goose, Persun thought to himself, seeing the expression on all their faces. Oh, yes, we are serving someone’s goose.

At Klive, Amethyste and Emeraude were playing hostess, both blank-faced and quiet, both dressed very much as Marjorie was. “The Obermum sends her regrets that she cannot greet you. Obermum asks to be remembered to you. Won’t you join us in the hall?”

Somehow Marjorie and Tony went in one direction while Rigo and Stella went in another. Marjorie did not miss Stella immediately. She found herself drinking something hot and fragrant and smiling politely at one bon and another, all of them shifting to get a view of the first surface. There the riders were assembling, faces bland and blind in the expression Marjorie had grown to expect among hunters. Sylvan came into the room, not dressed for the hunt.

“Not hunting today, sir?” asked Tony in his most innocent voice, busy putting two and two together but not sure how he felt about the resultant sum.

“A bit of indigestion,” Sylvan responded. “Shevlok and Father will have to carry the burden today.”

“Your sisters aren’t hunting either,” murmured Marjorie.

“They have told father they are pregnant,” he murmured in return, almost in a whisper. “I think in Emeraude’s case it may be true. One does not expect women of their age to be able to Hunt as often as the men. Father realizes that.”

“Has he—“

“No. No, he does not seem to miss ... he does not seem to miss the Obermum. He does not seem to know she is gone.”

“Have you heard from her?”

“She is recovering.” He turned and stared out the arched opening to the velvet turf, jaw dropping, eyes wide in shock—“By all the hounds, Marjorie. Is that Rigo?”

“Rigo. Yes. He feels he must,” she said.

“I warned you all!” His voice rasped in his throat—“God. I warned him.”

Marjorie nodded, fighting to maintain her mood of cool withdrawal. “Rigo does not listen to warnings. I do not know what Rigo listens to.” She took a cup of steaming tea from the tray offered by one of the servants and attempted to change the subject. “Have you seen Stella?”

Sylvan looked around the room, shaking his head. The room was crowded, and he walked away from Marjorie, searching the corners.

“If you’re looking for the girl,” muttered Emeraude, “she went back out to the car.”

Sylvan conveyed this to Marjorie, who assumed that Stella had forgotten something and had gone to retrieve it. The bell rang. The servants in their hooped skirts skimmed into the house. The gate of the hounds opened. The hounds came through, two on two, gazing at the riders with their red eyes.

Marjorie took a deep breath. Rigo was standing at the extreme left of the group. When the riders turned to follow the hounds out the Hunt Gate, he was behind them all.

Except for one final rider, late, who came running from around the corner of the house onto the first surface, head tilted away from the observers, following Rigo out through the Hunt Gate at the tail end of the procession.

A girl, Marjorie thought, wondering why Stella had not returned.

A girl.

Something in the walk, the stance. A certain familiarity about the clothing, the cut of the coat....

Surely, oh, surely not.

“Wasn’t that your daughter?” asked Emeraude with a strange, wild look at Marjorie. “Wasn’t that your daughter?”

They heard the thunder of departing feet from outside the gate.

When Sylvan got to the gate at a dead run, there was no one left. All the riders had mounted and gone.

Stella had assumed that Sylvan would be among the riders. Despite what she had been told of the Hunt and had seen for herself, she had also assumed that she would find a way to bring her own mount near his. All such assumptions were forgotten the moment she vaulted onto the back of the mount that came forward for her. Before arriving at the bon Damfels’, she had worried that a mount might not be available, might not, as it were, be expecting her. Everything she had been told during her observation of the Hunt, however, indicated that there were always exactly as many mounts as needed for the hunters who assembled. If someone decided at the last minute not to ride, no mount showed up outside the gate. Since it was part of her plan to come into the garden late, after the hounds had gone through, there was no opportunity for anyone to intercept her. She came to the gate as her father was mounting, and then felt, rather than saw, a mount appear before her, extending its massive leg. She went through the movements she had rehearsed so many times on the machine that they had become automatic.

Until that moment everything had happened too quickly to think about, to consider, to change her mind. Then all at once the barbs were there, only inches from her breast, gleaming like razors. As she stared at them, half hypnotized and beginning to feel fear for the first time, the mount turned its head and drew back its lips in a kind of smile, a smile like enough to human for her to know that it held something like amusement, something like contempt, something, peculiarly, like encouragement. Then it lunged off after the others and she gasped, putting all her concentration into keeping herself braced away from the bony blades.

They had gone some distance before she thought to look for Sylvan. From behind, all the riders looked alike. She could not tell if he was there or not. The rider directly ahead of her was her father. She knew his coat, cut unlike the coats of the other hunters.

After a time she thought to look for Sylvan. All the riders looked alike. Except for her father. His coat was different from the others....

After a time she looked for Sylvan. Her father was riding ahead of her....

Her father was riding just ahead ... ahead....

It was a good day for the Hunt. Though summer was over, the pastures were still green from recent rains. The farmers had taken down some of the worst of the wire fences, and those that were left were clearly visible. Ahead, crossing the silver-beige stubble of an oat field, she could see the foxhounds, running hard, before the pack lost itself behind the slope to her left. The light wind brought the yelp and clamor of the dogs and the sound of the Huntsman’s horn. Dark figures fringed the top of the hill, followers, hands shielding their eyes from the sun. One among them waved his hat and pointed the way the fox had gone. She reined her horse to the left, down along a spinney and around once more, up and over the crest of the hill, the short way around. From the top of the hill she could see the fox fleeing across the pasture below, nose low, bushy tail straight behind as it darted under a fence, then atop a long log and into Fuller’s Copse. She urged her mount over the fence toward the copse, taking the jump cleanly, joining some hunters already there, hearing the thud of hooves as others arrived. The Master gestured for them to circle the copse, and she turned to one side, positioning herself near a ditch where the fox might flee.

She could hear the hounds in the copse. The Huntsman was in there with them; his voice rose, calling individual hounds by name, urging them on. “Bounder, get out of there. Dapple, up, up girl....”

Then there was a shout and they were away again, the horn, and the hounds giving voice....

Sylvan.

Someone was supposed to be riding with them today. A guest? Someone not a member of this Hunt.

Sylvan. Here he was. Beside her, turning in the saddle to look adoringly at her. She felt her face flame and drew herself up proudly.

Some of the riders had fallen back. They had been at it all the morning, and it was noon now, with the sun overhead and hot on her hat. The fox had taken refuge in Brent’s Wood, and the Huntsman and whippers-in were among the trees. The Master, too, which was strange. Standing on his horse like some circus acrobat, standing and throwing things.

And then ... a surge of feeling. A jolt of pure pleasure that streaked up from her groin. An orgasm of sheer delight which seemed to go on and on and on.

Sylvan felt it, too. They all felt it. Every face showed it. Every body lashed with it, heads jerking, jaws lax.

Then at last the Huntsman was sounding the kill. There was the Huntsman with the fox’s mask, and the horses turning for home. Now the sun was behind her. A long ride home. Even if they went the short way, along Magna Spinney and onto the gravel road past the Old Farm, it was still a long way home

She was desperately tired when they returned. Her father came over to her and took her arm, roughly, too roughly, and they walked through the gate with the others.

“What in God’s name were you doing here?” he demanded, his mouth almost at her ear. “Stella, you little fool!”

She gaped at him. “Riding,” she said, wondering why he asked. “Why, Daddy, I was riding.”

She followed her father’s gaze, up to the terrace. Mother stood there, a glass in her hand, very pale, very beautiful. Sylvan was beside her. He had his arm around Marjorie, pointing down at them. How could he be there, not even in Hunt dress, when he had been riding just moments ago?

Stella felt her face growing red. Sylvan hadn’t really been on the Hunt. He couldn’t have been. Her father walked away from her, up the flight of shallow stairs. Mother was clutching the balustrade with both hands, tightly, her knuckles white. Sylvan was holding her up, snapping his fingers at a nearby servant. Then Father was there, shouldering him aside.

“Marjorie!”

His wife looked blindly at him, as though she did not know who he was. “Stella,” she said, pointing. “Her face ...”

Rigo turned to look back at his daughter where she stood at the foot of the stairs, turned just too late to see what Marjorie had seen, the same chill, senseless gaze that the Goosegirl had worn when she had appeared among them at Opal Hill.

As for Stella, she tottered upon her feet, trembling between fury and shock with the realization that Sylvan hadn’t really been there to see her riding and that she could remember almost nothing about the day at all. She remembered horses and hounds and a fox, but they were real horses, real dogs from some other time, years ago. She remembered that jet of feeling which had filled her and the memory made her flush, but she did not know why she had felt it. Staring up at Sylvan’s concerned face, at her father’s furious one, at her mother’s anxious one, she had the fleeting realization that there were things happening all around her, hideous, important things, and that she had not paid attention to what was going on.

12

Shoethai, assistant in the Office of Acceptable Doctrine, sat in the dining room of the port facility waiting for a ship to unload. Elder Brother Noazee Fuasoi had explained that the ship carried a very important cargo, and he had sent Shoethai to receive it.

Shoethai’s automatic response had been unvoiced. “Why me?” Even now he studiously avoided looking at himself in the window, where his reflected image was superimposed over the ship in question like a hovering and misshapen ghost. The face was sufficiently grotesque to have made several staff people at the port pretend they hadn’t seen him, including two of the waiters in this dining room.

Shoethai was so accustomed to his appearance and to the way people reacted to it that he no longer showed his hurt and outrage, though the emotions seethed below the surface, more malevolently violent with every passing day. Elder Fuasoi could have sent someone else. Yavi, or Fumo. Either of them. They didn’t look like much but they didn’t look like monsters, either. The question was eternal. “Why me?”

Back in Sanctity, very occasionally some well-meaning idiot had tried to comfort Shoethai by saying something like, “Still, you’re glad to be alive, aren’t you? You’d rather be alive than dead, wouldn’t you?” Which just went to show how stupid and unfeeling they were, mouthing cliches at him that way. No, he would not rather be alive. Yes, he would rather be dead, except he was afraid of dying. Best yet would be if he’d never lived at all, if they’d let his father kill him when he tried to. Father, at least, had cared about him and wanted what was best for him. What was best was never to have been born or, if that wasn’t possible, never to have lived past a few weeks when he was still too little to know anything. What would have been absolute best was never to have looked at this face, conscious that it was his own.

Still, the Elder Brother hadn’t sent Fumo or Yavi. The Elder Brother had sent Shoethai, and that meant something. It meant that Fumo or Yavi weren’t supposed to know about this shipment. If Fumo and Yavi weren’t supposed to know, then Elder Brother Jhamlees Zoe didn’t know, and Sanctity didn’t know either. And that meant it was something that only Shoethai and Fuasoi knew about, only those two.

“Do you know what Moldies are?” the Elder Brother had asked him one day, out of nothing, while Shoethai was cleaning the Elder Brother’s office.

“It’s martyrs of something,” Shoethai had said.

“Martyrs of the Last Days,” the Elder Brother had said. “A group of men who are dedicated to hastening the end. Have you ever read theBook of Ends?”

Shoethai merely stood there, mouth open, shaking his head. Of course he hadn’t read any Moldy books. You could get yourself terminated by Sanctity for reading Moldy books.

The Elder Brother had read his mind. “I know. It’s among the forbidden volumes. Still, I think you’d be interested in reading it, Shoethai. I’ll grant a dispensation for you. Take the book with you when you leave, but don’t let anyone else see it. Particularly, don’t let Jhamlees Zoe see it.”

It wasn’t even a reader. It was an old-style book, with pages. Elder Fuasoi laid it out on the desk and just left it there, an old brown thing with the wordsBook ofEnds in gold across the front. Shoethai had hidden the book in the deep pocket of his robe, had read it only when he was alone—which was most of the time. By now he had it almost memorized and frequently quoted sections of it to himself.

“Garbed in light, we will dwell in the house of light,” he recited to himself now as he sucked his tea through the gaps in his teeth. After the end of mankind would come the New Creation. In the New Creation he would no longer wear this face and this body. In the New Creation he would no longer be deformed. He would dart like a spear, clothed only in radiance, beautiful as an angel. Elder Fuasoi had taken particular notice of this, reading the proper section from the book and pointing to the illustrations, but Shoethai had believed it from the moment he read it for himself. It was as though it had been written just for him. Fair was fair. If people didn’t have a fair try in this life, they would in the next one.

“Let the changes come,” he whispered, inhaling another sip of tea. “Let the New Creation manifest itself.” The manager of the dining room had brought the tea after a furious whispering match with his two waiters. Shoethai prayed silently that the waiters would be among the first to be cleansed away, most painfully. Of course it would be painful. Elder Fuasoi had already told him that. Elder Fuasoi had seen the plague. Elder Fuasoi had actually spent almost a year in a plague camp. Elder Fuasoi was a Moldy. He said nobody could see the plague and be anything else.

Once Elder Fuasoi confessed that he was actually a Moldy, Shoethai had become a willing and dedicated convert even though they were the only Moldies on Grass and Jhamlees Zoe would have them both killed if he found out. Doing what the Moldies needed doing didn’t need more than two. Two, Elder Fuasoi had told him, would be more than enough.

“Bless me, O Creator,” Shoethai mused silently as he stared through his own image at the scurrying figures around the ship, “for I will cleanse thy house of ugliness.” Ugliness itself was a sin against Creation. The Elder Brother had even hinted that the Creator had given Shoethai this face in order to make explicit to Shoethai a certain knowledge, the knowledge of the absolute depravity and unworthiness of man, printing that message on Shoethai’s flesh for everyone to see. Elder Fuasoi said that what Shoethai appeared to be on the outside, all mankind actually was on the inside. What Shoethai looked like, mankind actually was. Misshapen. Deformed. A freak of Creation. Intelligence should not exist in such stinking, fallible flesh. Flesh was all right for animals, but not for intelligent beings, and mankind was an experiment that hadn’t worked out. For the few who helped clean up the mess, there would be divine rewards. And for the others there would be a final end which would leave the universe cleansed and purified and ready to start over.

Below him, he saw ground vehicles moving from the ship toward the port building. The shipment would be in one of them. Brother Shoethai decided to stay where he was for a time. Let the crowd clear away before he went down to the cargo office. There was no hurry. Once Elder Fuasoi had the shipment and distributed it, everyone on the planet would die, but it would take some time. The virus didn’t work for a long time, sometimes—There was no hurry. An hour more or less would make little difference. Shoethai giggled as he sipped at his tea. Then, seeing what the giggle did to his reflection in the window, he stopped and turned slightly away so that he would not be able to see himself anymore.

In his office at the Friary, Elder Brother Noazee Fuasoi leaned on his desk, choking down the pain from his belly. The second stomach and gut transplant hadn’t worked any better than the first one, even though the office had scoured the penitents for as close a tissue match as possible. That was the best the doctors could do here on Grass, and even then they’d objected that the donor hadn’t made a free gift of his body prior to getting fatally wounded in the head by (so Elder Fuasoi had informed them) an unfortunate fall from the towers. There were no facilities for cloning body systems on Grass, and while Elder Brother Noazee Fuasoi of Sanctity had sufficient clout to go back to Sanctity and wait while they cloned a gut for him, Jorny Shales the Moldy hadn’t wanted to take the time.

“One would think ...” he snarled to himself in a litany that was repeated every time his gut pained him, “one would think the Creator could grant surcease to those of us doing His work.”

“Pardon, Your Emminence?” said Yavi Foosh from his own desk by the window. “Pardon?”

“Nothing,” snarled the Elder. “I’ve got a pain, that’s all Probably something I ate.”

Though it wasn’t anything he had eaten. It was flesh, that was all. Fallible flesh. Full of stinks and pains and rot. Full of weakness and foolish, ugly appetites and dirty excretions. There would be no flesh in the next creation, not for those who had cleaned up this one. Elder Fuasoi gripped the edge of the desk and sweated, thinking of other times and places as he waited for the cramp to pass.

He had never really been aware of pain until the camp. His name had been Jorny then, a boy of fifteen dragged into the camp with his uncle Shales. One day he had been living with Uncle Shales in the fishing town, going to school, fishing off the pier, going out in the boat when the weather was right, writing love notes to Gerandra Andraws, cute little Gerry with the perky little bottom, wondering if he was old enough to really do something about her. The next day he had been there in the camp, crowded with fifteen other men and boys in one room with no school, no girls, no fishing, and no Uncle Shales.

The people in the camp either had the disease or were close family members of people with the disease. Uncle Shales was dying, they told him. Jorny had to stay in the camp until they found out whether he was going to die, too.

He wanted to see Uncle Shales, but they wouldn’t let him. He sneaked around until he found what building Uncle was in and where his bed was, and then he got up close to the wall, around back. Uncle Shales would open the window a little bit and they’d talk, at night. Uncle Shales told Jorny not to be afraid. Everything that happened, happened for the best, he said. Jorny sat crouched under the window, tears running down his face, trying to keep Uncle from hearing him cry. Then one night Uncle didn’t answer him and the window wasn’t open, so Jorny waited until everyone was asleep and sneaked in. He couldn’t find Uncle Shales. In the bed where Uncle had been was only this thing, this kind of monster, partly bandages, with one eye peering out and a round, raw hole where its mouth ought to be, leaking all over the place and stinking.

Later, when he asked, they told him Uncle had died. He thought they’d let him go then, but they didn’t. They kept looking all over him for sores, like the sores most of the people in the camp had.

Then one day there was a Moldy preaching in the camp. Preaching how it was near the end of the time for man. How it was time for man to depart, for he was only rotten flesh and decaying bone. How it was time to leave the universe clean for the next generation. How those who died now would rise again in the New Creation, clad in light, beautiful as the dawn.

Jorny knew then what had happened to Uncle Shales. He had shed his flesh so he could come back, dressed all in light, like an angel.

Jorny cried, the first time he’d let himself cry out loud, right there in the dusty street of the camp, half-hidden behind one of the scruffy trees. He had waited until the Moldy was finished and had gone up to him and said who he was and that his uncle had died and he wanted to get out of the camp. The man had patted him on the shoulder and said he could get him out, that Jorny could become a Moldy right then, without even having a toothbrush. He got in a truck with the man and they looked him all over to see if he had any sores on him, and when they saw he didn’t they hid him under some stuff while they smuggled him out to a place where there were lots of people and other kids and nobody had sores on them anywhere. Not that they’d really had to smuggle him. The camp commander had been paid off, the Moldy said. Paid off to let the Moldy preach and bring comfort to the dying.

That night Jorny slept. Whenever he thought about Uncle, he made himself stop thinking. At first he thought maybe he should have gone home to say goodbye to the people he’d known, but then after a while he figured most of them were dead and it didn’t matter. They were all dead and ready to be reborn. The Moldies pointed out people who were already transformed. Before the sun went down, sometimes you could see them, slanting down from the clouds, golden beams of fiery light. Later on, Jorny figured out that was just stories, just sunlight, but it didn’t matter. Later on he realized who that monster on the corner bed had been, too, but by that time he had it all figured out.

When he was seventeen, the Moldies had sent him to Sanctity as an acolyte with instructions to study and work and rise in the hierarchy. He had become a member of the Office of Acceptable Doctrine. It was the Moldies, paying people off, that got Sanctity to send him to Grass. It was time for Grass to join the other homes of man, the Moldies said. Time for Grass to be cleansed.

And now he was here, ready to spread the plague which had killed everything he had cared about. If Uncle Shales had deserved the plague, then there were none who did not deserve it. If Uncle Shales had died, then everybody ought to die.

He opened his eyes, surprised to find them wet, feeling the cramping in his belly wane to its usual dull, wallowing ache. Standing across the desk from him was his superior in Sanctity, Elder Brother Jhamlees Zoe.

“You don’t look well, Fuasoi.”

“No, Elder Brother. A bit of pain is all.”

“Have you seen the doctors in the town recently?”

“Not for several weeks, Elder Brother.”

“What have they said is wrong?”

“The systems transplant isn’t doing as well as they’d like.”

“Perhaps it’s time to ship you back to Sanctity.”

“Oh, no, Elder Brother. Much too much work here.”

Elder Brother Jhamlees fretted, moving his hands, scratching his infinitesimal nose, rising on his toes, then down again. “Fuasoi?”

“Yes, Elder Brother?”

“You haven’t heard of there being any ... sickness around, have you?”

Fuasoi stared at him in disbelief. Sickness? Was the man crazy? Of course there was sickness around. “What does the Elder Brother refer to?”

“Oh, any serious sickness. Any. ah .. .well. Urn. Any, ah .. .plague?”

“Sanctity teaches us that there is no plague,” said Brother Fuasoi firmly. “Surely the Eider Brother is not questioning Sanctity’s teaching?”

“Not at all. I was thinking more of... something contagious, you know, that might threaten the Friary. Still, good to know there’s nothing. Nothing. Take care of yourself, Fuasoi. Let me know if you’d like to go back....” And he was out the door, hurrying away down the corridor.

Well, well, thought Fuasoi. I wonder what occasioned that?

“Shoethai’s here,” said Yavi, interrupting his thoughts. “I can hear him coming down the hall.” He got up and went to the door, opening it slightly and turning to peer inquiringly back at his superior.

“Let him come in,” Fuasoi said, nodding. The pain in his belly had passed. The other pain, the one that brought him awake in the night, sweating and weeping, that one would pass when everything was all over. He patted his forehead with a throwaway and stared at the door. “I want to speak to him privately.”

Yavi shrugged and went out, passing Shoethai in the door.

“Your Eminence.” Shoethai fell to his knees.

“Get up,” Fuasoi directed impatiently. “Did you get it?”

Shoethai nodded wearily, rising to put the small package on the desk. “Once I found somebody to look for it. Mostly they try to pretend I’m not there.”

The Elder gestured with his fingers to give the package to him. When he had it, he opened it carefully, revealing a fist-sized packet within.

“Is that it?” Shoethai begged, wanting to be reassured once more.

“That’s it-“ His superior smiled, content at last that the work could go forward and his own pain would end. “Plague virus. Packed especially for Grass.”

Brothers Mainoa and Lourai arrived at Opal Hill just in time to interrupt an altercation. When Persun Pollut announced the arrival of an aircar bearing the Green Brothers, Marjorie was for the moment shocked into inaction. She had forgotten they were coming. After the momentary pause, however, she went out to bring them in, hoping their arrival would put an end, however temporary, to the discord between Rigo and Stella.

Ignoring the arrival of the two strangers, Rigo went on shouting at Stella, furious that she had not told him she intended to ride, furious at her for having ridden at all without his permission. Though Tony and Marjorie were angry too, angry with both the riders for risking their lives, they felt the conflict had gone on long enough. Marjorie intruded upon the sounds of battle by introducing the brothers to her husband and daughter.

As Rigo turned and offered his hand to Brother Mainoa, his face still suffused with anger, he suddenly remembered his words to Marjorie about this man. The Brother was shortsighted and elderly, rotund and half bald. Rigo was instantly aware that he had made himself ridiculous by his accusations then and that he was not improving matters by his manner now. All he could bring himself to do was to make brusque apologies and go off with Stella still frothing after him like a small, mad animal determined to bite, leaving Marjorie and Tony to make amends.

Mainoa waved her apologies away. “All families have their upsets, Lady Westriding. I understand your husband and daughter rode to hounds yesterday.”

“How did you know?”

“That information spread across Grass within moments of their leaving Klive,” the friar replied. “A servant called a friend on the tell-me. The friend called someone else, who called three others. One of the Brothers came to tell Brother Lourai and me, bringing the news down into the Arbai street we are currently unearthing. Oh yes, Lady Westriding, everyone knows.”

“The two of them have been fighting over it,” she confessed unnecessarily. “Tony and I are afraid for them.”

“As you might well be,” the Brother agreed.

Since Stella had left them, Rillibee had stood looking after her, an expression of wonder on his face. Now he sat down abruptly. “She’s determined to go on?” he asked.

“Rigo is determined to go on. Stella is no less determined, though not for Rigo’s reasons. My husband thinks she should not. The reasons he gives her for not riding are the same reasons I give him for not riding. He says in his case it is different.” She sighed, throwing up her hands.

“It’s all become rather nasty and boring,” said Tony, trying to make light of what had been a very hostile encounter. “Everyone telling each other the same things, and no one listening.”

“I’m told that Rowena, Obermum bon Damfels, is at Commons,” Brother Mainoa remarked. “I hear that Obermun bon Damfels does not seem to know she is gone.”

“You hear everything,” Marjorie said ruefully. “Have you heard what any of it means?”

“As you do, Lady Westriding. As you do.”

“Call me Marjorie, Brother. Please. Father James wants to see you while you are here. He particularly asked to be included.”

Brother Mainoa nodded, smiling. He had wanted very much to talk with either of the Fathers.

When the time came, he spoke to the young priest, quiet young Father James—Rigo’s nephew, Marjorie informed them—and also to Father Sandoval, and to Tony and Marjorie as well. Their luncheon was served on the terrace in the mild airs of spring. Neither Rigo nor Stella joined them. Neither Rigo nor Stella could be found.

“I wanted particularly to speak with you Fathers,” Brother Mainoa confided in his comfortable voice, “because I have a philosophical matter which I am seeking advice upon.”

“Ah?” Father Sandoval acknowledged in a patronizing tone. “You wish an answer from a religious point of view?”

“I do,” said the Brother. “It pertains to creatures which are not human. You may regard the question as hypothetical but nonetheless important.”

Father Sandoval cocked his head. “You mean in a doctrinal sense?”

“Precisely. A matter of no practical relevance whatsoever, but important in a doctrinal sense. To ask my question, I must ask you first to suppose that the foxen here on Grass are sentient beings and that they are troubled by matters of conscience.”

Tony laughed. Marjorie smiled. Father Sandoval seemed only slightly amused. “I can accept that as a ground for ethical argument.”

Brother Mainoa nodded, gratified. “It is a question of original sin.”

“Original sin?” Father James looked as though he was genuinely amused. “Among the foxen?” He looked at Marjorie with a smile, as though reminded of their recent conversation on the same subject. She looked down at her plate. She was still troubled by the things he had said, and was not sure it was a laughing matter.

Brother Mainoa saw this interchange but pretended not to notice. “Remember that you agreed to accept that they are thinking beings, Fathers. Accept it. Regard them as fully sentient. As much as you yourself may be. Now, having done so—do not laugh, sir,” this to Tony—“we are supposing that the idea of original sin oppresses the foxen. They are carnivores. Their bodies require meat. So, they eat meat. They eat the peepers, the larvae of the Hippae.”

“You know!” exclaimed Marjorie. “You know what the peepers really are.”

“I do, madam. Not many know, but I do. And let us suppose the foxen do, as well. They eat them.”

“And the foxen consider this sinful?” Tony asked. “Well, young sir, it is an interesting point. If these were men, you yourself would consider it sinful. If a man or woman kills an unborn child, your faith and Sanctity both consider it murder, do they not? The larvae of the Hippae are not thinking beings. They are as near mindless as makes no matter. However, when they grow great and fat and unable to move, they make their first metamorphosis and emerge as hounds.”

“Ah.” Father Sandoval had already heard of this from Marjorie and he now saw where Mainoa was leading.

“The hounds, some say, are thinking beings. Certainly they are capable of some thought. I believe they are self-aware. Whether they are or not, they undergo a further metamorphosis and become something else....”

“Mounts.” Marjorie nodded. “I have seen them.”

“Of course. And as Lady Westriding knows in her heart, as we all know in our hearts, the Hippae are thinking beings. You and I have discussed this before, have we not? So, when foxen eat the peepers, they are killing the young of a thinking race.”

“But if they know this, why—“

“What else can they eat? The mounts? The Hippae themselves? There are a few other creatures, all of them too fleet or too small to be of any use. The grazers are too huge. No, the foxen eat the peepers because they are available and abundant. There are many more peepers than the world could hold if all of them went through metamorphosis, and history upon Terra tells us what horrors follow upon religious mandates of unlimited reproduction. That is not the point, however. The point is that foxen eat and relish peepers, but let us suppose that in recent years, since being exposed to the thoughts of man, the foxen have acquired pudency. They have learned to feel guilt.”

“They had no guilt until man came?”

“Let us suppose not. Let us suppose that they had reason, but no sense of shame. They have acquired it from men.”

“They must have acquired it from the commoners, then,” said Tony. “I’ve seen little enough among the bons.”

Brother Mainoa laughed. “From the commoners. Surely. Let us say they have learned it from the commoners.”

“Those of our faith,” said Marjorie with a frown, “seem to agree that the original sin of humankind was ah ... an amatory one.”

“And the foxen, who have learned of this doctrine from someone, heaven knows who, wonder if it is not as valid to have one that was and is gustatory. Let us suppose they have come to me with this matter. ‘Brother Mainoa,’ they have said, ‘we wish to know if we are guilty of original sin.’

“Well, I have told them I do not understand the doctrine of original sin, that it is not a doctrine Sanctity has ever concerned itself about. ‘I know someone who knows, however.’ I have told them. ‘Father Sandoval, being an Old Catholic, should know all about it,’ and so they want to discuss the matter.”

“Discuss the matter?”

“Well, in a manner of speaking. Let us postulate that they have found some way to communicate.”

Father Sandoval’s brow creased and he sat back in his chair, fingertips of his hands pressed together to make a cage, staring at it for a time as though it held his thoughts captive. “I would tell them,” he said after a considerable pause, “that their sense of guilt does not arise from original sin at all. It is not their first parents who have committed the sin,ifit is a sin, but they themselves.”

“Does this make a difference?”

“Oh, yes. A sin that they themselves have committed, if it is a sin, can be remedied by their own penitence and forgiven by God. If they are penitent. If they believe in God.”

If God believes in them, amended Marjorie, silently. If God did not know the names of his human viruses, would he care about foxen?

Brother Mainoa shifted the utensils before him, frowning in concentration. “But suppose it had been a sin of their.. .their ancestors.”

“It is not simply a matter of who committed the sin, whether the creatures themselves or their ancestors or their associates with or without their connivance or acquiescence. We would have to ask how God sees it. In order to have been the equivalent of original sin, then it would be necessary to determine whether the foxen had ever existed in a state of divine grace. Was there a time when they were sinless? Did they fall from grace as our religion teaches us that our first parents fell?”

Brother Mainoa nodded. “Let us suppose they did not. Let us suppose things have always been this way, so far back as anyone can remember.”

“No legend of a former time. No scripture?”

“None.”

Father Sandoval grimaced, drawing his upper lip back and ticking his thumbnail against his teeth. “Then it is possible that there is no sin.”

“Not even if, in this latter day, these reasoning beings are beset by conscience over something they have always done?”

Father Sandoval shrugged and smiled, raising his hands as though to heaven. “Brother, let us suppose that we think they may be guilty of original sin. First we must establish whether their salvation is possible—that is, whether any divine mechanism exists to remove their sense of sin by forgiving them. They cannot be truly penitent for something they did not do, and therefore penitence is useless to them. They must rely upon a supernatural force to redeem them from a sin committed long ago or by someone else. Among Old Catholics, that redemption was offered by our Savior. We are granted immortality through Him. Among you Sanctified, redemption is offered by your organization. You are granted immortality through it.”

“The Sanctified believe in the same Savior,” Brother Mainoa remarked. “They once called themselves His saints.”

“Well, perhaps. If so, it is no longer any significant part of Sanctity’s belief, but I will not argue that point with you. This is no time to discuss the types of immortality and what our expectations may be. My church teaches that those pious men and women who lived prior to the human life and sacrifice of the Savior were redeemed by that sacrifice despite the fact that they lived and died long before it was made. So, I suppose, might these foxen have been saved by that same sacrifice despite the fact that they lived and died in another world. I would not say, here and now, that this is impossible. However, it is a question for the full authority of the church to decide. No mere priest should attempt to answer such a question.”

“Ah.” Brother Mainoa grinned widely, shaking his head to indicate amazed amusement. “It is an interesting point, is it not. It is with such conjecture I while away the time while I am digging and cataloguing.”

Seeing the slightly angry expression on Father Sandoval’s face, Marjorie turned to the younger Brother in an effort to change the direction of their conversation. “And you, Brother Lourai. Do you also consider such philosophical and ethical points?”

Rillibee Chime looked up from his salad, peering deeply into Father Sandoval’s eyes, seeming to see more there than the old priest was comfortable with.

“No,” he said. “My people sinned against no one, and I have never had any chance to be guilty. I think of other things. I think of trees. I remember my parents and how they died. I think of the name they gave me. I wonder why I am here.”

“Is that all?” She smiled.

“No,” he replied, surprising both her and himself. “I wonder what your daughter’s name means, and whether I will see her again.”

“Well,” said Mainoa, lifting his brows and patting his younger colleague on the arm. “He’s young yet. I thought of such things too, long ago.”

A brooding silence fell. Marjorie persisted in moving the conversation away from these troublesome areas. “Brother Mainoa, do you know of an animal here on Grass which looks something like a bat?” She described the creature she had seen in the caverns, dwelling upon its most noteworthy feature, the fringing teeth.

“Not only know it,” the friar answered, “but been bitten by it. Most people have, at least once. It’s a bloodsucker. It comes out of the dusk and hits you right here—“ he clamped a work-roughened hand on the back of his neck, just at the base of his skull, “and tries to sink those teeth into you. Since our headbones get in the way, they don’t do much damage to humans. Evidently the Grassian animals have a notch in the skull right there. Miserable-looking things, aren’t they?”

Marjorie nodded.

“Where did you see them?”

She explained, telling the story of the cavern once more. Rillibee and Father James were interested, even though Brother Mainoa was quite unsurprised.

“Then you undoubtedly saw dead ones, also. Their bodies lie around the Hippae caverns like leaves on a forest floor in a Terran fall. I do know about them. I’m among the few who’ve sneaked up on a cavern and gotten away afterward.” He gave her a look which told her that he guessed more of her reasons for going into the grasses than she wanted him to.

“Gotten away?” she repeated faintly.

“I would say it’s a rare thing to get away, Lady Westriding. If you’d been smelled or spotted, they’d have had you.” He had fallen into his colloquial, avuncular manner.

“I was riding. On a horse.”

“Still, I find it amazing. Well, if your horse got you out of there quickly, you may have outrun ‘em. Or maybe the wind was just right and you simply weren’t noticed. Or maybe the smell of the horse confused them just long enough. You took your life between your teeth, Lady.” He gave her a concentrated, percipient look. “I’d suggest you not do it again. Certainly not during the lapse.”

“I ... I had already decided that.” She cast her eyes down, embarrassed at Tony’s scowl of agreement. Could the man read her mind?

“They don’t like to be spied upon?” Tony asked.

“They won’t tolerate it. That’s why so little’s known about ‘em. That’s why so few people that wander off into the grasses ever come home. I can tell you, though. Hippae lay eggs sometime during the winter or early spring. I’ve seen the eggs in the backs of caverns in late spring and I know they weren’t there in the fall. When the sun gets enough warmth in it, the migerers move the eggs into the sun and shift ‘em around until the heat hatches ‘em. About the same time, some of the peepers and some of the hounds, those that are grown enough, come back to the caverns and change themselves into something new. The Hippae guard ‘em while they’re doing it. That’s why the lapse.”

“The bons don’t know,” Marjorie said, a statement rather than a question.

“Right, they don’t know. Don’t know, won’t be told, don’t want to hear. Taboo for ‘em.”

“I do have something you may not know,” she said, getting up to fetch the trip recorder and punching up the pattern she had walked over in the cavern. “I have been told that the thunderous noise we sometimes hear is Hippae, dancing. Well, this seems to be what the dancing produces.”

Brother Mainoa stared at it, at first in confusion, then in disbelief.

Marjorie smiled. Good. For all his knowing looks, he wasn’t omniscient, then.

It was Rillibee who said, almost casually, “It looks like the words in the Arbai books, doesn’t it, Brother?”

“The spherical peepers!” Marjorie exclaimed, remembering suddenly where she had seen the rotund peepers and heraldric hounds, carved on the housefronts of the Arbai city. The twining design did look like the words in the Arbai books—or like the vines carved on the housefronts. She mentioned this, occasioning a deep and thoughtful silence from everyone.

Though the conversation later turned to other things, including whether there was or was not unexplained death upon Grass (for Marjorie and Tony remained aware of their duty) the pattern on Marjorie’s recorder was in all their minds. Brother Mainoa, particularly, wanted very much to show it to a friend—so he said as he departed—and Marjorie let him borrow the recorder, believing he meant some friend among the Green Brothers.

It was only after he was gone that she began to wonder how it was that Brother Mainoa had seen the caverns of the Hippae and had escaped to tell them about it.

When Rigo left for the Hunt on the following day, the last Hunt to be held at Klive, Stella, who had been thinking much of Sylvan, demanded to go with him.

“You said you wouldn’t risk the children,” Marjorie reminded him. “Rigo, you promised.” She would not cry. She would not shout. She would merely remind him. Still, the tears hung unshed in her eyes.

He had forgotten he had wanted tears, and tears over the children would never have satisfied him in any case. “I wouldn’t have,” he explained in his most reasonable voice. “I would never have ordered any of you to ride. But she wants to. That’s a different matter.”

“She could die, Rigo.”

“Any of us could die,” he said calmly, gesturing to convey a hostile universe which plotted death against them all. “But Stella won’t.

According to Stavenger bon Damfels, she rode brilliantly.” He said the word as though it had been an accolade. “Stavenger urged me to bring her again.”

“Stavenger,” Marjorie said quietly, the name seething on her tongue. “The man who beat Rowena half to death and attempted to starve her. The man who hasn’t figured out yet that she is gone. That Stavenger. Why would you risk Stella’s life on Stavenger’s say-so?”

“Oh, Mother,” Stella said in a voice very much like her father’s in its obdurate reasonableness. “Stop it! I’m going, and that’s that.”

Marjorie stood on the terrace steps and watched them go, staring into the sky until the car became merely a dot and vanished. As she was about to go in, Persun Pollut came up behind her. “Lady ...” “Yes, Persun.”

“You have had a message on the tell-me. Sylvan bon Damfels asks if you will be attending the Hunt, I told him you would not. He says he wishes to visit you here, this afternoon.”

“He may have word of Rowena,” Marjorie said sadly, still staring at the empty sky where they had gone. “Bring him to my study when he arrives.”

When he came, he did have some word of Rowena. As Marjorie commiserated and exclaimed, he told her that the wounds to Rowena’s flesh were healing. The wounds to her mind were more troublesome. Finding Dimity had become an obsession with her. She could not admit that the girl was gone forever, or if not, that finding her might be more heartbreaking than considering her dead.

None of which was what Sylvan had really come to say. He soon left the subject of Rowena and Dimity, which he found painful, and began to talk of something else. It had been so long since Marjorie had been the object of anyone’s overt romantic intentions that he had managed to get out most of what he had planned to say, however allusively and poetically, before she realized the tenor of his words.

“Sylvan,” she begged, suddenly terrified. “Don’t.”

“I must,” he whispered. “I love you. I’ve loved you since the moment I saw you. The moment I first took you into my arms on the dance floor. You must have known. You must have felt—“

She shook her head, forbidding him to say anything more. “If you say anything else, Sylvan, I will have to forbid you this house. I am not free to listen to you. I have a family.”

“So? What difference does that make?”

“To you, none perhaps. To me, all the difference.”

grass • 242

“Is it your religion? Those priest persons you have with you? Do they guard you for Rigo?”

“Father Sandoval? Father James? Of course not, Sylvan. They help me guard myself!” She turned away from him. exasperated. “How can I explain to you? You have none of the same ideas. And you are so young. It would be a sin!”

“Because I am young?”

“No. Not for that reason. But because I am married to someone else, it would be a sin.”

He looked puzzled. “Not on Grass.”

“Have you no sacrament of marriage upon Grass?”

He shrugged. “It is not marriages the bons need but children. Proper children, of course, though the fiction will often do as well as the fact. There’s many a bon with commoner blood, though the Obermuns would deny it. Well, look at it yourself! Why should Rowena have a lonely bed all spring and all fall while Stavenger hunts, or recovers from hunting, or sweats thinking of hunting again? I have no doubt Shevlok is Stavenger’s son, but I have some doubts about myself.”

“Have you no sins upon Grass? Nothing that you feel is wrong to do?”

He stared at her, as though trying to see past her surface to the mystery she confronted him with. “It would be wrong to kill another bon, I suppose. Or to force a woman if she weren’t willing, or hurt a child. Or to take something from some other estancia. But no one would see it as wrong for us to be lovers.”

She regarded him almost with fear. His eyes glowed with fervor, his hands reached out to her. Her fleeting desire to take those hands filled her with panic. So she had once longed to take Rigo’s hands. How could she convince someone who had so little in common with her when her own self was conspiring against her? “You say you love me, Sylvan.”

“I do.”

“And by this you mean more, I presume, than mere lust. You are not telling me only that you want my body.” She flushed, saying this, a thing she had never said, not even to Rigo. It was only possible to say it if she walked away from him, to the window where she stood looking out.

“Of course not,” he blurted, stung.

She spoke to the garden. “Then, if you love me, you will say nothing further about it. You must accept what I tell you. I am married to Rigo It does not matter if that marriage is happy or unhappy. It doesn’t matter that you and I might be happier together than either of us might be with others. None of that matters, and you must not speak of it! My marriage is a fact in my religion, and that fact can’t be changed. I will be your friend. I cannot be your lover. If you want religious explanations, ask Father Sandoval to explain it If I were even to converse with you about it, it would be an occasion of sin.”

“What can I do?” he begged. “What can I do?”

“Nothing. Go home. Forget you came here. Forget you said anything, as I will try to do.”

He rose, unwillingly, reluctantly, far more stirred to passion by her refusal than he would have been by her consent. He could not let her go. “I will be your friend,” he cried. “And you must be mine. This business of the plague, we must not forget that. You need me to help you with that!”

She turned back to him, her arms crossed protectively across her breasts. “Yes, we need you, Sylvan. If you will. But not if you talk about this other thing.” Her throat was dry. She longed to comfort him, he seemed so distraught, but she did not dare touch him or even smile at him.

“Very well, then. I will not talk about this other thing.” He made a wide, two-handed gesture, as though casting everything away, though he gave up nothing. If talking of love was not the way to Marjorie’s affection, he would try to find some other way. He would not give up courting her. He did not understand Marjorie’s religion, but he would learn about it. Obviously it tolerated many things it did not allow. Otherwise that proud, harsh man, her husband, would not be able to keep his mistress almost upon his wife’s doorstep!

He stayed, for a time, sitting a good distance from her, discussing the things she needed to know. He promised to do everything he could to find out whether there was any unusual disease upon Grass. He let nothing happen to disturb her again, controlling their conversation with a courtly charm, seeing her gradually relax, lower her defenses, become the woman he had danced with. When he left her, he felt his eyes grow wet, wondering what she thought of him, amazed that it mattered to him that much. He was no youngster to worry what a woman thought! And yet ... and yet he did.

She, looking after him, was more stirred than she had been in years, wishing with all her heart that he had never come, that he had never spoken, or that she had met him before she had met Roderigo Yrarier.

It was an evil thought. She went to the chapel and prayed. Over the years, prayer had comforted her. It did not do so now, though she knelt for most of an hour, seeking peace. The light over the altar glowed red Once she had thought of it as a holy eye, seeing her, but she did not think it saw her now. She had been God’s child once. Now she was only a thinking virus, a thing beset by longings with no appeasement allowed. “How long has it been since I laughed at something?” she asked herself. “How long since we have had any fun at all, as a family?” She could remember both, and it had been long, too long ago, when Stella was still a child, before Rigo had Eugenie.

She went outside. The afternoon had grown chill. From the northeast came the muted roar of an aircar. She hurried toward the graveled court where it would land, stood there shivering and looking up. She needed Rigo, needed Stella, needed family, needed to belong to someone, be held by someone. She would make them offer her something, make them show some affection. She would beg it, demand it!

The car came slowly closer, from a speck to a ball, from a ball to an ornament, one of the ornaments her family had used to hang upon trees at Christmas time, bulging with rococo extravagance.

It landed. The door opened and the servant who had piloted it got out and went away, without looking at her. Rigo came out, facing the car, turning slowly until he saw her, He did not move then, just stood there, his face still and empty. There was an endless moment during which nothing moved at all, a moment in which a first dreadful suspicion hardened into certainty,

“Stella!” she cried, her voice shrilling into the wind.

Rigo made a hopeless gesture but said nothing. He did not move toward her. She knew he was too ashamed to do so, that he knew there was nothing he could ever say which would help at all.

“Brother Mainoa,” she insisted, pounding her fist on the kitchen table where she found Father James and her son having an evening snack together. “Brother Mainoa knows something! He’s been out in the grass. He’s seen. Things. If the Hippae have taken Stella, he’s the only one who can possibly help us.”

“Where is your husband?” the priest asked. “Marjorie, where is Uncle Rigo?”

“I don’t know,” she said, turning wild eyes upon him. “He came into the house.”

“What exactly did he say?”

“That she was gone. Vanished. She never returned. Like Janetta. Like the bon Damfels girl. Gone.” She gulped for air, as though she could not possibly get enough into her lungs. “He won’t be any use. He’s like them. Like Stavenger and like the Obermun bon Haunser. I’ve been thinking who to ask. Not any of the bons. They don’t do anything about it when their own children get carried off; they wouldn’t do anything for mine. Not anyone from Commons. They don’t know anything about it. Not villagers. They’re frightened to death of the grass. I wish you could have seen Sebastian Mechanic’s face when he was telling me about the thundering in the night. But someone told him! Who do you suppose? I asked. He says Brother Mainoa. It always comes back to Brother Mainoa!”

“Do you want to go there now, Marjorie?”

“Now. Yes.”

“Have you checked to be sure he’s there?”

“No.” She sobbed helplessly. “He has to be there.”

The priest nodded at Tony, then toward the tell-me link in the corner of the kitchen, before rising to fold Marjorie in his arms. He was no taller than she, and slighter, but he gave her enough support that he could urge her into a chair and make her sit there until she grew quieter. Tony muttered in the corner once, then again before snapping off the link and turning back to them.

“He’s there. Him and the other one, I told him what happened. He says he’d come to you but he doesn’t have a car. You can come to him, or I’ll go get him and bring him here.”

“I’ll go.” She jumped up, staring wildly around herself. “I was wicked, Father James. I resented her. God has taken her away because of—“

“Marjorie!” he shouted, shaking her. “Stop that! Is God so unjust that he would punish your daughter because of something you did? You won’t help Stella by having fits of guilt. Stop it.”

She gulped again, visibly taking hold of herself. “Yes. Oh, yes, of course. I’m sorry. You’re right. Tony, grab whatever food you can put together in five minutes. You and Father James will be hungry. I must get my coat.”

She ran out and they heard her footsteps clattering along the hallway, stumbling at first, then slowing into a firm, rapid walk as she took better control of herself. She returned in moments and did not break down again during the flight.

In the Arbai city, Brother Lourai took them to the home he and Mainoa occupied, one of the excavated houses made weathertight, with a stove in one corner and a few pieces of furniture that fit human bodies. Brother Lourai conducted them there through a downpour of rain, and Brother Mainoa refused to let Marjorie talk until she had shed her wet cloak and was settled with a steaming cup before her. Then, unable to contain herself a moment longer, she poured out the story of Stella’s disappearance.

“Why did you come to me?” he asked.

“You know why,” she answered, like a challenge. “You may have fooled everyone else with that business about theoretical discussions and postulating what the foxen think, but I think that was real, at least partly. I think you know things the rest of us don’t know. About the Hippae, maybe. About the foxen. About what goes on out there in the grasses.”

“You want to find your daughter.”

“Of course I want to find my daughter.”

“Even if she is like the other girl. Janetta bon Maukerden. Even if your daughter is like that?”

“Damn it,” Tony interjected angrily. “Did you have to bring that up?”

Brother Mainoa gave him a long, measuring look. “Of course I did, young man. I don’t know where your sister is. I know the Hippae took her. I wasn’t at your reception, but I’ve heard about Janetta bon Maukerden showing up. I’ve talked with Jandra Jellico on the tell-me. I’ve heard what happens when the Hippae take young women, and you’ve seen it for yourself. Before we all risk our lives on something hideously dangerous, it’s best to know that we really want to, wouldn’t you say?”

“Hush, Tony,” said Father James to the angry boy. “The man is right.”

Rillibee/Lourai got up from his place by the wall and refilled their teacups. “They had Janetta for a long time. They’ve only had Stella since today.” He sounded more concerned than Marjorie had expected, in the light of Brother Mainoa’s comments.

Brother Mainoa nodded. “My colleague is right. There is hope that if we find Stella—assuming that is soon—she might not be ... very different than she was when she vanished.”

“It wouldn’t matter,” Father James said tiredly. “Even if we knew she would be like that other girl, if we have any chance of success we must still try to find her. Not if it means certain destruction, however. I will not allow that, Marjorie, so set the idea aside. We must have some hope of succeeding.”

“You’ve been out there, haven’t you?” Marjorie demanded of Brother Mainoa once more. “You’ve seen things and the Hippae haven’t killed you.”

“I had protection,” Brother Mainoa said. “Protection to go alone into the grass and look at things. I have no idea whether we can obtain protection to go into the grasses and look for someone. It might be better to let me try it alone.”

She shook her head. No. Not alone. She herself had to go. “Now, at once!”

“No. Not at once,” he cut her off. “Soon, but not at once. Since we returned from Opal Hill, Brother Lourai and I have been trying to make sense of that design you showed us. Many volumes of Arbai books have already been filed with the tell-me computers at Commons. They have a link with the network on Semling. Brother Lourai and I have been feeding in the designs carved on the doors and the houses. Within hours we may have some … some indication that there are correlations.”

“Is that more important than Stella’s life?” Marjorie was incredulous.

“It could be the key to Stella’s life,” he said patiently. “If the design in the Hippae cavern has meaning, if it seems they comprehend that meaning, perhaps it gives us a way to reach them. Wait here. It may be only an hour or two.”

It was less than an hour before the report came, peeping out of the tell-me into a portable link-reader that Brother Lourai had ready. When all the information had been recorded, Brother Mainoa pocketed the device and got hurriedly to his feet, summoning the others with a gesture. “I’ve skimmed over it. We won’t take time to study it now. Remember that we can see nothing helpful from the air. We must go on foot. And we must start from where Stella started. The bon Damfels estancia.” He turned toward the door, leaving his other papers on the table behind him.

“Not on foot,” Marjorie contradicted him as she put her still-damp cloak around her. “No, Brother Mainoa. We can do better than that. We’ll go on horseback.”

Rigo had gone first into the house for a drink. After a few glasses of the excellent brandy Roald Few had provided, Rigo had gone to look for his family, not finding Marjorie or Tony or even Father James when he went down to the priests’ house. Father Sandoval told him they had gone.

‘To the Arbai dig, I think I heard Father James say. Marjorie thinks there may be some help there.”

“Help for what?” Rigo snarled, angered that he had not been asked to go along.

“To find Stella,” the old priest said. “For what other reason?”

“Does she think I have no interest in that?” Rigo demanded. “Doesn’t she think I care?”

Father Sandoval struggled to find something that would calm Rigo’s anger. “I haven’t talked to Marjorie, Rigo. I know only what Father James told me.”

Rigo snarled again wordlessly and left the old priest while he, Rigo, wandered aimlessly in the garden, cursing to himself. When his feet brought him to Eugenie’s house, he went in, telling himself he would stay only for a short time. He wanted to be in his own room when Marjorie returned. Still, Marjorie had gone some distance, so there was no hurry. He began to unburden himself to Eugenie, telling her many things to which she murmured sympathetically without paying any attention at all.

She poured him another drink, and then several more. Rigo grew at first angrier, then sad and maudlin. He wept, and she comforted him. They found their way into the summer bedroom. Neither of them heard the aircar return in the middle hours of the night.

Father James, who had done some show riding in his youth, saddled Millefiori, the most spirited of the mares, while Marjorie, who had already saddled Don Quixote for herself and El Dia Octavo for Tony, urged Brothers Mainoa and Lourai to help her with Her Majesty and Blue Star. These two were graceful and elegant mares with habits of calm good sense. “You’ll ride these two, Brothers. All you need to do is sit on top and relax. The horses will do the rest.”

Brothers Mainoa and Lourai looked at one another in embarrassed surmise. Rillibee had ridden something a few times in his childhood, ridden at a slow walk, with someone leading the horse or donkey or whatever it had been. Brother Mainoa could not remember ever having touched a riding animal of any kind before. Marjorie had no time to reassure them. She was busy at the top of a short stepladder, putting a saddle on the great draft horse, Irish Lass.

“Who’s going to ride that?” Rillibee/Lourai asked.

“Irish Lass will carry most of our supplies. And Stella can ride her, when we find Stella.”

When we find her, Father James thought quietly to himself. If. If we find her. He had not gone back to the house he shared with Father Sandoval. He had not told the older priest he was going on this wild venture. It would be easier to ask forgiveness later than to seek permission now, permission which he would not receive.

“I have to go out into the grass for a while before we leave,” Brother Mainoa said. “Something I need to do if we want to get where we’re going.”

Marjorie stared at him, eager to be off and yet aware of what dangers lay out there. “Is it necessary?”

“If we’re going to get to bon Damfels in one piece, yes.” She gestured, biting her lip. “Hurry. If you can.” Then she stood looking after him into the darkness, wondering what he was up to.

Tony came into the stables with a pile of things which he set down on the floor, announcing, “These have to be sorted out. There’s food and some equipment. I have to make another trip/’

“Father James?” Marjorie indicated the pile. “Is there anything that we need that Tony hasn’t found?” She leaned wearily against the flank of the huge horse, asking Tony, “Did you tell your father where we’re going?”

“I didn’t find Father,” Tony reported. “I went through the house.”

“Leave him a message on the tell-me,” Marjorie said, relieved that Rigo was not shouting at them, telling them they could not go. He was probably with Eugenie, but it wouldn’t be appropriate for Tony to seek him there. “Leave him a note, Tony. Tell him we’ve gone looking for Stella, that we’ve taken the horses.”

“I did,” the boy replied. “I already did that.”

“Water bottles,” said the priest. “First aid supplies.”

“I’ll get them.”

The boy turned and left, the priest following him, calling, “Dry clothes in something waterproof.”

“Do you have everything you need?” Marjorie asked Brother Lourai.

He shrugged, elaborately, as though to ask who knew what was needed. “We each brought a change of clothes and boots. Brother Mainoa raided our dry stores to bring what food he could. We could use something to cook in or heat water in.”

“There.” She pointed at a miniature cooker in the pile. “And over there are the saddlebags. Before we came to Grass, Rigo and I thought we might be taking extended rides. We brought camping gear, as we would have done for endurance rides at home.”

“Home. Where was your home?”

“Lesser Britain. And then, later, Old Spain. After Rigo and I were married.”

“Old Spain?” Rillibee asked.

“The southwestern province of Western Europe.”

“Are there many Old Catholics there?”

“Many. More than anywhere else. Sanctity has not had good luck with converts in Spain.”

“Where I lived, only a long time before, there were Old Catholics.”

“Where was that?”

“In New Spain, the Middle American Provinces, Joshua, my father, said our province was once called Mexico.”

“Your father was Old Catholic? But you are one of the Sanctified.”

He shook his head no. “I am whatever Joshua was. But I don’t know what he was. He wasn’t Old Catholic, I know that.” He leaned against the horse she had told him to ride, imitating her stance, stroking the animal as she did hers, feeling the stiff, glossy hair slide beneath his fingers. “He loved trees. Miriam loved trees, too.” Tears came and he blinked them away. He had seen no trees on this place, except for the small copse near the dig. There had been no trees at Sanctity. Sometimes he thought if he could only see trees, then he would not feel so alone.

Tony and Father James returned with more supplies. Brother Mainoa, looking pensive, came in to help them sort the supplies into the saddlebags, including the two hamper-sized containers that Irish Lass was to carry. When they were done, they stood looking at one another as though reluctant to take the next, inevitable step. It was Brother Mainoa who broke the silence.

“I’ll lead if I may, Lady Westriding. For a little while. After that, it shouldn’t be necessary. If you’ll tell me how to steer?”

Marjorie explained the use of reins and legs and rode out beside him to make sure he understood. Within moments they had left the garden trail and were pushing through tall grass, each barely able to see the nearest rider. Then, almost before they had had a chance to be annoyed by the lash of the thick growth, they came through the tough stems into lower grass and turned purposefully toward the northeast. They rode silently except for Brother Mainoa’s occasional querulous, “Tell me again what I do to get farther right?” And then, after he had been told two or three times, he did not ask again. They rode for some time in silence except for the soft plop of hooves and the rustle of the grass.

Marjorie, riding alongside Brother Mainoa, thought she heard him speak and leaned closer to whisper, “What was that. Brother?” She heard the same sound again. A snore. He was riding asleep while Blue Star went placidly along the sides of starlit hills and down winding shadowed vales as though she were on her way home, her ears forward as if hearing someone there calling her name.

Rigo woke with gritty eyes and a sour taste in his mouth. For a moment he did not remember where he was; then, seeing the flash of a flick bird across the tall windows and hearing a grass peeper call repeatedly from the grass garden, he remembered Grass. It was the soft, rose-colored curtains blowing in the morning wind that told him he was in Eugenie’s room rather than in his own bedroom adjoining Marjorie’s. The bed beside him was empty.

Eugenie came in like the head of a small tray-bearing comet, billowing hair and silken draperies in a turbulent tail behind her. “The girl doesn’t get here until later, Rigo, so I made you coffee my own self.” She plumped his pillow, sat beside him on the bed, and leaned prettily forward to pour. The cups were pink, curved like the petals of a flower. The cream was steaming.

“Where did you get cream?” he asked. “I haven’t had cream since we’ve been here.”

“Never you mind.” She pouted, flushing with pleasure at his pleasure. “I have my ways.”

“No, really, Eugenie. Where did you get it?”

“Sebastian brings it to me. His wife has a cow.”

“He never said a word to me about—“

“You didn’t ask, that’s all.” She stirred his cup and handed it to him.

“You flirted with him.”

She didn’t deny it, merely smiled through her lashes at him. sipping at her own cup.

He started to say something about flirting, about Stella’s flirting, and the memory came back. The cup dropped from his hand and rolled across the thick carpet and he struggled to get out of the clinging sheets.

“Rigo!” It was a protest.

“I forgot about Stella,” he cried. “I forgot!”

“You didn’t forget,” she told him. “You told me, last night.”

“Oh, damn you, Eugenie. That’s not what I meant.” He went away from her into the bathroom. She heard water running as she sat staring into her cup, not drinking anymore. If he only hadn’t remembered. For a little while.

He went straight to the kitchen, then to Marjorie’s room, and then Tony’s. Only after finding all three places empty did he think of the tell-me. There he found a message, brief but complete: Tony and his mother had gone. They had taken the horses. They had gone to find Stella. Rigo howled, half in anger, half in pain, making the crystal ornaments complain in icy voices. Where would Marjorie have gone? Tony hadn’t said, but there was only one logical starting point for a search. Bon Damfels’ place.

He flushed, remembering how he had left bon Damfels’ place the day before, begging, pleading with them to help him find his daughter, while Stavenger, at first frostily cold and then heated with anger, had accused him of undisciplined, un-Huntly behavior; while Stavenger and Dimoth and Gustave told him to go home and mourn Stella in private and quit shouting about her; while bon Haunser and bon Damfels aunts and cousins pointed derisive fingers at him. Despite all that, the people of Klive were not at a Hunt today, and he would return to Klive.

In the garage, he found both aircars partially disassembled, with Sebastian hovering over a case of new parts.

“What in the name of God ... ?”

“Your driver said the stabilizer was malfunctioning yesterday,” Sebastian said, startled. “We’ve had trouble with both of them, and since there is no Hunt today...”

Rigo bit back a roar of outrage. “Is there any other vehicle here? Or in the village?”

“No, sir. I can have this one reassembled in an hour or two. If you must travel before then, perhaps someone from Commons ...”

Persun Pollut called his father, but Hime Pollut was out of his shop. No one knew when he would return. Roald Few was not available. Three other persons who Persun called were at the port—a long-awaited shipment had come in. Persun made exaggerated swoops with his eyebrows, indicating annoyance.

As for Rigo, while hours passed, he seethed, barely able to contain his frustration at Marjorie’s passing slowly, slowly away to someplace where he might never find her.

13

When Marjorie and the others arrived at Klive, Marjorie rode directly to the Kennel Gate. It was the closest place she knew to the first surface, one of the two familiar approaches to the mansion. Above the first surface was the terrace, and fronting on the terrace were the reception rooms. She was halfway across the terrace before someone saw her and moved swiftly to intercept her. Sylvan.

“Marjorie!” His voice was a muffled shout of dismay. “What are you doing here?”

“I’ve come to find out what I can about Stella.” She confronted him, arms folded, half angry, half pleading.

He took her arm, pulled her away from the windows. “You Yrariers do believe in courting danger. For the love of whatever you hold dear, Marjorie, come away from the doors. Let’s go down into the garden.” He turned away, still pulling at her, and she followed him, somewhat unwillingly and too late. The stentorian bellow startled them both. Stavenger had come out the doors and stood towering at the top of the steps, face purple with fury.

“What are you doing here?Fragras!I’m speaking to you!”

His fists were clenched as though he intended to strike her. Her own frustration and fury rose to meet his, all in a moment. She drew herself up, one hand forward, the index finger pointing him out.

“You,” she screamed. “You unholy monster!” Her voice hung on the air like a smell.

He shuddered and drew back, more surprised by her attack than he would have been by any other tactic. He was not accustomed to either defiance or reproach, and he had been so far from sensible thought that it took him time to puzzle out that he had intended to attack her.

“You despoiler of children!” she cried. “You barbarian! Where was it you saw my daughter last?” She moved up toward him, waving the finger as though it had a cutting edge, like a sword.

“I never saw her,” he snarled. “I didn’t look.”

“How can a Master not observe his Hunt?” she cried. “Are you so enslaved to your mounts that you’re insensible?”

His face became even darker, his neck swelled, his eyes bulged as he howled inarticulately and came toward her like a juggernaut. Sylvan caught her from behind and dragged her away.

“Move!” he hissed at her, a long, frightened exhalation. “He’ll kill you if he gets the chance!”

He pulled her down the steps, away down the Hounds’ Way and through the Kennel Gate, then shut the heavy gate behind her. Through it she could still hear Stavenger’s wordless bellows of fury.

Sylvan leaned against the gate, his face pale. “I knew you’d want to know. I found out for you. I asked Shevlok and some of the others. They don’t notice much during a Hunt, quite frankly, but it was Darenfeld’s Coppice, the same as Dimity, the same as Janetta. That’s the last place anyone saw her.”

“Show me!” she demanded, leaping up into Don Quixote’s saddle. “Now!”

“Marjorie—“

“Now! You can ride Irish Lass. She’s smaller than those monstrosities you’re used to riding.” Then, seeing him looking vacantly at the big horse, “Put your left foot in the stirrup, that metal thing there. Grasp the saddle and pull yourself up; she’s not going to put her leg out for you. Now, take the reins, as I have mine. Don’t bother doing anything with them. She’ll follow us. Now, show me where!”

He gestured off to the left and they all rode in that direction, gaining only a little distance before they heard the gate bang open and looked back to see Stavenger howling after them. The riders looked resolutely forward as they entered the taller grasses which soon hid them from view.

Sylvan sat very quietly on the horse, occasionally reaching forward with his feet as though to find the toe spaces he was accustomed to on his Hippae mounts.

“Sit up,” Marjorie instructed him tersely. “She has no barbs to skewer you with. Lean forward. Pet her. She likes it.” He did so, slowly, almost fearfully, relaxing gradually.

“A different kind of beast, eh?” queried Brother Mainoa. “Though I am very sore from this unaccustomed position, I am not afraid.”

“No,” Sylvan agreed abstractedly. “No. But then, one really isn’t afraid while on the Hunt, either.” He stared around himself, as though seeking landmarks. “There.” He pointed ahead of them, a little to the right. “That’s the Ocean Garden. Normally we’d ride on the other side, but we can get where we’re going around this way.” He gestured, showing Marjorie the way, and she rode ahead, letting him call directions to her as they went.

“Why was your father in a rage?” Tony asked. “Because of your father. When they returned last night, from the Hunt, Roderigo demanded that they help him search for your sister. It isn’t done. When someone vanishes, everyone pretends not to notice. No one searches. No one demands help from others. Father —my father—couldn’t keep his temper. He’s been wild, ever since yesterday. Seeing you set him off, and then when your mother accused him ...” Sylvan’s eyes opened widely, and he stroked his throat. “How can I ...?”

“No Hippae around,” murmured Brother Mainoa. “Not just now. I think our... well, our guides have frightened them off. Or perhaps they have gone for reinforcements.”

“Guides?”

“Do not speak of it. Perhaps we will, in time, but now is not the time. We do not want to think cheese with hunger all around us.”

Sylvan went back to massaging his throat and staring incredulously about himself .Only after they had gone some miles through the grasses did he settle down, though he still managed to disconcert Marjorie from time to time by standing upright on Irish Lass’s back. “I have to get up here to see,” he explained, waving toward a distance the others could not perceive. “There, off there, is the ridge that leads to the copse.”

They turned in the indicated direction and moved on, gaining a lower limb of the ridge and following it as it wound its lengthy way onto the height. From there they could look down into a valley dotted with copses. Sylvan pointed to the largest of them “Darenfeld’s,” he said.

“Why Darenfeld?” asked Rillibee/Lourai. “There are no bons by that name.”

“There were,” Sylvan replied. “There were eleven families originally. The Darenfeld estancia and all the family perished in a grass fire several generations ago. Others had been burned out before,”

“A grass fire?” Marjorie wondered. “We’ve seen no fires since we’ve been here.”

“You haven’t been here in summer.” He gazed out toward the horizon. “There is almost no rain in the summer, but there is lightning. The fires come like great waves, eating the grass, sending smoke boiling up into the clouds. Sometimes there are fires in the spring, but they are small ones because the grass is still fresh and full of moisture—“

“And a summer fire burned the Darenfeld estancia?”

“It was before they had grass gardens,” Brother Mainoa remarked. “We at the Friary have designed the gardens to stop the flames. There are areas and aisles of low turfs which smolder but do not burn. They break the fire so that it goes around rather than through. We have done the same thing at the Friary, to protect it, and at Opal Hill and the other estancias. The great gardens of Klive were not planted merely for their beauty.”

“True.” Sylvan nodded. “None of the bons would have gone to the trouble merely for beauty.”

Marjorie urged Don Quixote toward the copse below them. It loomed dark and mysterious among the soft-hued grasses, the more so the closer they came. Small pools sucked at the horses’ feet. Great trunks went up into gloomy shade, gnarled roots kneed up to brace their monstrous bulk, their lower branches as huge as ordinary trees. Rillibee leaned toward the copse as though toward a lover.

“Now what?” asked Tony. “The hunt came here and left here. We should find a path trampled into the grasses where many Hippae went. Then we should find another, where one Hippae went.”

“If it went,” said Brother Mainoa. “Though this is called a copse, it is in fact a small forest. What would you say, Sylvan? Half a mile or more through?”

Sylvan shook his head. “Estimating distances is not something we do much of, I’m afraid. On the Hunt, it doesn’t matter. We measure Hunts in hours, not in miles or kilometers or stadia, as they do on Repentance.”

“From the ridge it looked to be half a mile,” Father James agreed. “Enough territory in here to hide any number of Hippae.”

“If we do not find a trail leading out,” said Marjorie wildly, “then we will search within, among the trees.” She appealed to each of them in turn, seeking agreement. Brother Mainoa sat very still upon his horse. His expression was alert, as though he heard something she could not hear. “Brother Mainoa?” she asked. “Brother?”

His eyebrows went up, and he smiled at her. “Of course. Of course. Let us first look for a trail,”

The way the Hunt had come was easy to find. The way the Hunt had gone was equally easy. Crushed grasses testified to the fact that more than one Hunt had come this way recently. Some stems were completely dried, others were newly broken and still leaking moisture. Brother Mainoa rode down this broad trail and then pulled Blue Star to a halt as he pointed off to the left. All of them could see the narrow trail which wound into the grass. Father James picked a stem of broken grass and handed it to Marjorie. It was still moist. “So,” she said. “So.”

“If a Hippae has her,” Tony said in a carefully emotionless voice, “how are we to get her?”

“Hide,” she said. “Wait until it leaves her alone. Steal her back.”

“I wish we had weapons,” Father James said.

“So do I,” she admitted. “But we don’t.”

He shook his head, only slightly. “Let us hope we find only one of the beasts opposing us.”

Rigo boiled the morning away, waiting while Sebastian reassembled the aircar, a longer process than had been anticipated. The new parts, though appropriately numbered, were not a precise fit. Sebastian took them to his own shop in the village, as he put it, “to shave them down a bit.”

By midafternoon the first car had been put together and tested. Driven by Sebastian, with Persun Pollut along for whatever assistance he might offer, Rigo set out for Klive. The trip took slightly more than an hour, across the southern tip of the swamp forest with the clutter of Commons off to their left. They landed in the gravel court beyond the first surface and crossed that surface on their way to the terrace of Klive.

“Your Excellency,” a little voice cried from behind the balustrade. “Your Excellency!”

Rigo turned, surprised to see one of the bon Damfels daughters beckoning to him. He moved toward her, impatiently, wanting to go on into Klive to see whether Marjorie was there.

“They’ve gone,” the girl said. “Roderigo Yrarier, your wife and son and the Green Brothers, they’ve gone.”

“Gone where?” he blurted. “Where?”

She shook her head, tears suddenly starting down her cheeks. “You mustn’t go up there. Father, the Obermun, is in a rage. He will kill you. He has half killed Emmy already. Your wife came to ask where your daughter had been lost. Sylvan told her. He found out from Shevlok, and he told your wife. Sylvan went with them. Father had been screaming since then. Emmy tried to calm him and he beat her—“

A bellow from the house above them sent the girl fleeing along the side of the house. Rigo stopped, put one foot on the step before him, and felt himself pulled firmly away. Sebastian had one arm and Persun the other, and they seemed determined to drag him away from Klive, by brute force if necessary.

“Don’t go up there, sir. He will not listen to reason. Listen to him. He sounds like a bull!”

“Listen to Pollut, sir. He will not give you any help, not now. You must wait. Wait until he is calmer. Wait until you can speak with someone else.”

“At the Hunt,” Sebastian suggested. “Tomorrow. At the bon Laupmon Hunt.” They dragged Rigo away, he resisting them but not protesting, as though some part of him realized the sense of what they said even though his body was unwilling to agree.

The horses followed the trail in single file, their riders at first alert for any sound, then gradually, as mile succeeded mile, growing slack and distracted. Mainoa and Lourai were preoccupied with pain, aching joints and throbbing buttocks. Marjorie was thinking of Rigo, and Sylvan of Marjorie. Father James was praying that he had not done the wrong thing, and Tony was thinking of a girl he had not seen for a very long time. The slap of the grass blades on their bodies had become hypnotic. Even Marjorie, usually alert to the nuances of horse behavior, did not notice that the horses were acting very much as Don Quixote had acted when she had ridden him away from the Hippae cavern. Ears alertly forward, they moved as though they were headed home. As though someone spoke to them. The riders did not comment upon this. With the sun on their backs, they rode, unspeaking, the only noise the sound of the horses’ hooves.

The world spun the sun to the center of the sky and then downward once more. The light was on their faces. They had stopped once or twice to drink and relieve themselves, but the trail winding enigmatically ahead of them had enticed them to keep the stops brief. The first howl came from behind them, far off to the right.

Marjorie stiffened. She had heard the sound before, and it meant terror.

“Hippae,” said Sylvan in a hopeless voice. “Do they know we are here?”

“Not yet,” said Brother Mainoa.

“How do you know?” Marjorie demanded.

“You came to me for help, Lady Westriding, and I’m giving you help. How or why isn’t something we can talk of yet. I tell you truthfully that the Hippae do not yet know we are here. They will know, shortly, but not yet. I would suggest we move more rapidly.”

Tony sat up, kneeing El Dia Octavo into a canter. He rattled away down the narrow trail, the others following. Brothers Mainoa and Lourai were hanging onto their saddles, grunting with effort. “Push down with your feet,” Marjorie cried. “Sit straight. It’s no more difficult than a rocking chair.”

Brother Mainoa pushed down with his feet and continued to hang on. After a time the rocking motion became predictable and his body adapted to it. Rillibee/Lourai was quicker. He found the motion exhilarating. Grass heads slapped him in the face and he grinned widely, seeds in his teeth.

More howls from behind them, to both right and left.

“Do you know where we’re going?” Marjorie demanded over her shoulder.

“Swamp forest,” Mainoa said, grunting, “just ahead.”

He had no sooner said it than they came through the last of the tall grasses to see the forest at a considerable distance ahead and below them, stretching to the limits of sight in either direction. The trail they had been following ran toward the forest like an arrow flight, one aimed at a rocky knob which raised itself above the level of the distant trees. The bowl of grasses before them came only slightly above the horses’ bellies.

“Can the horses run faster?” Mainoa called plaintively. “If they can, we should.”

Don Quixote and El Dia Octavo had made the same decision or had been informed of it—at the same moment. They waited for no signal from their riders but sped down the slope, tails streaming behind them, ears flattened. The mares plunged after them, Irish Lass thundering away at the rear. For Mainoa it was as though he rode a nightmare. Though he knew he would fall, he did not. Though he knew he could not stay on, he did. The horse beneath him seemed determined to keep him in the saddle, and through all his panic he perceived that fact even as he heard the howls rising from the height they had just left. He could not risk looking back to see how close the Hippae were.

Sylvan could. Over the drumming of the hooves he heard the wild screaming from the ridge. He spun half around on the broad back, holding tight to one of the vast panniers Irish Lass carried. A dozen enormous beasts pranced upon the height. Around their feet a great pack of hounds leapt and yammered. As though in response to some signal that Sylvan had not seen, the whole Hunt of them plunged down the slope after the fleeing horses. Not silently, as when they hunted foxen, but clamoring as with one shrill ear-shattering voice.

He turned. The other horses were ahead of him, far ahead of him. This great beast was not as fleet as the others. He lay forward on her neck and whispered to her. “Do the best you can, my lady. I think otherwise, both you and I will be meat for them.” He turned to watch the pursuit. One huge violet-mottled Hippae led the charge, mouth wide, nostrils flared. It seemed to stumble in the grass, then again. It fell, eyes rolled back. A ripple in the grass fled to one side.

Behind the fallen monster the others slowed, prancing uncertainly. “Go,” called Sylvan to his mount. “Go, lady. As best you can.”

Irish Lass heard him and went. The distance between her and the other horses had grown. She did her best to decrease it, but it became wider yet.

Again the Hippae howled pursuit. Again the foremost among them tripped and fell. Again a ripple in the grass fled away, out of their path.

El Dia Octavo had reached the forest. Don Quixote was just behind him Millefiori was next Then Blue Star and Her Majesty. The riders had dismounted and were waiting for Sylvan.

Beside Sylvan a hound ran even with Irish Lass, its head darting through the grasses, teeth bared to strike at the running legs of the horse. Beyond the hound the grass quivered and something made of shining barbs snatched the hound away. Sylvan had not seen what it was, but he heard the hound screaming. Seemingly, so did the rest of the pack. The sound of their howling fell farther behind him. The great horse grunted beneath him. Her hide was wet and sleek. Foam flew from her mouth. “Good Lass,” he whispered. “Good Lass.”

And then, at last, he was there among the others. He turned once more to see the grass behind him alive with ripples. Something was moving there. Something the Hippae-hound pack was aware of, for it stood away, circling, screaming defiance but coming no nearer.

Irish Lass stood with her head dragging.

“Ah, Lass, Lass,” Marjorie was saying. “Poor girl. You’re not built for it, are you Lass, but so brave! Such a wonderful girl.” She led the mare in a tight circle as she talked. Gradually, Lass’s head came up.

“Where now?” asked Tony. “We don’t dare ride in there.” He gestured toward the trees, where water glimmered among the dark foliage.

“Yes,” said Brother Mainoa. “In there. Following me.”

“Have you been in there before?”

“No.”

“Well, then ...”

“I haven’t been out in the grasses on a horse before either. But we are here. The immediate threat is past. We were guided. Protected.”

“By?”

“I won’t tell you until your knowing can’t endanger us. Those things”—he thrust a hand in the direction of the Hippae—“can readyourthoughts. We have to get into the forest. The barrier between us and them is more pretense than real. If we stay here too long, the Hippae may realize that.”

Tony looked at his mother, as though for permission. Father James was already mounting once more. With a sigh, Brother Mainoa heaved himself up, struggling to get his leg across the horse. Brother Lourai helped him. Sylvan was still atop Irish Lass.

“Go,” Marjorie said.

Blue Star moved into the shallow water, picking her way among towering trunks and through thickets of reedlike growths. The others followed. The mare took a winding path, turning abruptly to take new directions. “Follow her closely,” Brother Mainoa called hoarsely. “She is avoiding dangerous places” So they went, a slow, splashing game of follow the leader, with Blue Star following who-knew-what.

When they had come into the swamp far enough that they could no longer see the prairies, Blue Star stopped her twisting path and led them straight along a shallow channel between two impenetrable walls of trees. This watery aisle seemed to go on for miles. At last a gap appeared in the endless line, and the mare struggled up a shallow bank and onto solid ground. “An island?” Marjorie asked.

“Safety,” Brother Mainoa said, sighing and half sliding, half falling off his horse and lying where he fell. “How? Safety?”

“The Hippae will not come in here. Nor the hounds.” He spoke from the ground, staring up through the trees to far-off glimmers of sunlight, like spangles. Like gems. His eyes would not stay open. “One did,” she contradicted. “We saw the trail.”

“Only as far as the swamp,” he acknowledged. “And then, I think, perhaps it went along the side....” His mouth fell open and a little sound came out. A snore.

“He’s old.” Rillibee said to them defiantly, as though they had accused the old man of some impropriety. “He falls asleep like that a lot.”

Sylvan had dismounted. “What do I do for her?” He asked Marjorie as he stroked the mare.

“Rub her down with something,” Marjorie said. “A clump of grass, a fistful of leaves, anything. If we’re going to stay here awhile, take the saddle off.”

“We can’t go on until he wakes up,” said Tony, indicating the supine form of Brother Mainoa.

“We can’t go on until the horses rest a little anyhow,” Marjorie sighed. “They had quite a workout. About a day and a half a night of steady walking plus a mad run. Don’t let her have much water,” she cautioned Sylvan. “Walk her until she’s cool, then let her have water.”

“Otherwise what?” Sylvan asked. “Would it kill her?”

“It could make her sick,” Tony answered him, looking up as Mainoa had done before he fell asleep. Sun spangles, very high. Something else up there, too. Something high that blocked the sun. Tony pointed. “What’s up there?”

Sylvan turned to look. “Where?”

“Right up in the top of this tree, running over to that other one ...”

“This island is quite sizable,” said Father James, rejoining the group from among the trees “There’s a grassy clearing through these trees. Enough pasture there for the horses to have a good feed.”

Rillibee/Lourai pulled the saddles from Blue Star and Her Majesty and stacked them against the root buttresses of a tree. “The sun is low. It’ll be dark before long. Too dark to ride.”

“How long will Brother Mainoa sleep?”

Lourai shrugged. “As long as he needs to. He’s been up since the middle of the night, on a horse most of that time. I told you, he’s an old man.”

Marjorie nodded. “All right, then. If he rests, we will all rest. Tony?”

The boy pointed upward. “We were just trying to figure out—“

“Figure out whether there’s any firewood, while it’s still light. Sylvan, please help him. We need enough wood to last all night. Father, if you’ll find the clearest water possible and fill this bucket—“

“What about me?” Brother Lourai asked.

“You and I will be chief cooks,” she said, burrowing in the capacious baskets Irish Lass had carried. “When we have eaten we will talk about what we do next.”

Tony and Sylvan wandered toward the nearest thicket, Tony taking out his laser knife. When he used it to cut an armload of dried brush, Sylvan exclaimed, “What’s that?”

Tony gave it to him, explaining.

“Is this something new?” Sylvan asked.

“Of course not. They’ve been around forever.”

“I’ve never seen one before,” Sylvan marveled. “I wonder why.”

“Probably because they wouldn’t let you,” Tony said. “It would make a handy weapon.”

“It would, wouldn’t it?” Sylvan said, turning the device over and over in his hand. He sighed, gave it back to Tony, and turned his attention to carrying wood. Still, he thought of the knife with wonder. Why hadn’t he known about such things?

Brother Mainoa awoke about the time the food was ready, quite willing to interrupt his rest to join them for supper When they had eaten, when the utensils were cleaned and put back in the panniers, they sat around the fire, waiting.

Marjorie said, “Well, Brother Mainoa. So, we are here.”

He nodded.

“Are we any closer to Stella than when we set out?”

“The trail led along the swamp-forest,” he said. “Outside it, unfortunately. We could not have stayed there.”

“Tomorrow?”

“Perhaps If the Hippae have gone. Tonight we would be unable to see anything.”

She sighed.

Tony said, “Mother, it’s just as well. The horses couldn’t have gone much farther.”

Marjorie was still looking at Brother Mainoa “You know something,” she said. “You obviously know much more than you have told us.”

He shrugged. “What I know, or think I know, is not something I can share with you, yet. Perhaps tomorrow.”

“Will you decide?” she asked with a percipient glare.

“No,” he admitted. “No, the decision won’t be mine.”

“What does it—they—want? To look us over?”

He nodded.

Tony asked, “What are the two of you talking about?”

“Yes, Marjorie. What are you—?” Sylvan asked.

Father James gave Marjorie a percipient glance and said, “Let it alone, Sylvan. Tony. For now. Perhaps Brother Mainoa has already presumed upon his acquaintance with ... well, the powers that be.”

Mainoa smiled. “A way of saying it, Father. If you can bear it, Lady Westriding, I would suggest that we rest. Sleep, if possible. We are quite safe here.”

Safety was not what Marjorie wanted, if she had been in danger of her life, at least she would have felt she was doing something. To sleep in safety meant that she was slacking while Stella was in danger, but there was no argument she could make. It was already too dark to find a trail. She rose from her place beside the fire and made her way among the trees to the grassy area where the horses grazed. There she sought the comfort from them which she did not receive from those in her company. It was only when she leaned against Quixote’s side that she realized how desperately tired she was.

Behind her the others made their beds near the fire. Tony put his mother’s bed to one side, screened from the others by low brush, where she would have some privacy. When she returned, he pointed it out to her, and she went to it, grateful for his help. Silence came then, broken by Mainoa’s low, purring snores, the cries of peepers distant upon the prairie, and the cries of other less familiar things in the swamp around them.

Marjorie had thought she would lie sleepless. Instead, sleep came upon her like a black tide, inexorably. She went down into it, dreamless and quiet. Time passed, with her unconscious of it. The hand that was laid upon her arm did not wake her until it shook her slightly.

“Ma’am.” said Rillibee Chime. “I’m hearing something.

She sat up. “What time is it?”

“Midnight, more or less. Listen, Lady. It’s sounds that woke me. People, maybe?”

She held her breath. After a moment she heard it—them—the sounds of voices, wafted to them on a light wind which had come up while she slept. A conversation. No words she could understand, but unmistakably the sound of people talking.

“Where?” she breathed.

He put his hand on her cheek and pushed so that her head turned. As she faced in another direction, she heard them more clearly. “Light,” she whispered.

He already had it in his hand, a torch which shed a dim circle before their feet. He handed her another, and they walked among the trees, through the meadow where the horses grazed with a sound of steady munching, beyond the meadow into the trees once more. Rillibee pointed up. It was true. The sounds came from above them.

She was no longer sure they were people. The sound was too sibilant for human people. And yet ...

“Like the sounds in the Arbai village,” she said.

He nodded, peering above him. “I’m going up,” he said.

She caught at him. “You won’t be able to see!”

He shook his head. “I’ll feel, then. Don’t wait for me. Go back to the others.”

“You’ll fall!”

He laughed. “Me? Oh, Lady, at the Friary they call me Willy Climb. I have the fingers of a tree frog and the toes of a lizard. I have stickum on my knees and the hooves of a mountain goat. I can no more fall than an ape can fall when it creeps among the vines. Go back to the others, Lady,” and he was away, his torch slung about his neck, the light dwindling up the great trunk of the tree as he swarmed up it like a monkey.

When the circle of light had dwindled to nothing, she went back the way she had come, certain now that she would not sleep again. Yet when she lay down upon her bed she found sleep waiting for her. She had time only to wonder briefly what Brother Lourai would find among the branches before she was deeply asleep once more.

At the Friary, Elder Brother Fuasoi was sitting late at his desk, angrily turning the pages of a book. Yavi Foosh sat disconsolately on a chair nearby, yawning, trying to keep from nodding off.

“No sign of Mainoa or Lourai, then?” Fuasoi asked for perhaps the tenth time.

“No, Elder Brother.”

“And they didn’t mention to anyone where they were going?” “There wasn’t anybody there to mention to, Elder Brother. Mainoa and Lourai were all alone at the ruins. The library crew had changed shifts three days ago. Shoethai and me didn’t take the replacement men back until this evening. When we got there, Shoethai and me went to tell Mainoa, but he was gone. Him and Lourai. We looked all through the ruins, Elder Brother.” He sighed, much put upon. He had told the story four times.

“And you found this book where?”

“Shoethai found it, Elder Brother. On Brother Mainoa’s worktable. He thought—since they were gone—there might be something written down somewhere. The book was the only writing Shoethai found. He brought it straight here to you.”

Fuasoi glared at the book, obviously a new one, with only a few pages written in. Oh, indeed there was something written down. All in Brother Mainoa’s own hand. Conjecture about the plague. Wonderment that it hadn’t infected Grass. Conjecture about the Moldies, and whether there might not be some on Grass. And if so, what they might be up to. Interest in the people at Opal Hill, and what they were doing, which was working to thwart the work of the Moldies. Working for Sanctity to stop the plague. To find whatever had kept Grass free of it up until now.

He swore, slamming the book shut. Mere chance had kept Grass free of the plague until now! Mere chance. The virus hadn’t come here until now because … because it was remote. Because it simply hadn’t, yet. There couldn’t be anything on Grass that stopped it.

But … but if there were, no one could be allowed to learn of it. If they learned of it, they might stop the plague elsewhere. Mainoa and those from Opal Hill would have to be stopped. “Elder Brother?” Yavi murmured. “Yes,” he snarled.

“Could I be excused now? I’ve been here for a very long time.”

“Go,” he growled. “Go, for God’s sake, and send Shoethai here.”

“Shoethai, Elder Brother?” Shoethai had been dismissed an hour ago.

“Are you deaf? I said Shoethai.” Not that Shoethai would be of any help, but at least he would listen to Fuasoi talk.

Shoethai surprised his fellow Moldy by having an idea.

“You should send Highbones after them,” the misshapen Brother suggested. “Highbones and Ropeknots and Steeplehands and the two Bridges.”

“Who the devil are you talking about?” Fuasoi blurted.

Shoethai flushed. “The climbers. Those are some of the names they call themselves. Highbones is Brother Flumzee.”

“Why should I send climbers?”

“Because they hate Brother Lourai. Because he climbed better than any of them. Because some of the younger brothers called him Willy Climb.”

“Willy Climb?”

“That’s the name they gave him. It’s a better name than Highbones, even. When they made him climb the towers and he outclimbed them all. He got up and got down again without being caught. But High-bones had a bet he would die upon the towers, so Highbones hates him.”

“It would depend, wouldn’t it?”

“On what, Elder Brother?”

“On where Mainoa is.”

Shoethai shrugged, his gargoyle face twisting into a hideous grin. “Doesn’t matter so long as he’s with Brother Lourai. If he’s at Commons, Highbones would kill him there. If he’s at one of the estancias, Highbones would kill him If he’s out in the grasses ...”

Highbones had been one of Shoethai’s most diligent persecutors. Shoethai loved the idea of Highbones out in the grasses, where the Hippae were, and the hounds.

Elder Brother Fuasoi put the book in the drawer of his desk as he mumbled to himself. “If Mainoa is out in the grasses, we needn’t worry about him. No. no. The first thing to do is find out where he went. And the most likely place is Opal Hill. I’ll try that first.”

Elder Brother Fuasoi reached Persun Pollut. Persun Pollut, with a caution which was natural to him, said that he believed Brothers Mainoa and Lourai might have gone away with Lady Westriding and some other persons but he did not know where,

Shoethai mumbled, “The daughter of that house vanished during the Hunt yesterday. Everyone is talking about it. She vanished somewhere near the bon Damfels estancia. Perhaps they went there.”

Elder Brother Fuasoi regarded his assistant with unusual interest as he keyed the tell-me once more Who would have thought that Shoethai had any interest in Grassian gossip? At Klive he reached a subordinate family member who verified that “some people from Opal Hill” had come to Klive and had gone again. “Out in the grasses,” the voice said with a breathless hint of laughter, as though hysteria waited backstage for its entrance cue. “Out in the grasses, to Darenfeld’s Coppice.”

“If they went in the grasses,” Shoethai mumbled, “there will be a trail” He sighed with pleasure. “Send Highbones and the others to follow them.”

“On foot?”

“No, no,” Shoethai amended thoughtfully. “In an aircar. To find the trail in an aircar.” He thought about aircars. It would be easy to fix an aircar so that it would fly quite a long way and then fall. “I’ll get one ready for them.”

“Who did you say?”

“Brother Flumzee. Brother Niayop. Brother Sushlee. Brothers Thissayim and Lillamool. Highbones, Steeplehands, Ropeknots, Long Bridge, and Little Bridge.”

Bones, Ropes, Steep, Long, and Little—who had tortured Shoethai too many times to be forgiven. Who didn’t need to wait for the plague because they hadn’t deserved the New Creation anyhow.

“Have they hurt you?” Elder Brother asked, suddenly aware of the flame burning at the back of Shoethai’s one good eye.

Shoethai frowned and picked at a scab on his cheek, licking the blood from his finger with every evidence of relish. “Oh, no, Elder Brother. It’s just that they’re always bragging about who they’ll do in next.” He said nothing more about the aircar. Maybe it would be better not to let Elder Brother know he was going to fix it. That way, when Bones and the others didn’t come back, nobody would know it was Shoethai’s doing.

Yavi Foosh had left Elder Brother Fuasoi’s office only to report directly to that of Elder Brother Jhamlees Zoe, where he waited for half an hour to see his superior.

“What’s Fuasoi up to now?” Jhamlees wanted to know.

“Shoethai found a book Brother Mainoa had been writing, and he brought it back to Fuasoi. And now Fuasoi’s all in a uproar about it.”

“What’s in the book?”

“I don’t know, Elder Brother. Shoethai found it, and he wouldn’t let me see it.”

“He should have brought it to me!”

“Sure he should, Elder Brother, but he didn’t. I even told him he should bring it to you. But Elder Fuasoi’s his bosom friend, so that’s where he took it.”

“I think I’ll walk on down there and see what’s going on.” Elder Brother Jhamlees rose from his chair and strode down the hall. Yavi Foosh stayed a sensible distance behind. He didn’t want to be identified as Jhamlees’ man, the way Shoethai was identified as Fuasoi’s man. Once that happened, people didn’t let you alone.

The door to the office was open. The room itself was empty. Jhamlees stared at the emptiness a moment, then went in and pulled out the drawer in the desk. “This it?” he asked, waving the book as he beckoned Yavi closer.

Yavi nodded. “That looks like it.”

“You won’t say anything about this?”

Yavi shook his head. Of course he wouldn’t say anything about it. Jhamlees Zoe could take all the books in the world, and Yavi wouldn’t say a word.

Rillibee moved upward along the trunk of a giant tree, his feet finding a path in the twine of a woody vine, in the ascent of a forking branch. Branch led to branch, vine to vine, a barkway opened before him. He fumbled with the light, trading it from hand to hand as he climbed, once or twice holding it in his mouth when he needed both hands for holding on. As he came up into the first levels of foliage, however, he began to see the forest around him. The leaves glowed, some of them, or creatures upon them glowed in soft fluorescence: green puddles swam at the base of branches, yellow lines delineated twigs, blue dots gleamed from indigo masses. Branches cut darkly across these shining nebulae, these glowing galaxies, and he climbed on structures of solid shadow among moving effulgences.

A small wind came through the trees, bearing a cloud of winged pink blossoms. When the wind died, they perched all together, turning a sapling into flame. Larger wings the color and scent of melons beat slowly from trunk to trunk, the creatures at rest assuming the shape of cups in which golden light pulsed to attract other fliers, darts of violet and a blue so pale it was almost white.

“Joshua,” Rillibee whispered. “You’d have loved this. Miriam, you ... you’d have loved this.”

“Heaven,” said the parrot from the top of a tree “Died and gone to heaven.”

Leaves brushed his face, exuding resinous sweetness. A hard knob of fruit knocked against his arm. He picked it, smelled of it, bit into it. Crisp, sweet-sour, the juice ran into his mouth and was followed by a tingling, almost as though the fruits themselves were effervescent.

The sounds he had heard on the ground were all around him in the trees. Voices. One laughing. One speaking, as though telling a long story to an eager audience, interrupting itself with little side chains of sound. “You’re not going to believe this, but...”

“So then, what do you think happened?” If Rillibee closed his eyes, he could see the speaker, cheerfully telling a tale, leaning across a tavern table.

He moved slowly through the branches. The sound faded behind him. He turned and moved toward it once more, caressing the branches with his fingers, loving them with his feet. The voices were off there somewhere among the glowing trees. He would find them eventually.

There was something else to find as well. The girl. Stella. He had set her name beside the other names in his litany. She was to belong to him, to Rillibee Chime. Though her family was wealthy and important, still she would belong to him. Though she herself would disdain him, still ...

“Heaven,” whispered the parrot above him,

So he climbed in the night hours. At dawn he found the voices when the sun slanted into their city through leaves of heartbreak gold.

Marjorie woke to birdsong and the music of water. It took her a few moments to remember where she was and a little longer to remember the interruption in the night. When she did, she looked about for Brother Lourai. not finding him but meeting Mainoa’s eyes.

“He hasn’t come back,” the old man said.

“You knew he’d gone off.. ..”

“I knew he woke you and you both went off. But you came back.”

“He went up there.” She gestured at the high spangle of sun among the boughs. “He told me they call him Willy Climb and that he’d be all right.”

Mainoa nodded. “Yes. Hewillbe all right. He’s like you. When things get very difficult, he thinks of dying from time to time, but he’s too curious about what may happen next.”

She flushed, wondering how he knew so much about her. It was true. She was curious about what would happen next. As though something awaited her, personally. Some opportunity....

Father James returned from the nearest pool with a full bucket of water, looking alert and rested. “I haven’t slept that well in weeks,” he said. “I had the oddest dreams.”

“Yes,” said Brother Mainoa again. “I think we all did. Something here invaded our dreams.”

Marjorie stood up and looked about her, suddenly concerned.

“No, no.” The old man rose in slow motion, grasping knobby ex-cresences on the nearest tree to lift himself up. “Nothing inimical, Marjorie. They, too, are curious.”

“They?”

“Those I think we will meet today, later. After Brother Lourai returns.”

“Hasn’t he some other name?” Tony asked.

“Brother Lourai? Oh, yes. As a boy he was Rillibee. Rillibee Chime. You think he doesn’t look like a brother?”

“Tony is thinking that he doesn’t look like the Sanctified we know,” Marjorie offered. “His eyes are too big. His face too lean and intelligent. His mouth too sensitive. I always think of the Sanctified as thick, enthusiastic people with simple thoughts and a great need for answers. Old Catholics are supposed to be slender and ascetic-looking, with huge, philosophical eyes. These are stereotypes, and I’m sometimes ashamed of my thoughts, but they persist, even when I look into a mirror. You don’t look like a Sanctified either, Brother. But I suppose you’ve used the name Mainoa for too long to give it up.” She turned away in order not to see Father James’ amused and evaluating gaze.

“Far too long,” Mainoa said in agreement, laughing. “But do use Rillibee’s own name, it means much to him. He will appreciate that.”

“We’ll go out and try to pick up the trail today,” Marjorie said. Mainoa amended her statement. “It may not be possible to do so for a day or two.”

She turned on him, exasperated and frustrated, ready to scream at the delay. Father James laid a hand on her arm.

“Patience, Marjorie. Don’t be obsessive. Let it go a little.”

“I know, Father But I keep thinking what may be happening to her.”

Father James had been thinking of that, too. His mind dwelt all too frequently on certain monstrousnesses he had heard of in the confessional, on certain perversions and horrors he had read of that he could never have imagined for himself. Why these memories were associated in his mind with the Hippae he did not know, but they were. He set the evil thoughts aside. “We will find her, Marjorie. Trust Brother Mainoa.”

She desisted, willing herself to trust Brother Mainoa, since there was no one else to trust.

They ate cold rations. They washed themselves in a placid pond, one of those which encircled the island. Marjorie and Tony examined the horses, looking closely at their hooves, their legs. Despite the wild run of yesterday, the animals seemed to be uninjured. Though she did her best to remain calm, Marjorie felt herself ready to explode from impatience before they heard the call from above.

Rillibee swarmed down a great vine-draped tree like an ape. “I got turned around,” he said. “The trees look different in the light, and it took me a while to find my way back.”

“Did you find them?” she asked. “The voices?”

“I found their city,” Rillibee answered. “You have to come see it.”

“We have to go the other way”—she pointed—“to find the trail ...”

“Up,” he insisted. “I think we should.”

“Up,” agreed Brother Mainoa. “If we can.”

“One of the things that took me so long was finding a trail the horses can follow,” Rillibee said. “That way.” He pointed deeper into the swamp. “Then we’ll climb.”

“Why?” Marjorie cried. “Stella isn’t in there....”

“The trail is out there among the grasses, Marjorie,” Brother Mainoa said. “But that’s not necessarily the way. While you were still asleep, Tony and I went to the edge of the forest. The Hippae are still there. There is no way we can go out that way just now.”

“But why?” she gestured upward, fighting tears. “I don’t want to go sightseeing, for the love of God.”

“Perhaps it is for the love of God we should go,” Father James said. “Do you know what’s up there, Brother Mainoa?”

“I suspect.” he replied. “I suspect what is up there. I have suspected since the report came from Semling.”

“What is it?”

“I think it is the last Arbai city,” he said. “The very last.”

He would tell them nothing more. He said he didn’t know. When they asked Rillibee, he said only that they would see for themselves. He led them as they rode across shallow pools, down aisles of trees. Sometimes he stopped and simply looked at the trees while they waited. Once he dismounted and put his hands on a tree, leaning against it as though it had been a friend. Sylvan started to say something during one of these pauses, but Brother Mainoa laid a hand on his shoulder to silence him. They crossed small islands, coming at last to a very large one with a hill at its center.

On a flat pedestal of stone stood a twisted monument much like that in the plaza of the Arbai city.

“Arbai?” Marjorie whispered, staring at it, unbelieving. Despite what Brother Mainoa had said, she had not let herself believe him.

Rillibee pointed upward along a flank of the hill where a trail wound toward a precipitous cliff edge.

“That’s how I came down,” he said. “Leave the horses. They’ll be all right here.”

They dismounted, trying to do it quietly so they would not interrupt the voices above them. People were talking. Singing. Telling stories to the accompaniment of muted laughter. Rillibee led them up the trail. At the cliff edge a bridge led between fantastically carved posts across a gulf of air into the trees—a bridge made of grass and vines and splits of wood, intricate and closely woven as an ornamental basket. The railings were laced into designs of leaves and fruit. The floor was plaited in swirls of color, solid as pavement. Two hundred feet in the air they walked behind Rillibee into the shadow of the trees.

There were dwellings—gazebos and cupolas, tented roofs and conical spires, woven walls and latticed windows—hung like fruit in the branches of the trees, opening upon wicker-work alleys and suspended lattice streets. Aloft were sun-dappled pergolas, shaded kiosks, intricate cages, all joined to those below by spider stairs. Lacework houses hung in the high branches like oriole’s nests.

There were inhabitants calling from windows, talking from rooms above and below, conversing as they moved along the roadways, their voices growing louder as they came near, dwindling away as they passed Shadowy forms met along the railings. A group leapt from a doorway into the play of light from the applauding leaves. They were graceful, only slightly reptilian. Their eyes lit with laughter, their hands extended to one another as though to say, “Welcome.”

But there was no one there No one at all.

A pair of lovers leaned on the railing of the bridge, arms entwined. Rillibee walked through them, his face spattered with their faces, his body with their bodies, and they reassembled behind him, still staring into one another’s glowing eyes.

“Ghosts,” breathed Tony. “Mother ...”

“No,” she said, tears on her cheeks at the sight of the lovers. “Holos, Tony. They left them here. The projectors must be somewhere in the trees.”

“They gave them to one another,” Mainoa said. “Toward the end. When there were fewer and fewer of them. To keep the last survivors company.”

“How do you know?”

“I was told,” he said, “just now. And it fits in with other things I have learned since we had lunch together that day at Opal Hill.”

“The language ...” Marjorie turned to him, eyes wide.

“The language, yes.”

“I was so eager to get away, to find Stella, I never thought to ask—“

“The great machines at Semling have chewed on the problem, chewed and swallowed and spat it out again. The machines can translate the books of the Arbai. Some. Oh, half, let us say. Half they can read. The other half they can guess at. The clue was there in the vines on the doors. Where we had never thought to look.”

“And the carved doors themselves?”

“They can read those as well.”

“What do they say?”

Brother Mainoa shook his head, trying to laugh, the laugh becoming a cough which bent him double. ‘They say the Arbai died as they lived, true to their philosophy.”

“Here?”

“There on the plain they died quickly. Here in the trees they died slowly. Their philosophy prevented their killing any intelligent thing. In their city on the plain, the Hippae had slaughtered their kinfolk. Those who lived in this summer city among the trees could not go back to live there safely. They did not wish to die. So they lived out one last summer here, and when winter came they slowly died here, knowing that in all the universe they were the last of their people.”

“How long ago?”

“Centuries. Grassian centuries.”

She looked around her at the woven buildings and shook her head.

“Not possible These structures would not last- The trees would grow; eventually they would die and fall. These woven roadways would rot away.”

“Not if they were renewed, hour by hour, day by day. Not if they were mended.”

“By whom?”

“Yes, Marjorie, by whom? We all wonder, don’t we. Yes. I think we will meet them very soon.”

Rillibee led them along the woven streets. Before them the way widened, expanding into a broad platform with rococo railings and spiraled pillars supporting a wide witch’s hat of a roof.

The town square, Marjorie thought. The village green. The meeting hall, open to the air, to the wind and the sound of birds. All around it shadowy figures walked and danced and saluted one another, shadows so thickly cast that for a moment the humans thought the mighty figure padding toward them from across the platform was another shadow. When they saw that it was not, they drew together, Tony reaching for the knife he carried.

“No,” said Brother Mainoa, putting his hand on the boy’s arm. “No.” He walked forward to see what he had so often longed to see with his eyes instead of his mind. “No. He won’t hurt us.”

They saw an expanse of trembling skin over eyes they could not quite see. Fangs, or something like fangs, in a gleam of blued ivory. Flaring wings of hair, doubly flaring violet auroras, like spurts of cold lightning.

Brother Mainoa murmured, head down, as though he addressed a hierarch, “We are honored.”

The being crouched. It gave the impression of nodding. Paws curled—no—hands curled upon the braided walkway. Hands which seemed for an instant to have three fingers and opposed, furry thumbs. Behind maned shoulders lay an armored expanse of mottled hide and callused plates, seen only for an instant, or perhaps not seen at all. It was an impression only, gone too quickly to define. They could not describe it except to say it was not like anything else, not like any earth creature, not like any Grassian creature except itself. The proportions were wrong. The legs were not the usual thing one thought of as legs.

Brother Mainoa confronted this mirage with an expression of awed interest, blinking rapidly, as they all were, trying to clear their vision. “Perceiving you for the first time has made me wonder what evolutionary tangle led to the development of this ferocious aspect,” he murmured, eyes down.

Great orbs may have widened. Perhaps a long, curved talon extruded from a half-furred, half-scaled finger and pointed toward Brother Mainoa’s throat.

Brother smiled as though at a joke. “I cannot believe you mean that You don’t need any of it against me. You don’t need much of it against mankind unless they choose to use heavy weaponry against you, and if they did, all your armor wouldn’t help much. Men are expert killers, if nothing else.”

Eyes narrowed, possibly, and Brother Mainoa seized his head in both hands. The others fell to their knees, holding their heads, except for Sylvan, who started forward, anger and fear combining to make him reckless.

“Whoa. Whoa.” Mainoa drew himself erect, gasping. “I wish they wouldn’t do that.” Now he knew what evolutionary tangle had led to this armour. There had been an enemy once, a huge, inexorable creature. Brother Mainoa had received an excellent picture of it rampaging about, devouring both Hippae and hounds. His head ached from the assault.

“Extinct?” he asked, receiving a feeling of agreement. “Did you kill them?”

They received an impression of perplexity, then sureness. No. The Arbai had killed them. The armored monsters had not been intelligent things. They had been only walking appetites. The Arbai had done away with them to protect the Hippae. Since that time, there had been many, many Hippae.

Brother Mainoa sat down on the walkway, suddenly lost in weariness. “This being is my friend,” he said to the other humans. “He and I have been talking for some time.” Now that he had almost seen the creature, he felt weak with anxiety over all the times he had talked with it, unseen. If he had seen, would he have said—? No. If he had seen, he could not have said anything. One could talk to gods and angels only so long as they did not look like gods and angels, he thought. In order to approach them, we must think of them as like ourselves, and one could not think of the foxen as like oneself. ..

“Foxen,” Tony breathed. He was still on his knees with the others.

“Foxen,” Mainoa agreed. “He or they managed to keep the Hippae at bay long enough for us to get here. He and a few of his friends wanted us to come here, where they could get a good look at us.”

“Does he know where Stella .. .” Marjorie pleaded. She had the impression of a vast head turned in her direction. She shuddered as she said, “I see. Of course. Yes.” Sylvan said, “Marjorie?”

“I can hear him,” she cried. “Sylvan, I can hear him. Can’t you?” He shook his head, casting a suspicious glance at the place he thought the foxen was. “No. I hear nothing.”

“You have been a hunter too long,” Mainoa said. “You have been deafened by the Hippae.”

“Is he speaking?” asked Sylvan.

Rillibee nodded. “It’s somewhat like speech. Pictures. Some words.” He rose to his feet, utterly immune to further wonder. The trees were wonder enough for one man. He needed nothing else. He did not want to talk to foxen. He, like Marjorie, wanted to find Stella. “What does he say about your daughter?” Sylvan asked. “That others of his kind are looking for her,” Marjorie replied. “That they will tell us when they find her.”

“There are many things they want to tell us, to ask us,” Brother Mainoa said wearily, longing for and yet dreading that converse. “Many things.”

“I’ll go back down and unsaddle the horses,” said Rillibee. If they weren’t going to hunt for Stella, then he wanted to be by himself, to cling to the trunk of a huge tree and let the feel and smell of it sink into him. In the darkness, they had looked like the spirits of trees. In the light, they looked like themselves. Joshua would have given his soul for trees like these. On all of Terra there were no trees like these. Trees, all around him, like a blessing. He turned to go back the way they had come.

Sylvan followed him. “I’ll help you,” he said. “I’m no good here.” Ungraciously, Rillibee nodded. The others did not even see them go.

In his suite high in the bon Damfels estancia, Shevlok bon Damfels reclined on a window seat and sipped at a half-empty glass of wine. Dawn stood at the edge of the world. Through the open window he could see the huddled houses of the village, tied to the sky by the smoke rising from their chimneys. Dead calm. The morning had not yet been broken by sound. Even the peepers were silent at this hour.

A case of bottles stood open beside him, half of them empty. On the tumbled bed the Goosegirl slept. She had not left the bed for days. She had slept sometimes. Sometimes she had lain unmoving beneath him while he stroked her, whispered to her, made love to her. Her body had reacted to his manipulations. Her skin had flushed, her nipples had hardened, her crotch had grown moist and welcoming. Beyond that, she had given no evidence that she felt anything at all. Her eyes had stayed open, fixed somewhere in the middle distance, watching something Shevlok could not see.

Once, only once in the midst of his lovemaking, he thought he had seen a spark in her eye, the tiniest spark, as though some notion had fled across her mind too swiftly to be caught. Now she slept while Shevlok drank. He had been drinking since he had first brought her there.

She was to have been his Obermum. She was to have ruled the family with him, when Stavenger died. She was fitting. More than that, he had loved her passionately, Janetta had been everything he had wanted.

But the thing on the bed was not Janetta, not anymore.

He was trying to decide whether he should keep her or not.

Someone rapped at the door, and then, without waiting for an invitation, came in.

“You did do it!” It was Amethyste, peering across the dim room at the girl sprawled on the bed. “Shevlok, what were you thinking of?”

“Thought she’d know me,” Shevlok mumbled, the words sounding sticky and ill-defined coming from lips numbed by the wine. “She didn’t. Didn’t know me.”

“How long has she—“

He shook his head. “Awhile.”

“What are you going to do with her?”

“Dunno.”

“Everyone says someone took her. From her mother’s servant. You did that?”

Shevlok gestured, hand tipping one way then the other, conveying that yes, he had, probably.

“Then you’d better give her back. Take her back to bon Maukerden village. Send word so they’ll be looking for her.”

“Better dead,” Shevlok said with surprising clarity. “She’d be better dead.”

“No,” Amy cried. “No, Shevlok! Suppose it was Dimity. Pretend it’s Dimity.”

“Better dead,” Shevlok persisted. “If it was Dimity, she’d be better dead.”

“How can you say that!”

He rose, took his sister’s arm roughly, and dragged her to the bed. “Look at her, Amy! Look at her.” He stripped the blanket away to show the girl who lay there naked, face up. With a hard thumb he pulled back the girl’s eyelid, “Janetta’s eyes were like water over stones. They sparkled with sun. Look at this one! This one’s eyes are like the pools that collect in the cellars in spring when the snow melts. No sun in them. Nothing normal swims there. Nothing good lives there.”

Amy jerked her arm away. “I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

“When I look in these eyes, all I see is dark going down and down into bottomless muck where there’s something squirming that’s maimed and horrid. She’s been short-circuited. They’ve done something inside her She can’t feel anything anymore. She doesn’t know anyone anymore.”

“Give her back, Shevlok. I know there’s nothing there anymore—“

“Oh, there’s still something there. Something dreadful and perverse. Something they could use....” He gasped with sudden pain. “Damn them.”

His sister laughed bitterly, rubbing her bruised arm. “Damnthem.Shevlok? Damn them? You’re one of them. You agreed. You all went along. You and Father and Uncle Figor all knew what the Hippae did to girls, but you still made me ride, me and Emmy and Dimity.”

He shook his head like a baffled bull. “I didn’t know what the Hippae did.”

“My God, Shevlok, what did you think happened when girls disappeared? When they vanished? What did you think!”

“I never thought they did that,” he insisted. “Never thought they did that.”

“You never thought!” she shrieked at him. “Right! You never thought. It wasn’t you, so you never thought. Oh, damn you, Shevlok. Don’t go blaming the Hippae for getting her like that. You did it. You and Father and Figor and all you damn riders ...”

“Not ... not my fault.”

“If this hadn’t happened, you’d have married Janetta and had children and made them go hunting, too,” she accused him. “You’d have seen your daughters vanish and your sons get their arms bitten off, but you wouldn’t have stopped!”

“I don’t know. I might have. I don’t know.”

“Are you going to bon Laupmon’s to the Hunt today?”

He shrugged. “Probably.”

“You see! You know what happens, but you’ll still go. And some bon Laupmon girl or some bon Haunser girl will disappear, but that won’t matter because you’re not in love with them.” She wiped her face with her fingers, then pointed to the sleeping girl “What will happen to her?”

“I’ve got a woman from the village to come feed her, wash her, play with her, like a kitten.”

“If you’re going to Hunt, and Father goes ...”

He shook himself, looking at her for the first time, trying to smile. He was fond of her, and of Emeraude. He kept trying to remember that. He was fond of her and Emeraude and Sylvan, and of his mother. “I heard about Emmy. You want an aircar, don’t you. To take Emmy in to Commons. Is she bad?”

“She’s as bad as Father could do before we pulled him off her. She won’t die, if that’s what you mean. Not if I can get her away from here. Her, and me.”

“Take her. then.”

“Father told the servants not to obey me. He didn’t tell them not to obey you.”

“I’ll tell old Murfon. After Father’s gone to bon Laupmon’s, Murfon will take you. I’ll tell him to pick you up from the village. Don’t let anyone see you.”

“Shall I take her, too?” Amy gestured toward the sprawled girl on the disordered bed.

Shevlok staggered to his feet and went to look down at the sleeping figure. He sobbed once, a sound that held more anger than grief. “You might as well. If you leave her here, I’ll kill her.”