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"You will find us under a boulder that leans against a cliff, before you come to the city," she said, holding him down without effort. As he gasped he suckled involuntarily. She let go. "Now you can forgive like a woman." When she walked away he recognized the girl who had used to tag behind him in the marsh city, the one who had run to show him a cloth spotted with her first blood and receive a hug of congratulation.

The next thing he knew, Huey was shaking him awake. The trees were burning. Dream or real? he thought as they ran crosswise to the fire's path.

If it were a nightmare, he himself had dreamed it, finally taking the great social wrongs into his own body and mind, letting them touch him as Paula had let them, forgiving as she had forgiven Maxwell, not for his sake or hers but for forgiveness alone. And if it were real, a rough joke, her way to tell him she had been raped and a test of his understanding? There was no reason why he should have been so frightened. She could never have choked him without waking the others, even had she been able to hold him down. It was still his own nightmare that terrified him, fear of being drawn back like Paula, drawn back to a time before reason like Tiyar. All this was in preparation for meeting him, Clark thought as he climbed the last summit.

His thoughts were immediately dispelled by what he saw. The valley was a flaming river. Roaring clashes of hot air with cold and the noise of crashing trees made him start back as though he expected the whole valley to collapse.

Below lay the capital and origin of the Lir, opposite rose a cliff and beyond it hills and mesas, on one of which the landing field's distinctive cone-pits and acceleration tracks appeared to waver in the heat. At the left end of the valley, flames bursting over a wall of earth surged toward great stone buildings tottering with the shock of explosions. At the right end, inside the broken circle of fortifications, stone houses of the priestly class burned within until the unsupported walls and rooftops crumbled, sending out jets of sparks and flame. Between these two ends were rows of wooden huts and houses, the neighborhoods of the city, and it was these that truly blazed. Here flames shot up to the treetops and paved the surface of the walkways, while showers of hot embers erupted continually.

People were shouting in the valley, distant and quiet as rustling grass against the inferno they had created. A mob swirled like smoke among the trees around the temple. Clark descended into the forest, the others following, and quickly lost his way.

He ran downhill, looking for a streambed. At times he or one of the others tripped in the darkness or they scattered, fleeing the crash of a tree as it fell and then regrouping, shouting for one another.

Voices shouted back in low Paffir. Clark headed toward them. A stone shot by. He dropped to the ground. A woman ran past, stopped to look and ran on. Clark followed her. She zigzagged a while among the trees, then headed downhill.

"Pimel!" Clark shouted. The woman stopped. She raised her hand, and before Clark saw the slingshot a stone bruised his shoulder. She ran away.

"Peace!" Clark yelled in low Paffir, but his attackers were making too much noise to hear him. He darted back and forth among the trees until they lost him.

Now he was near the fire. Flaming branches dropped left and right, igniting the underbrush. Clark listened to the voices around him, all varieties of modern low Paffir, many with Itscriyite accents. The woman he had been following ran past again. She whistled.

"Tiyar!" he shouted. "Where is Tiyar Kituman?"

It was Klyne. She raised her hand again. "Who calls?"

"Me. Clarek. What's going on?"

"Oh. Some fighting." She stepped closer and smiled, then saw Greyesar. Her mouth jerked downward. "Clarek, you are a man who was born of a woman. Please, no more ghosts."

A woman! That was the second time--but in this desperate place such expressions must come often. "No, he isn't a ghost. He--where are Tiyar and Akiva? Where is Fuego?"

"Fuego is gone. Tiyar--" She pointed to a rock leaning against a cliffside. So it was real.

Firelight did not penetrate the bed of old boulders in the cliff's apron, nor did the noise of battle. The bone-colored light of two moons gave way to blackness when they rounded the leaning rock. Had she been trying to tell him Tiyar was dead? Huey and Greyesar dropped back, saw a pale shaft at the next turn and came on. Others were following.

Between the rock and the cliffside thousands of freshets had bored out a cathedral-high cavern. A gap in its ceiling filled the chamber with the bloodless light. Tiyar lay on a shelf padded with straw. His ribs were crushed. When he turned his head, moonlight flickered on the surface of his eyeballs.

"It's not as bad as it looks," he whispered. "Nor contagious."

Clark moved nearer. "What's going on outside?" he asked.

Tiyar made a slight gesture. "Skirmish. Pahid." No one else bothered to elaborate.

Akiva stepped swiftly toward them, his robe billowing, and laid his arm across Clark's shoulder to murmur, "He is going back to the dead, and we...we have done harm, but when he is gone we will return to the city of knowledge."

Clark put his hand on Tiyar's head. The skin was cold. Beside him, in shadow, Pimel leaned forward. Her fingers drew absently in the dirt. There was a ghastly detachment in her steady gaze.

"Tiyar, Greyesar Uchide is here with me," Clark said in high Paffir.

Tiyar rolled his eyes toward Clark with another flash of moonlight. "I am the Uchide here. Look at me, Resheborian. I am dying of a wound that would make your doctors laugh. You survive me..." He turned his head. "You bested me...with Greyesar, with Paula, with history. I will be forgotten as a monster and you remembered as the one who brought the new crop that sustains us...Fuego and Berthe sustain us. And you have bested me with Sevit. He will remember you."

"Let's carry him up to the landing field and see if we can hail a ship," Greyesar said.

"Privilege," Tiyar sneered. "Take Pimel. She will represent Paffir Haretz before the Eyimalian lawyers...she is pregnant."

Pimel shudered at her name. "I was asleep and you woke me up," she said harshly, thrusting her face out into the bluish light.

"Yes, you were asleep and I woke you." Tiyar's eyes closed, and he appeared to be fainting, but when Clark moved close he turned his hand to reveal a Puro and said, "Leave me here."

Now the chamber was full of silent people sitting on the floor and perched in the gaps and ledges all the way to the roof. More filed in, their bare feet brushing the stone.

"Tiyar!" they whispered together, as at a signal. The chamber reverberated in delicate sorrow, as if stone and stone, leaning together, mingled their tresses and wept.

Greyesar and Huey stepped forward. Tiyar's eyes flickered, closed again and re-opened, looking at Hugh. He had seen the explosive shirt. "Huey!" he breathed.

"Yes?"

"Hugh!"

"Yes?" Hugh took a step toward him. Greyesar pulled his arm.

"This world calls you."

Clark took Hugh's other arm and felt him trembling. Why didn't we get it off him in all these weeks, he accused himself. Pick out the biocloth with a knifepoint, undo the gadgets, sensors last, on a cliff or a gorge or a hillside where we could drop the thing over before it blew. We could have done it in a morning. But then we might still have needed him wired if we'd stumbled into the wrong camp. And he's waited all his life.

Tiyar motioned to someone and said in low Paffir, "Take him to Lir Temple. Show him what is there."

"Wait," Clark protested, but no one had moved.

"Say nothing. No lies. Show what is there."

"But that's a lie," Clark began. Huey shook his head. There was silence.

At length Tiyar whispered, "You mean transient. This room is a lie, this moonlight...In truth, the forest is burning. In truth the forest is always burning." He paused and spat blood. "Day is a lie in the universe of night. Life is a lie in death. Go to the Lir Temple, Hugh. Triumph!" He motioned with one hand to Pimel. She shook her head.

"Lir Temple is filled with bones," he went on. It was unbearable that he should speak so long. His pain oppressed them, demanding silence. "On top, the hair is still rotting. Underneath a white powder as deep as--" He raised his forearm, let it drop and lay still. "Sacrifices. You, Hugh, be the last."

"Last," Hugh echoed.

"But what good--" Clark interrupted.

"For rain, Hugh! Peasants from everywhere...sacrificed. For rain."

Clark looked desperately at Greyesar, but he was staring over all their heads as though frozen.

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CONTINUE.....................

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INDEX