"Before you came the first time?"

She did not answer. "I was not at all sure I could make the Crossing. We heard stories. How much strength was required, how much endurance. If you're not strong enough, not a strong enough flier, you fall back to Green a failure. If you lack endurance . . ." She shrugged. "Only your frozen corpse gets to Blue. It crosses the sky there, a little scratch of fire. No doubt you've seen them. I have."

I nodded.

"That little scratch of fire, and you're gone forever. I wanted to try just the same. We all do, even if some want it more than others and many never actually try. It's something we get from you, a need to become more and more like you, until we're as human as we can possibly be."

"We feel it too," I told her, "though not always as strongly as we should."

"So I was wondering whether I could, and whether I'd be brave enough to try. I wasn't flying all that well yet, and I knew I'd have to get a lot better to fly fast enough to leave Green. One day there was a break in the clouds. You've lived on Green, you said. You must know it happens now and then."

I nodded again.

"Burning light from the sun came streaming through, but I looked up anyway and saw this little streak of gray against the cliff, and I told myself I'd fly up to it someday to see what it was, and when I did I'd be a strong enough flier to Cross."

"You did, clearly."

"Yes. I tried to for years, and there were days when I couldn't even get up above the clouds. There are strong winds at this level, and the air is thin."

I filled my lungs with it, and said, "It certainly seems better to me than the sopping air down there."

"I suppose it would. Are you waiting for the end of my story? It's ended. The day came when I was able to fly up here. I knew by then that I had much more to learn, and that I had to be stronger before I tried Crossing. But I felt I'd come more than halfway, too, and I was right. There was a corroded metal hatch over that window then. I tore it off and let it fall. When I'd explored all the rooms on all the levels, I decided to clean this one out and make it a private place just for myself, my own room in my own tower in the sky. There were bones in here and some other things, but I threw them out that window and swept this floor with my hands. When everything was tidy, I told myself I'd come back and spend hours up here after I'd made the Return Crossing, just thinking about who I was and what I had done for my children. But I never did, till now."

"I'll try to leave you here," I promised her, "and take the troopers back with me. I don't know if it can be done, but I'll try." I shut my eyes, gathering the thoughts that had fled my mind soon after we arrived. "Whose bones were they?"

"You know. They were your friends. I doubt that you want to talk about it."

Blindly, I sat down again upon the bed that been hers and mine. I hated Green then as I have hated it so often, the whorl of teeming unclean life, of violent death and universal decay. In my heart I rejected it, I hope once and for all. "Were they the Neighbors'?" I asked. "The Vanished People's?"

Perhaps she nodded. "I think that when we'd destroyed them everywhere else, they held the tablelands against us. As places of final refuge, they must have built these towers in the cliffs, with windows like this one so that--"

She was gone.

I had recalled my body as she spoke, with all its well-remembered k.n.o.bs and insufficiencies, the sagging face behind my beard and the ankle that ached in rainy weather, and ached abominably in any weather whenever I had to walk far. . . . And realized with a sort of shock that I was no longer sitting on the bed, but lying in it. I opened my eyes and saw the smoke-blackened timbers that supported the roof of the inn.

"Master Incanto? Awake you are?"

It was Azijin; I asked him who had told him to call me that.

"Your son, mysire. Where he was, and you, of Master Incanto they speak, he says. About dreams you know? That also he says, Mysire Horn."

"Much less than he believes." I sat up, very conscious that Jahlee lay beside me still sound asleep.

Vlug sat up too. "Wah! Good Mysire Pas!"

I got out of bed and went to the fire. "I know what you must be thinking, Sergeant, seeing my daughter in bed with me. I can only say that nothing of the kind took place. She became frightened, as women sometimes do at night in strange places, and sought rea.s.surance from her father."

Azijin joined me at the fire. He sleeps naked and was naked still, hairy and muscular. "Such things I never think, mysire. But me it was that the door barred. If anyone the bar took down, I would hear, I thought."

"We tried not to wake you, Sergeant. I suggest that we try not to wake my daughter as well."

"Right, mysire. Loud I will not speak."

Vlug came over wrapped in a blanket, and Azijin told him to get something for us to sit on. There are no chairs, but he carried over the mattress from his bed. He is a tall, fresh-faced boy with unhappy hair that is neither truly red nor truly yellow but brighter than either. "Morning now it is, I think," he said. "The pig who this inn keeps we wake, Sergeant?"

"Not yet," Azijin told him. "For Mysire Horn to unriddle a dream I wish."

"I too!"

"Always in my dreams I am awake, Master Horn," Azijin began. "Not like that it is, this dream of last night. Like real it is," he tapped the hearth before him. "Most real. Not like a dream at all it is."

"With me, the same it is!" Vlug exclaimed.

"In this dream asleep I am, in my bed lying. You and your daughter not sleeping like me are, but walking past, talking and talking while on I sleep. Wake I must, I think. What if you escape? Hard with me it will go when Judge Hamer hears! To wake I try, but I cannot. My eyes open. The room bright is, sunshine everywhere there is, and my bed on the wall like a picture hangs. There I sleep and do not fall, so all right it is. Here no one but me there is, so all right too that is. Only in a dream it is that the old magician, and the strange girl his daughter, and the boy who calls him Father I must guard. No one to escape there is."

He looked at me beseechingly. "Never before such a dream, mysire. For me this dream you will explain?"

Vlug started to speak, but Azijin silenced him.

"Boy talk," Oreb suggested from his high perch.

"I think Oreb's right," I told Azijin. "Vlug's dream may well illuminate yours--or yours illuminate his, as frequently happens. Vlug, tell us your dream before you forget it."

"This I never forget, Mysire Horn," Vlug began. "Never! When white my beard is, each smallest part I remember."

Momentarily he fell silent, his hands outspread with the palms down, and his wide eyes the color of blue china; but he was a born relater of tales, whose pauses and intonations came to him as its song does to a young thrush.

"As my sergeant says it is. I sleep, but asleep I am not. Up and down, up and down, a man and woman walk. Wise and kind he is, but stern. Unhappy, discontent she is. His counsel she wishes, and it he gives. No, no, not what he suggests she will do. Herself she will kill. Soon. Very soon."

Vlug spoke to Azijin. "Jahlee and her father perhaps it was, but why?

"Mysire, once around me I too looked. Your daughter before me stood. So beautiful!" He raised his pale eyebrows in tribute to her, when my old friend Inc.l.i.to would have kissed his fingers.

"A great light behind her there was. A great wind also. A cloak she wore, very big and black. This cloak the wind blew." His hands suggested its fluttering motion. "Her hair also. So long her knees without such a wind it must reach. To lay hold of me with Scylla's hundred arms--"

Oreb squawked and fluttered, perturbed.

"At me it blows. So long really it is, mysire?"

I shook my head.

"In my dream it is." He shut his eyes, trying to recapture it. "So beautiful she is. A dream? So beautiful. Her lips, her eyes, her teeth. My spirit flamed. An angry G.o.ddess, your daughter Jahlee is, mysire, in my dream."

I asked whether he could recall how she had been dressed, other than the cloak.

"Not . . ." He glanced at Azijin. "Her gown I don't remember, mysire. No hat, or only a very small cap, it could be."

"Good girl." Oreb dropped from his perch to my shoulder.

"Really, Oreb? Usually you call her a bad thing."

"Good girl!" he insisted.

"Although you can't remember her gown, Legerman Vlug, she was in fact dressed?"

He glanced at Azijin, as before. "Oh, yes, mysire."

Azijin held up a stiff right forefinger, tapped it with his left, and said, "Young he is, mysire." I doubt that he is thirty himself.

"Silk talk," Oreb declared in a decided tone.

"I suppose he means that it is high time for me to interpret your dreams, and no doubt it is. A little additional thought might further the interpretation, however, and so might bacon and coffee. What do you say we rouse my son and your other troopers, and find out what this inn can offer in the way of breakfast? Jahlee has been tired and ill--no doubt you've noticed it. With your leave, I'll throw a few more sticks on the fire before we go, and give her a couple of extra blankets. If she wakes up before breakfast is ready, she can join us. If she doesn't, sleep may help her."

We got dressed and collected Hide and his guards, whom Azijin abused roundly for having allowed Jahlee to leave their room unnoticed, and went downstairs. Everything was dark and silent, but we opened the shutters--finding that it had snowed heavily during the night--and lit every candle in the place from the smoldering remains of the parlor fire. Azijin took it upon himself to wake up the innkeeper and his wife, but returned rubbing his knuckles and looking disgusted. "Sick they are, this they say. So it may be, I think. Our breakfast Vlug will prepare. If their food he wastes, on their own heads they brought it. You can cook, Vlug?"

Vlug swore that he could not.

"Then you I teach. A legerman must cook, and shoot too. Zwaar, Leeuw, to the horses you must see. Well do it! When we have eaten, I will inspect."

Hide said, "I'll take care of ours, Father. My father's a fine cook, Sergeant. I'm sure he'll help you in the kitchen, if you ask him."

I did, of course, warming a pastry of nuts and apples, approving the cheese (these people seem to relish cheese with every meal) and contriving hearth cakes while the sausages and a ground pork and cornmeal mixture were frying.

"Not good food it is," Azijin declared when everything was ready. "For good a kitchen like my mother's we need, and my mother to cook. But worse than this in an inn I have eaten. What is it in these little cakes for us you make, mysire?"

"Honey and poppyseed." I offered a sc.r.a.p of the pork and cornmeal mixture to Oreb to see whether he would like it.

"Soda, too. Salt, and three kinds of flour. Those I saw you mix. If another I eat, dreams more mad than I have already will it give?"

"Not mad mine was," Vlug insisted. "The finest of my life it was, and more real than this." He speared another sausage; he had been in charge of them and seemed proud of them.

"In a bed on the wall to sleep, and the bedroom has no roof to see!" Azijin shook his head and forked more pickled cabbage onto his plate.

Hide's lips shaped the word where? where?

"You have asked me to explain your dreams," I began, after sampling the pork and cornmeal mixture for myself. "It would be easy for me to contrive some story for you, as I originally planned to do. It would also be dishonest, as I decided while we were coming downstairs. I am not speaking under duress. You have asked me to help you understand what has happened to you. I have said I will, and am therefore bound to do it faithfully. Are you aware that the spirit leaves the body at death?"

Two nodded. Leeuw said, "With G.o.ds to talk."

"Perhaps. In some cases, at least. I must now ask you to accept--to ask you, Sergeant Azijin, and you, Legerman Vlug, particularly--to accept the fact that it can, and does, leave it at other times as well."

I waited for their protests, but none came.

"Let me ill.u.s.trate my point. A man has a house where he lives for some years with his wife. They are very happy, this man and his wife. They love each other, and whatever else may go amiss, they have each other. Then the man's wife dies, and he leaves the house in which he has had so much happiness. It has become abhorrent to him. Unless the Outsider, the G.o.d of G.o.ds, restores her to life, he has no wish to see that house ever again. Am I making myself clear?"

Vlug said, "So I think," and Azijin, "To me not."

"I am speaking of the spirit departing the body at death. The body is the house I mentioned, and life was the wife who made it a place of warmth and comfort."

Azijin nodded. "Ah."

"Perhaps her husband goes to the G.o.ds, as Legerman Leeuw suggested, perhaps only out into darkness. For the moment, it doesn't matter. My point is that he leaves the home she made for him, never to return."

"Bird go," Oreb declared. He had been hopping around the table, cadging bits of food. "Go Silk."

I told him, "If you mean you wish to die when I do, Oreb, I sincerely hope you don't. In Gaon they tell of dying men who kill some favorite animal, usually a horse or a dog, so it will accompany them in death; and under the Long Sun their rulers went so far as to have their favorite wives burned alive on their funeral pyres. When I die, I sincerely hope no friend or relative of mine will succ.u.mb to any such cruel foolishness."

Zwaar, who had been silent until then, said, "When the spirit goes a man dies, I think."

I shook my head. "He dies because you shot him through the heart. Or because he suffered some disease or was kicked by a horse, as a wise friend once suggested to me. But you bring up an important point--that the spirit is not life, nor is life the spirit. And another, that the two together are one. A husband is not his wife, no more than a wife is her husband; but the two in combination are one. What I was going to say was that though the man in my little story left his house once and for all when his wife died, he had left it many times previously. He had gone out to weed their garden, perhaps, or gone to the market to buy shoes. In those cases he left it to return."

Hide said helpfully, "The spirit can leave the same way, can't it, Father?"

"Exactly. We have all had daydreams. We imagine we're sailing the new boat we're in fact building, for example, or riding a prancing horse we don't actually possess. Most of the dreams we have at night are of the same kind, and 'dreams' is the right name for them. There are others, however. Dreams--we call them that, at least--which are in fact memories returned to the sleeping body by the spirit, which left it for a while and went elsewhere."

Azijin was grinning, although he looked a bit uncomfortable; Vlug, Leeuw, and Zwaar heard me with wide eyes and open mouths.

"That is what befell you and Private Vlug," I told Azijin. "Your spirits departed while you slept, and went to sleep in another place. There Vlug's spirit--"

I rose. "Excuse me for a moment. I took off Oreb's ring while I was cooking and laid it on a shelf in the kitchen."

Before they could protest, I hurried out. The ring was where I had left it earlier when I decided I might require some such excuse. I put it on and went through the kitchen and into the private quarters of the innkeeper and his wife, finding him just struggling into his trousers.

"I heard you were ill," I said, "and thought it might be wise for someone to look in on you. If you and your wife would like a bite to eat, I would be happy to prepare something."

"So weak we are, mysire." He sat down upon the conjugal bed. "Thank you. Thank you. Anything."

I explained matters to Azijin and his troopers, and Hide and I looked after the innkeeper and his wife. As I feared, both have been bitten by Jahlee. They should recover, provided she does not return for a few days. She is still asleep at present, although it is well past noon. "Girl sleep," reports Oreb, who just flew up to our room to look; he and I are agreed that it is best to leave it so. I have arranged the blankets so that her face is scarcely visible, and of course the shutters are closed. Azijin and Vlug promise not to disturb her.

Azijin has decided not to travel today. "The cause of justice and good order," he says, "we serve as well in comfort here as by in this snow dying and the horses crippling." I second him in that with all my heart.

The ring will no longer fit my thumb, which seems very odd. I have been wearing it on the third finger.

4.

HE I IS S SILK.

H e felt Pig's hand close on his shoulder. "Hooses, bucky. Trust ter Pig. Hooses h'all 'round." e felt Pig's hand close on his shoulder. "Hooses, bucky. Trust ter Pig. Hooses h'all 'round."

At that moment, he was too tired to wonder how Pig knew. "Then let's stop here and ask, if they'll talk to us."