XVI

BRUDOER continued his exploration of the tunnels and caves, seeking to gain a thorough knowledge of them so he could move freely and give the oppressed Threerivers people safety if some insurmountable crisis rolled over them.

The caves seemed the most impregnable area, if there were a way out of them. As he searched, he found another box of old manuscripts. Since he had seen Craydor’s hand, he recognized its distinctive flourish. Brudoer knew the manuscripts to be unpublished material since all children at Threerivers read Craydor extensively. Perusing one, he was increasingly astonished for he found the old sage questioning all her own accomplishments, and even the Pelbar system of woman’s dominance. “While it may seem natural for males, since they tend to be physically stronger, to do the heavier work while the women handle administrative matters, still unfairness develops. Reward does not always come to those who genuinely contribute. Others are promoted because of gender, and from their positions of prominence do mediocre work. The ideal society would appear to be one not oriented by gender. But in our present primitive state, that seems impossible.”

Another essay, in a shaky hand, questioned the concept of Threerivers. Slowly picking his way through the difficult script, Brudoer made out, “There will be a time when Threerivers is no more. That has always been the way with human things. However, I hope deeply that my unlocking system is never activated, but, rather, that the city is taken down stone by stone to use for other things or new building, or else that other structures will have grown up around it and out from it so that when it is time to take down the old, it will not be missed.” What did she mean? What unlocking system did she hope was never activated? Brudoer couldn’t fathom it.

 

Far down the river, Gamwyn and his two companions paddled deeper and deeper into the flat country of the lower Heart. They passed two empty spaces along the river, where weeds and grasses barely grew. As they journeyed, the river seemed to flatten and slow down, spreading and meandering. Great, moss-draped trees hung over the banks, and the three were surprised one afternoon to see a long, scaled animal with a knurled back and a great long mouth slide off the bank into the water and vanish. Reo shuddered, knotting his forehead.

Flocks of white water birds seemed to be everywhere, rising from the shallows, flying overhead in delicate, translucent brilliance, yellow bills stretched forward, black legs thrust out behind.

The three took their time, fishing and floating. Using his folding knife, Gamwyn made a bow and managed to trim a few straight arrows and even to fletch them, though he had had little practice in that.

Though the river maintained a channel, it was increasingly braided by muddy islands and swamps, seeming to frazzle out into a maze of confusing, side passages and dead ends. More than once they had to turn and seek the main river again. Eventually, all solidity seemed lost. They were moving through a labyrinth of water, trees, vines, hummocks, and occasional stretches of grassy swampland. Snakes glided in the water and hung on vines and trees. Mosquitoes whined and stung constantly, and the three grew irritable and frightened. Reo wished he had never left Murkal.

One day, seeking the main channel again, they heard a shout. Looking behind, they saw three slim boats, far up another channel. A man waved a paddle. The three dug in and surged out toward a nearby bend, hoping to lose themselves in the swamp beyond. One boat began to follow, gaining rapidly. They could faintly hear someone calling. It sounded like, “Come back. Come back. Don’t go that way.”

They reached the flooded trees and moved their boat through them, twisting and crouching, until they finally felt safe. Gamwyn guided the boat up against a projecting root, panting and, sweating. But as he gently set the paddle down, the boat that had been following glided slowly out across his bow. Five men were in it, dark-skinned, with bushes of tightly curled black hair and broad noses. One was standing, holding a fish spear at ease.

He grinned. “Well, children,” he said. “Where you goin’?” He held up his hand as Gamwyn reached for his bow. “No. None of that. You’re in Southocean country. Ours. That don’t matter, really. There’s plenty of it. We just wanted to catch you before you ended up in the dead flats.”

“The dead flats?” Artess asked.

“All poisoned. Nothing there. No good to go there. The river goes through it. At least one part. Where you goin’?”

“To the South Ocean,” Gamwyn said. “To find a shell.”

“What kind of shell?”

Gamwyn described it at length. The men frowned. “I don’t know no kind of shell like that,” one said.

“You’d best go east to Sagol,” another said. “A lot of shells there.”

“Sagol?” another said. “How’d they ever get there?”

“How far is it?” Gamwyn asked.

“About a hundred fifty kiloms, a lot of it open sea. But you could follow the curve of the islands outside the empty bay. You could do it.”

“So long as there ain’t no big storms,” one man said.

“Too early. Won’t be none yet. Too early,” another remarked.

“You got a sail?”

“No,” said Gamwyn. “Just paddles.”

“You’d best come with us,” the standing man said. “My name is Samme.” He held out his hand, and the three clasped it in turn. The slim boat turned, then, and led the way through the maze of passages out into the open again, then north to where they first had encountered the dark men.

They found a settlement with sixteen of the slim boats and forty-two people, all living in families in houses built upon stilts, some using living trees as a part of their support.

The three soon found themselves the center of a conference that seemed more like an amorphous argument than anything else, but out of it came several rapid decisions. Gamwyn would leave the boat with them. He, Reo, Artess, and seven others would traverse the swamps—portaging when necessary—eastward to the open sea in two boats and take them to Sagol in payment for the boat. They would also take a quantity of reed baskets with them for trade.

Though it was afternoon, they set out immediately, through narrow, watery aisles. The Southocean men called themselves Atherers, and Gamwyn gathered that they belonged to a loose alliance of several groups, all mostly self-governed. The Atherers seemed to know exactly where they were going in the maze of swamps and channels.

That night they camped on a small knoll, surrounded by swamp. The men built a fire and occasionally spread it over with damp tree moss for smoke to drive away the insects.

“Not long now,” Samme remarked. “We’ll see the ocean by midmorning.”

As they settled down, the three slept together in spite of the heat, with Reo in the middle. But Gamwyn felt Artess’s hand come across her brother’s head to touch his shoulder and reassure herself he was there. Somehow they felt safe with the Atherers, but the great strangeness made them uneasy.

Just as Samme had promised, in the morning they emerged into an area of swampy sand islands, an ill-defined shoreline. In spite of what he had heard and imagined, Gamwyn was not prepared for his first sight of the ocean, which stretched to the horizon, bright and greenish blue. It was restless in the calm summer air; so vast, with such a sense of incipient power and indifference, that the great river he had grown up with seemed small and tame by contrast. The ocean seemed an active, understandable, animate presence. Here was an eyeless and careless immensity. It seemed to reach to the rim of nothingness.

But the Atherers didn’t hesitate to launch out onto it, shaking out their gray sails and pointing their small, slender boats directly at the empty horizon to the northeast. Gamwyn looked at Reo and saw the boy was visibly frightened. But Artess seemed comfortable enough.

She reached over and touched her brother’s hand; “It’s better than hoeing cotton and beans,” she said. That afternoon the party saw two low islands to the south, and as evening neared, another, much longer than the others, appeared. They steered for it, beaching the boats near sunset, drawing them far up the sandy beach. As the group sat at ease, cooking and eating, Samme questioned Gamwyn, Artess, and Reo about their background, and Gamwyn filled him in on everything he could. He felt an openness and honesty in the Atherers that he hadn’t since leaving home. The Atherers laughed a great deal, and they sang beautifully. They seemed family-oriented. But Gamwyn couldn’t understand how they functioned so Well without apparent authority. No one was obviously in charge.

After sunset the Atherers knelt and sang a hymn to the Lone One. Later, Gamwyn asked them if that was the name they gave to God.

“No,” one said. “God is God. We know that name and share it with others. The Lost One is God and he ain’t. He brought God to the ancients. That is, the sense of God. Somehow, everything known about him vanished in the turmoil of the terrible time after the great burning. We’ve never learned nothing about him since. You. What do you know about him. Anything?”

Gamwyn sighed and said no. He told them about Pelbar religion, and one man shook his head. “Another religion created after the burning,” he said. “By somebody who didn’t like men.”

“Not that bad,” another said. “You can see the outlines of the Lost One in it.”

“You ought to come to Pelbarigan and talk about it,” Gamwyn said. “They’re gathering people there from all over—as far west as beyond the great mountains. Somebody might remember something. Even the Tusco had some scraps of paper from the ancient times.” Gamwyn recited it to them. They looked at him silently, and had him repeat it until they all knew it by heart. A hush fell over them.

“It’s the faint voice of the Lost One again,” Samme said. “It is. It surely is.” He sighed. “With knowing that, I don’t see how the ancients managed to burn everything. But they did.”

The whole group fell silent, watching the fire die. Then they unrolled their light cotton bed bags and slid in for the night. Gamwyn lay awake for much of the night listening to the light curl of surf slapping soothingly on the beach. Then he shut his eyes a moment and woke in daylight, with the gray-backed gulls crying overhead, wheeling and touching at the air with their wingtips. The Atherers had cooked more fish and were nearly ready to go. They laughed at his sleepiness, but they looked at him differently since he had recited the Tusco scripture.

Samme put an arm around him and said, “Are these the uttermost parts of the sea? Maybe to somebody from the uttermost parts of the river. But they’re home, you know.”

Toward evening of the third day, they saw the coast at Sagol ahead, and soon were hailed from the beach near a small stream entering the sea. A crowd gathered, and the three travelers were surrounded and engulfed, the whole group surging toward a large, low building back from the beach. Beyond it, Gamwyn could see a number of open, conical houses, thatched with leaves and fronds, arranged in arcs.

Sagol was an Atherer summer town, he was told. In winter, they moved back from the shore a bit to a place called Adant, where they prepared a spring crop before returning. That night a communal supper was held to celebrate the coming of the strangers, and afterward, Gamwyn was asked again to tell his story. While the vernacular of the Atherers tended toward what seemed to Gamwyn a slightly blurred drawl, it was closer to Pelbar speech then was that of Artess and Reo, and they understood him clearly enough. He gathered that they had a written language, and that proved to be the case. Their library, he was told, was at Adant, but books were around the summer town, some traded from the eastern cities. Gamwyn was disappointed to learn that none came from ancient times. He also learned that children were schooled four days of every ten the year round.

Gamwyn was told that the Southocean people were united in what they called a federation all of whose members lived along the north sea rim of the South Ocean, in peace with each other, meeting annually for a long governmental conference. “Most are dark-skinned, like us,” one old man told him, “but some are lighter, and a few even light-haired, like you and your friend.” He pointed to Artess, who smiled faintly.

“Tomorrow,” the old man added, “is a school day. You will begin school with the others under the canopy.”

“But my shell,” Gamwyn said. “I’ve got to find my shell and get back.”

The old man shook his head. “We all talked about it. There ain’t no shell like that here, though the hermit may have one. He has a good many.” He called to a boy and had him run up to a conical house nearby. Soon the boy returned with a blue-gray, ridgy shell, which he held out.

“Thank you, Welle,” the old man said, smoothing the sand off it. “This is the nearest thing we have to it. But it ain’t separated inside, and yours had no ridges. These are common enough.”

Gamwyn took the shell and examined it. It was thin and fragile, a beautiful spiral, much like Bival’s, but it lacked the exquisite flaring shape. Suddenly he felt a wave of despair, set the shell down, and sobbed, hiding his face in his hands. Artess’s hand came to him, went around him, but seemed not to help. He didn’t understand. Everybody had said the shell came from the South Ocean.

He cleared his eyes, finally, and saw the old man patiently regarding him. “You’d better go see the hermit. No school for you just now. But you two—you go to school.” Artess made a face, and the old man laughed, showing an expanse of toothless gum.

The next morning, Gamwyn set out for the hermit’s with the old man, who was thin and stooped, but surprisingly wiry. They walked eastward along the beach for about two ayas, then turned inland, mounting a slight rise. On the way, the old man, whose name was Aylor, scarcely said anything, except to explain that the hermit lived alone at the edge of a ruined area, collecting things from the ancients, cleaning them up, and explaining them. “He ain’t an Atherer,” Aylor explained. “He came from Innanigan when I was young, and he’s been here ever since, building his junk pile.” Aylor chuckled, fell silent, then chuckled again. Then he added, “You’ll like him. He’s alone so much, you’d think he’d lose the power of speech, but he’s just sharpened it.” Then the old man chuckled again.

Soon they mounted another rise, toward a grove of scraggly trees, in which Gamwyn could see a ramshackle building. Soon they could hear someone humming and found the hermit seated at an old plank table scrubbing at a chunk of old iron with a piece of sandstone. He looked up at them, at first vaguely, his eyes swimming.

“You. Aylor,” he said. “I’d better get a dog. He who sneaks like a snake must be minded like one.”

“Nobody’s sneakin’, you old gator face. I brought somebody to see you. Gamwyn, this is Darew the hermit. Darew, this is Gamwyn, come all the way down the Heart River and here to find a shell. We tell him there ain’t none like it here. Thought you might have one.”

“A man who envies the possessions of others ignores the great goodness he has, boy. Gamwyn, huh. From the Heart, huh. He who has a heart already has more than he who has a shell. You would trade the better for the worse. Would you trade your skin for cotton pants? You have the essence and you expend it on trifles.”

“Stuff it, Darew, and listen to him. He’s come well over a thousand kiloms.”

Darew looked at him. “A thousand kiloms. Never escaped yourself in all that distance, did you.”

Aylor sighed. “Gamwyn, you tell him.”

Gamwyn sat down across from the hermit on a section of old log and described the shell, stressing why he needed it so badly. Darew pulled at the thin gray hair on his crown as the boy talked. Then he stood abruptly, saying, “I have one of those. Found it in the ruin. You may find one there, too. I will keep mine. He who keeps what he has will never need to seek what he has not.”

Beckoning, Darew walked back into the grove, where Gamwyn saw, arranged in neat rows, stacks of curious and baffling rusty objects, then rows of other objects—stones, pine cones, types of wood, mostly broken ceramics, and finally shells. Darew picked one up, tossed it up in the air, caught it, and handed it to Gamwyn. It was the shell, the very type Ravell had brought to Bival. The boy found his hands trembling.

“You—you have no other one?” he asked,

“No. Only one. They don’t come like that around here. The ancients brought it from someplace. See the hole they drilled in it?”

“Can I earn it from you?”

“No. Spoil the collection. It’s the best one. That’s how I knew it right off. He who sells the ham must be content with snout meat and pig’s feet.”

Aylor spat in disgust. “Might have known. He’s always sure have some stupid aphorism to shroud his selfishness in.”

“He who can’t gain his end by worth, tries to gain it by words,” the hermit replied.

“Where’d you find it? May I look, there?” Gamwyn asked.

“Found it at the finding place. And—”

“Yeah, yeah,” Aylor said. “He who looks with the hawk’s eye, finds what the hawk would find. He who looks with the eye of a clam, finds what a clam would find.”

“Eye of a clam? My old friend, I believe you’ve had too much sun. Anyone—”

“Yeah. He who gets too much sun, gets from light darkness.”

“That’s good. That’s very good. I’ll have to remember that.”

“And he who always has a saying never has to have a doing.”

“Jeez I cry, Aylor, look how busy I am. Someday this will all make sense. All is in order if we can find the order.”

“Order is awful the way you see it.”

“No, my friend. Ordure is offal.”

Grumbling but amused, the old Atherer left Gamwyn with the hermit and took his way back to Sagol. Darew promised to take the boy to the place where he found the shell when he finished brushing away the loose rust from the latest object he had unearthed. While he worked at it, Gamwyn moved through the aisles of his collection, frustrated and a little angry. Soon, quite naturally, he came back to the shells, and noticed for the first time the richness and variety of the collection. They were arranged in the open on rough planks, all in groups resembling each other. As he moved through them, Gamwyn was startled to see what was obviously the exact image of the rear tower of Threerivers. He took it up. Yes. It certainly was the right one, with its broad and spreading spiral, its large, hooded opening.

He ran to Darew with it. The old man paid no attention at first, then looked up quizzically. “That one? You can find bags and baskets of that one down on the beach.” He snorted. “That’s no rarity.”

“Nothing is rare where it is in plenty, but where I’m from, it’s not only rare but unknown. It’s the main guard tower, in miniature, even to those mottled colorings.”

“Nothing is rare where it is in plenty, eh. Very good. Smart boy. I’ll have to remember that. Rare is not plenty. Clever. Why didn’t I think of that. I’ve been neglecting my philosophy.” He laughed raucously. Gamwyn felt chagrined. Darew scrutinized him, then put down his sandstone abrader. “Tell me what the other towers are like. Shells?”

“The water tower is a tall spiral quite like some of our local snails, but different. Longer.‘It’s as though you took a coil of wet clay and spun it up to a point in your hands.”

“I have those over there,” the hermit said, pointing a long, crooked finger. “Many kinds. What about the others?”

“Oh. The other main one is curious. It’s really used for produce storage. It isn’t like the others at all. It’s large, humped, with openings on the ends. It curves over like a roof.” Gamwyn gestured with his hands. “Inside you walk down a center aisle. The sides curve in and around toward you, forming shallow bins for compost. Above them are shelves and racks.”

“A money shell.”

“What?”

The hermit sighed and stood up, dusting himself. Finding two old sacks by a tree, he handed one to Gamwyn, then started for the beach without a word. Once there, they turned east away from Sagol, and sauntered on the sand, Gamwyn looking quizzically at the old man, who absently splashed in the light surf like a child, watching the sea birds, sand, waving grass, and the sky with an unabashed delight. Gamwyn walked along beside him wondering what they were doing. After they had walked about three and a half ayas, they came to an area rich in shells. The old man stooped over, moving slowly, putting shells in his bag, humming lightly.

Gamwyn followed suit, soon becoming completely enraptured by the varied shapes, colors, sizes, and textures of the shells. Some curved broad and flat, like the small river clams at home, but ridged in many ways, patterned, colored, toothed, or bent. Rifts of small spirals of various kinds lay in miniature handfuls. Large, heavy, knobbed shells lay half filled with sand, and worn and broken ones revealed inner structures of bizarre design.

Finally Gamwyn found the miniature of the storage tower, then found a slightly larger model. Darew suddenly appeared at his shoulder and put a tight spiral in his hand. It was not quite the water tower, but almost. In a quarter sun’s looking, Gamwyn had nearly a dozen varieties like it, including what seemed to his memory to be the exact model. Walking up beyond the reach of the waves, he laid them all out in rows, fascinated by the shapes. But there was nothing like the shell he had come for.

Darew’s shadow crossed the shells. “See? No shell like the one you want. But he who can modify his wants to suit the possibilities can live happily. He who desires the impossible cries because he cannot soar like the birds—who cannot think or read.”

Gamwyn sifted dry sand through his hands. “Somehow I’ll find one,” he said. “There have to be some. Craydor had one. Ravell brought one. You have one, too. There must be others.”

“In the ruin. They must have been brought here. I found mine in the ruin. Out of the old may often come the new. You may dig with me. Eventually we may find one.”

“But I don’t have all my life. Who knows what they are doing to my brother while I scratch around in your ruins.”

“Patience is often an attitude that simply makes comfortable the inevitable.”

Gamwyn looked out over the water and felt inside the broad emptiness he saw there. Maybe the old man was right. Well, he would continue to look. He would dig if he had to. He would never give up.

But that evening, when he had left the hermit and returned to Sagol, things looked much more bleak. Aylor put his arm around the boy and patted his shoulder, but said nothing. Aylor’s family, a large one, with three married sons and their children, all seemed very solicitous. But Aylor also said, “School tomorrow. For you, too, Gamwyn. You’ll have time.”

“School?”

“You won’t mind, Gam,” Artess said. “It isn’t like Murkal. Today we went fishing.”

“Fishing?”

“How else can you learn tides, weather, currents, navigation, fish, and work?” Aylor asked.

Gamwyn felt relieved. “Jeez I cry,” he said.

“Picked that up from the old man already, eh?”

“What does it mean?”

“Don’t know. Now, time to pray to the Lost One and then to bed. We shake out sail before sunup tomorrow.”

The next three weeks saw Gamwyn fishing far off shore, drying fish with the children, measuring, cutting, and splitting wood for dwellings, weaving rush mats, and grinding shell to burn for mortar—all in school. When the others had free days, which they often spent in singing, working, or swimming, Gamwyn worked with the old hermit at the ruin site.

It had evidently been a town in ancient times. Back from the beach, it was still choked with sand where it wasn’t buried. Darew had shoveled away great quantities of sand, exposing broken streets and shattered buildings. He was interested in small artifacts, which he continued to collect and speculate about. Some of his conclusions Gamwyn found very shrewd, but others seemed strange. However, the old hermit didn’t like disagreement, so Gamwyn always kept silent or agreed with him. The old man talked incessantly, peppering his talk with endless aphorisms, some of them amusing and incisive. Sometimes others came to dig or talk, always bringing Darew something to eat or some small present. The hermit was grateful for the company, though he never admitted it, preferring to seem aloof.

As time advanced, Gamwyn grew more despairing. Day seemed to flow into day without hope of solving his dilemma. The Atherers lived a rich life of leisure and work, replete with social enjoyments and the gentle religion of the Lost One that all of Sagol embraced. But Gamwyn seemed no closer to his shell than he had been when he left Pelbarigan. Artess and Reo seemed settled, and Reo was seldom separated from Aylor’s granddaughter, Daun, who took care of him like a mother.

One morning, as summer was well advanced, Gamwyn arose to find a number of men on the beach, staring southward with shaded eyes. Gamwyn noticed a mass of clouds, but it seemed to him little different from those he had seen in the past.

“What do you think?” one man asked.

“I think it’ll be a big one. I think we ought to begin to move now.”

“We may waste a lot of time if it isn’t.”

“We may lose everything if it is.”

“Call Oin.”

A boy ran off to get her. Oin came down from her stilted house slowly and painfully, carrying a stick. She advanced toward the beach in a slow shuffle, chewing something with toothless gums. At last she arrived among the men and squinted southward, still chewing. She stood for a long time, but finally said, “Start moving now.” Then she turned and started back.

One of the men sighed. “Begin with the boats,” he said. Someone blew a large seashell, which produced a mournful bellow, and people began to tumble from their houses. Soon Gamwyn was caught up in the mass move back from the beach. The smaller boats were slid along the sand, then in a trough that led inland. The three larger boats were lifted by a crowd of men onto large sledges that accommodated their keels, and dragged back over the rolling flat land on the main road inland. The whole village dragged and carried, even the small children. Gamwyn helped haul a small boat with a rope, wondering why the Atherers traveled so far, for they went over scrubby hills almost two ayas, finally sliding the boat up a long, high bill. Behind it he saw the houses of the winter town, Adant, and fields, now weedy. He knew a storm was coming, but surely nothing could demand such work.

The men trotted all the way back. Gamwyn arrived tired, but he was given little chance to rest. The clouds to the south, now a dark, swirling mass, had moved closer. The surf had risen, too, and now lifted, rolled, and slammed into the beach in hollow roarings.

After the boats had been moved, the crowds began to lift the shelters using long poles that slid under the raised flooring, carrying each structure entire. Soon the long communal building had been taken down, its planks and logs tied into bundles for dragging. The wind picked up as the cloud piles reached in over Sagol, blowing from the west along the beach. Weel, one of Aylor’s sons, looked up at it as he worked. “God help us,” he shouted. “This one’s coming straight on in.”

By the time Gamwyn had made three trips back from the beach, he was exhausted. But much of the summer settlement still remained to be moved. He sank down a moment. Someone grabbed him roughly by the arm. “Not now. Later.” The man was furious, and as he wearily stood up to work, Gamwyn realized dimly that was the first time since arriving at Sagol he had seen anyone angry.

He took hold of a pole and helped walk another of the conical houses along the road inland. Soon the wind began to tug, then tear at the thatch. The Atherers he was working with stopped to lash the structure to the poles, but as they finished, the wind rose, heaved the structure upward, and ripped it from their hands, tilting it and rolling it into a mass of heavy oaks. The men ran back to help by the beach, but their effort was of no use, for the rising wind had torn away the remaining houses, and the whole body of people began to flee inland.

Gamwyn felt a tug on his arm. It was Aylor, who leaned close to his ear and shouted, “Have you seen the hermit?”

“No,” the boy shouted back.

“I’m afraid for him. The sea will reach his place.”

“How could it?”

“Trust me. I’ve lived here. It will. Come on.”

“I’ll go get him,” Gamwyn shouted, his words whipped away in the wind and pelting rain.

Aylor grabbed his arm. “No. Too late. He’ll have to get along himself. He should know better than to stay. Maybe he’s gone. Come.”

Gamwyn looked at the old man’s lined face streaming with water, his eyes nearly shut against it. Aylor took his arm and led him inland. As they moved, sideways to the wind, Gamwyn could scarcely believe what he saw, for the whole landscape seemed to bend and pitch in the screaming gale. Leaves and branches blew by. The force of the wind threw him to his knees several times, but others lifted him. They moved in a tight mass, supporting each other.

At last they came over the long hill. At its summit, Gamwyn turned around and glimpsed a surge of the sea as it rose and toppled far inland among the scrubby trees. Aylor moved him on. In a short while, they stumbled into a heavy, stone-walled house, and suddenly everything was still and muted.

In the dim light, Gamwyn could make out many huddled bodies, as the Atherers relaxed and waited out the hurricane. At first they were still, but eventually one of them started a slow hymn to the undying love of the Lost One. Others took it up. The mellow voices had a calming effect, and eventually Gamwyn nodded off to sleep, waking only when people moved over him to go outside. He himself eventually stood up and stooped out the door, finding the wind very light and most of the people climbing on the summer houses, refastening their bindings after tying them together tighter in a single mass.

Gamwyn climbed up the hill and looked seaward, but the deep gray sky and blowing water kept him from seeing far. He heard a voice and turned to find Artess calling and beckoning. He stumbled down the hill. When he reached her, she took his arm, saying, “It’s not over yet, they say. This is just the middle of it. Come on now. The wind’s picking up again.”

It was. Gamwyn felt the storm come quite suddenly, from the east this time, and he crouched into the door of the stone house as the sky began to howl again. Inside, candles were lit, and some of the people were playing a game with pebbles, chuckling and joking. But when the singing began again, all joined in.

Gamwyn didn’t know how long the storm continued, since he drowsed off again, his exhausted body lying limp. His whole interior self seemed to rise out of it, leaving the empty shell below, as he rose unblown high into the air to look for the old hermit. He felt as if he stayed there, distant and still, untouched by the anger of the wind, seeing nothing but gray sky, dark rain, and blowing debris.

When he finally jerked awake, it was almost evening. The wind had died down, and the stone house was nearly empty. Outside, he found the Atherers working on their summer houses, separating them, tightening lashings, refastening thatch. He walked to the top of the hill again, but he couldn’t see the road southward. Suddenly a thought settled on him like a vulture. He had done it again. Every time he joined a society, it experienced some disaster. Was it a curse? What would he do next? He turned and saw Artess walking up the hill toward him, disheveled by the storm.

“Come and eat,” she said. “A big fish chowder. You look awful. What’s the matter?”

“Oh, nothing.” He suddenly realized how hungry he was. Artess slipped her hand into his as they went down the hill. He looked at her.

She smiled. “I was scared,” she said. “But they don’t seem too worried about it. All the valuable things are in these stone houses. Look. They are used to such storms—even though this was a bad one.”

As he finished his chowder, Gamwyn became aware of Aylor standing over him. “In the morning, you go look for Darew, Gam. The storm’s about over now. A lot of work left. But we have the time. We’re all safe. Ever see anything like that?”

“No, sir. Only a tornado or two.”

“We have a lot of rebuilding to do. Lost some crops. But nothing so bad. We’ll have to see how the beach is. Something like this will change it all around. Had enough food?”

“Oh. Yes.” As Gamwyn said this, Aylor turned away. Gamwyn could see that the old man was tired, too, dragging his feet toward the long stone house again.