“Behold this chaplet. It has been given from old hand to young hand for five hundred years. It can never be replaced. The making of such beauty in bronze is lost to our craftspeople. This may seem little, when instead we have steel; but the ugly coppersmithing of today cannot uplift the soul, and this is but the smallest token of the emptiness within us. Who now sings the ancient epics, who now honors the ancient wisdom and righteousness? The links of kinship corrode, as youth mocks at age and wants its way in everything. And why not? Is not our whole world a mere dust-fleck adrift in limitless, meaningless hollowness? Are we ourselves anything save wind made flesh, chance-formed, impotent, and foredoomed? This is the teaching the strangers have sent seeping into us, a teaching of despair so deep that few of us even recognize it as despair.”
The harp rang. “But you have heard me chant this lay before. What of the present gathering? What shall we say?
“I bid you think. Yewwl has never hidden that she is the creature of an alien. What she does keep hidden is what that alien may have bidden her do, for its cold purposes. Long have they declared, at the House of the Banner, that we must not become dependent for our lives on things of theirs. This is true; but has it been a truth uttered to lull our wariness? For at last Yewwl proposes that we do indeed make such things necessary to our survival. I tell you, if that happens, we will be helpless before the demands of their makers. And what might those demands be? Who can tell? Yewwl herself admits she does not understand the strangers.
“Perhaps”—sarcasm ran venomous—“she is honest in her intent, in what she thinks she has said. Perhaps. But then, how can she hope to deal for us? What miscomprehensions might result, and what disasters follow? Better the glacier grind down across this whole country, and we flee to impoverished exile. At least we will remain free.
“Deny yonder witch. Cast her hence!”
The harp snarled to a finish.
Skogda sprang onto his bench, vanes wide. “You slime-soul, you dare speak thus of my mother!” he yelled. Almost, he launched himself against the Seeker. Two friends barely pulled him down and quieted him.
Erannda gave Yewwl a triumphant look. “That,” he murmured, “deserves I put a satire upon him, and upon you.”
—“Banner, what shall I do? I haven’t his word-skill. If he makes a poem against me, I will be unheeded in council for the rest of my world-faring.”
—“Oh! … But hold, Yewwl, don’t panic, stand fast. I thought about this, that you might someday run into just this danger, years ago. I didn’t discuss it with you, because it was a nasty subject, for you much more than for me; but I did prepare—”
Wion stirred on the dais. “It is a terrible thing you would do, Erannda,” he warned. “Worse than the outburst of a way-wearied young male calls for. Such excess could bring reproach on you and the whole College. Best let him humble himself to you.”
“I will that,” Erannda replied, “if his mother and her gang will abandon their crazy scheme.”
Banner had been whispering, fast and fiercely. The sense of her nearness in spirit sufficed by itself to kindle the heart anew. Yewwl stood forth and said:
“No. Are we not yet gorged with senseless rantings? What does he preach but fear and subservience—fear of tomorrow, subservience first to him and later to doom? Yes, the star-folk have caused changes, and in those changes is loss. But would you call it wrong that as your child grows, you lose the warmth of his little body in your pouch? Do you not, instead, rejoice to watch him soar forth?
“What threat have the star-folk ever been, save to those who would fetter us down and require we honor them into the bargain? The threat is from them, I tell you. If they prevail, everything we have achieved will perish, and likewise countless of us and our children and children’s children. Shall we not even have a chance to seek help?”
Her audience listened aghast. Nobody had ever defied a senior Seeker thus openly, and before the very Lord of the Volcano.
Yewwl’s words had been her own, following the advice she received from Banner. Having uttered them, she stalked toward Erannda, her vanes open, fur-abristle, fangs bare. She said, before she herself could be appalled at what it was:
“I will lay a satire on you instead, old one, that all may ken you for what you truly are.”
He controlled his rage, made his harp laugh, and retorted, “You? And what poetics have you studied?”
“I begin,” she answered, halting close to him. And she declaimed Banner’s words, as they were given her:
“Stop!” he yelled. As he lurched back, his harp dropped to the clay floor.
He would have needed a night or longer to compose his satire. She threw hers at him, in perfect form, on the instant.
—“Don’t be vengeful,” Banner urged. “Leave him a way out.”
—“Oh, yes,” Yewwl agreed. Pity surprised her. Erannda straightened, gathered around him what was left of his dignity, and said, almost too low to hear: “Lord of the Volcano, colleagues, clanfolk … I have opposed the proposal. I could possibly be mistaken. There is no mistaking that quarrels among us … like this … are worse than anything else that might happen. Better we be destroyed by outsiders than by each other … I withdraw my opposition.”
He turned and stumbled toward his bench. On impulse, Yewwl picked up his harp and gave it to him.
After a hush, Wion said, not quite steadily, “If none has further speech, let the thing be done.”
The inscribed parchment felt stiff in her fingers, and somehow cold.
She tucked it carefully into her travel pack, which lay by her saddle. Not far off, her tethered onsar cropped, loud in the quietness roundabout. Yewwl had wanted a while alone, to bring her whirling thoughts back groundward. Now she walked toward the camp, for they would be making Oneness.
They were out on the plain. The short, stiff nullfire that grew here glowed in the last light of the sun, a red step pyramid enormous amidst horizon mists. Lurid colors in the west gave way to blue-gray that, eastward, deepened to purple. In the north, Mount Gungnor was an uplooming of blackness; flames tinged the smoke of it, which blurred a moon. Northwestward the oncoming storm towered, flashed, and rumbled. The air was cold and getting colder. It slid sighing around Yewwl, stirring her fur.
Ahead, a fire ate scrubwood that the party had collected and waxed ever more high and more high. She heard it brawl, she began to feel its warmth. They were six who spread their vanes to soak up that radiance. The others were already homebound. Skogda, his retainer and companion Ych (oh, memory), Zh of Arachan were male; Yewwl’s retainers lyaai and Kuzhinn, and Ngaru of Raava, were female; Yewwl herself made the seventh. More were not needed. Maybe seven were too many. But they had wanted to go, from loyalty to her or from clan-honor, and she could not deny them.
Let them therefore make Oneness, and later rest a while; then she would call Banner, who would be standing by about the time that Fathermoon rose. And the ship would come—the new ship, whereof a part could hold breathable air—and carry them east at wizard speed.
Yewwl winced. She had not liked lying before the assembly. Yet she must. Else Wion would never have understood why she needed a credential which, undated as was usual, made no mention, either, of cooperation by the star-folk. After all, he would have asked, were they not star-folk too in—?—but he would have failed to remember what the place was called, Dukeston. Yewwl herself had trouble doing that, when the noise was practically impossible to utter.