The sky darkened steadily as the day went along: from a pale hard blue to a deeper, richer color, then to a dark gray, almost purple, as the shadows gathered. He had not expected that. He knew of such things as day and night from the chronicles, but he had imagined that night would fall like a curtain, cutting off the light at a single stroke. That it might come on gradually through the hours was not something he had considered, nor that the sun’s light would change also, growing ruddier through the afternoon, until when the sky was just beginning to turn gray the sun would become a fat red ball hanging low above the horizon.
Late on the afternoon of the first day, as the long purple shadows were beginning to fall across the land, the front line of marchers came upon three large four-legged beasts with great scarlet pronglike horns sprouting in triple pairs from their snouts. They were grazing elegantly on a hillside, moving with careful high-stepping gestures as if in some formal dance. But at the first scent of the humans they looked up in terror and fled wildly, taking off at astonishing speed across the plain.
“Did you see those?” Koshmar asked. “What were they, Thaggoran?”
“Grazing beasts,” he said.
“But their names, old man! What are such creatures called?”
He ransacked his memory. The Book of the Beasts said nothing about long-legged creatures with three pairs of red prongs on their noses.
“I think they must have been created during the Long Winter,” Thaggoran ventured. “They are not animals that were known in the Great World.”
“Are you certain of that?”
“They are unknown creatures,” Thaggoran insisted, growing irritated.
“Then we must name them,” Koshmar said resolutely. “We must name everything we see. Who knows, Thaggoran? We may be the only people there are. The naming of things will be one of our tasks.”
“That is a good task,” said Thaggoran, thinking about the fiery pain in his left knee.
“What shall we call them, then? Come, Thaggoran, give us a name for them!”
He looked up and saw the tall graceful things outlined sharply against the dark sky on the crest of a distant hill, peering cautiously down at the marchers.
“Dancerhorns,” he said unhesitatingly. “Those are called dancerhorns, Koshmar.”
“So be it! Dancerhorns they are!”
The darkness deepened. The sky was nearly black now. Thaggoran, looking up, saw some broad-winged birds flying east in the twilight, but they were too high overhead for him even to try to identify them. He stood staring, imagining himself soaring like that with nothing but air beneath him; for a moment it was an exhilarating idea, and then it became a terrifying one, and he felt a surge of nausea and vertigo that nearly knocked him to the ground. He waited for it to pass, breathing deeply. Then he crouched, digging his knuckles against the solidity of the dry sandy earth, leaning forward, putting his weight against the ground. It supported him as the floor of the cocoon once had done, and that was comforting. He rose after a time and went onward.
In the thickening blackness hard bright points of burning light began to emerge. Hresh, coming up beside him, asked him what they were.
“They are the stars,” Thaggoran said.
“What makes them so bright? Are they on fire? It must be a very cool fire, then.”
“No,” said Thaggoran, “a fiery fire, a blazing fire like the fire of the sun. What they are is suns, Hresh. Like the great sun that Yissou has placed in the day-sky to warm the world.”
“The sun is much larger than they are. And very much hotter.”
“Only because it’s closer. Believe me, boy: what you see are globes of fire hanging in the sky.”
“Ah. Globes of fire. Are they very far away, then?”
“So far that it would take the sturdiest warrior all his life to walk to the nearest of them.”
“Ah,” said Hresh. “Ah.” He stood staring at them a long while. Others had stopped too, and were studying the dazzling points of pulsating light that had begun to break out all over the sky. Thaggoran felt a chill, and not only from the evening air. He beheld a sky full of suns, and he knew there were worlds around all those suns, and he felt like dropping down to touch his head against the earth in recognition of his smallness and the greatness of the gods who had brought the People forth into this immense world, this world that was only a grain of sand in the immensity of the universe.
“Look,” someone said. “What’s that?”
“Gods!” cried Harruel. “A sword in the sky!”
Indeed something new was appearing now — a hook of dazzling white light, an icy crescent gliding into view above the distant mountains. All about him the tribe was kneeling, murmuring, offering up desperate prayers to that great silent floating thing that glowed with a frigid blue-white gleam above them.
“The moon,” Thaggoran called. “That is the moon!”
“The moon is round, like a ball, so you always told us,” Boldirinthe said.
“It changes,” said Thaggoran. “Sometimes it is like this, and sometimes its face is fuller.”
“Mueri! I feel the moonlight on my skin!” one of the men wailed. “Will it freeze me, Thaggoran? What will it do? Mueri! Friit! Yissou!”
“There’s nothing to fear,” Thaggoran said. But he was trembling now too. There is so much that is strange here, he thought. We are in another world. We are naked under these stars and this moon, and we know nothing, not even I, not even I, and everything is new, everything is frightening.
He found Koshmar. “We should make camp now,” he said. “It’s too dark to go on. And camping will give them something to do as the night comes over us.”
“What will happen in the night?” Koshmar asked.
Thaggoran shrugged. “Sleep will happen in the night. And then will come morning.”
“When?”
“When night is done,” he said.
They camped that first night in a depression beside a thinly flowing stream. As Thaggoran had thought, the work of halting and unpacking and building a campfire distracted the tribe from its fears. But they had hardly settled down when some sort of pale many-jointed insects as long as a man’s leg, with huge bulging yellow eyes and powerful-looking green legs tipped with nasty claws, came scuttering out of low mounds of earth nearby. The creatures were attracted by the light, it seemed, or perhaps the warmth of the fire. They looked fierce and ugly, and made a hideous clicking sound with their glossy red mandibles. The children and some of the women ran screaming away from them; but Koshmar came forward without fear and speared one with a quick contemptuous thrust. It pounded its two ends sadly against the ground a few moments before it became still. The others, seeing what had happened to their companion, crawled backward a dozen paces or so and stared sullenly. After a while longer they backed away into their holes again and were not seen again.
“These are greenclaws,” Thaggoran said, quickly inventing the name before Koshmar could question him. It embarrassed him not to know the names of the first two creatures they had encountered in the Time of Going Forth. There was nothing in the Book of the Beasts about these, either. He was sure of that.
Koshmar roasted the dead greenclaws in the fire that night, and she and Harruel and some of the other braver ones tasted its flesh. They reported that it had no particular taste at all; yet a few went back for second helpings. Thaggoran declined his share with tactful thanks.
In the night came another annoyance, small round creatures no larger than the ball of a man’s thumb, which moved in great lunatic leaps although they had no legs that could be seen. When they landed on someone they dug immediately in, deep down into the fur, and sank their little teeth into the flesh with a sensation that burned like a hot coal. From here and there about the camp outcries of annoyance and pain were heard, until everyone was awake, and the People gathered in a circle to groom one another, snapping the things between forefinger and thumb and pulling them free of the fur with no little difficulty. Thaggoran gave them the name of fireburs. They vanished with the dawn.