“Still at it, are you?” Harruel asked, and laughed. “By Dawinno, you’d better take care, or you’ll dig up an ice-eater down there!”
“Ice-eaters are all gone,” Salaman said, without breaking his rhythm. “Too warm for ice-eaters these days. Grab a shovel, Harruel! Come down here and do some digging. The work’ll do you good.”
“Pah! You think I have nothing better to do?”
Salaman did not reply. Teasing Harruel was always a risky game. He had gone as far as he dared. He bent himself to his task, and after a time he heard the king go lurching slowly away, grunting and wheezing.
Salaman’s trench was a long, winding thing that cut back and forth through the center of the City of Yissou like an immense dark serpent, running along the back of the royal palace, then between the house of Konya and Galihine and that of Salaman and Weiawala, and then in an undulating line that went curving around past the place where Lakkamai lived. It was deeper than a man was tall, and about as wide across as a man is through the shoulders.
He had dug most of it himself, with occasional help from Konya and Lakkamai, in his continuing search for some remnant of the death-star that he believed had struck here. Since the first days of the city’s existence he had managed to put in an hour or two nearly every day. He would dig for a while, carefully, meditatively, then carry the upturned earth back to fill in at the earlier end of the trench, so that it would not totally obstruct foot traffic in the city. As it was, it made him the butt of much humor and more than a little grumbling. But he went on steadily digging.
Salaman told the others that a piece of an actual death-star would be a holy talisman that could ward off any sort of peril. After a time he came to believe that himself. But his main purpose in digging was to prove to himself that the crater had indeed been formed by the impact of a plummeting star. Theories must have verification, Salaman told himself. One must not rely on guesswork alone. And so he dug on. He dreamed of striking shovel against metal, and finding some great mass of congealed iron lying in the ground just beyond the city’s edge, and shouting to the others to come and see, come and see.
He had found nothing so far, however, but stones and the thick roots of trees and occasional scraps of dead animals that some scavenger had buried. Perhaps the death-star lay so deep in the ground that he could not hope to dig down to it in five lifetimes; or perhaps, as he had suspected from the start, the death-stars had been made of some material that did not last, balls of fire or balls of ice, which did their terrible damage but left no remnant behind. The one hypothesis Salaman would not accept, because he was convinced it was false, was that this huge circular crater, so regular in form, so obviously an intrusion on the smoothness of the bland valley, could have been formed by anything other than a death-star. An entire civilization had perished under the impact of those falling stars; Salaman had no doubt that they would have left horrendous scars behind, and that the scars would be in the form of such craters as this one where Harruel had chosen to build the City of Yissou.
But death-stars were not uppermost in Salaman’s mind as he dug this morning. Today he was obsessed with that strange message from afar — if a message is what it was — which had come to him while he and Weiawala were touching their sensing-organs together on the high place south of the crater.
That insistent drumbeat throbbing. That pounding, rumbling sound. That frightening undercurrent of menace. His imagination, merely? No. No. The signal had been faint; the distance must be great; but Salaman was certain that he had not dreamed it. It had been subtle but it had been real. There was some movement out there, some stirring in the vastness of the continent. Perhaps there was a threat to the city. Perhaps there were precautions that could be taken.
Fearful, trembling, drenched in his own sweat, he dug like a madman for more than an hour, hacking through the ground as though all answers lay buried there. Bits of muddy sand clung to him everywhere. His fur became gritty with it. He felt it grinding between his teeth, and spat and spat without ridding himself of it. He dug with such lunatic force that the soil went spraying out in a wide arc behind him. He scarcely cared where he flung it. After a time he paused, heart thumping, eyes blurred with fatigue, to lean on his shovel and think.
Hresh would know what to do, he told himself.
Suppose you are discussing this with Hresh. What advice would Hresh give? I have received a message, but it is indistinct. It may be a message of great import, but I am unable to tell, because I cannot read it clearly. Tell me how you would proceed.
And Hresh would say, If a message is indistinct, Salaman, why, hold it to a brighter light!
Yes. Hresh always had a clever answer.
Salaman threw down his shovel and clambered from his ditch. In amazement he looked back at the ragged work he had done this morning, the wildly uneven cut, the dirt scattered everywhere all around. He shook his head in disapproval. Later he would have to mend it, he thought. Later.
Weary as he was, he forced himself to run. He circled past Lakkamai’s house, nearly bowled over an astounded Bruikkos, and sprinted up the trail that led toward the south rim of the crater. A demonic energy guided him. He felt Yissou perched on his right shoulder and Dawinno on his left, pouring their force into him; and there was the healing god Friit running just ahead of him, smiling, beckoning him on. Scrambling, stumbling, gasping, Salaman staggered to the crater’s edge, vaulted it, found new wind, went running madly on up the trail to his high place, his private viewing-point.
The earth in all its green majesty lay spread out before him.
He looked toward the sunlit southern hills, and paused a moment to gather his breath and collect his strength. Then he raised his sensing-organ and sent forth his second sight, that special perceptive skill that lay in reserve within all his kind. His sensing-organ became as rigid as a mating-rod. He aimed it toward the bright horizon and poured all the energy he had into it.
Once again he heard the throbbing sound: a low dull booming, resonating through the hills far away.
By second sight Salaman found himself at the edge of an understanding of that sound — but only at the edge. He saw a flash of color, a swatch of brilliant screaming scarlet. What did that mean? And then other colors: yellow, black, yellow, black, yellow, black, pulsing, pounding, alternating and repeating, over and over and over.
With those sensations came a profound feeling of terror that sent him down to the ground, crouching, quivering, digging his fingers deep into the rich loamy soil as if to anchor himself.
Something is coming this way, something frightening. But what? What?
He had held the message to a brighter light, and still the light was not bright enough. But he was aflame with resourcefulness now. Twining alone had not brought him clarity of vision; second sight alone had not, though the perception had been a deeper one. But twining and second sight, both at once—
Instantly Salaman was on his feet and running down the slope of the crater back into the city. In his frantic headlong plunge he dislodged all manner of pebbles and even larger rocks, so that a tiny avalanche accompanied him, and more than once he turned an ankle, though he let it slow him only for a moment. He knew that a kind of madness was upon him, that the fire of the gods had entered into him.
“Weiawala!” he called, as he burst into the center of the little city. “Where are you? Weiawala! Weiawala!”