Hain groveled all the more at this thought suddenly placed in her witless head.
“And your name shall now be Kokur, nor will you answer to any other but it, and so you will stay and so you will be until you have successfully carried out my tasks. Then only will you be restored to a name, and then that name will be great. Go, now. My servant shall show you your duties until I shall call you for the task.”
She turned and left the office quickly, on quivering legs.
When the door closed behind her, the baron relaxed.
Well, he thought, it is done. For the next few days, if The Diviner and The Rel were successful, Datham Hain would truly be as low as one could get. Although consciously obedient and happy, that nasty subconscious would be helplessly humiliated by the job and the status, and that was perfect. After a few days, Hain would be willing to do anything to get out of there, and she would be offered a permanent return to that miserable state as opposed to elevation as high as she could possibly reach.
Hain would serve him, he felt confidently.
Kokur wasn’t a name, it was a job description.
Until The Diviner and The Rel returned, Datham Hain would work in the defecation pits, piling up the huge amounts of crap his barony produced—including her own—and then treating it with a series of chemicals and agents that would change its composition into a horrible but physically harmless mess. Hain would not only work there, she would sleep in it, walk in it, and, as her sole diet, eat it. And the only name she could respond to or think of herself as was Kokur, which meant dung-eater.
When off with The Diviner and The Rel, it would be a constant and humiliating reminder of her lowly status and her lifelong fate for failure, a reminder that would even reach others through the translating devices used around the Well World.
Datham Hain would be a most obedient slave.
Actually kind of attractive, he thought. Too bad she’s a breeder.
DILLIA—MORNING
(Enter Wu Julee, Asleep)
Wu Julee awoke from a dreamless sleep and looked around. She felt strange and slightly dizzy.
The overriding fact that hit her was that the pain was gone.
She closed her eyes and shook her head briskly. The dizziness worsened for a moment, then things seemed to steady.
She looked around.
She was in a beautiful forest, the likes of which she had never seen before. Trees grew straight as poles fifty or more meters in the air, almost disappearing into a slight morning mist. The undergrowth was equally lush and a vivid green. Beautiful flowers grew wildly all around her. There was a trail nearby, a nicely maintained one made of deep sawdust lined with small, irregular stones. There was a slight but steady roaring sound in the distance, but it didn’t seem threatening, only curious.
The path seemed to lead toward the roar in one direction, and she decided to follow it. Walking felt strange to her, but she thought little of it. She felt strange all over. She walked slowly down the trail about a kilometer, and it led her to the source of the increasing roar.
She came upon a waterfall, dropping majestically in three stages down the side of a mountain whose gray rocks were well worn by uncounted years of erosion. The falls fed a stream, or river, which flowed swiftly but rather shallowly over a rocky bottom seen clearly through the greenish tinge to the water’s surface. Here and there, she saw logs and remnants of logs that had fallen due to weathering or age. Many were covered with mossy yellow-green growths and several were nurse trees, their dead and decaying limbs providing a haven from which newer trees of a different type were growing. Small insects hummed and buzzed all around, and she watched them curiously.
A sudden crackle of underbrush made her turn with a start. She saw a small, brown-furred mammal with a rodent’s face and a broad flat tail jump into the stream carrying a twig in its mouth. Her eyes followed it until it made the opposite shore and ran into the underbrush formed by swampy weeds and long grains of grassy plants diagonally opposite her.
Still acting without conscious thought, like a newborn child seeing the world for the first time, she went up to the stream just far enough down that she wasn’t caught in the spray from the great falls.
She looked down at her reflection. She saw the face of a young woman barely in her teens, a face that looked back at her. Not beautiful, but pleasant, with long brown hair falling down over small but well-formed breasts.
She reached up with one hand and brushed back the hair on one side. Her skin was a light brown, her palms a slightly lighter color but seemingly made of a tougher skin. I’ve got pointy ears, she thought, seeing them revealed by the brushed-back hair. And they were pointed, the insides a soft pink. Although not really large, she realized that they would probably protrude slightly if she stood perfectly erect. On some sort of impulse, she tried to wiggle her ears—and they moved noticeably!
Then she looked down at her body. At the waist the very light down that began just below her breast thickened into hair of the same color as her skin. Her eyes moved down to two stocky legs that ended in large, flat hooves.
That’s strange, she thought. Hooves and pointed ears that wiggle.
For no reason in particular she turned her body at the waist almost halfway around, and looked in back of her. A long, sturdy-looking equine body supported by two hind legs was clearly visible—and a tail! A big, brushy tail she found she could wiggle.
What am I? she thought in sudden fear. Where is this?
She tried to remember, but could not.
It’s as if I was just born, she thought. I can’t remember anything. Not my name, not anything.
The reflection and the body looked totally strange to her.
I remember the words, she thought. I know that this is a stream and that is a waterfall and that that person in the water is a reflection of me, and I’m a young girl.
She hadn’t even realized she was a girl until then.
There was a term for this, she thought, and she tried to remember it. Amnesia, that was it. People who couldn’t remember their past. Somehow she felt that she had never been to this place before, and that something was different about her, but she couldn’t think of what. She just stood there by the edge of the stream for several minutes in stunned silence, not knowing what else to do. Several insects buzzed around her rear, and with an automatic motion she brushed them away with her tail.
Suddenly her ears picked up the sound of laughing—a girl and a boy, she thought. They were coming down the trail! Quickly, almost in panic, she looked around for a place to hide, but found none before the pair came trotting down the path. They look like the top half of people stuck onto the bodies of working ponies, her mind thought. Her face turned quizzically at the thought. What were people anyway, if not these? And what were ponies?
The two beings were not really large, but the boy was almost a head taller and proportionately larger than the girl. The male was a golden color, with silver-white hair down to his shoulders and a full beard, neatly trimmed, of the same color. The girl, curiously, was a mottled gray mixed with large black spots, and this coloration extended to her upper torso. Her hair was a mixed gray and black, her gray breasts much fuller than the amnesiac onlooker’s.
No navels, she thought inanely. We don’t have navels.
The pair saw her and stopped almost in midlaugh. They surveyed her curiously, but without any trace of hostility or alarm. “Hello!” called the boy—he looked no more than fourteen or fifteen, the girl about the same. The voice was a pleasant tenor, with a slight, indefinable accent. “I don’t think we’ve seen you here before.”