"I will teach you the gift of storytelling," offered an ancient.
"The Watcher of the Fire needs no more than one hand," another said.
"Thank you, my friends and elders," Duwan said, "but I have not the memory for being a storyteller, and, as you well know, to watch the fire is a position of honor to be earned, not tossed to a disabled warrior as a sop to his pride."
"Drink," Duwan's father said, extending a cup. Duwan drank. He had to be carried to his sleeping pad in the small, private alcove of his father's house and he awakened much later with a bad taste in his mouth and the thunder of the land of the fires in his head. It was the time of the new greens, tender goodness plucked from certain low growing brothers without doing serious harm to them, and after he had accepted a dish from his mother and consumed it he felt better. He had not noticed, for she sat in shadows, that the old and hard and wrinkled figure of his grandmother was motionless in a corner.
"I saw you not, Grandmother," he said, "forgive me."
"I see you." the old one said.
"You see sadness and shame, Grandmother," he said. "You see a keeper of the young."
"I see one who escaped death." The old one rose with difficulty and moved jerkily until, with a creak of old limbs and a sigh, she sat on the pad next to Duwan.
"I don't know death," Duwan said sadly.
"It is not preferable to life," his grandmother said, as his mother nodded. "Perhaps, at this moment, you may think so."
"Never to climb into the gift of Du again?" Duwan said. "Is that not a form of death?"
"Walk to the south, go out of the valley, and bask in Du to your heart's content," his mother said.
Duwan made a motion of dismissal with his good hand.
The old one leaned down, her dimming eyes thrust close to the stump of Duwan's arm. Her rough, hard hands lifted his arm and put the stump even closer. She made a thoughtful, humming sound.
"It has healed well," Duwan said.
"Uramra," his grandmother hummed, as she lifted one crooked finger and tested the tender new tissue of the stump. Then, dropping the arm and looking into the emerald eyes of her daughter. "For your sake," she said softly, "I would not speak. For his?"
"Speak, Mother," Duwan's mother said, letting her eyes drop.
"I had a son," the old one said.
Duwan's interest was instantly aroused. He had never heard mention of a brother to his mother.
"He was of an age to you, my son," the old one said, putting her hands on Duwan's arm again. "And he, too, was of indecision between dishonor or death. At my insistence he chose to accept a false accusation. We will not go into details, for it is an old wound best left unopened. To ease my hurt, he chose against his inclinations. It was said that his fall from near the cliff top was an accident. I have never been sure. I do know that to prevent the risk of death he chose to abdicate his rightful position, as you have been asked to do, and I fear that, realizing his own mistake, he chose death with no hope."
"I am sorry, Grandmother," Duwan said, not knowing why the old one was telling him something that obviously gave her great pain.
"Ah," the old one said, "this does apply to you. Be patient." Once again she lifted Duwan's stump to her eyes and felt it carefully with her Fingers. Then she sighed. "Yes," she said, "the bud is there." For a few moments Duwan had known a frail hope, wishing more than expecting an answer to his dilemma. Now his heart sank and he closed his mind as his grandmother continued, for she was voicing one of the most ancient and least believable of all the bits of lore.
"With the full strength of Du, it will grow," the old one said. "Not here, not in our valley, but far to the south, where the darks and lights are of equal duration, where Du is strong, it will bud, and grow. So it was of old. So it is still. We are different, my son, we Drinkers. It was this difference that drove the Enemy, this difference that he scorned and feared and made an excuse for a war of extermination."
"Oh, Grandmother," Duwan said sadly, for he had hoped. He knew that the wisdom of the very old ones was often filled with unexpected and surprising bits of esoteric knowledge, but this hoary old folktale?
"Do not the fixed brothers grow limbs to replace the lost?" the old one asked.
"They are fixed," he said.
"They are of the earth and for the earth," his grandmother said. "And of a blood to us, the Drinkers." She removed her hands from his arm. "It is up to you to believe or not to believe. Better for your mother that you disbelieve, for since we have lived in the valley no one has returned from the south."
"They were burned in the land of the fires," Duwan said.
"There is a way through the fires."
He wanted to believe. The mere possibility of belief had a perverse effect on him, bringing home to him the extent of his disaster. To lose Alning, that was certain, in spite of her protestations that nothing had changed. She would change when she saw him carrying, with his one arm, the nutrient containers for the young, when she saw him mucking in the soil, cleaning the insentient sprouts, when she came to him to find him reeking of bird droppings. Not that it was a job beneath his abilities, for he had, by choice, participated, as did most, and a few had the calling and were proud of their sure touch with the sprouts, but his calling was to arms.
"Have you seen this thing with your own eyes?" he asked. The old one shook her head. "Nor have I seen the old take root and become one with the earth. Here, where Du is weak, we see the wasting disease, and I, myself, feel it. But, nevertheless, in the south the old do not die, and in the south new limbs grow to replace those lost, unless the buds are damaged, and your bud is intact. In fact, even in this place where Du is weak and there is not the power, it has started." She lifted his arm, traced the cone-shaped protrusion that had accumulated on the stump. He felt the touch, felt a peculiar, stretching feeling in the skin of the stump, and he almost believed.
"The way through the fires," he said.
The old one closed her eyes, as if that aided memory, and in a sing-song chant said, "Between two smoking mountains Du shows his face at evening over a lake of fire, but one mountain is broken, and the fires drain not on the eastern slope, for there the smoking rock is cooled by springs. A layering of the skin of the needled brother smokes, but prevents the burning of the feet. A dash, a rest beside a spring, new layers of the skin of the needled brother brings one to the lake of fire where the skin pains and shrivels, but a turn to the west leads past the lake of fire into fields of cool, hardened ash."
"So it was said of old?" Duwan asked.
"So it was passed on, for your father's father, five times removed, planned to return once the Drinkers had rested, and had reinforced themselves by sprout with many warriors. He did not know the enervating effect of life without the full strength of Du, and that the dims and darks would limit sprouting, so that five generations have not replaced the losses in one."
"The ancient ones planned to return to the Land of Many Brothers?"