A sense of panic filled Tambol. Many of those whom he had taught personally were gone. Only a few real believers remained, and they were filled with fear and doubting, so that his urgings for hope, for action, went unheeded. When the edict came down to the pens that there was to be no breeding, there was a general wail of despair.
"It is evident," Tambol told a selected group, "that the Devourers' intent is to wipe out all knowledge of what happened here. They are going to kill all of you, so that no one will be able to tell others that here pongs fought and killed their masters. There is only one thing to do. We must help as many as possible to escape. This will be possible in the confusion, for so many are being killed that a few more who do not return, for example, from their work outside the city walls will not be missed." Singly and in groups of two to five, those who saw the hopelessness of staying in Kooh began to move toward the west. In their desperation, knowing that they faced certain death if they stayed in Kooh, they ate as Tambol had instructed them to eat. Most lived to survive the winter march, and many found the valley where they were welcomed by the growing force under the command of Duwan the Elder.
If the Master was dead, and Tambol began to believe that he was, his dream was still alive, not burning brightly as it had burned when an army marched and slew the enemy, but flickering, nevertheless. Winter had also come to the northern canyon where Duwan had made his last stand. The snows were deep there, and, although the canyon floor was shielded from the worst of the cold winds, the stream was frozen and the tall and other fixed brothers were laden with snow and ice. Jai had accumulated firewood and food in the cave where she had wintered with Duwan before they had made the trek to the valley of the Drinkers. There she had her memories. She had intended to leave the valley before the snows, but another change, a puzzling one, had kept her there. When the change first began she had screamed out in horror. She had noticed it first on the second day after Duwan's death. She'd spent the night in the cave, shivering with loss and the cold, too tired to build a fire, and she'd made her way to where he was standing, planted in the earth, shortly after sunrise to see that things, living things, were attacking his thighs just above where they disappeared into the earth. The things seemed, actually, to be growing in his dead flesh, absorbing the congealing liquids that had seeped from his exposed cells. She screamed and reached out to jerk them away, but she could not bring herself to touch that mass of horror. That was Duwan, his remains, but it was not the Duwan she'd loved. His orange eyes, now burned to a dull rust by the heat of the sun, were no longer the eyes into which she'd loved to gaze, picking out the little individual flecks of color.
She could not see the things growing, but by the end of the second day they had extended upward a full handspan on his thighs. She was led to remember the think vines, the living green that could be directed by the minds of the valley Drinkers to form their huts. She had seen Duwan's grandmother and many others of the valley oldsters return to the earth. In fact, as chance would have it, Elnice of Arutan had chosen an opening in the very grove where Sema the elder grew. Was this, Jai wondered, the earth reclaiming her own? Was Duwan to become one of those whisperers?
She lay on the cold earth before him and watched as, little by little, his peeled flesh was taken by the thick growth of tendrils. The growth spread as it reached upward, and there formed a moss-like fuzz, an all-covering blanket that gradually began to obliterate the shape of separate legs and arms.
With the coming of the first serious snow Duwan's body was no longer recognizable. It was a fuzzy mass, rounded to a point at the top, an odd growth, but a part of the earth, so much so that birds landed there to preen themselves and once she saw a small ground creature standing on its rear legs nibbling at the moss-like covering. Then the snow began to hide the mass, drifting against it, lodging on it, and soon there was a white pillar standing there in the grove.
She had conflicting emotions. She felt a need to be away from the reminder of her sorrow, but, when she thought of going, the emptiness inside her grew and engulfed her so that she would go into her cave, curl into her bed of boughs by the fire and weep until she fell asleep. Then the snows were too deep, the weather too cold, to consider traveling, so she settled in and would not leave the cave for days, for she could supply her need for water by eating the snow that drifted into the entrance. In the quiet winter nights, with the cold so brittle that the smallest sound seemed to reverberate throughout the entire canyon, she relived every moment she'd had with Duwan and as she remembered there were the whispers, indistinct, distant but comforting. To her knowledge she was the only one, other than valley Drinkers, who could hear them now that Duwan was dead. The whisperings renewed her speculation about what had happened to Duwan. Had the earth claimed him? Other dead bodies moldered, rotted, were eaten by scavengers. (It was more pleasant in the valley since the snows, for the grisly reminders of death were, at least temporarily, covered by a blanket of pure white.) Was he, like the ancestors and those oldsters from the valley, alive? She could not understand how. His heart had stopped. When Sema the elder and the others went back to the earth they had been living, if hardening. No, she told herself, he was dead, deprived even of that doubtful existence as a tall brother.
She had not yet accepted that aspect of being a Drinker. To think of half-burying oneself in the earth to become a tree seemed almost as horrible as being killed and left to become a part of the earth through decay. But now that Duwan was of the earth, she began to wonder, and, as she heard the confused, indistinct whispers, she told herself that, when her time came, she would return to the canyon and join Duwan there, to be by his side for—how long? Forever? Did the tall brothers die? She'd seen them killed by Devourers, cut for their wood. How could anything, even a tree, live forever?
"What follows forever?" she asked, aloud.
"Eternity," came the answer, clearly.
She jumped, startled. She came to her knees on her bed of boughs and looked around. The fire had burned low. She threw on dead branches and the light flickered. The entrance was almost totally blocked by snow.
"Who?" she asked. "Is it you, Sema? Speak to me. Tell me of Duwan." Silence. Massed whisperings.
With the morning she went to the green pillar that had been Duwan and brushed away snow with a fresh bough. The moss-like covering was denser, and seemed to glow with life. She touched it. It was not unpleasant to the touch.
"Duwan," she whispered. "Do you live? If you live tell me, and I will join you now."
The silence activated her pain and in a frenzy she began to dig away at the snow until she reached the frozen earth and broke fingernails trying to dig a hole into which she would plant herself.
"Peace, daughter," the voice said inside her mind. "It is not your time. Rest. You will go with the coming of the change of seasons." She kept her vigil through the coldest months. There was no change. The green pillar did not grow. Was that to be his last and final form? She asked and received no answer.
"You're hateful," she told the whisperers, one night when she'd called and called and prayed to Duwan's Du without answer. "You can speak. You can tell me, and you won't. You are cruel. I will leave this place with the first thaw."
When it came, the change of season, it came suddenly. She awoke one morning to find that she was not, as usual, shivering with the cold. There was a sound of dripping water. Since the cave was dark, lit only by the fire and a slit for ventilation at the top of the newly banked snow, the coming of morning meant nothing to her, and she slept, often, until midday. She saw a trickle of melt water running down the inside of the snowbank at the entrance to wet the dry floor of the cave. She pushed an opening through the snow and looked out to see a wet, bright, dripping world. A mass of snow fell from the laden bough of a tree and made a wet, soggy sound. She went to the green pillar. Its snow covering was melting, too, exposing the rich, dark green color. The sun had a hint of warmth. She bared her arms and drank of it. Soon, she told herself, she would set out for the west.