There was hot fire running along the wounded part of his leg. Perhaps it wouldn't be such a bad thing, Silver Cloud thought, to step aside and let someone else bear the burden. And make an end to this pain and weariness forever.
Goddess Woman joined them now. "Has She Who Knows convinced you that we should attack?"
"No."
"Are you so much afraid to die?"
Silver Cloud laughed. "The question is more foolish than you realize, Goddess Woman. What I'm afraid of is that you will die, and Milky Fountain and Fights Like A Lion and Beautiful Snow and everyone else. My task is to keep the People alive, not to lead them into certain death."
"The snowy rime is coming. That will kill us also, if we stay out here in the open."
With a sigh he said, "Yes, yes, I know that, too."
"I didn't want to make this pilgrimage," Goddess Woman said. "Do you remember? I said there was no need to come all the way back here to learn the will of the Goddess. But Keeps The Past talked me into letting you have your way."
"I remember," said Silver Cloud patiently. "It makes no difference now. We are here. Can we leave, do you think, without speaking with the Goddess?"
"Perhaps the Goddess has already spoken," said Goddess Woman, "and what She has said is that we are fools led by a fool, and therefore we deserve to die. Better to die fighting against the enemy, in that case, than to die standing here, endlessly talking to one another while the snow piles up around us. Or perhaps you think-"
"Look," She Who Knows broke in. "One of the Other Ones is coming to talk to us!"
Silver Cloud swung around, startled. Yes, it was so: a tall young warrior carrying a spear that had a strip of red fur tied around its point had left the other camp and was heading toward them. As the envoy passed the area in front of the shrine, Broken Mountain, who was on sentry duty, bristled at him and presented his weapon. The Other One made an Other One sound at Broken Mountain and kept on going, striding past him without pausing.
Blazing Eye and Tree Of Wolves came out of the encampment and pointed to the Other One as if they thought Silver Cloud had not noticed him. They brandished their spears and indicated that they were ready to jump forward and attack. Silver Cloud angrily gestured at them to get back. What did they think, that this was a one-man war party? Obviously the man was coming here to talk. Obviously.
But how am I supposed to talk with an Other One? Silver Cloud wondered.
The envoy took a zigzag path over the snowy ground, going around the places where underground water made the surface marshy, and came across to the place along the riverbank where Silver Cloud was standing with She Who Knows and Goddess Woman. He elevated his spear in what could only have been some sort of gesture of greeting and waved it solemnly from side to side.
Silver Cloud lifted his own spear a little way from the ground by way of acknowledgment and lowered it again, and waited to see what would happen next.
The Other One made Other One sounds. To Silver Cloud they were like the groaning of an animal in pain.
"Do you think there's something wrong with him?" he asked She Who Knows.
"He's saying something. That's how they speak."
"That? Speaking? It's just noise."
"It's the way they speak," She Who Knows said, "I'm certain of that."
"All right," said Silver Cloud. "Tell me what he's trying to say, then."
"Ah. Ah. How can I do that?"
"You are She Who Knows. You say so yourself."
"I only know what I know. The language of the Other Ones is not something I know."
"Ah," said Silver Cloud. "So there's something you don't know! I've never heard you say a diing like that before, She Who Knows."
She gave him a sour smile and did not reply.
The Other One was speaking again. His voice was pitched very high, and he seemed to be straining as he spoke, pushing the sounds out, working hard to make his meaning clear, as though he were speaking to children. But there was no meaning. Silver Cloud stared intently, watching the man's mouth, and he could not make out a single intelligible word. The sounds that the Other One was making were not the sounds of speech.
Silver Cloud said, "Can't you speak properly? I can't understand you if you moan like that."
The Other One leaned forward and thrust his head outward to bring it closer to Silver Cloud and put ojie hand behind his ear, the way a deaf man does, although Silver CJoud had been speaking very loudly indeed. It was a strange pose. The Other One was very tall, unbelievably tall, head halfway to the sky, and when he leaned forward he looked like some long-legged bird of the marsh country. Silver Cloud stared at him with utter fascination. How did he keep his balance? How was it that he didn't fall over, standing on legs so thin and long? Or break in half when he moved? And the ugliness of him-that pale skin, like a ghost's-the way his face jutted out below his mouth, and the weird tininess of his features"I said, can't you speak properly? Speak in words if you want to talk to me!"
"Those are his words," She Who Knows said suddenly. "He has his own words." She had an odd look on her face, the look of one who has been struck by a strange new truth. "The Other Ones have a language of their own, different from ours."
"What?" Silver Cloud said, mystified. "What does that mean? There's only one language, She Who Knows. There are words that can be understood, and there are noises that can't. We can't understand what he's saying, and therefore his sounds are only noises. How can there be more than one language? The sky is the sky. A mountain is a mountain. Water is water, snow is snow. Everybody knows that. How can anyone call them by other names?"
"Two peoples-two languages. One language for us -a different one for them-"
The thought made Silver Cloud's head ache. There might actually be some sense to it, he had to admit-two peoples, two languages, why not? -but it was very difficult to think about such a thing now. Ideas like that needed careful contemplation at a quiet time. He pushed the problem aside and looked back toward the Other One.
He was speaking again, as unintelligibly as before.
This time he was making gestures too, perhaps trying to act out the message he had come here to deliver, seeing that speech was not turning out to be very useful. He pointed with his fur-wrapped spear at the shrine; he pointed at the hill country to the east out of which the People had come; he pointed westward, to the lands that ran toward the sea, which now belonged entirely to the Other Ones. He pointed to the shrine again. He pointed to Silver Cloud; he pointed to himself. He pointed to the shrine.
"Goddess Woman?" Silver Cloud said. "Do you make any sense of this?"
"He wants us to leave, so they can have the shrine!" Goddess Woman said immediately.
Silver Cloud wasn't so sure of that. There was too much back-and-forth pointing. If he were the one who had gone to the Other Ones to tell them to leave, he would simply have pointed to the shrine and to the Other Ones, and then to the western lands, and made a nicking gesture with his hand to tell them that they should go back where they had come. Anyone with any intelligence ought to be able to understand diat.
In fact, why not try it now? And he did.
The Other One watched him with the sort of look on his face that one might give a child who was stammering through some long-winded interruption of a perfectly sensible adult conversation. When Silver Cloud was done, the Other One responded by going through his whole point-at-this-point-at-that routine all over again.
She Who Knows said, "I think he's trying to tell us that we can share the shrine, his people and ours worshipping at it together."
"Share a shrine with filth?" Goddess Woman crkd. "The shrine is ours!"
"Is that what you're telling me?" Silver Cloud asked the Other One, speaking as slowly and loudly as he could. "You think that we both can use the shrine? But you can't be serious. It's a shrine of the Goddess. You aren't people of the Goddess. -Or are you? Are you?"
He waited, hoping for an answer he could understand.
But the Other One said incomprehensible Other One things again: He did the pointing-with-the-spear one more time.