The guards opened the gate, threatening the crowding yumens inside with their spears; Gosse reentered the compound, his big shoulders hunched as if against the rain.
Selver was very tired. The head woman of Berre and another woman came to him and walked with him, his arms over their shoulders so that if he stumbled he should not fall. Tne young
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hunter Greda, a cousin of his Tree, joked with him, and Selver answered light-headedly, laughing. The walk back to Endtor seemed to go on for days.
He was too weary to eat. He drank a little hot broth and lay down by the Men's Fire. Endtor was no town but a mere camp by the great river, a favorite fishing place for all the cities that had once been in the forest round about, before the yumens came. There was no Lodge. Two fire-rings of black stone and a long grassy bank over the river where tents of hide and plaited rush could be set up, that was Endtor. The river Menend, the master river of Soraol, spoke ceaselessly in the world and in the dream at Endtor.
There were many old men at the fire, soine whom he knew from Broter and Tuntar and His own destroyed city Eshreth, some whom he did not know; he could see in their eyes and gestures, and hear in their voices, mat they were Great Dreamers; more dreamers than had ever been garnered in one place before, perhaps. Lying stretched out full length, his head raised on his hands, gazing at the fire, he said, "I have called the yumens mad. Am I mad myself?"
"You don't know one time from the other," said old Tubab, laying a pine-knot on the fire, "because you did not dream'either sleeping or waking for far too long. The price for that takes long to pay."
"The poisons the yumens take do much the same as does the lack of sleep and dream," said Heben, who had been a slave both at Central and at Smith Camp. "The yumens poison themselves in order to dream. I saw the dreamer's look in them after they took the poisons. But they couldn't call the dreams, nor control them, nor weave nor shape nor cease to dream; they were driven, overpowered. They did not know what was within them at all. So it is with a man who hasn't dreamed for many days. Though he be the wisest of his Lodge, still he'll be mad, now and then, here and there, for a long time after. He'll be driven, enslaved. He will not understand himself."
A very old man with the accent of South Soraol laid his hand on Selver's shoulder, caressing him, and said, "My dear young god, you need to sing, that would do you good."
"I can't. Sing for me."
The old man sang; others joined in, their voices high and reedy, almost tuneless, like the wind blowing in the water-reeds of Endtor. They sang one of the songs of the ash-tree, about the delicate parted leaves mat turn yellow in autumn when the berries turn red, and one night the first frost silvers them.
While Selver was listening to the song of the Ash, Lyubov lay down beside him. Lying down he did not seem so monstrously tall and large-limbed. Behind him was the half-collapsed, fire-gutted building, black against the stars. "I am like you," he said, not looking at Selver, in that dream-voice which tries to reveal its own
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untruth. Selver's heart was heavy with sorrow for hisfriend. *Tvegotaheadache,"Lyubovsaidin his own voice, rubbing the back of his neck as he always did, and at that Selver reached out to touch him, to console him. But he was shadow and firelight in the world-time, and the old men were singing the song of the Ash, about the small white flowers on the black branches in spring among the parted leaves.
The next day the yumens imprisoned in the compound sent for Selver. He came to Eshsen in the afternoon, and met with them outside the compound, under the branches of an oak tree, for all Selver's people felt a little uneasy under the bare open sky. Eshsen had been an oak grove; this tree was the largest of the few the colonists had; left standing. It was on the long slope behind Lyubov's bungalow, one of the six or eight houses that had come through the night of the burning undamaged. With Selver under the oak were Reswan, the headwoman of Berre, Gredaof Cadast, and others who wished to be in on the parley, a dozen or so in all. Many bowmen kept guard, fearing the yumens might have hidden weapons, but they sat behind bushes or bits of wreckage left from the burning, so as not to dominate the scene with the hint of threat. With Gosse and Colonel Dongh were three of the yumens called officers and two from-the logging camp, at the sight of one of whom, Ben ton, the ex-slaves drew in their breaths. Benton had used to punish "lazy creechies* by castrating mem in public.
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The Colonel looked thin, his normally y<&>w-brown skin a muddy yellow-grey; his illness had been no sham. "Now the first thing is," he said when they were all settled, the yumens standing, Selver's people squatting or sitting on the damp, soft oak-leaf mold, "the first thing is that I want first to have a working definition of just precisely what these'terms of yours mean and what they mean in terms of guaranteed safety of my personnel under my command here.'*
There was a silence.
"You understand English, don't you, some of you?"
"Yes. I don't understand your question, Mr. Dongh."
"Colonel Dongh, if you please!"
"Then you'll call me Colonel Selver, if you please.'' A singing note came into Selver's voice; he stood up, ready for the contest, tunes running in his mind like rivers.
But the old yumen just stood there, huge and heavy, angry yet not meeting the challenge. "I did not come here to be insulted by you little humanoids," he said. But his lips trembled as he said it. He was old, and bewildered, and humiliated. All anticipation of triumph went out of Selver. There was no triumph in the world any more, only death. He sat down again. "I didn't intend insult, Colonel Dongh," he said resignedly. "Will you repeat your question, please?"
*' I want to hear your terms, and then you * 11 hear ours, that's all there is to it."
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Selver repeated what he had said to Gosse.
Dongh listened with apparent impatience. "All right. Now you don't realize that we've had a functioning radio in the prison compound for three days now." Selver did know this, as Reswan had at once checked on the object dropped by the helicopter, lest it be a weapon; the guards reported it was a radio, and he let the yumens keep it. Selver merely nodded. "So we've been in contact with the three outlying camps, the two on King Land and one on New Java, right along, and if we had decided to make a break for it and escape from that prison compound then it would have been very simple for us to do that, with the helicopters to drop-us weapons and covering our movements with their mounted weapons, one flamethrower could have got us. out of the compound and in case of need they also have the bombs that can blow up an entire area. You haven't seen those in action of course."
"If you'd left the compound, where would you have gone?"
* 'The point is, without introducing into mis any beside the point or erroneous factors, now we are certainly greatly outnumbered by your forces, but • we have the four helicopters at the camps, which there's no use you trying to disable as they are under fully armed guard at all times now, and also all the serious fire-power, so that the cold reality of the situation is we can pretty much call it a draw and speak in positions of mutual equality. This of
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course is a temporary situation. If necessary we are enabled to maintain a defensive police action to prevent all-out war. Moreover we have behind us the entire fire-power of the Terran Interstellar Fleet, which could blow your entire planet right out of the sky. But these ideas are pretty intangible to you, so let's just put it as plainly and simply as I can, that we're prepared to negotiate with you, for the present time, in terms of an equal frame of reference."
Selver's patience was short; he knew his ill-temper was a symptom of his deteriorated mental state, but he could no longer control it. "Go on, then!"