The lady Suukmel Chirot u Vaadai was to become his partner in this task. By the time Danny met her, she was not the wife but the widow of the Mala Njeri ambassador to the court of Hlavin Kitheri, a woman bereft of status but not of respect, and well past middle age. Danny was enthralled by her from the start, but Suukmel was wary and inclined, herself, to delay trust in the man she knew as Dani Hi’r-norse.

Even so, as Danny’s hair grayed and Suukmel’s face whitened, there came a day when she and the foreigner could meet for pleasure and not only for policy. He believed, as she did, that the past was not dead but alive, and important by virtue of the very invisibility of its influence. When she discovered this, their friendship began in earnest.

It became their custom to walk together every morning, their path following the foothills encircling the N’Jarr valley, and to speak as they walked of what Suukmel now understood and wished Danny to understand as well. Danny would often begin these talks with a proverb, inviting her to respond. "On Earth, there is a saying: The past is another country," he told her once, and Suukmel found this a useful notion, for she did indeed feel a foreigner in the present. But even when she disagreed with Danny’s maxims, the exercise was interesting.

"Power corrupts," he suggested one day, as they started up the slope to the ring path on one of their earliest walks. "And absolute power corrupts absolutely."

"Fear corrupts, not power," she countered. "Powerlessness debases. Power can be used to good effect or ill, but no one is improved by weakness," she told him. "The powerful can more easily cultivate longsightedness. They can be patient—even generous—in the face of opposition, knowing that they will prevail eventually. They do not feel that their lives are futile, because they have reason to believe that their plans will become reality."

"Do you speak of yourself, my lady Suukmel?" Danny asked, smiling. "Or of Hlavin Kitheri?"

She paused to consider him. "There were certain harmonies of soul," she said carefully before resuming her ascent. Then she continued, "It was when Hlavin Kitheri was merely Reshtar that his life was corrupt. He was desperate, and he had the vices of desperation. This changed when he took power."

The path became steep and treacherous with scree, and for a time they climbed in silence. A little winded near the top, Suukmel sat on a fallen tupa’s smooth, substantial trunk, and gazed across the N’Jarr toward mountains rising from the ground like colossal projectiles shot from the center of Rakhat. "Of course, power can come to inadequate people," she admitted, when her breath again came easily. "Dull minds, small hearts, impoverished souls could once inherit power. Now such people can grasp it, or buy it, or stumble into power by chance." Her voice hardened. "Power does not necessarily ennoble." She said this looking south, and rose once more to her feet. "Tell me, Dani, why do you spend so much time with old women?" she asked with a sidelong glance as they resumed their walk.

He offered his strange naked hand to help her around an eroded ditch that thwarted the trail. "When I was very young," he told her, "my father’s beforemother came to live with us. She would tell us tales of the old times, which she herself had learned from her own beforemothers. Everything had changed, during those few generations. Everything."

"Do you remember her stories?" Suukmel asked him. "Perhaps," she suggested lightly, "knowledge of earlier times was of no use to you."

"I remember them." Danny stopped, and Suukmel turned back to see him looking at her—shyly, she thought. "But I was a scholar in my own land. So I tested the truth of the tales that came to me from five generations removed against the research of many other scholars."

"And did your beforemothers remember truly?" she asked.

"Yes. The tales proved themselves not stories but history. Why else would I spend so much time with old ladies now?" he teased, and she laughed.

"Change can be good," Suukmel said then, walking once more. "Many Jana’ata still believe as we all did in ages past: that change is dangerous and wrong. They believe everything my lord Kitheri did was error—that he was wicked to change a way of life bequeathed from one generation to the next without degradation or fallacy. Can you understand this? Have you such perfection on your H’earth, Dani?"

Danny fought a smile. "Oh, yes. I myself am a member of a ’church’ that is believed by many to be an infallible repository of timeless truth."

"My lord Kitheri and I considered this problem very carefully," Suukmel told him. "It was our belief that any institution considering itself the guardian of truth will value constancy, for change by definition introduces error. Such institutions always have powerful mechanisms to shore up invariance and defend against change."

"Appeal to tradition," he said, "and to authority. And to divinity."

"Yes, all those," she said serenely. "Nevertheless, change can be desirable or necessary, or both at once! How then does a wise prince introduce change when the generations have enshrined a practice or a prohibition that now harms or cripples?"

She stopped to look at him directly, no longer startled by the clarity of near vision she now enjoyed, with no veil to film her eyes. "Tell me, Dani, do you tire of an old woman?" Suukmel asked, head tilted in speculation. "Or shall I tell you of those first days of Kitheri’s reign?" Even now, knowing what would come, her eyes still glowed with the excitement of those times.

"Please," he said. "Everything you can remember." And so she began.

THE FIRST OF KITHERI’S DECREES MET WITH NO RESISTANCE, FOR HE merely revived the tournaments that had fallen out of practice: the dance duels, the massed voices of choir battles. "Not change," Suukmel murmured in conspiratorial remembrance. "Simply a return to earlier ways— which were, as he said, purer and closer to the old truth."

Soon, Kitheri established national competitions in poetry, architecture, engineering, mathematics, optics, chemistry. Having sworn during his investiture as Paramount to uphold the immutable Inbrokari order, he had to leave the ancient lines of inheritance untouched, and so prizes in such competitions were of no intrinsic value. "Tokens, merely," Suukmel said dismissively. "A single traja’anron blossom, or a pennant, or a rhyming triplet composed by the Paramount himself." But it was not long before there were acceptable ways for warriors with a scholarly bent or third-born merchants of athletic talent to hone their knowledge or skills: to be recognized for what they had within, and not merely for what they had been born to.

"Parallel hierarchies, based on competence," Danny observed. "Open to all, and bleeding off discontent. Your idea, my lady?"

Not since Hlavin had she enjoyed a man’s company so well. "Yes," she said, eyes downcast but pleased. "These competitions allowed my lord Kitheri to identify men of talent, wit, imagination, energy."

Drawing on a lifetime of well-used confinement, Suukmel Chirot u Vaadai had learned that almost any event or condition could be turned to advantage. "Locally strong government or evidence of incompetence could be equally favorable to the Paramount’s purpose, since both engendered resentment in the ranks below," she told Danny during another stroll. "My lord Kitheri was third-born, and trained therefore in law as well as combat. He could nearly always find legal precedent for deposing uncomfortably powerful or egregiously stupid nobles when younger brothers were better men, more attuned to the new regime. Where legal means were lacking," she said dryly, "accidents were encouraged to occur." Ears cocked forward, she invited him to comment.

"With the Paramount’s complicity?" Danny asked. Suukmel did not deny it. "So those who acceded under these conditions did so knowing whose influence made their own rise possible. Their claims to power and position would have been every bit as questionable as Hlavin Kitheri’s." He thought a moment. "Such men would have formed a reliable cadre of supporters, I think. Their fate was bound up with his."