"Like nests," said Luet.

Nafai nodded. For although they had never seen an angel nest with their own eyes, they had heard the descriptions pTo and Poto gave them, they had looked at the drawings they made, and finally they dreamed them and awoke from the dreams sure that the Keeper of Earth had shown them the truth. Woven and thatched out of supple twigs and grasses, the nests were really roofs sheltering the branches where the wives and young ones slept, hanging head down, wrapped in the blanket of their own wings.

Somewhere in the branches, in the surrounding trees, they knew the angels were watching them. Judging them.

Issib glided forward, his feet not touching the ground; Hushidh followed him, quietly telling him where the angels were, and which ones did not seem well connected to pTo and Poto. Those were the ones who needed to be won over, of course, and Issib, standing in the air-a trick that no one else, not even Nafai with his cloak, could do-he overawed them, the god visible, the only one who could fly.

"Where is Iguo, when her husband comes home to her?" Issib called out loudly in the language of the angels. He knew his voice would be hard to understand, pitched as low as it was, but he spoke quickly, hoping that the consonants would be enough of a guide to help them grasp his words.

No one emerged from the forest, but that was no surprise, not yet.

"His wing was torn, but now there is no tear in it. Do you think we will harm you, we who can heal the torn wing of a brave explorer?"

Still no one came forward.

"When the angry Old One harmed pTo, it was because he thought it was you, the people, who carried off his baby. We did not yet know the dark underground way of the devils."

Luet had argued against using the angels' word for the diggers, but Issib had insisted that they had to speak to them in language they would understand. "After all, Elya and Okya call the angels skymeat when they talk to the diggers, don't they?" Issib had pointed out. Everyone agreed then that devils was certainly no worse a word to use than that.

Issib went on addressing the invisible angels. "Now we know that the people do not come down the canyon to steal our children. Instead we see that when one brave man has been stricken down unjustly, his otherself, a man as brave as the first, will come down to care for him and save him if he can."

At last a few of the angels began letting themselves be seen, hopping forward to the leading branches of the trees that surrounded the clearing. Some of them stood upright atop the branches; others hung from them, head downward. It was dizzying to watch them, but Issib went on. "Now we know that the people who might have stopped brave Poto chose to let him come. These are the people who hoped for friendship with us, with the Old Ones who have been brought home by the Keeper of Earth."

There had been some argument about that, too. The angels had no concept of the Keeper of Earth, but Nafai had insisted that the name must be introduced from the beginning. "They'll find out soon enough that we aren't gods," Nafai had said. "Let it never be said we lied to them."

"As we lied to the diggers?" asked Luet mildly.

"We aren't trying to rescue a kidnapped baby from the angels," Nafai pointed out. "We're trying to make friends with people who have only seen us be mindlessly cruel. We're not going to let them see us as gods, even if we do get their attention by having Issib do his hovering trick."

So now Issib spoke the name of the Keeper of Earth, using the translation that pTo and Poto had given them, when they finally understood what and who the Keeper was. Or rather, when they understood as much as the humans did, as much as they could explain with their rudimentary mastery of the angels' difficult language.

"The Old Ones ask you to forgive us for our mistake, We did not know you then, but we know you now. Through these two brave and virtuous men we know you. Through the healing of pTo's wing you know us.

Let the four of us dwell among you. But first, let Iguo come forward to join her husband. Come and see, Iguo, that his body is whole, that it is truly pTo that we have brought back to you."

They waited then, doing nothing, saying nothing except for pTo's and Poto's occasional murmurs of reassurance. Patience. Have patience. This is a difficult thing, for them to decide whether to let Iguo come to us.

She came, fluttering awkwardly under the branches of the nearer trees until she reached the clearing. Her awkwardness, they soon saw, was because two infants clung to the fur of her chest, unbalancing her as she flew. pTo gasped in surprise, while Poto sang in delight. "Sons," he sang. "The wife of the broken one gave him sons while he healed. Now his joy is doubled and doubled again, for he returns to the woman he left as a wife and finds her now as a mother." pTo leapt from Luet's head and landed before his wife. The two of them spoke softly, rapidly, the music of their voices beautiful together even though none of the humans could make sense of the words they said. As Iguo inspected pTo's body, especially the wing that had once been torn, pTo in his turn examined the two babies that she left in the grass at his feet. They could stand, even if they could not fly, and though their words were halting and babyish, they knew to call him Father, and pTo wept shamelessly to be able to touch them with his fingertips and his tongue, to have them climb up his body and frolic under the canopy of his wings.

At last Iguo turned back to the waiting angels. "What cannot be healed has been healed," she said. "What was lost forever has been found. Therefore let that which cannot be forgiven be forgiven, and let friendship bind the guests who have come to us, weave them into our hearts and our families, our nests and our trees."

It was the formal proposal that pTo and Poto had primed them to wait for. And now came the vote. Only a few dropped out of the trees to the ground to show their displeasure or their misgivings. And when the voting was finished, all those who had said yes by remaining in the trees now took flight, rising over the clearing, swarming and frolicking and singing, then darting down, a few at a time, to touch the humans, to see them with hands and feet as well as with their eyes, to hear their voices as they struggled with the difficult language.

"Dapai," they called Nafai, because they could not pronounce the nasal and fricative of his name. "Quet," they called Luet, now using the deep guttural plosive as their substitute for the unpronounceable L. "Ittib" was Issib, and "Kucheed" was Hushidh. pTo had corn-plained that the Old Ones seemed to have chosen all their names to make them impossible for the people to say them.

But Dapai, Quet, Ittib, and Kucheed were close enough. The angels had spoken their names and welcomed them. With the chair tagging along behind, they followed the soaring, swarming angels down into the valley that was their home.

THIRTEEN - KILLINGS

Vas meant no harm. He was simply an observant man, and a compassionate one. In the months that had passed since Elemak brutalized that flying nightmare they called an angel and Eiadh repudiated him in front of everybody, Vas noticed that the chill between Elemak and Eiadh seemed not to have thawed. Indeed, as far as he could tell the two of them were not speaking to each other, and Elemak managed to spend almost no time in the same house with his wife. Not that Vas normally kept track of people's comings and goings. It was simply a matter of happening to observe that Elemak was staying in the ship with the digger hostage, learning to hum and hiss when he spoke, and poor Eiadh was without a male companion in her life.

Well, Vas was nearly as lonely. Sevet, his dear wife, who had regularly betrayed him back in Basilica, now had betrayed him again by growing thick-bellied from bearing so many children. Worse, she had none of the bright charm that he had loved back when he had contracted to marry her for a few years. In those days she had been a celebrity, a singer, popular and well-loved. It had been quite a coup for Vas to be the man on her arm.