After a pause, Gren came out of the cave.

Walking slowly, slack-kneed, he approached her.

She could not tell whether she sweated from the heat or the tension. Because she was afraid to gaze on that pulpy mash that covered his face, Yattmur shut her eyes, opening them again only when she felt him near, fixing them on him as he stooped over her and the child. Uttering his pleased noise, Laren stretched up his arms with complete confidence 'Sensible boy!' said Gren in his alien voice. 'You are going to be a child apart, a wonder child, and I shall never leave you.'

Now she shivered so violently that she could not hold the baby still. But Gren was bending close now, down on his knees, so near she caught an acrid and clammy odour from him. Through the fluttering fringes of her eyelashes she saw the fungus on his face begin to move.

It hung above Laren's head, gathering ready to drop on him. Her vision was full of it, peppered with spongy spores, and with a slab of the big boulder and one of the empty gourds. She believed herself to be breathing in short screams, so that Laren commenced to cry – and again the tissue slid over Gren's face with the reluctant movement of stiff porridge.

'Now!' cried Sodal Ye in a Voice which twitched her into action.

Yattmur whipped the empty gourd forward, over the child.

The morel was caught in the bottom as it fell, trapped by the plan the sodal had devised. As Gren sagged sideways, she saw his true face twisted like a rope in a knot of pain. The light ebbed and flowed, quick as a pulse, but she only knew something screamed, not recognizing her own high note before she collapsed.

Two mountains clashed together like jaws with a bloated and squalling version of Laren lost between them. Thrown back to her senses. Yattmur sat up with a jerk and the monstrous vision fled.

'So you are not dead,' said the catchy-carry-kind gruffly. 'Kindly get up and silence your child, since my women are unable to do so.'

It was incredible that everything was much as it had been before she fainted, so long had she seemed to be enveloped in night. The morel lay inert in the gourd that had trapped it, with Gren face down beside it. Sodal Ye was atop his boulder. The pair of tattooed women hugged Laren to their withered breasts without being able to hush his cries.

Yattmur stood up and took him from them, putting his mouth to one of her own plump breasts, where he at once began pulling greedily and was silent. To feel him there gradually stilled her trembling.

She stooped over Gren.

He turned his face towards her when she touched his shoulder.

'Yattmur,' he said.

Weak tears stood in his eyes. All over his shoulders, in his hair, across his face, ran a red and white stippling where the probes of the morel had gone down into his skin for nourishment.

'Has it gone?' he asked, and his voice was his own again.

'Look at it,' she said. With her free hand, she tilted the gourd over so that he could see in.

For a long while he stared down at the still-living morel, helpless and motionless now, lying like excrement in the gourd. His inner vision was looking back – more with amazement now than fear – at the things that had been since the morel first dropped on him in the forests of Nomansland, the things that had passed like a dream: how he had travelled through lands and performed actions and above all held knowledge in his mind in ways that would have been unknown to his former free self.

He saw how all this had come about under the agency of the fungus that now was no more potent than a burnt mess of food in the bottom of a dish; and quite coolly he saw how he had at first welcomed this stimulus, for it had helped him overcome the limitations natural to him. Only when the morel's basic needs conflicted with his own had the process become evil, driving him almost literally out of his own mind, so that in working to the dictates of the morel he had almost preyed on his own kind.

It was over. The parasite was defeated. He would never again hear the inner voice of the morel twanging through his brain.

At that, loneliness more than triumph filled him. But he searched wildly along the corridors of his memory and thought, He has left me something good: I can evaluate, I can order my mind, I can remember what he taught me – and he knew so much.

Now it seemed to him that for all the havoc the morel had caused, he had found Gren's mind like a little stagnant pool and left it like a living sea – and it was with pity he looked down into the bowl that Yattmur held out to him.

'Don't weep, Gren,' he heard Yattmur's voice say. 'We are safe, we are all safe, and you will be all right.'

He laughed shakily.

'I shall be all right,' he agreed. He formed his scarred face into a smile and stroked her arms. 'We shall all be all right.'

Then reaction hit him. He rolled over and was instantly asleep.

Yattmur was busy, when Gren awoke, attending to Laren who squealed with delight as she washed him by the mountain stream. The tattooed women were also there, carrying water back and forth to pour over the catchy-carry-kind on his slab, while nearby stood the carrying man, cramped into his habitual gesture of servitude. Of the tummy-bellies, there was no sign.

He sat up gingerly. His face was puffy but his head clear; what then was the jarring he could feel that had woken him? He caught a glimpse of movement from the corner of his eye, and turning saw a trickle of stones roll down a gully some way off. At another point, more stones rolled.

'An earthquake is in progress," said Sodal Ye in a cavernous voice. 'I have discussed it with your mate Yattmur and have told her there is no need for alarm. The world is ending on schedule, according to my predictions.'

Gren rose to his feet and said, 'You have a big voice, fish face; who are you?'

'I delivered you from the devouring fungus, little man, for I am the Sodal and Prophet of the Nightside Mountains, and all the denizens of the mountains hear what I have to say."

Gren was still thinking this over when Yattmur came up and said, 'You've slept so long since the morel left you. We too have slept, and now we must prepare to move.'

'To move? Where is there to go from here?'

'I will explain to you as I explained to Yattmur,' said the sodal, blinking as his women threw another gourd full of water over him. 'I devote my life to travelling these mountains, giving out the Word of Earth. Now it is time for me to return to the Bountiful Basin, where my kind live, to gather fresh instructions. The Basin lies on the fringe of the Lands of Perpetual Twilight; if I take you as far as that, you can easily return to the eternal forests where you live. I will be your guide and you shall help attend me on the way.'

Seeing Gren hesitate, Yattmur said, 'You know we cannot stay here on Big Slope. We were carried here against our wishes. Now we have the chance to go, we must take it.'

'If you wish it, it shall be so, though I'm tired of travel.'

The earth trembled again. With unconscious humour, Yattmur said, 'We must leave the mountain before it leaves us.' She added, 'And we must persuade the tummy-bellies to come with us. If they stay here, either the sharp-fur mountainears or starvation will kill them.'

'Oh, no,' Gren said. They've been trouble enough. Let the wretched creatures remain here. I don't want them with us.'

'Since they don't want to come with you, that question is settled,' said the sodal with a flick of his tail. 'Now, let us move, since I must not be kept waiting.'

They had next to no possessions, so close were their lives to nature. To make ready was merely to check their weapons, to stow a little food for carrying and to cast a backward glance at the cave that had sheltered the birth of Laren. Catching sight of a nearby gourd and its contents, Gren asked, 'What about the morel?'