"I don't want to be an Agre. I don't want to stay in Charad." But she could see he was pleased. Then he said, "Everything is stagnant here, isn't it?"

"It won't go on being. They are trying to make a truce. Then all of Charad will change."

"And when is this truce going to happen?"

"Shabis is trying to get a meeting with General Izrak."

"Well, good luck. You can't trust them — the Hennes."

She knew that this was more than a professional soldier talking about an enemy — the automatic thing. "Trust? Who cares about trust? If there's a truce there will have to be safeguards, which means that both sides will lose if they break it."

"Clever Mara. But you've forgotten, the Hennes are stupid. And, I've noticed, clever people often don't understand stupid ones."

This talk was sweet to them, after such a long time, almost six months. They could have gone on, but he had to return to his duties. Shabis came in and Dann saluted and stood at ease. Shabis asked Dann about some army problem, and Dann answered well and carefully, but not at too great a length. Mara could see that Shabis was testing him. Then he nodded and said, "Right. Dismiss. You can come and see your sister again soon." Dann saluted and went out, with a look at Mara that claimed her for their plans of escape.

Shabis sat himself where Dann had been and said, "Mara, how do you like the idea of becoming a spy?" And he laughed at her dismay. "I want you to come with me when we negotiate the truce, and then stay behind to work on the details — and report to me everything you see. It wouldn't be for long."

"I should be alone? Among the Hennes?" She was really horrified. "I can't tell one from another. I wonder that they can."

"Sometimes they can't. They all wear some sort of badge or mark."

"What is wrong with them? There is something."

"I think it is that the life — you know, the stuff of life — of one person is diluted with them so that ten — or who knows, fifty? — of them are the same as one of us."

She said,

"The inward spark,

The vital flame,

Can go as quickly as it came."

"What is that?"

"I don't know. My mind is full of — things, bits of words, ideas, and I don't know where they come from. Perhaps my childhood."

"Well, that's it. Their vital spark. Perhaps they don't have it. But they are clever enough at some things. After all, one of them copied that gun and made it work."

"I don't think that makes me like them any better."

"Well, are you refusing to do it?"

"I thought I was your prisoner and had to do as I'm told?" "Is that what you are?"

"I'll think about it. The trouble is, they make my flesh creep. I don't think I ever understood that saying until I saw the Hennes."

And she did think, hard and long when she was alone in her room. In her room — alone. What a happiness it was for her, this room, and being alone when she wanted.

Shabis wanted to change the whole country into something freer, easier, and to use money now spent on fighting and raids for improvement. And yet was there so much spent on war? There were battles, but not often. There were skirmishes. Dann had been right when he said Charad — or at least this part of it — was stagnant. The armies had farms and manufactories, they built towns over old ruins that were everywhere in Charad, they educated the men and the women in the armies, and it was a pretty easy life.

Shabis wanted to dismiss half the army back into civilian life and, as war receded into the past, keep only enough soldiers for an unexpected attack. But if you took away the army, the generals would have on their hands many thousands of people who were used to discipline and order, looking for work. What work? Everyone was fed and clothed as it was. Shabis said the former soldiers would be useful rebuilding towns and digging out silted rivers. Very well. For a while the invisible bonds of old disciplines would confine them, and then there would come a time when people would have to be forced by needs now satisfied so automatically no one need think about it, to compete for work. There would have to be money and systems of exchange, and if they refused to work or earn then they would not be fed. How simple it all sounded, how easily Shabis talked about it. But there would be a great turbulence and dissatisfaction and as Mara knew, though it seemed Shabis did not, there would follow the threat of poppy. When she said this to him he replied, "There would be punishments for that." For Shabis, the soldier, had to rely on punishments and rebukes. There would follow courts and prisons and police.

And there were the Hennes, a people within the mass of the Agre, a country within a country. Mara had said, "Why not let the Hennes split off and have their own country? Why do you want them?"

"They want us," was the reply. "They want what we have. They know we are quicker and cleverer than they are. I believe they think that if they capture our part of Charad — Agre territory — then they will become like us."

"But if you have a truce, then they must agree to stop trying to take Agre land, and be content with what they have." "Exactly. We will trade and be at peace."

A likely story, Mara thought. Shabis's life, spent since he was sixteen in the army, had narrowed his mind away from — well, the kind of experience she and Dann had at their fingertips. He did not understand anarchy, disorder, and the rages of frightened people.

The best part of Mara's life was now the afternoon talks, the "lessons," with Shabis. She was still taking language lessons every morning, though she was speaking pretty well by now, and understood everything that was said. She could write, just a little. Shabis owned an ancient book of tales from the distant past, made of tree bark. It was in

Mahondi. But her writing lessons were in Charad. She tried to use what she had in her brain — the Mahondi — to puzzle out the written words. Shabis helped her. He was spending more time with her, sometimes three or four hours every afternoon. They set aside one of these hours to say what they had to in Charad, to give her practice.

What she liked best was to talk about "those long ago people from thousands of years in the past." He said that he didn't have much to tell her, but as they went on, it turned out he did know a good deal, picked up here and there. They were piecing together what they knew, from her memories of her old home, from Daima, from the Mahondis of Chelops. Shabis said that if it had ever been possible to get all the different Mahondi families into one place then a pretty good record of the filtered down knowledge would result. "The trouble is," he said, "that we all know a little but not how it fits together." For instance he had not seen anything like Candace's wall map and the gourd globe, which came from such different times, separated by — well, probably, by hundreds of years. Or thousands. He asked Mara to draw him the map that had the white blanking out the top of it, and brought her a newly prepared white animal skin, as soft as cloth, and sticks of charcoal, and some vegetable dyes. Then he wanted another, of the time before that, when there was no white covering up so much of the picture.

Sometimes it was by accident that they found out what the other knew. For instance, Shabis remarked that in those long ago times there was a period when people lived to be quite old, even a hundred years or more, while, nowadays, if someone lived to be fifty that was pretty good. "I am an old man, Mara — thirty-five. Then a thirty-five-year-old man was still a young man. And there was a time when women had one child after another and sometimes died young because of it, or were old at forty, but then they discovered some medicine or herb that stopped them having children..."

"What?" said Mara. "What are you saying?"