"Where, " Klosterheim told us, in more normal tones, "our magic defeats them. White Crow is prisoner, but his brother and sister carry the lance. We must stop them! They are held captive on the Shining Path by a great ally of mine, who makes it impossible for them to continue on the last part of the Shining Path. Time does not pass there. They are unaware of it, but they have remained under that spell for half a century, allowing us to grow strong again. They have tried all their sorcery against my ally, but he is too powerful for them. Only White Crow escaped, but I was too clever for him. Yet even my pact with Lord Shoashooan is finite, and that busy elemental will soon grow hungry. He must have his promised reward. So we must reach Kakatanawa as soon as possible. Alone we might not defeat White Crow and his talented friends, but together we will make their end inevitable."

"What of your other lost treasures?" I said. "How will you get those back?"

"It will be easier once we have the Black Lance, " said Klosterheim. He added softly to me in Greek, "The treasures of the Pukawatchi are as nothing to the prize to be found in the city of the Kakatanawa."

"I am only interested in one damned treasure, " said Gunnar, to Ipkaptam's disapproval. "And that's a jeweled cup I've been seeking for some centuries. Failing that, I have some business with Death."

I had sudden insight. "You call it the Holy Grail! The Templars were obsessed with it. Supposed to contain some god's blood or head? The Welsh also have a magic bowl. My erstwhile comrade Ap Kwelch told me he once discovered it. There are too many of these magic objects loose in a world so ambivalent towards sorcery! Your learned priests say it's a myth, a will-o'-the-wisp”.

"I know that it is not, sir, " said Klosterheim disapprovingly.

"There are many legends but only one Grail. And that is what I expect to find in Kakatanawa."

Again the shaman was singing. He sang to apologize for our behavior to whatever spirits he had summoned. As we became quiet he spoke of his own destiny, the dream he had dreamed in his youth: to revenge his grandfather, who had died in the summoning of Lord Shoashooan. In that dream he had sought his people's treasures and he had led his people home.

"That is my destiny, " he said. "To redeem my father's house. To reclaim our treasures and our honor. For too long we have followed a false dream."

I am the God Thor,

I am the War God,

I am the Thunderer!

Here in my Northland,

My fastness and fortress,

Reign I forever!

Here amid icebergs Rule I the nations. This is my hammer, Mjolner the mighty.

Giants and sorcerers Cannot withstand it!

LONGFELLOW,

"The Saga of King Olaf"

Behold, this pipe. Verily a man!

Within it I have placed my being.

Place within it your own being, also,

Then free shall you be from all that brings death.

OSAGE PIPE CHANT (LA FLESCHE'S TR.)

Gunnar the Doomed was in good spirits as we stumbled from the heat of the lodge out into the cold slap of a northern autumn evening. "By Odin, " he said, "we are lucky men this day! " But I hardly heard him. I was still stupefied by the smoke and the heat of the lodge. I felt I was on the verge of understanding some great truth.

I looked up and almost reeled at the sight which met us. It took me a moment to realize that the Pukawatchi were decorated for battle. They looked like a hive of human-sized insects. They buzzed faintly. In all my travels I had never seen a people quite like this.

A sudden wilder buzzing-an ululation went up from the gathered warriors. Layers of different-colored paint in this light gave their faces the same quality I had noticed in that of their sachem, Ipkaptam the Two Tongues, as we sat in the lodge. Their eerie, insectlike quality was given further substance by a translucent black sheen which spread over the surface of the other colors. They had the dark iridescence of a beetle's wing. Some wore insectlike headdresses. The black overlay was symbolic. It meant they were prepared to fight to the death. The red-rimmed eyes announced they would show no mercy. Ipkaptam told me with some pride that they had named their path the Trail of Honor and would return with the nation's treasures or die nobly in the attempt.

Again something nagged at the million memories which shadowed those of my immediate incarnation. Who did these people remind me of? Was there a Melnibonean folktale I had read? About machines become fish who became insects who became human? Who had followed a Trail of Honor to establish a city in the south? I was unsure of all I could recall. With somewhat sentimental notions of intelligence, sensibility and virtue, the story did not feel like a Melnibonean tale. Perhaps I had heard it in the Young Kingdoms or in another dream of baroque life and rococo death spent in a realm far less familiar to me than this?

In my youth I performed the five journeys and dreamed the Dream of Twenty Years, then the Dream of Fifty Years and then the Dream of a Hundred Years. Each of those dreams I had to dream at least three times. I had dreamed some several more times than that. But this was only the second time I had dreamed the Dream of a Thousand Years, and this was no longer the quest of an education but the hope of saving my own life, and that of most of surviving humanity, from unchecked Chaos.

Perhaps this moment was what one trained for? It seemed I was born and reborn for crisis. It was what the nun had told me at the Priory of the Sacred Egg in the Dalmatian highlands. She had read my fortune that night in the light of a tallow candle while we sat naked in the bed. Fetching the cards had been her response, as passion was satisfied, to her first real sight of my physique, of its scars and marks. She asked in some seriousness if she had shared herself with a demon. I told her that I had been a mercenary for some time. "Then perhaps you yourself have slept with a demon, " she joked.

Fear the Crisis Maker, she had warned, by which I had decided she meant that I should fear myself. What was worse in a fully sentient universe than one who refused thought, who feared it, who was sickened by it? Who inevitably chose violence and the way of the sword, though he yearned for peace and tranquillity? Fear the child, she had said. Again, the child was myself- jealous, greedy, demanding, selfish. Why should her God choose such a man for his service?

I had asked the matronly prioress this question, and she had laughed at me. All soldiers she met seemed to be soul-searching in one way or another. She supposed it was inevitable. "In some eras, " she said, "the sword and the intellect must be as one. Those are our Silver Ages. That is how we create those periods we call Golden Ages, when the sword can be forgotten. But until the sword is fully forgotten, no longer part of the cycle, and men no longer speak in its language of gods and heroes and battles, every Golden Age will inevitably be followed by an age of Iron and Blood." She had spoken of the Prince of Peace as if he might actually exist. I asked her about this. "He is my soul's salvation, " she had said. I told her without irony that I envied her. But it was hard for me to understand the kind of man who was prepared to die on the chance that it might save others. In my experience, such sacrifices were rarely worth making. She had laughed aloud at this.

Her kind of Christianity, of course, was almost the apotheosis of what we Melniboneans see as weakness. Yet I had also seen ideas growing from the common soil which, when examined, actually had the hope of becoming reality. It was not for me to denigrate their softness and their tolerance. My father frequently argued that where you exalted the weak above the strong, thus you turned your nation from predator into prey. However much the thinking of the Young Kingdoms influenced me, it had never occurred to me to choose to become a victim!