A Melnibonean of my caste is expected to put himself through at least most of the tortures he will in the course of a long life bestow on others. This produces a taste, an intimacy, a conspiracy of cruelty which can give a culture its own special piquancy but in the end brings it to collapse. Imagination rather than inventive sensation will always be a nation's ultimate salvation. I had tried to convince my own people of this. And now the Pukawatchi faced a similar dilemma.

Indeed, as I came to know them, I discovered I had more in common with the Pukawatchi than with some of the crew of The Swan.

Preparations made, routes discussed, plans laid, we helped the Pukawatchi strike camp. Our somewhat ragged army slowly made ready for its long trek north. More pipes were smoked. More talks talked. The Vikings and the skraylings, as they still called their new allies, developed a reasonable camaraderie-good enough for the expedition, at least. Morally they shared much. The Pukawatchi understood the need to make a good death, just as the Vikings did. The warriors prayed for the right circumstances and the courage to display their virtues while they died.

These ideas were far closer to those of my immediate ancestors. Among the rest of what I still considered the Young Kingdoms, there had been developing a tradition which was as mysterious and as attractive to me as my own was familiar and repellent. It was that culture, not my own, I fought to save. It was those people whose fate would be decided by my success or failure in this long dream. I had no love for the millennia-old culture which had borne me. I rejected it more than once in preference to the simpler ways of the human mercenary. There was a certain comfort in taking this path. It demanded little thought from me. There was some urgency to my situation, of course, as I hung in Jagreen Lern's rigging waiting to die. But there are no significant correspondences between the passage of time in one realm and another. I had elected, after all, to dream of a thousand years, and now the full thousand must be endured even if my object were achieved sooner. It is why I am able to tell you this story in this way. What I achieved in this dream would reflect through all the other worlds of the multiverse, including my own. How I conducted myself in this dream was of deep importance. A certain path had to be followed. When the trail was left it had to be left knowingly.

The path had already taken on a certain relentless momentum. From being a group of raiders or explorers, we were now an army on the march. Egyptians and Norsemen tramped side by side with the same extraordinary stamina they showed at the oars. Asolingas and the Bomendando jogged ahead with the Pukawatchi scouts. Ipkaptam, Gunnar, Klosterheim and I marched at the center of the main group. The Pukawatchi went to war in finger-bone armor, with lances, bows and shields. They had jackets of bone and helmets fashioned from huge mammoth tusks decorated with eagle feathers and beads. The bone armor was decorated with turquoise and other semiprecious stones and was lighter than the chain mail most of our crew favored. Some warriors wore the carapaces of huge turtles and helmets made from massive conch shells. Braids were protected by beads and otter fur.

Just as I had noted the size of some of the huge pelts within the wigwam, I wondered at the size of the sea-life which supplied the Pukawatchi with so much. Klosterheim said somewhat dis-missively that sizes were unstable in these parts, something to do with the conjunction of various scales. We were too close to "the tree, " he said.

None of this made much sense to me. But as long as our journey took us forward to where I hoped to find the original of the black sword, I scarcely cared what rationales he presented.

We were now an army of about a hundred and fifty experienced warriors. Some of the women and youths and old people were also armed. At the far end of this mixed force of pirates and Pukawatchi came the unarmed women, the infirm, children and animals who would follow us until we began to fight. From what I had seen thus far, I expected the city to be a primitive affair, probably a stockade of some kind surrounding a dozen or so long-houses.

The Pukawatchi had no real beasts of burden, unless you counted their coyote dogs that pulled the travois on which they carried their folded lodges. Women and children did most of the work. The warriors rarely did anything except, like the rest of us, march at a steady, dogged pace. Those women who had what they called "men's medicine" dressed and armed themselves like the men and marched with the men, just as one or two of the men with "women's medicine" walked with the group at the back. Klosterheim told me such practices were common among many of the peoples of this vast land. But not all tribes shared values and ideas.

Ipkaptam, joining in, spoke of certain tribes who were beneath contempt, who ate insects or who tortured animals, but even those peoples they had exterminated he spoke well of, as people of honor. We Melniboneans had never experienced noble feelings for people we sent to oblivion. Melniboneans never questioned their own ruthless law, which they imposed on all they conquered. Other cultures were not of interest to us. If the people refused to accept our scheme of things, we simply slaughtered them. But we had become too soft, my father complained, looking always at me, and allowed the Young Kingdoms to grow arrogant. There had been a time when the world never dared question Melnibone. What we defined as the truth was the truth! But because it suited us to have fat cattle at our disposal, we allowed the people of the Young Kingdoms to proliferate and gain power.

Not so, the Pukawatchi! They believed in the law of the blood feud, so gave their enemies no chance to retaliate. Every member of the rival tribe had to be eliminated or the babies taken to substitute for any Pukawatchi killed. Once they had been so few they had stolen infants from stronger tribes. Now they needed no foreign babies.

Yesterday the Pukawatchi had been despised, said Ipkaptam, both for their stature and their intelligence. Today all took them seriously. Their story would survive. And when the Kakatanawa were conquered, the Pukawatchi would dominate all worlds. They had grown strong, he said, until they were the strongest of all.

They were certainly sturdy. When walking and water were the only two means of traveling long distances, the calves and the arms became capable of enormous endurance and power. Their means of transport ensured them success in battle. The Pukawatchi would have preferred the greater speed of water, but we were moving north and upstream of a small river which was too narrow to take any kind of craft. Klosterheim said there was a mooring rendezvous about two days ahead of us where we would acquire canoes so that the war party could make better progress. He seemed to have a greater sense of urgency than the rest of us. Of course, it was his magic, his energy, which was holding our rivals at bay. He suggested that soon the army should move on at a trot to the rendezvous, leaving the armed women and children with a small guard of warriors. I elected to command this guard. The idea of trotting did not appeal to me.

For the time being, we all continued at our regular pace.

Again I was impressed by the size to which everything in the region grew. Plants were far larger than anything I had seen before. I should have liked to have stopped and examined more. The terrain we were crossing was wooded and mountainous, and we traveled through a series of valleys, still following the winding course of the river, as we drove deeper and deeper into country nobody was familiar with. It had been deserted of people, Ipkap-tam told me, since a great disaster had struck here. He believed that the whole country around the Kakatanawa land was dead, like this. As you got closer, even the game began to disappear. But he had only heard this.