But this morning Biterulve had asked to accompany him, and Salaman had acquiesced at once. There was nothing that Salaman would deny Biterulve. He was fourteen, the sixth of the eight princes Salaman had sired, Sinithista’s only boy — a frail and gentle child so little like the others that Salaman once had doubted that Biterulve could be of his own engendering, though he had kept those doubts to himself and was glad of it now. Biterulve’s frame was slender and long-boned, whereas Salaman and all his other sons were squat and stocky; and his fur was an eerie pale hue, the color of a snowy field by moonlight, where Salaman and the rest of his brood were dark. But Biterulve’s cool gray eyes were the unmistakable eyes of the king; and his supple spirit, though its nature was less fierce than that of Salaman or any of his other sons, was one that the king recognized as kin to his.

In the hour before sunrise they rode out together from the palace. Salaman, out of the corner of his eye, watched the boy closely. He handled his xlendi well, keeping the loose-limbed beast on a tight rein as they moved through the narrow curving streets, pulling back capably when an early-morning workman with a dray-wagon came unexpectedly around a sharp corner.

One of Salaman’s great fears was that this gentle son of his was too gentle: that there was nothing at all warlike about him, that Biterulve would be unable to play a proper role when the hjjks at last made the move he had so long expected, and the great cataclysmic time arrived. It was not so much the disgrace that Salaman feared, for he had a host of other sons who would be heroic enough. But he didn’t want the boy to suffer when that dread host of unholy insects began their onslaught.

It may be that I have misjudged him, thought Salaman, as Biterulve proudly urged the clattering xlendi forward through the quiet streets.

The king spurred his own mount and caught up with him just as he emerged from the warren of inner streets into the wider outer avenues that led to the wall.

“You ride very well,” Salaman called. “Better than I remember.”

Biterulve glanced over his shoulder, grinning. “I’ve been going out with Bruikkos and Ganthiav practically every day. They’ve showed me a few tricks.”

The king felt a stab of alarm.

“Outside the wall, you mean?

The boy giggled. “Father, we can’t very well go riding inside the city, can we?”

“You have a point,” said Salaman grudgingly.

And what harm, he thought, could come to him out there, really? Surely Bruikkos and Ganthiav had more sense than to stray very far into places where hjjks might roam. If the boy wants to go riding with his older brothers, I’ll say nothing, Salaman told himself. I mustn’t overprotect him, if I want him to be a proper prince, if I want him to be a true warrior.

They had reached the wall now. They jumped down from their xlendis and tied them to posts. The first gray strands of morning were coming into the sky. The fog was scattering.

Salaman felt an uncharacteristic sense of ease. Ordinarily his spirit was dark and tense; but this morning his mind was loose and unfocused, his body poised and calm. He had spent the night just past with Vladirilka, the fourth and newest of his mates. The aroma of her was still on his fur, the warmth of her still soothed his flesh.

He was certain that he had sired a son on her in this night’s coupling. One is able to tell, Salaman believed, when a son is being made: and surely this had been a coupling for sons.

He had so many daughters that he had difficulty remembering all their names, and he needed no more of those. Women had ruled in the cocoon, and a woman still ruled, he knew, in Dawinno. But Yissou from the first had been a city for men. Salaman had respected old Koshmar and thought well of Taniane; but there would be no female kings here.

It was sons he wanted, and many of them, sons aplenty, so that the succession would be assured. A king, he thought, could never have too many sons. Building dynasties is like building walls: one must look beyond the immediate, and prepare for the worst of eventualities. Therefore Salaman had sired eight boys so far, and he hoped he had added a ninth tonight. If it wasn’t Chham who followed him to the throne, then it would be Athimin; and if not Athimin, then Poukor, or Ganthiav, or Bruikkos, or one of the even younger princes. Perhaps even the one he had engendered on Vladirilka this very night would be the next king. Or some boy yet to be conceived, by some mate not yet chosen. Only one thing was certain, that he would not give Biterulve the kingship. The boy was too sensitive, too complex. Let him be a royal counselor, Salaman felt. Let someone like Chham or Athimin handle the hard choices a king must face.

But there was plenty of time for fixing the succession. Salaman had just reached his sixtieth year. There were those who thought of him as old, he knew, but that was not an opinion he shared. He regarded himself as in the full vigor, still, of his manhood. And he suspected that soft young Vladirilka, lying now asleep with his warmth still between her thighs, would back him up on that score.

Biterulve pointed to the nearest of the staircases that led to the top of the wall.

“Shall we go up, father?”

“A moment. Stand here by me.” He liked to take it in from down here, first. To study it. To let its strength enter him and sustain his soul.

He looked up, and out, letting his gaze sweep along the wall as far as he could see. He had done this ten thousand times, and he never grew weary of it.

The immense wall that enclosed the City of Yissou was fashioned of cyclopean blocks of hard black stone, each one half the height of a man, and twice as wide as it was high, and deeper than man’s arm is long. For decades now, a phalanx of master stone-cutters had worked from dawn to twilight, every day of the year, slowly and patiently cutting those immense blocks in a mountain quarry in the steep ravine west of the city, trimming them, squaring them, dressing them smooth. Uncomplaining teams of vermilions hauled the massive blocks across the rough plateau to the edge of the wide, shallow crater in which the city lay sheltered. As each megalith reached its intended site along the constantly growing wall, Salaman’s skillful stonemasons lifted it and swung it boldly into its place, using elaborate wooden engines, and harnesses of tightly woven larret-withes.

The king nodded toward the wall. “This is the place where a block was dropped, five years back. That was the only time such a thing ever happened.”

Bitterness rose in his soul at the thought of it, as it always did when he was here. Three workmen had been crushed by the falling block, and two more were put to death for having dropped it, at Salaman’s order. His own sons Chham and Athimin had objected to the cruelty of that. But the king was inflexible. The men had been taken off and sacrificed that very day in the name of Dawinno the Destroyer.

“I remember it,” Biterulve said. “And that you had the men who dropped it killed. I often still think of those poor men, father.”

Salaman shot him a startled glance. “Ah, do you, boy?”

“That they should have died for an accident — was that really right, do you think?”

Keeping his anger carefully in check, the king said, “How could we tolerate such clumsiness? The wall is our great sacred endeavor. Carelessness in its construction is a blasphemy against all the gods.”

“Do you think so, father?” Biterulve said, and smiled. “If we were perfect in all things, we would be gods ourselves, so it seems to me.”

“Spare me your cleverness,” said Salaman, dealing him a light affectionate slap across the back of his head. “Three good men died because those masons were stupid. The foreman Augenthrin was killed. This wall had been his life’s work. That hurt me, losing him. And who knows how many more might have died if I’d let such incompetents live? The next stone they dropped might have been on my own head. Or yours.”