“Yes. Yes.”

She began the Yissou invocation. But after a moment she halted, and disappeared for a moment into a long silence, so that Thu-Kimnibol thought that she might have fallen asleep. Then she giggled.

“I coupled with Salaman once. It was in the cocoon. He was younger than I was, four or five years younger, just a boy, ten or eleven. But full of lust, even then, and he came to me — he was very quiet, then, a short dark boy, very broad through the shoulders, and so strong you wouldn’t believe it. He came to me and took me by the breasts—”

“Mother Boldirinthe, please. If you would—”

“And we did it, Salaman and I, right on the floor of the growing-chamber. Rolling around and around under the velvetberry vines. He didn’t say a word. Not before, not during, not after. He never said much in those days. It was the only time we coupled, the only time I had anything to do with him, really. Afterward it was all Weiawala for him, and I was with Staip, anyhow. If I had known Salaman was going to be a king some day — but of course how could I, we had no kings, the word itself meant nothing to us—”

“Mother Boldirinthe,” said Thu-Kimnibol, more urgently.

He was afraid the old woman would go on to recount her entire life’s history, every coupling and twining of the last fifty years. But she was done with her recollections. Her mind was on her work now. Lightly she touched him with her sensing-organ. She made the Five Signs, she uttered the words, she handled the talismans, she brought the gods into the room and opened Thu-Kimnibol’s soul to them. They were vivid before him, so real that he knew them each by sight, even though they had no shapes, only auras. They were bright clouds of light, encircling him in the darkness. This was loving Mueri, this was fierce inexorable Dawinno, and this was Emakkis who provides, and this was Friit, and this was Yissou, who would protect him. In the sanctuary of Boldirinthe’s offering-chamber he reached out to them and found them, the Five Heavenly Ones who ruled the world, and mantled his soul in their warm protective presences. It was a deeper communion than he had ever known, or so it seemed to him at that moment. A great satisfaction came over him, and a deep and abiding peace.

He felt ready to undertake his departure. The gods were with him, his gods, the ones he understood and loved. They would guide him and shelter him as he made his way north.

Thu-Kimnibol had no use for the more complex theologies that had sprung up among the People. There were some who worshiped the vanished humans — who believed that the humans were gods higher than the Five. Others knelt before the Beng god Nakhaba, saying that he too held a rank in heaven above that of the Five, that he was the Interceder who could speak with the humans on the People’s behalf.

And then there were those — mostly University people, they were, old Hresh’s crowd — who spoke of a god superior to all the rest, above the humans, and Nakhaba, and the Five. The Sixth, that one was called. The Creator-God. Of him, or it, nothing was known, and they said that nothing ever could be, that he was fundamentally unknowable.

Thu-Kimnibol had no idea what to make of any of this profusion of gods. It seemed needless to him to have any but the Five. But he could understand a willingness to pray to these others more easily than he did the position of those few, like his impossible niece Nialli Apuilana, who seemed not to believe in any gods at all. What a bleak existence, to walk godless beneath the unfriendly sky! How could they bear it? Weren’t they paralyzed with fear, knowing that they had no protectors? To Thu-Kimnibol it seemed crazy. Nialli Apuilana, at least, had an excuse. Everyone knew that the hjjks had tampered with her mind.

Slowly he came up out of his communion, and found himself sitting slumped at Boldirinthe’s rough wooden table, while she went puttering about, putting the gods back in her cupboard. She seemed pleased with herself. She must know the intensity of the communion she had created for him.

Silently he embraced her. His heart overflowed with love for her. Gradually the power of the communion faded, and he made ready to go.

“Be wary of King Salaman,” Boldirinthe said, when Thu-Kimnibol was about to leave her chamber. “Salaman’s a very clever man.”

“I know that, Mother Boldirinthe.”

“Cleverer than you.”

Thu-Kimnibol smiled. “I’m not as stupid as is generally thought.”

“Cleverer than you, all the same. As clever as Hresh, Salaman is. Believe me. Watch out for him. He’ll trick you somehow.”

“I understand Salaman. We understand each other.”

“They tell me he’s grown wild and dangerous in his old age. That he’s had power so long that he’s gone mad from it.”

“No,” Thu-Kimnibol said. “Dangerous, yes. Wild, perhaps. But not a madman. I knew Salaman a long time, when I lived in Yissou. You can tell who has madness in him and who doesn’t. He’s a steady one.”

“I coupled with him once,” Boldirinthe said. “I know things about him that you’ll never know. Fifty years, and I’ve never forgotten. Such a quiet boy, but there was fire inside him, and in fifty years the fire burns through to the surface. Be wary, Thu-Kimnibol.”

“I thank you, Mother Boldirinthe.”

He knelt and kissed her sash.

“Be wary,” she said.

As Thu-Kimnibol descended from the offering-woman’s cloister his path crossed that of Nialli Apuilana, who was coming toward him up steep cobblestoned Minbain Way. The day was bright and golden, with a perfumed wind blowing out of the west, where groves of yellow-leaved sthamis trees were blooming on the hills above the bay. Nialli Apuilana carried a tray of food and a flask of clear spicy wine for Kundalimon.

Her mood was brighter, though still not bright enough. After her startling breakdown at the Presidium she had gone into hiding, more or less, keeping out of sight for days, going out only for the sake of making her twice-daily journeys to Mueri House and hurrying back to her room as soon as Kundalimon had had his meal. Some days she hadn’t gone at all, but left it up to the guardsmen to feed him. Yissou only knew what they brought him. Most of her time she spent alone, meditating, brooding, going over and over everything she had said there, wishing she could call half of it back, or more than half. And yet it had seemed so important finally to speak out: all that talk of the hjjks as bugs, the hjjks as cold-blooded killers, the hjjks as this, the hjjks as that. And they knew nothing. Nothing at all. So she had spoken. But she had felt edgy and exposed ever since. Only now was she starting to realize that scarcely anyone in the city had heard about her outburst at all, and most or perhaps all of those who had witnessed it had chosen to see it as nothing more than a little show of hysteria, the sort of thing that one would expect from someone like Nialli Apuilana. Not very flattering, really: but at least she didn’t need to worry about being jeered at in the streets.

She was happy to see Thu-Kimnibol. She knew that she disagreed with him about practically everything, especially where the hjjks were concerned; but yet there was a strength about her imposing kinsman, a dignity, that she found steadying. And a certain warmth, too. Too many of these warrior princes liked to strike ostentatious poses, Thu-Kimnibol had a simpler style.

She said, “Are you coming from Boldirinthe, kinsman?”

“How can you tell that?”

With a toss of her head Nialli Apuilana indicated the offering-woman’s cloister at the top of the hill. “Her house is right up there. And the light of the gods is still in your eyes.”

“You can see that, can you?”

“Oh, yes. Yes, of course.”

She felt a sharp pang of envy. There was such tranquility on his broad face, such a sense of self-assurance.

Thu-Kimnibol said, grinning down at her, “I thought you were godless, girl. What do you know about the light of the gods?”