If Sam dreamed, she did not remember the dreams when she awoke. She stumbled out and nearly fell down the wagon's steep steps. The old crone was gone. All around, Gypsies lay sleeping on the ground, as if the party had raged so long that they had dropped where they stood, but the sky was unchanged, still the same murky, bruised gray.

I miss time, she thought sadly. I miss mornings, and the sun, and . . . and everything.

Someone was singing, a low and quiet wandering in a minor key. She walked around the edge of the wagon to find !Xabbu squatting beside a guttering fire, drawing in the gray dust with the end of a piece of charred firewood as he sang. He looked up and offered her a weak, almost ghostly smile.

"Good morning, Sam. Or good evening."

"You can't tell, can you? Sometimes it feels like that's the most impacted part of this whole thing." She crouched on the ground beside him. "What are you drawing?"

"Drawing?" He looked down. "Nothing. I was only letting my arm move while I was thinking. Like dancing, perhaps, but not so tiring." He couldn't muster another smile, even for his own small joke,

"What are you thinking about?" She was fairly certain she already knew, but he surprised her.

"Jongleur." He looked around. "But before we talk, let us go somewhere more. . . ." He searched for the word.

"Private?"

"Exactly. Where we can see for a distance around us." He stood and led her between the wagons, past more smoky embers and more sleeping Gypsies, toward the bluff that loomed above the encampment, they climbed until they could sit on a small headland at the end of a long slope with the wagons a hundred meters below them. There were still people nearby, some even camped along the slope—not Gypsies, but fairy-tale folk, as Sam thought of them, talking cats and gingerbread children—but they seemed listlessly uninterested in the newcomers.

"What are you thinking about Jongleur?" Sam asked as they settled themselves.

"That there is some mystery between him and Azador I do not understand." !Xabbu frowned. "First there is the way he helped Azador lead us here. Then there is his interest in the Gypsy camp—this man, who has nothing but scorn for the other people and creatures he has met here."

"I know." Sam shrugged. "But maybe there's a simple explanation. He did build the network. It makes sense he might know some things about it we don't, and not want to tell us. He's not, like, Mister Generosity."

"True. But there is still something about it that puzzles me."

They sat watching the movements of the awakening Gypsy camp, as well as the larger crowd of people and semi-people surrounding the Well, a tent city of the not-quite-human. The weird, lunar landscape brought back Sam's fierce sense of homesickness.

"So are we really waiting here for the end of the world?" she asked.

"I do not know, Sam. But there is always hope. Have I told you the story of how the All-Devourer came to the kraal of Grandfather Mantis? That is a story about hope. I told it to Renie, because she is the Beloved Porcupine."

"What?" Despite the heaviness of her spirit, Sam was startled into a laugh.

!Xabbu nodded his head. "Yes, that is what Renie also did when I told her. Porcupine is the daughter-in-law of Grandfather Mantis, his favorite of all the First People. And she was the bravest of them all as well—even when Grandfather Mantis himself was overcome by fear, she kept her head and did what was necessary. That sounds like Renie, does it not?"

Sam looked at him fondly. "You really love her, don't you?"

He did not speak for a moment, but a complicated set of emotions played across his face. "My people do not have a word that has so many meanings as your English word 'love' Sam. I care for her very much. I miss her badly. I am very, very frightened and unhappy that we cannot find her. If I did not see her again, my life would always be smaller and more sad."

"Sounds like love to me. Do you want to marry her?"

"I would like to . . . to try to have a life together, I think. Yes."

Sam laughed. "You may be from somewhere else, !Xabbu, but you've got the single-guy stuff down pretty well. Can't you just say it? You love her and you want to marry her."

He growled, but it was only mock-irritation. "Very well, Sam. It is as you say."

She guessed that his light-heartedness did not go very deep. "We'll find her, !Xabbu. She's here somewhere."

"I must believe it is so." He sighed. "I was going to tell you the story of the All-Devourer. It is frightening, but as I said, it is also a story of hope."

Sam settled in. "Go ahead."

!Xabbu was a good storyteller, active and involved. He changed voices for the different characters and punctuated the tale with broad gestures and even dancelike movements, leaping to his feet to show Porcupine journeying to her father's house, greedily scooping his hands toward his mouth as he portrayed the All-Devourer eating all that he found. When he crouched and said, in the flat, frightened voice of Mantis waiting for the monster, "Oh, daughter, why is it so dark when there are no clouds in the sky?" Sam truly felt the horror of seeing one's own sins come home at last.

When he had finished, she noticed that a few of the fairytale folk from the surrounding campsites had moved closer to listen. "That was wonderful, !Xabbu. But it's so scary!" It had not been the simple folktale she had expected. Something powerful that lurked in the unfamiliar images, in the confusion of motives, made her wish she understood better.

"But the story says there is light behind the greatest darknesses. Grandfather Mantis and his people survived and moved on." His face fell. "I thought that it was my job to preserve them, and with them the story of my people. I thought that was to be the work of my life, but I have done nothing to make it happen."

"You'll do it," she said, but !Xabbu's nod of agreement was perfunctory. She wanted to see him animated again, thinking about something other than Renie and their terrible situation. After all, it wasn't as if they were in a hurry anymore. They had nowhere else to go. "Can you tell me another one? Do you mind?"

He raised an eyebrow as if he suspected her motives, but said only, "Yes, but then I would like to go look for Renie again, in case new people have come in while we were sleeping." He looked out at the Well. "In fact, this place does bring another story to my mind—one of the greatest of my people's tales."

"Chizz," she said. "What's it about?"

"It is another story of Grandfather Mantis, about how the moon came to be in the sky . . . and about other things. You will see why I cannot help thinking of it in this place, beside this hole in the ground full of stars swimming in the waters of creation."

"The waters of. . . . Do you really think that's what it is?"

"I do not know, but to me it looks like the pictures I have seen in the city-school where I studied, pictures taken through the eyes of telescopes looking far away out into space—and back in time, too, as they explained to me, since the light itself was old when it reached us. To me this Well looks like a place where universes are born."

Sam felt a little shiver. She could not help wondering what it would be like to drown in that deep hole, to gasp out your last breath even as galaxies of light swirled around you. "Scanny," she said quietly.

!Xabbu smiled. "But the stories of my people are seldom of great things, of wars or stars or the creation of universes—or even if they are, they are spoken of in a small way. We are a small people, you see. We step very softly, and when we die, the wind soon has blown our footprints away. Even Grandfather Mantis, who once stole fire from beneath Ostrich's wing to give to his people so they would not fear the dark—yes, even Mantis, the greatest of us all, is only a tiny insect. But he is a person, too. All things in those first days were people." He nodded, eyes closed as he composed his thoughts, "This story starts with a very small thing indeed, as you shall see. A piece of leather.