“Perhaps it is.”

“I won’t allow it. Have you raised up my soul at the expense of your own?”

“If I’ve taken your fears from you, it pleases me greatly,” said Torlyri. “But now, yes, I suppose that the fears that troubled you lie heavy on me.” She scooped handfuls of sandy soil and tossed them about irritably. At length she said, “What if we are the only humans, Koshmar?”

“What if we are?” said Koshmar grandly. “Then we will inherit the earth, we sixty! We will make it our kingdom. We will repeople it with our kind. We must be very wary, that is all, for we are a rare precious thing, if we are the only humans there are.”

Koshmar’s sudden buoyance was irresistible. Almost at once Torlyri felt the dark moment beginning to lift.

“Still,” Koshmar went on, “it’s the same either way, whether we are the only humans or just a few out of millions. We must always go warily, past all the perils this world holds for us. For above all else we have to guard and preserve one another, and—”

“Oh, look — look, Koshmar!” Torlyri cried suddenly.

She pointed to the insect-castle. The cable-creature had yanked itself completely free of the ground at one end. It was enormously long, three or four times the length of a man. Looping high and swooping down, it was striking again and again at the elaborate walls and turrets of the structure. Its featureless, eyeless face ended in a gaping maw, and once it broke the castle open it began to devour the small red insects and their shattered ramparts of earth as well in a series of voracious gulps that would soon leave no trace of the builders or their work.

Koshmar shivered. “Yes: perils on all sides. I told you I wanted to kill it.”

“But it hasn’t harmed you.”

“And the insects whose castle it has destroyed?”

Torlyri smiled. “You owe them no favors, Koshmar. Every creature must eat, even nasty cable-things. Come, let it finish its breakfast in peace.”

“There are times I think you are less gentle than you seem, Torlyri.”

“Every creature must eat,” said Torlyri.

Leaving Torlyri to complete the sunrise rite that she had interrupted, Koshmar returned to the place where the tribe lay encamped. It was well past the sunrise hour now, and all the tribesfolk were up and moving about.

She stood atop a low hillock and peered toward the west. It was good to feel the warmth of the morning sun on her back and shoulders.

The land that lay before them was flattening out into a broad shallow bowl without mountains, without trees, almost without features of any kind. It was very dry here, sandy soil, no lakes, no rivers, only the most trifling of streams. Here and there the rounded stumps of little hills could be seen. They looked as though they had been ground down, polished smooth, by some gigantic force, as indeed most likely they had. Koshmar tried to imagine how it had been, deep layers of ice lying everywhere on the land, ice so heavy that it flowed like a river. Ice cutting into mountains, turning them to rubble, sweeping them away during the hundreds of thousands of years of the Long Winter. That was what Thaggoran said had happened in the world while the tribe nestled in its cocoon.

Koshmar wished she had Thaggoran with her now. No loss could have been more painful. She had not realized how much she relied upon him until he was gone. He had been the mind of the tribe, and the soul of it, and its eyes also. Without him they were like blind folk, lurching this way and that, knowing nothing of the mysteries that surrounded them on every side.

She brushed the thought away. Thaggoran had been important but he was not indispensable. No one was. She had refused to let his death subdue her spirit. Thaggoran or no Thaggoran, they would go on, and on and on and on, until they had strung their path clear around the round belly of the world if necessary, for it was their destiny to move forward until they had achieved whatever it was that they had been called into the world to achieve. They were a special folk, this tribe. That she knew. And she was a special leader. Of that too Koshmar was certain. Nothing could dissuade her of that.

Sometimes these days of the march, when she wavered even a little, when fatigue and sun-glare and dry cold winds carried doubt and fear and weakness into her soul, she summoned up Thaggoran out of death in her mind and used him to bolster her resolve. “What do you say, old man?” she would ask. “Shall we turn back? Shall we find a safe mountain somewhere and carve a new cocoon for ourselves?”

And he would grin. He would lean close to her, his rheumy red-rimmed old eyes searching hers, and he would say, “You speak nonsense, woman.”

“Do I? Do I?”

“You were born to bring us from the cocoon. The gods require it of you.”

“The gods! Who can understand the gods?”

“Exactly,” old Thaggoran would say. “It’s not our place to try to understand the gods. We are here simply to do their bidding, Koshmar. Eh? What do you say to that, Koshmar?”

And she would say, “We will go on, old man. You could never talk me into turning back.”

“I would never try,” he would say, as he turned misty and transparent and faded from her sight.

Staring now into the west, Koshmar tried to read the omens in the hard, flat blue sky. To the north there was a line of soft white clouds, very high, very far apart. Good. The gray clouds, low and heavy, were the snow-clouds. She could see none of those now. These were harmless. To the south there was a line of swirling dust on the horizon. That could mean anything. High winds knifing into the dry soil, maybe. Or a band of huge heavy-hooved beasts thundering this way. Or an enemy army on the march, even. Anything. Anything.

“Koshmar?”

She swung around. Harruel had joined her on the hillock without her hearing him. He stood looming behind her, a huge, powerful broad-shouldered thick-wristed figure half again her size, casting an enormous shadow that stretched off to the side like a black cloak flung across the ground. His fur was a dark brick-orange, clustering in bunches at his cheeks and chin to form a savage heavy red beard that all but concealed his features, leaving only his cold blue-black eyes blazing through.

It angered Koshmar that he had come up to her that way, in silence, and that he was standing so close to her now. There was a certain lack of respect in his standing so close.

Coolly she said, “What is it, Harruel?”

“How soon will we be breaking camp, Koshmar?”

She shrugged. “I haven’t decided. Why do you ask?”

“People are asking me. They dislike this place. It seems too dry to them, too dead. They want to pick up and move along.”

“If people have questions, they should bring them to me, Harruel.”

“You were nowhere to be found. You were off with Torlyri, we supposed. They asked me. And I had no answer for them.”

She regarded him steadily. There was a tone in his voice that she disliked and that she had never heard before. With the sound of his voice alone he seemed to be implying criticism of her: it was a sharp, fault-finding tone. There was almost a challenge in it.

“Do you have some problem, Harruel?”

“Problem? What kind of problem? I told you: they were asking me when we were going to leave here.”

“They should have asked me.”

“I said, you were nowhere to be found.”

“Better yet,” Koshmar said, going on as if Harruel had not spoken, “they should have asked no one, but simply waited to be told.”

“But they did ask me. And I had nothing to tell them.”

“Exactly,” said Koshmar. “There was nothing you could have told them. All you needed to say was ‘We will leave here when Koshmar says we are going to leave here.’ Such decisions are mine. Or would you prefer to make them for me, Harruel?”

He looked startled. “How could I do that? You’re the chieftain, Koshmar!”