It was a difficult time for Harruel: month after month of peace, and a son given a maddening name. Angers boiled and bubbled within him. It could not be long now before the cauldron boiled over.

There were few triumphs and many calamities as Hresh struggled to understand the things he had found in the ruins of Vengiboneeza.

The Great World folk — or the mechanicals who had been their artisans — had apparently intended to build their devices for all eternity. Most of them were simply constructed, strips of metal of different colors arranged in cunning patterns. They showed few signs of rust or other decay. Often they were inlaid with precious jewels that appeared to be part of the mechanism, rather than mere decorations.

In some cases operating them posed no difficulties. A few had intricate arrangements of pressure-points and levers, but most had the simplest of control panels, if they had any at all. Yet how could you tell what function a device was meant to have? Or what catastrophe you might cause by using it the wrong way?

Hresh’s early experiments led to catastrophe more often than not. There was one instrument, no longer than his arm, that began weaving a web the moment he touched a coppery node on its snout. With fantastic speed it hurled thin sticky strands of a nearly unbreakable cord from its muzzle, tossing them in wild loops for thirty paces all around. Hresh released the command node as soon as he saw what was happening, but by then he had snarled Sinistine, Praheurt, and Haniman in a tight net of the stuff. It took hours to cut them free of it and it was days before their fur was completely clean.

Another device, which fortunately he tried at some distance outside the temple courtyard, seemed to turn earth into air. With one quick blast Hresh dug a pit a hundred paces across and fifteen paces deep, leaving no trace behind of what had been there, only a faint burned smell. Perhaps it was meant for clearing away rubble, or perhaps it was a weapon. In horror Hresh hid it where no one was likely to find it again.

A long narrow box with angular projections running down its side turned out to be a bridge-building machine. In the five minutes before Hresh, with some desperation, managed to switch it off, it constructed a bizarre swaybacked bridge from nowhere to nowhere, ending in mid-air, that filled an entire avenue of the city. For a building material it employed a stonelike substance that it created out of — so it seemed — nothing at all. A similar-looking machine proved to be a wall-builder: with the same lunatic zeal as the bridge-building device, it began at the touch of a stud to throw up high walls at random all along the street. Hresh retrieved the pit-digging machine to clear away the bridge and the walls; but despite all caution he cleared away three buildings of the avenue with them. He hoped they had been unimportant ones.

Then there were the devices that could not be made to work at all — that was most of them — and the ones that somehow looked so treacherous and unpredictable that it seemed rash even to try them. Hresh put those away for such time as he might have a clearer notion of what he was doing.

Then, too, there were the ones that would function once, and almost immediately destroy themselves. Those were the most maddening of all.

One of those set up a star-map: a sphere of soft darkness that was three times as wide as a man’s body was long. On its surface all the stars of heaven were depicted in dazzling splendor. They moved as you looked at them; and if you pointed to one star with a shaft of light that came from the machine, a voice would utter a single solemn sound, which Hresh took to be the name of that star in the language of the Great World. He stared in awe and astonishment. But within five minutes curling wisps of pale smoke began coming from it and the brilliant panoply of the stars vanished in an instant, leaving Hresh gasping with the pain of irretrievable loss. He was never able to make that device work again.

Another played music: a tumultuous sky-filling music, full of heavy, clashing melodies, that brought everyone in the tribe running, as if the gods had come to Vengiboneeza and were playing in concert. It too died in smoke almost as soon as it had begun to function.

And there was one that wrote an incomprehensible message in the sky in letters of golden fire. Within moments the machine expired with a sad little sound and the wind blew the strangely fierce-looking sharp-angled characters away.

“We are ruining much and learning little,” Hresh said bleakly to Taniane, one day when there had been three such disasters. But Vengiboneeza was proving to be an incredibly rich storehouse of Great World artifacts. New treasures came back with the Seekers virtually every day. It was a pity to waste any of them, Hresh knew. But perhaps a certain amount of destruction was an inevitable part of the process of learning. He had to go on with the experiments, whatever the losses, whatever the risks. It was his task. The destiny of the tribe was at stake. And perhaps his own destiny as well: for he was here not to find mere curious toys, but to discover the secrets by which the People would rule the world.

The warm wet season came round again. That was winter, and when the cool east winds ended and the heavy rains began Torlyri went forth to do the winter-offering. The sun was low in the sky every day, which was why Hresh had named this season winter; but that seemed strange to Torlyri, because the weather was so mild. Winter was supposed to be a cold time. They had called it winter, had they not, that bitter time which was just ended, the Long Winter of the world, when everything froze and all living things had had to take refuge.

But there was a difference, Torlyri was coming to see, between the Long Winter and an ordinary winter. There were great cycles and small ones. The Long Winter had been the world’s dark calamity, brought by the falling death-stars, when dust and smoke in the sky had cut off the sun’s rays and a terrible cold descended; but that had been an event of the great cycles, which span immense periods, carrying doom at vast and distant intervals. It had been sent from the remote heavens and all the world had fallen to its knees before it. Millions of years would pass before such a thing occurred again. Whole epochs of life would rise and fall, remembering nothing of the last Long Winter that the great cycle had brought, knowing nothing of the next catastrophe that lay far in the future.

Ordinary winter, though, was simply one of the seasons of the small cycle. It was a thing which might differ greatly in intensity from one part of the earth to another. Hresh had explained how the seasons were caused, though the idea was still hazy for her. It had something to do with the movement of the sun around the earth, or the earth around the sun, she was unsure which. There was a time of year when the sun barely reached above the horizon, and that was winter. Winter was generally cold — certainly it had been when they had crossed the plains, that first year — but in certain fortunate places winter was gentle and mild. This was one such place. That was why the sapphire-eyes, who could not stand cold, had chosen to build their great city here long ago, before the death-stars came.

And so the seasons went round. It is winter again, Torlyri thought, our warm wet Vengiboneeza winter. Time passes, and we all grow older.

The tribe was increasing rapidly. All those who had come to Vengiboneeza on the great trek from the cocoon were still alive, and the settlement was full of new children now. Those who had been children before were rising toward adulthood. Taniane, Hresh, Orbin, Haniman — they were almost old enough to be initiated into the mysteries of twining. And soon after that they would be mating. And having children of their own.