If Hresh were here, Harruel would have asked him that. But Hresh was not here.

He stood with his arms folded until Konya and Lakkamai came up to him. “There’s good water here,” Harruel said. “And plenty of fruit on those bushes. And I think we’ll find lots of game down there tomorrow.” He pointed toward the basin below. “Look there, down ahead. What do you make of that?”

Konya walked to the edge of the ridge, where the land dropped away. He stared outward into the misty green declivity.

“Strange,” he said after a moment. “Like a big round bowl. I never saw such a thing.”

“No, nor I,” Harruel said.

“Bound to have a world of game living in it. You see there, where the edges rise like a curving barrier? The animals can get in, but they won’t find it easy to leave. So they’ll stay and thrive.”

“A city,” Lakkamai said, peering solemnly. “That must have been a city in the old times.”

“I’m not so sure about that. I think this is something the gods made. But we’ll see tomorrow.”

The others were coming up now. Harruel moved to one side while they went about the business of pitching camp.

That would have been another thing to ask Hresh about, that huge shallow basin down in the valley. Why it was there, how it had been formed. You could always depend on Hresh to give you some sort of answer. Sometimes he was just guessing, but more often than not he could provide you with real truths. His books told him almost everything, and he had witch-powers besides, or maybe god-powers, to allow him to see beyond ordinary sight and even beyond second sight.

Though Harruel had no liking for Hresh, though the boy had always seemed to him troublesome, sneaky, even dangerous, still there was no denying the power of Hresh’s strange mind, and the depth of the knowledge that he had gleaned from the casket of the chronicles. As it had turned out, Hresh did not choose to come. Harruel had thought for an instant of compelling him, that day when the tribe was splitting up; but he had decided that that was unwise, and perhaps impossible. Koshmar might have intervened. Or Hresh himself might have worked some mischief of his own to keep from coming. Nobody had ever been able to make Hresh do anything he didn’t want to do, not even Koshmar.

But Harruel had marched on all the same, choosing a route without benefit of Hresh’s wisdom. They were going south and west, following the sun all day long and until it set. There was no sense in going the other way, for that was the way they had come, and there was nothing back there but empty plains, rusted mechanicals, and wandering armies of hjjk-men. This way had the promise of the unknown. And it was a green and fertile land that seemed to be throbbing and bursting with the vitality of the New Springtime.

Each day he had set the pace and the others had made shift to keep up with him. He walked quickly, though not as quickly as he would have if he had been traveling by himself. Minbain and Nettin had babes in arms to deal with, after all. Harruel meant to be a strong king but not a foolish one. The strong king, he believed, demands more of his people than they are likely to give without being asked, but he does not demand more than they are capable of giving.

Harruel knew that they feared him. His size and strength and the somber nature of his soul assured that. He wanted them also to love him, or at least to revere him. That might not be easy; he suspected that most of them thought of him as a wild, brutish creature. Probably the forcing of Kreun was responsible for that. Well, that had been a moment of madness, and he was not proud of himself for having done it; but what was done was done. He thought better of himself than they did, because he knew himself better. They could not see his inner complexities, only his hard, savage exterior. But they would come to know him, Harruel thought. They would see that in his way he was remarkable, a strong and shrewd leader, a man of destiny, a fitting king. Not a beast, not a monster: strong, but also wise.

For an hour, until it was too dark to see, the men hunted and the women gathered small hard azure berries and round prickle-skinned red nuts. Then they settled by the campfire to eat. Nittin, who had never had a warrior’s training but who was turning out to be surprisingly quick with his hands, had caught a creature by the stream that crossed the ridge, a sleek agile fish-hunting beast with a long slender purple body and a thick mane of stiff yellow hair along its neck. Its hands, on pudgy little arms, seemed almost human, and its eyes were bright with intelligence. There was just enough meat on it to feed them all, and not a scrap went to waste.

Afterward it was the coupling-time.

Things were different now from the old days, the cocoon days, when people had coupled with whomever they pleased, though usually only the mated people, the breeding pairs, had any interest in it as a frequent activity. That had changed in Vengiboneeza, where nearly everyone had begun to mate and breed. There a new custom had sprung up in which the mated people normally coupled only with their mates. Harruel himself had abided by that until the day of his encounter with Kreun when he came down from the mountain.

But here on the trek Lakkamai had no mate, for he had not brought Torlyri the offering-woman along with him from Vengiboneeza. That did not seem to trouble him particularly, to be unmated here when everyone else was. But Lakkamai rarely complained about anything. He was a silent man. All the same, Harruel doubted that Lakkamai would be content to go the rest of his life without coupling, and there was no one here for him to couple with except other men’s mates and the infant Tramassilu, who would not reach the lawful age of coupling for many years.

It was also the case that Harruel, now that he had discovered a keen appetite for coupling himself, did not care to confine himself merely to Minbain to the end of his days. As she aged, she was losing what remained of her beauty, and the effort of nursing the child Samnibolon was a drain on her vigor. Whereas Konya’s Galihine was still in the prime of her womanhood, and the maidens Thaloin and Weiawala had the heat of youth about them, and even Nettin had some juice in her. So one night early in the trek Harruel had announced the new custom, and he had taken Thaloin that night to couple with.

If Minbain had any objections, she kept them to herself, as did Thaloin’s mate, Bruikkos.

“We will couple as we please,” Harruel declared. “All of us, not only the king!” He had learned from the Kreun experience that he must be careful in taking special privileges for himself: he could go so far, but no farther, and then they might rise up and overthrow him, or fall upon him in his sleep.

He was not delighted when Lakkamai and Minbain went off to couple a few nights later. But it was the rule, and he could hardly speak against it. Harruel swallowed his displeasure. In time he grew used to the other men coupling with Minbain; and he himself coupled as he wished.

By now no one gave the matter of coupling a second thought. At coupling-time this night Harruel selected Weiawala. Her fur was soft and glossy, her breath was warm and sweet. If she had a fault, it was only that she was too passionate, throwing herself against him again and again, until he had to push her aside in order to get a little rest.

Far-off animals chattered and boomed and sang shrilly in the night. Then the rain arrived, warm and torrential, putting out their fire. They all huddled morosely together, getting drenched. Harruel heard someone mutter on the far side of the heap that at least in Vengiboneeza they had had roofs over their heads. He wondered who that was: a potential troublemaker, maybe. But Weiawala, clinging to him, distracted him. Harruel forgot about the muttering. After a time the down-pour slackened and he slipped into sleep.