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back at me, a curious look taking hold of him.
    â€œNo. It is as nameless as you.”
    I turned back to the mare, looking at her through the bars of the pen but keeping well back from hooves and tearing teeth. Her angry eyes met mine. Large, the largest eye I had ever seen in any beast, white-rimmed, with a dark center the color of cloudy water, brown with a bluish tinge. Sorrows of ages seemed to be hidden in that murky eye. I felt a sudden surge of compassion for her, the wild creature in her confinement.
    â€œI will undertake vigil for a name for you, daughter of the hot winds,” I promised her.
    As I had once done vigil for a name for myself.

Chapter Three
    â€œArcher,” Kor protested, “you have not yet eaten even three full meals!”
    â€œSo much the better. The trance will all the sooner come to me.”
    He puffed his cheeks at me in exasperation and urged me toward a seat by the firepit, fed me chunks of fish and some bitter-tasting green stuff from the sea. I sat at trencher this time, but ate with wrinkled nose.
    â€œDo the Seal Kindred not know the worth of red meat?” I demanded. “Is there not enough game on the slopes?”
    â€œRed meat? We feed it to yon fanged mare.” Kor faced me soberly, and I could not tell whether he was jesting with me.
    After I had eaten I took my place by “yon fanged mare” and ate nothing more for the days of the vigil, waiting for a name to come from Sakeema.
    He is legend, Sakeema, he-whom-all-we-seek. Yet more than legend, for he is god. Yet less than legend, for he is living man, and my grandfather’s grandfather once spoke to an old man who knew him as a friend.
    Sakeema was born in a cold cave far up on the snowpeaks, my folk say, and all the creatures came to look at the naked babe. The little shivering pika came and the mighty catamount, the otter, the white fox, the tall antelope of the crags, the badger, and the wolf standing next to the shy hare, and the peregrine perched in the blue pines alongside the wren. They all kept silent vigil. And when his human mother left him he was suckled by a deer. Or so the Red Hart people say—the Seal Kindred say he was born in a seaside cave and suckled by a cow seal, held to her breasts with her flippers and taken to swim in the sea. No one knows surely whence he came.
    Sakeema, the king who will come again. He did not quickly come to me, and I shivered through that first day in the smurr.
    Kor brought me a deerskin to sit on, and a woolen cloak to ward off the chill, and a sort of cape woven out of the inner bark of cedar to fend off the damp and the rain. I put the things on, for day was darkening into dusk and I was miserable with the weakness of the vigil starting already to come on me. He looked at me a moment, then nodded and left me.
    Sometime during the first night the mare grew weary of screeching and striking at me. She went to stand against the farther wall, and after that all was silence and blackness until dawn. There was something cruel and nameless gnawing at my heart, and it was hard to empty my mind for the sake of Sakeema when the silence oppressed me, making me feel crushed by blackness, as if I would drown. Nor could I run away. So I sang. Years later Seal folk told me how they lay awake and cursed me through the night of that singing.
    Nonsense, mostly, I sang, my voice no more melodious than that of the craking rail. “Mare, dare, what about this mare.… What a shame, the lady has no name.… Name, shame, where is her name.… I give it up, Sakeema, send a name.… King, sing, what sort of creature is a king, Sakeema, I beg of you. I give it up, what king, what a thing …” On and on. And sometimes snatches of the old songs with words no one understood:
    â€œThe hart wears a crown but Sakeema wore none.
    Sakeema the king, where have you gone?
    Badgers have setts and the bears have their dens.
    Sakeema the king, where is your