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But he’d lain, staring down over his hip, afraid to move lest she wake, his heart hammering harder and harder, so that it was all he could do to pay attention to the feel of—yes, he could move them without disturbing her—the toes on his right foot in the copper torrent, the cataract, the cool swirl of her hair.
    Later, he’d decided she was a strange girl. But when, in all the nights between then and today, he’d drifted off to sleep, he kept finding a dark tenderness among his thoughts of her.
    Suddenly Qualt smacked the basket bottom, turned it up to peer within its smelly slats, then dragged it behind him, rasping on rock, toward the dozen others that stood around the end of his wagon.
    Rahm walked through the village, wondering at how well he knew his home’s morning-to-morning and evening-to-evening cycle.
    In hours, Rahm thought, the sun will drop behind the trees, and the western houses will unroll shadows over the streets. Then, at dawn, the sun will push between the eastern dwellings to stripe the dust with copper. He strolled on, hugely content.
    Reaching the burial meadow, Rahm glanced over the unmarked graves. (But Ienbar knew the name and location of each man, each woman, andeach child laid here time out of memory, and kept all the scrolls about them.…) The visiting singer was coming toward the meadow up the road from the fields.
    A chamois mantle hung forward over one shoulder but was pushed back from the other. A chain of shells held her short skirt low on her hips. A strap ran down between her breasts, holding something to her back. Its carved wooden head slanted behind her neck. Rahm knew it was her harp. “And hello to thee, Naä.”
    “Rahm, you’re back! Are you going to see Ienbar? I was on my way to visit him, but I stopped at my lean-to to replace three of my harp-strings—”
    “Yes, Rimgia told me, only moments past,” Rahm said. “Kern and Abrid were just home from the stone pits.”
    “And in your wander, what’d you see?” She fell in beside him. “That’s what I want to hear about!”
    “Naä—” Rahm looked at the ground, where olive tufts poked from the path dust—”thou makest fun of me.”
    “What do you mean, make fun?”
    “Thou, who hast traveled over all the world, asketh me what I have seen that thou hast not, after a simple week’s wander…?”
    “Oh, Rahm—I wasn’t making fun of you. I’m interested!”
    “But thou hast come all the way from Calvicon, with thy songs and tales. What can I have seen in a week that thou in a dozen years hast not?”
    “But that’s what I want you to tell me!”
    He saw her glance over to catch his expression (he was still pretending interest in the tufted ridge of the path)—and saw her surprise that his expression was a smile. “But now thou seest,” hesaid, looking at her again, “I am making fun of
thee!”
    “We’ll go to Ienbar together, and while we go, you’ll tell me!”
    “Naä, I saw antelopes come down across hazed-over grasses to drink at yellow watering holes at dawn. I found a village of folk who wove and plowed and quarried as we do, and live in huts and houses that might well have been built on the same plans as ours—though the only words in the whole of their language I could make out, after a day with them, were the words for `star,’ ‘ear,’ and ‘tomato plant.’ On the fifth day, as the rituals instruct us, I ate nothing from the time I woke, but drank only water, and stopped three times to purify myself with wise words. And, when the sun went down, still fasting I composed myself for sleep—hoping for a mystic dream.”
    She grinned: “Did you have one?”
    “I dreamt,” Rahm said, gravely, “that I walked by a great, rushing stream. And as the sun rose up, and I ambled along beside the current, the water began to sparkle. Then, in the dream, a little branch feeding into the water lay before me, so I decided to wade across to the other side. I stepped in. The water was cold at