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up, warbled like a bubbling stream and flew, gone in sky. Sakeema’s gaze left mine at last to follow it.
    â€œBlue wren,” I whispered.
    â€œYou have named it, son of earth.”
    It was a dream. I knew even as it happened that it was all a dream, too sweet to be real. Yet it was all true, as things dreamed are sometimes more true than things real, very truth, a truth I would have put my hand in fire for, and taken oath.
    Indeed I did travel with him. He sent his stag away, and we walked. Creatures came to him wherever we walked, and people, for there was healing in his touch. Battle’s wounded, made well. A woman dying of childbed fever, standing up to tend her baby. A small girl’s twisted leg made straight. Scrofula in a young man, gone as if it had never been.
    And there was that marvelous power in his hands, which I first had seen. If he took a bit of earth in his hands, or even a brown pine flower or a twig, and if he dreamed … The wonders that came of Sakeema’s hands and Sakeema’s dreams. Great-eared foxes called fennecs. Small burrowing bears. The crested jay, each of its feathers a different color from the others, and each brighter than the last. The tiny blue deer of Sakeema with antlers the clear color of ice. All these things I saw.
    That was the time of wonders, Sakeema’s time. There were a twelve of sorts of deer in those days, as many sorts as there are bodyguards in a king’s retinue, and I saw them all. Great maned elk, and the swimming deer with tines, small spotted deer, musk deer, the yellow deer with flattened antlers, black-tailed deer, many others—all gone, afterward, except the red. And the wolves, the foxes, their pelages—not gray only, as in the later time, but spice colored, like the trunk of a great upland pine, and black, blue, dun, yellow, brown, fawn, white, all beautiful. The foxes sat in the night and looked at Sakeema with shining eyes, and the wolves and the spotted wild dogs brought him meat, and the deer lay down by his side.
    I was not the only one who followed him, though I was the first. There came to be many others, and whatever questions they asked him, he would try to answer. And tales were told throughout the demesne of the marvels he did and of his wisdom, until at last, warily, the very kings came to him for counsel, and he spoke long with them.
    So another marvel came to be, that all six tribes learned to speak a common language: the Herders with their six-horned brown sheep, the salmon-eating Otter River Clan, the Red Hart, the Seal Kindred, the solitary Cragsmen, and the Fanged Horse Folk, fiercest warriors of us all. Even they followed peaceful ways during that time when folk called Sakeema “High King,” though he claimed no such title.
    One day in springtime—though in my vision it seemed always to be springtime—one day when the spotted lilies bloomed, a woman came and stood before Sakeema where he sat in a hemlock grove.
    â€œHonor me,” she told him with a smile. “I am your mother.”
    â€œI have no mother,” Sakeema said.
    The woman said, “I am your mother. Provide a home for me.”
    He got up slowly to stand and stare at her. “The All-Mother is my mother,” he said in a roughened voice, and only in that way did he ever call himself a god. And only I stood by to hear.
    â€œI am your mother,” the woman said. “I gave you life.” And he went to her and embraced her.
    â€œTurn your back!” I reproached him. “If she speaks truth, she abandoned you, left you in a cave to chance’s care!”
    â€œShe speaks truth,” he said. “How can I turn my back? Life itself is the greatest gift.”
    In my vision it seemed as if he had built her a home at once, with the embrace, a great lodge of stone and timber standing in the midst of the demesne. The kings of the six tribes came there to hold council. Sakeema did not dwell within. He