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roamed under sky as always, and I with him.
    The woman who called herself his mother—perhaps she was his mother, for she possessed something of power: For evil. Her hand could never clearly be seen, but always after the kings met in her house there were spiteful faces, skirmishes in distant places, a feeling as of thunder forming in the reaches of sky, and Sakeema walked long and far to quell it.
    It was the female king of the Otter who made the accusation: that the mother of Sakeema was guilty of abomination, of loosely consorting with men pledged to others, and with boys so young they were yet nearly children, and even with young girls. It was whispered that she lay also with her own son. But that charge was not made. So on a day in springtime, on a day when the asphodel nodded yellow, the council of kings met and brought the charge of abomination, and they called on Sakeema for justice.
    I knew whose blood they truly craved. His. For being what he was, far greater than they.
    In my vision I cried out in despair to Sakeema, “All falls to ruin!”
    â€œSay not so, son of earth.” He was sitting by me amidst grass greenwild with spring, in a meadow where many deer grazed. Purple spires of amaranth swayed, the healing flower born of his own hands, loveliest of flowers, which after his passing withered and died. Except for me and the deer, all his friends had forsaken him. The beauty of the place where we sat only deepened my despair.
    â€œThere may be dreaming and doing, and wonders without number, yet it all falls down into ashes again, always! I am young, yet I have seen it too many times. Has it not always been so, since the beginning of the world?” A plea in my voice, for him to tell me No, I was wrong.
    But instead he said, “Listen to me, son of earth.” All his great heart in his voice, for he was trying to teach me and comfort me, as he had taught and comforted so many. Yet he would not tell me other than truth. “Yes, it has always been so, turnings upon turnings. But think also of the things you cannot see. When the All-Mother carved stone and made mountains, when she took many colors of wool and wove the coverings of earth, when she wept and set her shining tears in the sky, she wept for love. When she took clay and made humankind and set us free for the wandering of this place, she wept the oceans for love of us. But there is a love farther away, which we cannot see, and next to it the love of the All-Mother is as hatred.”
    He spoke of the All-Mother as if he knew her, as if he had sat by her side and talked with her, as I now talked with him. But the rest of what he was saying was utterly new to me. “What love?” I whispered.
    â€œA love greater than sky, a love without ending, which you can scarcely understand, in the heart of the god who broods half a hundred worlds under one great starry wing. He is too vast for us to see or name, and so also is his brother, whom he loves as much as he does us.”
    â€œBrother?”
    â€œHis half-witted brother. You have known such folk? They put all to awk and awry, meaning no evil, no more than a toddling child means evil. The god’s half-witted brother often grows angry and jealous, as such folk do, and in his rages he sometimes destroys what the god wishes only to cherish.”
    â€œHe should be punished,” I muttered.
    â€œBut the one who will never cease to love us, should he then cease to love his own brother?”
    I had no answer.
    â€œHaply,” Sakeema added with a warm smile, “the brother must sometimes sleep.”
    He could jest? With his mother’s house looming in the distance, within which the council of kings waited?
    â€œAnd the god,” I said in a low voice. “Does he also sleep?”
    Sakeema did not cease to smile, but he said softly, “This is a time, I think, when the god is sleeping.”
    The woman who called herself his mother, she also deserved