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smiled, and spoke my name, Gavir.
    “Gavir” again . . . and I was in the pool of dim light, looking up a long way, it seemed, at a woman’s face. She wore a night wrapper of white wool drawn partly over her head. Her face was smooth and grave. She looked like Astano but was not Astano. I thought I was remembering her. Slowly I realised that she was the Mother, Falimer Galleco Arca, at whose face I had never in my life gazed openly. Now I lay staring at her as if she were a carven image, an Ancestor, dreamily, without fear.
    Beside me Sallo, sound asleep, stirred a little.
    The Mother laid the back of her hand a moment on my forehead, and nodded a little. “All right?” she murmured. I was too weary and dreamy to speak but I must have nodded or smiled, because she smiled a little, touched my cheek, and went on.
    There was a crib bed near my bed; she paused there a while. That would be little Miv, I thought, drifting back into the silence of the pool of light. I remembered when we went to bury Miv, down by the river, how the willows were like green rain in the grey rain of spring. I remembered Miv’s sister Oco standing by the small black grave with a flowering branch in her hand. I looked out across the river dappled with raindrops. I remembered when we all went down to the river to bury old Gammy; that was in winter, the willows were bare over the riverbanks, but I wasn’t so sad then because it was like a holiday, a festival, so many people came to bury Gammy, and there was to be a wake-feast after. And I briefly remembered some other time there, in spring again, I did not know who was being buried. Maybe it was myself, I thought. I saw the sorrow in the eyes of the man standing by the lamp at the table in the high, dark room.
    And it was morning. Soft daylight instead of the dim golden pool. Sallo had gone. Miv was a little lump in the crib bed nearby. At the end of the room an old man lay in bed: Loter, who had been a cook till he got old, and got sick, and now was here to die. Remen was helping him sit up against a pillow. Loter groaned and moaned. I felt all right, and got up; then my head hurt and went dizzy, and a lot of parts of me hurt, so I sat down on the bed for a while.
    “Up, are you, marsh rat?” old Remen said, coming over to me. He felt some of the lumps on my head. He had splinted a dislocated finger on my right hand, and explained the splint to me while he checked it. “You’ll do,” he said. “Tough, you kids are. Who did that to you, anyhow?”
    I shrugged.
    He glanced at me, nodded shortly, and did not ask again. He and I were slaves, we lived in a complicity of silences.
    Remen wouldn’t let me leave the infirmary that morning, saying that the Mother was coming in to look at both me and Miv; so I sat on the bed and examined my lumps and cuts, which were extensive and interesting. When I got bored with them I recited from
The Siege and Fall of Sentas
, chanting the lines. Along near noon, Miv finally woke up, and I could go over and talk to him. He was very groggy and didn’t make much sense. He looked at me and asked me why I was two. “Two what?” I said, and he said, “Two Gavs.”
    “Seeing double,” said old Remen, coming over. “A whack on the head’ll do that. —Mistress!” and he went down in the reverence, and I did too, as the Mother came into the room.
    She checked Miv very thoroughly. His head looked misshapen on the left from the swelling, and she looked into his ear and pressed his skull and cheekbones softly. Her face was concerned, but finally she said, “He is coming back,” in her deep, soft voice, and smiled. She was holding him on her lap, and she spoke tenderly. “Aren’t you, little Miv? You’re coming back to us.”
    “It roars,” he said plaintively, squinting and blinking. “Is Oco coming?”
    Remen, shocked, tried to get him to address the Mother properly, but she waved him away. “He’s only a baby,” she said. “I’m glad you decided to