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good. We’d better tell Ienbar, anyway.”
    They had reached the center of the field.
    “If he is at home.” Rahm looked around. He cupped his hands to shout. “Ienbar, I am here! Where art thou?”
    On the meadow’s far side, a door in a board wall between two trees flew open. A figure lurched out. White hair and white beard jutted in small braids. “Rahm!” the old man shouted and began to rush bandy-legged across the grass. Round his neck jangled half a dozen thongs tied with animal teeth. His long arms were heavy with copper bracelets. At his waist, a leather apron was hemmed with metal pieces worked with symbols and designs. Metal circled his ankle above a skinny foot. Several huge brass hoops hung from his ears, their thickness distending pierced lobe and rim.
    Ienbar threw his clinking arms around Rahm, stepped back, then embraced him again. “My son!” he said, in a voice cracked and crackling, then stepped back, while Rahm steadied his scrawny shoulders in his big hands. “Thou hast come safely from thy wandering.” Turning to Naä, the old man seized her wrist. “And thou hast come too,my daughter, to sing and play for me. It is good to see thee this fine day.”
    “It’s always good to see you, Ienbar,” Naä said. “Just like it’s good to have Rahm back with us.”
    “Come, the both of you,” Ienbar declared. “Well, boy, where hast thou been and what didst thou see?”
    In the hut, they sat on mats Rahm tossed across small benches, while Ienbar heated his pot. Shelves about them were stacked with bones and parchment scrolls, bits of beautiful uncut stone, lengths of painted wood, dried lizards, stuffed bats, and the mounted skeletons of various ground birds and field creatures. Some of the village children still entered here with fear—but to Rahm it had been his home since the death of his parents when he was fifteen.
    “… what a dream!” Ienbar chuckled. “What a dream, indeed! Yes, I recall that river, from the first years thou hadst moved in with me here, I do—” Ienbar grinned at a reproving look from Rahm. “Well, I do! Sometimes, I think, thy sleeping corner still smells of it—and I’ve told thee before, I don’t mind. I rather like it. A bit of dung, a bit of urine, fresh turned earth, and new cut grass—those are good smells!” Ienbar broke a small bone and, on the pot’s rim, tapped the marrow into the broth. “The smells I don’t like, now—charred meat, rotten vegetables, and the stench of clogged water that should be running free.” Ienbar turned to serve Naä, then Rahm; for himself, at last, he filled a third bowl. “Well, well, what a dream, what a stream… !”
    Rahm took one sip; then, bowl between his knees, he began on the rest of his wander. But when he reached the encounter with the Myetran, the old man’s face wrinkled. Ienbarput his soup on the hearth-flags by his big-knuckled toes with their thickened nails, sat back, and moved his tongue about in his mouth without opening his lips.
    Questioningly, Rahm lowered black brows. “Why art thou and Naä so concerned about these Myetrans?”
    Ienbar sucked his gums. “Oh, sometimes one hears stories—”
    Naä interrupted: “I’ll tell you a story, Rahm—” She looked across her bowl at the old man. “Ienbar—in Calvicon, we hear stories too. And the stories of Myetra were never good. I told you about my brother’s friend, Rahm? Well, he said that his powergun was from Myetra. And he told stories of the destruction that went on there—between man and man, between one race and another. You have your flying neighbors at Hi-Vator? Well, Myetra is on the sea—and once there were people who lived and swam in the water, and could breathe under it like fish do in the ponds and the stream in the quarry. But Myetra fought them; and made slaves of them; and finally killed them. And there are no more water folk around the Myetran shore. That’s the story my brother’s friend told us. Then, one day,