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himself again. He had only made things worse by his belligerence.
        Dejected, he went to the only place he knew where he could find some understanding, however cynical. The isolated tent of his traveling companion: the Master's wife.
        "I was afraid it would come to this," Sola said, her voice oddly soft. "I will go to Tyl and have him fetch you a damsel. You shall not be deprived, this night."
        "No!" Var cried, horrified that he should have to be satisfied by the intercession of a woman going to his enemy. Human mores were not natural to him, but this was too obviously a thing of shame.
        "That, too, I anticipated," she said philosophically. "That's why I had my tent set up away from the main camp."
        Var did not understand.
        "Come in, lie down," she said. "It'd not- as bad as you think. A man doesn't prove himself in one day or one night; it's the years that show the truth."
        Var crawled into the tent and lay down beside her. He really did not know this woman well. She had remained aloof all the years the Master trained him, only instructing him curtly in computations. Thanks to her, he could count to one hundred, and tell whether six handfuls of four ears of corn were more than two baskets with fifteen ears each. (They were not.) Such calculations were difficult and pointless, and he had not enjoyed the lessons, and Sola had made him feel particularly stupid, but the Master had insisted. Thus his chief association with her had been negative.
        He had been surprised when she was delegated-or had volunteered-to accompany him here for his manhood test. A woman! But as it had turned out, she was quite competent. She walked well, so that they made good distance each day and knew the route, and when they encountered strangers she had done the talking. They had spent the nights in the hostels, she in one bunk, he in another, though he would have preferred even now to sleep in a familiar tree. Aloof she remained, but she did not entirely conceal her body as she showered and changed for the night, and the glimpses he bad had, had given him painful erections. His nature was animal; any female, even one as old as this, provoked him. And she did know his origin and understand his limitations.
        Now, in this strange unfriendly camp, hurt by his own failures, he had come to her-his only contact with his only friend, the Master.
        "So you asked the young girls, and they ridiculed you," she said. "I had hoped better for you-but I was young once myself, and just as narrow. I thought power was most important-to marry a chief. And so I lost the man I loved, and now I am sorry."
        She had never talked like this before. Var lay silent, satisfied for the moment to listen. It was better than thinking of his own humiliations. She referred, of course, to her former husband-Sol of All Weapons, who had lost his empire to the Master, and had gone to the mountain with his baby girl. The episode had become legend already; everyone knew of that momentous transfer of power and that tragic father-daughter suicide.
        If Sola had loved power so much that she had given up the man she loved and the daughter she had borne to him, and taken the victor to her bed-no wonder she suffered!
        "Would you understand," she asked, "if I told you that when I thought I'd lost my love for ever, he returned to me-and I found that it was only his body, not his heart, that was mine, and even that body maimed and unfamiliar?"
        "No," Var said honestly. It was easier to voice the words for her, for she understood him whether or not his wilderness mouth cooperated.
        "Not everything is what it seems," she murmured. "You, too, will find that friendship can make hard requirements of you, and those you might deem enemy are men to be trusted. Life is like that. Come, let's get this done with."
        He recognized a dismissal and began to crawl out of the tent.
        "No,"