The Word for World is Forest Read online

  Selver sat still. Uneasiness turned to fear in his mind. This one spoke like a Great Dreamer.

  He made no response at all.

  “Will you tell me one thing, Selver. If the question doesn’t offend you. There will be no more questions after it. . . . There were the killings: at Smith Camp, then at this place, Eshsen, then finally at New Java Camp where Davidson led the rebel group. That was all. No more since then. . . . Is that true? Have there been no more killings?”

  “I did not kill Davidson.”

  “That does not matter,” Lepennon said, misunderstanding; Selver meant that Davidson was not dead, but Lepennon took him to mean that someone else had killed Davidson. Relieved to see that the yumen could err, Selver did not correct him.

  “There has been no more killing, then?”

  “None. They will tell you,” Selver said, nodding toward the Colonel and Gosse.

  “Among your own people, I mean. Athsheans killing Athsheans.”

  Selver was silent.

  He looked up at Lepennon, at the strange face, white as the mask of the Ash Spirit, that changed as it met his gaze.

  “Sometimes a god comes,” Selver said. “He brings a new way to do a thing, or a new thing to be done. A new kind of singing, or a new kind of death. He brings this across the bridge between the dream-time and the world-time. When he has done this, it is done. You cannot take things that exist in the world and try to drive them back into the dream, to hold them inside the dream with walls and pretenses. That is insanity. What is, is. There is no use pretending, now, that we do not know how to kill one another.”

  Lepennon laid his long hand on Selver’s hand, so quickly and gently that Selver accepted the touch as if the hand were not a stranger’s. The green-gold shadows of the ash leaves flickered over them.

  “But you must not pretend to have reasons to kill one another. Murder has no reason,” Lepennon said, his face as anxious and sad as Lyubov’s face. “We shall go. Within two days we shall be gone. All of us. Forever. Then the forests of Athshe will be as they were before.”

  Lyubov came out of the shadows of Selver’s mind and said, “I shall be here.”

  “Lyubov will be here,” Selver said. “And Davidson will be here. Both of them. Maybe after I die people will be as they were before I was born, and before you came. But I do not think they will.”