We have decided that bison are too dangerous to live in a Courtyard, and it seems like providing wild meat to the terra indigene in Talulah Falls will help all of us. We have enough room to store the meat from one bison. Ask Jerry Sledgeman to bring his livestock truck and take the other four bison to Talulah Falls. That will be plenty of meat for everyone.

—Simon Wolfgard

To: Stavros Sanguinati

Have tried to contact you several times. I’m concerned about the rumors that the terra indigene have been driven out of the Toland Courtyard. Please contact me at your earliest convenience.

—Greg O’Sullivan, Investigative Task Force

CHAPTER 23

Cel-Romano

The men and women in the small villages that dotted the border separating Cel-Romano from the wild country led simple lives. They farmed, raising the crops that suited the land. They raised some animals for food and others for fleece. They stopped in certain shops in the village proper to listen to the radio or use a telephone because such things weren’t found in most houses. They laughed; they sang; they married and made love and raised children.

And every village had one or two families who had the special duty of following a path into the wild country to a designated place and leaving a gift at the full moon. Sometimes it was special food; sometimes a length of cloth or a rug. Sometimes it was a book purchased by the whole village just for this.

Members of the families would go to that designated place and say, “For our friends,” as they held their offering. Sometimes a wolfman or a foxman would come out of the woods and accept their offering. Sometimes it was a Crow or a Hawk that would land nearby and indicate the gift was acceptable.

Generation after generation, each side carried out the ritual. A gift in exchange for the men in the village venturing into the wild country to cut wood to warm their houses, for the women to pick fruit. And when the Important Men from the Big Cities came to the villages to take most of a harvest, or the horses that were needed for the farms, or the animals that would have been sold to the butcher for the coins that would provide the income the family needed for the next year, sometimes there was a basket, woven from vines and filled with fruit, left on a doorstep. Sometimes there was a rabbit for the pot or a small deer that kept many families in the village from going hungry.

“For our friends.” The people knew the wolfman, the foxman, the Crow, and the Hawk were messengers. They knew there were things in the wild country—and in the sea—that were too ferocious and should not be seen. They lived at the border of the wild country; they lived in fishing villages at the edge of the sea. They had always known what the Important Men from the Big Cities refused to know—that being friends was the only way to survive.

Since the New Year, the Important Men had come to the villages and taken more than food and animals; they had taken the strong, healthy sons because “we need workers in our factories; we need soldiers for the great battle.”

There would be no battle. The people in the villages had passed down the old stories and they knew this, but the Important Men wouldn’t listen. They claimed that they needed more food, more animals, more fish for the cause. They needed more wood, more glass, more metal, more cloth, more leather.

More men.

“Do not forget,” fathers whispered to sons. “You will come home to us if you do not forget.”

Day after day, the people tended their flocks and their fields. They baked bread and wove cloth. And they traveled the paths to the special places, bringing not only gifts but also precious photographs of their sons.

“He is a good boy. Let him come home.”

There was no answer. But as the villagers returned to homes all along the border of Cel-Romano, the land was filled with a terrible silence.

CHAPTER 24

Fingerbone Islands

Rising out of the surf that caressed the Fingerbone Islands, she waited a moment, allowing most of the crabs and small fish to spill out of her gown before she made her way to the treasure rooms. There were chests filled with gold coins and tables heaped with necklaces so encrusted with gems she thought of them as rocks covered with colored barnacles.

Coins and necklaces had no particular interest for her, but maps were her delight. To see what she knew in a different way, to see where her kin lived. When she rose to walk on land, maps of any kind provided knowledge and entertainment.

But today she wandered from room to room, looking at what had been salvaged over centuries, and felt no curiosity, no pleasure. The creatures who made these things had been an enemy in the past and were an enemy again. They had killed her Sharkgard. They had killed fish of all kinds with their poison. And for what? To fill their little ships with gold or some other kind of treasure and scurry from one shore to another?

Let them fight among themselves. That was no more significant to her than male crabs maintaining a territory in order to entice a mate. But they had touched her domain, had spilled poison into her waters.

Because the Sanguinati were land predators the Sharkgard respected, she had sent her warning to give them time to withdraw inland. Soon she would strike. But not quite yet. Air said strange noisy things had been flying lately. Ancient Tethys was stirring, roused out of her benign watchfulness of the Mediterran Sea. Even Indeus slapped at the shores that bordered his domain, disturbed by a change of temper in Earth and Air.

Two shores—Thaisia and Cel-Romano. Where was she needed?

Leaving her treasure rooms, she returned to the water and flowed toward the west. The poison had come from Thaisia. She would deal with the enemy there first.