When he came to again, he was moving.

The entire frame he was strapped to had be lifted and carted out of the gloom. He faced the sky. Blinding light filled his eyes, dust filled his nose and mouth, and shouts and screams filled his mind. He felt himself shiver like a fever victim, tearing pain from each shattered limb. He tried to shout, and to raise his head to see, but all there was was noise and dust. His insides felt worse; skin taut over his belly.

Then he was upright again, and the village was beneath him. It was small, there were some tents, some wicker and clay dwellings and some holes into the ground. Semi-arid; an indeterminate scrub — stamped down inside the perimeter of the village — vanished quickly beyond it, into a yellow-glowing mist. The sun was just visible, low down. He couldn't work out if it was dawn or dusk.

What he really saw were the people. They were all in front of him; he was up on a mound, the frame tied to two large stakes, and the people were beneath him, all on their knees, heads bowed. There were tiny children, their heads forced down by nearby adults, there were old people held up from collapsing completely by those around them, and every age in between.

Then in front of him walked three people, the girl and two of the men. The men, one on either side of the girl, lowered their heads, knelt down quickly and arose again, and made a sign. The girl did not move, and her gaze was fixed on a point between his eyes. She was dressed in a bright red gown now; he could not remember what she had worn before.

One of the men held a large earthenware pot. The other had a long, curved, broad-bladed sword.

"Hey," he croaked. He couldn't manage anything else. The pain was getting very bad now; being upright didn't do his broken limbs any good at all.

The chanting people seemed to swing about his head; the sunlight dipped and veered, and the three people in front of him became many, multiplying and wavering, unsteady in the waste of mist and dust before him.

Where the hell was Culture?

There was a terrible roaring noise in his head, and the diffuse glow in the midst which was the sun was starting to pulse. The sword glittered to one side; the earthenware pot gleamed on the other. The girl stood directly in front of him, and put her hand into his hair, grasping it.

The roaring noise was filling his ears, and he could not tell if he was shouting and screaming or not. The man to his right raised the sword.

The girl pulled his hair, yanking his head out; he screamed, above the roaring noise, as his broken bones grated. He stared at the dust at the hem of the girl's robe.

"You bastards!" he thought, not sure, even then, exactly who he meant.

He managed to scream one syllable. "El — !"

Then the blade slammed into his neck.

The name died. Everything had ended but it still went on.

There was no pain. The roaring noise was actually quieter. He was looking down at the village and the crouching people. The view swung; he could still feel the pull of the roots of his hair straining at the skin on his scalp. He was swung round.

The slack, headless body dribbled blood down its chest.

That was me! he thought. Me!

He was swung round again; the man with the sword was wiping blood from the blade with a rag. The man with the earthenware pot was trying not to look into his staring eyes, and holding the pot out towards him, the lid in his other hand. So that's what it's for, he thought, feeling somehow stunned into an eerie calmness. Then the roaring noise seemed to gather and start to fade at once. The view was going red. He wondered how much longer this could go on. How long did a brain survive without oxygen?

Now I really am two, he thought, remembering, eyes closing.

And he thought of his heart, stopped now, and only then realised, and wanted to cry but could not, for he had finally lost her. Another name formed in his kind. Dar…

The roar split the skies. He felt the girl's grip loosen. The expression on the face of the youth holding the pot was almost comically fearful. People looked up from the crowd; the roar became a scream, a blast of air swept dust into the air and made the girl holding him stagger; a dark shape swung quickly through the air above the village.

A little late… he heard himself think, slipping away.

There was more noise for a second or two — screams, maybe — and something whacked into his head, and he was rolling away, dust in his mouth and eyes… but he was starting to lose interest in all that stuff, and was happy to let the darkness wash over him. Maybe he was picked up again, later.

But that seemed to happen to somebody else.

When the terrible noise came, and the great, carved black rock landed in the middle of the village — just after the sky's offering had been separated from his body and so joined to the air — everybody ran into the thinning mist, to get away from the screaming light. They gathered, whimpering, at the water hole.

After only fifty heartbeats, the dark shape appeared above the village again, rising hazily into the thinner mists near the sky. It did not roar this time, but moved quickly off with a noise like the wind, and shrank to nothing.

The shaman sent his apprentice back to see how things stood; the quaking youth disappeared into the mist. He returned safely, and the shaman led the still terrified people back to the village.

The body of the sky-offering still hung limply on the wooden frame at the summit of the mound. His head had disappeared.

After much chanting and grinding entrails, spotting shapes in the mists and three trances, the priest and his apprentice decided it was a good omen, and yet a warning at the same time. They sacrificed a meat-animal belonging to the family of the girl who had dropped the sky-offering's head, and put the beast's head in the earthenware pot instead.

Five

"Dizzy! How the devil are you?" He took her hand and helped her up onto the wooden pier from the roof of the just-surfaced module. He put his arms round her. "Good to see you again!" he laughed. Sma patted his waist, finding herself unwilling to hug him back. He didn't seem to notice.

He let her go, looked down to see the drone rising up from the module. "And Skaffen-Amtiskaw! They still letting you out without a guard?"

"Hello, Zakalwe," the drone said.

He put his arm round Sma's waist. "Come on up to the shack; we'll have lunch."

"All right," she said.

They walked along the small wooden pier to a stone path laid across the sand, and on into the shade under the trees. The trees were blue or purple; huge puff heads of dark colour standing out against the pale blue sky, and tugged at by a warm, intermittent breeze. They sweated delicate perfumes from the tops of their silver-white trunks. The drone lifted to above tree height a couple of times, when other people passed on the path.

The man and woman walked through the sunlit avenues between the trees until they came to where a wide pool of water trembled reflections of twenty or so white huts; a small, sleek seaplane floated at a wooden jetty. They entered the cluster of buildings and climbed some steps to a balcony that looked over the pool and the narrow channel that led from it to the lagoon on the far side of the island.

The sun was sifted through the tree-heads; shadows moved to and fro along the veranda and over the small table and the two hammocks.

He motioned Sma to sit on the first hammock; a female servant appeared and he ordered lunch for two. When the servant had gone, Skaffen-Amtiskaw floated down and sat on the parapet of the veranda's wall, overlooking the pool. Sma levered herself into the hammock carefully.

"It true you own this island, Zakalwe?"

"Um…" he looked round, apparently uncertain, then nodded his head. "Oh yes; so I do." He kicked off his sandals and slumped into the other hammock, letting it sway. He picked up a bottle from the floor, and with each sway of the hammock poured a little more from the bottle into two glasses on the small table. He increased the swing when he had finished to be able to hand her drink to her.