"I can imagine what price," Sutty said.

He looked his question.

"Your immortal part," she said. There was no Akan word for soul. Yara waited for her to explain. "I imagine he said: You must believe. You must believe in the One God. You must believe that I alone, Father John, am God’s voice on Aka. Only the story I tell is true. If you obey God and me, we’ll tell you all the wonderful things we know. But the price of our Telling is high. More than any money."

Yara nodded dubiously, and pondered. "Fodderdon did say that the Executive Council would have to follow his orders. That’s why I called him a boss maz."

"That’s what he was."

"I don’t know about the rest. We were told that there were policy disagreements, and the ship and the Legates were sent back to Terra. However… I’m not certain that that’s what happened." He looked uncomfortable, and deliberated for a long time over what he was going to say. "I knew an engineer in New Alyuna who worked on the Aka One." He meant the NAFAL ship now on its way from Aka to Hain, the pride of the Corporation. "He said they’d used the Terran ship as a model. He may have meant they had the plans for it. But he made it sound as if he’d actually been in the ship. He was drunk. I don’t know."

The fifty Unist missionary-conquistadors had very likely died in Corporation labor camps. But Sutty saw now how Dovza itself had been betrayed into betraying the rest of Aka.

It saddened her heart, this story. All the old mistakes, made over and over. She gave a deep sigh. "So, having no way to distinguish Unist Legates from Ekumenical Observers, you’ve handled us ever since with extreme distrust… You know, Yara, I think your Executives were wise in refusing the bargain Father John offered. Though probably they saw it simply as a power struggle. What’s harder to see is that even the gift of knowledge itself had a price attached. And still does."

"Yes, of course it does," Yara said. "Only we don’t know what it is. Why do your people hide the price?" She stared at him, nonplussed. "I don’t know," she said. "I didn’t realise… I have to think about that."

Yara sat back, looking tired. He rubbed his eyes and closed them. He said softly, "The gift is lightning," evidently quoting some line of the Telling.

Sutty saw beautiful, arching ideograms, high on a shadowy white wall: the twice-forked lightning-tree grows up from earth. She saw Sotyu Ang’s worn, dark hands meet in the shape of a mountain peak above his heart. The price is nothing…

They sat in the silence, following their thoughts.

After a long time, she asked, "Yara, do you know the story about Dear Takieki?"

He stared at her and then nodded. It was a memory from childhood, evidently, that required some retrieval. After a bit longer he said definitely, "Yes."

"Was Dear Takieki really a fool? I mean, it was his mother who gave him the bean meal. Maybe he was right not to give it away, no matter what they offered him."

Yara sat pondering. "My grandmother told me that story. I remember I thought I’d like to be able to walk anywhere, the way he did, without anybody looking after me. I was still little, my grandparents didn’t let me go off by myself. So I said he must have wanted to go on walking. Not stay at a farm. And Grandmother asked, ’But what will he do when he runs out of food?’ And I said, ’Maybe he can bargain. Maybe he can give the maz some of the bean meal and keep some, and take just a few of the gold coins. Then he could go on walking, and still buy food to eat when winter comes.’"

He smiled faintly, remembering, but his face remained troubled.

It was always a troubled face. She remembered it when it was hard, cold, closed. It had been beaten open.

He was worried for good reason. He was not progressing well with walking. His knee would still not bear weight for longer than a few minutes, and his back injury prevented him from using crutches without pain and risk of further damage. Odiedin and To-badan worked with him daily, endlessly patient. Yara responded to them with his own dogged patience, but the look of trouble never left him.

Two groups had already left the Lap of Silong, slipping away in the dawn light, a few people, a couple of minule, heavy-laden. No bannered caravans.

Life in the caves was managed almost wholly by custom and consensus. Sutty had noted the conscious avoidance of hierarchy. People scrupulously did not pull rank. She mentioned this to Unroy, who said, "That was what went wrong in the century before the Ekumen came."

"Boss maz," Sutty said tentatively.

"Boss maz," Unroy confirmed, grinning. She was always tickled by Sutty’s slang and her Rangma archaisms. "The Dovzan Reformation. Power hierarchies. Power struggles. Huge, rich umyazu taxing the villages. Fiscal and spiritual usury! Your people came at a bad time, yoz."

"The ships always come to the new world at a bad time," Sutty said. Unroy glanced at her with a little wonder.

In so far as any person or couple was in charge of things at the Lap of Silong, it was the maz Igneba and Ikak. After general consensus was established, specific decisions and responsibilities were made by them. The order and times at which people were to depart was one such decision. Ikak came to Sutty at dinnertime one night. "Yoz Sutty, if you have no objection, your group will leave four days from now."

"All of us from Okzat-Ozkat?"

"No. You, Maz Odiedin Manma, Long, and Ieyu, we thought. A small group, with one minule. You should be able to travel fast and get down into the hills before the autumn weather."

"Very well, maz," Sutty said. "I hate to leave the books unread."

"Maybe you can come back. Maybe you can save them for our children."

That burning, yearning hope they all shared, that hope in her and in the Ekumen: it frightened Sutty every time she saw its intensity.

"I will try to do that, maz," she said. Then — "But what about Yara?"

"He’ll have to be carried. The healers say he won’t be able to walk any long distance before the weather changes. Your two young ones will be in the group with him, and Tobadan Siez, and two of our guides, and three minule with a handler. A large party, but it has to be so. They’ll go tomorrow morning, while this good weather holds. I wish we’d known the man would be unable to walk. We’d have sent them earlier. But they’ll take the Reban Path, the easiest."

"What becomes of him when you reach Amareza?"

Ikak spread out her hands. "What can we do with him? Keep him prisoner! We have to! He could tell the police exactly where the caves are. They’d send people as soon as they could, plant explosives, destroy it. The way they destroyed the Great Library of Marang, and all the others. The Corporation hasn’t changed their policy. Unless you can persuade them to change it, yoz Sutty. To let the books be, to let the Ekumen come and study them and save them. If that happened, we’d let him go, of course. But if we do, his own people will arrest and imprison him for unauthorised actions. Poor man, he hasn’t a very bright future."

"It’s possible that he won’t tell the police."

Ikak, surprised, looked her question.

"I know he’d made it a personal mission to find the Library and destroy it. An obsession, in fact. But he … He was brought up by maz. And …"

She hesitated. She could not tell Ikak his grave-secret any more than she could tell her own.

"He had to become what he was," she said finally. "But I think all that really makes sense to him is the Telling. I think he’s come back to that. I know he feels no enmity toward Odiedin or anybody here. Maybe he could stay with people in Amareza without being kept prisoner. Just keep out of sight."

"Maybe," Ikak said, not unsympathetic but unconvinced. "Except it’s very hard to hide somebody like that, yoz Sutty. He has an implanted ZIL. And he was a fairly high official, assigned to watch an Observer of the Ekumen. They’ll be looking for him. Once they get him, I’m afraid, whatever he feels, they can make him tell them anything he knows."