Aaron and Trish carried a pole across their shoulders, with a dozen netted samlon suspended from it. They were singing some kind of hunting song or working song... "Heigh ho, heigh ho, it's off to hunt I go".... making up verses as they approached the campfire.

Water was already simmering and bubbling in the glass cauldron. Potatoes and onions had been brought over from Camelot, but there was more: mainland bulbs and leaves known to be edible, and tasty. Some of the brighter Scouts noticed how flashlights had been focused into the cauldron, so that the vegetables could be seen dancing around in the roiling water.

There was an air of excitement, and someone ooh'd as Justin produced a wicked-looking knife and sliced the heads off the samlon.

"Look at their eyes," he said. "But for us, they would have been grendels one day, and hunted us. We killed them first. What eats grendels?" he asked. "We eat grendels."

They were as tense as an audience awaiting a magic trick. Justin figured that that was pretty close to accurate.

His blood-smeared hands gathered the beheaded samlon up and carried them to the pot, dropping them into the water.

The water foamed with blood.

"Watch," Justin said, "watch and see..."

Those first few trips, the Scouts had been crawling all over each other to watch and see, to look down into an inadequate aluminum pot. Once Ansel Stevens fell in and scalded his whole arm. Once there was a full riot. The pots kept getting bigger, but the Scouts still missed most of the action, until Chaka got big enough to carry this mucking great glass cauldron. And now everyone could see it all.

The three gallons of water in the pot churned. The samlon sank, and then churned up to the surface again, in a curious and disquieting imitation of life.

Something was happening. The flesh of the samlon split, and worm-like things boiled out. Scores of them. Hundreds. Pale, fleshy things churning and dying in the boiling water, turning the clear bubbling broth into a kind of thick gumbo... or jambalaya.

The Biters pulled back, choking. There rose from the red kettle a stench of blood.

And in a disturbing way... it was a good smell. Like last night's savory aroma, only stronger.

Justin and Aaron and Katya and Jessica and the other Second watched ghoulishly. The children stared at the kettle, sniffed at it One of them fled to the entrance of the cave and vomited.

In a half hour the brew was done, and ladled into bowls. It was an evil-looking mess, filled with fragments of samlon heads and the gutted carcasses now torn into chunks by Katya's bloody knife. The dead worms and corkscrew things were bloated pinkly in death. There were little transparent crabs no bigger than a Biter's fingernail. The base stock was as crimson as tomato soup. It looked filled with insects.

Aaron held the bowl to his lips. The Biters watched him, horribly fascinated.

"Mmmmm," he raised the spoon to his lips. He blew on it. Something thick and wormy flopped over the edge of the broad spoon. He slurped it up as if it were vermicelli, making a smacking sound. "Delicious."

"Dinner," Jessica said, "is served."

Chapter 10

THE FIRST CHURCH OF THE GRENDEL

In thee, O Lord, do I put my trust; let me never be ashamed: deliver me in thy righteousness.

Bow down thine ear to me; deliver me speedily; be thou my strong rock, for an house of defense to save me.

For thou art my rock and my fortress; therefore for thy name's sake lead me, and guide me.

Pull me out of the net that they have laid privily for me: for thou art my strength.

Into thine hand I commit my spirit: thou hast redeemed me, O Lord God of truth.

Psalm 31:16

Jessica rose only when she was absolutely certain that the others were asleep. On tiptoes, she crept out of the cave. The soft purring snores of sleeping children surrounded her. She felt a delicious synthesis of maternal concern and utter wickedness.

Aaron waited just outside the cave, and held a finger to his lips.

"Shhh."

Jessica nodded, understanding the need for secrecy. This wasn't for Justin. Not anymore-he had made his choice, and Jessica had made hers. Her heart thudded in her chest as she followed Aaron down the path. They passed a tree, and it wasn't until they had passed that she realized that it wasn't just a shadow, but Trish, dark as the night. A Bottle Baby.

Trish joined them as they moved silently down the trail. Little Chaka and others drifted into their line until there were seven in all. They came to a small clearing near a very shallow running stream.

"Running water," she observed unnecessarily. "Everything I am, and everything I've learned says to stay away from it."

Aaron nodded. "In mortis veritas," he said.

He pulled a stone away from a cairn of fist-sized, smooth rocks. Then all seven of them were rolling away rocks, until they exposed a small kettle wrapped in transparent plastic.

Trish produced a hot plate and a battery cell. Toshiro brought water from the stream, and filled the small kettle.

Jessica's stomach felt light and fluttery. During the day she watched Aaron studying leaves and plants with the intensity of a trained ethnobotanist. She was one of the very few who knew why he studied so intently. Quietly, without drawing any attention to himself, he had collected the plants that he needed.

He had also collected the grendel's liver.

Speed generates enormous heat. The metabolic byproducts would kill the grendel, just as the by-products of combustion will kill a fire. Its liver and bile ducts-or the grendel versions thereof-are awesome. A grendel can eat anything, and survive the products of its own massive oxidation, because of its efficient cooling and detoxification systems.

At thirteen years of age, Aaron had analyzed grendel bile ducts, livers, and other organs of cleansing with a view to psychopharmacology.

At fourteen he had created the Ritual. Since then, he had indoctrinated ten others into the mysteries of grendel flesh.

"The First Church of the Grendel," Jessica had laughed. Aaron had barely smiled.

The kettle was bubbling now, and would soon be ready. He added a few handfuls of mushroom-looking things, and something that looked like a fern. She nervously contributed her own handful, a few leaves pruned from one of Cadmann's living room cacti. Poisonous, yes. But in very precise combination with certain plants, and the liver of a grendel that had died on speed...

She watched the stars. The same, but different stars from those beneath which her ancestors had lived and died, loved and hunted, fought and borne children. But they were her stars. The way to survive is to become one with the environment. The Earth Born still saw Avalon as a place of strangeness, of danger. Every one of them would have to die, the things of Earth would have to die before this planet could be truly conquered. And this ritual, as old as humanity, was the prayer of the hunters and gatherers whose lives were interwoven with the land itself. The Earth Born had come as the Europeans to the new world. Aaron said that they would have to learn the traditions of the Native American peoples in order to survive here. They could not own the land, but they could be a part of it.

Aaron dipped a cup into the brew, and lifted it steaming to his lips.

"To us," he said. "To the children of a new world."

He drank. When he was finished, he passed the cup to the left, and the ritual was repeated, and again, until all of them had downed a mouthful of the sour mash.

It smashed into her gut like napalm. She broke into a sweat, her heartbeat rocketing.