Tchupa looked at Tull, raised his eyebrows in shock. "But perhaps someday the child will have to steal in order to stay alive. And if he must steal, he must learn to steal well!"

Tull looked Tchupa in the eye and saw that the Okanjara was truly a stranger, a man whose mind he did not want to comprehend, for it was said among the Pwi that "To understand another, you must become like him." Tull had never lived in Craal, could not imagine a man beating his child for not stealing well.

The stories he'd heard of Thrall warriors working for slavers, of Thralls who ate human flesh, who thought it a sign of strength to endure unendurable pain—all of them could be true with a man as duplicitous as Tchupa.

A realization struck. Tull felt a bond with Tchupa, a sense of brotherhood. You can love a man, and yet hate what he does.

"I see," Tull said. His head was spinning. He felt that he needed to leave, to have time to think about Tchupa, and perhaps advise him as a friend. But for now, it was too late, and his mind moved too slowly. He yawned as if tired, stretched. "In the morning, we will talk more, my friend."

The small taste that he'd taken from the Okanjara's drugs must have made him dizzy, for he staggered a bit as he ambled back to his own camp.

That night when Thor set behind the hills and the cries of jackals filled the camp as the dogs began to sneak in to nibble table scraps beside the fires, Tull still lay thinking. He could not sleep. The Okanjaras' drugs gave him strange dreams and brought back painful memories, and the nightmares seemed too real.

He kept seeing flashes of Tchupa in his mind, Tchupa riding upon the back of a horned dragon in the night, beneath Thor's green moon.

He heard a sudden shout. "Hukm! Hukm are upon us!"

Tull and Wisteria were lying in the giant barrel, and thus were somewhat protected. He untangled himself from Wisteria's arms and whispered urgently, "Wait here. I'll go I see what's happening!"

But as he pulled off his bearskin covers, he looked out, and in the dying embers of the fires he could make out dozens of mastodons, black shadows with great curved tusks. The white of the polished tusks reflected the light of campfires. The mastodons had circled the camp.

Giants squatted atop the mastodons, and as Tull watched, the great hairy men silently urged their mounts in among the people.

The traders had naturally set up several camps—one made mostly of Pwi, another to the east for humans, and a third just to the north for the Okanjara, and so Tull was watching the mastodon men enter his own camp, a wall of flesh surrounding it. His own people began to cry out and flee.

Everywhere the Pwi shouted, "Run, run!" "The Hukm are here!" "This way!" "No, here!" They were rushing about in fear—turning first one way, and then the next.

In the darkness Tull heard sickening thuds as Hukm war clubs smashed into bodies.

Thus the Pwi die, some small part of him thought. Ever it was so. Neanderthals were tougher than humans in so many ways, so much stronger, but kwea could kill—with fears and loves that could not be mastered.

Tull spotted Phylomon beside a fire, the light playing on the back of his blue skin, desperately waving his fingers in Hukm finger language.

A great hairy Hukm, a lord with many silver bracelets, steered his mammoth close, peered down at Phylomon, and answered calmly, with slow waves of his fingers.

"Hold! Hold!" Phylomon began shouting to the Pwi, trying to keep them from running to their deaths.

Phylomon pointed toward the Okanjara camp, and the Hukm lord pointed in that direction, urging his warriors toward the new camp.

Only the two smaller moons shone, and Tull could see little by their light. A wall of mastodons raced through camp, trampling the tents. The heavy scent of wet, shaggy hair from the mammoths blended with woodsmoke.

Faint cries rose from the throats of a few women in the nearby camp, and Tull remembered that the Okanjara were all drugged, that they were helpless.

Above the cries, rose the rhythmic beating, like drums, as war clubs smacked into flesh.

"Leave, now!" Phylomon shouted to the Pwi, over and over. "Walk calmly. Don't make any quick moves!"

Tull threw on his tunic. Several huge Hukm, each over eight feet tall, came loping through camp. One stopped to examine Tull as if he were a child. It sniffed at him, peered into his face, into his eyes, gripping a polished war club, and then trudged on.

It was rumored that the Hukm could see in the dark, and Tull realized that the creature had been looking for the blackening under the eyes of the Okanjara warriors. He smelled the warm coppery blood on the Hukm as it rushed past.

Scandal and Ayuvah quickly threw their bedding in the barrel. Wisteria covered herself with a bearskin.

"Stay inside," Tull warned.

He suddenly feared for the Dryad, wondered where she might be, but spotted something pale moving deep in the shadows.

Tirilee was there hiding in the black heart of the barrel.

"Where are the oxen?" Scandal huffed. "We need to get the team of oxen!"

"They've scattered," Phylomon shouted, and suddenly the blue man stood beside Tull, throwing his own bedding on the wagon. "Leave them for now. The Hukm will not harm them. We can come back for them later!"

The men began pushing the wagon away from camp as quickly as possible.

A Pwi woman ran in front of them, and a huge dark form met her in the darkness. There was the whistling sound of a club swinging through the air, and the woman skittered sideways.

"Keep moving!" Phylomon shouted, "Keep moving! You cannot save them. The Okanjara chose their own fate."

For a solid fifteen minutes, that is exactly what they did, pushing and pulling the wagon at a near run.

Tull pushed so hard that he stumbled, his mind numb.

The Okanjara's drugs were still affecting him, and he raced as if in nightmare, as if he might push the wagon forever.

He heard the Okanjara's cries, and children wailing. War clubs pounded relentlessly, and mammoths trumpeted.

In his mind, the images of Phylomon killing slavers and the Hukm killing the Okanjara all roiled together.

Death follows me, wherever I go, Tull thought.

Death was like a tyrant bird, trailing a pteranodon, dogging it relentlessly.

And then he realized, No, death is not trailing me. It has come for everyone else. Justice is coming to the world.

For a moment more, he held the image of a tyrant bird, and then imagined himself as that bird.

They stopped by a small pond to wait for sunrise, and in the cool morning air Tull listened. Behind the constant chitter of gray squirrels and the cackle of magpies, he thought he could still make out distant screams. With each turn of the wagon wheels, he imagined he could hear the dull thud of a club smashing into flesh.

They set their blankets out, and while Phylomon stood and looked over the pool, his brow furrowed into a frown.

"Are we cowards for running?" Ayuvah asked.

Phylomon sighed. "We could not have saved them," he said at last. "I could have killed a few Hukm in my time, but there was no fighting them in the dark. The Okanjara were fools to kill mammoths from the sacred herds."

"Still, to leave just them. . . ." Tull said, and trailed away. He felt a kinship to the Okanjara. "The children were innocent. To leave them feels like . . . murder."

"Not murder. Self-preservation," Scandal chimed in. Don't let it rub you wrong. We ran because we were afraid, and we had a right to fear. I only wish we had found the damned team of oxen. Shall we go back and look for them?"

"Not yet," Phylomon answered.

"We've a better chance of finding them if we go now," Scandal said. "They'll be running all day."

"The Hukm have not finished their work," Phylomon answered.

If the Hukm only want to beat the Okanjaras to death, their work should not take long, Tull thought.

So, they waited.

Scandal did not make breakfast, for none could have stomached it. Instead, he made tea. Within an hour they heard real screams—not the half-imagined cries Tull thought he'd heard all morning, but shouts of pain so loud that even at a distance of over a mile, the squirrels fell silent and the birds left their songs.

The Hukm were making an example of their victims.

The women busied themselves re-packing the blankets and furs that had been thrown into the wagon.

"What's this?" Wisteria asked, picking up Tull's sword of Benbow glass.

"Something I got from the glass trader's wagon," Tull said feebly.

"I feel dirty," Wisteria said, throwing it back into the wagon.

She and Tirilee went to the pool to wash themselves, hidden by a screen of cattails and willows. Red-winged blackbirds and meadowlarks flew about in the reeds.

The women stayed down at the pool all morning and the men waited, lost in private thoughts. Tull envied the women—drowning those cries with clean water.

At noon the screams of pain ended. When they had been silent for a full twenty minutes, Tull and Ayuvah climbed a great sprawling oak, searched the land south, toward Frowning Idols. A line of sixty mammoths left the camp, heading northwest, and the smoke billowed at the Idols, but Tull could see no sign of any standing tents.

"They're leaving," he shouted down to the others.

Scandal said, "Then let's get the women and go see if we can find the oxen."

Tull suddenly realized that the women had been gone a long time—too long. Ayuvah and Scandal realized it at the same moment, and the four men looked at one another, then began shouting as they raced down to the pond.

Tull remembered how the Okanjara had asked for the women, had sought to purchase them if even for a night.

They reached the lake, and the morning wind had blown all the algae to the west side. In the floating algae, Tull saw paths that the women had formed as they swam.

The women were gone. After a bit, they found the women's clothes ground into the mud by heavy feet. Phylomon knelt and studied the distinctive crisscross pattern left by moccasins woven from sage bark. "Okanjara."