“I believe it was,” I told her.
“Your ultimate Ularian,” said Leelson, from the shadows.
“That’s not who it is,” whispered Lutha. “Why can’t you see who it really is?”
“If it’s Ularian, we’d taste it,” Poracious objected.
“No,” Lutha whispered again. “That was for us. It is disgusted with us. It is simply disgusted!”
Poracious stared at her as though she were crazy. “What are you saying?” she demanded querulously. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Lutha closed her eyes, refusing to answer. Her face was agonized. I remembered our talk, on that other world, the night before we came to the omphalos. She had spoken of the guilt she had felt when she thought Leely was lost among the Nodders, wondering if she would grieve. Now he was lost, utterly, and she grieved. I held her, rocking back and forth, unable to forget that dreadful rending.
“Why?” cried Poracious. “Oh, why … ?”
Yes. Why. I stopped listening to the others. They went on talking, mostly Leelson and Mitigan, asking each other questions that neither could answer: What might we do to help ourselves? Should we stay where we were or go elsewhere?
After hacking each alternative to death, they decided to stay where we were, a simple decision considering that none of us was in any condition to do anything else.
And Lutha lay in my lap, hurting. Grief is not only in the mind. A spirit does not agonize in separate space. It takes the body with it!
“He called my name,” she wept. “Oh, Saluez! He called my name!”
Eventually she wept herself into exhaustion. Despite everything, all our capacity for wonder or outrage or grief wore itself out. No one had the energy to weep another tear, to ask another unanswerable question. I made tea. Snark brought me some herbs to put in it, soothing things, she said. Her own face was wet and weary, but when I offered a cup, she would not take it. She would keep watch, she said, though what good watching could do she did not say.
In the night I heard Lutha moving. I said her name. She mumbled something about a stone in her bed. In a moment she was quiet again.
Gray light came and I woke. Around me on the sand the others lay in blanketed hummocks, Snark among them. Evidently she had decided it would do no good to keep watch. Against the far wall, another hummock showed where the ex-King of Kamir had been laid. Beside me, Lutha moved uncomfortably, whining again about the stone beneath her.
Quietly, thinking to ease her, I reached under her covering to remove what troubled her, encountering instead a warm softness, not Lutha, something else alive.
My first thought was the cats. I had never felt a cat, but presumably a cat would feel soft and warm and alive. Then I had a less pleasant thought, something to do with the serpents that had driven us from our rock pile.
Shuddering, I drew it away from Lutha’s side, waking her. Her eyes came open as I held the thing at arm’s length, thrust it into the light …
And dropped it as Lutha screamed, a sound that might have waked the bones in Snark’s jar. It waked all those around us, who within moments were babbling as wildly as I.
It was Leely! Leely, the size of my foot! Leely no bigger than a small cat, a whole Leely in miniature, exactly like himself but tiny, tiny.
Mitigan cursed, brushing his hands across his blanket, bowling another Leely onto the sand. Two Leelies, three, four. A dozen Leelies from among our blankets, all piping in reedlike voices, “Dananana.”
Poracious held Lutha while she came apart. I, too, felt the seams between reality and madness fail, felt myself rip into pieces, then saw all the pieces, a row of them on the edge of a precipice, teetering into hysteria, ready to tumble!
“Lutha!” Leelson, who had taken Poracious’s place. “Lutha, Saluez, think! It’s all right. It’s all right!”
There was Snark beside the stove, holding out crackers to the Leelies. There were dozens of them. Some no larger than my thumb.