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7

Stark awoke instantly at the touch of Ashton's hand. The grudging rebirth of Old Sun stained the heath with a level flood of bloody light. The birds stood in it, their plumage touched to a burning gold on one side, shadows flung darkly on the other. There were about thirty of them. They watched the two men from a distance of a hundred feet or so, the flowers nodding around them.

"They came so quietly," said Ashton, who had been on watch. "I didn't realize they were there until the sun came up."

There was something unnatural about the silence of the birds, and their patience. Stark would have expected them to be noisy with greed and excitement. He would have expected them to attack. Instead, they simply stood there, unreal in that unreal light that caused the landscape to appear tilted and foreshortened, depthless, like a tapestry with golden birds embroidered on it.

Stark took up his club. He searched for stones. One of the birds lifted its head and sang, in a very clear and flutelike voice—the voice of a woman singing through a bird's throat. The song had no words. Yet Stark straightened, frowning.

"I think we've been forbidden to kill," he said, and clicked two stones together in his hand, measuring the distance.

"I felt the same thing," Ashton said. "Perhaps we ought to listen?"

Stark was hungry. The yellow birds represented both food and menace. He did not know what they would do if he did kill one of them, for they were numerous and powerful. If he provoked an attack, it would not be easy to fight them off. Besides, they seemed to have some purpose, and that wordless song had struck a note of strangeness which made him reluctant to do anything rash until he knew more about what was afoot.

He said irritably, "For a while, at least." And he dropped the stones.

"They're in our way," said Ashton.

The birds had ranged themselves to the southwest.

"Perhaps they'll scatter," Stark suggested.

He started walking. So did Ashton.

The birds did not scatter. They stood high on their strong legs and opened their curved beaks, clashing them together with a harsh and threatening sound.

Stark halted, and the birds were still.

"We can fight them," he said, "or we can go another way."

Ashton put his hand on his tunic, over the bandages. He said, "Their claws are very sharp, and I see thirty double sets of them. Their beaks are like knives. Let's try another way."

"Perhaps we can circle them."

They tried that. The flock raced to turn them back.

Ashton shook his head. "When the bird attacked me, it was acting according to its normal instincts. These are not acting in any normal way at all."

Stark looked about him at the heath, the twisted thorn and the skeletal trees, the peering flowers that blew as they listed with no regard for the wind.

"Someone knows we're here," he said. "Someone has sent for us."

Ashton weighed his club and sighed. "I don't think I could knock down enough of those brutes, and I'd like to keep my eyes yet a while. Perhaps the someone only wants to talk to us?"

"If that's so," said Stark, "it will be the first time since I came to Skaith."

The bird lifted up its head and sang again. Perhaps, Stark thought, it was the natural voice of the creature. But the feeling that some greater intelligence was speaking through it was inescapable. Do as I ask, it seemed to say, and no harm shall come to you. Stark trusted it not at all. Alone, he might have chosen to gamble on fighting his way through, even though the odds were formidable. As it was, he shrugged and said, "Well, perhaps we'll get fed, anyway."

The birds, thirty careful herd-dogs, drove them on, westerly across the heath. They moved at a good pace. Stark kept one eye and ear cocked at the sky in case Penkawr-Che decided to send the hoppers for a final look around. None appeared. Apparently Penkawr-Che felt that plundering villagers of their valuable drug crop was more to the point than searching for two men who were almost certainly dead, and who, if they were not now, soon would be. In any case, the chance of their being rescued and flown back to Pax was so remote that while Penkawr-Che would have killed them out-of-hand when he had them, it was not likely that he would mount any full-scale search for them. If nothing else, he lacked the time and manpower.

Old Sun sat glaring in the middle of the sky and Simon Ashton was beginning to stumble in his walk, when Stark saw two figures silhouetted on the crest of a rise before them. One was tall, with long hair and flowing robes that blew in the wind. The other was smaller and slighter, and the taller one stood protectively with one hand on its shoulder. They stood quite alone, with something regal in their aloneness and their proud bearing.

The birds made little glad sounds and drove the men onward more quickly.

The tall figure became a woman, neither beautiful nor young. Her face was lean and brown, with an immense strength, the strength of wood seasoned to an iron toughness. The wind pressed coarse brown garments against a body that was like a tree trunk, with meager breasts and thin hips and a powerful straightness as though it had fronted many gales and withstood them. Her eyes were brown and piercing, and her hair was brown with streaks of frost.

The slighter figure was a boy of perhaps eleven years, and he was sheer beauty, bright and fresh and graceful, but with a curious calmness in his gaze that made his eyes seem far too old for his child's face. Stark and Ashton halted below these two, so that they were looking up and the woman and the boy were looking down, a nice positioning psychologically, and the bird sang once more.

The woman answered, in the sweet identical tone, without words. Then she studied the men, with a sword-thrust glance, and said, "You are not sons of Mother Skaith."

Stark said, "No."

She nodded. "This was the strangeness my messengers sensed." She spoke to the boy, and in her manner were both love and deference. "What is your thought, my Cethlin?"

He smiled gently and said, "They are not for us, Mother. Another has set her seal upon them."

"Well, then," said the woman, turning again to Stark and Ashton, "be welcome, for a time." She beckoned to them with the stateliness of a bending tree. "I am Norverann. This is my son Cethlin, my last and youngest, who is called the Bridegroom."

"The Bridegroom?"

"Here we worship the Trinity—my lady Cold and her lord Darkness, and their daughter Hunger, who come to rule us. My son will go to the Daughter in his eighteenth year, if she does not claim him sooner."

"She will, Mother," said the calm-eyed boy. "The day is close at hand."

He moved away from her, disappearing below the crest. Norverann waited. Stark and Ashton climbed to where she stood.

They looked down into a long hollow set with tents and pavilions. Beyond the hollow, clearly visible, was the edge of the plateau, which had curved round to meet them, so that they had not actually come far out of their way. Beyond the rough and channeled edge was a soaring emptiness of air, and beneath that, distant and misty, a greenness reflecting from a sea of treetops.

The encampment itself formed a rough semi-circle round an open space, where men and women busied themselves and children played. The colors of the pavilions were brown and green and russet, with here and there a gleam of gold or white, or a touch of scarlet, and menders had been at work sewing new seams and setting patches. But each tent was adorned with garlands and sheaves of grain. Baskets of roots and other things were set before them. Tattered pennons fluttered in the wind. "A festival?" asked Stark.

"We celebrate," said Norverann, "the Death of Summer."

Between the points of the semi-circle, beyond the open space and close to the edge of the plateau, was a structure of cut stone. It crouched close to the ground, somehow ominous in its squat windowless strength, covered like an ancient boulder with moss and lichens.

"That is the House of Winter," said Norverann. "It is almost time for us to return to the blessed darkness and the sweet sleep." She bent in her stately fashion to touch the nodding flowers, which swayed toward her. "We share the sacred months of the Goddess with the grasses and the birds and all things dwelling on the heath."

"They are your messengers?"

She nodded. "Long ago we learned the lesson of our kinship. On the heath we are all one, parts of the same body, the same life. When violence was done to the eastern extremity of our body, the message was brought to us here. Burning and destruction, the slaughter of many grasses and flowers and families of thorn. You will tell me about that." She turned her gaze toward Stark and Ashton, and it was as cold and cruel as the sharpest edge of winter. "If you were not already claimed, there would be punishment."

"It was not our doing," Stark said. "Other men were hunting us. We barely escaped with our lives. But who has claimed us, and for what?"

"You must ask Cethlin." She led them down from the ridge to a pavilion of mossy green, and she lifted aside a curtain of dull umber. "Please to enter, and make yourselves fit for the day. Water will be brought to you for washing—"

"Lady," said Stark, "we are hungry."

"You will be fed," she told him, "in good time." She dropped the curtain and was gone. The pavilion was furnished with no more than a few rough pallets stuffed with something dry and crackly, and a store of blankets. There was dust about, but it was clean dust and the air smelled of the same things it had smelled of outside. Small personal articles were arranged neatly by the pallets. The pavilion was apparently a summer dormitory for upward of a score of persons.

Ashton threw himself down on somebody's bed with a sigh of relief.

"The promise of food is at least hopeful. And since it seems we're promised to somebody else, I gather our lives are safe for the moment. So far, so good." He added, with a twist of his mouth, "Still and all, I don't like this place."

"Neither," said Stark, "do I." Men came presently with ewers and basins and towels. The towels were of coarse cloth, as were the shapeless tunics and leg-wrappings of the men. The ewers and basins were of gold, beautifully shaped and chased with graceful designs worn almost invisible by the handling of centuries. The golden things glowed beautifully in the mossy gloom of the pavilion.

"We are called Nithi, the People of the Heath," said one of the men, in answer to Ashton's question.

The man, like Norverann, had the look of old wood, knotty and enduring, and there was something about his eyes, brown and secret, and his mouth, which was broad-lipped and square, with strong spade teeth, that gave an impression of kinship with unknown elemental things—soil and roots and hidden water, and the dark spaces below.

"Do you have trade with the jungle folk?" Stark asked, and the man smiled slowly.

"Trade," he said, "from which they get little gain."

"Do you eat them?" Stark asked matter-of-factly, and the man shrugged.

"They worship Old Sun. We rededicate them, to the Goddess."

"You must have a way down to the jungle, then."

"That is so," said the man. "Sleep now."

He went away with the others, taking the golden vessels. The sides of the pavilion flapped in the wind.

The voices of the folk outside seemed faraway and unfamiliar.

Ashton shook his head. "Old Mother Skaith is still full of surprises, and few of them pleasant. That boy, the Bridegroom, who goes to the Daughter in his eighteenth year—unless she claims him sooner—sounds like ritual sacrifice."

"The boy seems to be looking forward to it," said Stark. "You'd better sleep, if you're not too hungry."

Ashton pulled a ragged blanket over him and lay quiet.

Stark watched the slack cloth of the roof billow under the wind, and he thought about Gerrith. He hoped she was well away from Irnan. He hoped she would be safe.

He thought about a lot of things, and felt the anger rising in him so strongly that it became a fever and a throbbing, and the mossy gloom turned reddish in his eyes. Because the anger was useless, he forced it away. Because sleep was necessary, he slept.

He woke with a snarl and a lunge; and there was a man's neck between his hands, ready for the breaking.

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Framed