The village was small, about twenty or twenty-five huts of mud-brick. Jet-black goats maundered or skipped through fenced enclosures beyond. Red fires were burning up in the salty evening air. Clearly, Hwenit-Uasti’s krarl was no longer nomadic, as the tribes usually were—red, yellow, or black—and I wondered what choice invisible pickings had encouraged them to put down roots in such a spot. Maybe they relished fried fish?

She had let me come up to her when home was in sight, but I had not actually been chasing her, only letting her lead me, guessing she was going to her krarl-hearth. My brief flare of sexual appetite had long since abated. I had been starving for food quite a while, neither had I slept soft, or had shelter for many days. I had forgotten the four hunters and the massacre I had scattered over the hills inland. Even my sorcerous powers seemed abruptly banal and unimportant. As for the girl, I could believe almost anything just then, and possibly she had summoned me by witching. After all, as she said, I was there.

I had heard tales of the black folk. The red tribes reckoned them simple; they were not. They must at some date have come from hotter lands, to judge by their skin, but that was long ago. If they knew of it, they gave the knowledge no utterance. As for their healers and their worship of gold books of old lore, there had been tribal stories of this, too, all nonsense, as anything chattered by the ill-informed must be.

Some of the women were outside their huts, cooking the evening meal. Slender and dark as night, they did not fall to gawking as Hwenit conducted me into the village. A group of men at the village’s lower end had been erecting two more hut-houses, and had broken off, as the light went, to discuss the work. To these Hwenit called, in an imperious voice, “Where is my father?”

The men looked up, nodded politely to me as if they had seen me many times, and the nearest answered, “He has gone walking, with Qwef.”

At that Hwenit-Uasti shook her hair, as if the name or the fact irritated her.

“Follow,” she directed me in her empress tone, and stalked on, nearly bowling over a small black handsome child, who courteously, and prudently no doubt, gave her right of way.

Hwenit-Uasti’s hut was the last one, set a little apart from the others, having a fine doorway of dressed stone painted pink and yellow, and a lighted lamp of red clay and a string of tiny black rodent skulls depending together from the lintel. A strange tree grew beside the hut, a surprising dwarf fir, which the lamplight showed to be a powdery blue in color. It was of the sort the antique kings, perhaps, nurtured in their gardens; I had never seen its like before.

“Because I am Uasti, I have a well-made house, and a blue tree to mark it out,” said Hwenit. The faces of the men and women in the village had been enigmatic and not unfriendly, yet I had sensed a faint air of affectionate indulgence directed toward their healer. Were the doorway and the tree toys for a talented and precocious child? “The women will bring me food,” said she, “and some for you, since they see I have a guest. Enter, but touch none of the herbs or instruments of my trade.”