The biter smiled. “I’m insulting you,” he said. “Listen. Use your mind. We are beginning to starve. There is no meat left in these mountains. Every day the hunters bring in less. There is none left.”

I listened, hardfaced. This made no sense to me.

“Don’t you understand?” he said. “We have to do it. Something. All together, for the first time. Not just alone. Together.”

I stared at him. This made no sense.

“South of here,” he said. “Way south, there is no snow. There are deer on the hill. Fish in the water.

Listen—every day I talk to the barbarian. The dead barbarian. Every day I come here. I listen to his stories. He is teaching me so much. Now he is dead, yet it is still the truth. He was . . . He told me about it. There is food to eat.”

“I prefer to starve.”

“That’s stupid.”

“Yes,” I cried, furious. “But I am not a slave of my own mind. I am not. I prefer to die. My brothers and sisters are too proud.”

“But I don’t mean that,” he said. “We are not beggars. I mean to take what we want. Steal it. These barbarians are a race of hairy dwarves. Free men and women would burn through them like a fire. And I can make it happen. He was teaching me a trick. A way of singing—don’t you understand?”

Bored, I turned away. But there was a peculiar music in his words. He brought his fist crashing down on the tabletop. “But I can force you,” he shouted. “I can force you to follow me. There is a power in this room, if I knew how to use it. There is power in these empty gods.” He came towards me, grinning savagely, and I backed away. “I will do it,” he said. “I hate your stupidness. And I hate myself.”

He lied. His self-love rang in every word. His voice was like two instruments in conflict, one ferocious, one insinuating. He had been a strong musician, and this music was a storm in him. “Do not laugh at me!”

he shouted, and shook the stump of his arm in my face as if it were a weapon. He was a little crazy, too, I thought, with his bony face, his eyebrows, his dark eyes. In the light of the carbide lantern his shadow made a giant on the wall, reeling drunkenly.

In those days I was easily bored. I knew so few words. And this biter was talking about something. He was using words as a kind of action, and that made me uncomfortable. So I left him, and outside it had begun to snow again. The sky was full of wordless snow. It blunted the edges of the mountains and the buildings, blunted everything, relaxed and calmed me. The dogs were stifled as I slogged away. It was very cold.

* * *

“What is he talking about?” whispered Thanakar Starbridge. “What did he call us, a race of hairy dwarves?”