In the morning and the evening they helped Cosgrad Torrinde catalog insects and plants, telling him about the ratoon rice that had once grown on the monsoon-plains south, and about the new development that had raised the farmers up to better crops. He was monstrously curious about everything—and Tau-indi did not use the word monstrous idly, because he was also stupidly rude. A field hand came up the hill with a machete wound, rotted and swollen, and Cosgrad insisted furiously that they had to wash it out with boiled water and put maggots in the wound—maggots! As if he’d never heard of botfly or nagana! Insects could never, ever be allowed to grow in anyone’s flesh.

“What does that mean?” Cosgrad struggled with the phrase Tau had just pronounced. “That didn’t sound like Seti-Caho, the words you just said.”

“A ut li-en?” Tau-indi shivered. “Yes, it means to grow in us, in the old tongue the Cancrioth used. We use those words when we speak of taboo parasites like botfly.”

“The Cancrioth, yes, that’s what I thought. Who were they?” Cosgrad hovered with his incredibly smooth paper and his charcoal pencil. “In Falcrest, see, there are legends of the Cancrioth—legends and, of course, rag-paper novels. We think of them as raiders, highly degenerate, bred to survive in tropical climes by a partial regression to the animal template.…”

“Degenerate, no.” Oh, the griots had always been so oblique about this topic! It was hard to teach, for fear of tearing a little hole in the mbo with the words, and letting in old power. “The Cancrioth were councilors and philosophers who ruled the continent of Oria before the Mbo. They gathered in Mzilimake, in the southern lands beyond the veldt, where the fish in the water glow with inner light, to study the heat that boils up in the uranium land.”

Cosgrad’s pencil whirred and jagged. He broke it and threw it aside and snatched another from his breast. “Yes, yes … why did they gather there?”

“They wanted to find immortality, down in the hot places where the uranium seeps in pitch. The heat of the hot lands never dwindles: an invisible fire burns in the caves below, and fills the rivers with light. Because the heat never dwindles, it must be immortal. And—ah, Cosgrad, this is hard.”

“Courage, Prince! Courage!”

“The Cancrioth said,” Tau-indi vomited up in a rush, “that the water coming out of the uranium mountains had a special charge, and if prepared and applied properly, that charge could induce cancer, which was a higher form of vitality: for does not cancer grow in living flesh, and displace that flesh? Is it not more energetic and prosperous?