She found a still, cold form. Snakelike entrails had coiled around the body in a hopeless attempt to keep it warm. Exploring by touch, Erwal found the tiny buds, hard as gristle, which had begun to grow to replace the child's lost hands.

"She's dead, isn't she?"

Erwal withdrew her arms, rubbed snow over them to clean them, tucked them once more into her clothes. Sura stood beside her, her arms loose at her side. "...Yes, Sura. I'm sorry."

"It worked for your husband, didn't it? Teal, I mean. That mummy-cow he took to the Eight Rooms kept him alive by opening herself up... I suppose you despise me because I have killed a cow." Sura sounded resigned, no longer caring. "Will you punish me?"

Erwal stood. "No, Sura. I understand."

"You do?"

"You were trying to save your child. What more can any of us do? What else is there? Come on." She took Sura's unresisting arm. "Let's go to your teepee."

"Yes," Sura said.

On the first clear day of the tepid spring the villagers filed in silence to a low hill a mile from the village. After months in the fug of the teepees Erwal took deep breaths of the cold, fresh air, and felt the blood stir within her. She looked around with renewed interest. It was a still, windless day; above her the lakes and rivers of Home shone like threads in a carpet. The ruddy light of the Sun was almost cheerful, and frosty snow crackled beneath her feet. She tried to imagine what it must have been like in the days before she was born, when the Sun was yellow and so hot that, even in spring, you could discard your furs and leggings and run like a child in some huge teepee.

At the top of the hill orange flowers were struggling to blossom through the permafrost. The villagers gathered in a rough circle around the flowers; some clasped their hands before them, others dropped their heads so their chins rested on their shirts of fur. Damen stepped into the middle of the circle. "We're here for those who died in the winter." His voice was flat and lifeless. Without ceremony he intoned a list of names.

"...Borst, husband of Sura. Brought down by fluid in the lungs. A girl, daughter of Borst and Sura; the frost attacked her flesh in the blizzards..."

Numbly Erwal counted the names. Twenty-two in all, mostly children. She glanced around the silent group; there were surely no more than a hundred souls left. Already, she knew, the outer portions of the village had been abandoned, so that their homes were encircled by silent, ruined teepees.

There were hardly any old people left, it struck her suddenly. In fact, she and Damen were the old people now. Who would be the last to go? she wondered morbidly. Some child, crying over the cooling bodies of its parents?