As they walked the landscape changed. The rock walls receded and sandy mounds appeared beside the river, dotted here and there with vegetation and stunted trees. After a short distance the land became flatter and greener, with low shrubs stretched out in even rows. Kerrick wondered at this regularity until they passed a group of men digging at one of the rows.

He marveled then at two things: the rows had been planted that way on purpose. And there were hunters working among the plants, doing woman’s work. It was most unusual. But the Yilanè had planted fields around their city; there was no reason that Tanu could not do the same, that men should labor in them as well as women. His eyes followed the green rows to the rock wall of the valley beyond, up to the dark openings in the stone.

They passed a group of women next, all of them wrapped in the soft white substance, pointing at him and chattering in high-pitched voices. Kerrick knew that he should be feeling fear here in this valley, among these dark strangers, but he did not. If they had wanted to kill him they would certainly have done it long before this. He might still be in danger, but his curiosity was overwhelming any fears he still had. There was smoke from fires ahead, children running, the cliffs were closer—and he stopped with sudden realization.

“A city!” he said aloud. “A Tanu city, not a Yilanè one.”

The hunters he had been following stopped and waited while he looked about him. Notched beams of wood, they must have been entire treetrunks, reached up the cliffside to the openings above. The beams could be climbed for he saw faces peering down at him. There was a rush and bustle here, also like a Yilanè city, with many activities he could not understand. Then he noticed that the hunter he had first met was waving him forward, towards a long, dark opening in the base of the cliff. Kerrick followed him inside and looked up at the rock wall that slanted back above. He blinked at it in the gloom, barely able to make out details after leaving the bright sunlight outside. The hunter was pointing at the rockface above.

“Waliskis,” he said, the same word he had used when he pointed at the water vessel.

Kerrick looked up at the tracings in the rock and began to understand something of what the hunter was trying to say.

There were beasts there, marked out in color upon the rock, many of them like the deer that he recognized. In pride of place above them all, almost life-size, was a mastodon.

“Waliskis,” the hunter said again and bowed his head towards the representation of the great beast. “Waliskis.”