To show them he was not afraid, he began to sing the song of the dog who danced with a man, which was funny and had a jaunty tune. And to show them he knew they were there, he bent over as he walked, scooped up a handful of damp soil, and flung it lightly over his shoulder.

  The sound of sputtering outrage told him that the god had guided his lump of mud right to its target. He stopped and turned to find four men following him, one of whom was brushing dirt out of his face, cursing loudly. The others looked uncertain whether to be angry at Glogmeriss for flinging dirt at them or afraid of him because he was so large and strange and unafraid.

  Glogmeriss didn’t want them to be either afraid or angry. So he let a slow smile come to his face, not a smile of derision, but rather a friendly smile that said, I mean no harm. To reinforce this idea, he held his hands out wide, palms facing the strangers.

  They understood him, and perhaps because of his smile began to see the humor in the situation. They smiled, too, and then, because the one who was hit with dirt was still complaining and trying to get it out of his eyes, they began to laugh at him. Glogmeriss laughed with them, but then walked slowly toward his victim and, carefully letting them all see what he was doing, took his waterbag from his waist and untied it a little, showing them that water dropped from it. They uttered something in an ugly-sounding language and the one with dirt in his eyes stopped, leaned his head back, and stoically allowed Glogmeriss to bathe his eyes with water.

  When at last, dripping and chagrined, the man could see again, Glogmeriss flung an arm across his shoulder like a comrade, and then reached out for the man who seemed to be the leader. After a moment’s hesitation, the man allowed Glogmeriss the easy embrace, and together they walked toward the main body of the tribe, the other two walking as closely as possible, behind and ahead, talking to Glogmeriss even though he made it plain that he did not understand.

  When they reached the others they were busy building a cookfire. All who could, left their tasks and came to gawk at the giant stranger. While the men who had found him recounted the tale, others came and touched Glogmeriss, especially his strong arms and chest, and his loincloth as well, since none of the men wore any kind of clothing. Glogmeriss viewed this with disgust. It was one thing for little boys to run around naked, but he knew that men should keep their privates covered so they wouldn’t get dirty. What woman would let her husband couple with her, if he let any kind of filth get on his javelin?

  Of course, these men were all so ugly that no woman would want them anyway, and the women were so ugly that the only men who would want them would be these. Perhaps ugly people don’t care about keeping themselves clean, thought Glogmeriss. But the women wore naprons made of woven grass, which looked softer than the beaten reeds that the Derku wove. So it wasn’t that these people didn’t know how to make cloth, or that the idea of wearing clothing had never occurred to them. The men were simply filthy and stupid, Glogmeriss decided. And the women, while not as filthy, must be just as stupid or they wouldn’t let the men come near them.

  Glogmeriss tried to explain to them that he was looking for the Heaving Sea, and ask them where it was. But they couldn’t understand any of the gestures and handsigns he tried, and his best efforts merely left them laughing to the point of helplessness. He gave up and made as if to leave, which immediately brought protests and an obvious invitation to dinner.

  It was a welcome thought, and their chief seemed quite anxious for him to stay. A meal would only make him stronger for the rest of his journey.

  He stayed for the meal, which was strange but good. And then, wooed by more pleas from the chief and many others, he agreed to sleep the night with them, though he halfway feared that in his sleep they planned to kill him or at least rob him. In the event, it turned out that they did have plans for him, but it had nothing to do with killing. By morning the chief’s prettiest daughter was Glogmeriss’s bride, and even though she was as ugly as any of the others, she had done a good enough job of initiating him into the pleasures of men and women that he could overlook her thin lips and beakish nose.

  This was not supposed to happen on a manhood journey. He was expected to come home and marry one of the pretty girls from one of the other clans of the Derku people. Many a father had already been negotiating with Twerk or old Dheub with an eye toward getting Glogmeriss as a son-in-law. But what harm would it do if Glogmeriss had a bride for a few days with these people, and then slipped away and went home? No one among the Derku would ever meet any of these ugly people, and even if they did, who would care? You could do what you wanted with strangers. It wasn’t as if they were people, like the Derku.

  But the days came and went, and Glogmeriss could not bring himself to leave. He was still enjoying his nights with Zawada—as near as he could come to pronouncing her name, which had a strange click in the middle of it. And as he began to learn to understand something of their language, he harbored a hope that they could tell him about the Heaving Sea and, in the long run, save him time.

  Days became weeks, and weeks became months, and Zawada’s blood-days didn’t come and so they knew she was pregnant, and then Glogmeriss didn’t want to leave, because he had to see the child he had put into her. So he stayed, and learned to help with the work of this tribe. They found his size and prodigious strength very helpful, and Zawada was comically boastful about her husband’s prowess—marrying him had brought her great prestige, even more than being the chief’s daughter. And it gradually came to Glogmeriss’s mind that if he stayed he would probably be chief of these people himself someday. At times when he thought of that, he felt a strange sadness, for what did it mean to be chief of these miserable ugly people, compared to the honor of being the most ordinary of the Derku people? How could being chief of these grub-eaters and gatherers compare to eating the common bread of the Derku and riding on a dragonboat through the flood or on raids? He enjoyed Zawada, he enjoyed the people of this tribe, but they were not his people, and he knew that he would leave. Eventually.

  Zawada’s belly was beginning to swell when the tribe suddenly gathered their tools and baskets and formed up to begin another trek. They didn’t move back north, however, the direction they had come from when Glogmeriss found them. Rather their migration was due south, and soon, to his surprise, he found that they were hiking along the very shelf of land that had been his path in coming to this place.

  It occurred to him that perhaps the god had spoken to the chief in the night, warning him to get Glogmeriss back on his abandoned journey. But no, the chief denied any dream. Rather he pointed to the sky and said it was time to go get—something. A word Glogmeriss had never heard before. But it was clearly some kind of food, because the adults nearby began laughing with anticipatory delight and pantomiming eating copious amounts of—something.

  Off to the northeast, they passed along the shores of another small sea. Glogmeriss asked if the water was sweet and if it had fish in it, but Zawada told him, sadly, that the sea was spoiled. “It used to be good,” she said. “The people drank from it and swam in it and trapped fish in it, but it got poisoned.”

  “How?” asked Glogmeriss.

  “The god vomited into it.”

  “What god did that?”

  “The great god,” she said, looking mysterious and amused.

  “How do you know he did?” asked Glogmeriss.

  “We saw,” she said. “There was a terrible storm, with winds so strong they tore babies from their mothers’ arms and carried them away and they were never seen again. My own mother and father held me between them and I wasn’t carried off—I was scarcely more than a baby then, and I remember how scared I was, to have my parents crushing me between them while the wind screamed through the trees.”

  “But a rainstorm would sweeten the water,” said Glogmeriss. “Not make it salty.”

  “I told you,” said Zawada. “The god vomited into it.”

  “But if you don’t mean the rain, then what do you mean?”

  To which her only answer was a mysterious smile and a giggle. “You’ll see,” she said.

  And in the end, he did. Two days after leaving this second small sea behind, they rounded a bend and some of the men began to shinny up trees, looking off to the east as if they knew exactly what they’d see. “There it is!” they cried. “We can see it!”

  Glogmeriss lost no time in climbing up after them, but it took a while for him to know what it was they had seen. It wasn’t till he climbed another tree the next morning, when they were closer and when the sun was shining in the east, that he realized that the vast plain opening out before them to the east wasn’t a plain at all. It was water, shimmering strangely in the sunlight of morning. More water than Glogmeriss had ever imagined. And the reason the light shimmered that way was because the water was moving. It was the Heaving Sea.

  He came down from the tree in awe, only to find the whole tribe watching him. When they saw his face, they burst into hysterical laughter, including even Zawada. Only now did it occur to him that they had understood him perfectly well on his first day with them, when he described the Heaving Sea. They had known where he was headed, but they hadn’t told him.

  “There’s the joke back on you!” cried the man in whose face Glogmeriss had thrown dirt on that first day. And now it seemed like perfect justice to Glogmeriss. He had played a joke, and they had played one back, an elaborate jest that required even his wife to keep the secret of the Heaving Sea from him.

  Zawada’s father, the chief, now explained that it was more than a joke. “Waiting to show you the Heaving Sea meant that you would stay and marry Zawada and give her giant babies. A dozen giants like you!”

  Zawada grinned cheerfully. “If they don’t kill me coming out, it’ll be fine to have sons like yours will be!”

  Next day’s journey took them far enough that they didn’t have to climb trees to see the Heaving Sea, and it was larger than Glogmeriss had ever imagined. He couldn’t see the end of it. And it moved all the time. There were more surprises when they got to the shore that night, however. For the sea was noisy, a great roaring, and it kept throwing itself at the shore and then retreating, heaving up and down. Yet the children were fearless—they ran right into the water and let the waves chase them to shore. The men and women soon joined them, for a little while, and Glogmeriss himself finally worked up the courage to let the water touch him, let the waves chase him. He tasted the water, and while it was saltier than the small seas to the northwest, it was nowhere near as salty as the Salty Sea.

  “This is the god that poisoned the little seas,” Zawada explained to him. “This is the god that vomited into them.”

  But Glogmeriss looked at how far the waves came onto the shore and laughed at her. “How could these heavings of the sea reach all the way to those small seas? It took days to get here from there.”

  She grimaced at him. “What do you know, giant man? These waves are not the reason why this is called the Heaving Sea by those who call it that. These are like little butterfly flutters compared to the true heaving of the sea.”

  Glogmeriss didn’t understand until later in the day, as he realized that the waves weren’t reaching as high as they had earlier. The beach sand was wet much higher up the shore than the waves could get to now. Zawada was delighted to explain the tides to him, how the sea heaved upward and downward, twice a day or so. “The sea is calling to the moon,” she said, but could not explain what that meant, except that the tides were linked to the passages of the moon rather than the passages of the sun.

  As the tide ebbed, the tribe stopped playing and ran out onto the sand. With digging stones they began scooping madly at the sand. Now and then one of them would shout in triumph and hold up some ugly, stony, dripping object for admiration before dropping it into a basket. Glogmeriss examined them and knew at once that these things could not be stones—they were too regular, too symmetrical. It wasn’t till one of the men showed him the knack of prying them open by hammering on a sharp wedgestone that he really understood, for inside the hard stony surface there was a soft, pliable animal that could draw its shell closed around it.

  “That’s how it lives under the water,” explained the man. “It’s watertight as a mud-covered basket, only all the way around. Tight all the way around. So it keeps the water out!”

  Like the perfect seedboat, thought Glogmeriss. Only no boat of reeds could ever be made that watertight, not so it could be plunged underwater and stay dry inside.

  That night they built a fire and roasted the clams and mussels and oysters on the ends of sticks. They were tough and rubbery and they tasted salty—but Glogmeriss soon discovered that the very saltiness was the reason this was such a treat, that and the juices they released when you first chewed on them. Zawada laughed at him for chewing his first bite so long. “Cut it off in smaller bits,” she said, “and then chew it till it stops tasting good and then swallow it whole.” The first time he tried, it took a bit of doing to swallow it without gagging, but he soon got used to it and it was delicious.

  “Don’t drink so much of your water,” said Zawada.

  “I’m thirsty,” said Glogmeriss.

  “Of course you are,” she said. “But when we run out of fresh water, we have to leave. There’s nothing to drink in this place. So drink only a little at a time, so we can stay another day.”

  The next morning he helped with the clam-digging, and his powerful shoulders and arms allowed him to excel at this task, just as with so many others. But he didn’t have the appetite for roasting them, and wandered off alone while the others feasted on the shore. They did their digging in a narrow inlet of the sea, where a long thin finger of water surged inward at high tide and then retreated almost completely at low tide. The finger of the sea seemed to point straight toward the land of the Derku, and it made Glogmeriss think of home.

  Why did I come here? Why did the god go to so much trouble to bring me? Why was I saved from the cats and the lightning and the flood? Was it just to see this great water and taste the salty meat of the clams? These are marvels, it’s true, but no greater than the marvel of the castrated bull-ox that I rode, or the lightning fires, or the log that was my brother in the flood. Why would it please the god to bring me here?

  He heard footsteps and knew at once that it was Zawada. He did not look up. Soon he felt her arms come around him from behind, her swelling breasts pressed against his back.

  “Why do you look toward your home?” she asked softly. “Haven’t I made you happy?”

  “You’ve made me happy,” he said.

  “But you look sad.”

  He nodded.

  “The gods trouble you,” she said. “I know that look on your face. You never speak of it, but I know at such times you are thinking of the god who brought you here and wondering if she loved you or hated you.”

  He laughed aloud. “Do you see inside my skin, Zawada?”

  “Not your skin,” she said. “But I could see inside your loincloth when you first arrived, which is why I told my father to let me be the one to marry you. I had to beat up my sister before she would let me be the one to share your sleeping mat that night. She has never forgiven me. But I wanted your babies.”

  Glogmeriss grunted. He had known about the sister’s jealousy, but since she was ugly and he had never slept with her, her jealousy was never important to him.

  “Maybe the god brought you here to see where she vomited.”

  That again.

  “It was in a terrible storm.”

  “You told me about the storm,” said Glogmeriss, not wanting to hear it all again.

  “When the storms are strong, the sea rises higher than usual. It heaved its way far up this channel. Much farther than this tongue of the sea reaches now. It flowed so far that it reached the first of the small seas and made it flow over and then it reached the second one and that, too, flowed over. But then the storm ceased and the water flowed back to where it was before, only so much saltwater had gone into the small seas that they were poisoned.”

  “So long ago, and yet the salt remains?”

  “Oh, I think the sea has vomited into them a couple more times since then. Never as strongly as that first time, though. You can see this channel—so much of the seawater flowed through here that it cut a channel in the sand. This finger of the sea is all that’s left of it, but you can see the banks of it—like a dried-up river, you see? That was cut then, the ground used to be at the level of the rest of the valley there. The sea still reaches into that new channel, as if it remembered. Before, the shore used to be clear out there, where the waves are high. It’s much better for clam-digging now, though, because this whole channel gets filled with clams and we can get them easily.”

  Glogmeriss felt something stirring inside him. Something in what she had just said was very, very important, but he didn’t know what it was.

  He cast his gaze off to the left, to the shelf of land that he had walked along all the way on his manhood journey, that this tribe had followed in coming here. The absolutely level path.

  Absolutely level. And yet the path was not more than three or four man-heights above the level of the Heaving Sea, while back in the lands of the Derku, the shelf was so far above the level of the Salty Sea that it felt as though you were looking down from a mountain. The whole plain was enormously wide, and yet it went so deep before reaching the water of the Salty Sea that you could see for miles and miles, all the way across. It was deep, that plain, a valley, really. A deep gouge cut into the earth. And if this shelf of land was truly level, the Heaving Sea was far, far higher.

  He thought of the floods. Thought of the powerful current of the flooding river that had snagged him and swept him downward. And then he thought of a storm that lifted the water of the Heaving Sea and sent it crashing along this valley floor, cutting a new channel until it reached those smaller seas, filling them with saltwater, causing them to flood and spill over. Spill over where? Where did their water flow? He already knew—they emptied down into the Salty Sea. Down and down and down.