“I know it already,” she said.

  “Do you?”

  “Yes,” she said softly, “and much to my surprise, I find that I love you too. Even an old lady like me,” she said, laughing.

  “Oh,” he said, “that was not my confession. I already knew that you knew I loved you. Why else would I have come back when you called?”

  And then she felt a chill in the room and remembered the only time she had ever called for help.

  “Yes,” he said, “you remember. How I laughed when they named me. If they only knew, I thought at the time.”

  She shook her head. “How could it be?”

  “I wondered myself,” he said. “But it is. I met a wise old man in the woods when I was but a lad. An orphan, too, so that there was no one to ask about me when I stayed with him. I stayed until he died five years later, and I learned all his magic.”

  “There’s no magic,” she said as if by rote, and he laughed.

  “If you mean brews and spells and curses, then you’re right,” he said. “But there is magic of another sort. The magic of becoming what most you are. My old man in the woods, his magic was to be an owl, and to fly by night seeing the world and coming to understand it. The owlness was in him, and the magic was letting that part of himself that was most himself come forward. And he taught me.”

  The Bear had stopped shaking because his body had given up trying to overcome the illness.

  “So I looked inside me and wondered who I was. And then I found it out. Your nurse found it, too. One glance and she knew I was a bear.”

  “You killed my husband,” she said to him.

  “No,” he said. “I fought your husband and carried him from the palace, but as he stared death in the face he discovered, too, what he was and who he was, and his real self came out.”

  The Bear shook his head.

  “I killed a wolf at the palace gate, and left a wolf with a broken neck behind when I went away into the hills.”

  “A wolf both times,” she said. “But he was such a beautiful boy.”

  “A puppy is cute enough whatever he plans to grow up to be,” said the Bear.

  “And what am I?” asked the queen.

  “You?” asked the Bear. “Don’t you know?”

  “No,” she answered. “Am I a swan? A porcupine? These days I walk like a crippled, old biddy hen. Who am I, after all these years? What animal should I turn into by night?”

  “You’re laughing,” said the Bear, “and I would laugh too, but I have to be stingy with my breath. I don’t know what animal you are, if you don’t know yourself, but I think—”

  And he stopped talking and his body shook in a great heave.

  “No!” cried the queen.

  “All right,” said the Bear. “I’m not dead yet. I think that deep down inside you, you are a woman, and so you have been wearing your real self out in the open all your life. And you are beautiful.”

  “What an old fool you are after all,” said the queen. “Why didn’t I ever marry you?”

  “Your judgment was too good,” said the Bear.

  But the queen called the priest and her children and married the Bear on his deathbed, and her son who had learned kingship from him called him father, and then they remembered the bear who had come to play with them in their childhood and the queen’s daughters called him father; and the queen called him husband, and the Bear laughed and allowed as how he wasn’t an orphan any more. Then he died.

  And that’s why there’s a statue of a bear over the gate of the city.

  Holy

  ORSON SCOTT CARD, born in Washington State, raised in Northern California, living now in Utah, shows in his writing the effects of having spent most of his life in the broad, open country of the American West. His fiction, which has been appearing for the past few years in Analog and several other magazines, reveals a genuine belief that problems have solutions, that conflicts can be resolved, and that life has a purpose. His vigorous and refreshing stories have won wide popularity with readers—at the 1978 World Science Fiction Convention in Phoenix, he received the John W. Campbell Award as the year’s outstanding new writer—and it is with pleasure that I welcome him to New Dimensions.

  “You have weapons that could stop them,” said Crofe, and suddenly the needle felt heavy on my belt.

  “I can’t use them,” I said. “Not even the needle. And definitely not the splinters.”

  Crofe did not seem surprised, but the others did, and I was angry that Crofe would put me in such a position. He knew the law. But now Stone was looking at me darkly, his bow on his lap, and Fole openly grumbled in his deep, giant’s voice. “We’re friends, right? Friends, they say.”

  “It’s the law,” I said. “I can’t use these weapons except in proper self-defense.”

  “Their arrows are coming as close to you as to us!” Stone said.

  “As long as I’m with you, the law assumes that they’re attacking you and not me. If I used my weapons, it would seem like I was taking sides. It would be putting the corporation on your side against their side. It would mean the end of the corporation’s involvement with you.”

  “Fine with me,” Fole murmured. “Fat lot of good it’s done us.”

  I didn’t mention that I would also be executed. The Ylymyny have little use for people who fear death.

  In the distance someone screamed. I looked around—none of them seemed worried. But in a moment Da came into the circle of stones, panting. “They found the slanting road,” he whispered. “Nothing we could do. Killed one, that’s all.”

  Crofe stood and uttered a high-pitched cry, a staccato burst of sound that echoed from the crags around us. Then he nodded to the others, and Fole reached over and seized my arm. “Come on,” he whispered. But I hung back, not wanting to be shuffled out without any idea of what was going on.

  “What’s happening?” I asked.

  Crofe grinned, his black teeth startling (after all these months) against his lightbrown skin. “We’re going to try to live through this. Lead them into a trap. Away off south there’s a narrow pass where a hundred of my men wait for us to bring them game.” As he spoke, four more men came into the circle of stones, and Crofe turned to them.

  “Gokoke?” he asked. The others shrugged.

  Crofe glowered. “We don’t leave Gokoke.” They nodded, and the four who had just come went back silently into the paths of the rock. Now Fole became more insistent, and Stone softly whined, “We must go, Crofe.”

  “Not without Gokoke.”

  There was a mournful wail that sounded as if it came from all around. Which was echo and which was original sound? Impossible to tell. Crofe bowed his head, squatted, covered his eyes ritually with his hands, and chanted softly. The others did likewise; Fole even released my arm so he could cover his face. It occurred to me that though their piety was impressive, covering one’s eyes during a battle might well be a counterevolutionary behavior. Every now and then the old anthropologist in me surfaces, and I get clinical.

  I wasn’t clinical, however, when a Golyny soldier leaped from the rocks into the circle. He was armed with two long knives, and he was already springing into action. I noticed that he headed directly for Crofe. I also noticed that none of the Ylymyny made the slightest move to defend him.

  What could I do? It was forbidden for me to kill; yet Crofe was the most influential of the warlords of the Ylymyny. I couldn’t let him die. His friendship was our best toehold in trading with the people of the islands. And besides, I don’t like watching a person being murdered while his eyes are covered in a religious rite, however asinine the rite might be. Which is why I certainly bent the law, if I didn’t break it: my toe found the Golyny’s groin just as the knife began its downward slash toward Crofe’s neck.

  The Golyny groaned; the knife forgotten, he clutched at himself, then reached out to attack me. To my surprise, the others continued their chanting, as if unaware that I was protecting them, at not inconsiderable risk to myself.

  I could have killed the Golyny in a moment, but I didn’t dare. Instead, for an endless three or four minutes I battled with him, disarming him quickly but unable to strike him a blow that would knock him unconscious without running the risk of accidentally killing him. I broke his arm; he ignored the pain, it seemed, and continued to attack—continued, in fact, to use the broken arm. What kind of people are these? I wondered as I blocked a vicious kick with an equally vicious blow from my heavy boot. Don’t they feel pain?

  And at last the chanting ended, and in a moment Fole had broken the Golyny soldier’s neck with one blow. “Jass!” he hissed, nursing his hand from the pain, “what a neck!”

  “Why the hell didn’t somebody help me before?” I demanded. I was ignored. Obviously an offworlder wouldn’t understand. Now the four that had gone off to bring back Gokoke returned, their hands red with already drying blood. They held out their hands; Crofe, Fole, Stone, and Da licked the blood just slightly, swallowing with expressions of grief on their faces. Then Crofe clicked twice in his throat, and again Fole was pulling me out of the circle of stones. This time, however, all were coming. Crofe was in the lead, tumbling madly along a path that a mountain goat would have rejected as being too dangerous. I tried to tell Fole that it would be easier for me if he’d let go of my arm; at the first sound, Stone whirled around ahead of us, slapped my face with all his force, and I silently swallowed my own blood as we continued down the path.

  Suddenly the path ended on the crown of a rocky outcrop that seemed to be at the end of the world. Far below the lip of the smooth rock, the vast plain of Ylymyn Island spread to every horizon. The blue at the edges hinted at ocean, but I knew the sea was too far away to be seen. Clouds drifted here and there between us and the plain; patches of jungle many kilometers across seemed like threads and blots on the farmland and dazzling white cities. And all of it gave us a view that reminded me too much of what I had seen looking from the spacecraft while we orbited this planet not that many months ago.

  We paused only a moment on the dome; immediately they scrambled over the edge, seeming to plunge from our vantage point into midair. I, too, leaped over the edge—I had no choice, with Fole’s unrelenting grip. As I slid down the ever-steeper slope of rock, I could see nothing below me to break my fall. I almost screamed; held the scream back because if by some faint chance we were not committing mass suicide, a scream would surely bring the Golyny.

  And then the rock dropped away under me and I did fall, for one endless meter until I stopped, trembling, on a ledge scarcely a meter wide. The others were already there—Fole had taken me more slowly, I supposed, because of my inexperience. Forcing myself to glance over the edge, I could see that this peak did not continue as a smooth, endless wall right down to the flat plain. There were other peaks that seemed like foothills to us, but I knew they were mountains in their own right. It was little comfort to know that if I fell it would be only a few hundred meters, and not five or six kilometers after all.

  Crofe started off at a run, and we followed. Soon the ledge that had seemed narrow at a meter in width narrowed to less than a third of that; yet they scarcely seemed to slow down as Fole dragged me crabwise along the front of the cliff.

  Abruptly we came to a large, level area, which gave way to a narrow saddle between our peak and another much lower one that stood scarcely forty meters away. The top of it was rocky and irregular—perhaps, once we crossed the saddle, we could hide there and elude pursuit.

  Crofe did not lead this time. Instead, Da ran lightly across the saddle, making it quickly to the other side. He immediately turned and scanned the rocks above us, then waved. Fole followed, dragging me. I would never have crossed the saddle alone. With Fole pulling me, I had scarcely the time to think about the drop off to either side of the slender path.

  And then I watched from the rocks as the others came across. Crofe was last, and just as he stepped out onto the saddle, the rocks above came alive with Golyny.

  They were silent (I had battle-trained with loud weapons; my only war had been filled with screams and explosions; this silent warfare was, therefore, all the more terrifying), and the men around me quickly drew bows to fire; Golyny dropped, but so did Crofe, an arrow neatly piercing his head from behind.

  Was he dead? He had to be. But he fell straddling the narrow ridge, so that he did not plummet down to the rocks below. Another arrow entered his back near his spine. And then, before the enemy could fire again, Fole was out on the ridge, had hoisted Crofe on his shoulders, and brought him back. Even at that, the only shots the enemy got off seemed aimed not at Fole but at Crofe.

  We retreated into the rocks, except for two bowmen who stayed to guard the saddle. We were safe enough—it would take hours for the Golyny to find another way up to this peak. And so our attention was focused on Crofe.

  His eyes were open, and he still breathed. But he stared straight ahead, making no effort to talk. Stone held his shoulders as Da pushed the arrow deeper into his head. The point emerged, bloody, from Crofe’s forehead.

  Da leaned over and took the arrowhead in his teeth. He pulled, and the flint came loose. He spat it out and then withdrew the shaft of the arrow backward through the wound. Through all this, Crofe made no sound. And when the operation had finished, Crofe died.

  This time there was no ritual of closed eyes and chanting. Instead, the men around me openly wept—openly, but silently. Sobs wracked their bodies; tears leaped from their eyes; their faces contorted in an agony of grief. But there was no sound, not even heavy breathing.

  The grief was not something to be ignored. And though I did not know them at all well, Crofe was the one I had known best. Not intimately, certainly not as a friend, because the barriers were too great. But I had seen him dealing with his people, and whatever culture you come from, there’s no hiding a man of power. Crofe had that power. In the assemblies when we had first petitioned for the right to trade, Crofe had forced (arguing, it seemed, alone, though later I realized that he had many powerful allies that he preferred to marshal silently) the men and women there to make no restrictions, to leave no prohibitions, and to see instead what the corporation had to sell. It was a foot in the door. But Crofe had taken me aside alone and informed me that nothing was to be brought to the Ylymyny without his knowledge or approval. And now he was dead on a routine scouting mission, and I could not help but be amazed that the Ylymyny, in other ways an incredibly shrewd people, should allow their wisest leaders to waste themselves on meaningless forays in the borderlands and high mountains.

  And for some reason I found myself also grieved at Crofe’s death. The corporation, of course, would continue to progress in its dealings with the Ylymyny—would, indeed, have an easier time of it now. But Crofe was a worthy bargaining partner. And he and I had loved the game of bargaining, however many barriers our mutual strangeness kept between us.

  I watched as his soldiers stripped his corpse. They buried the clothing under rocks. And then they hacked at the skin with their knives, opening up the man’s bowels and splitting the intestines from end to end. The stench was powerful; I barely avoided vomiting. They worked intently, finding every scrap of material that had been passing through the bowel and putting it in a small leather bag. When the intestine was as clean as stone knives could scrape it, they closed the bag, and Da tied it around his neck on a string. Then, tears still streaming down his face, he turned to the others, looking at them all, one by one.

  “I will go to the mountain,” he whispered.

  The others nodded; some wept harder.

  “I will give his soul to the sky,” Da whispered, and now the others came forward, touched the bag, and whispered, “I, too. I, also. I vow.”

  Hearing the faint noise, the two archers guarding the saddle came to our sanctuary among the stones and were about to add their vows to those of the others when Da held up his hand and forbade them.

  “Stay and hold off pursuit. They are sure to know.”

  Sadly, the two nodded, moved back to their positions. And Fole once again gripped my arm as we moved silently away from the crest of the peak.

  “Where are we going?” I whispered.

  “To honor Crofe’s soul.” Stone turned and answered me.

  “What about the ambush?”

  “We are now about matters more important than that.”

  The Ylymyny worshiped the sky—or something akin to worship, at least. That much I knew from my scanty research into their religious beliefs in the city on the plain, where I had first landed.

  “Stone,” I said, “will the enemy know what we’re doing?”

  “Of course,” he whispered back. “They may be infidels, but they know what honor binds the righteous to do. They’ll try to trap us on the way, destroy us, and stop us from doing honor to the dead.”

  And then Da hissed for us to be quiet, and we soundlessly scrambled down the cliffs and slopes. Above us we heard a scream; we ignored it. And soon I was lost in the mechanical effort of finding footholds, handholds, strength to keep going with these soldiers who were in much better condition than I.

  Finally we reached the end of the paths and stopped. We were gathered on a rather gentle slope that ended, all the way around, in a steep cliff. And we had curved enough to see, above and behind us, that a large group of Golyny were making their way down the path we had just taken.

  I did not look over the edge, at first, until I saw them unwinding their ropes and joining them, end to end, to make a much longer line. Then I walked toward the edge and looked down. Only a few hundred meters below, a valley opened up in the mountainside, a flood of level ground in front of a high-walled canyon that bit deep into the cliff. From there it would be a gentle descent into the plain. We would be safe.

  But first, there was the matter of getting down the cliff. This time, I couldn’t see any hope of it unless we each dangled on the end of a rope, something that I had no experience with. And even then, what was to stop the enemy from climbing down after us?