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"Ah. Ah. How can I do that?"
"You are She Who Knows. You say so yourself."
"I only know what I know. The language of the Other Ones is not something I know."
"Ah," said Silver Cloud. "So there's something you don't know! I've never heard you say a diing like that before, She Who Knows."
She gave him a sour smile and did not reply.
The Other One was speaking again. His voice was pitched very high, and he seemed to be straining as he spoke, pushing the sounds out, working hard to make his meaning clear, as though he were speaking to children. But there was no meaning. Silver Cloud stared intently, watching the man's mouth, and he could not make out a single intelligible word. The sounds that the Other One was making were not the sounds of speech.
Silver Cloud said, "Can't you speak properly? I can't understand you if you moan like that."
The Other One leaned forward and thrust his head outward to bring it closer to Silver Cloud and put ojie hand behind his ear, the way a deaf man does, although Silver CJoud had been speaking very loudly indeed. It was a strange pose. The Other One was very tall, unbelievably tall, head halfway to the sky, and when he leaned forward he looked like some long-legged bird of the marsh country. Silver Cloud stared at him with utter fascination. How did he keep his balance? How was it that he didn't fall over, standing on legs so thin and long? Or break in half when he moved? And the ugliness of him-that pale skin, like a ghost's-the way his face jutted out below his mouth, and the weird tininess of his features"I said, can't you speak properly? Speak in words if you want to talk to me!"
"Those are his words," She Who Knows said suddenly. "He has his own words." She had an odd look on her face, the look of one who has been struck by a strange new truth. "The Other Ones have a language of their own, different from ours."
"What?" Silver Cloud said, mystified. "What does that mean? There's only one language, She Who Knows. There are words that can be understood, and there are noises that can't. We can't understand what he's saying, and therefore his sounds are only noises. How can there be more than one language? The sky is the sky. A mountain is a mountain. Water is water, snow is snow. Everybody knows that. How can anyone call them by other names?"
"Two peoples-two languages. One language for us -a different one for them-"
The thought made Silver Cloud's head ache. There might actually be some sense to it, he had to admit-two peoples, two languages, why not? -but it was very difficult to think about such a thing now. Ideas like that needed careful contemplation at a quiet time. He pushed the problem aside and looked back toward the Other One.
He was speaking again, as unintelligibly as before.
This time he was making gestures too, perhaps trying to act out the message he had come here to deliver, seeing that speech was not turning out to be very useful. He pointed with his fur-wrapped spear at the shrine; he pointed at the hill country to the east out of which the People had come; he pointed westward, to the lands that ran toward the sea, which now belonged entirely to the Other Ones. He pointed to the shrine again. He pointed to Silver Cloud; he pointed to himself. He pointed to the shrine.
"Goddess Woman?" Silver Cloud said. "Do you make any sense of this?"
"He wants us to leave, so they can have the shrine!" Goddess Woman said immediately.
Silver Cloud wasn't so sure of that. There was too much back-and-forth pointing. If he were the one who had gone to the Other Ones to tell them to leave, he would simply have pointed to the shrine and to the Other Ones, and then to the western lands, and made a nicking gesture with his hand to tell them that they should go back where they had come. Anyone with any intelligence ought to be able to understand diat.
In fact, why not try it now? And he did.
The Other One watched him with the sort of look on his face that one might give a child who was stammering through some long-winded interruption of a perfectly sensible adult conversation. When Silver Cloud was done, the Other One responded by going through his whole point-at-this-point-at-that routine all over again.
She Who Knows said, "I think he's trying to tell us that we can share the shrine, his people and ours worshipping at it together."
"Share a shrine with filth?" Goddess Woman crkd. "The shrine is ours!"
"Is that what you're telling me?" Silver Cloud asked the Other One, speaking as slowly and loudly as he could. "You think that we both can use the shrine? But you can't be serious. It's a shrine of the Goddess. You aren't people of the Goddess. -Or are you? Are you?"
He waited, hoping for an answer he could understand.
But the Other One said incomprehensible Other One things again: He did the pointing-with-the-spear one more time.
"Hopeless," Silver Cloud said. "Hopeless, hopeless, hopeless. I don't understand you and you don't understand me. No question about that. She Who Knows and Goddess Woman think they understand you, but they don't, not really. They're both just hearing the things they want to think you're saying."
"I could sit down with him and try to teach him our language," She Who Knows offered. "Or maybe I could learn how to speak his."
"Keep away from him," Goddess Woman said. "He's unclean, and this is holy land."
"But if we were able to speak with-"
"It's no use," said Silver Cloud. "Even if those noises of his are a language, you'd never learn it. How could you? It's like sitting down with a bear and trying to learn bear-noises. Or to teach a bear to speak. It can't be done."
"Old men always say that things can't be done," She Who Knows retorted.
"Old? Old?" Silver Cloud cried.
But now the Other One was gesturing again with his spear, and making his sounds again. One last attempt, perhaps, to get his message across to Silver Cloud. It was as incomprehensible, though, as it had been before. Silver Cloud felt a great sadness coming over him, and not only because She Who Knows had called him old, or because there was fiery pain in his leg, or because the snowy time was coming and the People had not yet made provision for winter camp. No, it was because this strange stork-like man had come to him with what might have been a message of peace, but he could not understand it and could not make himself understood, and so the stalemate would continue. It was like a wall of stone between them, cutting off communication.
The Other One finished his speech and waited.
"I'm sorry," Silver Cloud said. "I just don't understand. The problem is that I don't speak your language. And I guess you don't speak mine."
"So you agree it's a language, then!" She Who Knows said in triumph.
"Yes," said Silver Cloud glumly. "For whatever good that does."
The parley was over. The Other One, looking irritated and morose, swung around and walked quickly away, back toward his own encampment. Silver Cloud watched, astonished by the loose-jointed free-wheeling stride of the man. It seemed a wonder that his arms and legs didn't fall off as he walked, so poorly strung together was he, so badly designed. Or that his head didn't roll right off his flimsy neck. Silver Cloud felt grateful for his own sturdy, compact body, weary and aching though it had become of late. It had served him well for a great many years. It was the work of the Goddess, that body. He pitied the Other Ones for their fragility and their ugliness.
As the envoy of the Other Ones passed the sentry zone again, Broken Mountain once more shook his spear at him and made a hissing sound of defiance. The Odjer One took no notice. Broken Mountain looked to Silver Cloud for instruction, but Silver Cloud shook his head and told him to hold his peace. The Other One disappeared into the distant encampment of his people.
So that was that. Nothing accomplished.
Silver Cloud felt racked by doubts. Whatever he did these days led only to muddle. The Goddess had gone unworshipped, a litde boy had vanished into thin air, the shrine they had come all this way to venerate was inaccessible to them, and the season was quickly turning against them; and now he had failed to achieve anything at all by way of parley. No doubt She Who Knows was right, as she usually was, much as he hated to admit that to himself: he was too old for the job. Time to step aside, to let the Killing Society do its work, and lie down in the sleep that never ends.
Blazing Eye would be chieftain in his place. Let Blazing Eye worry about what to do next.
But even as the thought crossed his mind, Silver Cloud was angered by it. Blazing Eye? A fool. He would do foolish things, as fools can be expected to do. It would be a sin to hand the tribe over to Blazing Eye.
Who, then? Broken Mountain? Tree Of Wolves? Young Antelope?
All fools. He couldn't give the tribe to any one of them. Maybe they would outgrow their foolishness someday; but he wasn't very confident of that.
Then who will be chieftain after me?
Let the Goddess decide, Silver Cloud told himself. After I'm gone. It'll be Her problem then, not mine.
He would not resign. He would wait for death to claim him. He knew that he was a fool, too-or else they would not be here in this useless deadlock now-but at least he was less foolish than the younger men, and he might just as well keep his chieftainship a little while longer.
"What are you going to do now, Silver Cloud?" She Who Knows asked.
"Nothing," he said. "What is there to do?" He went back to the camp and sat down by the fire. Some child came over to him-he couldn't remember her name-and he drew her close against his side, and they sat there staring at the leaping flames for a long while. The presence of the child lifted a little of the sadness that had come over him. From this little girl the People of tomorrow someday would come forth, long after he was gone. That was a comforting thought: that chieftains might die, that warriors died, that everyone died sooner or later, but the People would go on and on, into time immemorial, world without end. Yes. Yes. A good thing to bear in mind.
Shordy it began to snow, and the snow went on falling late into the night.