"I know you now." "What do you know, wild man?" Stark said quietly, "You are a Rama." She did not answer at once. Then she said, "I was bred in these deserts. Is it so strange that I should know of this well?" "Strange that you didn't mention it before. You were afraid, weren't you, that if you led me here your secret would come out? But it was that, or die." He leaned forward, studying her. "If you had led me straight to the well, I might not have wondered. But you had to stop and remember, how the halls were built and where the doorways were that led to the inner court. You lived in this place when it was whole. And no one, not even Kynon himself, knows of it but you." "You dream, wild man. The moon is in your eyes." Stark shook his head slowly. "I know." She laughed, and stretched her arms wide on the sand. "But I am young," she said. "And men have told me I am beautiful. It is good to be young, for youth has nothing to do with ashes and empty skulls." She touched his arm, and little darts of fire went through his flesh, warm from his fingertips. "Forget your dreams, wild man. They're madness, gone with the morning." He looked down at her in the clear pale light, and she was young, and beautifully made, and her lips were smiling. He bent his head. Her arms went round him. Her hair blew soft against his cheek. Then, suddenly, she set her teeth cruelly into his lip. He cried out and thrust her away, and she sat back on her heels, mocking him. "That," she said, "is because you called Fianna's name instead of mine, when the storm broke." Stark cursed her. There was a taste of blood in his mouth. He reached out and caught her, and again she laughed, a peculiarly sweet, wicked sound. The wind blew over them, sighing, and the desert was very still. For two days they remained among the ruins. At evening of the second day Stark filled the water skin, and Berild replaced the golden cover on the well. They began the last long march toward Sinharat. IX Stark saw it rising against the morning sky--a city of gold and marble, high on an island of rose-red coral laid bare by the vanished sea. Sinharat, the Ever-Living. Yet it had died. As he came closer to it, plodding slowly through the sand, he saw that the place was no more than a beautiful corpse, the lovely towers broken, the roofless palaces open to the sky. Whatever life Kynon and his armies might have foisted upon Sinharat was no more than the fleeting passage of ants across the perfect bones of the dead. "What was it like before?" he asked, "with the blue water around it, and the banners flying?" Berild turned a dark, calculating look upon him. "I told you before to forget that madness. If you talk it, no one will believe you." "No one?" "You had best not anger me, wild man," she said quietly. "I may be your only hope of life, before this is over." They did not speak again, going with slow weary steps toward the city.