Softly--Brian saw no motion of her lips--the woman muttered: "He wake." A twitch of the man's hand was probably meant to warn her to be quiet. His other hand clutched the shaft of a javelin with a metal blade. Brian saw that the blade had once belonged to a bread-knife; it was polished and shining, lashed to a peeled stick. The javelin trailed, ready for use at a flick of the young man's arm. Brian opened his eyes plainly. Deliberately, he sighed. "Good morning." The youth said: "Good morning, sa." "Where do you come from?" "Millstone." The young man spoke automatically, but then his facial rigidity dissolved into amazement and some kind of distress. He glanced at his companion, who giggled uneasily. "The old man pretends to not know," she said, and smiled, and seemed to be waiting for the young man's permission to go on speaking. He did not give it, but she continued: "Sa, the old ones of Millstone are dead." She thrust her hand out and down, flat, a picture of finality, adding with nervous haste: "As the Old Man knows. He who told us to call him Jonas, she who told us to call her Abigail, they are dead. They are still-without-moving for six days. Then we do the burial as they told us. As the Old Man knows." "But I don't know!" said Brian, and sat up on his pallet, too quickly, startling them. But their motion was backward, readiness for flight, not for aggression. "Millstone? Where is Millstone?" * * * * * Both looked wholly bewildered, then dismayed. They stood up with splendid animal grace, stepping backward out of the cave, the girl whispering in the man's ear. Brian caught only two words: "Is angry...." He jumped up. "Don't go! Please don't go!" He followed them out of the cave, slowly now, aware that he might well be an object of terror in the half-dark, aware of his gaunt, graceless age and dirty hacked-off beard. Almost involuntarily, he adopted something of the flat stilted quality of their speech: "I will not hurt you. Do not go." They halted. The girl smiled dubiously. The man said: "We need old ones. They die. He who told us to call him Jonas said, many days in the boat, not with the sun-path, he said, across the sun-path, he said, keeping land on the left hand. We need old ones to speak the--to speak.... The Old Man is angry?" "No, I am not angry. I am never angry." Brian's mind groped, certain of nothing. No one had come for twenty-five years. Only twenty-five? Millstone? There was red-gold on the dirty eastern windows of the Hall of Music, a light becoming softness as it slanted down, touching the long rows of cases, the warm brown of an antique spinet, the arrogant clean gold of a 20th century harp, the dull gray of singing stones five thousand years old and a clay face much older than that. "Millstone?" Brian pointed southwest in inquiry.