I lunged at him. He turned and ran. I would have followed, but Dayhan began to call after me frantically. I returned to help her. The ground beneath her was stained red; a jagged blade of ice had ripped a deep gash in her leg. With my knife I cut a strip from my fur jacket and wound it as a tourniquet above the pulsing wound. My fingers were numb with cold. I worked slowly and awkwardly, but at last the bleeding ceased. Dayhan tried to stand, but she could not. "Leave me here, my Lord," she whispered. "Brother glacier is angry; he wants my blood." "It was simply an accident, Dayhan. The glacier had nothing to do with it." "I trod on tabooed ground. I defied him." "Man makes the taboos and the punishments and the sacrifices!" "So you have said, my Lord, and yet--" "I have taught you truth. You walked alone and without harm on tabooed ground. You must tell that to your people. The harm came to you after you found us, Dayhan--from Baiel. Only man is cruel to man, not the gods." I pulled her arm around my shoulder and we began the slow, painful walk back to the village. We had to stop frequently to rest. Twice I loosed the tourniquet to permit the blood to circulate in her lower leg. It was four hours before we reached the edge of the forest. There two of my men met us. They had begun to search the forest for me when Baiel returned to the village alone. We improvised a stretcher for Dayhan and carried her between us. The bleeding of her wound had stopped. With a pinpoint Hayden beam, I turned a drift of snow into steam and used the boiled water residue to cleanse the caked blood away from the cut. I seared a strip of skin and used it as a bandage. On the gently swaying stretcher Dayhan closed her eyes and slept. * * * * * When we were still a quarter of a mile from the village, the chief and a small band of his hunters met us on the forest trail. "The sun god speaks to us in a giant voice," the chief said. "It thunders in every corner of our village!" "What does the god say?" "He orders to take up our goods and go. He gives us the hunting ground of the dead, beyond the fire mountains." "And your people fear to obey?" "No. Your sun god is all-powerful. It is your own people who prevent us. They hold the priest, Baiel, with his followers, imprisoned in the cave by means of your weapons, the brothers-of-the-sun. They tell us it is not the sun god who speaks, but Baiel himself." "They tell you truly." "But no man can have so great a voice as that we hear!" So that was why Baiel had gone back to the _Olympus_! He had returned to the village with a portable amplifier concealed under his fur cloak. "Baiel is no priest," I told the Chief. "He speaks for no god. The great voice you hear is made by a machine, such a thing as this weapon that we use to slay meat for the tribe."