itself: all the earth that had clothed it and all the stumps that had been rooted in that earth. It fell upon the souls in the river and buried them. And it fell too upon the water of the rivers.
The two rivers burst out from under the avalanche, forming up into white waves. Seen from downriver, these waves—one in each of the two forks—unfurled like angels’ wings, spreading across each of the streams and rebounding from the banks opposite, throwing up spumes of dirty foam as the displaced water piled up into a fluid hill. The water acted as if it had a soul of its own, and the soul was confused; but after some moments it determined that the way out was down in the direction of Eltown. There was further confusion as the two mounds of water came together and clashed at the junction, just at the foot of the hill—or what had been the hill a minute ago. Now it had shed its cloak of earth to reveal a skeleton of boulders, resembling a much larger version of Cairn.
Which on any other day would have commanded their full attention. But now they could not stop watching the slow relentless marshaling of the waters. These settled into a step: a clear and straight cliff that stretched from one bank to the other and marched downstream at a pace that looked stately until one compared it to the movements of a few terrified souls running full-tilt along the banks.
The wave spread across Eltown, inundating it all, toppling its buildings and snuffing its fires, the graves of which were thereafter marked by columns of steam. It spread thence over the new walls and across the green fields of the Autochthons, strewing them with flotsam picked up from the ruined structures of the town. The farther it spread, the slower it went, and at the end it was no more than knee- or ankle-deep on the legs of the Autochthons and their mounts. They seemed only a little inconvenienced by the flood. Their fields were left speckled with flat puddles and strewn with wreckage. Damage was much greater in town, where many structures had been knocked flat and some, paradoxically, were burning.
Concerned as they were with trying to help souls trapped in wreckage, or salvaging their belongings, the people of Eltown had eyes only for what was close to hand. A similar state of affairs prevailed in the smaller settlement down below Camp, which had likewise been inundated. But the higher ground of Camp was unaffected. From there Adam and Eve and the other souls were able to look up the valley to the place where the river forked. Formerly they would have said “to the hill with the great tree” but those were both gone now.
Standing there was a pile of boulders, each bigger than a house. The shape of it changed slowly; it grew taller and narrower. It was already as tall as the hill and the tree combined. It changed at the slow but steady pace of shadows shifting across the ground over the course of an afternoon; looked on directly it did not seem to move.
“We should go down there and help those people,” said Eve, fetching an axe from a hook above the door. She turned to go down the hill. Then, noting that Adam showed little inclination to go with her, she pulled up short and looked at him curiously.
“Yes, we should,” Adam said, “and we shall. But we should do it with one eye toward leaving this place. Possibly in some haste.”
“Why?” asked Eve.
“They are going to turn on us,” said Adam.
“That would make no sense!”
“I have spent much time among them,” said Adam, “and I regret to say that they do things that make no sense more often than they show wisdom. They are ruled by emotion and rumor. Even though we had nothing to do with the cutting down of the great tree, they will look at that”—he stretched out his arm to indicate the pile of boulders—“and note its likeness to Cairn, and they will say that all of us, even our twelve children, are of a shared kind, which is responsible for what has just occurred and for every other imperfection in the world besides. They will come for us and they will try to do to us what Cairn did to Messenger of El and what Feller and his crew just did to the great tree.”
Until then Adam had