hesitated and said, "You are different. You began differently. I cannot say how you will live."
"Maybe I'll never have any more visions. Maybe I came back to the beginning there out on the lake, and the beginning was the end."
"You're afraid," Dorod said, with unusual gentleness. "It's hard to know the lion is walking towards you. Don't be afraid. I will be with you."
"Not there," I said.
"Yes, even there. Go wait for the lion on the deck now."
I obeyed, listlessly, kneeling on the little deck of the hut over the mud and stones of the end of the peninsula, looking out at the lake under a calm grey sky. I breathed as he had taught me and tried to keep my thoughts from drifting. Presently I was aware that a black lioness was walking across the ground behind me, but I did not turn round. Whatever it was I had been afraid of, my fear had gone. There were flowers in the narrow garden where I sat. I walked up a cobbled street at night in rain, and saw the rain blown against a high red wall over the street in the faint light from a window across the way. I was in the sunlit courtyard of a house I knew, my house, and a young girl came to greet me, smiling; it gave me great joy to see her face. I stood in a river, the current pushing me nearly off my feet, and on my shoulders was a heavy burden, so heavy I could barely stand up as the water pushed at me, and the sand under my feet slipped and slid. I staggered and took a step forward. I was kneeling on the deck of the hut in Reed Isles. It was evening. A last flight of wild duck passed across the reddish cloud cover where the sun had set.
Dorod's hand was on my shoulder. "Come in," he said in a low voice. "You've made a long journey."
He was silent and gentle with me that night. He asked nothing about what I had seen. He made sure I ate well, and sent me to sleep.
Over the next days I told him my visions, little by little, and over and over. He knew how to draw from me things I would not have thought to tell, things I didn't even know I'd seen until he made me recall the vision again, closer, seeking details, as if studying a picture. In this I felt my two kinds of memory come together into one.
And several times during those days I "journeyed," as he put it, again. It was as if a door stood open that I could go through, not at will, but at the lion's will.
"I don't see how my visions can be of use or guidance to our clan," I said to Dorod one evening. "They're always of other places, other times—almost nothing of the Marshes. What use can they be here?"
We were out fishing. Our contributions to the fish-mat had been rather poor lately, and what the women gave us had been correspondingly meager. We had thrown out the net and were drifting a while before we began to pull it in.
"You are still making the journeys of a child," Dorod said.
"What do you mean."
"The child sees only with his own eyes. He sees what is before him—places he will come to. As he learns to journey as a man, he learns to see more widely. He learns to see what other eyes may see, he sees where others will come. He goes where he will never himself go in his body. All the world, all places, all times are open to the great seer. He walks with Amba and flies with Hassa. He journeys with the Lord of the Waters." He said all this quite matter-of-factly. He looked round at me with a quick, shrewd glance. "Untaught, beginning so late, you see as a child sees. I can teach you how to make the greater journeys. But only if you trust me."
"Do I distrust you."
"Yes," he said calmly.
My aunt had said something to me about remembering myself but going no further. I could have found her words in my memory if I looked for them, but I did not look for them. Dorod was right: if I was to learn from him I must do it his way.
We pulled in our net. We were in luck. We brought two big carp to the fish-mat. I found