were there in the orchard. This rule made it extremely dangerous and exciting, with only one or two tree-robbers per expedition, but any number of watchers and warners to hoot, tweet, chirp, and whistle when the enemy came close. Then, if we'd made off with some plums or early pears, we could pop up on the home side of the boundary, display our loot, and exult in our victory.
The great fruit wars came to an end when Mother Falimer told Yaven that a little group of our farm slave children had been savagely beaten by a group of orcharders at Obbe farm, who caught them stealing plums. One boy had had his eye gouged out. The Mother said nothing to Yaven beyond telling him what had happened, but when he brought the report to the rest of us, he told us that we'd have to stop our raids. The farm children had probably hoped to be mistaken for us and so get away unhurt, but the trick hadn't worked, and the men from Obbe had taken their rage out against them.
Yaven apologised to us formally for his thoughtlessness in leading us into doing harm, and Astano, repressing tears, joined him. "It was my fault," she said. "Not yours, none of you." They took full responsibility, as they would do when they were grown, when Yaven was the Father of Arcamand and Astano perhaps Mother of another household, when every decision would be theirs and theirs alone.
"I hate those awful orchard slaves," Ris said.
"The farm people really are brutes," Umo said regretfully.
"Foul Morvans," Tib said.
We were all disconsolate. If we didn't have an enemy, we needed a cause.
"I tell you what," Yaven said. "We could do the Fall of Sentas."
"Not with weapons," Astano said very softly and lightly.
"No, of course not. I mean, like a play."
"How?"
"Well, first we'd have to build Sentas. I was thinking the other day that the top of the hill behind the east vineyard, you know?—it's like a citadel. There are all those big rocks up there. It would be easy to fortify it, and make some trenches and earthworks. Teacher-dí has the book here—we could get the plans out of it. Then we could take different parts, you know—Oco could be General Thur, and Gav could say the Envoy's speeches, and Sotur could be the prophetess Yurno ... We wouldn't have to do the fighting parts. Just the talking."
It didn't sound very exciting, but we all trooped up to the hilltop, and as Yaven paced around among the big tumbled rocks and described where we could build a wall or make an earthwork, the idea of building a city began to take hold. Later in the afternoon he got Everra to bring out the book and read us passages from the epic, and our imaginations caught fire from the grand words and tragic episodes. We all chose what characters we would be—and all of us were Sentans. Nobody wanted to be a besieging warrior from Pagadi, not even the great General Thur or the hero Rurec, not even though Pagadi had won the war and destroyed the city, so that now, after hundreds of years, Sentas was still a poor little town among great ruined walls. Usually we were on the side of the winners; but we were going to build doomed Sentas, and so her cause was ours, and we would fall with her.
We built Sentas and enacted her glory and her fall, all the rest of the summer. Building was hard work up there on the hilltop in the sparse dry grass with the sun beating down and no shade except under the rock walls and towers we piled up. The two little girls, Oco and Umo, toiled up and down the hill with water from the stream while the rest of us sweated and grunted. We swore with parched mouths when a stone refused to fit in its place or slipped and came down on a finger; we greeted the water carriers with praise and rejoicing. Astano's delicate hands were rough and bruised, as hard, the Mother said, as horse hoofs; but the Mother smiled and did not reprove. She even came out several times and walked up the Hill of Sentas to see how the work was going. Yaven and Astano showed her our triumphs of engineering, the Eastern Gate, the Tower of the Ancients, the defensive ramparts. Erect in her light summer robes, smooth-faced, smiling, she listened, nodded, approved. I saw