Now it was summer, some years later. The exact number didn't matter. Old Walker preferred to count by how much the children had grown. Little Seikil was almost knee-height on them now, which must have meant he was five or six years old. He'd been born in the valley, when Nualles had been about as tall as Old Walker's shoulder. She'd been born in the valley too.

Speaking of, here came Nualles now.

Troll hair had a tendency to mat, and Nualles kept her dreadlocks in place with a simple strip of canvas. They bobbed up and down as she carried the basket of yams to the granaries. When she ran into Old Walker, she said nothing, only stood still for a moment as if adapting to the issue, and then ducked between their legs without a word.

Old Walker liked her.

Others saw the Prophet on the way and nodded respectfully, some throwing handfuls of grain in a gesture of respect. Nobody asked where they were going, having become accustomed to the mystery. Which was good, since Old Walker didn't know, and wouldn't have answered if they did.

The Sculptor stepped over an irrigation channel, small fish squabbling silently in its flow. The fields of the valley were perfectly ordered, grids and supergrids, water and roads, beans and barley. Each year the crops were rotated to a different field, such that each might refresh the soil for the next. The mountain slopes beyond them were terraced for vegetables.

At the northern end of the valley lay the lens grove, where the Meterans brought their restless dead. Not far from there was the hall of writings, where urtelem busily counted every basket of produce and pail of water to be produced by the valley, and all the visitors that arrived, and all their wares, and all their prices, and everything that had been bought, and everything that had been sold by the returning travellers who had been to Rulanah and to the Mist City, that is, Alefpria.

Old Walker went there. The memory came some time on the way.