Jickrenner Dyland was closing his shop for the night when the revolution came to Cherraway. He paused with his hand on the door, and turned, and saw them far along the road like a great wave: women and men, mostly young, and all wearing the green scarves that had been the badge of the underground, and singing, singing as though they were the voice of all the world. Jickrenner stood bemused, key in hand. They came to the gates of the town and smashed them down from their hinges though they stood open, with a joyful violence that it somehow hurt to see. People came out and stood along the roadside, Jickrenner's friends and neighbours. It was sundown and hot. Some cheered.

A laughing girl with tumbled black hair flung a scarf around Jickrenner's neck and kissed his cheek, then disappeared again into the giddy crowd. Already the head of the great parade was well along the road, and Jickrenner couldn't see its tail. They must have emptied the university and the prisons and all the other places rebels come from. Some were hurt and many were barefoot, but they showed no sign of stopping. It was eleven miles to the city limits of Barlset, and already growing dark; surely they didn't mean to march all night? But there were lanterns being brought out now, and here and there torches, firelight giving the walkers a savage look. They were going on, on into the dark.

The end of the procession came into view, stragglers tired and grimy from breathing dust, and a dozen huge open trucks carrying the old and the lame. On one was grey-headed Suzu Madaridan, the rebels' most famous face, who had been jailed four times and been broken free the last time two days before, so the radio had said. She waved her crutch like a trophy and smiled at the crowds, but did not sing.

Jickrenner watched them go, watched the lights fade, listened to the singing and the rumble of the trucks die away. The green scarf, black now in the orange glow of the streetlights, felt warm and scratchy against his neck. He realized that he was still holding his key, and that the shop door stood open to the night. Hurriedly he closed and locked it, and then laughed to himself, a little, looking again at the fragments of the town gate lying in the road: if a howling mob wanted to loot his shoe and leather shop, the lock would be nothing. But they had not been howling, after all, only singing, and in any event they had gone on.

He pocketed the key and slung the bag with his tools and the day's earnings over his shoulder, and walked home in the warm humid dark. More people were out than usual, all having stopped to watch the rebels walking. Jickrenner nodded to a few of them, thinking perhaps he should have something to say, but there was nothing. A great wave had passed through Cherraway and gone on, and though the water continued to ripple in its wake, the main body of the wave was elsewhere, and would not return.

Three years the war raged in Esgarrat, lumbering back and forth across the great plain until all the low fields were mud and dust. The great general Volat Mors was killed by a mine late in the second year, and a bridge weakened by sappers collapsed and killed eleven soldiers on it and six bargemen under it. A boy of ten tried to join the rebels by sneaking into a camp near Skerdale and was summarily shot as a spy. There was famine in four provinces and poison in all the streams of the Esgarrat Watershed, and a mysterious dearth of cats. All these things had happened already when Suzu Madaridan went to the oracle.

"The war is going well," said Suzu's generals. "Volat Mors is dead and the king's hopes with him. They will beg for peace soon."

"They will not," said Suzu. She sat in a carved chair in her cave, soaking her feet that had been broken in prison in a wide shallow bowl. Most of the rebel army was lodged in caves along the Scardel Range, where they had chased the king's army back through the passes. Nine-tenths of them were dead on the plain; but they held Esgarrat at last.

"You do not know war," said the generals, which was true.

"I know the king," said Suzu.

In those days there was an oracle who lived on a mountain in the Scardels, just where the trees stopped, in a cave. But everyone lived in caves now, even if they were caves stocked with guns and strung with telegraph wire between mountain and mountain. Suzu took up her crutches and went to see the oracle.

The cave was easy to find; there was a path, all carved with devotional symbols and the names of pilgrims. "The very stone is holy," Suzu said to herself, and wished she had something to make her own mark with. She could have called down to the soldiers who guarded her at the foot of the ridge—the face of the rebellion and its guiding soul, she was not allowed to go anywhere alone—but instead she set her face to the rock, and began to climb.

When she emerged from the cave it was dark. Night had fallen, on the same day or another, and it was cold as only the mountains can be cold. Her shawl was gone and she wrapped her arms around herself, shivering. Then, because it was dark and the path almost invisible below her, she called down to the soldiers after all.

"Did you find what you were looking for?" one asked when they came beside her, and it was only then that Suzu realized she couldn't remember.

"Everything will happen as it should," she said, which was no answer, but satisfied them. They went down together into the rebel encampment and the generals asked her nothing, ignoring an old woman's folly. She tried later, and for the rest of her life, but she never remembered anything more.

Winter came and passed, and spring came to Cherraway with the usual torrent of rains and lambs. A cousin of Jickrenner's secured him a moderately lucrative contract for three hundred pairs of boots for the army, and when the factor for Lord Grannet's Third of Foot counted out his pay and drove off with the boots in his wagon, Jickrenner raised his eyes briefly skyward and thanked God for the war.

The radio said the rebel advance had been halted at the Scardels, that great barrier that divided the Esgarrat plain from the rocky land where Cherraway was and the capital as well. The rebels' path in the last four years made a long looping track, south from the capital and west over the mountains into the plain, and now east again, slowly, now that so much of the king's army was dead in Esgarrat. The radio brayed of glorious victories, but Jickrenner believed his cousin's rumours more, and the tired, lined face of Lord Grannet's man when he drove off to rejoin his fellows.

And so one day in spring it rained from morning to noon, and just as the clouds began to lift a regiment of the king's men marched into the town. The gates had never been repaired, for lack of money and lack of need, and perhaps from fear that the rebels would come back and view it as an affront, and so the king's soldiers strode through the gap in the walls like conquerors, like heroes. They were even bloodied, as Jickrenner guessed heroes would be. There were gaps in their files like missing teeth, and too many empty horses.

Thus it was that Jickrenner Dyland and eleven of his neighbours became recruits in the king's army. They went first to the capital, and then into the mountains. A third of his battalion or more were new recruits, townsmen like Jickrenner or farmers. Most of the eligible city men had been taken already, long ago.

In the mountains it was still winter. Snow lay drifted man-high against the rocks some places, and ran downhill in melting rivers elsewhere. Footing was treacherous and the head of each column carried a stick to probe the ice ahead of him for hidden crevasses. There was rain, and snow, and lightning, and great rolling mist that filled the passes and stopped the soldiers' ears and eyes, and so the rebels descended on them unheard one spring morning, and slaughtered them almost to a man. Then they carried away the bodies and flung them into deep gorges so that no sign of their fate would ever reach the outpost that expected them. In later years, the Lost Battalion became something of a legend.

By the time Jickrenner was captured by a rebel scouting party he had been wandering alone in the mountains for three days. The camp doctor, a small serious woman with braided black hair, cut off three of his fingers to save his arm, and neither remembered her giving him a scarf the day they passed through Cherraway.

Later, when he was lucid and the gales kept the army snowbound in the caves, Suzu Madaridan came to visit him.

He was not, of course, the only prisoner in the camp, and mostly they kept him in the same wide low-roofed cavern as the other captured scouts and spies. This day, though, he was alone, placed in solitary confinement in one of the warders' sporadic attempts to wring information from him. He guessed, squatting on the bare floor in a vain attempt to find a comfortable position for his bruised and cold-numbed legs, that they were more bored than anything. He'd told them everything he could think of, babbling, half-delirious, while the doctor was cutting into his hand. He'd been convinced that she was a torturer (that they employed a woman seemed a particularly cruel trick) and that his only hope lay in immediate and total capitulation. He was not, he decided after, a hero.

"You're cold," Suzu said. She set her lamp on the floor beside him and he turned his face away from it, dazzled a little after a day and night in the dark. She had brought a blanket also and he took it gratefully, folding it underneath his legs to insulate them from the seeping chill of the stone. He saw Suzu glance once at the welts on his legs and then quickly away. He shrugged.

"I told you everything already," he said.

"Yes," Suzu said, vaguely, as though not really listening. "When they found you—"

"I was dying," he said. "Thank you. Even if—well, thank you."

"You said something about an oracle," Suzu said.

Jickrenner looked at her. "I don't remember," he said.

"You must," said Suzu. "You were shouting."

"I was mad," he said. "The cold, and the pain—I went mad for awhile. I don't remember."

"The oracle lives in these mountains," she said, trying to force memory, her hands clasping and unclasping on the folds of her trousers as though she would have wrung the words from him if she could. The backs of her hands were knotted with age, harmless. "You must have found her. You must!"

"Why does this matter so much to you?" Jickrenner asked curiously, studying her agitated face. He felt oddly detached. A fragment of memory drifted before him—another woman's face, lit by firelight—and then sank into darkness, never to be reclaimed.

Suzu glared at him and hauled herself to her feet, the stick she carried scraping on the stone. "Rot and die then," she said, and took the lantern and went out into the dark.

When Jickrenner was released, five months later, it was into the custody of a nephew of his. Breckenden Hye was from Cherraway as well, the son of one of Jickrenner's younger brothers, and had been in the university before the war. The rebel army was preparing to move again and had no-one to spare to guard prisoners. Most of the captives would be turned out into the mountains, to make their way home or not, but those who had someone to vouch for them would be allowed to accompany the army into the lowlands, as cooks or grooms or mechanics. Jickrenner's healing hand was still awkward but he could sew one-handed well enough to mend clothing, and Breckenden gave assurances for his good behaviour as needed.

"Of course you can run away when we reach the lowlands," he told Jickrenner confidentially, as they squatted beside the fire. "Everyone more or less expects it. They don't want to feed you lot forever. They just don't quite have the stomach to cut your heads off and be done with it."

Jickrenner's own stomach was none too settled at this, but he didn't reply. Breckenden had taken to fighting with a keenness that surprised and worried Jickrenner, but the older man still remembered him as a bookish adolescent, more interested in his studies than in the world around him. Books knew things that Jickrenner didn't, and so Jickrenner asked his question, and was answered.

"Of course there are oracles," Breckenden said. "Everyone knows that. What difference does it make?"

"Everyone knows a lot of things I don't," Jickrenner said. "What do you mean, what difference?"

"There are oracles everywhere," Breckenden said. "I've read about an old man in Byserrion who can tell you the very hour of your death. In Choum there's a woman who will read the future in your dreams if you spend the night with her. In Drekar Dannis across the ocean the wise children wake at sunrise to sing all the deeds that will be done that day. And in the Scardels—well, as you said. But it doesn't matter."

"It matters to me," Jickrenner insisted. "It matters to your glorious leader."

"That's not what I mean," Breckenden said, nettled. "What matters to you or me or even her is insignificant. The oracles of the world don't exist for our benefit. Their purpose is to shape the world. I've read about these things, Jick." His eyes were alight and for a moment his old delight in knowledge shone through him. "The word gives meaning to the event. Without words we have no history, you know that much; there would be no kingdom, no culture, no great tradition, just a lot of things happening, meaningless. Well, and so the future is the same. The words of the oracles make it real, make it whole. That they sometimes help one person or another is not the point. Some of them hinder as much as help, and some of them are never even understood. Or remembered."

"So it's magic then," Jickrenner said, disappointed. He had expected more, from someone who had been to the university.

"I don't know anything about magic," Breckenden said. "What shapes the world and time is deeper than that." He shook his head. "What do you remember?"

"Cold," Jickrenner said, after thinking deeply. "It was cold. I slept walking, and dreamed I was on fire. I saw things, shadows, armies that disappeared when I looked closely on them." He looked intently into his nephew's eyes. "I remember a cave. I don't remember going inside, but there was a cave. There might have been an oracle, Breck. There could have been."

"There probably was, then," Breckenden said.

The revolutionary army tumbled out of the mountains with the spring avalanches and took the capital in eleven bloody days. The story went that the moon stayed full every night of the battle to give the warriors light to kill by, and that when the walls had come down and the fires had burnt out and the king's loyal guards had lain down their lives for their sovereign, Suzu Madaridan went to the royal chambers and found them empty. There were rumours that some or all of the king's family had been smuggled out over the walls during the fighting, or even well before. Suzu was fifty-one that spring.

When she was fifty-four and the new government was more or less established, and the revolutionary representatives of the people had begun to realize that they were better qualified to know what was good for the people than the people themselves, Suzu left the capital and went out into the countryside. No-one minded. She had been a symbol of defiance, jailed for her views and stubbornly unbroken, someone to rally behind. In the public mind she was defined solely in terms of her opposition to an order that no longer existed; and she had been pretty, once, a romantic image, a stained-glass window or the heroine of a radio play. Now she was old, and ugly, and free.

Suzu went into the country and walked the muddy roads, stopping sometimes to watch the peasants at their endless, meaningless, vital work. It was a lean year and there were brigands on the roads, and three times she was set on and robbed of the little she carried. It hardly mattered. In every town of any size there was someone who knew her. They had been her comrades; they had been with her in the mountains. The rhetoric that all people were sisters seemed thin and stretched these days, but she at least was still their beloved sister, for a little while. Suzu walked.

One day she stood at a place where three roads met and one went on, up through a jumble of boulders into a wash full of broken stone, and up and up until it vanished in the clouds. Somewhere up there were the caves, and the oracle, and a woman starving and freezing among her sisters for the hope of a brighter future.

Suzu turned away, and began the long trek back to the city.

After the counter-revolution and the king's return, the heads of the rebels were paraded through the streets of every major town in the realm, as an example and a warning and a massively expensive entertainment, for which, naturally, taxes would be raised. People grumbled, but few stayed away.

Jickrenner Dyland came out of his door to watch, wiping sweat from his forehead in the dry midsummer. He was toting barrels for an innkeeper in Stannet's Climb then; he had been, briefly, a seven-fingered cobbler, and after failing at that for half a year he had found an old comrade in the innkeeper of the Copper Bull and come to work for him at apprentice wages. He was fifty-eight and his hands and feet hurt in the weather. Now that the king was back they would all get a pension, Margan said, all the old soldiers, out of what the rebels had squirreled away.

Watching the bloody heads go by, Jickrenner didn't see that they looked rich. Most were hollow-cheeked and scraggly. The ones that followed in great barred flatbed trucks, staring disconsolately out at the crowds as they waited for their day to adorn the poles—fresh, bloody heads made a better spectacle than rotting ones, and the smell was less of a burden to the guards besides—were even worse, gaunt to starvation and dressed in filthy rags. That was deliberate, Jickrenner thought. Make them look as pathetic as possible. He was filled with weary disgust, and almost turned away; but his eyes were drawn back despite himself.

He knew who she was, now, though he hadn't at the time. There were pictures of her everywhere for awhile. He still wasn't sure why she had visited him in the cave that day, but somehow her words had stayed with him: the oracle, the answer—

She wasn't there. There were a few women in the trucks, not many, and one female head, but all were young. Maybe they were saving her for the capital, Jickrenner thought. The great parade would end there. He had heard her capture announced brassily on the radio, and ever since then he had thought, in a vague and unfocused way, of seeing her today, and what that would be like. It would be a measure of revenge for his time in the caves, for his hand, for saving him; but he would forgive her, he had decided, now that she could never hurt him again he would forgive it all.

He waited until the last of the prisoners and their polished guards were gone, and then he went inside and interrupted Margan's grumbling with a stagger-stepped explanation of why he was leaving. Margan shouted at him and cursed him for a fool and gave him a month's wages beyond what he was owed, and Jickrenner went to his room to pack what he would need for the road.