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to their left, they moved through it, picking up a pig trail. This was the area known as Sternstairs, where a great hill led down to lower levels. A crashing sounded from over the brink of the slope, followed by an unmistakeable squealing. Pig!
    Motioning Gwenny to stay where she was at the top of the hill, Complain, dexterously sliding his bow from his shoulder and fitting an arrow to it, commenced the descent. His hunter’s blood was up, all worries forgotten, and he moved like a wraith. Gwenny’s eye sped him an unnoticed message of encouragement.
    With room for once to reach something like their full stature, the ponies on the lower level had grown up into thin trees, arching overhead. Complain slipped to the brink of the drop, peering down through the tall ponics. An animal moved down there, rooting contentedly; he could see no litter, although the squealing had sounded like the cries of small creatures.
    As he worked cautiously down the slope, also overwhelmed with the ubiquitous tangle, he felt a momentary pang for the life he was about to take. A pig’s life! He squashed the pang at once; the Teaching did not approve of ‘softness’.
    There were three piglets beside the sow. Two were black and one brown: shaggy, long-legged creatures like wolves, with prehensile noses and scoop jaws. The sow obligingly turned a broadflank for the readying arrow. She raised herhead suspiciously and probed with her little eye through the poles round her.
    ‘Roy! Roy! Help –’
    The cry came piercingly from above: Gwenny’s voice, raised to the striking pitch of fear.
    The pig family took fright instantly, breaking through the stalks at speed, the young determinedly keeping up their mother’s pace. Their noise did not quite cover the sounds of a scuffle above the hunter’s head.
    Complain did not hesitate. At the startlement of Gwenny’s first cry, he had dropped his arrow. Without attempting to pick it up, he whipped the bow over his shoulder, pulled out his dazer and dashed back up the slope of Sternstairs. But a stretch of uphill tangle is not good running ground. When he got to the top, Gwenny was gone.
    A crashing sounded to his left and he ran that way. He ran doubled up, making himself as small a target as possible, and was rewarded by the sight of two bearded men bearing Gwenny off. She was not struggling; they must have knocked her unconscious.
    It was the third man Complain did not see who nearly settled him. This man had dropped behind his two companions, stepping back into the stalks to cover their retreat. Now he set an arrow whipping back along the corridor. It twanged past Complain’s ear. He dropped instantly, avoiding a second arrow, and grovelled quickly back along the trail. Being dead helped nobody.
    Silence now, the usual crumbling noise of insane plant growth. Being
alive
helped nobody either. The facts hit him one by one and then altogether. He had lost the pigs; he had lost Gwenny; he would have to face the council and explain why they were now a woman short. Shock for a moment obscured the salient fact: he had lost Gwenny. Complain did not love her, often he hated her; but she was his, necessary.
    Comfortingly, anger oiled up in his mind, drowning theother emotions. Anger! This was the salve the Teaching taught. Wrenching up handfuls of root-bound soil, he pelted them from him, distorting his face, working up the anger, creaming it up like batter in a bowl. Mad, mad, mad . . . he flung himself flat, beating the ground, cursing and writhing. But always quietly.
    At last the fit worked itself off, and he was left empty. For a long time he just sat there, head in hand, his brain washed as bare as tidal mud. Now there was nothing for it but to get up and go back to Quarters. He had to report. In his head his weary thoughts ran.
    I could sit here forever. The breeze so slight, never changing its temperature, the light only seldom dark. The ponics rearing up and failing, decaying round me. I should come to