Read Online The Fourth Circle by Zoran Zivkovic, Mary Popović - Free Book Online Page B

in the unintelligible language of the wraiths. He woke only after the pack had left the lowlands, which were swarming with wingless, buzzing insects that unsuccessfully tried to push their long, poisonous stingers through the thick fur of the denizens of the mountains. But his awakening did not bring any explanation to the pack, eager for knowledge: the cub, no longer marked, remembered nothing, and the memory of the conversation with the apparitions never returned to him.
    The pack learned nothing from the next two marked cubs, either. Males also, they, too, could never remember the meetings on the shore, although in their sleep they occasionally spoke the gravelly, incomprehensible language of the wraiths. At such times the band over the fifth paw would again glimmer a little, but only briefly. Otherwise, the marks remained permanently darkened. When the previously marked traveled again to the Big Water, they were as invisible to the crackling, intangible forms as any other member of the pack. Only once could the mark function as a link.
    The fourth cub to bear the mark was a female. From her, the pack gained their first, albeit limited knowledge of the presences. She, too, had fallen limply on the sand after the glimmering forms around her evanesced into the nonexistence from which they came, but she regained consciousness soon after, while the pack was still on the shore, and retained a vivid memory of the encounter. On the journey back through the wet lowlands, under attack by swarms of wingless insects, the pack listened to her story. Very little could be understood—not so much because the young female still had only an elementary knowledge of her own species' language as because the many aspects of the strange wraith-world did not conform to anything in the language of the pack.
    Only after the passage of many more generations and a long succession of useless males and far fewer females whose stories, however scanty, could be added to each other and gradually built up, did a single story begin to emerge.
    This was a grand, marvelous story, an adumbration only, far stranger than all the legends preserved from ancient times and told in the mountain dwellings while the gloomy light of Lopur flowed from the sky, legends told to divert everybody's thoughts, if only for a short while, from the terrible hunger that always came with the fourth month.
This grand story was about a strange pack of four-limbed, one-headed creatures who lived on the Other Side (of the Big Water, presumably, since nothing else had another, unreachable side). These creatures did not hunt hamshees or communicate in any of the dialects of the Highlands, but they were still somehow related to the pack to the extent that they were constantly haunted by the need to establish a connection. This urge for connection was irresistible, for after each successful communication the alien kin would lose a member. The fate of these unfortunates was unknown, but worse than anything that could be imagined in the Highlands.
    This sacrifice had to be endured, however, in order to achieve the ultimate purpose: the total union of the two packs, in some place that was neither the shore of the Big Water, although it would begin there, nor the Other-Side world of the strange kindred, but some third region that had only three differently-colored moons in the sky, a region without water and without hamshees, as the Highlands were in the ages before the ur-pack, before even the stunted shrubs and mosses.
    And yet that repulsive, lifeless place possessed a single feature that made it very familiar to the pack—so familiar that its members, who never trusted anything alien, were neither anxious nor hesitant to undertake an uncertain union with such different cousins and the certain loss of the safe haven of their native world under the many colors of light that shone from its five moons. That feature was a circle, similar to the one the inhabitants of the Highlands formed