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not away from them now. He wonders what he would have done if he had known that, before he twisted the sheet. Is there no escape? He cannot leave the tent. Where can he go?
    He goes into his memories; he goes into the past. He remembers the beauty of Lémabantunk, but it is only a pain to him, for he has lost that beauty and caused his family to lose it. He remembers the day he met Gallicina in the market, a day forever scented with cinnamon, but that, too, brings him no joy, for he must perforce remember also their terrible parting.

    He remembers his mother, dead of fever. It is a comfort to remember Frella, for she died of fever before anything else happened, before she could know what a shameful son he was, before he had disgraced the family. When she died, he had not yet met Gallicina. When she died, he sometimes came home drunk with wine, but as yet it seemed nothing more than the foolishness of youth. She died loving her youngest child, believing him worthy of that love. How glad he is that she never realized she was wrong!
    Delighted to have found solace, he wraps himself in his earliest memory of his mother; indeed, it is his earliest memory of anything. They are in the garden, at home. The air is rich with thyme and jasmine, and the soil is luxuriously warm under his bare feet; he delights in curling his toes into the earth, like little worms. Lizards run across his feet, tickling him, and he laughs, and laughs also at the butterflies, who are his friends. He has been toddling after Frella as she weeds and tends the vegetables; she has just picked some tender baby peas for him to eat, and now she is explaining to him why she must bless the peas before she pops them into his mouth.
    â€œThey might contain the spirits of the dead, Darroti.”
    He peers in wonder at the peas, pale and shining, which look only like peas to him, precious green pearls. He knows they will taste wonderful when he eats them; he can taste them already. “How could they?”
    â€œAnything could.”
    â€œAnything at all?”
    â€œYes. That is why we lead lives of blessing.”
    â€œBut how do you know if the peas have dead people in them?”
    â€œWe cannot know; no one knows for sure. Once, very long ago, the spirits of the dead could speak to us to let us know exactly where they were, but that is no longer true.”
    â€œWhy not, Mama?”
    And so she sits herself cross-legged in the dirt, pulls him onto her lap, and tells him the Tale of the Great Breaking, as the sun shines down on them and the butterflies frolic above the blossoms. “Once, at the beginning of time, there were four worlds. One was all earth, one all water, one all wind, and one all flame, and they were the only things in the cosmos, so far apart that none of them knew of any of the other three.”
    Darroti frowns. “But fire needs air.” Even as a baby, he knows this. “To put the fire out, you put things on it to keep the air away. How could there be fire without air?”
    Frella laughs and kisses him. “How smart you are, Darroti! You will hear the answer, if you listen. For indeed these worlds did not work like ours: for the Judges of each world decreed that everything on that world should be
all alike, and that nothing should ever change, and the elemental creatures thought themselves content. But on each world one creature grew restless and desired change, desired to meet entities unlike itself. And the Judge of each world accounted this terrible rebellion, an infection that would make all the elemental spirits unhappy, and so the four were sent into exile.
    â€œEach Element wandered for a long time through the Void, weeping in great loneliness, but finally all four of them met, and they rejoiced, for they had found what they were seeking in the very punishment imposed on them for having sought it. And then they stopped cursing their Judges and blessed the Judges’ wisdom instead, and they formed a