The blue-green moon was huge, and close to the horizon.  The ghostly rings around her looked as if they touched the ground.

'It's as if you could walk there,' said Aykesh.

Iyeeye nodded, but didn't reply.  She was tired, her bag heavy with its load of tubers and seeds, the leather strap biting into her shoulder.  In the dry smell of the night, the taint of the Others was strong.  Were they here, gathering people in the same way as Aykesh and Iyeeye had been gathering plants?  It might not be safe to talk.  But Iyeeye hadn't the energy to shush Aykesh either.

'Etineyu says you could walk to the Moon once, before the worlds parted.'

Iyeeye didn't think so, but refused to return to this old dispute.  The two women had gathered together since before Aykesh had married.  Iyeeye had been the child then, thin, tough, wiry; Aykesh the willowy, earth-sensitive woman, showing her the best places to dig, the right times to pick the seeds and the nuts, the fruiting-places in the damp gullies.  Aykesh had always wanted to talk about the Old Worlds, the magic, the legends.  Iyeeye had always doubted - the stories sounded obvious, childish, things that people like Aykesh wanted to believe rather than things that were actually true.

Now, with Aykesh swollen-bellied, almost ready to bear her first child, she and Iyeeye had less in common than ever.  Iyeeye knew the world needed more people to fight the Others, but, although she was almost fifteen and had been a woman two years, she had resisted marriage and the the offers of men; she wanted to know the world better before she chose a father for her children.  She wanted to hunt with the men, to track the taste and smell of meat across the dry plains by day, rather than grub at the ground in the cool of evening.  A woman could learn the Hunt Magic, in theory, but in practice the need to bear children made it difficult.  She had learned instead the Time Magic, which let her glimpse other worlds, worlds where high mountains towered above the plains, and strange beasts walked the lands.  Worlds of green fog, and worlds of emptiness.  Worlds without humans, and without Others.

'I'd like to find a world where there were people but no Others,' she said aloud.

That stopped Aykesh in mid-prattle.  'How could you do that?  It's impossible to go to time-worlds where there are people.  Everyone knows that.'