oked up, thinking of the globes; he could see the sky in many
places through the tangle, but realized that it was probably a thick
green solid floor to a watcher from above. A god would have to come very
low to see anything moving beneath it.

The woman said bitterly, "For Orbs' sake, at least carry me in some
fashion that won't expose _quite_ so much of me to the thorns!" She
paused and added as an after-thought, "You mudhead!"

He hitched her around and held her curled to his chest, faintly
conscious of the smooth body, but concentrating on protecting her from
harm; he thought suddenly that he was treating her as if she'd been a
ruck woman, instead of one of the gentry, the loathed and feared
squirarchy. Was he putting too much importance on the physical
attractions that had made him take her?

Jerran was leading him now along a tunnel-like passage of twined, arched
shrubbery that made them stoop low. "It'd help if you walked, Lady," he
said.

"You may not have noticed it, miner, but I have on just one slipper, and
it doesn't have a heel." She scowled up at him. "And when I say one
slipper, I mean that's _all_."

"You look fine," he grinned. "No silk and satin looks as attractive as
your own pelt, my lady."

They traveled for upwards of half an hour, sometimes down forest lanes
that allowed free passage, other times through thickets that ripped
their flesh and slowed them to a swearing, sweating crawl. Always there
was a screen above them of natural growth, shielding them from the
buttoned sky.

At last before them there opened a huge amphitheater of the forest, a
hollow with gently sloping sides, covered by a gigantic roof of twined
willow wands and twigs. Jerran said, gesturing upward, "That's the
biggest piece of camouflage we ever did! The top of it is planted with
grass and scrub, rooted in square sods of earth cut from the woods'
floor in many places. From above it looks like a round hill rising out
of the trees. Took us a year to perfect it."

"Jerran, who is 'us' and--"

"Why, lad, the rebels."

Revel stared at the little man. Could Jerran, the straw-colored stringy
fellow he'd worked beside all these years, the quiet one who'd preached
serenity and dragged him out of a hundred brawls, could he be a rebel?
Fantastic....

The rebels were the anonymous elite of the ruck. They were the
malcontents of their society, men whose intellects could not swallow the
dreary bromides of the priests, who felt