Summary

The narrator says the second wave of predators were more “cunning” than the first because they understood not only how to use force but how to exploit existing tensions between the rulers and the ruled. During this time the community remained blind to the fact that “things were being done not in our way, that they were things being done against us, against our way” (53-4) even by members of their own community. For example, some men began using women the way they had seen destroyers using them.

Abdallah, a man who had become a follower of the predators, took that name in keeping with “the predators’ fashion, Abdallah, a name he said signified he was a slave--slave of a slave-owning god” (56). While the rest of the community recoiled at such a ridiculous name, Abdallah worked to convert a lonely, isolated man named...