Fire Time by Poul Anderson

Zera among them. They have outlived nations, and brought new ones to speedier birth and growth. Moreover, this time the humans had come, those aliens of whom you surely know rumors–
    ‘Yes, I have met humans, though not to talk with at any length. But another evening, Kusarat. You have asked about the dauri and me.
    ‘Legionary records showed that the Cruel Star would stand straight above Valennen. In the past, said those records, most Valenneners – belike our forebears didn’t call themselves Tassui – most had perished. Dim and broken word-things bespoke northerners who in still earlier ages, before any legions were founded, overran the Fiery Sea and parts of Beronnen. Their names are lost; their descendants are part of today’s civilization; but they themselves lived through Fire Time. They lived!
    ‘I thought: If the Gathering keeps its might, there can be no such invasion of it now; and most of my people will die. I cared for them still. What quarrels I had had among them I saw as lovers’ quarrels.
    ‘I thought: But the Gathering will at best be much weakened. If Valennen meanwhile is strengthened, united, knowingly led– Do you see? And before you say it, I will. Yes, of course I want to be he who shapes the whole next cycle. I want the humans to come to
me
while I live, not to Sehala, and deal with me in wonders. And when I am dead, I want my memory to stand, my skull enshrined for an oracle, till the next Fire Time after this, and beyond. That is no more than soldier’s pay for saving a folk.
    ‘Therefore I came home.
    ‘You have heard the rest: how I cleared new land at Ulu; how I built wealth and power through trade with the Gathering, and reaving of those places from which the Gathering withdrew; how lesser families who saw worsening years ahead came to me, gave oath in return for land and leadership, learned from me how to fight with the head as well as the hands. They are the bone of my strength.
    ‘But the spirit in it–
    ‘Kusarat, I will say frankly, I have hunted out word about you, because you are an Overling of weight. Thus I know I can speak to you more openly than to some. You are no back-country huddler who gulps down every cackle of old wives’ gossip about the gods. When I say that our shortsighted, wrangling Tassui cannot be brought together by force alone, not to save their very lives – that only an Otherness can melt them into an ingot from which I may forge a sword – you will understand.
    ‘I sought my dauri again.
    ‘Long and long was that search. Yet they do make ever more treks to mortal realms, in ever greater numbers, as the Stormkindler draws nigh. Their Starklands dry out worse than our grounds do; and meanwhile, as the waxing heat kills off our kind of life, their kind – which can better take it – moves in, to nourish them. Thus in the end, it matters not how, I found me a daur. We spoke what littlewe could. Later I met more dauri and we spoke further.
    ‘I do not know if he I saved was among them, nor even if they had heard that tale. I tried to find out, and failed. What I did have was a slight command of their speech and knowledge of their ways, to show I had formerly been friendly with their sort. I worked hard to add to this.
    ‘For … in Fire Time, it is not only mortals who seek what allies they can get.
    ‘They are leery of us. And, frankly again, too much closeness might make my followers not leery enough of them. I needed a sigil, a Thing, which I could bear for a mark of their favor while they mainly kept away from the Tassui. But I could not make this clear; they are so utterly sundered from us. Or if they understood me, perhaps they did not know what would serve. After all, I myself was blind as to what there might be. A token of stone or bone was no use; I could have fashioned that myself.
    ‘The upshot was that they took me into their homeland.
    ‘You have heard that I went. You may have heard that I came back in mummy skin and bones