standard-bearer whose green flag the Sekrusu males followed. On his right sprang Tornak, a son of his, holding on high the Ulu emblem—pole-mounted, the great horned skull of an azar from North Beronnen. Behind them came their folk.
And elsewhere, Arnanak saw in eye-flashes, elsewhere were the other bands, a wave of warriors pouring down upon the soldiers of the Gathering. They overwhelmed the outer legionary squads without stopping, hewed them into the ground and plunged onward.
Trumpets and drums called the soldiers below into close formation. Arrows, javelins, slingstones flew. Arnanak saw a male of his smitten, stumble and fall, roll flopping downward while he screamed and his veins threw gobbets over the thirsty ground. “Forth, forth!” Arnanak bawled. “Get in among them! Swordwork, axwork! For your lives and your households’—when Fire Time comes!”
After the battle, all were weary and most had suffered wounds. Fain were they to lie down and strive at naught but willing the pain out of their minds. But toil remained. Those hurts must be dressed, stitched if need be; one could not long spend heedfulness on forcing them not to bleed, at the cost of urgent tasks. The throats of hopelessly maimed legionaries must be cut, and of comrades unable to do it for themselves. What foes had not died or escaped must be hobbled and hand-bound, to be led off for enslavement unless the Gathering paid a goodly ransom. And then, although a water hole was nearby, Arnanak said they would camp at the next, an hour’s march hence.
To angry shouts he replied; “These whom we fought today, who now lie slain, fought well. If we stay here, the carrion eaters will not dare come, and thus their spirits will be trapped that much longer. We can let them have quick release, can we not? Luck follows an honorable deed.”
He himself closed the eyes of Wolua.
So the host loaded themselves and their prisoners with what they had stripped from their adversaries, and with their own dead. The latter would not be brought home; that was too big a trek. But they wouldn’t greatly mind waiting a day or two in the anguish and bewilderment of flesh, if it would be boiled off them and eaten in Tarhanna. The final service to war-friends was as noble a liberation into the after-world as when one gave that feast to one’s family. And of course their bones would travel back, to be used for conjuring oracular dreams before getting final rest in the dolmens.
Arnanak did not, in truth, share this belief. While a soldier of the Gathering, he had been initiated into the mysteries of the Triad. They made more sense to him than the raunchy gods of his people. But he held his peace about that, led the sacrifices as became an Overling, and today did what he did because it would add to his name.
The Sun had almost followed the Rover below the hills—or the True Sun had almost followed the Invader— when they reached the spring they sought. Already it lay shrunken in a ring of dried and cracked mud. But lowgrowing buff-colored lia and scrubby red-leaved yan trees hung on, a meager oasis. Arnanak noticed blue shoots here and there, the early encroachments of Starkland life. Lore, handed down from ancestors who had outlived former Fire Times, said that plants of this kind could better get along then than plants of mortal sort; they became common, and drew beasts that could feed on them, which drew dauri. In this wise the parched, burnt, storm-lashed country also became haunted.
Afterward, when the Marauder had retreated, the blue plants did, too, and their animals—save for kinds like the phoenix, which always throve in South Valennen; and folk could again beget children with hope that these would grow up.
Arnanak ordered the prisoners tethered in the best grazing the oasis offered. There was no other food. Any dried meat or fruit that anybody had brought was long since eaten; and who had strength to search for game? Free to range, he and his warriors could get something into their guts from the sparser parts of the vale.
Night fell as they plucked and cropped. The years around Fire Time were doubly strange in that each night of advancing spring was (hereabouts) longer than the last—for the Red One so moved through heaven as to share it with the True Sun about midsummer.
Stars glittered forth, Ghost Bridge, doubly lit small rock of Narvu, above shadowed steeps and pinnacles. The air stayed hot, but a breath of breeze came like a well-wisher’s hand. At last the victors could take their ease. Arnanak heard sighs go through the dimly seen mass of them as body after body dropped and chins sank down onto arms laid across forelegs. He settled himself by a low fire. Tomak lay at his side, and three more sons. Kusarat of Sekrusu asked if he might join them. “Unless you would sleep,” he added politely.
“No, I would liefer rest awake for a little,” Arnanak said.
“And I. My thoughts are still a jumble. Did I drowse off straight-away, I’d have no hope of making a good dream for myself.”
“Vu? Do you have skill in the dream art? I knew that not.”
“No, I can’t bring any forth that are worth telling,” Kusarat admitted. “But I can make them pleasant… or useful.”
Arnanak nodded. “Thus is it for me.”
“And me,” said Tornak. He laughed. “Tonight I want dreams of beer and females—not in Tarhanna nor my father’s hall, but Port Rua when we take it—that should be something!—or even Sehala.”
“Be not over-eager,” Arnanak warned him. “Those conquests lie afar in time; and we may not live to make them.”
“The more reason to dream them,” said Tornak’s half brother Igini. Their father signed them both to silence. They were young, their manners not yet honed. The other two were older, sober married males, though since neither had passed his sixty-fourth year, Arnanak’s power continued over them too.
His desire was that Kusarat be shown respect. Seemingly the latter was just as anxious to please, for he asked, “Are these lads yours, Arnanak?” and upon getting a yea: “Then you must have the rest out widely, those who’ve gotten their growth. I hear you’ve sired very many, by more different females than most of us ever get at.”
Arnanak didn’t deny it. Besides several advantageous marriages and a row of concubines, no doubt he had made fruitful a fair number of wives he borrowed on his travels. Husbands were pleased to give him that hospitality, in the hope of strong children born into their houses. Above the fame and power he had won, there was himself, huge, soft-footed, eyes as vividly green in the black face as teeth were white, the worst of the wounds he had gotten in a gale-driven life all healed without a scar.
What he did say, gravely, was: “Aye, some are raiding at sea, some bear my messages across land. But most are at home doing their work, by my orders. I never forget how thin an edge we must live on till we’ve won new homes in better countries. Even a victory like today’s means less than the garnering of what food and goods we can.”
“Ng-ng-ng… you speak like a Gathering dweller,” Kusarat murmured.
“Which I have been. Since then I’ve dealt with them here in Valennen, watched them, listened to them, always trying to learn. Why do you suppose they wield power across the whole known world? Aye, they’ve more skills than us, their heartland is more wealthy and populous than ours, true, true. But mainly, I do believe, mainly they have this habit of thinking ahead.”
“You’d make us into their image?” Kusarat asked warily.
“As far as we can gain thereby, and are able,” Arnanak said.
Kusarat regarded him for a silent while, by the flicker of spitting, shadow-weaving flames, before he replied:
“And yet you deal with the dauri… who knows with what witchcraft?”
“That question is often shot at me,” Arnanak said. “The best answer I can give is the truth.”
Kusarat erected his ears and switched tail against flank. “I listen.”
“I first met them, kyai-ai, maybe two hundred years ago when I was a youth, hardly out of cubhood, and the world not troubled by the Torchbearer. Already then its brightness cast shadows by night, and we knew it was on the way back to us. But the young do not fear a distant tomorrow and the old have no reason to. We lived well in those days—do you remember?
“My parents dwelt in Evisakuk, where Mekusak was Overling. My father was a full freeholder and had given no oath. Their house lay in the woods on Mount Fang, without close neighbors. Nevertheless, my parents thought Mekusak must have sired me, an eventide when he chanced by and got shelter from them. For I grew to be like him in size and short temper and hating to scratch the soil. We kept a niggard plot where we raised a few herbs. Mainly
