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20

It was warm in the woods, shadowed and warm and quiet. Branches were thick overhead, screening out Old Sun. The hollow was rimmed with flowering bushes and lined with golden moss. The tiny stream that ran through the hollow whispered and chuckled to itself, almost too softly to be heard. The smells were sweet and drowsy. Now and then a bird called somewhere, or some small creature rustled, or the brown shag-coated riding animals whuffled contentedly at their tethers. It was altogether a pleasant place to sit on an afternoon, after all the cold deserts and bitter winds and hard riding. Tuchvar had difficulty keeping his eyes open.

He had to. He was on watch.

Because he knew the way to Ged Darod and could handle the hounds, the Dark Man had chosen him as guide and companion. Him alone.

The hounds slept, thirteen great white sprawls on the moss. It saddened Tuchvar to see them so gaunt, and he tried to convince himself that they looked better than they had. They twitched and groaned and muttered in their sleep. He was aware of them as they dreamed; fleeting scraps of memory, of hunts and fights and mating and feeding and killing. The old hounds remembered mist and snow and the free-running of the pack.

The Dark Man slept, too, with Gerd's head resting on his thigh and Grith snoring by his other side. Tuchvar peeped at him sidelong, feeling like an intruder and afraid that at any moment those strange clear eyes would open and catch him at it. Even in sleep the man was powerful. Tuchvar felt that if he were to creep toward that muscled body, relaxed and sprawled like those of the hounds, no matter how quietly he went it would spring up all in a second before he could reach it, and those long-fingered hands would have him by the throat.

But they would not kill him until the brain behind the disconcerting eyes had considered and made that decision.

Control. That was the strength one felt in the Dark Man. Strength that went beyond the physical. Strength that the big tall man with the big long sword did not have, and perhaps that was why he disliked the Dark Man so much, because he knew that he lacked this strength himself, and envied it.

Stark's face fascinated Tuchvar. Had since he first saw it there at Yurunna. He thought it was beautiful in its own way. Subtly alien. Brooding, black-browed, with a structure that might have been hammered out of old iron. A warrior's face, scarred by old battles. A killer's face, but without cruelty, and when he smiled it was like sunlight breaking through clouds. Now, in the unguarded innocence of sleep, Tuchvar saw something there that he had never noticed before. It was sadness. In his dreams, it seemed, the Dark Man remembered lost things and mourned them, not unlike the hounds.

He wondered where, across the wide and starry universe, on what remote and unimagined worlds, Stark might have lost those things, and what they might have been.

He wondered if he himself would ever get beyond the narrow skies of Skaith.

Not if the Wandsmen had their way.

It made him hurt inside to think that with one single word they could make those skies a prison for him, forever.

The Dark Man stirred, and Tuchvar became busy with the fastenings of his blue smock. He had put off the gray tunic of an apprentice Wandsman at Tregad. He had not chosen to wear it in the first place, and he had grown to hate it.

Being an orphan, he had come into the care of the Wandsmen; and Welnic, finding him more intelligent than most, had sent him to Ged Darod to be educated. That was a prideful thing, to be chosen, and even though he was made to study hard and learn the virtues of service and self-abnegation, the off-times in the lower city were a carnival, a fair that never ended.

Then they sent him north to Yurunna, and that was a different story. Cold and bleak, half-lifeless above the unpleasant oasis, the city had oppressed him with a sense of the unnatural. There was no laughter in those cheerless streets, no activity except the Yur, with their blank faces and empty eyes, going about their regimented business. One never saw their women or their young ones. No children played. No one ever sang, or shouted, or quarreled, or made music. There was nothing to do. The senior Wandsmen kept to themselves. The Houndmaster had been a harsh disciplinarian; Tuchvar had wept no tears for him, though he recognized the man's devotion to the hounds. He himself had become attached to the brutes for lack of anything better. Varik had not been much, as an only companion. He had elected with snuffling loyalty to remain with the Wandsman being held at Yurunna, rather than aid the forces of subversion. Tuchvar wondered how he was, and hoped that he was miserable.

It was Pedrallon and the Wandsmen's treatment of him that had made Tuchvar begin to question the system to which he was apprenticed.

His eyes were on the stars. He lived for the day when he could go to Skeg and actually see the ships and the men from other worlds. He was passionately on the side of the Irnanese, and he had worshipped Pedrallon, from his humble distance, for saying that the Irnanese were right and the Wandsmen wrong. And then Pedrallon had been silenced, punished, put to shame. He himself had been given a tongue-lashing by his mentor and soon after had found himself packed off to Yurunna.

He had begun to think, for the first time in his life. Really think, trying to separate the deed from the word and the word from the truth, getting hopelessly confused because here there was nothing one could put one's hand on, only uncertainties and perhapses. But he decided at the last that in any case he wanted the stars more than he wanted to be a Wandsman, and if the Wandsmen were going to forbid him the stars, he would fight them in any way he could.

Beyond the trees, shimmering in the midst of the plain, lay Ged Darod, golden roofs and thronging multitudes, with the great towers of the upper city reared like a benison over all. Memories swept across Tuchvar's mind in a crushing wave, memories of power, deep-seated and very old, as strong as the foundations of the world. His belly contracted with a pang of dismal certainty.

Surely not even the Dark Man could overcome that power.

He wanted to pound his fists against all frustration. Why were grown men so blind, so stupid, so stubborn, when the answers to everything were so clear and simple? He had stayed for hours in the state hall at Tregad, with its fine pillars and sturdy arches carved in patterns of vines and fruit, listening to the speeches and the arguments. Some were still concerned with the rightness or wrongness of what had been done, as though that mattered now. Some demanded that the city take the Dark Man and his companions prisoner and hand them over to the Wandsmen in the hope of buying forgiveness. These people had had to be forcibly silenced when the Dark Man and his people spoke, telling of the Citadel and Yurunna and urging help for Irnan as a means of freeing Tregad from the yoke of the Wandsmen.

And of course that was the thing to do. Tuchvar could not understand why there was any question about it, why they did not at once raise every man they could spare and march to Irnan. Yet still they talked and argued.

Some said they ought to shut themselves up behind their walls and wait to see what happened. Others wrangled about the starships—whether or not they were worth fighting for, whether or not some or all of the people should emigrate, whether or not both those questions were fruitless because in any case the Wandsmen would send the ships away. Men and women yelled and screamed at each other. Finally Delvor had risen, in his iron and worn leather, and fixed them his fierce glare.

"The stars are nothing to me one way or the other," he said. "Skaith was my mother, and I'm over old for fostering. But I tell you this: Whatever you want, life on another world or a better life right here, you will have to fight for it, and not with words or halfhearts, and you cannot fight alone. The first blow has been struck. Let us strike the second. Let us march to relieve Irnan. And let word be sent among all the city-states that the Citadel has fallen, that the Lords Protector are human and vulnerable men, that we fight for our own freedom, and if they want to get the bloody Farers off their backs, they had better damned well join us!"

Someone had yelled, "Tell 'em to try hanging up a few Wandsmen! It's tonic for the soul."

There had been a lot of cheering, and the majority of people in the hall, those who had had little to say, began to shout, "On to Irnan!" Then somebody shouted, "Yarrod! Yarrod!" like a battle cry, and so the decision was finally made in a bedlam of noise, and Tuchvar understood dimly that this had been the only possible decision all along and that the people had known it.

A little later he had asked the off-worlder with the kind eyes, the man called Ashton for whom Stark had a special look, why it had taken them so long.

"The city-states are democracies," Ashton said. "The curse of all democracies is that they talk too much. On the other hand, the Wandsmen haven't got to talk at all. They simply decree."

So now men were marching toward Irnan, and that had pleased the tall warrior Halk.

The wise woman, with her thick bronze braid of hair and her splendid body, had not seemed happy at all when she said good-bye to Stark. Tuchvar thought he had seen tears glint at the corners of her eyes when she turned away.

He could not know it, but the Dark Man was reliving, in his dreams, an earlier moment spent with Gerrith, the two of them quite alone.

"I have seen a knife, Stark."

"You saw one before, remember? And it was good."

"This is not good."

"Where is the knife? Who wields it?"

"I cannot see . . ."

And her lips came against his, and he tasted salt upon them, the salt of tears . . .

Stark woke, and was in the hollow with Tuchvar and the hounds, and Ged Darod out on the plain. He wondered if the knife waited for him somewhere in those streets. Then he shrugged the thought aside. Knives were no new thing to him. Nor was being wary.

While the boy took food from the saddlebags, Stark went through the trees to where the wood ended above a cliff and he could look out over the plain, green and lush, with Ged Darod in the middle of it like a dream. Golden roofs, roofs tiled and lacquered in scarlet and green and cobalt blue, flashed and glittered in the sunlight. The upper city was built on a slight rise, natural or artificial, and the massive buildings there, with their soaring towers, were of a pure whiteness unrelieved by any color. Roads crossed the plain from all directions, converging upon the city, and the roads were thronged with pilgrims, indistinct masses of tiny figures moving in a haze of dust He went back to the hollow and said to Tuchvar, "Tell me again where I will find Pedrallon."

"If he's still kept there . . ."

"I understand that. Tell me."

Tuchvar told him, while he ate and drank, and washed in the running stream, and the sunlight slanted lower. Then the boy watched while Stark opened a bundle and took out the things he had brought from Tregad. Tuchvar had a special interest because Stark had consulted with him on what habit might pass without notice among the mass of pilgrims.

A cloak to conceal somewhat his height and his manner of walking. A hood to cover his head, and a mask or veil, after the manner of the Hooded Men, to hide his face. Stark had considered borrowing a cloak from one of his troopers. He decided against it; any member of any one of the Seven Hearths of Kheb would be a matter of interest to the Wandsmen on sight, and the Farers who had seen the troop at Tregad would pose too much of a threat. So he had chosen a cloak of coarse gray homespun, with a deep hood of a different cut and a cloth of faded blue to wrap about his face. Tuchvar had seen pilgrims in every sort of garb; and some hid this, and some that, and some nothing; he thought Stark's choice of garments would not draw notice.

But when Stark turned to him and asked, "Will I pass," Tuchvar sighed and shook his head.

"You are too much you," he said. "Let your shoulders hang, and don't look at anyone straight . . . you have not a pilgrim's eyes."

Stark smiled. He spoke to the hounds, ordering them to stay with the boy and wait for his return. The young hounds were not concerned. The five whined, Gerd and Grith protesting. In the end they obeyed, though not happily.

Guard Tuchvar, Stark said, until I come. He went away between the trees, in the deepening dusk.

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Framed