The valley of Irnan was a desolation in what should have been the fullness of approaching harvest. Besieging armies had ruined and devoured, trampled and destroyed. Not one blade of grass remained. The fields were dust, the orchards long vanished into the smoke of campfires. Only the city remained outwardly unchanged, gray and old upon its height, the walls battered by siege engines but still unbreached. Above the gate the mythic beast still reared its time-worn head, jaws open to bite the world.
Inside the walls the people of Irnan were starving. Each day voices grew more insistent, calling for surrender. Jerann and his council of elders knew that they could not hold out much longer against those voices. People died. There was no more room to bury them within the walls. There was no more wood wherewith to burn them. The bodies were thrown over the walls now for the carrion birds, and Jerann was afraid of pestilence.
On a dark still morning, between the setting of the Three Ladies and the rising of Old Sun, a wind came out of the east. It struck the encampments of the besiegers with sudden violence, scattering the bivouac fires, tearing down tents. Flames sprang up. A herd of cattle stampeded through the outlying rabble of Farers. Dust whirled in choking clouds.
Behind their stone walls the people of Irnan watched and wondered. It was a strange wind, and there was no other sign of storm under the clear stars.
For three hours the wind screamed and battered, striking now here, now there. At times it subsided entirely, as though it rested and gathered strength to strike again. When Old Sun rose, the encampments were a shambles of wrecked tents, of clothing and equipment tossed about and trampled. Men coughed and shielded their eyes from the dust. And then those in the farthest lines, looking toward the sunrise, cried out and reached for the war-horns.
A legion was there, poised and ready. They saw the leather-clad troops with their heavy spears, and the banner of Tregad leading them. They saw a company of villagers armed with bills and reaping hooks. They saw hooded men in cloaks of dusty purple, red and brown, green and white and yellow, with their lances and their many-colored pennants, and their strange long-legged beasts. They saw, off to one side, an assembly of small dark winged folk all glittering with glints of gold, their wings outstretched. All about them, standing guard, were ranks of unhuman shapes striped in green and gold and armed with tall four-handed swords.
The hollow-eyed watchers on the wall saw all this, too, though they did not at first believe it.
The small folk folded their wings, and a sound they had made, as of chanting, stopped.
The wind fell. The dust cleared. War-horns sounded, deep and snarling.
The legion charged.
The Farers, always disorganized, ran away. The mercenaries, taken as they were by surprise, were not so easily overrun. Horns and shrill-voiced pipes mustered them. Officers shouted them into line. They caught up what weapons they could find and ran through the rubbish of their encampments to meet the attackers.
Foremost among the mercenaries was a company of Izvandians, tall lint-haired warriors from the Inner Barrens with the faces of wolves. They had been quartered at Irnan at the time of the revolt, in the service of the Wandsmen, and their leader was the same Kazimni who had taken Stark and his party north.
Kazimni recognized the two who rode at the forefront of the Tregadians, beside the fierce old man who captained them, and he laughed. The man, what was his name, something short and aggressive . . . Halk. Halk was shouting the war cry that had been born that day at Irnan.
"Yarrod! Yarrod! Yarrod!"
The watchers on the city walls heard it. They too recognized the big man with the long sword. They knew the woman who rode by him armed for battle, her hair falling loose from under her cap, the color of bronze new from the forges.
"Gerrith! The wise woman has returned! Gerrith and Halk!"
Jerann, not alone, wondered about the Dark Man.
Men and women took up that war cry. Irnan became, in a matter of moments, a city of the hopeful instead of the doomed. "Yarrod! Yarrod!" they cried, and the mustering horns began to call.
The two forces joined battle.
The first charge bore the mercenaries back and scattered them. But they greatly outnumbered their attackers; and they were tough, seasoned fighting men. They rallied. A force of them drove against the left of the Tregadian line, to put a wedge between it and the tribesmen. The Fallarin, idling in reserve, shot a whirlwind against them, and in its wake the century of Tarf loosed a storm of arrows and followed that with swinging steel. The mercenaries were thrown back.
They formed again. This time they went against the Tregadians, feeling that the alien troops would desert the battle if they were beaten. The men from Tregad reeled and gave back. Old Delvor roared at them, cursing them in a voice like a trumpet. They fought furiously, but still they were borne back by superior numbers.
Sabak rallied the tribesmen and came down at a run on the Izvandian flank. The Izvandians wheeled to meet them, forming a square bristling with lancepoints, archers in the rear ranks firing steadily. The charge of the Hooded Men faltered in a tumbling of men and mounts like a wave shattered on a sudden reef.
For the first time in months, the gates of Irnan opened and every man and woman who could still bear arms issued out to fall upon the mercenaries' rear.
To the south and east, a ragged multitude had come swarming out of the passes from the direction of Ged Darod. Old Sun knew how many thousand had left the temple city to pour across the mountains. Probably no more than half of those had finished the journey, driven by an all-consuming fever of holiness to accomplish the downfall of Irnan and the traitors who had come to her assistance. The Wandsmen who were scattered throughout the mass judged that twenty thousand would hardly tell their sum.
When Stark saw them from the air, they looked like one of the moving carpets one sees when an ant colony is on the move. Disorganized, untrained, slatternly, they were still a formidable weight of flesh to be dumped on the wrong side of the balance.
He nodded to the blue man and spoke into the microphone, to the pilots of the three hoppers flying with him.
"Let's build them a fence."
Out of the naked sky, four shapes came rushing toward the mob of Farers. Swift as dragonflies, they roared back and forth across the astounded and terrified front of the mob, striking the ground with lightnings that blinded the eye and deafened the ear, and each crack shattered rocks and trees and made the ground smoke.
A god's voice spoke from the leading shape.
"Turn back! Turn back or you will all die!"
The flying shapes began to quarter across the depth and width of the mob. God-voices spoke from all of them in huge tones. "Turn back. Turn back." At the edges of the mob the ground was tortured by more lightnings.
A frenzy of cries went up. Farers knelt and lay on the ground. They milled and swirled. Even the Wandsmen did not know what to say to them in the face of this stunning power.
The flying things drew off and hung motionless in the sky, in a line across the Farer front, where the smoke and dust still rose. They waited for a time. Then they began to move slowly forward, and the licking tongues of fire cracked over the heads of the mob.
"Turn back!"
The Farers turned and streamed away in panic toward the mountains, leaving behind scores of dead, trampled underfoot.
The hoppers flew on to Irnan, where the battle swayed back and forth in dust and blood and weariness.
They flew in formation, a diamond pattern with Stark's craft at the leading point. They flew slowly and not very high because there was no weapon on the ground that could harm them. They flew over the knots and clots and ranks of struggling men, and faces turned upward to stare at them, petrified. Stark could pick out the colored cloaks of the tribesmen and the distinctive dress of some of the mercenary bands, but most of them were clad in indistinguishable leather, and in any case they were too closely engaged to pick out friend from foe.
"Anywhere you can, hit the ground," he said, "without hitting anything else. No good killing our own people."
The hoppers peeled off, each pilot pleasing himself. Laser bolts cracked and smoked around the broad perimeters of the battle, and in the open places where there were only the dead, beyond hurt. It was strange to watch how the fighting quieted and men stood still with their weapons half raised, looking upward. No one of them had ever seen a machine that flew in the air, nor any weapon that made lightning brighter than that of the sky god, and more deadly.
The four craft took up formation again, and Stark spoke into the pickup of the loud-hailer. His voice, magnified, echoing, tremendous, rang out across the field of battle.
"I am the Dark Man. I have come back from the Citadel and the prophecy of Irnan is fulfilled. You who fight against us, lay down your arms, or the lightning will strike you dead."
And he began to give orders, the hopper now darting swiftly here and there as he pointed. Orders to the captains of Irnan and Tregad and the leaders of the tribesmen to disengage and draw back.
This they did, leaving the enemy isolated.
Once more in formation, the hoppers quartered the field and voices said, "Lay down your arms or die."
On the ground Kazimni shrugged and said to his Izvandians: "We were paid to fight men, and we have done that." He sheathed his sword and tossed away his spear.
All over the field men were doing the same.
To the three pilots Stark said, "Bring them together and hold them. If any try to break out, stop them." He turned to the blue man. "Set down there by those hooded riders. Then join the others."
The hopper settled down.
Tuchvar and the hounds scrambled out, Stark followed. The blue man had given him first aid, and his wound had been cared for by Arkeshti's surgeon, while he waited for the three hoppers to be rigged and serviced. Penkawr-Che had given him a tunic of foreign cut that showed the color of spilled blood in the sunlight.
With Tuchvar and the hounds behind him, Stark walked toward the tribesmen, and Sabak brought him one of the tall desert beasts. He mounted.
The troop formed into line: purple Hann, brown Marag, yellow Qard, green Thorn, white Thuran, red Kref.
Fallarin and trotting Tarf fell in in their accustomed place, but this time Alderyk remained with them, leaving Stark alone with his hounds at the head of the line. Ashton was with the Fallarin, where he had been throughout the battle; he, too, stayed.
They passed the ranks of the Tregadians, who were forming raggedly, and old Delvor shouted, "Let them go first, they've marched a long way for it!"
Halk and Gerrith left the standard of Tregad and rode beside Stark.
They rode toward the city, and the Irnanese in the field lifted weapons and cried out their names, hailing them.
Stark passed through the massive gate, beneath the dim heraldic beast. The tunnelway through the thickness of the wall was as he remembered it, dark and close. Beyond was the wide square with the gray stone buildings around it, and in the center was the platform where he had stood bound and awaiting death those months ago. Then he remembered the voice of the mob, remembered the spear that pierced Yarrod's heart, remembered Gerrith stripped of the Robe and Crown, standing naked in the sunlight. He remembered how the arrows had flighted from the windows around the square, a shining rain of death that struck down the Wandsman and signaled the beginning of the revolt.
Jerann and the elders, in threadbare gowns, their starveling faces overfilled with joy, stood waiting, and all about them crowds of tattered scarecrows wept and cheered.
So the Dark Man came back to Irnan.