Halk leaned forward, his jaw thrust out, challenging. Stark had an idea that if he said run, the long blade would be for him.
Farer trash or not, the odds were staggering. He did not know what had happened in Tregad, though he could make a guess. Presumably, having slain their Wandsmen for whatever reason, the people of the city were committed to revolt. Presumably, when they saw a small force attacking the Farers, they would make a sally to support it. If they did not, or if they came too late, the results would be unpleasant.
Stark sighed and said, "Alderyk?"
The Fallarin had been staring at the mob, his aristocratic nose wrinkling with disgust.
"I think we must have a wind," he said, "to blow away the stink."
He rode back to his people. They began to move out, forming the familiar crescent—a much smaller one this time, and with no Runners ahead of it to drive against the enemy. Stark sent Tuchvar with Grith and half of the pack to stay by Gerrith and Ashton, both of whom were armed and ready. He himself rode back along the line, snapping orders.
The Farers began to be aware of the newcomers.
They were drawn from every race of the Fertile Belt, in all colors, sizes and shapes. They were of all ages, except young children and the very old. They were dressed, or not dressed, in every conceivable fashion, each according to his taste; rags, body-paint, flowing things, flapping things, no things. Some were shaven bald as eggs, others had hair to their knees. Some were adorned with flowers or plucked branches hung with fruit. Some affected tufts of leaves, or feathers or garlands of the potent love-weed. These were the blessed children of the Lords Protector, the weak to be succored, the homeless to be sheltered, the hungry to be fed. Happy children, blowing free with the winds of the world, living only for the day because the years of Old Sun were numbered and there was no time to waste on anything but love and joy.
Their other name was mob.
The ones in the outer fields saw Stark's troop first. They stopped their trampling and stared. The stopping and starting spread gradually inward toward the wall, until the whole motley crowd of them had fallen quiet.
They stared across a level space of turf at the company that had appeared so suddenly from among the low hills above Tregad. They saw the dark man on the dappled beast, the huge white hounds, Halk and the sun-haired woman and the off-world man, the winged Fallarin glinting with gold in the sunlight, the Tarf with their striped bellies and four-handed swords, the tribesmen in their leather cloaks, the villagers with crude weapons and faces full of hate.
They stared, startled and agape, until they realized how small a troop it was and who was leading it.
A single voice, a woman's voice, cried out, "The Dark Man and the whore of Irnan!"
Mob shout, mob yell.
"The Dark Man and the whore!"
A woman, slim and naked, with body-paint laid on in whorls of pink and silver, pushed her way from the crowd and leaped onto a farm wagon abandoned in the fields. She was graceful and young and her hair was like a dark cloud around her head.
Stark knew her. "Baya."
So did Halk. "I told you then to kill her, Dark Man. Did I not?"
Baya shouted to the mob. "I was at Irnan! I saw the arrows fly. I saw the Wandsmen butchered. I saw the Farers slain . . . because of them!"
She flung out her arm toward Stark and Gerrith, her body bent like a bow.
"The star-spawn and the red-haired bitch whose mother made the prophecy!"
The mob gave tongue, a strange wild high-pitched scream.
Gerrith said, "That is the girl you brought from Skeg?"
"It is." Baya had made the first contact there with Stark, leading him to Gelmar and a deadly trap beside the milky sea. She had led the search for him after he escaped, when Yarrod and his group from Irnan hid him among the ruins beyond the river. Stark remembered how he had broken up a particularly nasty business involving two of Baya's Farer companions, high on love-weed, and had then been faced with the choice of killing the girl to keep her mouth shut or bringing her along on the journey to Irnan. He had chosen to do the latter. Mordach, Chief Wandsman of Irnan, freed her when he took Stark and Yarrod's people prisoner. Stark had not seen her again. He had wondered if she survived the slaughter in the city. Now he knew.
"These are the ones we came to take!" she was crying. "Let the traitors of Tregad rot behind their walls, we don't need them. Kill the Dark Man! Kill the whore! Kill! Kill! Kill!"
She leapt from the wagon and began to run across the turf, naked and lithe and light, hair flying behind her. Her name meant Graceful, and she was. Gerd snarled and lifted his hackles, his head against Stark's knee.
N'Chaka. Kill?
The blood-cry of the mob shook the heart. The Farers began to move, not as one man, but in groups, patches, swirls, until the whole of the mass was in motion. They were armed only with such things as stones and sticks and knives, an assortment of weapons as haphazard as themselves. But they were a good four thousand strong. They were not afraid.
The Fallarin had formed their crescent. They began to chant.
The tribesmen had swung into a V formation, with Stark and Halk at the apex and the villagers between the wings.
"Archers," said Stark. "And keep together. Head straight for the gate. Above all, don't stop."
Arrows were nocked to strings. The mob streamed toward them, a flapping bobbing grotesque multitude with that single slender form fleeting ahead.
The first sharp gust of wind knocked Baya from her feet. Her pink-and-silver body rolled on the green turf. The Fallarin moved forward, hunched in their saddles, dark wings beating, voices harsh and commanding. Magic or mind-force, the winds obeyed it. They whirled and beat, lashing hair and garments, pelting the Farers with leaves and twigs and heads of broken grain, chaff to sting and blind the eyes.
The mob mass faltered and began to stumble. The winds drove group against group, spreading confusion which fed upon itself.
Stark raised his arm, and a tribesman in Hann purple put a horn to his lips and blew a strident call.
Stark said to the hounds, Now kill!
He kicked his beast into a run, heard the troop move behind him. Gerd ran at his knee. The winds dropped as suddenly as they had begun. Bowstrings twanged. He saw Farers dropping, spinning away. The floundering mob was split before him and he crashed on into the opening.
Fallarin and Tarf closed up swiftly behind the wings of the V. The beasts began to stumble over bodies. Halk was shouting a battle-cry that Stark had heard once before, in the square at Irnan: "Yarrod! Yarrod! Yarrod!" Stark looked at the gates of Tregad, and they were still far away and they were still shut. The mass of Farers seemed to be clotting and compacting ahead, between him and the gate.
There were too many of them. Swords rose and fell with increasing desperation. The hounds could not kill enough, could not kill fast enough. From out the milling screaming horde stones came flying. Stones are cloddish weapons, without grace or beauty, but they function. Stark shouted, urging the men on, fighting off a horrible vision of the mob rolling in like water in the wake of the troop and submerging it by sheer weight of numbers.
Ponderously, with what seemed like dreamlike slowness, the gates of Tregad swung open.
Armed men poured out. A torrent of them. Hundreds of them. No sortie, but a full-scale attack. They fell upon the Farers with the ferocity of a long hatred, spilling blood into the fields as payment for the murdered grain.
Archers and slingers appeared upon the walls. A mounted troop rode out. Farers began to run. The solid mass broke. Bits of it shredded away, and the armed men moved through the chaos, smiting, until the shredding became a rout and the Farers were fleeing for the hills, leaving their dead in heaps amid the wreckage they had made.
A comparative quiet came over the field. Tregadians went among the wounded or leaned on their arms and stared at the strangers. Stark rallied his folk. Some had been hurt by flying stones, and one of the Tarf was dead. Three of the villagers were missing. He sent Sabak and some others to search for them.
Alderyk looked after the Farers, who were still being harried by the mounted troop and the more energetic foot. "The cold north has something to recommend it, after all," he said.
"You have the Runners."
"They don't pretend to be human," Alderyk said, "and we're not obliged to keep them fed."
The mounted troop turned and came back, having seen the Farers well on their way. An old man rode at the head of it, a fierce old man, all eyebrows and cheekbones and jut nose and thrusting chin. Locks of gray hair hung from under a round hard leather cap. His body-leather was worn and stained with use, and his sword was plain, with a broad blade and a sturdy grip, made for a day's work.
His black eyes probed at Stark, darted to Gerrith and Ashton, to the Fallarin and the Tarf, back to the hounds and Tuchvar. Those eyes were startlingly young and bright with angry excitement.
"You bring an interesting assortment of talents, Dark Man."
"Is that why you waited so long?" Stark asked. "To see what we could do?"
"I was impressed. Besides, it was my attack you were interfering with. I might ask you why you didn't wait until we were ready." He sheathed his sword. "I am Delvor, Warlord of Tregad." He bowed with a stiff courtliness to Alderyk and his Fallarin. "My lords, you are welcome in my city." In turn he greeted the others. "You find us at a moment of sudden event. Those ornaments on the wall are still warm."
He faced Stark abruptly and said, "Dark Man. I have heard one story and another story, all from Wandsmen and Farers. Now I want to hear the true one. Has the Citadel fallen?"
"It has. Ask Ashton, who was prisoned there. Ask the Northhounds, who were its guardians. Ask the Hooded Men, who heard of it through Gelmar himself, the Chief Wandsman of Skeg."
Delvor nodded slowly. "I was sure, even though the Wandsmen said no and the Farers said lie. But it is strange, then . . ."
"What is?"
"The Lords Protector. The mighty ones who dwelt at the Citadel. Where are they? Or were they only a myth?"
"They're no myth," Stark said. "They're old men, red Wandsmen moved up to the top of the ladder, where there's only room for seven. They wear white robes and do the ultimate thinking, remote and cool and unhurried by the urgencies of the moment. They make the policies that run your world, but they're making them at Ged Darod now, instead of at the Citadel."
"At Ged Darod," Delvor said. "The Lords Protector, undying and unchanging . . . Seven old men, turned out of their beds and their immortality, running for shelter at Ged Darod. Is this what you're telling me?"
"Yes."
"And yet there is no word of it? No beating of the breast, no crying of woe among the faithful? Those several thousand vermin didn't know it."
"They'll have to know in time," Stark said. "The Wandsmen can't keep it secret forever."
"No," said Halk. "But they haven't got to tell the truth, either." He looked almost himself again, holding the bloody sword, his face streaked with the sweat of battle. He laughed at Stark. "These Lords Protector are going to be harder to destroy than you thought, Dark Man."
"Come," said Delvor, "I forget my manners."
They rode toward the gate, and the soldiers of Tregad raised a ragged cheer.
Stark squinted up at the Wandsmen dangling on the wall. "The red one wouldn't be Gelmar, I suppose?"
"No, that was our Chief Wandsman. One Welnic. Not a bad sort until he bethought him of his duty."
"What happened here?"
Delvor bent his black gaze upon the Farer dead sprawled amid crushed grain. "They came swarming out of the hills this morning. We're used to Farers, the gods know, but they run in small packs normally, drifting in and out. These were in their thousands, and for a purpose. We didn't like the look of them. We shut the gates. One of those—" He pointed to a green Wandsmen swinging gently in the breeze, "a one-eyed man, slightly mad, I think, was leading them. He raged at us, and Welnic insisted that he be let in to talk. So we let him through the postern, with the mob howling outside. They'd been sent from Ged Darod. It was thought that you were coming here to try and raise troops for Irnan, and they meant to trap you here in my city. I might not have minded that so much, since no decision had been made . . ."
"You were still waiting," Halk said, "for word from the north."
"Prophecies are all very well," said Delvor coldly, "but one does not go to war on the strength of a simple statement that thus or such will happen."
"We did."
"It was your prophecy. We preferred to wait." He gestured impatiently and got back to the subject. "The Farers had been brought to take over our city, to make sure that you got no help from us. The people of Tregad were to be used as hostages. They felt that you would hesitate to use your several weapons against us, and so you could be more easily disarmed and taken. We refused to have our people so endangered. That madman, that one-eyed swine, told us that if some of them had to die, it was in a good cause, and he bade us open the gate to his mob, which was already screaming threats and damaging our fields. We became even more angry when Welnic told us we would have to obey. When we did not, the Wandsmen tried to open the gates themselves. You see where they ended."
His restless gaze stabbed at them. "They pushed us too far, you see. We might never have gone over. We might have sat debating and havering until Old Sun fell out of the sky. But they pushed us too far."
"So they did at Irnan," said Stark.
As they came under the wall, he was able to distinguish the individual features of the Wandsmen. Distorted and discolored as it was, there was no mistaking one of those faces, with the livid scar marring all of one side from brow to chin.
"Vasth," he said.
Halk, recognizing his handiwork, said harshly, "He will trouble decent men no more. You've done well here, Delvor."
"I hope so. There are many who will not agree."
"One thing puzzles me. Were there no mercenaries quartered on you, as there were at Irnan?"
"Only a token force. The rest had been sent as reinforcements to the siege. The Wandsmen were desperately anxious that Irnan should fall. I keep my men well trained to arms. We were able to deal with the mercenaries."
They passed in through the long tunnel of the gateway, into the square beyond, a cobbled space surrounded by walls of honey-colored stone. People straggled about, looking dazed by the swift turn of things, talking in low voices. They fell silent as the cavalcade came in and turned to stare. At the Dark Man and the whore of Irnan, Stark thought, wondering if Baya had escaped a second time.
Trail-worn and tired, they dismounted from their lean and footsore beasts; the tall desert beasts so out of place here. The tribesmen shook the dust from their cloaks and stood proudly, their veiled faces giving an impression of remote impassivity beneath their hoods, fierce eyes fixed resolutely on nothing, refusing to be awed by crowds or buildings.
The Fallarin, dainty as winged cats, stepped lightly down. The hundred Tarf, in quiet ranks, blinked in mild unconcern at the townsfolk.
"I wonder," said Ashton, "that Gelmar didn't come himself to Tregad."
"Probably," Stark said, "he has something more important to attend to." His face hardened, "We all know that as soon as word of this day's work gets back to Ged Darod, Gelmar will be on his way to Skeg to shut down the starport."