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Twenty-five wagons came in single file, surrounded by stave-carrying priests who coughed and spat and tripped over stones in the mist. According to the lookouts there were about half a dozen people with each wagon and an escort of sixty priests sent by Pahid.

Up on the wagontops, drivers looked through clouds of rising dew and insects at pallid emptiness. Down in the mud, Clark fought an impulse to cry. A marsh bird yelled. The flock took off in a thunderous rush of clapping wings, roiling the grass and mud and water. Human beings emerged from the swamp. Their water-wrinkled bodies dripped black muck that released bubbles of marsh gas where it fell.

Clark climbed onto the road in front of the wagons. The first one stopped. There were cries of annoyance, then the second stopped. More cries, then the third and on.

"Get down!" Clark shouted in high Paffir. No one moved.

Stones rushed out of the fog and struck wheels and axles. The drivers jumped down, their boots clacking on the roadway. They crouched and stared.

A huge crowd surrounded them. The population of a city had risen from the mud. They were two crowds, stretching back from the point of contact into the mist.

"Go back the way you came. Run, otherwise you'll be killed," Clark warned them, speaking clearly.

"Hey, you're not letting them go, are you?" one of the Itscriyites called.

"Come on!" yelled another. About fifty people clambered up onto the roadway.

"Stop," Tiyar shouted from his hiding place. "Remember our plan."

"I almost froze off my balls, waiting in the mud," someone complained.

The priests were staring at the robbers, trying to follow the low Paffir conversation. One of them seemed to groan, or it might be the wind in the pass.

"Remember the weapon of discipline. You are not ruffians now. You are an army," Tiyar said.

Suddenly one of the priests jumped off the road into the swamp. A dozen Itscriyites chased and caught him and dragged him back. He stood in front of the wagons, blotting his tears with his sleeve. "I am killed by children," he said.

One of them kicked him. Seeing that no one else was running away, the man shouted, "Run for your lives! What are you waiting for? These are the rat-eaters, the dead from Itscriye!"

There was a quick exchange of whispers that sounded like the first fall of rain, then all of them, men and women, dove off the roadway. Horses ran headlong in different directions, fell and overturned the wagons. Priests thrashed like wounded birds in the grass, screaming at the tops of their voices.

Itscriyites ran after them with sticks and knives. They struck at random. Blades slashed the grasses, sometimes completing a swing and sometimes stopped. Blood spouted over the cattails. The Itscriyites killed everyone they could find.

It was over quickly, and silence fell with the suddenness of thunder after lightening, stilling them in the postures they had assumed at the decisive moment, Clark half-foundered in the swamp with his hands upraised looking at Fuego, who had crouched over someone to protect him. Tiyar had remained in his hiding place. He waited for the Itscriyites to come back, and then waited for them to sit down passively in a circle around him. Finally he said, "Soldiers do not kill merely to relieve childish anxieties."

They looked up at him, then down. Some tried to kiss his hands, but he recoiled. When they were all staring into the distance with bleak expressions, he commanded, "Bring every one of the dead to me." They rushed to obey him, pushing and quarreling to hide their remorse.

Fuego walked around the bodies, cursing in Eyimalian. "These people are out of their minds," he told Clark.

"I don't know," Clark said. He tried not to look at the bodies, all beyond his help in any case, but to concentrate on great disasters, destruction of planets and the loss of whole peoples, to keep these murders in perspective. Those gloomy thoughts only depressed him further. "Before, I didn't like the idea of killing those six Outlanders but maybe I was wrong. A small group may be killed, but a bigger group may be saved." He was talking too fast. "Nothing will happen without bloodshed. Maybe we need them."

"Not like this." He looked around at the people now dragging their burdens up to the road. "We must have known better."

One man lying with his throat cut, arms peacefully folded, attracted Clark's attention by the insignia on his cassock. "This is the one who warned them. Lir Temple priest." A satchel hung inside the dress. Clark undid the leather thong and scooped out a handful of medicine capsules. "Fuego! Fuego, look at this!" Beneath the capsules lay Holy Huey's map of Paffir Haretz. "Fuego!"

"I see it. Is there anything else in there?"

Clark dug in the bag. There was a Resheborian undershirt and a folded paper densely covered in script. "It must be Paffir. It's a message from--it's Paffir." He started to call Tiyar to translate, then thought better of it and went to Akiva. Listening, Tiyar drifted near.

"Beloved children," Akiva read. "You are in danger. I have taken an Akivite witch. These are her effects. She is educated, but ignorant of religion, not fluent in any language. She speaks high and low tongues, but haltingly. Otherworldly origins must be conjectured. The prisoner represents something powerful, new and treacherous. We dare not ignore the possibility that the Akivites may have conjured souls from some time before the Temple, nor that this woman is one. I hold her as best They allow me. My beloved, you may guess your peril. Pray unceasingly. Sing, for your lives and the lives to come. Once more I crave your attention to the beleagured parishes of Itscriye and Miyosardia. Give them your prayers for fair weather. The few who remain there are in a piteous condition, even in view of the underreverence for which their lot is meted. I rejoice at the prospect of embracing you again. Pahid."

Akiva returned the letter. "My children afraid, my brother--my brother so nearly right and so afraid. I will go."

Clark folded the parchment and put it in his belt. "We can get to the city in a few days, walking, and spring her. Ten people could do it, with our equipment." After saying this, he glanced at the dead. He would have gone much farther on much less evidence at that moment.

"Ten could do it, perhaps, but four hundred may expect to meet resistance," Tiyar objected. "Since her captor evidently plans to bring Paula to the Lir Temple, they must come through this pass and we can easily intercept them then." He leaned against a wagon, resting his chin on one arm.

Clark said, "I'm going. Does anyone else want to come?"

"No, you must not divide the group."

"Why not? You'll still be here when we get back."

"Why do you say that?"

"Because none of the new people are trained," Clark told him impatiently. "You've got to make sure this doesn't--" He looked around. Birds were settling already. "It's safe for you to stay here. Even if people came after the robbers, you'd be bound to outnumber them by ten to one. Stay here and train."

Tiyar smiled.

"What are you talking about?" Fuego broke in, speaking Eyimalian. "Everyone who disobeyed orders this morning must be sent away, now."

"To where?" Tiyar asked. In low Paffir, meaning everyone around to hear, he said, "We need them."

Fuego took a deep breath. His face turned red. "All they can do is make you into a Ketry, a Viyato, or a Var. Take your choice. Don't forget it. If you use them to grab power, you isolate yourself from history. You'll all go down as a fluke of circumstance, a footnote."

"Don't be so nervous, old man. With these zealous friends and the others who will follow them, we can break the grip of the Ketries and the Vars and the Viyatos and release this planet from Eyimalian domination," Tiyar urged.

"What then? Nobody here can read except the priests. No one knows the planet's terrain except the Vars' Outlanders. Pahid's own letter tells you the Viyatos control the weather. Paffir Haretz has no cash crop but Love's Arrow. The planet has no law, just a religion adapted from Pravelany." Fuego sat down on the ground.

"You may go if you like," Tiyar told him.

He was speaking to Fuego, but Clark said, "All right," took the hormone detector from Tiyar and walked off down the line of wagons, away from the fishy scent of blood. The mist had lifted and the day would be clear. Clark breathed the tangy air with more pleasure than he had taken in anything for weeks. He remembered the story Akiva had told him of the delivery from a bewitched mother, the woman insisting that her child, teeth and claws already grown, would attack the family. That's us, he thought. We're so sure we can raise hell on this planet, when all we can really do is get ourselves killed.

Many still lived, though. Only thirty adults from their side had been killed in the long fight in the hollow, and the children remained safely hidden throughout. He calculated the percentage, eager to think of anything, concentrate on anything anywhere. Theirs was an enviable survival rate, better than most deep-space construction crews. "I wonder whether my family thinks I'm alive," he said in high Paffir.

Akiva came up beside him, holding Neshar to his chest. The boy's eyes were closed. "Where do you come from?" he asked.

Clark named his home planet.

"Is that near Eyimalia?"

"No. It's closer to Reshebora."

"What are these places? I thought they were islands, but Fuego looks at the sky..."

"You can't see Eyimalia from here," Clark said.

"Is it up...?" Akiva pointed.

Clark was tired of making a secret of his origins, evading questions and saying mysteriously, "It's a place," or, "Far away." Akiva had obviously caught on. "It's a world," he said. "Worlds float in the sky, like islands. Even Paffir Haretz is an island in the sky."

Now Klyne was behind them, carrying her baby on her left arm along with a blanket because her right, wounded in battle, remained weak. The two older boys trotted behind her. After them came Akiva's ten students and some women who had been friendly with Paula.

"Go back, everyone," Akiva told them. "Teach the new ones."

The students turned around and walked back. Some of the women went with them, others stayed. "We will go with you," Klyne said.

"The children are safer here."

"Not with the new ones," she answered. Clark felt himself flinch.

"There's more to eat here."

"I have food with me." She touched Akiva's elbow, face turned away as though finding something in darkness. "I will go with this one."

By twilight the group of three women, eight children, Clark and Akiva had come to the Middle Plains. The wheat there was cut, the exposed fields mantled with dust that shone faintly pink in the evening sun as though the fields had taken not only the peasants' lives but their blood as well. Shortly before dark, they left the main road to follow a dirt path to a village. The tax collectors had been there recently and worn a fresh rut with their haul.

"Too late, priest," an old man jeered.

"We're just travelling," Clark answered.

"You're off the road. Go back the way you came."

Klyne sat down. The other women followed suit. The children wandered off to gather sticks. When they started reappearing with armfuls of kindling wood, the man came out of his house to say reluctantly, "I can give you a light."

People watched from every house while they made oatmeal for supper. Akiva began singing a prayer. The old man came out again to say, "Keep quiet."

Later, after they had put up mats and laid the children to sleep under them, it began to drizzle. The mothers covered the blankets with grass. Again the old man emerged, still reluctant. "Kids can come inside," he growled. "And the women. Not you," he said to Akiva. "Priest."

"You just gave a third of your crop to the temple for nothing. It won't make you any braver to harry poor wanderers," Akiva said.

"I've sent more tax collectors scrambling over those hills than you've seen in your life, smart mouth."

"You have? What happened this year?"

The man sighed. "Pahid. The bullies from Lir Temple. They don't follow tradition. They want everything they can get." He started to go, then looked back. "We did send tax priests running once."

Akiva got up. "We, too, have set them running. You live alone as Fatayad since she died, don't you?"

He nodded. "Must be...don't know, ten years maybe. Gone fast."

"Yes. You get up in the morning and race to the field to weed and it seems it's just midday when the sky goes black. You mend and cook and spin a little and suddenly the day is back. Midsummer, replanting time and the nights should be short but they eat up the days and more. You lie on your mat and pray for daylight and everywhere a chink lets in the wind the drafts take voices, hers and her children's. And others? Yes, others. Fall comes, you've barely slept, then winter and you're alone with them. You wait for spring, but you know some day you must die and then they will have you."

"That's how it is," the man said.

"But if you were to enter the city of Ayekar this moment, would things be better?"

"Nope." The man looked at the ground, eyebrows up in surprise at his answer, then added, "I'd probably have to pay more taxes there, wouldn't I?"

"You see, you must build Ayekar here." Akiva tapped the man's chest. "People build temples and expect to find gods in them. But this earth is the temple of Ayekar and those who work its soil are her priests."

Suddenly the man knelt and kissed Akiva's foot. Big tears, bigger than raindrops, swelled on his lashes and fell. Akiva trembled slightly as the man holding his ankles shuddered. So that was how a heart melted. Clark took Akiva's hands, cold with sweat and shaking, and warmed them between his own. Then he led the two men into the house.

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CONTINUE.....................

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