The nemet reacted with amazing agility, swung one man into the path of the ax, kneed the other, snatched a dagger and applied it with the blinding speed he could use with the ypan.The men clutched spurting wounds and went down howling and writhing.

“Archers!” Renols bellowed. There was a great clear space about the area. Kurt and Kta stood back to back, men crowding each other to get out of the way. Renols was closest.

Kurt charged him, ax swinging. Renols went down with his side open, rolling in the dust. Other men scrambled out of the way as he kept swinging. Kta stayed with him. Their area changed. People fled from them screaming.

“Shoot them!” someone else shrieked.

Then all chaos broke loose, a hoarse cry from the rear of the crowd. Some of the Tamurlin turned screaming in panic, their cries swiftly drowned in the sounds of battle in the center of the crowd.

Kta jerked at Kurt’s arm and pointed—both of them for the moment stunned by the appearance of nemet among the Tamurlin, the flash of bright-edged swords in the sunlight. No Tamurlin offered them fight anymore: the humans were trying more to escape than to fight, and soon there were only nemet around them. The humans had vanished into the brush.

Now with Kurt behind him, Kta stood in the clear, with dagger in hand and the dead at his feet, and the nemet band raised a cheer.

“Lord Kta!” they cried over and over. “Lord Kta!” And they came to him, bloody swords in hand, and knelt down in the dust before their almost-naked and much-battered lord. Kta held out his hand to them, dropping the blade, and turned palm upward to heaven, to the cleansing light of the sun.

“ Ei,my friends,” he said, “my friends, well done.”

Val t’Ran, the officer next in command after Bel t’Osanef, rose from his knees and looked as if he would gladly have embraced Kta, if such impulses belonged to nemet. Tears shone in his eyes. “I thank heaven we were in time, Kta-ifhan, and I would have reckoned we could not be.”

“It was you who killed the humans outside the camp, was it not?”

“Aye, my lord, and we feared they had spoiled our ambush. We thought we might have been discovered by that. We were very careful stalking the camp, after that.”

“It was well done,” said Kta again, with great feeling, and held out his hand to the boy Pan, who had come with the rescuers. “Pan, it was you who brought them?”

“Yes, sir,” said the youth. “I had to run, sir, I had to. I hated to leave you. Tas and I—we thought we could do more by getting to the ship—but he died of his wound on the way.”

Kta swallowed heavily. “I am sorry, Pan. May the Guardians of your house receive him kindly.—Let us go. Let us be out of this foul place.”

Kurt saw them prepare to move out, looked down at what weight was clenched in his numb hand, saw the ax and his arm bloodstained to the shoulder. He let it fall, suddenly shaking in every limb. He stumbled aside from all of them, bent over in the lee of a hut and was sick for some few minutes until everything had emptied out of his belly—drugs, Tamurlin food. But the sights that stayed in his mind were something over which he had no such power. He took dust and rubbed at the blood until his skin stung with the sandy dirt and the spots were gone. In a deserted hut he found a gourd of water and drank and washed his face. The place stank of leaf. He stumbled out again into the sunlight.

“Lord Kurt,” said one of the seamen, astonished to find him. “Kta-ifhan is frantic. Come. Hurry. Come, please.”

The nemet looked strange to him, alien, the language jarring on his ears. Human dead lay around. The nemet were leaving. He felt no urge to go among them.

“Sir.”

Fire roared near him; a wave of heat brought him to alertness. They were setting fire to the village. He stared about him like a man waking from a dream.

He had pulled a trigger, pressed a button and killed, remotely, instantly. He had helped to fire a world, though his post was noncombat. They had been minute, statistical targets.

Renols’ astonished look hung before him. It had been Mim’s.

He lay in the dust, with its taste in his mouth and his lips cut and his cheek bruised. He did not remember falling. Gentle alien hands lifted him, turned him, smoothed his face.

“He is fevered,” Pan’s clear voice said out of the blaze of the sun. “The burns, sir—the sun, the long walk—”

“Help him,” said Kta’s voice. “Carry him if you must. We must get clear of this place. There are other tribes.”

The journey was a haze of brown and green, of sometime drafts of skin-stale water. At times he walked, hardly knowing anything but to follow the man in front of him. Toward the last, as their way began to descend to the sea and the day cooled, he began to take note of his surroundings again. Losing the contents of his stomach a second time, beside the trail, made him weak, but he was free of the nausea and his head was clearer afterwards. He drank telise,the kindly seaman who offered it bidding him keep the flask; it only occurred to him later that using something a sick human had used would be repugnant to the man. It did not matter; he was touched that the man had given it up for his sake.

He shook off their offered help thereafter. He had his legs again, though they shook under him, and he was self-possessed enough to remember his ship and the equipment they had abandoned; he had been too dazed and the nemet, the nemet with their distrust of machines, had abandoned everything.

“We have to go back,” he told Kta, trying to reason with him.

“No,” said the nemet. “No. No more lives of my men. We are already racing the chance that other tribes may be alerted by now.”

It was the end of the matter.

And toward evening, with the coast before them and Tavilying off-shore, most welcome of sights—there came a seaman racing up across the sand, stumbling and hard-breathing.

He saw Kta and his eyes widened, and he sketched a staggering bow before his lord and gasped out his message.

“Methi’s ship,” he said, “upcoast. Lookout saw them from the point there. They are searching every inlet on this shore—almost—almost we would have had to pull away—but without enough rowers. Thank heaven you made it, sir.”

“Let us hurry,” said Kta, and they began to plunge down the sandy slope to the beach itself.

“My lord,” hissed the seaman. “I think the ship is Edrif.The sail is green.”

“ Edrif.” Kta gazed toward the point with fury in every line of him. “Yeknis take them!—Kurt, t’Tefur’s Edrif,do you hear?”

“I hear,” Kurt echoed. The longing for revenge churned inside him, when a few moments before he would never have looked to fight again. He shivered in the cold sea wind, wrapped his borrowed ctanabout him and followed Kta downslope as fast as his trembling legs would take him.

“We have not crew enough to take him now,” Kta muttered beneath his breath. “Would that I did! We would send that son of Yr’s abominations down to Kalyt’s green halls—amusement for Kalyt’s scaly daughters. Light of heaven! If I had the whole of us this moment,—”

He did not, and fell silent with a grimness that had the pain of tears behind it. Kurt heard the nemet’s voice shake, and feared for him before the witness of the men.

16

Tavi’s dark blue sail billowed out and filled with the night wind, and Val t’Ran called out a hoarse order to the rowers to hold oars. The rhythm of wood and water cadenced to a halt, forty oars poised level over the water. Then with a direction from Val they came inboard with a single grate of wood, locked into place by the sweating rowers who rested at the benches.

Somewhere Edrifstill prowled the coast, but the Sufaki vessel had the disadvantage of having to seek, and the lower coast was rough, with many inlets that were possible for Tavi,a sleek, shallow-drafted longship—while Edrif,greater in oarage, must keep to slightly deeper waters.