Dan's sword rattled as he drew it: "DON'T!" cried Chaldez. "We haven't a chance!" In the next moment Dan was surrounded and was being pulled out of his saddle. His raised sword sank out of view, hidden by the heads and shoulders of the crowd which was now pressing in on him. Chaldez dismounted and pushed his way through. At his feet, lying on his back and looking very surprised, was Dan. He appeared not to have been hurt. Chaldez was about to help him to his feet when he was seized roughly, and at once everyone was talking.
Dan managed to get to his own feet, but immediately he too was seized. And then Doo was brought to them.
Together they were marched across the sward towards what appeared to be an inn. It was a larger building than its neighbours and had a courtyard. Chaldez, Dan and Doo were hustled into a long, long-ceilinged room.
The cacophony of raised voices was as alarming as it was deafening. The room was lit by smoky rush torches whose unsteady flames cast exaggerated shadows, but there was enough light for Chaldez to see that Doo was very pale.
It began to dawn on him that the three of them were the subject of a heated discussion, but what was being proposed and counter-proposed were a mystery to him. Doo kept glancing at him, her expression of bewilderment and terror stabbing through him. He tried to give her an encouraging smile, but he knew she would not be taken in by it. Dan was looking grim, and his face too was pale.
The voices were getting louder and louder when there was a movement by the door, and presently a group of men, all similarly dressed, came pushing through the crowd until they were ranged in front of Dan, Chaldez and Doo. Gradually a hush descended on the room. The new arrivals parted to create a narrow corridor, and down this strode a large man whose sallow face was framed by a mass of curly black hair. When he spoke, Chaldez realised with relief that he was able to understand him: this was the Kroyan tongue spoken by Lewvin.
“Who are you?” he demanded.
Chaldez said “I and my companions are slaves of the Theigans but we have friends in Eujinni and we go to seek their protection.”
This statement appeared to put their interrogator off balance.
“Slaves?” he repeated.
Chaldez began to take off his riding cloak. The room was now in total silence. He removed it completely and then took off his tunic and shirt to reveal the scar of the branding iron on his chest. Only those standing near him could see it, but they turned and told those standing behind them so that the brief silence gave way to a low murmuring.
The man with the bushy black beard indicated to Chaldez that he could put on his clothes back on again. he then made an announcement in the local dialect, and the room began to empty, but as they left, many of the villagers turned and stared at the trio.
When he, Doo, Chaldez, Dan and the men who had preceded him into the hall were alone, he told Chaldez he would like to be of help, and he invited them to share his evening meal with them. His name, he said, was Hathar.
Chaldez and Dan had their horses returned and then all them rode the short distance to where Hathar lived in a fortified manor. Dan came up beside Chaldez. “That was risky, wasn’t it - telling them we’re slaves?”
Chaldez laughed. “If they’d gone on thinking we were Theigans, we’d be dead by now.”
The manor house was surrounded by a moat, and its walls were tall and sturdy, with slits for windows. The accommodation - a great hall, kitchens, temple, dormitories and the principal bed chambers - looked out upon a central courtyard.
That evening the three companions learned that they had, indeed, nearly been killed by the villagers, and Chaldez gave Dan a meaningful look.
The Theigan invaders, Hathar assured them, were hated. A garrison, he explained, had been billeted in the village up until that very day, and the soldiers had behaved with appalling brutality. Villagers had been murdered, raped and robbed. Trade had been suppressed, and all movement in and out of the village, unless authorised by the garrison commander, had been forbidden. At midday the garrison had been called away to assist, he believed, a near-by garrison which had come under attack.
He looked at Chaldez. “The Theigans would have killed you as runaways,” he said, “and my people would have killed you as Theigans. I think your gods are with you!”
Later that evening he discovered that his guests had little idea of how they would get to Eujinni. “This road,” he told them, “goes to the port of Raggan. There you might find someone who will take you by boat to Reard. I have been there once. It is in the kingdom of Eujinni. It lies below the Great Cascade so you must disembark there, but you will be safe. My own men will escort you to the coast - they will know how to avoid the Theigans.”
The following morning, after an early breakfast, Doo, Chaldez and Dan were on their way again, but riding with them now were two of Hathar’s retainers.
They soon left the road, their route taking them along narrow tracks which passed numerous mine workings among the exposed hills and barren spoil heaps. They were all deserted. In the scattered hamlets and villages there was a hostile watchfulness which only relaxed into casual disregard after one or other of Hathar’s men had shouted out a Kroyan greeting.
Far ahead, the sky was smudged by a pall of smoke; they found the cause of it when they eventually came upon a village in which every house appeared to be burning. The villagers were doing what they could to put out the fires, but the stream from which they were collecting the water was some distance away, and their vessels for carrying it in were pathetically inadequate.
Doo gripped Chaldez’s arm. “You will help them, won’t you?” she urged. Chaldez pulled up and immediately Hathar’s men dismounted, as though they had been waiting for just such a signal. Dan shouted: “By the gods, what are you doing?”
To Chaldez’s relief, he spoke in Eujinni, but to the villagers who heard him, one foreign tongue sounded much like another, and immediately an unfriendly crowd began to gather around them. It only dispersed after Hathar’s men explained who they were, but even Dan realised it would be diplomatic to stay and help for a while.
Unsure exactly what he could do, Chaldez stared about him. Each family, he realised, was concerned only with saving its own house; people were running about on their separate errands, and far more water was being spilled than ever reached the flames.

He was unable to explain afterwards how it happened, but he succeeded in forming some of the villagers into a human chain between the stream and the houses closest to it; gradually more and more people were drawn into a single, co-ordinated effort. Pitchers and pots were passed from hand to hand, and in one house after another, the flames were extinguished.
Some of the more distant ones inevitably burned to the ground, but the villagers gathered from Chaldez via Hathar‘s men that they were to share the houses which had been saved, and to work together to rebuild those which had been lost. They laughed and smiled, and nodded in agreement, but Chaldez suspected they were putting on a show to impress him.
As the day went on, it became apparent that people had died in the Theigan attack, and when at last lack of light prevented any more useful work, the dead were produced by their grieving relatives for burial by torch light. It was a macabre and tragic scene as the corpses were laid in the hastily-dug graves while a holy man intoned mournful invocations.
Exhausted and filthy, the three companions and their guides were pressed to remain in the village until morning. They were installed in a burnt-out shell which still retained a roof, and from somewhere food was brought to them. They ate it in the midst of a dense throng; everyone, it seemed, wanted to see the strangers feeding.
Hathar’s men were plied with questions, and Chaldez found himself being addressed by an eager young man whose urgent remarks he understood not a word of.
“What’s he saying?” he demanded of the guides, and they told him that he wanted to be of service. “How?” demanded Chaldez, but they only shrugged.
The next morning, the eager young man presented himself once to more to Chaldez; it seemed he intended to join his party.