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with the Helkent pinnacles black on a tiger’s eye streak of cloud. Torches lit the marketplace tangle of skittish horses, clumsy riders and swearing, laughing grooms, and all Saphar had come to see us off. Hooded market-women jostled lords untimely out of bed, urchins dived among wives anxiously watching their men cling to reins and manes, or counselors disordered by reversing rumps. Sellithar had not come, but a bright yellow square of window marked the queen’s tower, high in the gloomy sky. There were no cheers, no thrown flowers: just a great many quick, quiet embraces, some bleats from the Regent, and a few heartfelt cries of “Luck!”
    After things settled, I found myself riding close behind the banner, the trumpeter, the general, and the king. Inyx, top-heavy in mail on a shaggy mountain pony, resembled a bandit off on a raid. Beryx, resplendent with crimson cloak, damascened corselet, and plumed helmet, sat his big brown blood-horse like the pattern of a cavalryman. As the bumping, grumbling, jeering tangle unwound behind us, hide armor bundled on horses’ rumps and sarissas waving all ways to imperil neighbors’ heads, he glanced round and grinned. “Thank the Four,” he remarked, “they’ll be earthborne before we charge.”
    It was my first true acquaintance with flesh and blood warriors. They may be gallant and lordly in combat, but beforehand they grumble, quarrel, get drunk, lose their gear, their money, their horses and themselves, make lewd jests, sing lewder songs, and need more shepherding than all Quarred’s flocks. Nor do they relish civilian company.
    At first the horses kept them humble, but the second night Beryx and Inyx took me along with trumpeter, banner, and armor-bearers when, as usual, they joined the circle at the nearest fire. Beryx too had noted some surly looks. The moment we settled, he called across, “Harran, will you give us a song?”
    Soldiers have their own bards: they have poets as well. Some of this doggerel had been running in my head, mixed with the rhythms of our going, the broken clop and crunch of hooves, the jingle of scabbard and bridle, the gusts of talk, the heavy flap-flap of the long green banner on its haft. I patterned the rhythms and married in the rhymes, adding a few of my own. What emerged was a marching song, scurrilous as always, deriding everything from the dragon, “that flame-throwing lizard,” to the king’s helmet plume, “tall enough to tickle the dragon’s—”
    I had begun in dour silence. I progressed in stunned quiet that broke in a roar of delight. A little unsure how Beryx would take it, I glanced across, and he shook his fist at me, laughing with the rest. Then a huge Gebrian’s friendly pat almost snapped my collarbone, his neighbor soused me with a battered tin bucket of wine, and next day I had to ride with the first squadron, who all wanted to sing, but could not quite recollect the chorus of my song.
    * * * * *
    All those days are merry, when I look back. We were on the road, an enlargement in itself: riding in the effervescent spring weather, and it was fine. Meeting a new challenge, and in my case, finding a new fellowship. And crossing the uplands of Saphar Resh, Everran’s heart, with its trim whitewashed villages, its endless rolling green vines, its cultivated trees at every well and roadside, its cheerful, prosperous people to feed and stable and wish us on our way.
    Beryx too was merry. He had become a soldier, no more than first among equals, and he had the soldier’s gift of living now, shutting out before and behind. Often he made me think of the boy who shipped with the whalers those fifteen years ago—until the mirror signal came.
    We were nearing the rust-red, deep-cloven uplands of Raskelf, where the Kelf river springs and Quarred summers its flocks. Against the Helkents’ embery flanks the signal made a white stutter of light in the