With dawn bleaching the eastern sky, weary travelers trudged into Uryutta’s Oasis after a long night march across the parched Warril Plain — a teeming, thirsty crowd of donkeys and simlas, humans and hoon. Even urrish pilgrims stepped daintily to the muddy shore and dipped their narrow heads, wincing at the bitter, unmasked taste of plain water.

Full summer had broken over the high steppe, when hot winds ignited rings of circle grass, sending herds stampeding amid clouds of dust. Even before the present crisis, wayfarers avoided the summer sun, preferring the cool moonlight for travel. Urrish guides bragged they would know the plain blindfolded.

That’s fine for them, Sara thought, swishing her aching feet in the oasis spring. An urs doesn’t fall on her face when a chance stone turns underfoot. Me, I like to see where I’m going.

Predawn light revealed mighty outlines to the east. The Rimmers, Sara thought. The mixed-race expedition was making good time, hurrying to reach the Glade before events there reached a climax. On the plus side, she was anxious to see her brothers, and to learn how well Bloor was implementing her idea. There might also be medical help for her ward, the Stranger, if it seemed safe to reveal him to the aliens. A big if. Nor had she quite given up on getting to see one of the fabled library consoles of the Great Galactics.

Yet there was also much to fear. If the star-gods did plan on wiping out all witnesses, it would surely start at the Glade. Above all, Sara worried that she might be taking the Stranger into the hands of his enemies. The dark, ever-cheerful man seemed eager to go, but did he really understand what was involved?

A whistling sigh fluted from Pzora’s corrugated cone, as the traeki siphoned water from the pond, fatigued despite having ridden all the way in a donkey-drawn chariot. A new rewq draped across Pzora’s sensor ring, one of two Sara had bought from the fresh supply at Kandu Landing, to help the traeki pharmacist treat the wounded alien, even though she wasn’t keen on the symbionts herself.

A chain of bubbles broke the surface near Sara’s foot. By Loocen’s silver light, she made out Blade, from Dolo Village, resting underwater. The hasty trek had been hard on red qheuens, and blues like Blade, as well as those humans too big to burden a donkey. Sara had been allowed to mount every even-numbered midura. Even so, her body ached. Serves me right for leading a bookish, cloistered life, she thought.

A raucous cheer rose up where urrish donkey-drivers piled grass and dung to make a campfire. Simla blood was drained into a tureen, followed by chopped meat, and soon they were slurping tepid sanguinary stew, lifting their long necks to swallow, then bending for more — sinuous silhouettes whose rise and fall was eerily accompanied by the Stranger’s plinking dulcimer. Meanwhile a hoon cook, proud of her multirace cuisine, banged pots and sprinkled powders until spicy aromas finally overcame the stench of roast simla, restoring even Sara’s queasy appetite.

A little while later, full dawn revealed stunning tan-and-green mountains towering across the eastern horizon. The Stranger laughed as he worked shirtless, helping Sara and the other humans do a typical camp-chore assigned to Earthlings — erecting shelters of g’Kek blur cloth, to shade travelers and beasts through the blazing day. The star-man’s muteness seemed no handicap at working with others. His pleasure at being alive affected all those around him, as he taught the others a wordless song to help pass the time.

Two more days, Sara thought, glancing up toward the pass. We’re almost there.

The oasis was named for a nomad warrior who had lived soon after urrish settlement on Jijo, when their numbers were still small, and their planet-bound crafts pitifully crude. In those olden times, Uryutta fled east from the rich grazing lands of Znunir, where her tribal chiefs had vowed fealty to mighty Gray Queens. Uryutta led her fellow rebels to this wadi in the vast dry plain, to nurse their wounds and plot a struggle for freedom from qheuen dominance.

Or so went the legend Sara heard that afternoon, after sleeping through the hottest part of the day — a slumber during which she had dreamed vaguely of water, cool and clear, raising a terrible thirst. She slaked it at the spring, then rejoined the other travelers under the big tent for another meal.

With a few hours still to go before dusk, and a leaden heat still pressing outside, tinkers and pack-handlers gathered around a storyteller, accompanying her recital with foot-stamps and switched braided tails. Even after gaining books and printing, urs still loved the oral tradition, its extravagance and impromptu variations. When the bard’s chant reached the Battle of Znunir Trading Post, elongated heads swayed together. Triplet eyes stared past the poet toward times gone by.

Listeners hissed contempt for gutless renegades. Sara pulled out her notebook and took notes on the antiquated storytelling dialect, already devolved from GalTwo, long before humans came.

This time the urs listeners vented repeated low grunts, marking respect for a tough foe, a sound humans first heard the third generation after arriving, when Earthlings won their own place in the pre-Commons chaos.

At first Sara had trouble following the action. Then she understood Uryutta’s combat innovation — using “long-sticks,” or rods of boo, to tip over the invincible qheuen infantry. Urrish volunteers served as living fulcrums, braving snapping” claws and crushing weight while their fellows heaved, toppling one qheuen after another.

Despite the ecstatic song of vengeful slaughter, Sara knew the historical Uryutta’s victories had been shortlived, as qheuens adjusted their tactics. It took a later breed of heroes — the warrior smiths of Blaze Mountain — to finally drive gray tyrants off the high plains. And still the queens thwarted the rising Commons, until humans brought new-old skills to the art of war.

Not all the urs were celebrating past glories. The caravan chief and her aides knelt on a peko-skin rug, planning the next trek. From their gestures over a map, they clearly meant to skip the next oasis and make a hard dash for the foothills by sunrise.