Earth years, but he looked younger, and his clothes were subtly different. His trousers were of the rough-texture cloth worn by the villagers, but the jacket and cloak were of finer stuff, and Nathan noted that there were discolored lines at the collar, as if it had once been trimmed with something now lost. He recalled that cloth-of-gold collars and bands were the marks of the Guildmasters.

The tavern keeper gave the newcomer the glass of cheap wine and thick slice of bread which he served to all daily in lieu of his tithe to the church. The man began to eat without speaking to anyone.

“That’s who you should talk to,” Hoorn told MacKinnie. “We should send for him. If there is a man in Jikar who can tell you what you’ll find beyond the river and forest, Brett can. Or that warrior friend of his.”

“Who is he?” MacKinnie asked.

“His name is Brett,” Hoorn said. He lowered his voice. “He is said to have come from far away, some say the eastern coast. He comes carrying tales and songs, and will not discuss his ancestry. As for me, I believe he was born a barbarian.”

“Yet he speaks many civilized tongues,” Master Blatt said.

“Aye.” Hoorn pursed his lips in thought. “The barbarians do not come here often, so it is a thing not done here. But I am told that in parts where the plains riders are more common, the townsfolk often capture young plainsmen and keep them as slaves.”

“And you think Brett was one of those?” MacKinnie asked.

“It is possible,” Blatt said. “Although I do not envy anyone who would be master to the singer. I would rather have him as a friend.”

“Aye,” Hoorn agreed. “There have been other singers in Jikar, but none came as Brett. Most are on foot, but Brett rides a great war-horse, and has for companion one of the iron men with armor and lance and sword. Vanjynk his name is. He was driven from his lands to the south and now wanders as Brett to sell his abilities to any purchaser.”

A wandering mercenary, MacKinnie thought. As I once was.

MacKinnie studied the dark features of the man in question and approved. He might be down on his luck, Nathan thought, but he wasn’t defeated. Despite his youth he was more akin to the Guildmasters than the tavern loafers. “Call him over,” he said in a moment of decision.

“Singer,” Hoorn called. “At your pleasure, join us. Our noble friend is a willing host.”

The singer came to the table and bowed as Hoorn performed introductions.

“I am told you know of faraway lands,” MacKinnie said. He poured a glass of wine and pushed it toward Brett. “If you have the time, perhaps you can tell me of your travels.”

Brett made a wry face. “I have little but time.” He drained his wineglass at a gulp.

“You do not travel alone, singer?” MacKinnie asked, pouring more wine.

“Not for a yir. I teach Vanjynk poetry, he teaches me to fight. Now we are both good at both trades and the living is better.” He stared ruefully about the tavern. “Or was. But we will not leave our bones here for Master Blatt to put to earth.”

“You would like to leave Jikar, then?” MacKinnie asked.

“Trader, we would pay the man who allowed us to fight for him, be it only that he had sufficient men to cut through the maris. But the maris will stay until they have eaten and burned everything they can find, and as they are not so stupid as the Guilds hope, that will not be before the snows. Then they will leave. At that they will bring you a blessing, Guildmasters.”

“What blessing could a horde of barbarians — maris, you called them? — what blessing can they bring?” Blatt stood, his wide shoulders almost blotting out the youngerman, his great hands, hardened with brine and tanners’ liquor, on his hips.

“Calmly, calmly, you will alarm our host and the wine will stop,” Brett said softly. There was a hint of threat to the voice, a tone one did not take with Guildmasters. “I call them maris because that is what they call themselves. And the blessing is the destruction of the hive-rats. There will be few enough of them when they move on — in fact, that is why they will move on. The ayuks must eat many of them, which keeps the maris moving about the great plains. When the ayuks don’t eat, the maris don’t eat. Even here they’ll finish off all your Earth crops before the ayuks are done with the hive-rats.”

MacKinnie listened with interest. “The maris live off their ayuks?”

Brett looked at him in puzzlement. “Your speech is unlike any that I have heard in any land,” he commented. “Yet you are not native here, where the maris have not been. Where have you lived that you don’t know about them? Ah, the cities of the mountains of the north. Well, know, northman, that the plantain of the great flatland is as poisonous to us as most of the other plants on Makassar. It must be true, as the priests say, we came here from another star long ago, else why would God have put us where we cannot eat? But the ayuk can eat the plants, and men can eat the ayuk, and drink her milk, and, even as the maris do, drink the blood of their steeds. Their horses fare better, eating grasses which grow among the plantain, and some maris live from their horses alone, but the ayuk is better. It is not enough, though. Fed nothing else, they waste and die, even as these men here. In your north, you can eat the tallgrass, which they say came from Earth, and you eat the grotka. But did you eat nothing but grotka, and the swimmers from the sea, you would die also.”

MacKinnie nodded. The Imperials had told him of the dietary problems of Makassar. Most of the animal life was edible, but not all of it, and little of the plant life except that which came originally from another planet. The local plants stored up various metals, which gave them their hardness, but also made them deadly. The local animals separated out the metal, although some, like the hive-rat which ate not only fruits and grains but woody stems, were deadly. All lacked essential vitamins. Listening to the singer, he had an idea.

“I wish to return to the mountains of the north,” Nathan said. His maps showed that Batav was nestled on the side — the wrong side from Jikar, of course — of the mountain range which ran down the great peninsula jutting from the north edge of the continent. The mountains then curled east before they dwindled away to hills, still high enough to form a natural barrier to the great plains.

“North?” Brett asked incredulously. “How long has it been since you came from there? But you must have come by ship. The land route has been closed for two years, Trader. The High King of the Passes is dead, and the others fight for his place. No life is safe, no judges sit, and the people make do as best they can. With your wealth, you might hire enough men to take you south. With me to show the way you could fight through the maris and come to the city-states and kingdoms of the Kepul. But not to the north, Trader. We could never pass the Sangi.” Brett tossed off the glass of wine, then waved at a smaller man, fair-haired and contrasting with the singer in every dimension, yet bearing the same manner of confidence. The newcomer came forward slowly.

“Trader,” Brett said, “this is Vanjynk, the best friend a wanderer ever had, tragedy as it is that he must roam the lands.” Brett poured his friend wine without asking.

Vanjynk nodded to MacKinnie and sat in silence. MacKinnie noted that he was younger than Brett, possibly by as much as two of the local years. Yet he was born of the nobility, while whatever Brett’s origin it had not been in an iron and stonewood fortress. The relationship between the men must have been complex.

The others explained to the young warrior what MacKinnie had in mind. “But there is no way through the Sangi,” Brett finished. “Or none that I can see.”

“Nor I.’’ Vanjynk drank slowly and deliberately, as he seemed to do everything else. “You will not find enough men to take the trail through the forest. The coast is closed. I do not know the sea.”