Hardan was puzzled at her change of garb, but his blood pounded with joy as he saw her apparently unharmed and well-fed. With the coming of darkness he could rescue her, and, Ung Roth willing, the priests and their wives as well.
So he set out looking for a concealed pathway to the river's edge and a thousand feet further downstream came upon a sheer gorge cut into the clay and soft gray rock of the bluff. Down this he lowered himself and in the increasing gloom made his way to the river and submerged.
He swam upstream, silent as a hunting prel, his only weapons his two swords. His spear and the excess garments he had left on the little sunken bowl of grass where his maars grazed.
Like a great Dryland Ape of the woodlands he crept up from the water at last, his only shelter the waist-high clumps of ulfo grass that dotted the river's shingly bank. And he won at last inside the carelessly guarded ring of wagons to the small fire where Ylda sat silently and stared into the flames.
From the shelter of a great double-spoked wheel he studied the camp. Well for the fleeing sarifs, he thought, that no raiding party of Drylanders had come to attack. He heard them quarreling and shouting drunkenly, and saw their swords and other weapons heaped carelessly beside the fires as they ate and caroused.
The guard spat impatiently into the fire and ran a dry tongue over his parched lips. Longingly he studied the growing excitement at the center of the encampment. There was nothing to do here, only the priest and priestess discussing the strange healing property of a vegetable mold recently discovered in Tarn. He slapped his hip, cursed roughly, and climbed to his feet.
"Don't stir from the fire," he ordered Ylda fiercely. His tongue poked thirstily at his lips.
The guard swaggered away from the fire toward the curtain-hung rear of the wagon just ahead. This wheeled canvas-and-wood shack had a sagging roof sloping from a central ridge to either end of the box so that a sort of awning covered the low rear entrance. He reached inside and when his arm emerged a basket-woven jar was in his hand, its inner earthware lining containing a sloshing fluid.
Hardan scented the raw reek of alcohol, of garack, as he crept closer. The guard's thick lips smacked, he rubbed a rasping fist across his mouth and snorted appreciatively. Then the jar tilted again, gurgled.
The guide sprang, his fingers clamping about the startled throat of the sarif. He squeezed hard, choking back the gasp of terror, and the jug crashed to the hard ground. Then his fist chopped in a short vicious punch to the sarif's neck that felled the man.