"Nitka Porn again," Hardan Synn spat out savagely as the blue dust swirled about him. "Always he seeks to stir up trouble among the sarifs."
His sun-darkened face was a gaunt mask as he neared the river, but his slitted green eyes were hot with growing rage. He could not leave the eighty great wagons with their cargos of two hundred Wetlanders and their meager supplies for so short a time as a turev of the water dial without trouble arising.
Hardan sprang off his mount and elbowed his way into the thick of the melee, his broad hard shoulders tossing soggy-padded men aside. His hard fists smashed one scowling-faced Wetlander's nose, and then he was through into the rude square formed by the inner ring of six-wheeled wagons.
"Nitka Porn!" he shouted, his voice a knife-thrust of sound above the tumult.
The fighting men separated slowly, some weaving on their legs unsteadily, bleeding, and others kneeling and groaning. A half-dozen, most of them wearing the short green capes of the nobles' personal servants, sprawled limply in their own reddish-brown blood.
From one of these unmoving bodies a huge-bodied man, his brutal jaws masked by a bush of fiery red whiskers and his broad nose segmented by a sword-cut's diagonal scar, rose. Half his protective shell of faded blue cloth stuffed with vurth was ripped away from his shoulder and chest. Great muscles knotted there in his swiftly dehydrating pink flesh. He snarled at Hardan.
"The Drylander arrives," he jeered, and laughed.
From the hard-packed blue clay of the camping place he picked an arm-long stake of wood. He waved it derisively at Hardan.
"Watch him shiver," he roared. "When he is well beaten I will drive him from the camp. Then I will lead."
Hardan's stomach knotted—and then dissolved into a glowing spot of fire. His fingers bit into the leather handles of his twin short swords. He had no eyes for the grinning minority clustered about Nitka Porn. Nor did he see the puzzled empty faces of the other trekkers, the slow-minded plodding sarifs caught in this bloody trailside struggle.