“A homeland. We search out a place to build our houses and sow our fields anew, to pasture our sheep and dwell in peace. After the burning mountains and quaking land drove us forth from the valley of our fathers— the sacred place where their machines landed from the sky at the end of the Old Ones’ war—we have wandered many circles of the seasons. Now in these wide fields, along the river, we have found what we have sought for so long. And no man or beast shall drive us from it!” As he ended, his hand was on his sword hilt and he stared straight along the ranks of the Plainsmen.
Fors turned now to Marphy: “And what do your people seek. Marphy of the plains?”
The Recorder raised his eyes from the ground where a pattern of crushed grass blades had apparently held his attention.
“Since the days of the Old Ones we of the Plains have been a roving people. First we were so because of the evil death which abode in the air of many quarters of the land, so that a man must be on the move to shun those places where plagues and the blue fires waited to slay him. We are now hunters and rovers and herdsmen, warriors who care not to be tied to any camp. It is in us to travel far, to seek new places and new hills standing high against the sky—”
“So.” Fors let that one word fall into the silence of those war-torn ranks.
It was a long minute before he spoke again. “You,” he pointed to Lanard, “wish to settle and build. That is your nature and way of life. You”—it was Marphy he turned to now—“would move, grazing your herds and hunting. These,” he bent a stiff arm painfully to gesture up the hill to that uneven pile of earth and stone under which lay the bodies of the Beast Things, ’live to destroy both of you if they can. And the land is wide…”
Lanard cleared his throat—the sound was sharp and loud. “We would live in peace with all who raise not the sword against us. In peace there is trade, and in trade there is good for all. When the winter closes and the harvest has been poor, then may trade save the life of a tribe.”
“You are warriors and men,” the woman chief of the Dark People broke in, her head high, her eyes straight as she measured the line of strangers facing her. “War is meat and drink at the table of men—yes—but it was that which brought the Old Ones down! War again, men, and you will destroy us utterly and we shall be eaten up and forgotten so that it shall be as if man had never lived to walk these fields—leaving our world to the holding of those!” She pointed to the Beast Things’ mound. “If now we draw sword against one another then in our folly we shall have chosen the evil part for the last time, and it is better that we die quickly and this earth be clean of us!”
The Plainspeople were quiet until along the ranks of the men a murmur arose and it spread to where their women were gathered. And the voices of the women grew louder and stronger. From their midst arose one who must have ruled a chieftain’s tent since there was gold binding her hair:
“Let there be no war between us! Let there be no more wailing of the death song among our tents! Say it loudly, oh, my sisters!” And her appeal was taken up by all the women, to be echoed until it became a chant as stirring as the war song.