were now filled with what might, I suppose, be accounted refugees. It was claimed by some that the retreat from Ar had been a rout, precipitous and disorderly, and, in some cases, even disciplined troops had cast aside their shields and fled for their lives. Were it not for the ruination of her walls, thousands might have been unable to escape the city, to the open fields beyond. Countless dead would have been heaped at the gates. As it was, men of Ar tried to prevent the remnants of the occupying forces fleeing and hundreds of sympathizers and collaborators from leaving the city. Bands of mercenaries not quartered outside the city often had to fight their way to the countryside. Even in the open fields they were pursued and hunted, sometimes from the sky by tarnsmen of Ar, no longer enrolled in the sorry task of protecting uniformed looters and policing a sullen, resentful citizenry with which they shared a Home Stone. For pasangs about the city the fields were littered with feasting for scavenging jards. Within the city long proscription lists were posted, and traitors and traitresses were hunted down, house to house. Hundreds of impaling spears were adorned with writhing victims. Few free traitresses, or traitresses who long remained free, escaped the city. The common price for their license to accompany armed, fleeing men, unwilling to accept the burden of conducting free women, was their stripping and the collar. Many were currently being offered in the markets of Brundisium and other coastal cities. Some of those vended in the recent sale I had attended were former high women of Ar, now naked properties worth only what men were willing to pay for them. Many of the refugees still flooding into Brundisium were ragged, exhausted, and half-starved. Some had sold even their swords. Others had formed larger or smaller outlaw bands and prowled the roads, producing a realm of peril and anarchy for a hundred pasangs about. Passage to Tyros or Cos was costly, and many of Brundisium’s newcomers were destitute. Some, armed with clubs, hunted urts by the wharves. Two men had been killed for stealing a fish. It was said, too, that various towns and cities, even villages, in the island ubarates themselves were not enthusiastic about the turn of events, that they were less than willing to welcome the return of defeated, penurious veterans. Could honor be retained in the face of defeat, even rout? If the stories were true, of triumph, and such, where was their wealth, their spoils? Surely, for whatever reason, or reasons, justified or unjustified, an inhospitable reception not unoften awaited them. Some, even regulars managing to return to the islands, found themselves isolated and despised, denied work and a post. “Where is your shield,” they might be asked, “where is your sword?” In Brundisium, on the other hand, a busy port, with access to the northern and southern coastal trade, and an access to the major island ubarates westward, Cos and Tyros, there was considerable prosperity, for the coin that leaves one purse will soon find a home in another.
But beyond the influx of refugees, more streaming in each day, the crowding, the begging, the closing of hiring tables, the raiding of garbage troughs, the sleeping in cold, damp, dangerous streets, the discordant accounts of doings to the south and east, the racing about of rumors, it was clear that something different and unusual was occurring in Brundisium, something apart from refugees, apart from remote dislocations, apart from proscriptions and impaling spears, apart from tumult and flight, apart from red grass and bloodied stones, apart from hazard and vengeance, apart from political rearrangements, apart from exchanges of power wherein, as it is said, the “streets run with blood.”
This had to do with those spoken of as the Pani.
There must be two or three hundred of them in Brundisium, and perhaps many more in the north, in their unusual garb, with their dark, keen eyes, their black hair drawn back and knotted behind their head, men lithe and graceful, like panthers, taciturn, not mingling, avoiding the taverns, equipped with their unfamiliar weaponry.
It was not clear from whence these strange warriors, and their cohorts and partisans, were derived. Some, from the eyes, said they were Tuchuks, but others who had had the fortune, or misfortune, of encountering Tuchuks, as some looted, ransomed merchants, survivors of raided caravans, and such, denied this. Surely none wore the colorful, ritual, exploit scarring of the Tuchuks. Some