However, news came of villages that had been destroyed by an approaching band of nomads. Refugees came into Tiq, and they said there had come thundering down on them a wild people — in the imagination of these refugees their assailants had half-flown through the air in long leaps, led by a dire warrior who, in their imagination, was clad in clanging steel and was kous — irresistible.
     Whatever the truth about these barbarians, to whom nobody could get near, it was true that farms and villages were being destroyed. Inside Tiq, Arinka began to imagine its unthinkable destruction.
     By a word let slip, he suspected that people had always feared the peace would end, and that this could have been why they inveigled him to stay with them.
     Even before it had been suggested to him, he began to think that he himself should go out and find these people — if humans they were — and persuade them to like him, spare him, and understand the preciousness of Tiq and of civilized life.
     Before the first light of dawn, he disentangled himself from Etke by infinitesimal stages so as not to wake her; stood, and put on the entertaining clothes that she sometimes made him wear. Their room was in the wall; he had begun by carrying her up the spiral stair to it from the hall inside the city. Their window looked out on a lake, in which he could see a star and a meteor reflected. He let himself out through a small gate. He expected that the exercise of walking through the cool twilight would allow his mind to determine what he would do, but as he topped the bank on the other side of the pool a figure sprang from behind a bush and flung a stone at his eye.
     The stone missed and the invader was only a boy. Arinka seized him gently and said (the unplanned words were startled out of him): “Take me to your leader.”
     He had not expected that he would have any language in common with the invaders, but the child understood him and replied:
     “Shastin?”

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