The Keepers of the People

CHAPTER III

THE HISTORY OF VARANDALEEL

940The Princes of Varandaleel are of the race of strangers; and the Varandals call them the Arlab ga leel, the comers from the peaks. As it has run among the Varandals, without the change of a word, for the life of a crow, theirs is the story of many another Eastern dynasty. Some eighty years ago the fortunes of Varandaleel had ebbed to their lowest: two chiefs, warring for the sovereignty, had by their bloody struggles brought the little country to the extreme of weakness, and in its evil hour the Northern tribes, urged by the spur of the overgrowth of peoples, had forced the barrier of the mountains that wall it in from the rest of the world. They were slowly overcoming the country, in spite of the desperate resistance of a people no less brave, and more skilful in war than themselves, by force of numbers; for kindred hordes came flocking through the open passes, at the tidings of the spoiling of the champaign land, to fill the gaps in their ranks.

941But with the hour came the man. Some Varandal horsemen, flying from a lost fight by obscure paths to the rallying-place, chanced upon a young man at the foot of the hills, spent by hunger, and the toils of a journey over them by perilous ways that none but he had ever dared. They gave him the only chance they could offer, a spare horse; and marvelled at the dogged endurance with which in such a plight of exhaustion he bore the fatigues of their unresting haste. To all seeming he was dumb; and his only possession was a sword of a weight and straightness strange to them. They would have thought him of the race of the invaders but that he was many shades paler than they; his hair was yellow, his eyes were gray, and not of the Northern brown. When they had won their way to their friends, and his strength had come back to him, he took his place among the chiefs, with so natural an air of its being proper to him, that none thought to say him nay. In a month he was fighting at the side of one of their most foolhardy captains, on a horse bought with the spoils of his slain; fighting with a deadly coolness as strange to them as his fashion of using his strange sword. In a land of curved scimitars he used the point. When he was not fighting, he was scouting with a skill and good fortune that had enabled them to destroy, in small bodies, several hundreds of the enemy; he imparted to them what he had learned of their coming and going by signs.