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quietly. She went and picked up one of the smallest
    children and automatically put it to her breast, her silent tears dropping on the small fuzzy head.
    An older woman, long gray hair straggling in wisps around her face, looking as if she had been roused
    from sleep three days ago and had not had a moment since to wash or comb her hair, as was in fact the
    case, came and took a long spoon from a rack by the fireplace. She began ladling a rough nut porridge
    into wooden bowls and handing it to the men, who dropped down and began to eat quietly. There was no
    sound in the room except the sobs of the young woman and the sighs of exhausted men. A child
    whimpered, sleeping, and murmured for its mother. Outside the sleet battered the wooden shutters with
    an incessant hissing sound.
    It was like an explosion in the quiet room when someone began to hammer on the door, with blows like
    gunfire, and shouting outside. Two of the smallest children woke and began to wail with terror.
    One of the men, older than the rest and with an indefinite air of command, went to the door and flung it
    part way open. He demanded, "In the name of all the gods, what is this racket? After eight days of fire fighting, haven't we earned a breakfast's worth of rest?"
    "You'll be glad to leave your breakfast when you hear what we have here," said the man rattling the door. His face was grim and smoke stained, eyebrows burnt away and one hand in a bandage. He jerked
    a head over his shoulder. "Bring the bre'suin here."
    Two men behind him thrust forward a struggling man in nondescript clothing, much burnt, cut,
    scratched and bleeding from a dozen wounds that looked like thorn scratches. The man holding the door
    open glanced quickly back at the women and children inside and thrust the door shut, but some of the
    men eating breakfast put down their bowls and came crowding out. They were mostly silent, waiting
    grimly to know what this was all about.
    One, of the men holding the stranger said, "Father, we caught him setting light to a pile of resin-
    branches at the edge of Greyleaf Forest, not four miles away. He had piled the thing like a beacon, to
    blaze and catch living wood. We had an hour's work to put it out, but we stopped it—and brought this
    here to you!"
    "But in the name of Sharra and all the gods at once," said the older man, staring in disbelief and horror at their prisoner, "Is the man mad? Is he crackbrained? You—what's your name?"
    The prisoner did not answer, simply increased his struggles. One of his captors said roughly, "You hold still or I'll kick your ribs clear through your backbone," but he seemed not to understand, and went on madly struggling until the two men holding him kicked him quietly and methodically into
    unconsciousness.
    The Darkovans stared at the man on the ground, almost without believing what they had seen and heard.
    In the mountains of Darkover, the only threat which will unite the fiercely anarchistic little tribes and families, riddled with blood-feud and independence, is the universal threat of forest fire. The man who
    breaks the fire-truce is outlawed even from his own fireside and his mother's table. The story of Narsin, who a hundred years ago in the Kilghard Hills met his father's blood-foe on the fire line and slew him,
    and was in turn hacked apart by his own brothers for breaking the fire-truce, exists in a dozen ballad
    versions. The idea that a man would deliberately set a living tree ablaze was as inconceivable as the
    thought of serving a festival feast of children's flesh. They stared at him and some of them made
    surreptitious signs against ill-luck or madness.
    The older man, an elder in the burnt out village, said in an undertone, "The women mustn't see this.
    They've been through enough. Somebody get a rope."
    Someone asked, "Shouldn't we try to ask him a few questions; find out why he did this?"
    "Asking questions of a madman—what for? Ask the river why it floods, or the snow why it hides