To Save a World by Marion Zimmer Bradley Read Free Book Online

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 the sun," one of them said; and another, "A man mad enough to set a blaze would be too mad to tell us why."
    The village elder said quietly, "Any chance this is a Terran? I've heard that they do mad things."
    One of the young men, one who had told the girl Marilla of their grandfather's death, said, "I've been in the Trade City, Father, and seen the Terrans when they were on Alton lands, years ago. Mad they may be, but not like that. They have given us farseeing eye lenses, and news of new things, chemicals ," he used the Terran Empire word, "to smother fires. They would not set a forest to burn."
    "That's true," murmured one; and, "Yes. Remember when the lower Carrial Ridge burned and men came from the Trade City to help us put it out, flew here in an airship to help us."
    "Not the Terrans, then," the older man said. He repeated, "Get a rope—and don't say a word to the women."
    By the time the sun broke over the lower ridge, red and dripping with cloud and fog like a weeping cyclops' eye, the man had ceased to struggle and hung limp like a black flag above the dead forest.
    The villagers, breathing easier and thinking that now, perhaps, the rash of terrifying fires would cease, had no way of knowing, in the widely scattered and wild mountains, that in the thousands of miles of forests this scene, or something very like it, had been repeated at least a dozen times in the last year.
    No one knew that except the woman who called herself Andrea Closson.
     
    "Darkover. It's a damned funny place, you know. We hold scraps of it, by compact, for trade, just as we do with planets all over the galaxy. You know the routine. We leave the governments alone. Usually, after the people of the various worlds have seen our technologies, they start to get tired of living under hierarchies or monarchies and demand to come into the Empire of their own accord. It's almost a mathematical formula. You can predict the thing. But Darkover doesn't. We don't quite know why, but they say we just don't have a thing they want . . ."
    Disgruntled Terran Empire Legate, repeating a common complaint of politicians on Darkover.
     
    "You are to house and feed them with the best and treat them well," Danilo Syrtis repeated to the small crowd of swart mountain Darkovans. He indicated the four Terrans, uniformed with the dress of Spaceforce. He ignored the protest he could sense and added, "It is the will of