would march around the city clad in purple, bearing lights and
singing songs of Welleran. Always the guard went unarmed, but as the
sound of their song went echoing across the plain towards the
looming mountains, the desert robbers would hear the name of
Welleran and steal away to their haunts. Often dawn would come
across the plain, shimmering marvellously upon Merimna's spires,
abashing all the stars, and find the guard still singing songs of
Welleran, and would change the colour of their purple robes and pale
the lights they bore. But the guard would go back leaving the
ramparts safe, and one by one the sentinels in the plain would awake
from dreaming of Rollory and shuffle back into the city quite cold.
Then something of the menace would pass away from the faces of the
Cyresian mountains, that from the north and the west and the south
lowered upon Merimna, and clear in the morning the statues and the
pillars would arise in the old inviolate city. You would wonder that
an unarmed guard and sentinels that slept could defend a city that
was stored with all the glories of art, that was rich in gold and
bronze, a haughty city that had erst oppressed its neighbours, whose
people had forgotten the art of war. Now this is the reason that,
though all her other lands had long been taken from her, Merimna's
city was safe. A strange thing was believed or feared by the fierce
tribes beyond the mountains, and it was credited among them that at
certain stations round Merimna's ramparts there still rode Welleran,
Soorenard, Mommolek, Rollory, Akanax, and young Iraine. Yet it was
close on a hundred years since Iraine, the youngest of Merimna's
heroes, fought his last battle with the tribes.

Sometimes indeed there arose among the tribes young men who doubted
and said: 'How may a man for ever escape death?'