‘There has to be more to it than that,’ Kalten objected.

‘Natural talent perhaps, Sir Kalten?’ Berit suggested.

‘I’m not that clumsy, Berit.’

‘Was your mother a warrior, Kalten-Knight?’ Engessa asked him.

‘Of course not.’

‘Or your grandmother, or your grandmother’s grandmother? Back for fifty generations?’

Kalten looked confused.

‘Atana Mirtai is descended from warriors on both sides of her family. Fighting is in her blood. She is gifted, and she can learn much just by watching. She can probably fight in a half dozen different styles.’

‘That’s an interesting notion, Atan-Engessa,’ Vanion said. ‘If we could find a horse big enough for her, she might make a very good knight.’

‘Vanion!’ Kalten exclaimed. ‘That’s the most unnatural suggestion I’ve ever heard!’

‘Merely speculation, Kalten.’ Vanion looked gravely at Sparhawk. ‘We might want to give some thought to including a bit more hand-to-hand fighting in our training programme, Preceptor Sparhawk.’

‘Please don’t do that, Vanion,’ Sparhawk replied in a pained tone. ‘You’re still the preceptor until the Hierocracy says otherwise. I’m just the interim preceptor.’

‘All right, Interim Preceptor Sparhawk, when we get to Atan, let’s pay some attention to their fighting style. We don’t always fight on horseback, you know.’

‘I’ll put Khalad to work on it,’ Sparhawk said.

‘Khalad?’

‘Kurik trained him, and Kurik was better at close fighting than any man I’ve ever known.’

‘He was indeed. Good idea, Interim Preceptor Sparhawk.’

‘Must you?’ Sparhawk asked him.

They reached the city of Atana twelve days later – at least it seemed like twelve days. Sparhawk had decided to stop brooding about the difference between real and perceived time. Aphrael was going to tamper no matter what he did or said anyway, so why should he waste time worrying about it? He wondered if Zalasta could detect the manipulation. Probably not, he decided. No matter how skilled the Styric magician might be, he was still only a man, and Aphrael was divine. An odd thought came to Sparhawk one night, however. He wondered if his daughter could also make real time seem faster than it actually was instead of slower. After he thought about it for a while, though, he decided not to ask her. The whole concept gave him a headache.

Atana was a utilitarian sort of town in a deep green valley. It was walled, but the walls were not particularly high nor imposing. It was the Atans themselves who made their capital impregnable.

‘Everything in the kingdom’s named Atan, isn’t it?’ Kalten observed as they rode down into the valley. ‘The kingdom, its capital, the people – even the titles.’

‘I think Atan’s more in the nature of a concept than a name,’ Ulath shrugged.

‘What makes them all so tall?’ Talen asked. ‘They belong to the Tamul race, but other Tamuls don’t loom over everybody else like trees.’

‘Oscagne explained it to me,’ Stragen told him. ‘It seems that the Atans are the result of an experiment.’

‘Magic?’

‘I don’t know all that much about it,’ Stragen admitted, ‘but I’d guess that what they did went beyond what magic’s capable of. Back before there was even such a thing as history, the Atans observed that big people win more fights than little people. That was in a time when parents chose the mates of their children. Size became the most important consideration.’

‘What happened to short children?’ Talen objected.

‘Probably the same thing that happens to ugly children in our society,’ Stragen shrugged. ‘They didn’t get married.’

‘That’s not fair.’

Stragen smiled. ‘When you get right down to it, Talen, it’s not really very fair when we steal something somebody else has worked for, is it?’

‘That’s different.’

Stragen leaned back in his saddle and laughed. Then he went on. ‘The Atans prized other characteristics as well – ability, strength, aggressiveness and homicidal vindictiveness. It’s strange how the combination worked out. If you stop and think about it, you’ll realise that Mirtai’s really a rather sweet girl. She’s warm and affectionate, she really cares about her friends, and she’s strikingly beautiful. She’s got certain triggers built into her, though, and when somebody trips one of those triggers, she starts killing people. The Atan breeding programme finally went too far, I guess. The Atans become so aggressive that they started killing each other, and since such aggressiveness can’t be restricted to one sex, the women were as bad as the men. It got to the point that there was no such thing in Atan as a mild disagreement. They’d kill each other over weather predictions.’ He smiled. ‘Oscagne told me that the world discovered just how savage Atan women were in the twelfth century. A large band of Arjuni slavers attacked a training camp for adolescent Atan females – the sexes are separated during training in order to avoid certain complications. Anyway, those half-grown Atan girls – most of them barely over six feet tall – slaughtered most of the Arjuni and then sold the rest to the Tamuls as eunuchs.’

‘The slavers were eunuchs?’ Kalten asked with some surprise.

‘No, Kalten,’ Stragen explained patiently. ‘They weren’t eunuchs until after the girls captured them.’

‘Little girls did that?’ Kalten’s expression was one of horror.

‘They weren’t exactly babies, Kalten. They were old enough to know what they were doing. Anyway, the Atans had a very wise king in the fifteenth century. He saw that his people were on the verge of self-destruction. He made contact with the Tamul government and surrendered his people into perpetual slavery – to save their lives.’

‘A little extreme,’ Ulath noted.

‘There are several kinds of slavery, Ulath. Here in Atan, it’s institutionalised. The Tamuls tell the Atans where to go and whom to kill, and they can usually find a reason to deny petitions by individual Atans to slaughter each other. That’s about as far as it really goes. It’s a good working arrangement. The Atan race survives, and the Tamuls get the finest infantry in the world.’

Talen was frowning. ‘The Atans are terribly impressed with size, you said.’