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?’

But graver men answered them:  ’Hear us, ye whose wisdom has discerned so much, and discern for us how a man may escape death when two score horsemen assail him with their swords, all of them sworn to kill him, and all of them sworn upon their country’s gods; as often Welleran hath.  Or discern for us how two men alone may enter a walled city by night, and bring away from it that city’s king, as did Soorenard and Mommolek.  Surely men that have escaped so many swords and so many sleety arrows shall escape the years and Time.’

And the young men were humbled and became silent.  Still, the suspicion grew.  And often when the sun set on the Cyresian mountains, men in Merimna discerned the forms of savage tribesmen black against the light, peering towards the city.

All knew in Merimna that the figures round the ramparts were only statues of stone, yet even there a hope lingered among a few that some day their old heroes would come again, for certainly none had ever seen them die.  Now it had been the wont of these six warriors of old, as each received his last wound and knew it to be mortal, to ride away to a certain deep ravine and cast his body in, as somewhere I have read great elephants do, hiding their bones away from lesser beasts.  It was a ravine steep and narrow even at the ends, a great cleft into which no man could come by any path.  There rode Welleran alone, panting hard; and there later rode Soorenard and Mommolek,