To Save a World by Marion Zimmer Bradley

the lower Council room. Suddenly, he felt less lonely.
    As Old Hastur had said, much of what happened in the Council room was more of the same. Regis had been hearing it for seven of his twenty-four years and it had had a familiar sound long before that. There had been, for almost a hundred years, one or another party on Darkover fascinated by Terran technology and the hypothetical benefits of joining their interplanetary civilization. They were in the smallest of minorities and seldom listened to. Once every few years the Council, or such a council as there was in these days, gave them a formal hearing, thanked them for their opinions, solemnly voted to ignore their recommendations and it was all over for a few more years. This was no exception. Regis sat in the seat marked with the insignia of the Hastur, the silver fir on the blue ground and the Hastur slogan, Permanedó (Here we remain), and looked around the ancient highseats, filled now with the merest remnant of the old laran caste; with minor nobility, younger sons, anyone who could or would take responsibility for one of the Domains.
    He could ignore the first delegation, that group of smug businessmen who called themselves the Pan-Darkovan League. They looked sleek and firm. Despite their complaints, they weren't hurting, even though, he was willing to admit, there were fat profits to be had from an expanding civilization and it hurt them to miss out.
    But when the delegation from the lower foothills of the Hellers was ushered in, Regis sat up and suddenly began to take notice.
    He knew some of the mountain men. He'd climbed with them, in the days when he could manage to get away on such trips. He'd lived at the edge of the mountains all his life. He liked them, in many ways, better than the complacent lowland people of the Domains.
    These were mountain men of the old style: booted and wrapped in thick fur shirt-cloaks, swarthy and long-haired, and although some of them were young, their faces were lined with rough weather and their eyes wrinkled with seeing into the far distances. They looked up at Regis with the old kind of respect for the Comyn caste, a direct and simple awareness; but they were wild-eyed with fatigue and grief which had been sustained much longer than men are meant to bear such things. And even though they tried to speak with stoical calm, some hint of this showed.
    Their leader was an old man, grayed and grizzled with a profile something like one of the sharp-toothed crags behind the city. He addressed himself to Old Hastur, even though Regis sat in the seat of the head of council. "I am Daniskar of the Darriel Forst," he said briefly. "I swore thirty years ago that I'd starve to death and all my family with me before we crawled down into the lowlands to ask help of the Comyn, let alone the accursed Terrans. " He looked about to spit, evidently remembered in time where he was and didn't. "But we're dying , Lord. Our children are starving. Dying."
    Mine too, thought Regis, not starving but dying, and leaned forward, speaking in the mountain tongue. " Com ' ii , I am to blame that we have heard nothing of crop failure or famine in your hills."
    Daniskar shook his head. He said, "You don't get crops back there, Lord, there's no plowed land for crops. We live off the forests. And that's the problem; we're being burned out. Vai dom , do you know how many forest fires we've had just this season? You wouldn't more than half believe me if I told you. And nothing we can do stops them. Forest fires are nothing new; I fought them before my beard was grown. I know as much as any man from the Kadarin to the Wall Around the World about forest fires. But these—nothing we can do stops them. It's as if resin fuel had been poured on them. Our beacons fail. I'd say they were being set by human hands, only what living man could be so evil? Men can kill men if they hate them, but to harm a forest so that men who never harmed them would suffer, friend and foe