He nodded with his usual solemnity. This didn't concern him.
"`They have waited months, some years, to be sacrificed,' he said almost indifferently.
`They come from all over the land. And they cannot change their fate any more than we can change ours. It is to perish in the forms of the Great Mother and her Lover.'
"I was becoming ever more desperate. I should have done anything to escape. But even now some twenty Druids surrounded the cart and beyond them was a legion of warriors. And the crowd itself went so far back into the trees that I could see no end to it.
"Darkness was falling quickly, and everywhere torches were being lighted.
"I could feel the roar of excited voices. The screams of the condemned grew ever more piercing and beseeching.
"I sat still and tried to deliver my m
