A slim-witted wild hen came searching her breakfast of bugs barely ten yards off. My arrow lifted her head from her neck — she’d never miss it. I couldn’t stop to make a cooking fire, but drank the blood and dressed her off, and ate the heart, liver and gizzard raw, wrapping the rest in burdock leaves for lunchtime. I recall I gave the luckcharm no credit, although in many ways I was still quite religious.
The nearest stream began at a spring on the mountain’s northeast slope beyond my cave, a small loud brook with alders and brambles along the banks. I knew it ran two miles or so through the woods and then across the Northeast Road at a little ford. I could follow it almost to the road and then use the road as a guide, glimpsing it now and then to check my position as I traveled east — toward Levannon.
The brook covered the bottom of a scratchy tunnel, a narrow green hell. Thinking of policer dogs, I had to try it. I stuffed my moccasins in the sack again, to save them. My bare feet winced at the thought of snakes, and took a beating on the stones.
Of course when the dogs lost the scent the men would use some brains, following the brook with the dogs searching both banks. At a break where the brambles gave way to common weeds, I stepped out and walked away, to make it look as if I had given up and started back toward Skoar. I passed within grabbing reach of a big oak but went beyond it, to a thicket where I messed around a little and peed on the leaves to keep the dogs amused. Then I backtracked and swung into the oak with care to leave no damaged twigs. From the oak, by risking one leap far above ground, I passed to another tree, and then from branch to branch all the way back to the brook.
They’d at least lose time beating their gums over it, maybe decide I was a demon and sit down and wait for a priest to come help them louse it up. But I stayed with the stream another half-mile, and when I left it I did so by the way of the trees again, proceeding through the branches to another great oak. There I climbed high, to study the land.
Clouds swarmed eastward playing dark games before the sun. Edgy weather, a petulant wind stirring the oak leaves with sultry insistence. A spring storm might be advancing.
The road was nearer than I thought. I saw a red gash less than half a mile to the east. It could only be red clay, where the road approached and crossed a rise of ground. Though the road was empty I heard an obscure and troubling sound that was no part of the forest noises. Turning my head to puzzle at it, I found I was staring down on what must be another section of the same road, startlingly near my oak, hardly fifty feet away, a spot where branches thinned out to reveal the red clay and some gravel. Confirming it, the unstable breeze brought me a whiff of horse-dung. Not fresh — this near part of the road was empty like the other, but I didn’t like it, and clambered to a lower spot where I was better hidden. Whatever the sound might mean it was fairly distant, a dry mutter not resembling either voices or a waterfall.
I cut off an end of my gray loin-rag and tied it around my bead. I don’t mind being red-haired, but it doesn’t help you look like a piece of bark. While I was busied with that, a dot of life appeared on the distant road between me and the uneasy sky.
Even far off, a human being seldom looks like any other animal. In Penn, with the Ramblers, I’ve seen the flapeared apes they call chimps, the chimpanzees of Old Time. I could always tell one of those from a man if I wasn’t drunk or spiteful. The man I saw on the red clay road was too distant for me to be sure of anything but his humanity — that rather arrogant, rather fine human stance by which even a fool can defy the lightning with a hint of magnificence — and his alertness, his observant stillness under the intermittent sun.
10
That dot of man printed against the sky was studying the road. The noise ceased while he paused, then a tiny arm swung up and forward, and the uncertain sound resumed. Men must have used that signal from ancient days, when there’s been good reason not to shout aloud: “Come ahead!”
He was followed at first by a few like himself in brown loin-rags and red-brown shirts, walking with the long stride of men used to extended journeys with light burdens. Advance scouts. The sound strengthened as the first horsemen appeared over the rise.
Feet of a mass of men and horses — having once heard the surge of it as I did that morning you’d never mistake it for anything else, whether the men are marching in rhythm or coming broken-step like the soldiers who followed that mounted detachment. This was no parade. They were coming to defend the city. I saw presently a group of men without spears surrounding a handsome motion of white, blue and gold — our Moha flag.
The advance scouts would not take much time to reach that near section of the road. I drew back all the way behind the tree-trunk, waiting. They were good — to tell of their passage I heard only a faint crunch of gravel. Then came the plop and shuffle of hoofs. I dared peek around the trunk as the cavalry went by; they’d leave it to the scouts and never think of looking upward. Thirty-six riders — a full-strength unit, I happened to know.
The horses were the breed of western Moha, mostly black or roan, with a few palominos like sunlight become flesh, all bred for grace and glory, maybe the best-looking children of my native land. Bershar is famous for horses too, by the way — mountain type, homely but steady in a crisis as these slimlegged beauties were not.
The horsemen were sleek young aristocrats. Owning their horses and gear, they’d feel they were doing the army a favor. They made a grand military picture. They wouldn’t dream of riding any horses except the beautiful breed of western Moha — hell, I’d as soon send a green girl into battle. You can’t trust them to stand, and if the rider loses control for an instant they go wild as the wind.
For most of the cavalry — the boys were that young — this would be the first war. Not so for the infantry — old faces there, furrowed by sword-work; hard-case types used to stinking rations and the rule of the bull-whip. Some were clods, others looked repulsively crafty — ex-slaves some of them, and some were petty criminals given a choice between slavery and infantry service. Any discipline they possessed had been banged into them from outside; they were men for the ugly labors, the uncelebrated dying. Except for the murders and rapes of their profession they had no pleasures but gambling, drink, cheap marawan, stealing, and whatever enjoyment can be wrung out of a fifty-cent prostitute or a complaisant drummer-boy. In their inarticulate heavy way I suppose they welcomed war and thus were good patriots. I’d say that building the infantry out of such trash was another Moha mistake — one that Katskil didn’t make. An army of men able to think like human beings may be hard to handle, but it does win wars, so far as any army ever does.
A second mounted detachment appeared on the higher ground. That meant a second battalion — three companies, each of a hundred and fifty foot, plus the mounted unit of thirty-six. A Moha regiment consists of four such battalions. As it turned out, only two battalions were on the road — Emmia had heard it wrong, or some upholstered brass in Moha City decided that since Skoar was only a half-ass city with a twelve-foot stockade, why bother with more than half a regiment?
I watched the foot-sloggers down there. Some were marching with drooping heads — tired, hot, bored. Gnarled masks, two out of three pockmarked. From time to time I saw a dull mouth-gash turn sideways to shoot the juice of a ten-cent chaw. A twist of the wind brought me their reek, more disturbing than the sight of them. An army, however. On them, people said, depended our safety from the Katskil Terror. And, yes, there was a Katskil Terror. So far as any nation can be imagined to possess a personality, that presented by Katskil was iron-gutted, ambitious, stern. A political image of course, which means, largely a fantasy: the Katskil people themselves were and are of every sort, cruel, gentle, wise, sffly, mixed-up average like the people of any nation.