Presently Flandry left. There wasn’t going to be much sleep for anyone in the next few days. Tonight, though. He rapped eagerly on his own Iurt. Silence answered him, the wind and a distant sad mewing of the herds. He scowled and opened the door.
A note lay on his bunk. My beloved, the alarm signals have blown. Toghrul gave me weapons and a new varyak. My father taught me to ride and shoot as well as any man. It is only fitting that the last of Clan Tumuri go with the warriors.
Flandry stared at the scrawl for a long while. Finally, “Oh, hell and tiddlywinks,” he said, and dressed and went to bed.
XIV
When he woke in the morning, his cart was under way. He emerged to find the whole encampment grinding across the steppe. Toghrul stood to one side, taking a navigational sight on the rings. He greeted Flandry with a gruff: “We should be in our own assigned position tomorrow.” A messenger dashed up, something needed the chiefs attention, one of the endless emergencies of so big a group on the move. Flandry found himself alone.
By now he had learned not to offer his own unskilled assistance. He spent the day composing scurrilous limericks about the superiors who had assigned him to this mission. The trek continued noisily through the dark. Next morning there was drifted snow to clear before camp could be made. Flandry discovered that he was at least able to wield a snow shovel. Soon he wished he weren’t.
By noon the ordu was settled; not in the compact standardized laagers which offered maximum safety, but straggling over kilometers in a line which brought mutinous grumbling. Toghrul roared down all protest and went back to his kibitka to crouch over the radio. After some hours he summoned Flandry.
“Ship departing,” he said. “We’ve just picked up a routine broadcast warning aircraft from the spaceport area.” He frowned. “Can we carry out all our maneuvers while we’re still in daylight?”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Flandry. “Our initial pattern is already set up. Once he spots that from space-and he’s pretty sure to, because it’s routine to look as long and hard as possible at any doubtful planet-the skipper will hang around out there.”
His gray eyes went to a map on the desk before him. The positions of all Tebtengri units had now been radio confirmed. As marked by Toghrul, the ordus lay in a heavy east-and-west line, 500 kilometers long across the winter-white steppe. The more mobile varyak divisions sprawled their bunches to form lines slanting past either end of the stationary one, meeting in the north. He stroked his mustache and waited.
“Spaceship cleared for take off. Stand by. Rise, spaceship!”
As the relayed voice trickled weakly from the receiver, Flandry snatched up a pencil and drew another figure under Toghrul’s gaze. “This is the next formation,” he said. “Might as well start it now, I think; the ship will have seen the present one in a few minutes.”
The Gur-Khan bent over the microphone and rapped: “Varyak divisions of Clans Munlik, Fyodor, Kubilai, Tuli, attention! Drive straight west for 100 kilometers. Belgutai, Bagdarin, Chagatai, Kassar, due east for 100 kilometers. Gleb, Jahangir—”
Flandry rolled his pencil in tightened fingers. As the reports came in, over an endless hour, he marked where each unit had halted. The whole device began to look pathetically crude.
“I have been thinking,” said Toghrul after a period of prolonged silence.
“Nasty habit,” said Flandry. “Hard to break. Try cold baths and long walks.”
“What if Oleg finds out about this?”
“He’s pretty sure to discover something is going on. His air scouts will pick up bits of our messages. But only bits, since these are short-range transmissions. I’m depending on our own air cover to keep the enemy from getting too good a look at what we’re up to. All Oleg will know is, we’re maneuvering around on a large scale.” Flandry shrugged. “It would seem most logical to me, if I were him, that the Tebtengri were practicing formations against the day he attacks.”
“Which is not far off.” Toghrul drummed the desk top.
Flandry drew a figure on his paper. “This one next,” he said.
“Yes.” Toghrul gave the orders. Afterward: “We can continue through dark, you know. Light bonfires. Send airboats loaded with fuel to the varyak men, so they can do the same.”
“That would be well.”
“Of course,” frowned the chief, “it will consume an unholy amount of fuel. More than we can spare.”
“Don’t worry about that,” said Flandry. “Before the shortage gets acute, your people will be safe, their needs supplied from outside-or they’ll be dead, which is still more economical.”
The night wore on. Now and then Flandry dozed. He paid scant heed to the sunrise; he had only half completed his job. Sometime later a warrior was shown in. “From Juchi Shaman,” he reported, with a clumsy salute.” Airscouts watching the Ozero Rurik area report massing of troops, outrider columns moving northward.”
Toghrul smote the desk with one big fist. “Already?” he said.
“It’ll take them a few days to get their big push this far,” said Flandry, though his guts felt cold at the news. “Longer, if we harry them from the air. All I need is one more day, I think.”
“But when can we expect help?” said Toghrul.
“Not for another three or four weeks at the very least,” said Flandry. “Word has to reach Catawrayannis Base, its commandant has to patch together a task force which has to get here. Allow a month, plus or minus. Can we retreat that long, holding the enemy off without undue losses to ourselves?”
“We had better,” said Toghrul, “or we are done.”
XV
Captain Flandry laid the rifle stock to his shoulder. Its plastic felt smooth and uncold, as nearly as his numbed cheek could feel anything. The chill of the metal parts, which would skewer any fingers that touched them, bit through his gloves. Hard to gauge distances in this red half-light, I across this whining scud of snow. Hard to guess windage; even trajectories were baffling, on this miserable three-quarter-gee planet… He decided the opposition wasn’t close enough yet, and flowered his gun.
Beside him, crouched in the same lee of a snowbank, the Dweller turned dark eyes upon the man. “I go now?” he asked. His Altaian was even worse than Flandry’s, though Juchi himself had been surprised to learn that any of the Ice Folk knew the human tongue.
“I told you no.” Flandry’s own accent was thickened by the frostbitten puffiness of his lips. “You must cross a hundred meters of open ground to reach those trees. Running, you would be seen and shot before going half way. Unless we can arrange a distraction—”
He peered again through the murk. Krasna had almost vanished from these polar lands for the winter, but was still not far below the horizon. There were still hours when a surly gleam in the south gave men enough light to see a little distance.
The attacking platoon was so close now that Flandry could make out blurred individuals, outlined against the great vague lake. He could see that they rode a sort of modified varyak, with runners and low-powered negagrav thrust to drive them across the permasnow. It was sheer ill luck that he and his squad had blundered into them. But the past month, or however long, had been that sort of time. Juchi had withdrawn all his people into the depths of the Ice Lands, to live off a few kine slaughtered and frozen while their herds wandered the steppes under slight guard… while a front line of Tebtengri and Dwellers fought a guerrilla war to slow Oleg Khan’s advance… Skulk, shoot, run, hide, bolt your food, snatch a nap in a sleeping bag as dank as yourself, and go forth to skulk again…