“I wonder that the guards let him cross the border!”
“I doubt that he came through the skirmishing zone, Sire. He probably crossed from the Province.”
“By way of Leibowitz Abbey, I dare say, for he was with a monk of theirs. Right now, I want you to send one of your chaplains to bring Brownpony to me. Let a military policeman go with him. Let them not take no for an answer. Bring that monk along too.”
Colonel Father Pottscar hurried away. The Hannegan glanced curiously at Admiral e’Fondolai and asked, “I don’t remember calling you here. Do we need the Navy to fight Nomads on the Plains? Not that you aren’t welcome—”
“I asked him to come,” explained General Goldæm. “Brownpony inherited six alien warriors from a cardinal who died in conclave, and Carpy here knows something about their race and nation. We might need to know.”
The admiral frowned. Carpios Robbery had been e’Fondolai’s nom de guerre in his pirate days, when he had become the second man since antiquity to circumnavigate the globe, but he hated to be called “Carpy,” especially in the presence of his Hannegan.
They entered the conference room. First, the Emperor asked about the status of the forces protecting new farming lands, and any further encounters with the Grasshopper people. Told they had drawn back defensively, Filpeo ordered there be no punitive raids by Texark forces until he so commanded. He then stated, “If I were a Grasshopper war sharf, I would make an alliance with the Wilddog to strike the Province. I would cut the telegraph line in several places. The Wilddog will cut the Province in half, while Grasshopper strikes toward Texark. What is your response?”
Colonel Father Pottscar entered the room and nodded to Filpeo.
Colonel Holofot spoke. “They can destroy, but they cannot hold. Such an invasion can be no more than a massive cavalry raid. Our forts would remain secure. They might massacre the Jackrabbit settlers and the colonists, but they would quickly exhaust themselves and be driven back, as in the Grasshopper raid.”
General Goldæm looked levelly at his ruler and shook his head. “Your scenario is improbable, Sire. When they began establishing winter quarters after the war, they became vulnerable. If they attacked the south, they know our cavalry would strike in the north at their family settlements, which would not be well defended. When the hordes were entirely mobile, they could retreat forever. They could lead pursuers to exhaustion. Now they have fixed property. It’s vulnerable. They have no infantry to take or hold ground.”
“Suppose the Jackrabbit revolted and joined the invaders?”
“We have kept them disarmed,” said the engineer, Colonel Holofot. “What will they fight with, pitchforks?”
“No, but if they could provide the invaders with food, water, shelter, and places to hide,” said the general. “The question is: would they? The Jackrabbit has bitter memories of the Northerners, for the wild hordes were contemptuous of the Jacks. Frankly, to me it seems a tossup whether they hate us more, or the Northerners. But even with Jackrabbit support, Colonel Holofot is right. A mass cavalry attack would exhaust itself in the south, and the northern underbelly would be exposed. They would be more likely to strike the farmlands north of the Valley, uh, north of the Watchitah Nation, and that is what we are not well prepared for yet. But we are preparing fast, and the whole border will be fortified in two years. The surviving farmers there are well armed now, and since the raid, they have a lot of hate for Nomads. We have the troops to back them up, but not to attack prematurely, because we have the same problem in the north as they in the south.”
“And that is?”
“We can attack and kill, but we don’t have the men or the logistics to occupy Grasshopper territory. Unless, of course, we weaken our forces in the Province.”
Filpeo became thoughtful. “I wonder,” he said, “why is it that these farms on the eastern fringe, which get more rain, are not as productive as the refugee lands at the foot of the Rockies, where the land is said to be nearly a desert?”
There was a brief silence. The Hannegan’s remarks seemed almost idle, having nothing to do with the Nomad as a military problem.
“Sire, that question is outside my field,” said the commanding general. “But it may have something to do with discipline. As you know, ours are free peasants, and they work mostly for themselves. When you say ‘productive,’ you mean it in terms of commercial crops. The ex-Nomads are sharecroppers, working for landowners, especially the Bishop of Denver. They are forced to work, and they grow only a few crops.”
“I think that is not an explanation,” said Father Colonel Pottscar. “And it’s not quite true. The ex-Nomads learned from the mountaineers, who have been dry-farming for centuries. And as for the rainfall—there is a monastery in the hills north of Valana where the monks keep records of events in the heavens, waiting for the coming of the Lord. One of the things they keep track of is rain, because they pray for the weather. They say the rainfall on the western side of the mountains is now nearly twice what it was eight hundred years ago. That, and that alone, is your miracle of the ex-Nomad farms. Of course, the monks think it’s their miracle, answering eight centuries of prayer. But the runoff for irrigation is better than in ancient times, miracle or no.”
“Well, doesn’t the increase apply to the whole Plains?” asked the Monarch.
“Their records are local. I can’t say. Thon Graycol points out that there are no very old trees in the edges of our forests where the prairie begins looking eastward. That suggests our tree line has been moving slowly westward for a few centuries, but nobody is sure. The Nomads may have cut the older trees for wood.”
“Well,” said General Goldæm, “if nature is closing in on them from the east and the west, they’re going to lose their precious desert anyway. We’ll just give nature a hand in their extinction.”
“Extinction? I don’t want to hear that word again, General,” Filpeo Harq said sharply. “Pacification and containment are the goals, not extermination. We have achieved that in the south. The Jackrabbit population is stable.”
“Except that their young men keep running away to join outlaw bands.”
“The northern Nomads kill most of those. One way, maybe the only way, to secure the area between the forests and the western mountains is to colonize.”
“How, Sire? Except along the eastern fringe, the land is poor, the water scarce, and the weather horrid. Who could, who would live there but wild herdsmen?”
“Tame herdsmen, and a tamer breed of cattle,” said Filpeo Harq. “Fenced ranches, as in the south. Some places down there, they use yellowwood trees for fences. If you plant them a foot apart and keep them pruned, they make hedges dense enough and thorny enough to keep cattle in. There may not be enough water for agriculture, but wells can be dug to water stock. Some land can be fenced, farther north where the cold kills yellowwood. We hold much forested land in the east. Enough timber can be shipped to settlers, and they’ll pay with beef and hides. And I’m not so sure agriculture is impossible either. The university is studying that problem. Until civilized men can live there, the Plains will remain an obstacle. The Pope might as well be living on the moon, and there is no way to unify the continent.”