It was the issue of the War Dog that saved Chuntar Cardinal Hadala and his officers from death at the hands of a Grasshopper war party. The occasion of the issue being raised was a council called when the news of Hadala’s invasion first came to the Grasshopper leadership. Demon Light became livid, and was quite ready to launch an immediate attack on the cardinal’s forces. For negotiating purposes, it always behooved a Grasshopper sharf to take a harder line in council than he expected the grandmothers to approve. But it was his own sister who used the issue of the War Dog against him after Eltür proposed killing Hadala and anyone else who resisted a seizure of the militia’s wagons.
“It is a complete betrayal, my sister,” said Demon Light before he yielded. “Brownpony’s plan was for the Suckamint spooks to attack in the Province, and the eastern allies to strike at the other shore of the Great River. The Grasshopper was to keep the peace until Hannegan took the forces which now face us to the defense of his allies. Now here comes this army of farmer clowns out of Valana tramping toward Glep Valley with guns! How is Filpeo Harq not to notice them coming? Every motherless one south of here has seen them and tried to sell the information to Texark. The first one who tried probably got paid.”
“Yes, and I wonder,” his sister said thoughtfully, “if the motherless one who told Texark about your war dogs was properly paid. And whether your dogs will affect Hannegan’s temptation to weaken the forces that face us. No, I don’t think Grasshopper justice demands killing the fools; it demands they turn back. You should let them choose: take their guns with them or surrender them to you. And that, my sharf, is the Weejus consensus.”
Demon Light let his battle fury subside, as it usually did in the face of the Weejus consensus, if no Bear Spirit objection arose. After the council, Bråm assembled a force of eighty warriors and led them south by east to intercept this mounted militia of townsmen from the mountains. His men had armed themselves with new five-shooters as well as traditional lances, but Eltür ordered ten repeating rifles brought along for killing officers at a distance if they met resistance from the townsmen.
Then he took an action which changed the course of the war. He sent for Black Eyes, who had been captured during Hultor’s raid. The man had been imprisoned by the Hannegan and had met Cardinal Brownpony in jail, but he was released months later to carry a message from Filpeo to his horde. Both Demon Light and the Emperor knew Black Eyes was a double agent, but as such he could be useful to both.
“Tell your contacts about Hadala’s expedition,” said the sharf, “so they can mount a defense in that area. And tell them I told you to tell them. If they want to know why I let them know, explain that I want hostilities to cease between the Grasshopper and Texark.”
“The farmers will be glad to hear it,” said Black Eyes with a snicker; he left camp immediately for the frontier.
Demon Light was not really turning on his allies, because he was not convinced of his own complaint of betrayal by the Pope, for while Brownpony alone might be foolish enough to launch such a venture, Brownpony had good advisers on Nomad affairs. Some were sent to him by Holy Madness, Lord of the Hordes. And Eltür thought highly of one of the Pope’s secretaries, the Nomadic interpreter monk Nyinden, who spoke Grasshopper so well. None of these counselors would allow Brownpony to believe that Chuntar Hadala’s incursion into Nomad country was acceptable to the Grasshopper, even were it not militarily stupid on the face of it. When his initial berserk reaction to the news of the advent subsided, Demon Light expected his war party to be confronted—not by a force of official crusaders launched by a Pope, but by a motley parade put in motion by the lunacy of lesser men.
When Brownpony first learned about Hadala’s mission, he himself cried betrayal, and his anger was stirred against his successor in the Secretariat of Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Concerns. The Pope could think of no reason why Sorely Nauwhat would betray him or lend support to a harebrained scheme to arm and assist such dubious allies as Hadala’s flock of gleps in the Valley, at the cost of probable hardening by Texark of its western frontier. Hadala had gone crazy in the service of his flock, the Pope decided. He would think thus: If Brownpony can arm the Nomads, I can arm the real Children of the Pope—not the spooks in the Suckamints, but the gleps in the Watchitah and Ol’zarks. The Pope could understand Hadala’s passion for his own people, but not Sorely Nauwhat’s duplicity in the ridiculous undertaking.
The possibility that his old friend Nauwhat had simply gone over to the enemy never occurred to Brownpony until it was put to him by Abraha Cardinal Deacon Linkono, the New Jerusalemite schoolteacher who was invited to join the Curia because he knew everyone in this nation now playing host to the papacy.
“But what could Filpeo Harq possibly offer that would tempt Sorely Nauwhat to betray us?” Pope Amen II wanted to know.
“The papacy perhaps?” the schoolteacher guessed.
Stung by Linkono’s speculation, Brownpony sent an immediate message to Valana ordering Cardinal Nauwhat and Brother St. George to appear before him. By including Blacktooth in his summons, the Pope hoped to alleviate suspicion in case Sorely really was guilty. Within two weeks, however, the messenger returned with the news that Blacktooth had gone with the Valanan Militia, and that Nauwhat had disappeared shortly after their departure. The news was very depressing to Brownpony. He called his Nomad messengers and instructed one of them to pursue Hadala’s militia and order him to turn back. He deputized another as an Officer of the Curia to arrest Nauwhat on sight if found in Nomad country and to arrest Hadala if he disobeyed the order to retreat. He sent a third messenger to assure the Grasshopper sharf that Hadala’s sortie was not authorized, for the Pope feared the wrath of Demon Light.
The Nomad messenger-service families, both Wilddog and Grasshopper, had for decades enjoyed a monopoly on a High Plains relay parcel delivery between Valana and New Rome. They kept fixed camps, and for this un-Nomadic practice they were not admired within their hordes. Sneering warriors would ask to see their “vegetable patches.” But they had made money, and they used it to buy horses from outsiders, thus freeing themselves from family obligations incurred by both buyer and seller when the seller was a Nomad mare woman. Brownpony had always used the relay families for communicating with the sharfs and the tribal chiefs. Now he used them for keeping in touch with the Qæsach dri Vørdar, and he was encouraging the families to establish relay stations north of the Misery River and well beyond the reach of Texark patrols. He had already sent messages toward the King of the Tenesi and several other rulers beyond the Great River, and he was awaiting news from that front.
To New Jerusalem Brownpony had brought two Wilddog and two Grasshopper riders to open a branch office of the families’ service. In the abrupt wake of Nauwhat’s and Sorely’s defection, he now found need for three of them. To one Grasshopper rider he gave a message for Demon Light. It “authorized” Bråm to exercise the papal warrant for the arrest of two princes of the Church in his territory with authorization to imprison them humanely. Forgetting for a moment that the Pope understood their dialect, this Grasshopper rider said to his kinsman, “Our sharf will surely appreciate these new powers in his own realm.”