The Molts would not forget, the survivors watching from distant hills with the representatives of the other themes. There was no need to rub their broad noses in it, that was all.
"General Radescu," said a voice. "Sir?"
Radescu turned, surprised but so much a man living on his nerves that no event seemed significantly more probable than did any other. "Yes?" he said. "General Forsch?"
Profile Bourne watched the chief of staff with the expression of disdain and despair which had summed up his attitude toward all the local forces—until the Oltenian line had made the assault beside him. Even those men were poofs again when they donned their carnival uniforms.
The sergeant's hands were linked on his breastplate, but that put them adequately near to his slung submachine gun. The reason the two Slammers had given for continuing to guard Radescu was a valid one: a single disaffected Molt could destroy all chances of peace by publicly assassinating Alexander Radescu. The general had not been impelled to ask whether or not that was the real reason.
Forsch was nervous, looking back at the divisional generals two paces behind him for support. Iorga nodded to him with tight-lipped enthusiasm.
"Sir," the lanky chief of staff continued, though he seemed to be examining his expression in the mirrors of Radescu's gilded boots, "I—we want to say that . . ."
The hills whispered with the rush of an oncoming aircraft. That, and perhaps the sculptured placidity of Radescu's face, brought Forsch back to full functioning. "You may have sensed," he said, meeting his commander's eyes, "a certain hostility when you announced your appointment to us."
"I surprised you, of course," Radescu murmured to make Forsch easier about whatever he intended to say. The great cargo plane commandeered to bring the Tribunes to sign the accords was visible a kilometer away, its wing rotors already beginning to tilt into hovermode fortheset-down. "Allof you performed to the highest expectations of the State."
"Yes," the chief of staff said, less agreement than an acceptance of the gesture which Radescu had made. "Well. In any case, sir—and I speak for all of us—" more nods from the officers behind him "—we were wrong. You were the man to lead us. And we'll follow you, the whole army will follow you, wherever you choose to lead us if the peace talks break down."
Lord and his martyrs, thought Alexander Radescu, surveying the faces of men up to twice his age, they really would. They would follow him because he had gotten something done, even though some of the generals must have realized by now that he'd have shot them out of hand if they stood in the way of his intent. Lord and martyrs!
"I—" Radescu began; then he reached out and took Forsch's right hand in his and laid the other on the tall officer's shoulder. "General—men—the peace talks won't fail." It was hard to view the quick negotiations between Ferad and himself as anything so formal that they could have been "broken off," but it was the same implicit dependence on bureaucratic niceties which had turned the war into a morass on the human side. "But I appreciate your words as, as much as I appreciated the skill and courage, the great courage, the whole army displayed in making this moment possible."
The Molts' problem had been the reverse of the self-inflicted wound from which the Oltenian Army had bled. The autochthons were too independent ever to deal the crushing blows that their ability to concentrate suddenly would have permitted them. Each side slashed at one another but struggled with itself, too ineffective either to win or to cease. And the same solution would extricate both from the bloody swamp: leaders who could see a way clear and who were willing to drive all before them.
"She's coming in," said Profile Bourne, not himself part of the formalities but willing to remind those who were of their duties. General Forsch wrung his superior's hand and slipped back to his place a pace to the rear, while the aircraft settled with a whining roar that echoed between the hills.
Debris and bodies had been cleared from the broad archway, and for the occasion the flagstone pavement had even been polished by a crew which ordinarily cared for the living quarters of general officers. Radescu had toyed only briefly with the thought of resodding the shell scars and wheel tracks. The valley's rocky barrenness was the reason it had become a Molt center, and nothing the human attack had done changed its appearance significantly. It was perhaps well to remind the Tribunate that this was not merely a human event, that the autochthons watching from vantage points kilometers distant were a part of it and of the system the treaty would put into effect for the remainder of the planet's history.
The aircraft's turbines thrummed in a rapidly descending rhythm when the oleo struts flexed and rose again as the wheels accepted the load. Dust billowed from among the russet grassblades, bringing General Radescu a flashback of a hillside descending in a welter of Molt bodies as the penetrators lifted it from within. He had been so frightened during that bombardment . . . .
The rear hatchway of the big cargo plane was levering itself down into an exit ramp. "Attention!" Radescu called, hearing his order repeated down the brief ranks as he himself braced. Most of the army was encamped five kilometers away in a location through which the troops had staged to the final assault. There they nervously awaited the outcome of this ceremony, reassured more by the sections of Hammer's men with detection gear scattered among them than they were by Radescu's promises as he rode off.
He'd done that much, at least, built trust between the indigenous and mercenary portions of his army on the way to doing the same between the intelligent species which shared the planet. It occurred to Alexander Radescu as he watched a pair of light trucks drive down the ramp, the first one draped with bunting for the ceremony, that wars could not be won: they could only be ended without having been lost. The skirmishes his troops had won were important for the way they conduced to the ends of peace.
The chairs draped in cloth-of-gold made an imposing-enough background for the Tribunes, but no one seemed to have calculated what uneven ground and the truck's high center of gravity would do to men attempting to sit on such chairs formally. Radescu suppressed a smile, remembering the way he had jounced on the back of the jeep.
That experience and others of recent days did not prevent him from being able to don a dress uniform and the makeup which had always been part of the persona he showed the world; but a week of blood and terror had won him certain pieces of self-knowledge which were, in their way, as important to him as anything he had accomplished in a military sense.
The driver of the lead truck tried to make a sweeping turn in order to bring the rear of his vehicle level with the red carpet which had been cut in sections from the flooring of the living trailers of high officers. An overly abrupt steering correction brought an audible curse from one of the men in the back of the vehicle, men who looked amazingly frail to Alexander Radescu after a week of troops in battledress.
Hawker and Bourne had kept a settled silence thus far during the makeshift procession until the six guards in scarlet—none of them were below the rank of major—jumped from the second truck to help the Tribunes down the steps welded to the back of the first. At the Honor Guard's appearance, Enzo Hawker snorted audibly and Radescu felt an impulse to echo the Slammer's disdain.
And yet those men were very similar to Radescu himself in background; not quite so well connected, but officers of the Tribunal Honor Guard for the same reason that Alexander Radescu was a general. That he was a man who could lead an army while they, with their rhodium-plated pistols, could not have guarded a school crossing, was an individual matter.