"What can one legion and the people of a few Pictish villages do against such an enemy?"
"You are an…experiment. Some of us wanted no more alien mercenaries. If you are good enough soldiers to beat the kzinti, and faithful, we may recruit more of you."
"Raid Earth again, you mean? To enslave more?"
"No. We are not slavers, however we may seem to you. We recruited you as we did because we had little choice in the matter. When we return to your Earth we will release you from our service with fair pay-enough to make you more than rich for life-and trust you to recruit for us. We know that enslaved conscripts do not fight as well as freely enlisted men."
That was true enough. It was one of the principles on which Rome had built her Empire.
"Besides the gold, you will have the products of our science and medicine. And I think I can promise that you will be rich in stories to tell your children."
That was worth pondering too. Rome with Jotoki weapons would be invincible indeed! Providing-and here a thought came to chill the heart-providing its enemies were no more than men! But I thought of another matter.
"By the time we see Earth again, we will be too old to make sense," I said.
"We trust not. First, you will spend time in deep sleep if needs be, and will not age. Second, we travel at near the speed of light. There is an effect at such speeds so that time seems to change. You will find when you set your feet on Terra again that less time has passed for you than might seem… Now, we must leave this region before kzinti reconnaissance returns."
But when we spoke again things had changed. There was news of other battles, more feline victories. It seemed that we would not be going home yet. When I spoke with Jegarvindertsa a few weeks later there was a change in their manner. There was less talk of possibilities of victories, or even of prolonging the war, now, more talk of fleeing. "We found you too late," they said. "There is nothing left on the ledger but to try to save some last poor remnant of our kind. We do not know if we can keep faith with you."
I showed no feeling or emotion. I had my sword by my side, and it occurred to me that the best policy would to plunge it into them then and there. Some of us had learnt something of spaceflight by then, and I thought that with a scratch crew we might still be able to get the ship back to Earth. Take the consorts by surprise and destroy them without warning.
Men had achieved such things before. I remembered the Greek story of Xenophon's march to the sea, of Odysseus and his wanderings, fighting perils and monsters. Better to die trying to get home than be lost in the stars forever. But I would try to learn a little more before I struck.
"Where will you go?" I asked.
"The universe is big."
"So I have learned. Would they follow?"
"We can accelerate to near light-speed. But so can the kzinti. The longer start we have the better."
"Where will you go ultimately? Would you head for another star cluster? Another galaxy?" I talked of these things easily now.
"It would take too long. Even if we put ourselves into hibernation, as we usually do, the air would gradually leak out through the hulls, atom by atom. Our automatics would fail, micrometeorites and free hydrogen atoms would erode hull material at last. In any event, our life systems would eventually disintegrate. So would our bodies, in hibernation or not. And so, at last, would the hulls of our ships. We can travel far, but there is a limit."
"Where will you go?" I pressed them.
"Our friend, if we do not tell you, you cannot reveal it under torture."
"I am a Roman still. I do not fear torture."
"Forgive us, but you have not experienced kzinti torture. In a matter as important as that they would not hesitate a moment. Also you know they have telepaths-think what it means to be tortured by a telepathic race, and pardon us if we do not entrust you with our most priceless secret. But perhaps we are not clear yet ourselves. We must seek among the stars for the furthest that it is practical for us or our tadpoles' tadpoles to reach."
"You will go and leave us here? To fight the kzinti alone and without hope?"
"No. Only a few of us will go. Enough, just, to crew the ships and care for the tadpoles. The rest remain to delay the kzinti."
"I see. Like Horatius."
"Who?"
"A hero of our people."
"If we defeat the kzinti, we buy not only the survival of our kind, but also the survival of your kind, perhaps. Conquer them, and you will have the ships to go where you will. Back to your own planet, perhaps. The kzinti will strike your kind sooner or later, but if it is late enough, perhaps your kind will have science enough to fight them."
"You really believe that?" I thought of the onagers and javelins of the legions and of Rome attacked by kzinti weaponry. Hannibal and his elephants had been hard enough to subdue. And the cold hand that had touched my heart at a certain vision touched it again-kzinti falling upon Earth, upon the towns and cities of the Empire, of legions marching out with eagles and trumpets and small swords and javelins to fight sword-lights and plasma cannon. All the Empire, all Terra, turned into a vast arena for humans to be hunted by beasts. Forever. Delay them, he said. But could we delay them or divert them long enough?
"All things are possible," Jegarvindertsa said. "You have barely begun to discover metal alloys, but your military and civil organization are amazingly advanced-we traded with many primitive races and we know potential when we see it."
Their strange eyes with their pupils like crosses looked deep into my eyes. Somehow-perhaps Mithras Himself spoke to me-I knew that I stood at one of those moments when the decision of a soldier may change all the world. Mithras had been a soldier.
"You have seen the star maps and you know we speak truth." Jegarvindertsa said. "Your world, your Terra, lies that way. We intend to flee. We think the kzinti will pursue us. We will draw them away from your Terra, a sector of space which they would otherwise reach within a few generations real-time."
"But you have shown us how the kzinti advance everywhere."
"In some directions faster than others. But the longer the kzinti are delayed, the better the chance we will have of escape. Which means leading their empire away from your Earth. That is also buying time for your kind to develop defenses of your own."
"Spaceships? Beam-weapons?"
"One day, perhaps. Why not? Your kind have the brain for arches and aqueducts, maps and mathematics and even a bureaucracy. That means, we think, you have the brain to build spaceships. We do not know why the gods gave your kind-plains-dwelling apes-so much brain, though they also gave it to us, colonial amphibians, and to the cursed cats. There is more brain in each of us than you-or we, or they-ever needed for mere survival. But if it happened once, if can happen again. Perhaps it is a condition of amphibianism."
"But we are not amphibians! We are not frogs or sea creatures!"
"You have poetry, art, philosophy, as well as arches and aqueducts and armies. You have religion. That makes you amphibians. That is why we argued against Jufadirvanlums that you be recruited."
"The felines appear to have all those things too."
"Yes. That is a part of the mystery. Those barbarians have a glimmering of something else as well. We have tried to civilize them and failed. Now nothing remains for us but to fight to ward off our final destruction by them. We, and the species we brought forward into the light, are doomed to be but their slaves and prey. And yet, perhaps, one day far beyond our vision, you may be the agent that…" They stopped, and their strange eyes took on a yet stranger cast, as though they were focused upon some faraway light.
"Yes?"
"Perhaps, perhaps…one day…you will civilize them. We cannot."
"We have civilized Greeks, and Gauls, and Britons. A few Caledonians. Even a few Germans. But for how long? I do not know."
"You are physically more like the kzinti than we are."