Chapter Forty-three

The sky was clear and windless, and the bright sunlight was all that was necessary to raise the spirits of the Eagle Battalion. It would be bitterly cold tonight in the lean-tos of leather and brushwood—and colder still for the slaves stoking the fires around which the warriors' lean-tos would cluster; but this was now.

The three battalions of the West Kingdom army were spaced across a ten-kilometer front. Hansen didn't like to divide his forces, but the need for haste made a multi-pronged advance necessary.

A dozen warriors and a larger contingent of freemen trotted by on ponies. They were going off to hunt, both for pleasure and to supplement the expedition's rations. The hunters would have no difficulty rejoining, since the main column was limited to the stolid pacing of the draft mammoths.

"Hey, Marshal Hansen!" called Tapper from the hunting party. "Why don't you tell Wolf and Bear to go home and whittle by the fire? We'll take care of Solfygg ourself!"

Hansen waved to them cheerfully from the back of his pony.

"Damn it, Malcolm," he muttered. "I'm leading lambs to the slaughter."

A mammoth carried the one-time Duke of Thrasey in a modified baggage basket rather than a howdah on the beast's back. The trails beneath the huge conifers were broad, free from undergrowth that might scrape off the cargo. And the low-hanging basket permitted Hansen to ride alongside Malcolm, the only person alive in the Open Lands with whom Hansen shared enough background to think of as a friend.

"Not children, Hansen," Malcolm replied. "They're all old enough to know what they're doing. We were, when we were their age."

Hansen clucked his pony on a wide circuit around a tree. When he closed with the mammoth again, he said, "They're well trained, but the West Kingdom's had peace for—"

His tongue stumbled. He'd almost said, "too long"; but that was the whole point of what he was trying to do.

Wasn't it?

"For a long time, Malcolm," he said. "They don't know what a real war's like, the way w-w-you do."

Malcolm gave a cracked, crippled laugh. It sounded much like the squirrels who occasionally chattered from out of sight in the branches; but the squirrels were louder and vibrant with health.

"Colimore wasn't war, then, laddie?" Malcolm said.

"Colimore was war," Hansen replied grimly. "But most of these men—" he waved his hand in the direction of the hunting party and the head of the column "—weren't there."

"You're always looking for a stick to beat yourself with, laddie," the old man said. "I didn't understand it before, and I don't understand it now."

"I—" Hansen said.

Another giant tree separated them. As he rode around it, Hansen realized he didn't know what he had been going to say next.

"How many of the men who served at Colimore," Malcolm asked in a voice as jagged and cutting as broken glass, "deserted after you got back, Marshal?"

"We lost a couple," Hansen admitted.

"And we didn't lose a hundred and some others," the old man said, "who knew sure as hell what a real war was like. We didn't lose Tapper, for one."

"Yeah," Hansen said. "That's true."

Ravens flew silently down the column.

Hansen started. The birds' broad wings made them seem shockingly huge, more like aircraft than their lesser relatives the crows.

"You made Tapper the sub-commander of Eagle Battalion," Malcolm continued. "Good choice, that. He's twice the man his father ever was. . . . But what are his chances of surviving Solfygg, Marshal Hansen?"

"Right," said Hansen.

Malcolm's formal phrasing brought up the coldly analytical part of Hansen's mind, much the way a code word switched on a battlesuit's artificial intelligence. Hansen weighed variables—the terrain, the Solfygg array; and then factored in the certainties, the way Tapper had fought at Colimore and the way he would behave now that Marshal Hansen had honored him by promotion for his skill and courage.

"I've upgraded his armor," Hansen said. "He's got the least damaged of the suits we took off Solfygg bodies at Colimore."

He wet his lips. "But the odds aren't good. Tapper has as much chance of surviving a full-scale battle at Solfygg as you do of living another century."

The wicker container rattled softly. Malcolm shifted within it to look squarely at the man riding beside him. "And you think he doesn't know it, laddie?" he asked.

Hansen said nothing.

"Go on," the cracked voice demanded. "You know the answer. I've told you the answer."

"I lead them to die, Malcolm!" Hansen cried bitterly.

"No friend," Malcolm said. "You lead the lucky ones to die."

The basket creaked again. The old man was working a hand out of his fur wrappings with the stolid determination of a butterfly emerging from its cocoon.

"Some of us grow old and useless," Malcolm continued in the whisper that was all the voice which age had left him. "But none of us get so old that we forget we were led by Lord Hansen—back when we were men."

Hansen did not reply. He reached out and held Malcolm's hand until another tree parted them.