The feast was still in progress when Margaret Hale called down from the ship.

  “Get ready for it tomorrow night,” she said. “Cold front moving in; heavy clouding with it.”

  The feasters broke into cheers when this was translated. He noticed that Nancy Patterson was clutching Harmakros’ arm, and that her cheering was rather mechanical.

  The firelight glowed brighter through the fog ahead; the guardians of Tarr-Dombra had built fires at the corners of the outside walls, and there were cressets over the gate. They were watchful, but they were watching the ground; with the wet fog swirling along the mountain-top, nothing could be seen from the watchtower, and only the lower ramparts were manned.

  The aircar ahead, piloted by Nancy Patterson, hovered briefly over the tower, then moved away. After a moment, there was a faint glow, a cloth-covered flashlight. Katherine Gower, piloting the lorry in which he and twenty men were riding, brought it up over the tower. Checking the safety of his submachine gun and the sack of spare drums slung from his shoulder, he stepped down. It was a pity they had to double up on vehicles, but only a few Freyans had had any instruction on Terran firearms and none, not even Harmakros, who had only a 10-mm automatic, could be trusted with machine weapons.

  In the faint glow of the covered flashlight, Harmakros showed him the head of the spiral stairway; they started down together, the man with the flashlight behind them and the rest softshoeing after. The light was uncovered after they were around the first turn. Outside, he knew, Lisette Krull and Dave MacDonald were bringing another lorry down to the top of the keep. Then they heard voices ahead.

  There were a dozen Nostori soldiers in the vaulted room at the bottom of the steps, kneeling or stooping in a circle under a cresset, around a pair of dice and a handful of coins on the stone floor. They were completely unsuspecting; as one of them stooped for the dice and shook them between his hands, he slipped off the safety of the submachine gun and saw Harmakros lift the Colt-Argentine from his holster. Then, with shocking suddenness, a black-powder smoothbore bellowed somewhere outside, followed by the gibber of a submachine gun, and a dozen voices began yelling at once.

  The man with the dice dropped them and snatched a long pistol from his sash, cocking it. Harmakros shot him dead at once. The rest flung their hands above their heads, clapping their palms together. One or two of them cried “Treason!” Considering the direction from whence they had been assailed, that wasn’t an unreasonable assumption. Outside, the shooting stopped; the yelling continued, and the cry of treason was being raised there, too. Dave MacDonald came through the doorway from the battlements, fitting a fresh drum onto his submachine gun. From the lower and outer walls, more shooting began, mostly local black powder, with a few sharp pangs of Terran smokeless.

  Half a dozen of the black-clad commandomen came in from outside, and the twenty who had landed with him on the tower came crowding out of the stairway. They found the stairs to the floor below. When they got there, they found more of their force, with Reginald Fitzurse and Arthur Muramoto; they had gotten in by the balcony from the central court. They had a crowd of prisoners—fifteen or twenty men and several women. Only one man wore armor; most were in night-dress, including a portly and dignified if badly shaken gentleman who was evidently the castellan himself.

  That was the end of the Battle of Tarr-Dombra. By this time, landing craft were coming in with infantry, a few of them with Fitzurse’s new bayonets on their muskets. Ptosphes was with the first one, and he was the first man off, with a big red-and-blue Hostigi flag, which he insisted on raising with his own hands before he did anything else.

  “My friends,” Ptosphes was saying, when the castle was secure and they were gathered in its council-room, “you have taken Tarr-Dombra from Gormoth, a thing nobody thought possible. Now, I will give it to you, the Company of Searchers Among the Stars. And when the Nostori are driven out of the Strip, you may have such lands there as you need, to make your buildings and places to land sky-things. This will be written into the agreement which we will sign.”

  “And we will make you one of the Company of Searchers Among the Stars,” Barron replied, “with a thousand shares of common stock.” Ptosphes wasn’t quite sure what that was, but he felt that it must be a great honor. “What’ll we do with these prisoners, now?”

  “Well, the captain of the castle, Phebron, is a gentleman. He is cousin to Prince Gormoth. If you follow our customs, you will furnish oukry for himself and his family and servants and release him under pledge to pay you such ransom as you name. Any other gentlemen you will release in the same way. As to the soldiers, if they are mercenaries you may take them into your service, but you may not require them to fight against Gormoth as long as their captains are in his pay. If they are Gormoth’s own soldiers, you may put them to work, as long as they are given soldiers’ pay and soldierly treatment, but you may not require them to fight against anybody, and you must release them as soon as the war with Gormoth is over.”

  Count Phebron—at least, he had a title a few below prince—had expected an exorbitant ransom. Instead, he was told that he would be freely released if he swore never again to bear arms against the Prince of Hostigos or the Company of Searchers Among the Stars, and to be their friend in everything saving his duty to the Prince of Nostor. He’d never heard of anything like that, and said so.

  “We would rather have your friendship than any ransom of money, Count Phebron,” Barron told him. “And it won’t cost you anything.”

  The implication that neutralizing him was worth more than cash was flattering.

  “But is it honorable for me to do this?” he asked.

  “It is a common and an honorable practice among our people,” Fitzurse assured him, without adding that it was chiefly used in pacifying the Northern Hemisphere barbarians on Terra.

  “He should also swear,” Ptosphes hastened to add, “that he will tell Gormoth nothing about the Terran weapons.”

  “Oh, nothing of the sort; we want Gormoth to hear all about them, and about the sky-things. And he can tell Gormoth that we are making our own fire-seed and don’t have to depend on Styphon’s House for it. We’ll put the soldiers of Gormoth to work making it, and teach them how, and after the war they can return to Nostor and make fire-seed there.”

  Ptosphes was shocked. As soon as Phebron was out of earshot, he exclaimed angrily:

  “What god has addled your wits, Roger? I never heard of such folly, to offer to teach an enemy!”

  “Nobody who can make fire-seed is our enemy, Ptosphes, because Styphon’s House will be his. If you don’t realize that yet, it will take Gormoth time to learn it, but sooner or later he will.

  Daylight filtered down through a fog that hung heavy on both sides of the mountain. Nothing happened on the Nostor side, except that a few carts and a pack-train, bound for the Strip, were turned back by Hostigi soldiers. There was a little shooting down in the Strip, the scattered reports floating up faintly. By mid-afternoon, the refugees began coming up, a few at first and then crowds of them. They had carts, and pack and riding animals, but no meat-cattle. Most were armed. Some of them stopped and shook their fists and shouted curses as they passed the castle, but that was all they did. There were too many guns staring blackly at them from the walls, and they could see the gunners’ smoking matches.

  Luther Smith watched them pass and go down the slope on the Nostor side. He was indignant; not because they had been driven from their homes, but because they had been allowed to keep their weapons. He said so to Barron. It wasn’t the first time, Barron reflected, that he had observed the ruthlessness of an idealist committed to a war to end war.

  “You’ll notice, though, that they haven’t anything to eat.”

  Luther hadn’t; now that it was mentioned, he shrugged.

  “I don’t pity them. That land down there didn’t belong to them; they stole it from the Hostigi in the first place.”

  Well, their grandfathers had. The distinction didn’t seem important to Luther. Nostori had done it, these people were Nostori, therefore they’d done it. He changed the subject by asking Luther how soon he could get work started on the contragravity ship.

  A lot of angry people, with weapons and no food. They had all been advised, when evicted from the Strip, to go to the city of Nostor, and told that it was Prince Gormoth’s duty to provide for them. He doubted if Gormoth would see it that way, and even so it was a two days’ journey to the city, and they’d be hungry before they got there. Hungry, and armed, in a countryside full of food.

  Have to alert the fifth column by radio. Mixed among those refugees were close to a hundred Hostigi infiltrators.

  That night he and Rylla took a landing-craft into Sask to land three men and their oukry a few hours’ ride from the city. One was an oukry-trader, suspected dealer in stolen livestock; one was a hunter, suspected smuggler; the third was a known and convicted thief whose head, by rights, ought to be over the town gate at Hostigos. They had all been promised free pardons and rewards if they followed instructions and survived.

  “The only thing I’m afraid of is that Sarrask won’t believe it,” he said as they lifted and turned back toward Tarr-Hostigos.

  “He’ll believe it. It’s such a big pack of lies that nobody would stop to doubt it, and it’s just what Sarrask has been waiting for,” she said. “But why do you want him to attack us now? Why not just go on and finish Nostor at once?”

  “And have Sarrask attack while all our soldiers are north of the mountain? We have between two and three thousand, counting those hooligans from Sastragath. Gormoth has over ten thousand, which would keep our army quite busy. And Sarrask has five thousand of his own. There is a temple of Styphon, and a powder mill, in Sask. We need more powder than we have to conquer Nostor. Rylla, Reginald has a saying: ‘The long way round is the shortest road to victory.’ He knows what he’s talking about.”

  The next day started early and ended late. From before daylight all the Terrans who could be spared were piloting landing-craft and lorries, ferrying soldiers to the southern border, and by noon only the five hundred Sastragath irregulars, patrolling and pilfering in the Strip, and a hundred men under Julio Almagro at Tarr-Dombra, remained in the north. Fitzurse, Chartiphon and Prince Ptosphes went south to take command in the field.

  By noon, too, the skies had cleared, and Arthur Muramoto and Adriaan de Ruyter took airjeeps, each with a hastily instructed Freyan machine-gunner, and flew reconnaissance over Nostor. They found long columns of troops, with artillery, marching south toward Dombra Pass, where an immediate invasion was evidently expected. When caught in inviting density, they were machine gunned from the air.

  The spy radio reported consternation in the city of Nostor. Count Phebron, arriving in the morning after an all day and all night ride, had told his story. He had been accused at once of having sold Tarr-Dombra to Ptosphes and thrown into prison. There were also reports of clashes between the refugees and troops.

  The invasion from Sask came at noon of the second day after the taking of Tarr-Dombra. He was in the banquet-hall of Tarr-Hostigos, now converted into staff headquarters, with Rylla, Xentos, Adriaan de Ruyter and a few others, when Reginald Fitzurse appeared in the screen.

  “This is it,” he said. “Their cavalry crossed just above the mouth of the Darro; our pickets gave them a few shots, bolted, and radioed in, according to plan. They’re headed north along the main road to Hostigos, into the ambush we have set up for them. The main army’s close behind; we can’t observe them because we don’t want to let them see our contragravity.”

  He gave a wave-length combination; Sylvia Davock punched it on another screen. The pickup was in a tree, and occasionally a spray of long triangular leaves would swing in front of it. It looked down into an empty village street, with thatched and whitewashed cottages on either side. Among and between them, hidden from down the road, infantrymen crouched. A few had pikes or halberds; most of them had muskets, a number with bayonets. More would be inside, waiting to fire out of doors and windows. An anvil rang intermittently in the smithy, and a cowbell—worn by something that looked not at all like a cow—went clank! clank-clank. Close to the pickup somebody, in a tone of subdued fervence, was imploring somebody else to watch the point of that unprintably qualified pike.

  Then they could hear the slap-thudding of many oukry feet. The infantrymen tensed, and gunlocks clicked. There were a few shots. Then three cavalrymen in blue and red sashes and shoulder-capes came tearing, one firing a pistol behind him, and passed out of view. Their pursuers, about two hundred, in black and orange Saski sashes and the white shoulder-capes that meant mercenaries, followed.

  They got to the middle of the straggling village, and then it blew up in their faces. The front of the column became a tangle of dead and wounded oukry and unseated riders. The rear kept on for a moment, pushing the middle off the road and among the houses, where they ran into pikes and the deadly novelty of bayonets. Then a howling tide of Hostigi cavalry, swinging long swords, swept in and chased the survivors down the road. There was a distant squall of musket-fire when they ran into another ambush.

  “Main body’s crossed the river, now,” Fitzurse said, from his own screen. “They’re in two divisions, about a thousand infantry in each, one two miles behind the other. We’ll give you that from an airjeep.” He gave another combination, and Sylvia, at the other screen, punched it out. “Ground troops are just going to demonstrate in front of them and stop them; we’re going to let them form a battle-line and then bust it from the air.”

  The jeep from which this was being picked up was grounded, out of sight of the enemy. In the foreground, the Hostigi army was deploying; none of these infantrymen had bayonets, and there was a pike or halberd between every two muskets. Field-guns—the carriages were abominably clumsy—were being run into position, and troop-sized blocks of cavalry came up and skittered off to the flanks. Then one of the guns was fired, and another. The jeep rose slightly, to get a view over the heads of the infantry; the advance force of the Saski army, approaching along the road, was forming a line across the fields on either side of it. The Hostigi infantry began firing, the men in the front rank passing back empty muskets and taking loaded ones.

  “All right; here we go,” Dave MacDonald’s voice said. “Ready, Gathlon? Don’t fire till I tell you to, now, and don’t fire unless there’s something in front of your guns.”

  The vehicle rose rapidly, and the landscape below swung in the screen as it made a half-circle to get on the Saski left flank. Then it came rushing down on the enemy, and Dave yelled, “Let them have it, Gathlon!”

  The blocks of cavalry on the flank simply exploded in all directions, leaving a residue of a few dead men and oukry. The infantry saw what was happening and bolted, all but a few with sluggish reflexes or the optimism to try to hit an airjeep with a smoothbore flintlock. A caisson beside one of the field-pieces blew up with a bang. The cavalry at the other end of the line simply weren’t there.

  By the time the jeep had turned and was approaching what had started out as a battle, two more jeeps and an aircar were at work, firing ahead of bunches of fugitives to stop them, and amplified voices were shouting offers of quarter. Whole companies were surrendering to aircraft, and Hostigi cavalry were arriving to disarm them.

  “Well, that was the Battle of Whatzit,” Fitzurse said. “Nancy and Harmakros and Lisette each have a jeep; they caught the other gang, a couple of miles south, and are herding them north under arms till somebody can take their surrender. Can you leave what you’re doing and come down and give a hand?”

  They began to hear firing, ahead, and Rylla, who was piloting the car, put on speed. It wasn’t fighting, though. About a thousand Saski troops had been marched into fields beside the road and were discharging their muskets to empty them before stacking them in surrender. There were two landing-craft on the ground and a third lifting out, and a couple of hundred Hostigi, some of them infantry on captured oukry, were guarding the prisoners. Some trestle-tables had been set up, and as Rylla brought the car down he could see Ptosphes and Fitzurse and Chartiphon and a number of others, among them a dozen Saski in long black and orange cloaks and gilded armor, but without swords or daggers.

  There were introductions. One of the Saski was a brother of Prince Sarrask, and the rest were dukes or counts or the equivalent. They were arguing about the pledge of peace and friendship, to which the Saski objected.

  “But it is a well-known and honorable usage of war, on our world,” Fitzurse was saying.

  “You’re not on your world, now!” the brother of Sarrask retorted, with a belligerence the circumstances didn’t quite justify.

  “I wonder about that,” one of his companions said. “A few more battles like this one and it’ll be their world. Peace and friendship with these people might be worth having.”

  Ptosphes stepped aside a little. He looked as though the merry-go-round was going too fast for him.

  “Roger, what are we going to do with these people?” he whispered.

  “Can you trust this brother of Sarrask’s?”

  “Great Dralm, no! Not even chained in a dungeon! He’s a bigger villain than Sarrask, and has twice as much wit. This war, and everything else, was his idea. All Sarrask cares for is wine and feasting and beautiful women.”

  “Then he’s our boy. Long live Sarrask, Prince of Sask, vassal of King Ptosphes of Hos-Hostigos.”

  The conquest of Sask turned out to be a large-scale Tarr-Dombra operation in triplicate. Charley Clifford was in charge of the taking of the temple farm, three miles southeast of the city; most of the men he had with him had been workers at the Hostigos powder mill, and it was hoped that they would know what not to do to avoid blowing the place up. Reginald Fitzurse took command of the detachment to take the temple itself, making a cryptic remark to the effect that dealing with turbulent priests was a Fitzurse tradition. The main force, led by Barron, Chartiphon and Ptosphes, took the citadel-palace in the center of the city. At all three the surprise was complete, and only at the third was there any serious fighting.

 

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