The road was nearer than I thought. I saw a red gash less than half a mile to the east. It could only be red clay, where the road approached and crossed a rise of ground. Though the road was empty I heard an obscure and troubling sound that was no part of the forest noises. Turning my head to puzzle at it, I found I was staring down on what must be another section of the same road, startlingly near my oak, hardly fifty feet away, a spot where branches thinned out to reveal the red clay and some gravel. Confirming it, the unstable breeze brought me a whiff of horse-dung. Not fresh — this near part of the road was empty like the other, but I didn’t like it, and clambered to a lower spot where I was better hidden. Whatever the sound might mean it was fairly distant, a dry mutter not resembling either voices or a waterfall.
I cut off an end of my gray loin-rag and tied it around my bead. I don’t mind being red-haired, but it doesn’t help you look like a piece of bark. While I was busied with that, a dot of life appeared on the distant road between me and the uneasy sky.
Even far off, a human being seldom looks like any other animal. In Penn, with the Ramblers, I’ve seen the flapeared apes they call chimps, the chimpanzees of Old Time. I could always tell one of those from a man if I wasn’t drunk or spiteful. The man I saw on the red clay road was too distant for me to be sure of anything but his humanity — that rather arrogant, rather fine human stance by which even a fool can defy the lightning with a hint of magnificence — and his alertness, his observant stillness under the intermittent sun.
10
That dot of man printed against the sky was studying the road. The noise ceased while he paused, then a tiny arm swung up and forward, and the uncertain sound resumed. Men must have used that signal from ancient days, when there’s been good reason not to shout aloud: “Come ahead!”
He was followed at first by a few like himself in brown loin-rags and red-brown shirts, walking with the long stride of men used to extended journeys with light burdens. Advance scouts. The sound strengthened as the first horsemen appeared over the rise.
Feet of a mass of men and horses — having once heard the surge of it as I did that morning you’d never mistake it for anything else, whether the men are marching in rhythm or coming broken-step like the soldiers who followed that mounted detachment. This was no parade. They were coming to defend the city. I saw presently a group of men without spears surrounding a handsome motion of white, blue and gold — our Moha flag.
The advance scouts would not take much time to reach that near section of the road. I drew back all the way behind the tree-trunk, waiting. They were good — to tell of their passage I heard only a faint crunch of gravel. Then came the plop and shuffle of hoofs. I dared peek around the trunk as the cavalry went by; they’d leave it to the scouts and never think of looking upward. Thirty-six riders — a full-strength unit, I happened to know.
The horses were the breed of western Moha, mostly black or roan, with a few palominos like sunlight become flesh, all bred for grace and glory, maybe the best-looking children of my native land. Bershar is famous for horses too, by the way — mountain type, homely but steady in a crisis as these slimlegged beauties were not.
The horsemen were sleek young aristocrats. Owning their horses and gear, they’d feel they were doing the army a favor. They made a grand military picture. They wouldn’t dream of riding any horses except the beautiful breed of western Moha — hell, I’d as soon send a green girl into battle. You can’t trust them to stand, and if the rider loses control for an instant they go wild as the wind.
For most of the cavalry — the boys were that young — this would be the first war. Not so for the infantry — old faces there, furrowed by sword-work; hard-case types used to stinking rations and the rule of the bull-whip. Some were clods, others looked repulsively crafty — ex-slaves some of them, and some were petty criminals given a choice between slavery and infantry service. Any discipline they possessed had been banged into them from outside; they were men for the ugly labors, the uncelebrated dying. Except for the murders and rapes of their profession they had no pleasures but gambling, drink, cheap marawan, stealing, and whatever enjoyment can be wrung out of a fifty-cent prostitute or a complaisant drummer-boy. In their inarticulate heavy way I suppose they welcomed war and thus were good patriots. I’d say that building the infantry out of such trash was another Moha mistake — one that Katskil didn’t make. An army of men able to think like human beings may be hard to handle, but it does win wars, so far as any army ever does.
A second mounted detachment appeared on the higher ground. That meant a second battalion — three companies, each of a hundred and fifty foot, plus the mounted unit of thirty-six. A Moha regiment consists of four such battalions. As it turned out, only two battalions were on the road — Emmia had heard it wrong, or some upholstered brass in Moha City decided that since Skoar was only a half-ass city with a twelve-foot stockade, why bother with more than half a regiment?
I watched the foot-sloggers down there. Some were marching with drooping heads — tired, hot, bored. Gnarled masks, two out of three pockmarked. From time to time I saw a dull mouth-gash turn sideways to shoot the juice of a ten-cent chaw. A twist of the wind brought me their reek, more disturbing than the sight of them. An army, however. On them, people said, depended our safety from the Katskil Terror. And, yes, there was a Katskil Terror. So far as any nation can be imagined to possess a personality, that presented by Katskil was iron-gutted, ambitious, stern. A political image of course, which means, largely a fantasy: the Katskil people themselves were and are of every sort, cruel, gentle, wise, sffly, mixed-up average like the people of any nation.
I suspect the mere fact that their territory encloses Nuber the Holy City on three sides has inclined the nation (as a political fantasy imitating reality) toward a certain pious arrogance which the Church may privately deplore but will not openly condemn. Church decisions have been consistently pro-Katskil (within respectable limits) for so long now that no one expects anything else.
They streamed by below my oak tree, the sodden, witless, beaten faces. On the hill, a trumpet screamed.
Flights of arrows from both sides of the road had cut into our troops like a pair of scissors. Riders were toppling off their mounts, the horses going mad at once and plunging everywhere. No sound reached me yet but the trumpet cry.
The Katskil battalion in ambush had let half our line go by, then stabbed at the center. Moha’s flank scouts must have merely skirted the edge of the woods; perhaps some idiot thought the forest too dense for an army to hide in it. Now that the trap was sprung, the Moha men doubling back to help — if they did — would have the hill to climb, and maybe the rush of a storm in their faces, for that fitful growing wind was a northeaster.
The trumpet blast echoed inside me — three short notes and a long. I knew it must be a recall of the first battalion that was passing below my tree. It halted them. I saw grotesque faces empty with shock. Someone started a yelping: “Skoar! To Skoar!” Noise swelled hideously on the name, and a furious young voice cut through it: “Get back up there! Move, you God damn pus-gutted slobs! You heard it. Move, move, you whoreson sumbitches, move!”
Up here — well, what was in it for them? Why, up there under blackening sky, men in dark green were pouring out of the woods and killing men in brown. I heard for the first time the shattering Katskil yell. And I saw our second battalion still marching over the rise — stifi in formation, poor yucks, stepping off a cliff in a dignified manner.