"Of course, sir."

I swallowed, knowing that it was useless to try to forget the crimson horsemen who would so quickly overwhelm us. "Suppose that I were to order you-you alone-to do it now. Would you, Captain Adatta?"

"Of course," she repeated. "My son's there, sir."

"I see. You don't need me to go along the walls behind General Inclito, Captain. Do it yourself. No better example of courage is to be had."

The silver notes of a bugle sounded far off.

Adatta unslung her slug gun. "Here they come, Master. You'd better get down."

The cavalry surged forward, and almost at once a score of horses fell. Rimando was waving to me frantically, but I shook my head while sympathizing with what he must have felt. I heard Adatta say "Shoot! Why don't they shoot?" under her breath.

The first trip rope had been cut or broken. More crimson-and-purple horsemen surged forward. Some were slashing at the winter wheat with their swords, and I saw one horse leap a fallen horse and rider magnificently. Two fell together almost at once; the indignant squeals of Atteno's pigs carried across the wheat field to us as clearly as the bugle.

The boys fired, a ragged crash followed by the rasping rattle of hundreds of fore-ends pulled back to expel hundreds of empty cartridges and pushed forward again to bring hundreds of fresh rounds into hundreds of chambers.

Adatta tugged at the leg of my trousers to get my attention. "Can I now, sir?"

I nodded, meaning that she should return to the walls; but before I could stop her, she was running down the line of boys, shouting encouragement and patting shoulders.

For a minute or more it seemed that the cavalry might never actually reach our long ditch. The trip ropes delayed it as I had intended, and in fact broke the legs of scores of horses. Against the greater charge of the Soldese cavalry, Atteno's boars made their own lesser charges again and again, working one another into a foaming fury that had many of the horsemen reigning up to shoot at them even as their fellow troopers fell from our fire.

Then a valiant trooper, virtually alone, broke from the rest and charged our line at full gallop. His horse jumped the last of our trip ropes only to plunge headlong into the snow-filled long ditch.

As it did, the hedgerow seemed to explode. Stars flew from it, and devils of red and blue, orange and yellow fire careened among the horses, whining, whizzing, shrieking and howling, lurching, and swerving before detonating in clouds of colored smoke and flying sparks.

"Make bang." Oreb announced self-importantly as he settled upon my staff. "Horse come. Come hole." Or at least that is what I think he said-it was hard to hear him over the noise of the fireworks.

Nor did I greatly care what he had said just then. Grateful for its new warmth, I pushed Hyacinth's azoth back into my waistband; and seeing Rimando running toward me, climbed down from the stile and walked calmly (I hope) toward him, careful to swing my staff and plant it solidly with every step, so that Oreb fidgeted and flapped on the handle, and at last abandoned it for my shoulder.

"May we open fire, sir?" Rimando called.

I waited until we were nearer, then said in a low tone, "Lieutenants may run, Captain. Captains walk."

"Yes, sir." He halted, drew himself up, and saluted. "Shall we open fire, sir?"

"You are sighted on the area behind the line of infantry facing us, as I instructed you?"

"Yes, sir."

"In that case, you may open fire as soon as the enemy's cavalry has been stampeded well into that area, Captain."

"They're in there now, sir." He pointed.

"Then you may open fire."

He spun about and dashed back toward the haystack gun, shouting; even so, it seemed to me a very long time before it spoke, and its first shot set the hay on fire so that half the crew had to fight the fire before it reached the ammunition, leaving only two men to load and fire.

The gun in the barn fired soon afterward-I got the impression that its crew had heard the first shot, and verified its elevation and direction one final time before pulling the lanyard. Almost at once, the gun in the wood by the river, the largest and most distantly sited of all, thundered forth so deeply that it seemed to me that I could feel it shake the ground.

After that, I paid little attention to which gun happened to fire at which time, or which was having the greatest effect on our enemy's troops. Inclito had an officer in the tree in front of the farmhouse, from which he was signaling about such matters with a yellow-and-black flag on a stick; and although I had been told what the two waves overhead meant, and the four waves down, and the rest of it, I had forgotten most of the code already. Whatever signals were sent, our shells were bursting among the enemy, striking stony ground and throwing up geysers of ocher dust and flying rock that only looked small to me as I hurried forward to our walls of earth-filled bags lined with women and elderly men; they were enormous and very dangerous, I knew, to thousands of terrified Soldese troopers, and to hundreds of horses already frantic with fear.

"More bang," Oreb muttered; and a young woman with brawny arms and a broad grin said, "Looks pretty good, don't it, Master Incanto?"

I nodded and told her, "We have to destroy that cavalry before it can make a second attempt," speaking as seriously as I might have to Inclito.

"They know our tricks now, I guess."

"That's so, and there can't be many fireworks left." As I spoke, I was looking for a way to climb over her wall as I had climbed Mattak's on Gold Street, but there was no helpful, murderous sergeant on the other side of this one to give me a hand up, only a deeper ditch full of snow.

Another woman exclaimed, "We've won!"

I shook my head and frowned at her. "Not yet, though we will win."

Like ghosts, I could see their corpses at the foot of the wall, dead women with open staring eyes, and dead men, their gray beards (their white beards) dyed with their own blood. Auk had taken off his undershirt to hang it out of the window of the Juzgado; but that undershirt had been as red as the old men's beards, and I had none, red or white, although a woolen undershirt would have been a comfort that day in that wind.

Another woman said, "They'll still come at us, won't they?," and this woman had her hair bound up in a white cloth and stood beside a wooden case of slug-gun cartridges. I got her to give me her cloth and tied it around my staff, and went to the end of the wall, where at Sfido's insistence we had left a narrow space between walls and between ditches.

Someone-I think the first woman to whom I had spoken-called, "They'll shoot you," and Oreb muttered uneasily, "No bang."

Each step was harder than the last. I reached the point I had marked with my eye as the midpoint and realized that it was not, and advanced step by uneasy step after that, waving my flag to signal one thing and one thing only, over and over. Had Maytera Marble felt like this while I, from a place of relative safety, watched her advance with steady strides toward Blood's villa?

"I have her new eye in my pocket," I told Oreb. "Maytera Marble's. You recall Maytera Marble, I hope?"

"Iron girl."

"That's the one. If I'm killed, you are to take her new eye to her."

I got it from my pocket to show to him, and he said, "Man come. No shoot."

Colonel Terzo was advancing toward me. He had a needier in his hand instead of a flag of truce. "You are killing our men," he said, "killing our horses."

"We will gladly stop," (I am afraid I sounded apologetic) "as soon as you give us any reason to do so."

"I should shoot you where you stand!"

"I have been shot before," I told him, and it affected him more than I would have anticipated; the hand that held the needier shook visibly, and although he was still too distant for me to be certain it appeared to me that he turned pale.