"A victory," V'Zek shouted. "We've taught it respect."

His warriors cheered. The thing was still there; they could see it faintly and still catch its sound, though that was muted now. But they had made it retreat. Maybe it had not been slain or broken or whatever the right word was, but they must have hurt it or it would not have moved away at all. The panic was gone.

But if V'Zek had managed to hold his army together, he still felt fury at the buzz which remained, to his way of thinking, all too audible. The sky-thing showed no sign of departing for good. It hung over the camp like, like?on a world where nothing flew and only a few creatures could glide, he failed to find a simile. That only made him angrier.

"What's it doing up there?" he growled. At first it was a rhetorical question. Then the chieftain rounded on Z'Yon. "Shaman, you lay claim to all sorts of wisdom. What is it doing up there?"

Z'Yon was glad he had been working through that question in his own mind. "My master, I do not think it came here merely to terrify us. Had that been the aim, it would be more offensive than it is. But for its, ah, strangeness, in fact, it does not seem to seek to disturb us."

V'Zek made an irregular clicking noise. The sky-thing was disturbing enough as it was. Yet Z'Yon had seen a truth: it could have been worse. "Go on," the chieftain urged.

"From the way it hangs over us?and keeps on hanging there?my guess is that somehow it passes word of us to the Soft Ones and, I suppose, to the T'Kai as well. I say again, though, my master, this is only a guess."

"A good one," V'Zek said with a sinking feeling. Hanging there in the sky, that buzzing thing could watch everything he did. At a stroke, two of his main advantages over T'Kai disappeared. His army was more mobile than any the city-dwellers could patch together, and he knew with no false modesty that he surpassed any southron general. But how would that matter, if T'Kai learned of every move as he made it?

He clicked again, and hissed afterward. Maybe things could not have been worse after all.

B'Rom peered into the screen Greenberg was holding. "So that is the barbarians' army, is it?" the vizier said. "Does their leader camp always in the same place within the host?"

"I'd have to check our tapes to be sure, but I think so," Greenberg answered cautiously; B'Rom never asked anything without an ulterior motive. "Why?"

The chief minister's eyestalks extended in surprise. "So I can give proper briefing to the assassins I send out, of course. What good would it do me to have them kill some worthless double-pay trooper, thinking all the while they were slaying the fierce V'Zek?"

"None, I suppose," Greenberg muttered. He had to remind himself that the M'Sak had not invaded the T'Kai confederacy for a picnic. Drone shots of what was left of C'Lar said that louder than any words.

B'Rom said, "Do you think our agents would be able to poison the barbarians' food, or will we have to use weapons to kill him? We would find fewer willing to try that, as the chances for escape seem poor."

"So they do." The master merchant thought for a moment, then went on carefully, "Excellency, you know your people better than I ever could. I have to leave such matters of judgment in your hands." He knew the translator would spit out the appropriate idiom, probably something like in the grasp of your claws.

The minister went click-click-hiss, sounding rather, Greenberg thought unkindly, like an irritated pressure cooker. "Do not liken me to the savages infesting our land." He glared at Greenberg from four directions at once, then suddenly made the rusty-hinge noise that corresponded to a wry chuckle. "Although I suppose from your perspective such confusion is only natural. Very well, you may think of yourself as forgiven." He creaked again and scurried away.

No doubt he's plotting more mischief, Greenberg thought. That was one of the vizier's jobs. The old devil was also a lot better than most G'Bur?most humans, too, come to that?at seeing the other fellow's point of view, very likely because he believed in nothing himself and found shifting position easy on account of that.

The T'Kai army moved out. Greenberg, Marya, and Koniev tramped along with the G'Bur. Even the locals' humblest tools would have fetched a good price on any human world. The water-pots they carried strapped to their left front walking-legs, for instance, were thrown with a breathtaking clarity of line the Amasis potter would have envied. And when they worked at their art, the results were worth traveling light-years for.

The T'Kai treated their land the same way. The orchards where they grew their tree-tubers and nuts were arranged like Japanese gardens, and with a good deal of the same spare elegance. The road north curved to give the best possible view of a granite boulder off to one side.

Greenberg sighed. The M'Sak cared little for esthetics. They were, however, only too good at one art: destruction. The master merchant wished he had a warship here instead of his merchant vessel. He wished for an in-atmosphere fighter. Neither one appeared.

"I didn't think they would," he said, and sighed again.

"Didn't think what would?" Marya asked. He explained. She said, "How do the M'Sak know the Flying Festoon isn't a warship?"

"Because it won't blast them into crabcakes, for one thing."

"Will it have to? They've never seen it before. They've never seen anything like it before. If a starship drops out of the sky with an enormous sonic boom and lands in front of them, what do you think they'll do?"

Greenberg considered. As far as he knew, no offworlders had ever visited the M'Sak. He laughed out loud and kissed Marya on the mouth. She kissed him back, at least until a couple of G'Bur pulled them apart. "Why are you fighting?" the locals demanded.

"We weren't," Greenberg said. "It's a?"

"Mating ritual," Marya supplied helpfully.

The G'Bur clacked among themselves. The translator, doing its duty, laughed in Greenberg's ear. He didn't care. He thought what the G'Bur did to make more G'Bur was pretty funny, too.

Jennifer put down the reader. Naturally, Greenberg's orders had come just when she was getting to the interesting part of the book. She wished this Anderson fellow, who seemed to have a feel for what the trader's life was like, were on the Flying Festoon instead of her. As he was about a thousand years dead, however, she seemed stuck with the job.

She had all three drones over the M'Sak army now, flying in triangular formation. They stayed several hundred meters off the ground. That first night had not been the only time the barbarians attacked them, and they thought of more ploys than Jennifer had. One M'Sak climbed a tall tree to pump arrows into a drone she'd thought safely out of range. Greenberg would not have thought well of her had it gone down.

She made a sour face. She did not think Greenberg thought well of her, anyway. Too bad. No one had held a gun to his head to make him take her on. Just as she had to make the best of boredom, he had to make the best of her.

The M'Sak were approaching a wide, relatively open space with low bushes growing here and there. When L'Rau got around to evolving grasses, that kind of area would be a meadow. It would, Jennifer thought with a faint sniff, certainly be more attractive as a broad expanse of green than as bare dirt and rocks punctuated by plants.

But even as it was, it would serve her purpose. She did not want the M'Sak distracted from her arrival by anything.

She told the computer what she wanted the Flying Festoon to do. She was smiling as she picked up the reader again. She doubted the M'Sak would have trouble paying attention to her.