Jones turned pale and sat down in a hurry. “I’ve got a picture of that, I do, bloody generals kowtowing to a radarman. Not flipping likely.”

“Why not?” Bagnall got to his feet. He had only German, and not all he wanted of that, but he gave it his best shot: “The Red Army doesn’t trust the Wehrmacht, and the Wehrmacht doesn’t trust the Red Army. But have we English done anything to make either side distrust us? Let General Chill command. If Russian units don’t like what he proposes, let them complain to us. If we think the orders are fair, let them obey as if the commands came from Stalin. Is that a fair arrangement?”

Silence followed, save for the murmur of Vasiliev’s interpreter as he translated Bagnall’s words. After a few seconds, Chill said, “In general, weakening command is a bad idea. A commander needs all the authority over his troops he can get. But in these special circumstances-”

“The Englishmen would have to decide quickly,” Aleksandr German said. “If they cannot make up their minds, orders may become irrelevant before they give their answer.”

“That would be part of the packet,” Bagnall agreed.

“The Englishmen would also have to remember that we are all allies together here against the Lizards, and that England is not specially aligned with the Russians against the Reich,” Lieutenant General Chill said. “Decisions which fail to show this evenhandedness would make the arrangement unworkable in short order-and we would start shooting at each other again.”

“Yes, yes,” Bagnall said impatiently. “If I didn’t think we could do that, I wouldn’t have advanced the idea. I might also say I’m not the only one in this room who has had trouble remembering we are all allies together and that plans should show us much.”

Chill glared at him, but so did German and Vasiliev. Jerome Jones whispered, “You did well there, not to single out either side. This way each of them can pretend to be sure you’re talking about the other chap. Downright byzantine of you, in fact.”

“Is that a compliment?” Bagnall asked.

“I meant it for one,” the radarman answered.

Chill spoke to the Russian partisan leaders. “Is this agreeable to you, gentlemen? Shall we let the Englishmen arbitrate between us?”

“He rides that ‘gentlemen’ hard,” Jones murmured. “Throws it right in the face of the comrades-just to irk ’em, unless I miss my guess. Gentlemen don’t fit into the dictatorship of the proletariat.”

Bagnall listened with but half an ear. He was watching the two men who’d headed the “forest republic” before the Lizards arrived. They didn’t look happy as they muttered back and forth. Bagnall didn’t care whether they were happy. He just hoped they could live with the arrangement.

Finally, grudgingly, Nikolai Vasiliev turned to General Chill and spoke a single sentence of Russian. The translator turned it into German: “Better the English than you.”

“On that, if you’reverse roles, we agree completely,” Chill said. He turned to Bagnall, gave him an ironic bow. “Congratulations. You and your British colleagues have just become a three-man board of field marshals. Shall I order your batons and have a tailor sew red stripes to your trouser seams?”

“That won’t be necessary,” Bagnall said. “What I need is assurance from you and from your Soviet counterparts that you’ll abide by whatever decisions we end up making. Without that, we might as well not start down this road.”

The German general gave him a long look, then slowly nodded. “You do have some understanding of the difficulties with which you are involving yourself. I wondered if this was so. Very well, let it be as you say. By my oath as a soldier and officer of the Wehrmacht and the German Reich, I swear that I shall accept without question your decision on cases brought before you for arbitration.”

“What about you?” Bagnall asked the two Soviet brigadiers. Aleksandr German and Vasiliev seemed imperfectly delighted once more, but German said, “If in a dispute you rule against us, we shall accept your decision as if it came from the Great Stalin himself. This I swear.”

“Da,” Vasiliev added after the interpreter had translated for him. “Stalin.” He spoke the Soviet leader’s name like a religious man invoking the Deity-or perhaps a powerful demon.

Kurt Chill said, “Enjoy the responsibility, my English friends.” He sent Bagnall and Jones a stiff-armed salute, then strode out of the meeting chamber in the Krom.

Bagnall felt the responsibility, too, as if the air had suddenly turned hard and heavy above his shoulders. He said, “Ken won’t be pleased with us for getting him into this when he wasn’t even at the meeting.”

“That’s what he gets for not coming,” Jones replied.

“Mm-maybe so.” Bagnall looked sidelong at the radarman. “Do you suppose the Germans will want you to give up the fair Tatiana, so as to have no reason to be biased toward the Soviet side?”

“They’d better not,” Jones said, “or I’ll bloody well have reason to be biased against them. The one good thing in this whole pestilential town-if anyone tries separating me from her, he’ll have a row on his hands, that I tell you.”

“What?” Bagnall raised an eyebrow. “You’re not enamored of spring in Pskov? You spoke so glowingly of it, I recall, when we were flying here in the Lanc.”

“Bugger spring in Pskov, too,” Jones retorted, and stomped off.

In fact, spring in Pskov was pretty enough. The Velikaya River, ice-free at last, boomed over the rapids as it neared Lake Pskov. Gray boulders, tinted with pink, stood out on steep hillsides against the dark green of the all-surrounding woods. Grass grew tall on the streets of deserted villages around the city.

The sky was a deep, luminous blue, with only a few puffy little white clouds slowly drifting across it from west to east Along with those clouds, Bagnall saw three parallel lines of white, as straight as if drawn with a ruler. Condensation trails from Lizard jets, he thought, and his delight in the beauty of the day vanished. The Lizards might not be moving yet, but they were watching.

Mordechai Anielewicz looked up from the beet field at the sound of jet engines. Off to the north he saw three small silvery darts heading west. They’ll be landing at Warsaw, he thought with the automatic accuracy of one who’d been spotting Lizard planes for as long as there had been Lizard planes to spot-and German planes before that. Wonder what they’ve been up to.

Whoever headed the Jewish fighters these days would have someone at the airport fluent enough at the Lizards’ speech to answer that for him. So would General Bor-Komorowski of the Polish Home Army. Anielewicz missed getting information like that, being connected to a wider world. He hadn’t realized his horizons would contract so dramatically when he left Warsaw for Leczna.

Contract they had. The town had had several radios, but without electricity, what good were they? Poland’s big cities had electricity, but nobody’d bothered repairing the lines out to all the country towns. Leczna probably hadn’t had electricity at all until after the First World War. Now that it was gone again, people just did without.

Anielewicz went back to work. He pulled out a weed, made sure he had the whole root, then moved ahead about half a meter and did it again. An odd task he thought: mindless and exacting at the same time. You wondered where the hours had gone when you knocked off at the end of the day.

A couple of rows over, a Pole looked up from his weeding and said, “Hey you, Jew! What does the creature that says he’s governor of Warsaw call himself again?”

The fellow spoke quite without malice, using Anielewicz’s religion to identify him not particularly to scorn him. That he might feel scorned anyhow never entered the Pole’s mind. Because he knew that, Anielewicz didn’t feel scorned, or at least not badly. “Zolraag,” he answered, carefully pronouncing the two distinct a sounds.