“Get me to a field hospital,” I said.
“Thou shalt wait for that,” he said. “Further” -and he waved the papers at me-“I see here thy pass, but no pass signed by one of authority in our ranks that gives free passage to the one thou callest thy assistant. Therefore he shall not come to thee, but remain with those prisoners of like uniform, to meet what the Lord shall send them.”
He threw the papers down into my lap, turned and stalked off, back toward the prisoners. I shouted after him, telling him to come back; but he paid me no attention.
But Greten ran after him, caught him by the arm and murmured something in his ear, meanwhile gesturing sharply toward the group of prisoners. The Groupman shoved him off with a thrust of his arm that sent Greten staggering.
“Are they of the Chosen?” the Groupman shouted. “j%e they Chosen of God?”
And he whirled about in fury, with his spring-rifle still set on automatic menacing not merely Greten, but the other guards as well.
“Fall in!” he shouted.
Some slowly, some hastily, they left off guarding the prisoners and fell into line, facing the Groupman.
“You shall all report to the Message Center-now!” the Groupman snapped. “Right face!” And they turned. “Move out!”
And so they left us, moving off out of my sight among the shadows of the trees.
The Groupman watched after them for a second, then turned his attention and his rifle back on the Cassidan prisoners. They shrank a little from him; and I saw the white, indistinct outline of Dave’s face turned momentarily in my direction.
“Now, your guards are gone,” the Groupman said to them slowly and grimly. “For an assault begins that will wipe your forces from the field. In that assault every soldier of the Lord is needed, for a call has been placed upon us by our Eldest in Council. Even I must go-and I cannot leave enemies like yourselves unguarded behind our lines, to do mischief against our victory. Therefore, I send you now to a place from which you cannot harm the Anointed of the Lord.”
In that moment, in that moment only, for the first time, I understood what he meant. And I opened my mouth to shout; but nothing came out. I tried to rise, but my stiff leg would not let me. And I hung there, mouth open, frozen in the act of half-rising.
He opened fire at full automatic upon the unarmed men before him. And they fell-Dave among them- they dropped and fell, and died.
CHAPTER 13
I am not clear in my mind exactly how things went after that. I remember, when there was no longer any stir or movement among the fallen bodies, how the Groupman turned and came toward me, holding his rifle in one hand.
He seemed, though he strode swiftly, to come slowly, slowly but inexorably. It was as if I watched him on a treadmill growing ever bigger as he loomed closer to me with the black rifle in his hand and the red sky behind his head. Until, at last, he reached me and stopped, standing over me.
I also tried to shrink from him, but could not; for the great stump of the tree was behind me and my damaged leg, itself stiff” as a dead stick of wood, anchored me. But he did not lift his rifle against me; and he did not shoot me.
“There,” he said, looking at me. His voice was deep and calm, but his eyes were strange. “Thou hast thy story, Newsman. And thou shalt live to report it. Perhaps they will let thee come when I am led before a firing squad-unless the Lord decrees otherwise, so that I fall in the assault now beginning. But though they executed me a million times over, thy writing will avail thee nothing. For I, who am the ringers of the Lord, have writ His will upon these men, and that writing thou cannot erase. So shalt thou know at last how little is thy writing in the face of that which is written by the God of Battles.”
He stepped back from me one step without turning his back. It was almost as if I were some dark altar from which he retreated with ironic respect.
“Now, farewell, Newsman,” he said, and a hard smile twisted his lips. “Fear not, for they will find thee. And save thy life.”
He turned and went. I saw him go, black into the blackness of the deeper shadows; and then I was alone.
I was alone-alone with the still dripping leaves ticking occasionally upon the forest floor. Alone with the red-dsrkening sky, showing in its tiny patches between the growing black masses of the treetops. Alone with the day’s end and the dead.
I do not know how I did it, but after a while I began to crawl, dragging my useless leg along with me, over the wet forest floor until I came to the still heap of bodies. In the little light that remained I hunted through them until I found Dave. A line of slivers had stitched themselves across the lower part of his chest, and from there on down his jacket was soaked with blood. But his eyelids fluttered as I got my arm around his shoulders and lifted him up so that I could support his head on my good knee. His face was as white and smooth as the face of a child in sleep.
“Eileen?” he said faintly but clearly as I lifted him. But he did not open his eyes.
I opened my mouth to say something, but at first no sound would come out. Then, when 1 could make my vocal cords work, they sounded strange.
“She’ll be here in a minute,” I said.
The answer seemed to soothe him. He lay still, hardly breathing. The calmness of his face made it seem as if he were not in any pain. I heard a steady sound of dripping that at first I took to be the rain dripping still from some leaf overhead; but then I put down my hand and felt the falling of dampness on its palm. The dripping was of his blood, from the lower part of his soaked jacket, onto the forest earth below where the mosslike groundcover had been scuffed away by the scrabbling of dying men, leaving the bare earth.
I hunted around as best I could for wound dressings on the bodies near us, without disturbing Dave upon my knee. I found three of them, and tried to stop his wounds with them, but it was no use. He was bleeding from half a dozen places. By trying to put the bandages on I disturbed him, rousing him a little.
“Eileen?” he asked.
“She’ll be here in a minute,” I told him, again.
And, later on, after I had given up and was just sitting, holding him, he asked again.
“Eileen?”
“She’ll be here in a minute.”
But by the time the full dark passed and the moon rose high enough to send its silver light down through the little opening into the trees, so that I could see his face again, he was dead.
CHAPTER 14
I was found just after sunrise, not by Friendly, but by Cassidan troops. Kensie Graeme had fallen back at the south end of his battle line before Blight’s well-laid plan of an attack to crush the Cassidan defenses there and cut them up in the streets of Dhores. But Kensie, foreseeing this, had robbed the southern end of his line and sent the armor and infantry so acquired swinging wide around to reinforce the north end of his line, where Dave and I had been.
The result was that his line pivoted about a central point, which was just about at the motor pool where I had first caught sight of him. The advancing reinforced north end of it, the following morning, swept around and -down, cutting the Friendly communications and crashing in upon the rear of those Friendly troops that thought they had most of the Cassidan levies penned and broken up within the city.
Dhores, which was to have been a rock on which the Cassidan levies were broken up, became instead the rock on which the Friendly forces themselves were broken. The black-clad warriors fought with their usual fierceness and reckless bravery on being trapped; but they were between the barrage of Kensie ‘s sonic cannon to the west of the city and his fresh forces piling in upon their rear. Finally, the Friendly Command, rather than lose any more of the valuable battle units in human shape that were their soldiers, surrendered-and the civil war between the North and South Partitions of New Earth was over, won by the Cassidan levies.
But I cared nothing about this. I was taken, half-conscious from medication, back to Molon for hos-pitalization. The wound in my knee had complicated itself from lack of attention-I do not know the details; but, though they were able to heal it, it remained stiff. The only cure for that, the medicians told me, was surgery and a whole new, completely artificial knee-and they advised against that. The original flesh and blood, they said, was still better than anything man could build to replace it.