“Thank you, Force-Leader,” said Kensie. He looked past his officer at the field and the table. “I think I’ll go down.”
“He doesn’t mean it,” I said.
“Force-Leader,” said Kensie. “Form your men ready, just under the crown of the slope on the back side, here. If he surrenders, I’m going to insist he come back with me to this side immediately.”
“Yes, sir.”
“All this business without a regular call for parley may be because he wants to surrender first and break the news of it to his troops afterward. So get your men ready. If Black intends to present his officers with an accomplished fact, we don’t want to let him down.”
“He’s not going to surrender,” I said.
“Mr. Olyn,” said Kensie, turning to me. “I suggest you go back behind the crest of the hill. The Force-Leader will see you’re taken care of.”
“No,” I said. “I’m going down. If it’s a truce parley to discuss surrender terms, there’s no combat situation involved and I’ve got a perfect right to be there. If it isn’t, what’re you doing going down yourself?”
Kensie looked at me strangely for a moment.
“All right,” he said. “Come with me.”
Kensie and I turned and went down the sharply pitched slope between the trees. Our boor soles slipped until our heels dug in with every step downward. Coming through the lilacs I smelled the faint, sweet scent-almost gone now-of the decaying blossoms.
Across the meadow, directly in line with the table, four figures in black came forward as we came forward. One of them was Jamethon Black.
Kensie and Jamethon saluted each other.
“Commandant Black,” said Kensie.
“Yes, Commander Graeme. I am indebted to you for meeting me here,” said Jamethon.
“My duty and a pleasure, Commandant.”
“I wished to discuss the terms of a surrender.”
“I can offer you,” said Kensie, “the customary terms extended to troops in your position under the Mercenaries’ Code.”
“You misunderstand me, sir,” said Jamethon. “It was your surrender I came here to discuss.”
The flag snapped.
Suddenly I saw the men in black measuring the field here, as I had seen them the day before. They had been right where we were now.
“I’m afraid the misunderstanding is mutual, Commandant,” said Kensie. “I am in a superior tactical position and your defeat is normally certain. I have no need to surrender.”
“You will not surrender?”
“No,” said Kensie strongly.
All,at once I saw the five stakes, in the position the Friendly noncoms, officers and Jamethon were now, and the stake up in front of them fallen down.
“Look out!” I shouted at Kensie-but I was far too late.
Things had already begun to happen. The Force-Leader had jerked back in front of Jamethon and all five of them were drawing their sidearms. I heard the flag snap again, and the sound of its rolling seemed to go on for a long tune.
For the first time then I saw a man of the Dorsai in action. So swift was Kensie’s reaction that it was eerily as if he had read Jamethon’s mind in the instant before the Friendlies began to reach for their weapons. As their hands touched their sidearms, he was already in movement forward over the table and his spring-pistol was in his hand. He seemed to fly directly into the Force-Leader and the two of them went down together, but Kensie kept traveling. He rolled on off the Force-Leader, who now lay still in the grass. He came to his knees, fired, and dived forward, rolling again.
The Groupman on Jamethon’s right went down. Jamethon and the remaining two were turned nearly full about now, trying to keep Kensie before them. The two that were left shoved themselves in front of Jamethon, their weapons not yet aimed. Kensie stopped moving as if he had run into a stone wall, came to his feet in a crouch, and fired twice more. The two Friendlies fell apart, one to each side.
Jamethon was facing Kensie now, and Jaraethon’s pistol was in his hand and aimed. Jamethon fired, and a light blue streak leaped through the air, but Kensie had dropped again. Lying on his side on the grass, propped on one elbow, he pressed the firing button on his spring-pistol twice.
Jamethon’s sidearm sagged in his hand. He was backed up against the table now, and he put out his free hand to steady himself against the tabletop. He made another effort to lift his sidearm but he could not. It dropped from his hand. He bore more of his weight on the table, half-turning around, and his face came about to look in my direction. His face was as controlled as it had ever been, but there was something different about his eyes as he looked into mine and recognized me-something oddly like the look a man gives a competitor whom he has just beaten and who was no real threat to begin with. A little smile touched the corners of his thin lips. Like the smile of inner triumph.
“Mr. Olyn,” he whispered. And then the life went out of his fece and he fell beside the table.
Nearby explosions shook the ground under my feet. From the crest of the hill behind us the Force-Leader whom Kensie had left there was firing smoke bombs between us and the Friendly side of the meadow. A gray wall of smoke was rising between us and the far hillside, to screen us from the enemy. It towered up the blue sky like some impassable barrier, and under the looming height of it, only Kensie and I were standing.
On Jamethon’s dead face there was a faint smile.
CHAPTER 29
In a daze I watched the Friendly troops surrender that same day. It was the one situation in which their officers felt justified in doing so.
Not even their Elders expected subordinates to fight a situation set up by a dead Field Commander for tactical reasons unexplained to his officers. And the live troops remaining were worth more than the indemnity charges for them that the Exotics would make.
I did not wait for the settlements. I had nothing to wait for. One moment the situation on this battlefield had been poised like some great, irresistible wave above all our heads, cresting, curling over and about to break downward with an impact that would reverberate through all the worlds of Man. Now, suddenly, it was no longer above us. There was nothing but a far-flooding silence, already draining away into the records of the past.
There was nothing for me. Nothing.
If Jamethon had succeeded in killing Kensie-even if as a result he had won a practically bloodless surrender of the Exotic troops-I might have done something damaging with the incident of the truce table. But he had only tried, and died, failing. Who could work up emotion against the Friendlies for that?
I took ship back to Earth like a man walking in a dream, asking myself why.
Back on Earth, I told my editors I was not in good shape physically; and they took one look at me and believed me. I took an indefinite leave from my job and sat around the News Services Center Library, at The Hague, searching blindly through piles of writings and reference material on the Friendlies, the Dorsai and the Exotic worlds. For what? I did not know. I also watched the news dispatches from Ste. Marie concerning the settlement, and drank too much while I watched.
I had the numb feeling of a soldier sentenced to death for failure on duty. Then in the news dispatches came the information that Jamethon’s body would be returned to Harmony for burial; and I realized suddenly it was this I had been waiting for: the unnatural honoring by fanatics of the fanatic who with four henchmen had tried to assassinate the lone enemy commander under a truce flag. Things could still be written.
I shaved, showered, pulled myself together after a fashion and went to see about arrangements for passage to Harmony to cover the burial of Jamethon as a wrap-up.
The congratulations of Piers and word of my appointment to the Guild Council-that had reached me on Ste. Marie earlier-stood me in good stead. It got me a high-priority seat on the first spaceliner out.
Five days later I was on Harmony in that same little town, called Remembered-of-the-Lord, where Eldest Bright had taken me once before. The buildings in the town were still of concrete and bubble-plastic, unchanged by three years. But the stony soil of the farms about the town had been tilled, as the fields on Ste. Marie had been tilled when I got to that other world, for Harmony now was just entering the spring of its northern hemisphere. And it was raining as I drove from the spaceport of the town, as it had on Ste. Marie that first day. But the Friendly fields I saw did not show the rich darkness of the fields of Ste. Marie, only a thin, hard blackness in the wet that.was like the color of Friendly uniforms.