think that she recognized you as a brother?”
“She did. Yes.” Now even weak anger was
ebbing swiftly, could not be called anger any
longer. Now it had departed. Leaving . . . what?
Again the Emperor was smiling at him faintly,
proudly. “You are a fit husband, Mark, for any
Queen on Earth–or any Princess either. I think you
are too good for most of them-but then I may be
prejudiced. Fathers tend to be.” The man in gray
stood holding on to Mark’s stirrup now, and squint-
ing up at him. “There’s something else, isn’t there?
What else are you trying to ask me?”
Mark blurted out a jumble of words, more or less
connected with the memorized version of Princess
Kristin’s formal request for an alliance.
“Yes, that’s what she sent you after me to do,
isn’t it? Well, I have a reputation as a prankster, but
I can be serious. Tell the Princess, when you see her,
that she has an alliance with me as long as she
wants it.”
There had been another alliance that Mark had
meant to ask for. But it was too late now. “Sir
Andrew has just been killed.”
“I know that.”
The calmness in the Emperor’s voice seemed
inhuman. Suddenly Mark’s anger was not dead
after all. “He died not half a kilometer from here. If
you would be our ally, why aren’t you fighting
harder on our side? Doing more?”
His father-it was suddenly possible now to think
of this man also in those terms-was not surprised
by the reproach, or perturbed either. He let go the
stirrup, and stroked the riding beast’s injured neck.
Mark thought he saw, though afterward he was not
sure, one of the small wounds there wiped away as
if it had been no more than a dead leaf fallen on the
skin. Mark’s newly acceptable father said, “When
you are as old as I am, my son, and able to under-
stand as much, then you can intelligently criticize
the way I am behaving now.”
The Emperor stretched himself, a weary move-
ment, then moved back a step and looked around.
“I think this present skirmish at least is yours. One
day you and I will have a long time to talk. But not
just now. Now that you have completed your mis-
sion for the Princess, I would advise you to get your
remaining people to Tashigang, and quickly inside
the walls. And warn the people in the city, if they do
not already realize it, that an attack is imminent.”
“I will.” Mark heard himself accepting orders
from this man, the same man he had sought for
days, meaning to confront in accusation. But this
change was riot like that brought about by the
Mindsword’s hideous warping pressure. This
inward change, this decision, was his own, for all
that it surprised him.
His revitalized mount was already carrying him
away. His father waved after him and called: “And
you can give them this encouraging news as well-
Rostov is bringing the Tasavaltan army to their
aid!”
CHAPTER 13 .
The little column of refugees was composed for the
most part of cumbersome carts and loadbeasts, and
for several days it had been moving with a nightmarish
slowness over the appalling roads. Now and again it
left the roads, where a bridge had been destroyed or
the only roads ran in the wrong directions, to go
trundling off across someone’s neglected fields. In this
manner the train of carts and wagons had made its
way toward Tashigang. The people in the train, all of
them villagers or peasants who had been poor even
before the war started, were fearful of the Dark
King’s cavalry, and with good reason. Behind them
the land was death and ruin, under a leaden sky hazed
at the horizon with the smoke of burning villages. The
wooden-wheeled carts groaned with their increasing
burden of people who could walk no more, and of the
poor belongings that the people were still stubbornly
trying to keep. The loadbeasts, in need
of food and most of all of rest, uttered their own
sounds of-protest.
Riding in the second wagon were four people, a
man named Birch and his wife Micheline, along with
their two small children. The man was driving at the
moment, urging on their one loadbeast that pulled the
wagon. In general he kept up a running stream of
encouraging comments, directed at the animal and at
his family indiscriminately. He was not getting too
much in the way of answers. His wife had said very
little for several days now, and the children were too
tired to speak.
Just now the train of wagons was coming to a place
where the poor road dipped between hills that had
once been wooded, to ford a small, muddy stream.
Most of the trees on the hills looked as if they might
have been individually hacked at by a hundred axes,
then pulled apart by a thousand arms, of people
needing firewood or wood for other uses; quite likely
someone’s army had camped near here not long ago.
The little train of half a dozen wagons and carts
now stopped at the ford. All of the travelers wanted
to let their animals drink, and the people who were not
carrying fresher water with them in their vehicles
drank from the stream too. Birch and his family did
not get out of their cart. At this point they were not so
much thirsty as simply dazed and exhausted.
While the company of refugees was halted thus, a
patrol of the Dark King’s cavalry did indeed come into
sight. Those who were sitting in their wagons or
standing beside them held their breath, watching
fatalistically. But the patrol was some distance
off, and showed little interest in their poor company.
They were greatly relieved. But hardly had the
cavalry ridden out of the way when one of the
women stood up in her wagon screaming, and pointed
in a different direction.
Over one of the nearby hills, studded with its
broken trees like stubble on a tough chin, the head and
shoulders of a god had just appeared. There was
more nearby smoke in the air in that direction, from
some farm building on the other side of the hill burning
perhaps, or it might have been a haystack or a
woodpile smoldering; ,and the effect of seeing the
god’s figure through this haziness was somehow to
suggest a truly gigantic figure kilometers away,
moving about, at the distance of an ordinary horizon.
Birch, the man in the second cart, froze in his
position on the driver’s seat. His wife, Micheline, who
was sitting beside him had clamped a painful grip
upon his arm, but he could not have moved in any
case. Behind them, peering out from where they had
been tucked away amid furniture in the large two-
wheeled cart, their two small children were frozen
too.
Birch could tell at first glance that the mountainous-
looking god coming over the hill was Mars. He could
make the identification at once by the great spear and
helm and shield of the approaching being’s equippage,
even though the man had never before seen any deity
and had not expected to see one now.
Mars was almost directly ahead of the people in
their wagons, advancing toward them from almost the
same direction that the train was headed. And
the Wargod had certainly taken notice of them
already; Birch thought for a moment that those
distant eyes were looking directly into his own. Now
Mars, marching forward out of the smoke, appeared
as no more than three times taller than a man. Now
he was lowering his armored helm as if in preparation
for battle; and still he tramped thunderously nearer, a
moving mountain of a being, kicking stumps and
boulders out of his way.
He was descending the near side of the nearest hill
now, taller than the treetops of the ruined grove as he
moved among them. Before Birch could think of any
way he might possibly react, Mars had reached the
muddy little ford.
Once there, he raised his arms. Looking
preoccupied, as if his divine thoughts were elsewhere,
and without preamble or warning, he spitted the man
who had been driving the first wagon neatly on his
spear, which was as long as a tall tree itself, and only
a little thinner. That man’s wife and children came
spilling around him from their cart, and rolling on the
ground as if they could feel the same spear in their
own guts.
Mars moved quickly, and came so close that he was
hard to see, like a mountain when you were standing
on it. Birch felt his own wagon go over next. If that
great spear had thrust for him too, it had somehow
missed. All Birch could feel was a fall that left him
half stunned, and then a growing pain in his leg and