The Man Who Counts

He paused. He could hear his own asthmatic wheezes… and the far unhappy mumble of the camp, and the cold wet clinking of water down alien rocks nothing more in all the world.

Finally Trolwen said in a weak voice: “If… if the challenge is considered answered… we shall resume our business.”

No one spoke.

“Will the Eart’a take the word?” asked Tolk at last. He alone appeared self-possessed, in the critical glow of one who appreciates fine acting.

“Ja. I will say, I know we ca

“What?” It barked from the throat of a councilor who forgot formalities.

“Ah.” Van Rijn laid a finger to his imposing nose and winked. “We shall see. Maybe now you think even if I am a pitiful old weak tired man who should be in bed with hot toddies and a good cigar, still a Polesotechnic merchant is not just to sneeze at. So? Well, then. I propose we all leave this land and head north.”

A hubbub broke loose. He waited patiently for it to subside.

“Order!” shouted Trolwen. “Order!” He slapped the hard earth with his tail. “Quiet, there, officers! Eart’a, there has been some talk of abandoning La

He drew a breath and hurled out: “But Kilnu is, at least, to the south. North of Achan, there is still ice!”

“Just so,” said Van Rijn.

“Would you have us starve and freeze on the Dawrnach glaciers? We can’t land any further south than Dawrnach; the Fleet’s scouts would be certain to spot us anywhere in Holmenach. Unless you want to fight the last fight in the archipelago — ?”

“No,” said Van Rijn. “We should sneak up to this Dawrnach place. We can pack a lunch — take maybe a ten-days’ worth of food and fuel with us, as well as the armament — nie?”

“Well… yes… but even so — Are you suggesting we should attack the Fleet itself, the rafts, from the north? It would be an unexpected direction. But it would be just as hopeless.”

“Surprise we will need for my plan,” said Van Rijn. “Ja. We ca

“Enough!” said Trolwen. “Let me hear your scheme.”

Much later: “It won’t work. Oh, it might well be technically feasible. But it’s a political impossibility.”

“Politics!” groaned Van Rijn. “What is it this time?.”

“The warriors… yes, and the females too, even the cubs, since it would be our whole nation which goes to Dawrnach. They must be told why we do so. Yet the whole scheme, as you admit, will be ruined if one person falls into enemy hands and tells what he knows under torture.”

“But he need not know,” said Van Rijn. “All he need be told is, we spend a little while gathering food and wood to travel with. Then we are to pack up and go some other place, he has not been told where or why.”

“We are not Drakska,” said Trolwen angrily. “We are a free folk. I have no right to make so important a decision without submitting it to a vote.”

“Hm-m-m maybe you could talk to them?” Van Rijn tugged his mustaches. “Orate at them. Persuade them to waive their right to know and help decide. Talk them into following you with no questions.”

“No,” said Tolk. “I’m a specialist in the arts of persuasion, Eart’a, and I’ve measured the limits of those arts. We deal less with a Flock now than a mob — cold, hungry, without hope, without faith in its leaders, ready to give up everything — or rush forth to blind battle — they haven’t the morale to follow anyone into an unknown venture.”

“Morale can be pumped in,” said Van Rijn. “I will try.”

“You!”

“I am not so bad at oratings, myself, when there is need. Let me address them.”

“They… they—” Tolk stared at him. Then he laughed, a jarringly sarcastic note. “Let it be done, Flockchief. Let’s hear what words this Eart’a can find, so much better than our own.”

And an hour later, he sat on a bluff, with his people a mass of shadow below him, and he heard Van Rijn bass come through the fog like thunder:

“…I say only, think what you have here, and what they would take away from you:

“I don’t comprehend all those words,” whispered Tolk.

“Be still!” answered Trolwen. “Let me hear.” There were tears in his eyes; he shivered.

“…This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this La

The army beat its wings and screamed.

Van Rijn continued through adaptations of Pericles’ funeral speech, “Scots Wha’ Hae,” and the Gettysburg Address. By the time he had finished discussing St. Crispin’s Day, he could have been elected commander if he chose.

XVI

The island called Dawrnach lay well beyond the archipelago’s end, several hundred kilometers north of La

When he stood on the beach at their goal, his legs barely supporting him, it was small comfort.

High Summer had come here also, and this was not too far north; still, the air remained wintry and Tolk said no one had ever tried to live here. The Holmenach islands deflected a cold current out of The Ocean, up into the Iceberg Sea, and those bitter waters flowed around Dawrnach.

Now the Flock, wings and wings and wings dropping down from the sky until they hid its roiling grayness, had reached journey’s conclusion: black sands, washed by heavy dark tides and climbing sheer up through permanent glaciers to the inflamed throat of a volcano. Thin straight trees were sprinkled over the lower slopes, between quaking tussocks, there were a few sea birds, to dip above the broken offshore ice-floes; otherwise the hidden sun threw its clotted-blood light on a sterile country.

Sandra shuddered. Wace was shocked to see how thin she had already grown. And now that they were here, in the last phase of their striving — belike of their lives — she intended to eat no more.

She wrapped her stinking coarse jacket more tightly about her. The wind caught snarled pale elflocks of her hair and fluttered them forlorn against black igneous cliffs. Around her crouched, walked, wriggled, and flapped ten thousand angry dragons: whistles and gutturals of unhuman speech, the ca