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"What do we do about Chain?" Roger asked. "That was the original point of this meeting, if I remember correctly."
"So far, he doesn't appear to be a viable threat, Your Highness," Pahner said. "Until he reaches the level of a viable threat, let's not do anything which would foreclose any of our options."
"Agreed," Roger said. "I think we ought to talk to Gratar again, though. Get a feel for what he thinks."
"About Grath Chain, or about the 'Great Plan'?" O'Casey wondered.
"About Chain . . . and whether or not he realizes there's anything else going on," Pahner replied grimly.
* * *
Honal waved his hand, and the hornsman trumpeted the call which brought the unit of civan to a stop.
"Damn it, Sol Ta! You were supposed to open out!"
"We're trying!" the infantry commander shouted back. "It's not as easy as it looks!"
"Yeah? Well, you ought to try pulling a thousand civan to an unexpected stop before they stomp all over your infantry allies!"
"Enough!" Bogess shook his head as he trotted his own civan over to where the two leaders were arguing. "Enough," he repeated more calmly. "It's the timing, Honal. And training. That's why we're out here, in case you didn't notice."
"Oh, I've noticed, all right," Honal said sharply, then drew a deep breath and waved over his shoulder at his troopers. "But my cavalry doesn't need training in basic movement orders. So we're going to cut back to just the minimum—myself and a company of about a hundred. Something that can stop unexpectedly if it has to without turning into this sort of confused mess . . . or walking on our allies."
"Fine." Bogess gave a handclap of agreement. "But this is important. I can see the humans' point about a charge at the end, rather than the begi
"Easily," Honal grunted. "The ones who weren't with us on the trek down from the mountains might have been a problem before we got hold of them, but not now. Those humans know what they're talking about, and their tactics have never failed. As long as we can hold up our end, everything will be fine."
"Good," Sol Ta said. "But for that to happen, we have to get this maneuver right. And that means—"
"Back to training," Bogess finished for him. "In the meantime, I'm going to see how it's going with the recruit forces. If we're having this much fun, you can just imagine what training them must be like!"
* * *
"On the square!"
Krindi Fain groaned and stumbled wearily to his feet. For three endless weeks from hell, they had assembled on this accursed square at the edge of the city and practiced the simple drills of how to stand and march as squads and platoons. Then they'd been issued their sticks in lieu of pikes and taught to march and stand with their sticks and shields. And then they'd learned more complex countermarches, company and battalion formations, and how to form and break. How to move at a trot with pike and shield in hand. How to do the approved Mardukan pikeman squats. How to live, eat, sleep, and defecate while carrying a pike and shield.
For every endless hour of each long Mardukan day, they'd trained for fifty minutes with a single ten-minute break. Then, at night, they'd been mercilessly hounded by the human demons into cleaning their encampment and gear. Finally, in the middle of the night, they'd been permitted to get some rest . . . only to be awakened before dawn and chivvied back onto the square.
He gave Bail Crom a hand to his feet.
"Don't worry, Bail," the squad leader said with mock cheerfulness. "Just think—a couple more weeks of live pike training, and then, when it's all over, we get to fight the Boman."
"Good," the former tinker grumped. "At least I'll get to kill something."
"We're going to kill something anyway," Erkum Pol said nervously.
"What do you mean?" Fain asked as he led them to their places. If you didn't make it to your mark before the humans, there was punishment drill: trotting around the square with lead weights on your pike and shield while chanting "I am a slow-ass! I want to kill my buddies!"
"Somebody told me we gotta kill something to graduate," Pol said sadly.
"What?" Bail Crom asked. "A civan? A turom?"
"No," the simpleminded private said with an expression of great woe. "We have to kill a member of our family."
"What?" Fain stared at him. "Who told you that?"
"Somebody," the private said. "One of the other squad leaders."
"From our platoon? Who?"
"No," Pol said. "Just . . . somebody."
The squad leader looked around the mass of troops on the square and shook his head in a gesture he'd picked up from their human instructors.
"Well, I don't care if it was another squad leader, or Sergeant Julian, or Colonel MacClintock himself. We are not going to have to kill a member of our own family."
He reached his position just as Corporal Beckley came up to take over the formation.
"Are you sure?" the private asked, his confused face still a mask of woe.
"Positive," the squad leader hissed out of the corner of his mouth. "We'll talk about it later."
Frankly, he sort of wished the job of squad leader was someone else's. This leadership stuff was for the atul.
* * *
Roger stepped through the door at a gesture from the guard, then stopped in surprise. He knew that this wasn't a throne room, but he was shocked by the informality of the setting. The priest-king of Diaspra was invariably surrounded by dozens of attendants and lesser priests, but this room, although large, was virtually empty. There were five guards along the i
The room echoed to the rumble of thunder. The Hompag Rains had come, and the city had been buried under the deluge for two days. The rain gurgled in the gutters, chuckled in the chubes, and filled the flood canals. Sheets of water wrestled with the dikes and threatened to overwhelm the defenses of the fields at every turn. The Chasten, once a clear blue-green from its mountain origin, now ran swollen and brown with the silt of the forests and plains, and everywhere the rains poured down and down and down.
After a glance at the guards, Roger walked to the window and stared out at the downpour beside the priest-king. The room was on the highest level of the citadel, and on a good day, the mountains were clearly visible from its heights. Now, the view was cloaked with rain.
The gray torrent gave patchy views of the fields to the east and of the dikes which protected them. That area was the drier upland of Diaspra's territory and should have been more or less immune to flooding, but beyond the dikes a sheet of water at least a meter deep—two meters, in places—washed across the landscape, hurrying to plunge over the cliffs and into the rivers and thence to the distant sea. That swirling sheet seemed not so much to spread from the river as to be a river a hundred kilometers wide; the actual Chasten was just an incidentally deeper cha
The bluff line that created the normal Falls of Diaspra was now a hundred-kilometer-wide Niagara, clearly visible to the north. The mist from that incredible cascade should have filled the skies, but it was beaten down by the rain, and that same curtain muted the rumble of the plunging tons of water. The sight was both impressive and terrifying, and the prince suspected that that was the reason for having the audience here.
After a moment, the king gestured out the window without looking at the prince.
"This is the True God. This is the God all Diasprans fear—the God of the Torrent. We worship the placid God of the Spring, and the loving God of the gentle Rains, but it is the God of the Torrent we fear. This is the God we strive to placate with our dikes and canals, and so far, that has always worked, but only with unceasing toil.