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Title: Down Styphon!
Author: Piper, H. Beam [Henry Beam] (1904-1964)
Date of first publication: November 1965
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, November 1965
   [first edition]
Date first posted: 5 June 2017
Date last updated: 5 June 2017
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1444

This ebook was produced by Al Haines


PUBLISHER'S NOTE

Italics in the original printed edition are indicated _thus_.

As part of the conversion of the book to its new digital
format, we have made certain minor adjustments in its layout.
All of the author's original text has been included.






  DOWN
  Styphon!


  H. BEAM PIPER



  The last story Beam Piper finished
  before his death--another tale of the
  Pennsylvania State Trooper thrown on
  his own in another time-line.
  With one great advantage--he knew
  military history those folks never heard of!




In the quiet of the Innermost Circle, in Styphon's House Upon Earth,
the great image looked down, and Sesklos, Supreme Priest and Styphon's
Voice, returned the carven stare as stonily.  Sesklos did not believe
in Styphon, or in any other god; if he had, he would not be sitting
here.  The policies of Styphon's House were too important to entrust to
believers.  The image, he knew, was of a man--the old high priest who,
by discovering the application of a half-forgotten secret, had taken
the cult of a minor healer-god out of its mean back-street temples and
made it the power that ruled the rulers of all the Five Great Kingdoms.
If it had been in Sesklos to worship anything, he would have worshiped
that man's memory.

And now, the first Supreme Priest looked down upon the last one.  He
lowered his eyes, flattened the parchment on the table in front of him,
and read again:


PTOSPHES, _Prince of Hostigos, to_ SESKLOS, _calling himself Styphon's
Voice, these_:

_False priest of a false god, impudent swindler, liar and cheat!  Know
that we in Hostigos, by simple mechanic arts, now make for ourselves
that fireseed which you pretend to be the miracle of your fraudulent
god, and that we propose to teach these arts to all, that hereafter
Kings and Princes minded to make war may do so for their own defense
and advancement, and not to the enrichment of Styphon's House of
Iniquities._

_In proof thereof, we send you fireseed of our own make, enough for
twenty musket charges, and set forth how it is made, thus:_

_To three parts of refined saltpeter add three fifths of one part of
charcoal and two fifths of one part of sulfur, all ground to the
fineness of bolted wheat flour.  Mix these thoroughly, moisten the
mixture and work it to a heavy dough, then press the dough to cakes and
dry them, and when they are dry, grind and sieve them._

_And know that we hold you and all in Styphon's House of Iniquities to
be our mortal enemies, and the enemies-general of all men, to be dealt
with as Wolves are, and that we will not rest content until Styphon's
House of Iniquities is utterly cast down and ruined._

PTOSPHES


That had been the secret of the power of Styphon's House.  No ruler,
Great King or petty lord, could withstand his enemies if they had
fireseed and he had none.  Given here, armies marched to victory;
withheld there, terms of peace were accepted.  In every council of
state, Styphon's House had spoken the deciding word.  Wealth had poured
in, to be lent out at usury and return more wealth.

And now, the contemptible prince of a realm a man could ride across
without tiring his horse was bringing it down, and Styphon's House had
provoked him to it.  There were sulfur springs in Hostigos, and of
Styphon's Trinity, sulfur was hardest to get.  When the land around the
springs had been demanded of him, Ptosphes had refused, and since none
could be permitted to defy Styphon's House, his enemy, Prince Gormoth
of Nostor, had been raised against him, with subsidies to hire
mercenaries and gifts of fireseed.  When Gormoth had conquered
Hostigos, he was pledged to give the sulfur springs to Styphon's House.
Things like that were done all the time.

But now, Ptosphes was writing thus, to Styphon's Voice Himself.  For a
moment, the impiety of it shocked Sesklos.  Then he pushed aside
Ptosphes' letter and looked again at the one from Vyblos, the high
priest of the temple at Nostor Town.  Three moons ago, a stranger
calling himself Kalvan and claiming to be an exiled prince from a far
country--the boast of every needy adventurer--had appeared in Hostigos.
A moon later, Ptosphes had made this Kalvan commander of his soldiers,
and had set guards on all the ways out of Hostigos, allowing any to
enter but none to leave.  He had been informed of that at the time, but
had thought nothing of it.

Then, six days ago, the Hostigi had captured Tarr-Dombra, the castle
guarding Gormoth's easiest way into Hostigos.  The castellan, a Count
Pheblon, cousin to Gormoth, had been released on ransom-oath, with a
letter to Gormoth in which Ptosphes had offered peace and friendship
and the teaching of fireseed making.  A priest of Styphon, a black-robe
believer, who had been at the castle, had also been released, to bear
Ptosphes' letter of defiance to him.


It had, of course, been the stranger, Kalvan, who had taught Ptosphes'
people the fireseed secret.  He wondered briefly if he could be a
renegade from Styphon's House.  No; only yellow-robe priests of the
Inner Circle knew the full secret as Ptosphes had written it, and had
one of these absconded, the news would have reached him as swiftly as
galloping relays of horses could bring it.  Some Inner Circle priest
could have written it down, a thing utterly forbidden, and the writing
fallen into unconsecrated hands, but he questioned that.  The
proportions were different, more saltpeter and less charcoal.  He would
have Ptosphes' sample tried; it might be better than their own.

A man, then, who had re-discovered the secret?  That could be, though
it had taken many years and many experiments to perfect the processes,
especially the caking and grinding.  He shrugged.  That was not
important; the important thing was that the secrecy was broken.  Soon
anyone could make fireseed, and then Styphon's House would be only a
name, and a name of mockery.

Perhaps, though, he could postpone the end for as long as mattered.  He
was near his ninetieth year; soon he would die, and for each man, when
he dies, the world ends.

Letters of urgency to the Arch-priests of the five Great Temples,
telling them all.  A story to be circulated among the secular rulers
that fireseed, stolen by bandits, was being smuggled and sold.  Prompt
investigation of all stories of anyone collecting sulfur or saltpeter
or building or altering grinding mills.  Immediate death by
assassination for anyone suspected of knowing the secret.

And, of course, destruction of Hostigos; none in it to be spared, even
for slavery.  Gormoth had been waiting until his crops were harvested;
he must be made to strike now.  And as Archpriest of Styphon's House
Upon Earth to Nostor, this was quite beyond poor Vyblos' capacities,
with more silver, and fireseed and arms, for Gormoth.

He glanced again at Vyblos' letter.  A copy of Ptosphes' letter to him
had been sent to Gormoth; why, then, Gormoth knew the fireseed secret
himself!  It had been daring, and fiendishly clever, of Ptosphes to
give this deadly gift to his enemy.

And with the archpriest, fifty mounted Guardsmen of the Temple, their
captain to be an Inner Circle priest without robe, and more silver to
corrupt Gormoth's nobles and his mercenary captains.

And a special letter to the high priest of the temple at Sask Town.  It
had been planned to use Prince Sarrask of Sask as a counterpoise to
Gormoth, when Gormoth had grown too mighty by the conquest of Hostigos.
The time for that was now.  Gormoth was needed to destroy Hostigos;
then he, too, must be destroyed, before he began making fireseed in
Nostor.

He struck the gong thrice, and as he did he thought again of the
mysterious Kalvan.  That was nothing to shrug off; it was important to
learn whence he had come before he appeared--he was intrigued by
Vyblos' choice of that word--in Hostigos, and with whom he had been in
contact.  He could have come from some distant country, in which
fireseed was commonly made by all.  He knew of none such, but it could
well be that the world was larger than he thought.

Or could there be other worlds?  The idea had occurred to him, now and
then, as an idle speculation.


It was one of those small late-afternoon gatherings, with nobody
seeming to have a care in the world, lounging indolently, smoking,
sipping tall drinks, nibbling canapes, talking and laughing.  Verkan
Vail, who would be Chief of Paratime Police after Year-End Day, flicked
his lighter and held it for his wife, Hadron Dalla, then applied it to
his own cigarette.  Across the low table, Tortha Karf, the retiring
chief, was mixing another drink, with the concentrated care of an
alchemist compounding the Elixir of Life.  The Dhergabar University
people--the elderly gentleman who was head of the department of
Paratemporal Theory, the lady who was professor of Outtime History
(IV), and the young man who was director of outtime study
operations--were all smiling like three pussycats at a puddle of
spilled milk.

"You'll have it all to yourselves," he told them.  "The Paratime
Commission has declared that time-line a study area, and it's
absolutely quarantined to everybody but University personnel and
accredited students.  And five adjoining, near-identical, time-lines
for comparison study.  And I will make it my personal business to see
that the quarantine is rigidly enforced."

Tortha Karf looked up.  "After I retire, I'll have a seat on the
Commission, myself," he said.  "I'll make it my business to see that
the quarantine isn't revoked or diluted."

"I wish we could account for those four hours after he was caught in
the transposition field and before he came to that peasant's farm," the
paratemporal theorist fretted.  "We have no idea what he was doing."

"Wandering in the woods, trying to orient himself," Dalla said.  "I'd
say, sitting and thinking, for a couple of hours, trying to figure out
what happened to him.  A paratemporal shift like that is a pretty
shattering experience for an outtimer.  I don't think he was changing
history all by himself, if that's what you're worrying about."

"You can't say that," the paratemporal theorist reproved.  "He might
have killed a rattlesnake which would otherwise have fatally bitten a
child who would otherwise have grown up to be an important personage.
That sounds farfetched and trivial, but paratemporal alternate
probability is built on such trifles.  Who knows what started the Aryan
migration eastward instead of westward on that sector?  Some chief's
hangover, some tribal wizard's nightmare."

"Well, that's why you're getting those five control-study time-lines,"
the operations director said.  "And that reminds me; our people stay
out of Hostigos on all of them for a while.  We don't want them
massacred along with the resident population by Gormoth's gang, or
forced to use First Level weapons in self-defense."

"What bothers me," the lady professor said over the rim of her glass,
"is Vall's beard."

"It bothers me, too," Dalla said, "but I'm getting used to it."

"He grew it when he went out to that time-line, and he hasn't shaved it
off since.  It begins to look like a permanent fixture.  And Dalla's a
blonde, now; blondes are less conspicuous on Aryan-Transpacific.
They're both going to be on and off that time-line all the time, now."

"Well, your exclusive rights don't exclude the Paratime Police.  I told
you I was going to give that timeline my personal attention."


"Well, you'll not introduce a lot of probability contamination, will
you?" the paratemporal theorist asked anxiously.  "We want to observe
the effect of this man's appearance on that time-line--"

"No, of course not.  But I'm already established with these people.  I
am Verkan, a free-trader from Grefftscharr, that's the kingdom around
the Great Lakes.  I am now supposed to be traveling on horseback to
Zygros, about where Quebec is on Europe-American; I have promised Lord
Kalvan to recruit brass-founders to teach the Hostigi how to cast brass
cannon.  He needs light field-pieces badly."

"Don't they have cannon of their own?" the historian asked.  "I thought
you said--"

"Wrought iron, welded up and strengthened with shrunk-on rings.  They
have iron works, there's a lot of bog iron mined in that section, but
no brass foundries.  There are some at Zygros, they get their copper
and tin by water from the west."  He turned to the operations director.
"I won't be able to get back, plausibly, for another thirty days.  Can
you have your first study team ready by then?  They'll be the Zygrosi
brass founders."

The young man nodded.  "They have everything now but local foundry
techniques and correct Zygrosi accent.  They'll need practice, you
can't get manual dexterity by hypno-mech.  Yes, thirty days'll be
plenty."

"Good.  We have two Paratime Police agents in Hostigos now, a supposed
blind minstrel and a supposed half-witted boy.  As soon as I show up
with your crowd, they can take off their coats and go to work, and they
won't even have to hunt for coathooks.  And I'll set up a trading depot
to mask your conveyor-head.  After that, you'll be in business."

"But you're helping him win," the paratemporal theorist objected.
"That's probability contamination."

"No, it isn't.  If I didn't bring in fake Zygrosi brass founders, he'd
send somebody else to get real ones.  I will give him information, too,
just what any other wandering pack trader would.  I may even go into
battle with him, as I did at Tarr-Dombra, with a local flintlock.  But
I want him to win.  I admire the man too much to hand him an unearned
victory."

"He sounds like quite a man," the lady historian said.  "I'd like to
meet him, myself."

"Better not, Eldra," Dalla warned.  "This princess of his is handy with
a pistol."

"Yes.  The man's a genius.  Only a police corporal on his own timeline,
which shows how outtimers let genius go to waste.  We investigated his
previous history.  Only son of a clergyman; father named him for a
religious leader, and wanted him to be a clergyman, too.  As a boy, he
resisted, passively; scamped all his studies at college except history,
and particularly military history, in which he was much interested.
Then they had this war in Korea, you know what that was, and it offered
him an escape from the career he was being forced into.  Father died
while he was at war, mother a year later.  After the war he entered the
Pennsylvania State Police.  Excellent record, as far as his
opportunities went; held down by routine because nobody recognized him
for what he was.  Then he blundered into the field of that conveyor,
just when it went weak, and--"


Three months ago--no, just "at another time," he was sure of that--he
had been Corporal Calvin Morrison, Pennsylvania State Police.  Now he
was the Lord Kalvan, in command of the army of Prince Ptosphes of
Hostigos, and soon he would marry Ptosphes' daughter Rylla and become
heir-matrimonial to the princely throne.  That couldn't have happened
in his own world.

Hostigos, of course, was no vast realm.  It was only as big as Centre
and Union Counties, Pennsylvania, with snips of Clinton and Lycoming.
That was precisely what it was, too, except that here-and-now there was
no Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, it was part of the Great Kingdom of
Hos-Harphax--_Hos-_ meant great--ruled by a King Kaiphranos.  No, just
reigned over lightly; outside his own capital at the mouth of the
Susquehanna, Kaiphranos' authority was nonexistent, the present
situation for example.

_When_ he was was less evident.  Going to arrest a perfectly routine
hillybilly murderer, he had entered what could only have been a
time-machine; emerging from it, he had landed on what could only have
been another time-dimension.  He had theorized a little about that, and
his theories had demolished themselves half constructed.  Then he had
given it up and dismissed the whole subject.  He had other things to
think about.

Rylla, for one; it was hard not to think about her all the time.  And
commanding an army, once he got it made into one.  And manufacturing
gunpowder in competition with Styphon's House.  And fighting a war,
against uncomfortably steep odds.  And, at the moment, a meeting of the
General Staff, all of whom were new at it.  So, for that matter, was
he, but he had a few vague ideas of military staff organization which
put him several up on any of the others.  And he was hot and
sweat-sticky, because he was wearing close to thirty pounds of armor,
to accustom himself to the weight.

They all stood around the big table, looking at the relief map of
Hostigos and surroundings which covered the entire top.  Just to show
you, none of this crowd had ever realized that maps were weapons of
war.  Maps, here-and-now, were illuminated parchment scrolls, highly
artistic and wildly inaccurate.  This one had taken over a month, he
and Rylla doing most of the work, from what he remembered of the U.S.
Geological Survey maps he'd used on the State Police, from hundreds of
talks with peasants, soldiers, woodsmen and landlords, and from a good
deal of personal horseback reconnaissance.

"The bakeries in Nostor work night and day."  That was old Xentos, the
blue-robed priest of Dralm, who was also Prince Ptosphes' chancellor
and because of contacts with his co-religionists in Nostor, head of
espionage and fifth-column operations.  "And milk cannot be bought at
any price, it is all being made into cheese, and most of the meat is
being ground for smoked sausages."

Field rations, stuff a soldier could carry in his haversack and eat
uncooked.  That could be stored, but Xentos also had reports of wagons
and oxen being commandeered and peasants impressed as drivers.  That
wouldn't be done too long in advance.

"Then they'll strike soon," somebody said.  "Taking Tarr-Dombra hasn't
stopped Gormoth at all."

"It delayed him," Prince Ptosphes said.  "He'd be pouring troops in
through Sevenhills Valley now if we hadn't."

There was a smile on the thin lips, between the pointed gray mustache
and the small chin-beard.  Ptosphes had been learning to smile again,
since the powder mill had gone into production.  He hadn't, before.

Chartiphon, bulky and grizzle-bearded, stood glowering at the map.  He
had been chief captain of Hostigos for as long as Ptosphes had been
Prince; now he was second in command--Field Marshal and Chief of
Operations--and gratifyingly unresentful at Lord Kalvan being placed
over him.  His idea of war was to hit every head you saw, and whoever
hit the most heads first won.  All this staff-stuff, maps and fifth
columns and logistics and intelligence and security, he did not
understand, and he was happy to let somebody do it who did.  He'd been
informed that Lord Kalvan had been hurled into the past from a thousand
years in the future by sorcery, and he probably half suspected that
Lord Kalvan was a sorcerer, himself.

"Yes, but where?" he wanted to know.

Ptosphes drew his sword.  It was a rapier; the bladesmiths at
Tarr-Hostigos had been swamped with orders for rapiers, since this
crowd had learned that a sword has a point and that a thrust beats a
swinging cut.  He used his point now to trace the course of the West
Branch--the Athan, here-and-now--from the otherwhen site of Muncy down
to where Milton ought to be.  The point rested on the river midway
between them.

"Marax Ford," he said.

"Oh, no, Prince!" Chartiphon growled.  "Go all the way around the
mountain and all the way up East Hostigos?  He won't do that.  Here's
where he'll try to come in."

He drew his own sword--long, heavy and double-edged, none of these
newfangled pokers for him--and pointed to the juncture of Bald Eagle
Creek and the river, at the site of Lock Haven.

"Listra Mouth," he said.  "He can move his whole army west along the
river, cross here--if we let him--and go up the Listra Valley to the
Saski border.  And that's where all our ironworks are."

Now that was something.  Not so long ago, Chartiphon had taken weapons
for granted.  Now he was realizing they had to be produced.

That started an argument.  Somebody thought Gormoth would try to force
one of the gaps.  Not Dombra--Antes Gap--that was too strong.  Maybe
Vryllos--McElhattan--or the gap back of where South Williamsport ought
to be.

"He'll attack where he can best use his cavalry," young Harmakros, who
was a cavalryman himself, declared.  "That's what he has the most of."

That was true.  Gormoth's cavalry superiority was something to worry,
not to say be frightened, about.

"He'll attack where we don't expect him to."


That was Rylla, in male riding dress, a big dagger on her belt and a
pheasant feather in her cap, leaning forward on the map table across
from him.

Rylla was the nicest of many nice things, here-and-now.  She was
beautiful--blond hair almost shoulder-length, laughing blue eyes,
impudent tilty little nose dusted with golden freckles--gay and
fun-loving.  She was utterly fearless; he'd first seen her riding into
a cavalry skirmish at the head of her father's troopers.  But best of
all, after the wonderful very-best that she loved him and was going to
marry him, the girl had a brain and wasn't afraid to use it.

"That's right," he agreed.  "Where don't we expect him?"

"You know what that means?" Ptosphes asked.  He had a pretty good
brain, himself.  "It means we'll have to be strong enough to resist
everywhere."  His rapier point swung almost from one end of the map to
the other.

"With five thousand, and that counts boys with bows and arrows and
peasant grandfathers with pitchforks?" Chartiphon demanded.  "Don't
joke about such things, Prince."

It came to a little over that, but not much.  Twenty-five hundred
regular infantry, meaning organized into something like companies and
given a modicum of drill, a thousand arquebusiers and calivermen, with
fifteen hundred pikemen to keep the cavalry off them.  Two thousand
militia, peasant levies, anybody who could do an hour's foot-drill
without dropping dead, armed with anything at all.  And slightly less
than a thousand cavalry, with steel cuirasses, helmets and
thigh-guards.  And against that, Prince Gormoth had four thousand of
his own subjects, including neither the senile nor the adolescent and
none of them armed with bows or agricultural implements, and six
thousand mercenaries, of whom four thousand were cavalry.

"Then we'll just have to be able to move what men we have around
faster," Rylla said.

Well, good girl!  She'd grasped what neither her father nor Harmakros
had, that mobility can make up for a numerical inferiority.

"Yes.  Harmakros, how many horses can you find to mount our infantry?
They don't have to be good horses, just good enough to get the men
where they can fight on foot."

Harmakros was scandalized.  Mounted soldiers were _cavalry_; anybody
ought to know it took years to train a cavalryman.  So was Chartiphon;
infantry were _foot_ soldiers, and had no business on horse-back.

"It'll mean one out of four holding horses in a battle, but they'll get
to the battle before it's over, and they can wear heavier armor.  Now,
how many infantry can we mount?"

Harmakros looked at him, decided that he was serious, and was silent
for a while.  It always took Harmakros a little to recover from the
shock of a new idea.  Then he grinned and nodded.  "I'll find out," he
said, grabbing the remount officer by the arm and pulling him off to
the side.  Rylla joined them with a slate and a piece of soapstone.
Rylla was the math wizard; she'd learned how to do up to long division
in Arabic numeration.  While they argued, he began talking to Ptosphes
and Chartiphon about artillery.

That was the one really hopeful thing about the situation.
Here-and-now cannon didn't have trunnions.  The guns were bedded into
timbers like huge gunstocks, or timber frames for the heavier pieces.
What passed for field artillery was mounted on four-wheeled carts,
usually ox-powered.  He blamed Styphon's House for that.  They did the
weaponeering, and they didn't want bloody and destructive wars, which
were bad for business, or decisive wars which established peace, which
were worse.  They wanted a lot of little wars, all the time, to burn a
lot of fireseed.

In the past two months, along with everything else and by methods which
would have made Simon Legree look like the Model Employer, he had
ordered six new four-pounders built, with trunnions, on field carriages
with limbers.  Drawn by four horses apiece, they would keep up with
cavalry on any sort of decent ground.  He had also had trunnions welded
onto some old pieces, mostly eight-pounders, and mounted them on
makeshift field carriages.  They would _not_ keep up with cavalry, but
they were five hundred per cent better than anything Gormoth had ever
heard of.

They were still talking when Harmakros and Rylla came over.

"Two thousand," Rylla said.  "They all have four legs.  We think they
were all alive yesterday evening."

"We'll need some for pack train and replacements.  Sixteen hundred
mounted infantry.  Eight hundred arquebusiers, with arquebuses, not
rabbit guns, and eight hundred pikemen, with pikes, not hunting spears
or those scythe-blade things."  He turned to Chartiphon.  "Can you
manage that?"

Chartiphon could.  Men who wouldn't fall off their horses, too.

"And all the riflemen."  Fifty of them, all the muskets and calivers
and arquebuses he'd been able to get rifled to date.  That was fifty
more than the combined rifle strength of all five Great Kingdoms.  "And
five hundred cavalry, swords and pistols, no lances or musketoons."

Everybody heard that, and everybody howled.  There weren't that many,
not uncommitted.  Swords flashed over the map, pointing to places where
there were only half enough now.  One of these days, somebody was going
to use a sword in one of these arguments for something beside
map-pointing.  Finally, they scraped up five hundred cavalry for the
new Mobile Force.

"You'll command," he told Harmakros.  "You'll have all six
four-pounders, and the best four eights.  You'll be based in Sevenhills
Valley; be ready at any notice to move either east or west from there."

"As soon as I get it organized, which will be tomorrow afternoon at
latest, I'll be ready to go to Sevenhills.  I can promise I'll be there
by noon the next day."

That meant he'd be there before that; that was another thing about
Harmakros.

"Oh, and before I forget."  He addressed them all.  "Battle cries."
They had to be shouted constantly, to keep from being killed by your
friends.  "Beside 'Ptosphes!' and 'Hostigos!' we will also shout,
'_Down Styphon!_'"

That met with general approval.  They all knew who the real enemy was.


Gormoth, Prince of Nostor, set down the goblet and wiped his bearded
lips on the back of his hand.  The candles in front of him and down the
long tables to the side flickered slightly.  Tableware clattered,
voices were loud.

"Lost everything!"  The speaker was a baron driven from Sevenhills
Valley when Tarr-Dombra had fallen.  "My house, a score of farms, a
village--"

"You think we've lost nothing?  They crossed at Vryllos and burned
everything on my land; it was a Styphon's miracle I got out at all."

"For shame!" Vyblos the high priest cried rebukingly.  "What of the
Sevenhills temple farm, a holy place pillaged and desecrated?  What of
the blood of fifteen consecrated priests and novices and a score of lay
guards, all cruelly murdered 'Dealt with as wolves are,'" he quoted.

"Well, we have an army, haven't we?" somebody at the side table on the
left hectored.  "Why don't we use it?"

Weapons clattered outside, and somebody else sneered, "That's Ptosphes,
now; under the tables, everybody."  A man in black leather entered,
advancing and saluting; the captain of the dungeon guards.

"Lord Prince," he said, "the special prisoner will tell all."

"Ha!"  He knew what that meant.  Then he laughed at the anxious faces
along the tables; not a few of his nobles dreaded the thought that
somebody was telling all about something.  He drew his poniard and cut
a line across the candle in front of him, a thumbnail's length from the
top.

"You bring good news.  I'll hear him in that time."

He nodded in dismissal.  As the captain backed away, he rapped loudly
on the table with the dagger-pommel.

"Be silent, all of you.  I've little time, so give heed."  He turned to
Klestreus, the elected captain-general of the mercenaries.  "You have
four thousand horse, two thousand foot, and ten cannon.  Add to them a
thousand of my infantry, choose which you will, and such cannon of mine
as you need.  You'll cross the river at Marax Ford.  Be on the road
before the dew's off the grass tomorrow before dawn the next day, take
and hold the ford, put the best of your cavalry across, and let the
others follow as speedily as they can.

"Netzigon," he addressed his own chief captain, "you'll gather every
man you can, down to the very peasant rabble, and such cannon as
Klestreus leaves you.  With half of them, confront all the gaps into
Nostor, from Nirfe up.  You'll take the others opposite Listra-Mouth
and Vryllos Gap.  As Klestreus moves west through Hostigos, he will
attack each gap from behind.  When he does, your men will cross the
river and attack from the north.  Dombra we'll have to starve out; the
rest must be stormed.  When Klestreus is back of Vryllos Gap, the force
you have at Listra-Mouth will cross and move up Listra Valley.  After
that, we'll have Tarr-Hostigos to take, Galzar only knows how long
we'll be at that, but by the end of the moon-half, all else in Hostigos
should be ours."

There was a gratified murmur along the tables; this made good hearing
to all.  Only the high priest, Vyblos, was ill-pleased.

"But why so soon, Prince?" he asked.

"Soon?" he roared.  "By the mace of Galzar, you've been bawling for it
like a weaned calf!  Well, now you have your invasion; thank your god
for it."

"A few more days would not be too much, Lord Prince," Vyblos said
mildly.  "Today I had word from Styphon's House Upon Earth, from the
pen of His Divinity Himself.  An Archpriest, His Holiness Krastokles,
is coming here to Nostor, with rich gifts of fireseed and money, and
the blessing of Styphon's Voice.  It were poor reverence not to await
His Holiness' coming."

He turned to the two captains.  "You heard me," he said.  "I rule here,
not the priest.  Be about it; send orders at once.  You move tomorrow."

Then he rose, pushing back his chair before the servant could withdraw
it.  The line was still visible at the top of the candle.


Guards with torches attended him down the winding stairs into the
dungeons.  The air stank.  His breath congealed; the heat of summer
never penetrated here.  From the torture chambers shrieks told of some
wretch being questioned; idly he wondered who.  Stopping at an
iron-bound oaken door, he unlocked it with a key from his belt and
entered alone, closing it behind him.

The room within was large, warmed by a fire on the hearth in the corner
and lighted by a great lantern from above.  Under it, a man bent over a
littered table.  He had a bald head and a straggling beard, and wore a
most unprisoner-like dagger on his belt.  A key for the door lay on the
table, and a pair of heavy horseman's pistols.  He straightened,
turning.

"Greetings, Prince.  It's done.  I tried it; it's as good as they make
in Hostigos, and better than the priests' trash."

"And no prayers to Styphon, Skranga?" he asked sarcastically.

Skranga was chewing tobacco.  He spat brownly on the floor.

"In the face of Styphon!  Try it yourself, Prince; the pistols are
empty."

There was a dish half full of fireseed on the table.  He measured in a
charge, loaded and wadded a bullet on top of it, primed the pan and
readied the striker, then fired into a billet of wood by the fire and
went to probe the hole with a straw.  The bullet had gone in almost a
little finger's length; Styphon's powder wouldn't do that.  He carried
the pistol back and laid it on the table.

"Well, Skranga," he laughed.  "You'll have to bide here a while, but
from this hour you're first nobleman of Nostor after me.  Style
yourself Duke.  There'll be rich lands for you in Hostigos, when
Hostigos is mine."

"And the Styphon temple farm of Nostor," Skranga grinned.  "If I'm to
make your fireseed, there's all there that I'll need."

"Yes, that too, by Galzar!  After I've downed Ptosphes, I'll deal with
Vyblos, and he'll envy Ptosphes before I let him die."

Snatching up a pewter cup without looking to see if it were clean, he
went to the wine keg and drew for himself, tasted the wine, then spat
it out.

"Is this the swill they've given you?" he demanded.  "By Galzar,
whoever's at fault won't see tomorrow's sun set!"  He flung open the
door and bellowed into the hall: "Wine!  Wine for Prince Gormoth and
Duke Skranga!  And silver cups!  And see it's fit for nobles to drink!"


Mobile Force HQ had been the mansion of a Nostori noble driven from
Sevenhills Valley on D-for-Dombra Day; his name had been shouted ahead
as he rode through the troop-crowded village, and Harmakros and his
officers met him at the door.

"Great Dralm, Kalvan!" Harmakros laughed, clasping his hand.  "Are you
growing wings on horses, now?  Our messengers only got off an hour and
a half ago."

"I know; I met them back of Vryllos Gap."  They crossed the outer hall
and through the doorway to the big room beyond.  "We got the news at
Tarr-Hostigos just after dark.  What have you heard since?"

At least fifty candles burned in the great central chandelier.
Evidently the cavalry had arrived here before the peasants, and hadn't
looted the place too destructively themselves.  Harmakros led him to an
inlaid table on which a map, scorched with hot needles on white
doeskin, was spread.

"We have reports from all the watchtowers along the mountain.  They're
too far back to see anything but dust, but the column's three miles
long; first cavalry, then infantry, then wagons and guns, and then more
infantry and cavalry.  They halted at Nirfe at dusk and built hundreds
of campfires.  Whether they left them burning and marched on after
dark, and how far ahead the cavalry are, we don't know.  We expect them
at Marax Ford by dawn."

"We got a little more than that.  The priest of Dralm at Nostor Town
got a messenger off a little after noon; it was dusk before he could
get across the river.  Your column's commanded by Klestreus.  Four
thousand mercenary cavalry, two thousand mercenary infantry, a thousand
of Gormoth's infantry, fifteen guns, he didn't say what kind, and a
wagon train that must be creaking with loot.  At the same time,
Netzigon's moving west, probably toward Listra-Mouth and we don't know
what with.  The messenger had to dodge his troops all the way up to
Vryllos.  Chartiphon's going to Listra-Mouth with what he can scrape
up; Prince Ptosphes is occupying Vryllos Gap."

"That's it; a double attack," Harmakros said.  "We can't help
Chartiphon, can we?"

"We can help him by beating Klestreus."  He got out his pipe; as soon
as he had filled it, one of the officers provided a light.  "Thank you.
What have you done so far?"

"I started my wagons and the eight-pounders down the main road.
They'll stop just short of Fitra, here"--he pointed on the map--"and
wait for us.  As soon as I'm all collected, I'm taking the cavalry and
mounted infantry and the four-pounders down the back road.  After we're
on the main road, the wagons and the eights will follow on.  I have two
hundred militia, the usual odds-and-ends, marching with the wagons."

"That was smart."

Puffing on his pipe, he looked at the map.  The back road, adequate for
horsemen and the four-pounders but not for wagons, followed the
mountains and then bent south away from them to join the main valley
road at the village of Fitra.  Harmakros had started his slow stuff
first, and could overtake without being impeded by it, and he was
waiting till he had all his striking force in hand and not dribbling it
in to be chopped up by detail.

"Where had you thought of fighting?"

"Why, on the Athan, of course." Harmakros was surprised that he should
ask.  "Klestreus will have some cavalry over before we get there, that
can't be helped, but we'll wipe them out or chase them back, and then
defend the line of the river."

"Huh-uh."  He touched the Fitra road-junction with his pipe stem.  "We
fight here."

"But that's miles inside Hostigos!" one of the officers cried.  Maybe
he owned an estate down there.  "We can't let them get that far."

"Lord Kalvan," Harmakros began stiffly.  He was going to be
insubordinate, he never bothered with titles otherwise.  "We must not
give up one foot of ground; the honor of Hostigos forbids it."


Here we are, back in the Middle Ages!  He seemed to hear the voice of a
history professor, inside his head, calling a roll of battles lost on
points of honor.  Mostly by the French; they'd been the worst, though
not the only, offenders.  He decided to fly into a rage.

"To Styphon with that!" he yelled, banging his fist on the table.
"Honor won't win this war, and real estate won't win this war.  The
only thing that'll win this war is killing Nostori!

"Now here," he continued, quietly, the rage having served its purpose,
"is where we can kill the most of them, and get the fewest of our own
men killed doing it.  Klestreus will cross the Athan here, at Marax
Ford."  That would be a little below where he remembered Watsontown to
have been.  "He'll rush his best cavalry ahead to secure the ford, and
the rest of the cavalry will cross next.  They'll want to get in on the
best looting ahead of the infantry; they'll push ahead without waiting.
By the time the infantry are over, they'll be stringing west in bunches.

"Now, that army Klestreus has could walk all over us, if they were all
together.  But they won't be.  And they'll be tired, and we'll have
reached Fitra by daylight, have our position prepared, our men and
horses will be rested, we'll even be able to give everybody a hot meal.
And Klestreus will be strung out for ten miles by the time his advance
elements come up to us.  Now, what kind of troops have we east of here?"

"A hundred cavalry along the river, and a hundred and fifty regular
infantry and about twice as many militia; about five hundred, militia
and regulars, at posts in the gaps."

"All right; get riders off at once.  Somebody who won't be argued with.
Have all that force along the river moved back; to Fitra if possible,
and if not they can reenforce the posts at the gaps.  The gaps'll have
to look out for themselves, we can't help them.  The cavalry will keep
just in front of Klestreus, skirmishing but doing nothing to delay him."

Harmakros looked at the map, thought for a little, and nodded.

"East Hostigos," he said, "will be the graveyard of the Nostori."

That was all right; that took care of the honor of Hostigos.

"Well, mercenaries from Hos-Agrys and Hos-Ktemnos, anyhow."  That
reminded him of something.  "Who hired those mercenaries; Gormoth, or
Styphon's House?"

"Why, Gormoth.  The money came from Styphon's House, but the
mercenaries contracted with Gormoth; they serve him."

"The reason I asked, the Rev. Whatshisname in Nostor included a bit of
gossip in his message.  It seems that this morning Gormoth had one of
his under-stewards put to death.  Had a funnel forced into his mouth
and half a keg of wine poured into him.  The wine was of inferior
quality, and had been given to a prisoner for whom Gormoth had
commanded good treatment."

One of the officers made a face.  "Sounds like Gormoth," he commented.
Another laughed and said he could think of a few tavern keepers in
Hostigos Town who deserved that.

"Who was the prisoner?" Harmakros asked.  "Count Pheblon?"

"Oh, no.  Pheblon's out of favor, but he isn't a prisoner.  You know
this fellow.  Agrysi horse-trader named Skranga."

"Yes, he got caught in Hostigos during the Iron Curtain."  Like Fifth
Column, Iron Curtain was now part of the Hostigi vocabulary.  Then he
blinked.  "He was working in the fireseed mill, while he was here!  You
think he might be making fireseed for Gormoth?"

"He is if he's doing what I told him to."  There was an outcry at that.
He laughed.  "And if Gormoth begins making his own fireseed, Styphon's
House'll hear about it, and you know what'll happen then.  That's why I
asked about those mercenaries.  I was wondering whether Gormoth would
use them against Styphon's House, or Styphon's House against Gormoth."
He shrugged.  "Not that it matters.  If everybody does his job
tomorrow, nobody'll use those mercenaries.  Except, maybe, us.  That's
another thing.  We don't bother with Nostori prisoners, but take all
the mercenaries who'll surrender.  We may need them later."


Dawn was only a pallor in the east, and the whitewashed walls were
blurs under dark thatches, but the village of Fitra was awake, light
pouring from open doors and a fire blazing on the small common.  There
was a crowd, villagers, and cavalrymen who had ridden ahead.  Behind
him, hoofs thudded and armor and equipment clattered; away back, he
could hear the four-pounders thumping over the pole bridge at the mill.
The shouting started, of course: "Lord Kalvan!  Dralm bless Lord
Kalvan!"  He was used to it, now; it didn't give him the thrill it had
at first.  He had to make a speech, while orders were shouted and
re-shouted to the rear, and men and horses got off to the sides of the
road to make way for the guns.

Then he and Harmakros and four or five of the officers turned left and
cantered down the main road, reining in where it began to dip.  The
eastern pallor had become a bar of yellow light.  The Mountains of
Hostigos were blackly plain on the left, and the jumble of ridges to
the right were taking shape.  Nearby trees began to detach themselves
from the obscurity.  In a few hours, they'd all be down.  He pointed to
the right.

"Send two hundred cavalry around that ridge, over there, to where those
three farms are clumped together," he told Harmakros.  "They're not to
make fires or let themselves be seen.  They're to wait till we're
engaged and the second mob of Nostori cavalry come up; then they'll
come out and hit them from the flank and rear."

An officer galloped away to the rear to attend to it.  The yellow light
was spreading upward in the east, only the largest and brightest stars
were still visible.  In front, the ground fell away into a little
hollow, with a brook running through it to the left, to join a larger
stream at the foot of the mountain, which rose steeply, then sloped up
to the summit.  On the right was broken ground, mostly wooded.  A few
trees around them, in the hollow, and on the slope beyond; open
farmland in front.  This couldn't have been better if he'd had Dralm
create it to order.

The yellow light was past the zenith, and the eastern horizon was a
dazzle.  Harmakros squinted at it and said something about fighting
with the sun in their eyes.

"No such thing; it'll be overhead before they get here.  Now, you go
take a nap.  I'll wake you in time to give me some sack-time.  As soon
as the wagons get here, we'll give everybody a hot meal."

An ox cart appeared on the brow of the little hill across the hollow,
piled high, a woman and a boy trudging beside the team and another
woman and more children riding.  Before they were down to where the
road crossed the stream, a wagon was coming up.

"Have them turned aside," he ordered.  "Don't let them get into the
village."  This was only the start; there'd be a perfect stream of them
before long.  They couldn't be allowed on the main road past Fitra, not
till the wagons and the eight-pounders got through.  "And use wagons
for barricades, and the oxen to help drag trees."

The village peasants were coming out, now, leading four- and six-ox
teams, chains dragging.  Axes began thudding.  One thing, if anybody
was alive here then, this village wouldn't have to worry about winter
firewood.  More refugees were coming in; loud protests at being
diverted, and at the seizure of wagons and teams.  The axemen were
across the hollow, now, and men shouted at straining oxen as trees were
dragged in to build an abatis.

He strained his eyes against the sunrise; he couldn't see any smoke.
Too far away.  He was sure, though, that the mercenary cavalry was
across the Athan, and they ought to be burning things.  Pyromania was
as fixed in the mercenary character as kleptomania.  Of course, he
could be misjudging here-and-now mercenaries; all he knew was what he'd
learned reading Sir Charles Oman's "History of the Art of War," when he
should have been studying homiletics and scriptural exegesis and
youth-organization methods at college, but there were universal
constants.  One was that mercenary soldiers' hearts were full of
larceny.  Another was that they liked being alive to spend their loot.
He was pretty confident of what Klestreus' cavalry were doing down
toward the river.


The abatis began to take shape, trees dragged into line, the tops to
the front, with spaces for three of the four-pounders on either side of
the road, and a barricade of peasants' wagons at either end.  He rode
forward a couple of times, to get an enemy's eye-view of it; he didn't
want it to look too formidable.  He made sure that none of the guns
would be visible.  Finally, he noticed smears of smoke against the
horizon, maybe five or six miles down the valley.  Klestreus'
mercenaries weren't going to disappoint him, after all.

A company of regular infantry, a hundred and fifty, three pikes to two
calivers, came up in good order.  They'd marched all the way from the
Athan, reported firing behind them, and were disgusted at marching away
from it.  He told them they'd get all the firing they wanted by noon,
and to fall out and rest.  A couple of hundred militia dribbled in,
some with crossbows.  There were a few more smokes in the east, but he
still couldn't hear anything.  At seven-thirty, the supply wagons and
the eight-pounders, and the two hundred militia wagon-guards, came in
from the west.  That was good; the refugees, now a steady stream, could
be sent on up the main road.

He found Harmakros asleep in one of the village cottages, wakened him,
and gave him the situation to date.

"Good; I'll get the men fed.  When do you want me to wake you?"

"As soon as you see smoke two miles down the valley, as soon as our
cavalry from the east begin coming in, and in any case in two hours."

Then he pulled off his boots and helmet, unbuckled his belt, and lay
down in the rest of his armor on the cornshuck tick Harmakros had
vacated, hoping that it had no small inhabitants or, if so, that none
of them would move in under his arming-doublet.  It was comparatively
cool in here, behind the stone walls and under the thick thatch; the
wet heat of his body became a clammy chill.  He shifted positions a
couple of times, finally deciding that fewer things dug into him if he
lay flat on his back.

So far, everything had gone nicely; all he was worried about was who
would let him down, and how badly.  If some valiant fool got a rush of
honor to the head and charged at the wrong moment--

If he could bring this off just half as well as he'd planned it, which
would be about par for the course for any battle, he could go to
Valhalla when he died and drink at the same table with Richard
Coeur-de-Lion and the Black Prince and Henry of Navarre.  A complete
success would entitle him to take a salute from Stonewall Jackson.  He
fell asleep receiving the commendation of George S. Patton.


An infantry captain wakened him a little before ten.

"They're burning Systros, now."  That was a town, about two thousand,
two and a half miles away.  "A couple of the cavalry who've been
keeping just in front of them came in.  The first batch are about
fifteen hundred; there's another lot, maybe a thousand, two miles
behind them.  We don't know where the infantry and the wagons are, but
we've been hearing those big bombards at Narza Gap."

That would be Klestreus' infantry on this side, probably supported by
Netzigon's ragtag-and-bobtail from the other side.  He pulled on his
boots and buckled on his sword, and, after eating a bowl of beef stew
with plenty of onion in it, he put on his helmet and drank a mug of
wine.  Somebody brought his horse, and he rode up to the line.  On the
way, he noticed that the village priest of Dralm and the Mobile Force
priest of Galzar had set up a field hospital on the village common and
that pole-and-blanket stretchers were being prepared.  No anesthetics,
here-and-now, though the priests of Galzar used sandbags.  He hoped he
wouldn't be wounded, himself.  The last time had been bad enough.

A big column of smoke dirtied the sky above Systros.  Silly buggers;
first crowd into it had fired it, here-and-now mercenaries were the
same as any other, and now the ones behind would have to bypass it.
They'd be handling Klestreus' army in retail lots.

The abatis was finished, over a hundred felled trees ox-dragged into
line, butts to the rear and tops to the front.  Between them, men sat
smoking or eating, or lay on the ground resting.  The horse lines were
back of the side road, with the more poorly-armed militiamen holding
horses.  At each end of the abatis were two of the four eight-pounders,
then an opening big enough for cavalry to sortie out through, and then
barricades of farm carts.

He could hear a distant, and then not so distant, popping of small
arms.  Away off, one of the bombards at Narza Gap boomed, and, after a
while, the other.  Good; they were still holding out.  Cavalry came
drifting up the road, some reloading pistols.  The shots grew louder,
and more cavalry, in more of a hurry, arrived.  Finally, a dozen or so
topped the rise across the hollow and galloped down; the last one fired
a pistol over his shoulder.  By the time he was splashing across the
brook, Nostori cavalry appeared, ten or fifteen of them.

Immediately, an eight-bore rifled musket bellowed from behind the
abatis.  His horse dance-stepped daintily; another, and another,
roared.  Across the hollow, a horse went down kicking, and another just
went down.  Another, with an empty saddle, trotted down to the stream
and stopped to drink.  The Nostori turned and galloped back out of
sight.  Nobody else had fired; riflemen were a law to themselves, but
the arquebusiers were waiting for orders.  He was wondering where the
rest of the rifles were when a row of white smoke puffs blossomed along
the edge of the bench above the creek on the left, and shots banged
like a string of firecrackers.  There were yells from out of sight
across the hollow, and musketoons thumped in reply.

Wasting Styphon's good fireseed; four hundred yards, they couldn't hit
Grant's Tomb at that range with smoothbores.  Along the abatis,
everybody was on his feet, crowding into position; there were a few
yells of "Hostigos!" and "Down Styphon!"  More confused noise from the
dead ground beyond the brow of the other hill, a steady whipcracking of
rifles, fired as fast as they could be reloaded and aimed, from the
bench.  He wished he had five hundred rifles up there.

Hell, while he was wishing, why not wish for twenty medium tanks and a
dozen Sabre-Jets?

Then the mercenary cavalry came up in a solid front on the brow of the
hill, black and orange lance-pennons and helmet-plumes and scarves,
polished breastplates.  Lancers all in front, musketoon-men behind.  A
shiver ran along the line as the lances came down; the advance paused
to dress front.

As though that had been the signal, which it had been, six
four-pounders and four eight-pounders went off as one, not a noise but
a palpable blow on the ears.  His horse started to buck; by the time he
had him under control again, the smoke was billowing out over the
hollow, and several perfect rings floated up against the blue, and
everybody was yelling, "_Down Styphon!_"

Roundshot; he could see the furrows it had plowed into the block of
black and orange cavalry; men yelling, horses rearing, or down and
screaming horribly as only wounded horses can.  The charge had stopped,
briefly, before it had started.  On either side of him, gun captains
were shouting, "Grapeshot!  Grapeshot!" and cannoneers were jumping to
their pieces before they had stopped recoiling with double-headed
swabs, one end wet to quench lingering powder-bag sparks and the other
dry.

The charge slid forward in broken chunks, down the dip into the hollow.
When they were twenty yards short of the brook, four hundred arquebuses
blazed; the whole front went down, horses behind tripping over fallen
horses in front.  The arquebusiers stepped back, drawing the stoppers
of their powder flasks with their teeth.  _Memo: self-measuring spring
powder flask; start making them as soon as possible_.  When they were
half reloaded, the other four hundred arquebuses crashed.  The way
those cavalry were jammed, down there, every bullet must have hit
something.  The smoke was clogging the hollow like spilled cotton, now;
through it he could see another wave of cavalry come up on the brow of
the hill.  A four-pounder spewed grape into them, and then another.
Down Styphon!  Before they could begin the descent, another
four-pounder went off.

Gustavus Adolphus' four-pounder crews could load and fire faster than
musketeers, a dry lecture-room voice was telling him.  Lord Kalvan's
weren't doing quite that well, but almost.  The first one had fired
close on the heels of the third arquebus volley.  Then one of the
eight-pounders fired, and that was a small miracle.

A surprising number of Klestreus' cavalry had survived the fall of
their horses.  Well, horses were bigger targets, and they didn't wear
breastplates.  Having nowhere else to go, they were charging up on
foot, their lances for pikes.  Some of them were shot in front of the
abatis, quite a few were piked trying to get through it.  A few did get
through.  As he galloped to help deal with one party of these, he could
see militiamen with scythe-blade things, he had never decided on the
correct name for those weapons, and billhooks and axes, running forward
from the horse lines.  At that moment, a trumpet sounded on the right,
and another on the left, and there were great shouts of "_Down
Styphon!_" at both ends.  Harmakros and the cavalry.


Then he was in front of a dozen Nostori mercenaries, pulling up his
horse and aiming a pistol at them.

"Yield, comrades!  We spare mercenaries!"

An undecided second and a half, then one raised his reversed musketoon
over his head.

"We yield; oath to Galzar."

That they would keep.  Galzar didn't like oath-breaking soldiers; he
always let them get killed at the next opportunity.  _Memo: cult of
Galzar; encourage_.

Some peasants ran up, brandishing axes.  He waved them back.

"Keep your weapons," he told the mercenaries.  "I'll find somebody to
guard you."

He found a couple of Mobile Force arquebusiers, and then had to save a
couple more mercenaries from having their throats cut.  Damn these
civilians!  Have to detail prisoner guards.  Disarm the mercenaries,
and the peasants would butcher them; leave them armed in the rear, and
maybe the temptation would be too great even for the fear of Galzar.

Along the abatis, the firing had stopped, but the hollow below was a
perfect hell's bedlam--_Down Styphon!_ and, occasionally, _Gormoth!_
Pistol shots, clashing steel.  Over his shoulder, he could see
villagers, even women and children, replacing the militia at the horse
lines.  Captains were shouting, "Pikes forward," and pikemen were
dodging out among the felled trees.  Dimly, through the smoke, he saw
red and blue colors on horsemen at the brow of the opposite hill.  The
road had been left open; he trotted forward and down toward the brook.

What he saw in the hollow made his stomach heave.  After being demob-ed
on the West Coast, he had made a side trip into Mexico on the way home,
and seen a bullfight in Juarez.  One horse gored to death by a bull
hadn't bothered him much, but this would have sickened the most
hardened _aficionado_.  The infantrymen, going forward, were stopping
to brain wounded horses or cut their throats or shoot them with pistols
from saddle holsters.  They oughtn't to stop to do that, but he
couldn't blame them.  The Hostigi soldier was a farmer and couldn't let
horses suffer.

Stretcher-bearers were coming forward, too, and so were villagers to
loot.  Corpse-robbing was the only way the civil population,
here-and-now, had of getting some of their own back after a battle.
Most of them had clubs or hatchets, to make sure that what they were
robbing really were corpses.  A lot of good weapons lying around, too.
They ought to be collected before they rusted into uselessness, but no
time to do that now.  Stopping to do that, once, had been one of
Stonewall Jackson's few mistakes.

Away ahead, there was another uproar of battle, and more _Down
Styphon!_  That would be the two hundred cavalry from the far right
hitting the second batch of mercenaries, who would be disorganized, by
now, by fugitives from the fight at the hollow.  Gormoth wasn't going
to have to pay a lot of mercenaries, if this kept up.  The infantry
were beginning to form up on the opposite hill, blocks of pikemen with
smaller blocks of arquebusiers between, and some were running back to
fetch the horses.  And Nostori cavalry were coming in in small groups,
holding their helmets up on their sword points and crying, "We yield;
oath to Galzar."  One of the officers of the flanking party, with four
men, was bringing in close to a hundred of them.  He was regretful that
so many had escaped.  The riflemen on the bench were drifting east,
firing as they went.  All the infantry from the Athan and many of the
militia had mounted themselves on captured horses.

There was a clatter behind him, and he got his horse off the road to
let the four-pounders pass in column.  Their captain waved to him and
told him, laughing, that the eights would be along in a day or so.

"Where do we get some more shooting?" he asked.

"Down the road a piece.  Just follow along; we'll show you."

He looked at his watch.  It was still ten minutes till noon, Hostigos
Standard Sundial Time.


By 1700, they were well down the road, and there had been a lot of
shooting on the way.  Now they were two miles west of the Athan, where
Klestreus' wagons and cannon were strung out for half a mile each way
along the road, and he was sitting, with his helmet off, on an upended
wine keg, at a table made by laying a shed door across a couple of
boxes, with Harmakros' pyrographed doeskin map spread in front of him
and a mug where he could reach it.  There were some burned-out
farm-buildings beside the road, and the big oaks which shaded him had
been yellowed on one side by the heat.  Several hundred prisoners were
squatting in the field beyond, eating food from their own wagons.
Harmakros, and the chief captain of mounted infantry, he'd be about
two-star rank, and the major-equivalent Galzar chaplain, and the
brigadier in direct command of the cavalry, sat or squatted around him.
The messenger from Sevenhills Valley, who had just caught up with him,
was trying to walk the stiffness out of his legs, carrying a mug from
which he drank as he paced and talked.

"That's all we know," he said.  "All morning, there was cannon fire up
the river, and then small-arms fire, a lot of it, and when the wind was
right, we could hear shouting.  A little after noon, some cavalry who
had been patrolling the strip between the river and the mountain came
in; they said Netzigon was across in force in front of Vryllos Gap, and
they couldn't get through to Ptosphes and Princess Rylla."

He cursed; some of it was comprehensible in local cursing terms.  "Is
she at Vryllos, too?"

Harmakros laughed.  "You ought to know her by now, Kalvan.  Try and
keep that girl out of a battle."

He'd probably be doing that the rest of his life.  Or hers, which
mightn't be so long, if she wasn't careful.  The messenger stopped,
taking a deep drink, then continued:

"Finally, a rider came in from this side of the mountain.  He said that
the Nostori were over the river and pushing Prince Ptosphes back into
the gap.  He wanted to know if the captain at Tarr-Dombra could help
him."

"Well?"

"We only had two hundred regulars and two hundred and fifty militia,
and it's ten miles up to Vryllos along the river, and the Styphon's own
way around the mountains on the south side.  So the captain left a few
cripples and kitchen women to hold the castle, and took everything else
he had across the river.  They were just starting when he sent me off.
I heard cannon fire when I was crossing Sevenhills Valley."

"That was about the best thing he could do."

There'd be a couple of hundred Nostori at Dyssa--about Jersey
Shore--just a holding force.  If they could run them out, burn the
town, and start enough of a scare, it might take some of the weight off
Ptosphes at Vryllos and Chartiphon at Listra-Mouth.

"I hope nobody expects any help from us," Harmakros said.  "Our horses
are ridden into the ground; half our men are mounted on captured
horses, and they're in worse shape now than the ones of our own we have
left."

"Some of my men are riding two on a horse," Phrames, the mounted
infantry CO, said.  "You figure what kind of a march they can make."

"It would be midnight before any of us could get to Vryllos Gap," he
said.  "That would be less than a thousand."

"Five hundred, I'd call it," the cavalry brigadier said.  "We've been
losing by attrition all the way east."

"But I'd heard that your losses had been very light."

"You heard?  From whom?"

"Why, from the men guarding prisoners.  Great Dralm, Lord Kalvan, I
never saw so many--"

"That's our losses; prisoner-guard details, every one as much out of it
as though he'd been shot through the head."


But Klestreus' army had simply ceased to exist.  It was not improbable
that as many as five hundred had safely crossed the Athan at Marax
Ford.  There would be several hundred more, singly and in small bands,
dodging through the woods to the south.  And some six hundred had
broken through at Narza Gap.  The rest had either been killed or
captured.

First, there had been the helter-skelter chase east from Fitra.  For
instance, twenty-five riflemen, firing from behind trees and rocks, had
stopped and turned back two hundred cavalry who were making for the
next gap down.  Mostly, anybody who was overtaken held up an empty hand
or a reversed sword and invoked Galzar.  He only had to fight once,
himself; he and two Mobile Force cavalrymen caught up with ten fleeing
mercenaries and charged them, shouting to them to yield.  Maybe the ten
were tired of running, maybe they thought it was insulting for three
men to try to capture them, or maybe they were just contrary.  Instead,
they had turned and charged.  He had half-dodged and half-parried a
lance and spitted the lancer through the throat, and had been thrusting
and parrying with two swordsmen when a dozen mounted infantrymen came
up.

Then, they had fought a small battle half a mile west of Systros.
Fifteen hundred infantry and five hundred cavalry, all mercenaries, had
just returned to the main road after passing around both sides of the
burning town and were forming up when the wrecks of the cavalry from
Fitra had come pelting into them.  Their own cavalry and the fugitives
were trying to force a way of escape, and the infantry were trying to
pike them off, when the Hostigi arrived, mounted infantrymen
dismounting to fight on foot.  Then the four-pounders arrived and began
throwing case-shot, leather tubes full of pistol bullets.  Gormoth's
mercenaries had never been exposed to case-shot before.  Several
hundred were killed, and the rest promptly hoisted their helmets, tore
off Gormoth's colors, and cried for quarter.

That had been where the mercenary general, Klestreus, had surrendered.
Phrames had attended to that; he and Harmakros had kept on with the
cavalry, now down to three hundred, pistoling and cutting down
fugitives.  A lot of these turned left toward Narza Gap.

Hestophes, the Hostigi CO there--about United States captain
equivalent, he'd be a full colonel this time tomorrow--had been a real
cool cat.  He'd had two hundred and fifty men, mostly regulars with
calivers, two old twenty-pound bombards, and several smaller pieces.
Klestreus' infantry had attacked Nirfe gap, the one below him, and,
with the aid of Netzigon's men from the other side, had swamped it.  A
few survivors had escaped along the mountain top and brought the news
to Narza.  An hour later, Hestophes' position was under attack from
both sides, too.

He had beaten off three assaults, a probable total of a thousand men.
Then his lookout on the mountain reported seeing the Fitra-Systros
fugitives streaming east.  Hestophes promptly spiked his guns and
pulled his men up out of the gap.  The infantry who had been besieging
him were swept along with the fleeing cavalry; from the mountainside,
Hestophes spattered them with caliver bullets to discourage loitering
and let them escape to spread panic on the other side.  By now, they
would be spreading it in Nostor Town.

Fitra had been a turkey shoot, Systros had been a roundup, and the rest
of it had been a fox hunt.  Then they had run into the guns and wagon
train, inching along under ox power.  There had been, with the train, a
thousand of Gormoth's own infantry, and five hundred mercenary cavalry.
This had been Systros all over, but a massacre.  The fugitive cavalry
had tried to force their way through, the infantry had resisted, and
then the four-pounders--only five, one was off the road below Systros
with a broken axle--had arrived and begun firing case-shot, and then
one of the eight-pounders arrived.  Some of the mercenaries tried to
put up a serious fight; when they found the pay chests in one of the
wagons they understood why.  The Nostori infantry simply emptied their
calivers and threw them away and ran.  Along with _Down Styphon!_ the
pursuers were now shouting, _Dralm and No Quarter!_  He wondered what
Xentos would have thought of that.  Dralm wasn't supposed to be that
kind of a god.

"You know," he said, getting out his pipe and tobacco, "we didn't have
a very big army to start with.  Just what do we have now?"

"Five hundred here, and four hundred at the river," Phrames said.  "The
rest are guarding prisoners all the way back to Fitra."

"Well, I think we can help Ptosphes and Chartiphon best from here," he
said.  "That gang Hestophes let through at Narza will be panting out
their story all the way to Nostor Town."  He looked at his watch again.
If he ever broke that thing, he'd be sunk!  "By this time, Gormoth will
be getting ready to fight the Battle of Nostor."  He turned to Phrames.
"How many men do you absolutely need, here?" he asked.  "Two hundred?"

Phrames looked up and down the road, and at the prisoners in the field,
and then, out of the corner of his eye, at the boxes under the shed
door that formed the table top.  They hadn't got around to weighing all
that silver yet, but there was too much to be careless with.

"I ought to have twice that many, Lord Kalvan."

"The prisoners are mercenaries, and they have agreed to take Prince
Ptosphes' colors," the priest of Galzar said.  "Of course, they cannot
bear arms against Gormoth or against any in his service until released
from their oaths to him by the end of the war.  In the sight of the
Wargod, helping you to guard these wagons would be bearing arms against
Gormoth, for it would free your own soldiers to do so.  But I will
speak to them, and I will answer that they will not break their oath of
surrender.  You will need no guards for them."

"Two hundred, then," Phrames said.  "I can use walking wounded for some
things."

"All right; take two hundred, the ones with the worst beat up horses,
and mind the store.  Harmakros, you take three hundred and two of the
four-pounders and cross at the next ford down.  I'll take four hundred
across at Marax and work east and north.  You can divide into two
columns of a hundred men and one gun apiece, but no smaller.  There
will be companies and parts of companies over there trying to reform.
Break them up.  And burn the whole country out, set fire to everything
that'll make a smoke, or a blaze after dark.  Any refugees going north,
give them a good scare, but don't stop them.  We want Gormoth to think
we have three or four thousand men across the river.  That'll take the
pressure off Vryllos Gap and Listra-Mouth."

He rose, and Phrames took his seat.  Horses were brought; he and
Harmakros and the others mounted.  The messenger from Sevenhills Valley
refilled his mug and sat down, stretching his legs in front of him.  He
rode along the line of wagons, full of food the people of Nostor
wouldn't eat this winter, and curse Gormoth for the lack, and kegs of
fireseed the slaves in Styphon's temple farms would have to toil to
replace.  He came to the guns, and saw one at which he stopped.  A long
brass eighteen-pounder, on a two-wheeled cart, with a four-wheeled cart
for ammunition and to support the tail of the heavy timber stock.
There was another behind it, and an officer in gilded armor sitting on
the cart, morosely smoking a pipe.

"Your guns, captain?" he asked.

"They were.  Prince Ptosphes' guns, now."

"They're still yours, and good pay for their use.  Gormoth of Nostor
isn't our only enemy."

The mercenary artilleryman grinned.  "Then I'll take Ptosphes' colors,
and my guns with me.  You're Lord Kalvan?  Is it really true that you
make your own fireseed?"

"What do you think we were shooting at you today, sawdust?"  He looked
at the guns again.  "We don't see brass guns around here."

They'd been made, as he suspected, in Zygros.  He looked at them again,
critically; there wasn't a thing wrong with Zygrosi brass-casting.  The
captain was proud of them, and glad he wasn't going to lose them; he
boasted about good shots they had made.

"Well, you'll find one of my officers, Count Phrames, back by that
burned house and those big trees.  Tell him I sent you.  He's to do
what he can to help you get those guns to Hostigos Town.  Where are
your men?"

"Some of them got killed, before we cried quits.  The rest are back
there with the others.  They'll all take the red and blue along with
me."

"I'll talk to you later.  Good luck, captain, and glad to have you with
us."

There were dead infantry all along the road, mostly killed from behind,
while running.  Infantry who stood firm had a chance, usually a very
good one, against cavalry.  Infantry who ran had none at all.  It grew
progressively worse until he came to the river, where the four-pounder
crews were swabbing and polishing their pieces, and dark birds rose
cawing and croaking and squawking when disturbed at their feast.  Must
be every crow and raven and buzzard in Hos-Harphax; he even saw a few
eagles.

And the river, horse-knee deep at the ford, was tricky.  Crossing,
their mounts stumbled continuously on armor-weighted corpses.  This one
had been a real baddie for Nostor.


"So your boy did it, all by himself," the lady history professor was
saying.

Verkan Vail nodded, grinning.  They were in a seminar room at the
University, lounging in seats facing a big map of Fourth Level
Aryan-Transpacific Hostigos, Nostor, northeastern Sask and northern
Beshta.

"Didn't I tell you he's a genius?"

"Just how much genius did it take to lick a bunch of klunks like that?"
the operations director challenged.  "From all the reports I got on it,
they licked themselves."

"Well, a great deal, accurately to predict the mistakes they'd make,
and then plan to take advantage of them," the elderly professor of
paratemporal probability theory pronounced.  He saw it as a brilliant
theoretical accomplishment, vindicated by experiment.  "I agree with
Chief's Assistant Verkan; the man is a genius.  Wait till we get this
worked up a little more completely!"

"He knew the military history of his own time line," the historian
said.  "And he knew how to apply it."  She wasn't going to let her own
subject be ignored.  "Actually, I think Gormoth planned a good
campaign--against Ptosphes and Chartiphon.  Without Kalvan, they'd
never have won."

"Well, Ptosphes and Chartiphon fought a battle of their own and won,
didn't they?"

"More or less.  Netzigon was supposed to wait across the river till
Klestreus got up to Vryllos Gap, but Chartiphon started cannonading
him--ordnance engineering by Kalvan--and Netzigon couldn't take it."

"Well, why didn't he pull back out of range?  He knew Chartiphon
couldn't get his cannon over the river."

"Oh, that wouldn't have been honorable.  Besides, he didn't want the
mercenaries to win the war, he wanted the honor of winning it."

"How often I've heard _that_ one!" the historian laughed.  "But don't
the Hostigi go in for this honor jazz, too?  On that cultural level--"

"Sure, till Kalvan talked them out of it.  As soon as he started making
better-than-Styphon's powder, he gained a moral ascendancy over them.
Indispensable Man.  And then, the new swordplay, the new tactics, the
artillery improvements; now it's 'Trust Lord Kalvan; Lord Kalvan is
always right.'"

"He'll have to keep working at that.  He won't dare make any mistakes.
But what happened to Netzigon?"

"He made three attempts to cross a hundred yards of river in the face
of an artillery superiority.  That was when he lost most of his
cavalry.  Then he threw his infantry across at Vryllos, pushed Ptosphes
back into the gap, and started a flank attack on Chartiphon up the
south bank of the river.  Ptosphes didn't stay pushed; he
counter-attacked and flanked Netzigon.  Then the girl, Rylla, took a
hundred-odd cavalry across, burned Netzigon's camp, slaughtered a lot
of camp followers, and started a panic in Netzigon's rear."

"That was too bad about Rylla," the lady historian said.

He shrugged.  "That can happen in battles, any size.  That's why
Dalla's always worried when she hears I've been in one.  Well, then
everything went to pieces and the pieces began breaking up.  We had a
couple of conveyors in on antigrav last night.  They had to stay above
twenty thousand feet, we didn't want any heavenly portents on top of
everything else, but they got some good infrared telephoto pictures.
Fires all over the western end of Nostor, and for a two-mile radius
around Dyssa, and in the southeast, that was Kalvan and Harmakros.  And
a lot of entrenching and fortifying around Nostor Town; Gormoth thinks
he's going to have to fight the next battle there."

"That's ridiculous!" the operations director declared.  "It'll be a
couple of weeks before Kalvan has his army reorganized, after those two
battles.  And powder; how much do you suppose he has left?"

"Five or six tons.  That just came in a little after noon, from our
people in Hostigos Town.  After he crossed the river, Harmakros
captured a wagon train.  An Archpriest of Styphon's House, on his way
to Nostor Town, with four tons of fireseed for Gormoth--and seven
thousand ounces of gold."

The operations director whistled.  "Man!  That's making war support
war, now!"

"And another ton or so in Klestreus' supply train, and Klestreus' pay
chest," he added.  "Hostigos came out of this deal pretty well."

"Wait till we get this all worked up," the paratemporal probability
theorist was cackling.  "Absolute proof of the decisive effect of one
superior individual on the course of history.  Kalthar Morth and his
Historical Inevitability, and his vast, impersonal, social forces,
indeed!"


Gormoth of Nostor stood with an arm over his companion's
shoulder--nobly clad, freshly bathed and barbered, with a gold chain
about his neck, Duke Skranga looked nothing like the vagrant horse
trader who had come to Nostor half a moon ago.  Together they stared at
the crowd in the Presence Chamber.  Netzigon, who had come stumbling in
after midnight with all his guns and half his army lost and the rest a
frightened rabble; his cousin Pheblon, his ransom still unpaid; the
nobles of the Elite Guard who had attended him yesterday, waiting with
him for news of victory until news of defeat had come; three officers
of Klestreus' mercenaries who had got through Narza Gap, and several
more who had managed to cross at Marax Ford alive.  And Vyblos, the
high priest, and with him Krastokles, the Archpriest of Styphon's House
Upon Earth, and his black-armored guard captain, who had arrived with
half a dozen men on broken-down horses at dawn.

He hated the sight of all of them, and the two priests most of all, and
wasted no words on them.

"This is Duke Skranga.  Next to me, he is first nobleman of Nostor.  He
takes precedence of all here."  The faces in front of him went slack
with amazement, then stiffened angrily.  A mutter of protest was hushed
almost as it began.  "Do any object?  Then he'd better be one who's
served me half as well as Skranga, and I see none such here."  He
turned to Vyblos.  "What do you want here, and who's this with you?"

"His Sanctity the Archpriest Krastokles, sent by His Divinity Styphon's
Voice," Vyblos began angrily.  "And how has he fared, coming here?  Set
upon by Hostigi heathens, hounded through the hills like a deer, his
people murdered, his wagons pillaged--"

"His wagons, by the mace of Galzar!  My gold and fireseed, sent me by
Styphon's Voice in his care, and look how he cared for it!  He and
Styphon between them!"

"Blasphemy!"  A dozen voices said it at once.  Vyblos', and
Krastokles', and the guard captain's.  And, among others, Netzigon's.

Now, by Galzar, didn't he have a fine right to open his mouth here?
Anger sickened him; in a moment he thought he would vomit pure bile.
He strode to Netzigon, snatching the golden chief captain's chain from
over his shoulders and striking him in the face with it, reviling him
with obscenity upon malediction.

"Out of my sight!  I told you to wait at Listra-Mouth for Klestreus not
to throw your army away with his.  By Galzar, I ought to flay you
alive!  Go, now, while you can!"

"Speak not of your fireseed and your gold," Krastokles told him.  "They
were the god's gold and fireseed, to be given to you for use in the
god's service at my discretion."

"And lost at your indiscretion; you witless fool in a yellow bed-gown.
Didn't you know a battle when you saw one in front of you?  Vyblos,
take this fellow you brought, and get you back to your temple with him,
and come here again at my bidding or at your peril.  Now go!"

He looked at the golden chain in his hand, then tossed it over the head
of his cousin Pheblon.

"I still don't thank you for losing me Tarr-Dombra, but that's a
handful of dried peas to what that son of a horseleech's daughter's
lost me.  Now, Galzar help you, you'll have to make an army out of what
he's left you."

"My ransom still needs paying," Pheblon reminded him.  "Till that's
done, I'm still oath-bound."

"So you are.  Twenty thousand ounces of silver, do you know where I can
find it?  I don't."

"I do, Prince," Skranga said.  "There should be five times that much in
the treasure vault of the temple of Styphon, here."

His horse stumbled, jerking him awake, and he got back onto the road.
Behind him clattered fifty-odd men, most more or less wounded, but none
seriously.  There had been a score on horse-litters or barely able to
cling to their mounts, but they had been left at the base hospital in
Sevenhills Valley.  He couldn't remember how long it had been since he
had had his clothes off, or even all his armor.  Except for pauses of a
quarter-hour now and then, he hadn't been out of the saddle since
daybreak, when he had crossed the Athan with the smoke of southern
Nostor behind him.

That had been as bad as Phil Sheridan in the Shenandoah, but every time
some peasant's thatch blazed up, he knew it was burning holes in Prince
Gormoth's morale.  He had felt better about it after seeing the
mile-wide swath of devastation along the main road in East Hostigos; at
Systros, there wasn't a house unburned.  It stopped dramatically short
at Fitra, and that made him feel best of all.

And the story Harmakros' stragglers had told him--fifteen eight-horse
wagons, four tons of fireseed, seven thousand ounces of gold, that was
at least one hundred fifty thousand dollars, three hundred new calivers
and six hundred pistols; a wagon-load of plate armor.  Too bad that
archpriest got away, his execution would have been a big public
attraction in Hostigos Town.

He had passed prisoners marching west, mercenaries, under arms and in
good spirits, at least one pike or lance in each detachment sporting
red and blue colors.  Some of them shouted "Down Styphon!" as he rode
past.  The back road from Fitra to Sevenhills Valley had not been so
bad, but now, in what he had formerly known as Nittany Valley, the
traffic became heavy again.  Militia from Listra-Mouth and Vryllos,
marching like regulars, which was what they were, now.  Lines of farm
wagons, piled with sacks and barrels and furniture that must have come
from manor houses.  Droves of cattle, and droves of prisoners not in
good spirits and not armed, under heavy guard; Nostori headed for labor
camps and intensive Styphon-is-a-fake indoctrination.  And guns, on
four-wheel carts, that he couldn't remember from any Hostigi ordnance
inventory.

Hostigos Town was in an all-time record traffic jam.  He ran into the
mercenary artillery captain, wearing his sword and dagger, with a strip
of blue cloth that seemed to have been torn from a bedspread and a red
strip from the bottom of a petticoat.  He was magnificently drunk.

"Lord Kalvan!" he shouted.  "I saw your guns; they're wonderful!  What
god taught you that?  Can you mount mine that way?"

"I think so.  I'll have a talk with you about it tomorrow, if I'm awake
then."

Harmakros was on his horse in the square, his rapier drawn, trying to
untangle the chaos of wagons and carts and riders.  He shouted to him
above the din:

"What the Styphon; when did we start using three-star generals for
traffic cops around here?"

MP's, of course; how the devil had he forgotten about that.  _Memo:
Organize, soonest_.

"Just till I can get a detail here.  I sent all my own crowd up to the
castle with the wagons."  He started to say something else, stopped,
and asked: "Did anybody tell you about Rylla?"

He went cold under his scalding armor.  "Great Draml, no.  What about
her?"  It seemed eternity before Harmakros answered:

"She was hurt; late yesterday, across the river.  Her horse threw her,
or something; I only know what one of Chartiphon's aides told me.
She's at the castle--"

"Thanks; I'll see you later."


He plowed his horse into the crowd.  People got out of his way and
yelled to those beyond.  Outside town, the road was choked with things
too big and slow to get out of the way, and mostly he rode in the
ditch.  The wagons Harmakros had captured were going up to
Tarr-Hostigos, huge covered things like Conestogas with the drivers
riding the nigh horses.  He thought he'd never get past them, there was
always another one ahead.  Finally, he rode through the outer gate of
Tarr-Hostigos.

Throwing his reins to somebody, he stumbled up the steps to the keep
and through the door.  From the Staff Room he heard laughing voices,
Ptosphes' among them.  For an instant he was horrified, then a little
reassured.  If Ptosphes could laugh, maybe it wasn't so bad.

He was mobbed as soon as he entered; everybody was shouting his name
and thumping him on the back, he was glad for his armor.  A goblet of
wine was thrust into his hand.  Ptosphes, Xentos, Chartiphon, most of
the General Staff--And a dozen officers decked with red and blue, whom
he had never seen before.

"Kalvan, this is General Klestreus," Ptosphes was saying, to introduce
a big man with gray hair and a florid face.

"An honor, General; you fought most brilliantly and valiantly."  He'd
fought like a damned imbecile, and his army had been chopped to
hamburger, but let's be polite.  He raised his goblet to the mercenary
and drank.  It was winter wine, set out in tubs to freeze and the ice
thrown off until it was almost as strong as brandy.  Maybe sixty proof,
the closest they had to spirits here-and-now.  It made him feel better,
and he drank more.

"Rylla; what happened to her?" he asked her father.

"Why, she broke a leg," Ptosphes began.

That scared him.  People had died of broken legs in his former world,
when the level of the medical art was at least up to here-and-now.
They used to amputate--

"She's all right, Kalvan," Xentos was saying.  "None of us would be
here if she were in any danger.  Brother Mytron is with her.  If she's
awake, she'll want to see you."

"Then I'll go to her."  He finished his wine and put the goblet down;
drew off his helmet and coif and put them beside it, stuffed his gloves
through his belt.  "You'll all excuse me--"

Rylla, whom he had expected to find gasping her last, sat propped
against a pile of pillows in bed, smoking a pipe with a cane stem and a
silver-inlaid redstone bowl.  She wore a loose gown, and her right leg
was buckled into a huge contraption of saddle-leather.  Mytron, the
chubby priest-physician, was with her, as were several of the women who
functioned as midwives, herb-boilers, hexers and general nurses.  Rylla
saw him first; her face lighted like sunrise.

"Hi, Kalvan!  Are you all right?  When did you get in?  How was the
battle?"

"Rylla, darling!"  The women sprayed away from in front of him like
grasshoppers.  She flung her arms around his neck as he bent over her;
he thought Mytron stepped in to relieve her of the pipe.  "What
happened to you?"

"You stopped in the Staff Room," she told him, between kisses.  "I
smell it on you."

"Well, what did happen?"

"Oh, my horse fell on me.  We were burning a Nostori village, and he
stepped on a hot ember."  Yes, just like William the Conqueror.
Nantes, 1087, the history professor in the back of his mind reminded
him.  "He almost threw me, and then fell over something, and down we
both went.  I had an extra pair of pistols down my boot-tops; I fell on
one of them.  The horse broke a leg, too, and they shot him."

"How is she, Mytron?"

"Nothing to worry about, Lord Kalvan!  It's a beautiful fracture.  A
priest of Galzar set it--"

"And gave me a Styphon's own lump on the head, too.  And now, it'll be
a couple of moons till we can have a wedding."

"Why, we could have it now--"

"I will not be married in my bedroom.  I will be married in the temple,
and I won't be on crutches."

"It's your wedding, Princess."  He hoped that the war with Sask
everybody expected would be out of the way before she was back in the
saddle.  "Somebody," he said over his shoulder, "go and have a hot bath
brought to my room, and tell me when it's ready.  I must stink to the
very throne of Dralm."

"I was wondering when you'd mention that, darling."


Sesklos, Supreme Priest and Styphon's Voice, rested his elbows on the
table and palmed his smarting eyes.  Around him pens scratched and
parchments rustled and tablets clattered.  He longed for the cool quiet
of the Innermost Circle, but there was so much to do.

The letter from the Archpriest of the Great Temple of Hos-Agrys lay
before him.  News of the defeat of Prince Gormoth's armies was
spreading, and with it rumors that Ptosphes of Hostigos was making
fireseed for himself.  Agents-inquisitory reported that the ingredients
and even the proportions and processes were being bandied in the
taverns.  To kill everyone who knew the secret was quite out of the
question; even a pestilence couldn't do that.  And how to check the
spread of the secret without further divulging it?

He opened his eyes.  Admit it; better that than deny it and later be
proven liars.  Let everyone, even the lay guards, know the full secret,
but, for believers, insist that special prayers and rites, which only
yellow-robe priests could perform, were necessary.

But why?  Soon it would be known to all that fireseed made by
unconsecrated hands would fire as well.

Well, there were malignant demons of the netherworld.  Everybody knew
that.  He smiled, imagining them thronging about, scrawny bodies, bat
wings, bristling beards, clawed and fanged.  In fireseed there were
many of them, and only the prayers of anointed priests of Styphon could
slay them.  If this were not done, as soon as the fireseed was
exploded, they would be set free into the world of men, to work
manifold evils and frights.  And, of course, the curse of Styphon was
upon all who made fireseed unconsecrated.

But Ptosphes had made fireseed and had not been smitten, and he had
pillaged a temple-farm and massacred the priests, and after that he had
defeated the armies of Prince Gormoth, who marched with Styphon's
blessing.  How about that, now?

But wait!  Gormoth was no better than Ptosphes.  He had made fireseed
himself, both Krastokles and Vyblos were sure of it, and he had
blasphemed Styphon, and despitefully used a holy archpriest, and forced
a hundred thousand ounces of silver from the Nostor temple, at as close
pistol-point as didn't matter.  To be sure, most of that had been after
the battle, but who outside Nostor would know that?  Gormoth had
suffered defeat for his sins.

He was smiling happily, now.  Of course, Hostigos must be utterly
destroyed and ruined, and all in it put to the sword; the world must
see, once and for all, what befell a land that turned its back on
Styphon.  Sarrask of Sask would have to do that; Gormoth couldn't, even
if he could be trusted to.  Sarrask, and Balthar, Prince of Beshta;
Sarrask had been seeking a Beshtan alliance, and now was offering his
daughter, Amnita, in marriage to Prince Balthar's younger brother,
Balthames.  An idea began to seep up into his mind.

Balthames wanted to be a Prince, too.  It needed only a poisoned cup or
a hired dagger to make him Prince of Beshta, and Balthar knew it.  He
wanted Balthames and his ambitions removed; should have had him killed
long ago.  Now, suppose Balthames married this wench of Sarrask's;
suppose Sarrask gave up a little corner of Sask, and Balthar a little
corner of Beshta, both adjoining Hostigos.  Call it the Princedom of
Sashta.  To it could be added all western Hostigos south of the
mountains; why, that would be a nice little princedom for any young
couple.  He smiled benevolently.  And the father of the bride and the
brother of the groom could recompense themselves, respectively, with
the Listra Valley, rich in iron, and East Hostigos.

That should be done immediately, before winter set in; then, in the
spring, Sarrask, Balthames and Balthar could hurl their combined armies
out of conquered Hostigos into Nostor.  He'd send out another
archpriest of Styphon's House Upon Earth ... let's see who that should
be ... to Sask, to make arrangements--with lavish gifts of money and
fireseed for Sarrask and Balthar.  And this time, make sure the
treasures of Styphon's House did not fall into the hands of the infidel.






[End of Down Styphon!, by H. Beam Piper]
