"They aren't four times our size, are they?" Prince K'Sed spoke with a certain amount of wonder as he studied the drawn-up ranks of the enemy.
"You knew that, Your Highness," Greenberg observed, hoping to hearten the T'Kai leader. "You've received M'Sak ambassadors often enough at your court."
"Ambassadors are different from soldiers," K'Sed answered. Now he could see the M'Sak were G'Bur much like the ones he commanded, but it did not seem to hearten him.
Eyeing the force ahead, Greenberg understood why the prince remained apprehensive. The ranks of the M'Sak were grimly still and motionless, while the T'Kai milled about and chattered as if they were still on march or, better image yet, gabbing about this and that while they tried to outdo one another in the marketplace. For the most part, they were merchants, not soldiers, by trade. The M'Sak, unfortunately, were soldiers.
The master merchant slowly realized that went deeper than the discipline the northern warriors showed. Everything about them was calculated to intimidate. Even their banners were the green of an angry G'Bur, not the unmartial bronze under which the T'Kai mustered. Greenberg wondered how many such clues he was missing but that were playing on the psyches of K'Sed and his army.
And yet, the T'Kai owned an edge no soldiers on L'Rau had ever enjoyed. "They cannot hide from us," he reminded K'Sed. "We will know all their concealed schemes and be able to counter them." Only once the words were out of his mouth did he stop to think the one might not be the same as the other.
Something of an odd color moved with a peculiar sinuous motion through the ranks of the T'Kai. V'Zek wondered if the southrons had lured ghosts to fight for them. Trying to suppress superstitious dread, he put the question to Z'Yon.
"Anything is possible, my master, but I have detected no signs of this," the shaman said. "I think you are seeing instead a Soft One."
V'Zek gave a clattery shudder of disgust. The Soft One moved like—like— V'Zek took a long time to find a comparison. Finally he thought of water pouring from a jug. That did not make him feel much better. Live things had no business moving like water pouring from a jug.
He waved to his drummers. Their thunder signaled his warriors forward. He spent only moments worrying about being watched from the sky. Once it was pike against pike, things would happen too fast for that to matter. And he felt fairly sure the sky-things could not read his thoughts. If they could, reading his hatred would have burned them down long since.
"They're advancing," Jennifer reported.
Greenberg's voice was dry as he answered, "I'd noticed. Let's check the screen and see what they're up to." After a pause, he spoke again. "Two lines, no particular weighting anywhere along them I can see. Whatever cards he's holding, he doesn't want to show them yet."
"No," Jennifer agreed. She paused herself, then added, "Maybe we shouldn't have let him get used to the idea of having the drones up there."
"Maybe we shouldn't. Why didn't you say something about that sooner?"
Jennifer hated blushing, but couldn't help it. Luckily, the link with Greenberg was voice-only. "I just thought of it now."
"Oh," Greenberg said. "Well, I didn't think of it at all, so how am I supposed to criticize you? We're all amateur generals here. I just hope it doesn't end up costing us. Do you suppose we shouldn't have shown the northerners the Flying Festoon, either?"
"We'll find out soon enough, don't you think?"
"Yes, I expect we will. This is a tad more empirical than I'd really planned on being, though. Wish us all luck."
"I do," Jennifer said. "You three especially, because you're on the ground."
The master merchant did not answer. Jennifer sighed. She sent the Flying Festoon whizzing low over the battlefield. The roar of cloven air filled the cabin when she activated the outside mike pickup. Then she shut it off again and turned on the ship's siren. It reverberated through the hull, even without amplification, and set her teeth on edge.
She studied the pictures the drones gave her. After reading about so many imaginary battles in Middle English, she fancied herself a marshal. She soon discovered the job was, as with most jobs, easier to imagine than to do. She found no magic strategic key to V'Zek's maneuvers. If anything, she thought him over-optimistic, advancing as he was against a strong defensive front: the T'Kai right was protected by a river, the left anchored by high ground and a stand of trees.
She wondered if he knew something she didn't, and hoped finding out wouldn't be too expensive.
B'Rom sidled up to Greenberg crabwise—an adverb the master merchant applied to few G'Bur but the vizier. "Soon now," B'Rom declared. The translator should have given his clicks, hisses, and whistles a furtive quality, but that, sadly, was beyond its capabilities.
"Soon what?" Greenberg asked, a trifle absently. Most of his attention was on the forest of oversized cutlery bearing down on the T'Kai. The Flying Festoon's histrionics left his ears stunned. He hoped the M'Sak were quaking in the boots they didn't wear.
Then his head whipped around, for B'Rom said, "Soon the assassination, of course. What better time than when the savages are in the midst of their attack?"
"None, I suppose," Greenberg mumbled. His hand eased on the stunner. Maybe he wouldn't have to use it after all.
The racket overhead was appalling and confusing, but V'Zek was proud of the way his warriors pressed on toward the waiting enemy. The Soft Ones had blundered in showing their powers too soon. That relieved V'Zek: ghosts or spirits never would have made such a foolish mistake. The Soft Ones were natural, then, no matter how weird they looked. V'Zek was confident he could handle anything natural.
A warrior whose carapace was painted with a messenger's red stripes rushed up to the chieftain. V'Zek's eyestalks drew together in slight perplexity—what could be so urgent, when the two armies had not even joined? Then the fellow's left front grasping-claw pulled a war hammer from its concealed sheath under his plastron. He swung viciously at the M'Sak chieftain.
Only V'Zek's half-formed suspicion let him escape unpunctured. He sprang to one side. The hammerhead slammed painfully against him between right front and rear grasping-legs, but the chisel point did not penetrate. By the time the would-be assassin struck again, V'Zek had out his own shortspear. He turned the blow and gave back a counterthrust his enemy beat aside.
Then half a ten M'Sak were battling the false messenger. Before their chieftain could shout for them to take him alive, he had fallen, innards spurting from a score of wounds. "Are you all right, my master?" one of the soldiers gasped.
V'Zek flexed both right-side grasping-legs. He could use them. "Well enough." He looked closely at the still shape of his assailant. The curve of the shell was not quite right for a M'Sak. "Does anyone know him?"
None of the warriors spoke.
"I suppose he is of T'Kai," the chieftain said. The soldiers shouted angrily. So did V'Zek, but his fury was cold. He had wanted the southrons for what they could yield him and his people. Now he also had a personal reason for beating them. He reminded himself not to let that make him break away from his carefully devised plan. "Continue the advance, as before," he ordered.
"Some sort of confusion for a moment there around the chieftain." Jennifer's voice sounded in Greenberg's ear. With the M'Sak so close, he had put away the vision screen. He let out his breath in a regretful sigh when she reported, "It seems to be over now."
"Damn." Marya and Koniev said it together. All three humans were on the right wing—the right claw, they would say on L'Rau—of the T'Kai army, not far from the river. Since V'Zek led the invaders from their right, he was most of a kilometer away, out of their view.
Closer and closer came the M'Sak. They were shouting fiercely, but the din from the Flying Festoon outdid anything they could produce. "Shoot!" cried an underofficer.
G'Bur held bows horizontally in front of themselves with their front pair of grasping-claws, using the rear pair to load arrows—sometimes one, sometimes a pair—and draw the weapons. The M'Sak archers shot back at the T'Kai, lofting arrows with chisel-headed points to descend on their foes' backs.
Every so often, a warrior on one side or the other would collapse like a marionette whose puppeteer had suddenly dropped the strings. More commonly, the shafts would skitter away without piercing their targets. Exoskeletons had advantages, Greenberg thought.
An arrow buried itself in the ground less than a meter from his left boot. He shuffled sideways and bumped into Marya, who was unconsciously moving away from an arrow that had landed to her right. Their smiles held little humor. She said, "Shall we give them something to think about?"
Greenberg and Koniev both nodded. The three humans leveled their stunners at the M'Sak. The gun twitched slightly in the master merchant's hand as it fed stun charges one after another into the firing chamber.
One after another, M'Sak began dropping; pikes and halberds fell from nerveless grasping-claws. The invaders' advance, though, took a long moment to falter. Greenberg realized the M'Sak, intent on the enemies awaiting them, hadn't noticed their comrades were going down without visible wounds.
Then they did notice, and drew up in confusion and fear: for all they knew, the felled warriors were dead, not stunned. Greenberg took careful aim and knocked down a M'Sak whose halberd had a fancy pennon tied on below the head—an officer, he hoped. "Good shot!" Koniev cried, and thumped him on the back.
"I only wish we had a couple of thousand charges instead of a hundred or so," Marya said, dropping another M'Sak. "That would end that, and in a hurry, too."
By no means normally an optimist, Greenberg answered, "We're doing pretty well as is." The M'Sak left was stalled; had they been humans, the master merchant would have thought of them as rocked back on their heels.
The officers who led the T'Kai right did not have that concept—or heels, for that matter—but they recognized disorder when they saw it. "Advance in line!" they ordered.
The T'Kai raised a rattling cheer and moved forward. They chopped and thrust at their foes, who gave ground. For a heady moment, Greenberg thought the M'Sak would break and run.
They did not. Faced by an assault of a sort with which they were familiar, the invaders rallied. Their polearms stabbed out at the T'Kai, probing for openings. The opposing lines came to close quarters. For a long time, motion either forward or backward could be measured in bare handfuls of meters.
The humans stopped shooting. They had to be careful with charges, and friend and foe were so closely intermingled now that a shot was as likely to fell a T'Kai as an M'Sak. If the enemy broke through, stunners could be of value again. Without armor, the humans were useless in the front line.
Koniev laughed nervously as he watched the struggle not far away. He said, "I never thought there would be so much waiting inside a battle."
"I notice you're still holding your stunner, not your mace," Marya said.
Koniev looked down as if he had not been sure himself. "So I am." The mace was on his belt. He touched it with his left hand. "If I have to use this thing, odds are we'll be losing. I'd sooner win."
Greenberg's own personal defense weapon was a war hammer. He had almost forgotten it; now he noticed it brush against his thigh, felt its weight on his hip. He nodded to himself. He would just as soon go on pretending it wasn't there.
"The savages are mad, mad!" Prince K'Sed clattered, watching the M'Sak swarm up the slope toward his waiting soldiers. "All the military manuals cry out against fighting uphill." Like a proper ruler, he could stand on any walking-leg. He had studied the arts of war even though they bored him, but had never expected the day to come when he put them to practical use.
B'Rom clicked in agreement. "No law prevents our taking advantage of such madness, however." He turned to the officer beside him. "Isn't that so, D'Ton?"
"Aye, it is." But the general sounded a little troubled. "I had looked for better tactics from V'Zek. After all, he—" D'Ton had at least the virtue of knowing when to shut up. Reminding his prince and vizier that the enemy had won every battle thus far did not seem wise.
"Let us punish him for his rashness," B'Rom declared. D'Ton looked to K'Sed, who raised a grasping-claw to show assent.
The general scraped his plastron against the ground in obedience. He had no real reason not to agree with the prince and vizier. Knowing when and by what route the M'Sak were coming had let the army choose this strong position. Not taking advantage of it would be insanely foolish. He filled his book lungs. "Advance in line!"
Lesser officers echoed the command. Cheering, the prince's force obeyed. They knew as well as their leaders the edge the high ground gave them. Iron clashed and belled off iron, crunched on carapaces, and sheared away limbs and eyestalks.
With their greater momentum, the T'Kai stopped their enemies' uphill advance dead in its tracks. The two lines remained motionless and struggling for a long moment. Here, though, the stalemate did not last. The T'Kai began to force the M'Sak line backward.
"Drive them! Drive them! Well done!" D'Ton shouted. V'Zek truly had made a mistake, he thought.
Prince K'Sed, gloomy since the day he learned of the M'Sak invasion, was practically capering with excitement. "Drive them back to M'Sak!" he cried.
"Driving them back to level ground would do nicely," B'Rom said, but as he spoke in normal tones, no one but K'Sed heard him. The T'Kai warriors picked up the prince's cry and threw it at the foe. "Back to M'Sak! Back to M'Sak!" It swelled into a savage chant. Even B'Rom found a grasping-claw opening and closing in time to it. Irritated at himself, he forced the claw closed.
"Hold steady! Don't break formation! Hold steady!" V'Zek heard the commands echoed by officers and underofficers as the M'Sak gave ground. He wished he could be in the thick of the fighting, but if he were, he could not direct the battle as a whole. That, he decided reluctantly, was more important, at least for the moment.
"Back to M'Sak! Back to M'Sak!" The shout reached him over the din of battle and the yells of his own warriors.
"Amateurs," he snorted.
"They aren't fond of us, are they?" Z'Yon observed from beside him.
"They'll be even less fond of us if they keep advancing a while longer." And, V'Zek thought but did not say, if my own line holds together. He would never have dared try this with the T'Kai semirabble. Even with good troops, a planned fighting retreat was dangerous. It could turn unplanned in an instant.
But if it didn't . . . if it didn't, he would get in some fighting after all.
Being a trader was different from what Jennifer had expected. So was watching a battle. It was also a good deal worse. Those were real intelligent beings trying to kill one another down there. Those were real body fluids that spurted from wounds, real limbs that lay quivering on the ground after being hacked away from their former owners, real eyestalks that halberds and bills sliced off, real G'Bur who would never walk or see again but who were in anguish now and might well live on, maimed, for years.
She tried to detach herself from what she was seeing, tried to imagine it as something not real, something only happening on the screen. Koniev or Marya, she thought, would have no trouble doing that; about Greenberg she was less sure. She knew she had no luck. What she watched was real, and she could not make herself pretend it was only a screen drama. Too many of these actors would never get up after the taping was done.
So she watched and tried not to be sick. The really frustrating thing was that, in spite of having a full view of the whole battlefield, she could not fathom what, if anything, V'Zek was up to. The T'Kai right wing was holding; the left, by now, had actually advanced several hundred meters.
This, she thought with something as close to contempt as her mild nature allowed, was the sort of fighting that had made V'Zek feared all through the T'Kai confederacy? It only showed that on a world with poor communications, any savage could build up a name for himself that he didn't come close to deserving.
F'Rev had no idea what the battle as a whole looked like. The commander-of-fifty had his own, smaller problems. His troop was in the T'Kai center. The line he was holding had stretched thin when the army's left claw drove back the barbarians: it had been forced to stretch to accommodate its lengthened front.
Now it could not stretch any further. He sent a messenger over to the troop on his immediate right, asking for more warriors.
The messenger returned, eyestalks lowered in apprehension. "Well?" F'Rev growled. "Where are the reinforcements?"
"He has none to send, sir," the messenger said nervously. "He is as thin on the ground as we are."
"A pestilence!" F'Rev burst out. "What am I supposed to do now?"
V'Zek's guards almost killed the red-striped messenger before he reached the chieftain—after one try on their master's life, they were not about to permit another. But when the fellow's bona fides were established, he proved to bring welcome news.
"There's a stretch in the center, three or four troops wide, my master, where they're only a warrior or two thick," he told V'Zek.
Z'Yon, who heard the gasped-out message, bent before V'Zek so that his plastron scraped the ground. "Just as you foretold, my master," the shaman said, more respectful than V'Zek ever remembered hearing him.
The chieftain knew he had earned that respect. He felt the way bards sometimes said they did when songs seemed to shape themselves as they were sung, as if even the sun rose and set according to his will. It was better than mating, purer than the feeling he got from chewing the leaves of the p'sta tree.
Neither moment nor feeling was to be wasted. "Now we fight back harder here," he told the subchiefs who led his army's right claw. "We've drawn them away from their strongpoint; now we'll make them pay for coming out."
"About time," one of his underlings said. "Going backward against these soft-shells was making my eyestalks itch."
"Scratch, then, but not too hard. I want you to hold their left in place, make it retreat a little if you like, but not too far."
"Why not?" the subchief demanded indignantly.
"Because that would only hurt them. I intend to kill." V'Zek was already running full tilt toward the center. Here indeed was his chance to fight.
"The M'Sak aren't giving up any more ground on the left," Jennifer reported into Greenberg's ear. "I suppose the T'Kai charge has run out of steam now that they're down onto flat ground." A moment later she added, "The barbarians are shifting a little toward the center, or at least V'Zek is moving that way."
"Anything serious there, do you think?" the master merchant asked.
After her usual hesitation, Jennifer said, "I doubt it. What can he do that he hasn't already failed with on the left? He—" She stopped again. When she resumed, all she said was, "My God."
This time, Greenberg did not blame her for halting. He could not yet see what had gone wrong, but he could hear that something had. He snapped, "What is it, Jennifer?"
"They found a soft spot in the line somehow—the M'Sak in the T'Kai line, I mean." Another wait, this time for Jennifer to collect herself. "Hundreds of them are pouring through. They're turning in on the T'Kai left wing and—rolling it up, is that the phrase?"
"That's the phrase," the master merchant said grimly.
Along with Koniev and Marya, he ran to try to stem the rout. Long before he reached the rupture point, he knew it was hopeless. No mere thumb could repair this dike. The few M'Sak the humans dropped did not influence the battle in the least.
From the Flying Festoon, Jennifer said, "I'm sorry I didn't notice anything going wrong."
"I don't think there was anything to notice, Jennifer," Koniev told her. "V'Zek didn't find that soft spot in our line—he made it. He lured the left out till the T'Kai got overextended, and then—and now—"
"And now," Jennifer echoed ruefully. "A few minutes ago, I was thinking V'Zek a fool of a general for letting himself get driven down the slope. He must have done it on purpose. That makes me the fool, for not seeing it."
"It makes all of us fools," Greenberg said.
"But he shouldn't have been able to do it," Jennifer protested. "Humans are a lot more sophisticated than any G'Bur, let alone barbarians like the M'Sak. We had the drones watching every move he made, too."
"He managed, though, in spite of everything," Greenberg said. "And that makes him a very nasty enemy indeed."
No one argued with him.
"We are undone!" K'Sed cried. It was not a shout of panic, but rather of disbelief. "They tricked us!" The M'Sak surged against his line and pushed it back. Maybe, he thought much too late, he should not have called for pursuit down off the slope the T'Kai had held. Then, perhaps, he would not have had these screaming, clacking savages in his rear, rolling up his warriors like a molt-ling folding a shed piece of grasping-claw.
"I did not know trickery was against the rules," B'Rom said. The vizier made as much a point of pride at being unimpressed with everything as V'Zek did with being unafraid. He went on, "After all, we tried to do the same to the M'Sak with what we learned from the Soft Ones."
"The Soft Ones!" K'Sed shouted. "They tricked us, too! They said we would win if we fought here. This whole botch is their fault."
"Oh, twaddle, Your Highness."
K'Sed stared at B'Rom. Under other circumstances, that would have been lese majesty enough to cost the vizier his shell, one painful bit at a time. But now—K'Sed mastered his anger, though he did not forget. "Twaddle, is it?"
"Certainly." Whatever his shortcomings in behavior, B'Rom was no coward. "They told us nothing of the sort that I recall. They said this was a good place to fight, and it is. You can see that with three eyes closed, as can I. But they are traders, not generals—that, unfortunately, is not a deficiency from which V'Zek suffers."
"Unfortunately." K'Sed could play the game of understatement, too. Staying detached was not easy any more, though, not when the line was unraveling like a poorly woven basket and the guards were almost as busy behind the prince as in front of him. He did try. "All these unfortunate things being true, what do you recommend now?"
One of B'Rom's eyestalks pointed behind him and to the left. "Running for the forest yonder seems appropriate at the moment, wouldn't you say? We'll save a remnant that way, rather than all staying in the trap."
"Our right—"
"Is on its own anyway."
K'Sed hissed in despair. B'Rom had a way of being not just right, but brutally right. With a more forceful prince, he would have been killed long since. K'Sed wished he were that sort of prince. The T'Kai confederacy could use such a leader, to oppose V'Zek if for no other reason. He was as he was, though; no help for it. "Very well. We will fall back on the forest." He hoped all the practice he'd put in with the shortspear would stay with him.
Chaos also gripped the T'Kai right claw, if in a less crushing embrace. Still under assault from the M'Sak before them, the T'Kai warriors could do nothing to rescue their cut-off comrades. In fact, the northerners pouring through the gap where the center had been tried to roll them up and treat them like the left.
"Here they come again!" Marya shouted. The humans expended more precious stun charges. M'Sak fell. Others advanced past them. Dying in battle, even strangely, held few terrors for them. They did not know the stun guns were not lethal, but they had seen enough to be sure the weapons were not all-powerful.
Pavel Koniev perturbed them more than the stun guns could when he sprang out and shrieked "Boo!" at the top of his lungs. The cry was as alien to their clicks, hisses, and pops as his fleshy body was to their hard integuments. Not even their stories held ghosts as strange as he.
But the M'Sak were soldiers, and they were winning. As with the Flying Festoon, the mere appearance of the unknown was not enough to daunt them. They rushed forward, weapons ready. The humans snapped shots at them. As with any hurried shooting, they missed more often than they wanted to. And they had time to press trigger buttons just once or twice before the M'Sak were on them.
Marya's scream made the shout Koniev had let out sound like a whisper. The warrior in front of her was startled enough to make only a clumsy swipe with his partisan. She ducked under it, stunned him at close range, then dashed up to crush the brain-nodes under his suddenly flaccid eyestalks.
Koniev did not use his stunner. He killed his foe with exactly the same move he had practiced on the way north. Then, orange body liquids dripping from his mace, he stood on the fallen M'Sak's carapace and roared out a challenge to the local's comrades. The challenge went unanswered.
Greenberg did not find out till later how his friends fared. At the time, he was too busy staying alive to pay them much attention. He threw himself flat to avoid a halberd thrust, then leaped up and grabbed the polearm below the head to wrestle it away from the M'Sak who wielded it.
That was a mistake. G'Bur were no stronger than humans, but their four grasping-limbs let them exert a lot more leverage. Greenberg found himself flung around till he felt like a fly on the end of a fisherman's line. He lost his grip and fell in a heap. The M'Sak swung up the halberd for the kill.
Before he could bring it down, he had to parry a blow from a T'Kai. The soldiers from the southern confederacy were frantically counterattacking. Greenberg scrambled to his feet. "Thanks!" he shouted to the warrior who had saved him. He doubted the local had done so out of any great love for humans. But if the right wing of the T'Kai army was to escape as a fighting force, it could not let itself be flanked like the luckless left. Greenberg did not care about why the local had rescued him. Any excuse would do.
The M'Sak gave ground grudgingly, but they gave ground. More and more of them went off to finish routing the left—and to plunder corpses. That was easier, more profitable work than fighting troops still ready to fight back. The T'Kai right broke free of its assailants and retreated south and east along the bank of the stream that protected its flank. The three humans trudged along with it.
Jennifer turned on the Flying Festoon's spotlight. A finger of light stabbed down from the sky. The ship descended, its siren wailing. She wished it were a rocket like the ones she read about—then it might incinerate thousands of M'Sak with its fiery blast. Sometimes mundane contragravity was too safe to be useful.
By then, the M'Sak took the starship for granted. They ignored it until it came down on top of several of them and smashed them into wet smears beneath it. The rest scattered. Jennifer ordered the air lock open. Her comrades laughed in delight as they scrambled inside. "It's a weapon after all!" Greenberg shouted.
"Why, so it is," Jennifer said. "Do you want to start squashing them by ones and twos?"
After a moment, Greenberg shook his head. "Not worth it, I don't think—might as well go smashing cockroaches with an anvil."
"All right," she said. She looked in the viewscreen. "They are running away."
"Good. That will let this half of the army get loose." Greenberg ran a grimy forearm across his face. He was swaying where he stood. "I don't believe I've ever been this tired in my life. I think we'll spend the next couple of nights in the ship."
"All right," Jennifer said again. She stifled a small sigh. With everyone else aboard, she wouldn't get much reading done.
Jennifer walked along the wall of the little town of D'Opt. Her reader was in her pocket; Bernard Greenberg walked beside her. They both looked out at the M'Sak who ringed the place. Jennifer wished the barbarians seemed further away. D'Opt was barely important enough to rate a wall; its four meters of baked brick sufficed to keep out brigands. Keeping out V'Zek and his troopers was likely to be something else again.
Walking-claws clattered on the bricks, close by her. She turned her head. So did Greenberg. He had the higher rank, so he spoke to K'Sed. "Your Highness."
The prince did not answer for some time. Like the humans, he was looking out at the encircling enemy. At last he said, "I wish we were back in T'Kai City."
"So do I, Your Highness," Greenberg said. Jennifer nodded. T'Kai City's walls were twice as high and three times as thick as those of D'Opt, and made of stone in the bargain.
"You Soft Ones could have done more to help us get there," K'Sed said—crabbily, Jennifer thought. She supposed the prince was not to be blamed for his bad temper. K'Sed had certainly had a hard time of it. Skulking through the woods and fleeing for one's life were not pastimes for which princes usually trained.
But Greenberg said, "Your Highness, were it not for us, you would have no army left at all, and the M'Sak would be running loose through the whole confederacy. As is, you are strong enough still to force them to concentrate against you here."
"But not strong enough to beat them," K'Sed retorted. "That only delays matters, does it not? Had we fought them somewhere else, we might have won."
The unfairness of that almost took Jennifer's breath away. For once, she did not hesitate. Before Greenberg could reply to the prince, she blurted, "But you might have lost everything, too!" You likely would have lost everything, she said to herself.
"We'll never know now, will we?" K'Sed sounded as if he thought he had scored a point. "And after the fight, you did little to keep the barbarians off us."
"We did what we could, Your Highness," Greenberg said. "I am sorry the M'Sak did not oblige us by holding still to be smashed one at a time."
His sarcasm reached the prince where Jennifer's protest had failed. K'Sed bent his left walking-legs, letting that side of his plastron almost scrape the bricks—a G'Bur gesture of despondency. "I knew this campaign was ill-omened when we undertook it. Even the moon fights against us."
It was late afternoon. Greenberg and Jennifer looked eastward. She rarely gave L'Rau's moon a thought—why worry about a dead stone lump several hundred thousand kilometers away? It looked as uninteresting now as ever: a gibbous light in the sky, especially pale and washed out because the sun was still up.
"What about the moon, Your Highness?" she said.
"When it grows full, three days hence, it will be eclipsed," K'Sed told her, as if that explained everything.
"Well, what of it?" She was so surprised, she forgot to tack on K'Sed's honorific. "You must know what causes an eclipse?"
The prince was distraught enough to miss her faux pas. He answered, "Of course—the passage of our world's shadow over the face of the moon. Every enlightened citizen of the towns in the confederacy knows this." K'Sed turned one eyestalk toward the soldiers swarming through D'Opt's narrow streets. "Peasants, herders, and even artisans, though, still fear the malign powers they believe to stalk the night."
"That is not good," Greenberg said.
Jennifer thought he'd come up with one of the better understatements she'd heard. As low-technology worlds went, L'Rau, or at least the T'Kai confederacy, was relatively free from superstition. But the key word was relatively. And because humans dealt mostly with nobles and wealthy traders, she did not have a good feel for just how credulous the vast majority of the locals were.
She had also missed something else. K'Sed pointed it out for her, literally, gesturing toward the bronze-hued T'Kai banners that still fluttered defiance at the M'Sak. "Perhaps our color is ill-chosen," the prince said, "but when the swallowed moon appears in that shade, how will the ignorant doubt it implies their being devoured by M'Sak? Truly, I could almost wonder myself." K'Sed was a sophisticate, Jennifer reminded herself, but even sophisticates on primitive planets found long-buried fears rising when trouble came.
"Maybe we could teach your soldiers—" Jennifer stopped, feeling Greenberg's ironic eye turned her way. She realized she'd been foolish. Three days of lessons would not overturn a lifetime's belief. She asked, "Do your warriors know the eclipse is coming, your Highness?"
"Sadly, they do. We tried to keep it from them, but even the M'Sak, savages though they be, have got wind of it. From time to time they amuse themselves by shouting it up to our sentries, and shouting that they will destroy us on that night. I fear . . ." K'Sed hesitated, went on, "I fear they may be right."
"Are you sure it is prudent to warn our foes of what we intend?" Z'Yon asked, listening to the M'Sak warriors yelling threats at the southrons trapped in D'Opt.
"Why not?" V'Zek said grandly. "We spread fear through their ranks, and anticipation of disaster. Having them with their eyestalks going every which way at once can only help us. And besides, they cannot be sure we are not lying. Almost I find myself tempted to delay the assault until the darkening of the moon is past."
"That might be wise, my master," Z'Yon said.
"What? Why?" When V'Zek stretched his walking-legs very straight, as he did now, he towered over Z'Yon. His voice, ominously deep and slow, rumbled like distant thunder—not distant enough, the shaman thought. He sank down to scrape his plastron in the dirt. "Why?" V'Zek repeated. "Speak, if you value your claws."
"The moltings suggest, my master, that we may fare better under those circumstances."
"So you consulted the moltings, did you?" The chieftain let the question hang in the air.
Z'Yon felt its weight over him, as if it were the big metal sky-thing that had crushed a fair number of M'Sak to jelly. "You said I might, my master," he reminded V'Zek, "for my own amusement."
"For yours, perhaps. I, shaman, am not amused at your maunderings. On the given night we shall attack and we shall win. If you put any other interpretation on what the moltings say, you will no longer be amused, either; that I promise you. Do you grasp my meaning?"
"With all four claws, my master," Z'Yon assured him, and fled.
Jennifer watched Greenberg cut another piece from the juicy, rare prime rib. "The condemned man ate a hearty meal," he said, and cocked an eyebrow at her. "Is that a quotation from your ancient science fiction?"
She paused to swallow and cut a fresh piece for herself. The Flying Festoon's autochef did right by beef and nearly everything else, though Koniev swore its vodka was good only for putting in thermometers. She answered, "No. I think it's even older than that."
"Probably is," Marya agreed. "It sounds as if any society would find it handy."
"No doubt," Greenberg said. "The T'Kai would certainly think it was relevant tonight." He told the others what he and Jennifer had learned from K'Sed.
Koniev nodded slowly. "I've heard the barbarians shouting their threats. I didn't take much notice; the translator garbles them a lot of the time, anyway. But they're not bluffing, then?"
"Not even a little bit," Greenberg said. "That's why we'll stay close by the ship. We may have to pull out in a hurry, and fighting my way back to the Flying Festoon through a mob of panicked or bloodthirsty G'Bur is something I'd rather not even have nightmares about."
"Sensible," Koniev said. Marya nodded a moment later.
"Too bad the T'Kai won't be able to take ship with us," Jennifer said.
"Yes—a good market will close down if the confederacy goes under," Marya said. "V'Zek won't be eager to deal with us, I'm certain."
"That's not what I meant!" Jennifer said angrily. She noticed the others staring at her and realized that until now she'd never been interested enough in what they were doing to get angry. She went on, "We'll be running away while the highest culture on this planet goes under. That counts for more than markets, if you ask me."
"Of course it does," Greenberg said. "I told you as much before, when you were setting out the drones, remember? Why do you think we've put so much effort into trying to save T'Kai? No matter how much money's on the line, I wouldn't do foot-soldier duty for a people I didn't like and respect. Do the characters in your old books care that much for profit?"
She bit her lip. "No, of course not—they're supposed to be true to life, you know."
"All right, then." Greenberg sounded relieved, maybe because he wanted her to stay involved. "What we've been trying to do, then, is—"
"Wait," Jennifer told him.
He, Koniev, and Marya stared again—she hardly ever interrupted. She ignored them. She got up from the table and dashed—again something new—for her cabin. Behind her, Koniev said, "What's twisting her tail?" She ignored that, too.
She returned a couple of minutes later with her reader set to the right part of the story she'd found. She held it out to Greenberg. "Here. Look at this, please. I think it's important."
Greenberg set the reader on his nose. He took it off again a moment later. "Jennifer, I'm sorry, but I can't make heads or tails of Middle English, or whatever the right name for this is. What are you trying to show me?"
She made an exasperated noise and took back the reader. She peered into it, then returned it to him. "This story is called 'The Man Who Sold the Moon.' Do you see the circle, here and on this page?" She hit the forward button. "And here—" She hit it again, "—and here?"
"The one with '6+' printed inside it? Yes, I see it. What's it supposed to be, some sort of magic symbol?"
She told him what it was supposed to be. He and Marya and Koniev all looked at one another. "This Heinlein person didn't think small, I have to give him that," Greenberg said slowly. "But I still don't quite follow how you think it applies to our problem here."
She knew she looked disappointed; she'd expected Greenberg to catch fire from her own inspiration. It was almost poetically apt, she thought: she'd planned to use trading to help her study Middle English science fiction, and now the Middle English science fiction might help her fellow traders. She did some more explaining.
Koniev said, "Where would we get enough soot, or for that matter rockets?"
"We don't need rockets," Jennifer said, "and soot wouldn't do us much good here, either. Instead . . ."
She outlined her plan and watched the three traders think it over. Koniev spoke first. "It might even work, which puts it light-years ahead of anything else we've got going for us."
"Pulling out the Flying Festoon will be tricky, though," Marya said.
Greenberg said, "Some of us will have to stay behind, to show the T'Kai we aren't abandoning them." He sounded unhappy at the idea, but firm. "All of us but Jennifer, I think. This is her hobbyhorse; let her ride it if she can."
"And let her—and us—hope she'll be able to rescue us if she can't," Marya said.
Jennifer gulped. If her scheme didn't work out as advertised, she'd be a long way away when D'Opt fell. Academia hadn't prepared her for having lives rest on what she did. "It will work," she said. Her nails bit into the palms of her hands. She knew she'd better be right.
V'Zek sent the T'Kai female scuttling out of his tent when the guard called that Z'Yon would have speech with him. "This is important, I take it?" the chieftain rumbled. It was not a question. It was more like a threat.
Z'Yon stooped low, but managed to keep the ironic edge in his voice. "It is, unless you would sooner not know that the great sky-thing has departed from D'Opt."
"Has it indeed?" V'Zek forgot about the female, though her shell was delicately fluted and the joints of her legs amazingly limber. "So the Soft Ones give up on their friends at last, do they?" He wished the weird creatures were long gone; without their meddling, he would have overwhelmed T'Kai without having to work nearly so hard.
Then Z'Yon brought his suddenly leaping spirits down once more. "My master, the Soft Ones themselves are still in D'Opt. They have been seen on the walls since the sky-thing left."
The chieftain cursed. "They are still plotting something, then. Well, let them plot. The moon still grows dark and red tomorrow night, and the Soft Ones cannot alter that. And our warriors will fight well, for they know the darkened moon portends the fall of T'Kai. They know that because, of course, you have been diligent in instructing them, have you not, Z'Yon?"
"Of course, my master." The shaman suppressed a shudder. V'Zek was most dangerous when he sounded mildest. As soon as Z'Yon could, he escaped from the chieftain's presence. He wondered how many eyestalks he would have been allowed to keep had he not followed V'Zek's orders in every particular. Surely no more than one, he thought, and shuddered again.
V'Zek watched the shaman go. He knew Z'Yon had doubts about the whole enterprise. He had doubts himself. The Soft Ones alarmed him. Their powers, even brought to bear without much martial skill, were great enough to be daunting. He would much rather have had them on his side than as foes. But he had beaten them and their chosen allies before, and after one more win they would have no allies left. For a moment, he even thought about trading with them afterward. He wondered what they would want for the weapons that shot sleep as if it were an arrow.
But even more, he wondered what they were up to.
The guard broke his chain of thought. "My master, shall I fetch back the female?"
"Eh? No, don't bother. I've lost the mood. After we win tomorrow, we'll all enjoy plenty of these southron shes."
"Aye, that we will!" The guard sounded properly eager. V'Zek wished he could match the fellow's enthusiasm.
Jennifer looked at L'Rau in the viewscreen. The world was small enough to cover with the palm of her hand. Away from the Flying Festoon, the ship's robots were busy getting everything into shape for tonight. She'd had to hit the computer's override to force it to make the gleaming metal spheroids do as she ordered.
At last, everything was the way she wanted it. She still had a good many hours of waiting before she could do anything else. She got into bed and went to sleep.
Her last fuzzy thought was that Heinlein would have approved.
L'Rau's sun set. Across the sky, the moon rose. The shadow of the world had already begun to crawl across it. The M'Sak raised a clamor when they saw the eclipse. Their tumult sounded like thousands of percussion instruments coming to demented life all at once.
The translator could handle some of their dialect. Most of their threats were the same stupid sort soldiers shouted on any planet: warnings of death and maiming. But some M'Sak showed imaginative flair, not least the barbarian who asked the defenders inside D'Opt for the names of their females, so he would know what to call them when he got to T'Kai City.
The hubbub outside the walls faded. An enormous G'Bur came out from among the soldiers. This, Greenberg thought, had to be the fearsome V'Zek. "Surrender!" he shouted up at the T'Kai. He used the southern speech so well, the translator never hiccuped. "I give you this one last chance. Look to the sky—even the heavens declare your downfall is at hand."
Prince K'Sed waved a grasping-claw to Greenberg. The master merchant stepped out where the M'Sak could see him; he hoped the sight of a human still had some power to unsettle them. "You are wrong, V'Zek," he said. The translator, and amplifiers all along the wall, sent his reply booming forth, louder than any G'Bur could bellow.
"Roar as loud as you like, Soft One," V'Zek said. "Your trifling tricks grow boring, and we are no hatchlings, to be taken in by them. As the sky-f'noi makes the moon bleed, so we will bleed you tonight, and all T'Kai thereafter." The M'Sak warriors shouted behind him.
"You are wrong, V'Zek," Greenberg repeated. "Watch the sky if you doubt me, for it too will show T'Kai's power."
"Lie as much as you like. It will not save you." V'Zek turned to his troopers. "Attack!"
M'Sak dashed into archery range and began to shoot, trying to sweep defenders from the walls. The T'Kai shot back. Greenberg hastily ducked behind a parapet. He was more vulnerable to arrows than any local.
"What if you are wrong, Soft One, and your ploy fails?" Only B'Rom would have asked that question.
"Then we die," Greenberg said, a reply enough to the point to silence even the cynical vizier. B'Rom walked away; had he been a human, he would have been shaking his head.
Arrows ripped through the T'Kai banners above the master merchant. He glanced up. The grasping-claw that stood for the confederacy had a hole in it. Not liking the symbolism of that, he looked away.
Shouts and alarmed clatterings came from the wall not far away. The translator gabbled in overload, then produced a word Greenberg could understand. "Ladders!"
Though poles set into a wall sufficed for the G'Bur, when such aids were absent the locals, because of the way they were built, needed wider and more cumbersome ladders than humans used. That did not stop the M'Sak from slapping them against the walls of D'Opt and swarming toward the top. In fact, it made the defenders' job harder than it would have been in medieval human siege warfare—being heavier than scaling ladders made for humans, these were harder to topple.
Without exposing more than his arm, Greenberg expended a stun cartridge when the top of a ladder poked over the wall. The barbarian nearly at the level of the battlements tumbled back onto his comrades below. They all crashed to the ground. Cheering, the T'Kai used a forked pole to push over the suddenly empty ladder.
"Good idea!" Koniev shouted. He imitated Greenberg. Another set of crashes, another overturned ladder.
"I'd like it better if I had more than—" Greenberg checked the charge gauge, "—half a dozen shots left."
"Eight here," Koniev said. Marya was somewhere off around the wall's circuit. Greenberg hoped she would not stop an arrow. For that matter, he hoped he would not stop one himself.
"Ladders!" The cry came from two directions at once. The master merchant looked at the moon. L'Rau's shadow covered more than half of it, but totality was still close to an hour away. "Ladders!" This shout was further away. Click-pop-hiss-click: By now, Greenberg had heard the T'Kai word often enough to recognize it in the original, even if he needed electronics to reproduce it.
"Lad—" This time, the cry cut off abruptly after click-pop—an arrow must have found its mark. The M'Sak were throwing everything they had into this attack. Greenberg worried. Jennifer hadn't counted on the possibility of D'Opt's falling in a hurry. Neither had he. If that was a mistake, it was likely to be his last one.
"Forward!" V'Zek roared. "Forward!" He wished he could have gone up the first ladder and straight into D'Opt. Waiting behind the scenes for his warriors to do the job was the hardest part of being chieftain. He corrected himself: no, the hardest part was knowing he needed to hold back, and not giving in to the urge to go wild and slaughter.
If he suppressed that urge all the time, he wondered, would he be civilized? He found the idea ridiculous. He would only be bored.
He cast two critical eyes on the fighting, turned a third to Z'Yon, who was clipping a wounded M'Sak's shell so no sharp edges would further injure the soft tissues inside. His fourth eye, as it had been most of the night, was on the moon. The fully lit portion grew ever smaller.
"You were right, shaman," he said, an enormous concession from him. But even a chieftain felt small and insignificant when the natural order of the world turned upside down.
Z'Yon did not answer until he had finished his task—had his prediction been wrong, he would have dared no such liberty. What would have happened to him had he been wrong was unpleasant to contemplate anyhow. He hoped he sounded casual rather than relieved when he said, "So it seems."
"The warriors truly know the meaning of the prodigy," V'Zek went on. "They fight bravely. I think they will force an entrance into the town not long after the whole moon goes into the jaws of the f'noi in the sky. You did well in instructing them and insuring that they would be of stout spirit for the battle."
"I did as you commanded, my master." Z'Yon's eyestalks tingled in remembered fright. A ladder went over, directly in front of the shaman and his chieftain. Injured M'Sak flailed legs in pain. One lay unmoving. "They fight well inside D'Opt, too."
"Doubtless their leaders and the Soft Ones have filled them with nonsense so they will not despair at our might," V'Zek said scornfully. "And see over there!" He pointed with a grasping-claw. "We've gained a stretch of wall! Surely the end cannot be far away."
"Surely not, my master." Z'Yon wished he had not taken omens with the moltings; he would have had no qualms now about being as excited as V'Zek. He tried to stifle his doubts. He had been wrong before, often enough.
The last bit of white disappeared from the moon. V'Zek shouted in a voice huge enough to pierce the tumult. "Now we hold the moment between our claws! Strike hard and T'Kai falls. The sky gives us victory!"
"The sky gives us victory!" the warriors cried, and redoubled their efforts. The dim red light made seeing hard, but cries of alarm from the walls showed places where the M'Sak were gaining fresh clawholds. Z'Yon decided he had been wrong again after all.
The last bit of white disappeared from the moon. "Now's the time, Jennifer," Greenberg said quietly into his comm unit. "Get things rolling, or the T'Kai have had it."
The pause that followed was longer than speed-of-light could account for. The master merchant started to call down curses on Jennifer's head. He wished he could take her damned reader and wrap it around her neck. He was starting to get more creative than that when she said, "Initiated."
He checked his watch. The delay had been less than fifteen seconds. All she'd done, obviously, was start the program before she answered him. He felt ashamed of himself. The fighting had screwed up his time sense.
He hoped he hadn't waited too long. T'Kai warriors fought desperately to keep the M'Sak from enlarging the two or three lodgments they had on top of the wall and to keep them from dropping down into D'Opt. If the southerners broke now, nothing could save them. But if he'd told Jennifer to start before the eclipse was total, odds were her scheme would have been wasted.
Too late for ifs now, anyhow. He wondered how long things would take at the Flying Festoon's end. When he judged the moment ripe, he started the tape that was loaded into his translator. The amplifiers around the wall made all the battle din, all V'Zek's shouts, seem as whispers beside his voice. "The very heavens proclaim the glory of T'Kai! Look to the sky, you who doubt, and you will see the truth writ large on the face of the moon itself!"
The message repeated, over and over. In the spaces between, the master merchant heard what he most hoped for: quiet. T'Kai and M'Sak alike were peering upward with all their eyes.
"Hurry up, Jennifer, dammit," Greenberg muttered. He made sure the translator could not pick up what he said.
". . . Look to the sky, you who doubt, and you will see the truth writ large on the face of the moon itself!" That roar might have been enough to frighten the M'Sak troops, had they not heard it before. More Soft One trickery, V'Zek thought, and handled as ineptly as the rest of their stunts.
Nevertheless, he looked. He could not help it, not with that insistent great voice echoing and re-echoing on his tympanic membrane. The moon remained dim and bronze—alarming, but alarming in a familiar way.
V'Zek laughed, loud and long. The last bluff had failed. No one but the f'noi in the sky could harm the moon, and from the f'noi it always won free in the end.
"Lies!" V'Zek shouted. "Lies!"
And as he watched, as he shouted, the moon changed.
A light-sail is nothing more than a gauze-thin sheet of aluminized plastic, thousands of kilometers across. When fully extended, it holds photons' energy as a seaboat's sail traps the wind. As it needs no internal power source, it makes a good emergency propulsion system for a starship.
Normally, one thinks only of the light-sail catching photons. No one cares what happens to them afterward. Jennifer did not think normally. A corner of her mouth twisted—on that, no doubt, she and Greenberg would agree. She'd realized the light-sail could also act as a mirror, and, with the ship's robots trimming it, a mirror of very special shape.
She'd been ready for more than a day. She was, in fact, reading when Greenberg called her, but she wasted no time getting things under way. The adjustment was small, tilting the mirror a couple of degrees so the light it reflected shone on L'Rau's moon instead of streaming past into empty space.
As soon as she was sure the robots were performing properly, she went back to rereading "The Man Who Sold the Moon."
The wait seemed to stretch endlessly. The M'Sak were not going to pause much longer, Greenberg thought, not with their chieftain screaming "Lies!" every few seconds. Then golden light touched the edge of the moon, which should have stayed bronze and faint upwards of another hour.
The light stayed at the edge only a moment. Faster by far than L'Rau's patient shadow, the radiant grasping-claw hurried to its appointed place in the center of the moon's disk, so that it became a celestial image of the emblem of T'Kai.
The warriors of the confederacy suddenly pressed against their foes with new spirit. The humans had promised a miracle, but few, Greenberg knew, believed or understood. Asking a planet-bound race to grasp everything starfarers could do was asking a lot. But since the prodigy worked for them, they were glad enough to accept it.
As for the M'Sak— "Flee!" Greenberg shouted into the translator. "Flee, lest the wrath of heaven strike you down!" The barbarians needed little urging.
"Hold fast!" V'Zek shrieked. A warrior ran by him. The warrior also shrieked, but wordlessly. All his eyes were on the moon, the horrible, lying moon. V'Zek tried to grab him. He broke away from the chieftain's grip and ran on. V'Zek swung a hatchet at him, but missed.
The chieftain's mandibles ground together in helpless fury. Moments before, he had led an army fine enough to satisfy even him. Now it was only a mob, full of fear. "Hold fast!" he cried again. "If we hold, we will win tomorrow."
"They will not hold," Z'Yon said softly. Even the shaman, curse him, had three eyes on the sky. "And tomorrow, there will be ambuscades behind every tree, every rock. We daunted T'Kai before. Now we will be lucky to win back to our own forests again."
V'Zek's eyestalks lowered morosely. The shaman was likely right. The M'Sak had gone into every fight knowing these effete southrons could never stand against them. And they never had. But now—now the T'Kai, curse them, knew the very heavens fought for them. Worse, so did his own warriors.
He turned on Z'Yon. "Why did you fail to warn me of this?"
"My master?" Z'Yon squawked, taken aback. Too taken aback, in fact, for he blurted out the truth. "My master, I did tell you the moltings indicated the need for caution—"
"A pestilence on the moltings!" Before V'Zek was aware of willing his grasping-claw to strike, the hatchet he carried leaped out and crashed through Z'Yon's shell, just to the left of the shaman's center pair of eyestalks. Z'Yon was dead almost before his plastron hit the ground.
V'Zek braced and pulled the hatchet free. Killing Z'Yon, he discovered, solved nothing, for the shaman's words remained true. There was no arguing him out of them any more, either. And a little while later V'Zek, like his beaten, frightened warriors, fled north from D'Opt.
Until the sky-f'noi began to relinquish its grip on the moon, the hateful emblem of T'Kai glared down at them. Forever after, it was branded in their spirits. As Z'Yon had foretold—another bitter truth—few found home again.
L'Rau's sun grew visibly smaller, visibly fainter in the holovid tank as the Flying Festoon accelerated toward hyperdrive kick-in. Jennifer waited eagerly for it to disappear. Civilization lay on the other side of the starjump. "Back to the university," she said dreamily.
Bernard Greenberg heard her. He chuckled. "I won't miss L'Rau myself, I tell you that. Anytime you have to bring off a miracle to get out in one piece, you're working too hard."
He spoke to her differently now; he had ever since she'd brought the Flying Festoon back to the planet. He'd kissed her then, too, where before he'd hardly seemed to notice her as anything save a balky tool. But I'm not balky any more, she realized: she'd proved herself a part of the crew worth having. A kiss of acceptance was worth a hundred of the sort men tried to press on her just because of the way she looked.
"Speaking of miracles, that eclipse was visible over a whole hemisphere," Koniev said. "I wonder what G'Bur who've never heard of T'Kai made of it." He took a sip of ship's vodka. For once he was not complaining about it—a measure of his relief.
"Giving the next generation's scribes and scholars something new to worry about isn't necessarily a bad thing," Marya said. She moved slowly and carefully, but X-rays said she had only an enormous bruise on her shoulder from a slingstone, not a broken collarbone. Left-handed, she raised her glass in salute. "Speaking of which, here's to the scholar who got us out." She drank.
"And with a profit," Koniev said. He drank.
"And with a civilization saved and a market for our next trip," Greenberg said. He drank.
Jennifer felt herself turning pink. She drank, too. After that, even her ears heated. "Speech!" Marya called, which made Jennifer swallow wrong and cough.
"A pleasure to pound your back," Greenberg said gallantly. "Are you all right now?" At her nod, he grinned. "Good, because I want to hear this speech, too."
"I—don't really have one to make," she said with her usual hesitancy. "I'm just glad it all worked out." A moment later, she added, "And very glad to be going home."
"Aren't we all?" Greenberg said. Koniev and Marya lifted their glasses again, in silent agreement. The master merchant also drank. Then he asked, "What are you going to do, once you're back?"
"Why, go back to school, of course, and work on my thesis some more," Jennifer said, surprised he needed to ask. "What else would I do?"
"Have you ever thought about making another run with us?"
"Why ever would you want me to?" Jennifer said. She was not altogether blind to what went on around her, and a long way from stupid; more than once, she suspected, Greenberg must been been tempted to leave her on L'Rau.
But now he said, "Because nothing succeeds like success. This little coup of yours will win you journeyman status, you know, and a share of the profits instead of straight salary. And with your, uh, academic background—" Jennifer guessed he'd been about to say "odd academic background," but he hadn't—quite. "—you'd be useful to have along. Who knows? You might come up with another stunt to match this one."
"You really mean it, don't you?" She had trouble believing her ears.
"Yes, I do," Greenberg said firmly.
"We'd like to have you along," Marya agreed. Koniev nodded.
"Thank you," Jennifer said. "Thank you more than I can say." She went over and kissed Greenberg. She found she didn't mind at all when his arm slipped around her waist. But she still shook her head. "Once, for me, is enough. I feel very certain of that. The university suits me fine."
"All right," Greenberg said. "I'll see you get rated journeyman anyhow. You've earned it, whether you choose to use it or not."
"Thanks," she said again. "That's very kind. I won't turn you down. Not, mind you, that I ever will use it."
"Of course not," Greenberg said.
She looked at him sharply. As a master merchant, he was used to—and good at—manipulating people to get his way. Not this time, you won't, she thought.
THE ATHETERS