"Your Highness, I fear you are right." Anything that kept K'Sed focused on dealing with his problems seemed a good policy to Greenberg.
"And after all," the prince said, mostly to himself, "the savages are still some days' journey from us."
"So they are." Greenberg chose his words with care, not wanting to let K'Sed delude himself that he need do nothing, but not wanting to alarm him further, either. "And remember Your Highness, that we still shadow their every move. When our forces close with theirs?" not, Greenberg made sure, when they attack us "?we will know their every move. They cannot take us by surprise."
"That is true." K'Sed brightened a little. "We will be able to ready ourselves to meet them. I shall remind my officers of this."
As soon as the prince was gone, Greenberg called Jennifer. He'd grown to expect to have to wait for her to answer the signal. When she finally responded, he said, "From now on, I want to hear everything the M'Sak do. Everything, do you hear? We can't afford to let them get any kind of edge at all."
"I understand," she said after another pause. "I'll do the best I can."
"Keep the reader off your nose for a while, can you?" he said.
Still another pause, this time a hurt one. "I said I'd do my best, Bernard."
"All right." Against his best intentions, Greenberg felt guilty. "It's important, Jennifer. Try to remember that. A whole civilization could be riding on what you spot."
"I'll remember," she said. He had to be content with that.
"We draw closer, my master," Z'Yon said. As the M'Sak moved further from their home, the land grew strange. These cool uplands?with only those trees that yielded nuts and tubers, and those in the neat orchards?were daunting. Even the shaman felt under his shell how far away the horizon was.
V'Zek rarely showed worry. This time was no exception. He made his eyestalks long as he peered south. The smellpores around his eyes opened wider; he seemed to be trying to sniff out the T'Kai. At last he said, "It will be soon."
Two of his eyes stayed where they were. The other two broke from their southward stare to glance up at the three drones that still shadowed his army, and at the flying building as well. The latter was just a silver dot in the sky now, but V'Zek knew its true size. He wondered absently how far up it was, to look so small. However far that was, it was not far enough.
Without his willing it, his grasping-claws clattered angrily. "They watch us," he said. His voice reminded Z'Yon of the hunting call of a f'noi.
"They are not very brave, my master," the shaman said, trying to ease the chieftain's gloom.
But V'Zek burst out, "How brave need they be? Knowing how we come, they can meet us at a spot of their own choosing. And when at last we fight them, they will see every move we make, as we make it. They will be able to respond at once, and in the best possible way. How can we gain surprise in a fight like that?"
"Warrior for warrior, we are better than they," Z'Yon said. But he knew, as did V'Zek, that that only meant so much. Fighting defensively, the T'Kai might hold their casualties close to even with those of the invaders. A few engagements like that, and the M'Sak were ruined. Unlike their foes, the T'Kai could levy fresh troops from towns and countryside. The M'Sak had to win with what they had.
The shaman turned one cautious eye toward his chieftain. He was in luck: V'Zek paid him no attention. The chieftain's eyestalks were all at full length, his eyes staring intently at one another?a sure sign of furious concentration.
Then V'Zek let out a roar like a f'noi that had just killed. "Let them see whatever they want!" he cried, so loud that half the army looked his way. He took Z'Yon's upper grasping-claws in his and squeezed till the shaman clattered in pain and feared for his integument.
V'Zek finally let go. He capered about like a hatchling, then, as if whispering some secret bit of magical lore, bent to murmur into the shaman's tympanum, "They cannot see into my mind."
Pavel Koniev leaped aside. The halberd's head buried itself in the ground where he had stood. The G'Bur hissed with effort, using all four grasping-legs to tug the weapon free. It lifted.
Too slow, too slow?before the local could take another swing with the long, unwieldy polearm, Koniev sprang close. The G'Bur hissed again, dropped the halberd, and grabbed for his shortspear. By then Koniev had jumped onto his back. He swung the mace up over his head.
The circle of spectators struck spearshafts against carapaces in noisy tribute to his prowess. The claps and whoops that Greenberg and Marya added were drowned in the din. Koniev scrambled down from the G'Bur and gave him a friendly whack where a grasping-leg joined his shell. "You almost split me in two there, N'Kor, even though that halberd just has a wooden head."
"I meant to," N'Kor said. Luckily, the soldier did not seem angry at having lost. "I thought it would be easy?I flattened you often enough when we started our little games. But you're learning, and you Soft Ones dodge better than I dreamed anything could. Comes of having just the two legs, I suppose." With their wide, armored bodies and three walking-legs splayed off to either side, the G'Bur were less than agile.
Of course, Greenberg thought as Koniev repeated his moves slowly so the locals could watch, the G'Bur weren't very fragile, either. A practice halberd would bounce off a carapace with the equivalent of no more than a nasty bruise, but it really might have done in Pavel.
"A good practice," Koniev was saying to N'Kor. "With the M'Sak so close, we need all the work we can get."
N'Kor made a puzzled noise that sounded like brushes working a snare drum. "But you have your little belt weapons that bring sleep from far away. You will not need to fight at close quarters."
"Not if everything goes exactly as it should," Koniev agreed. "How often, in a battle, does everything go exactly as it should?"
This time, N'Kor's clattering was a G'Bur chuckle. "Next time will be the first. As I said, for a trader you are learning."
"Hmm," was all Koniev said to that. He wiped sweat from his face with a yellow-haired forearm as he walked over to the other two humans. "What are they doing?" he asked Greenberg; the master merchant always kept the vision screen with him.
"Making camp, same as we are," he answered after a brief look at it.
"How far away are they?" Marya asked.
She and Koniev waited a moment while Greenberg keyed new instructions into the vision screen. The M'Sak camp vanished, to be replaced by a map of the territory hereabouts. Two points glowed on the map, one gold, the other menacing scarlet. "Fifteen kilometers, more or less," Greenberg said, checking the scale along one side of the screen.
"Tomorrow," Marya said thoughtfully. Her dark eyes were hooded, far away. Greenberg suspected he bore a similarly abstracted expression. He had been in plenty of fights and skirmishes, but all of them out of the blue, leaving him no time for anything but reaction. Deliberately waiting for combat was, in a way, harder than taking part.
Because humans needed less room than G'Bur, the tents they set up were dwarfed by the locals' shelters. But their three stood out all the same, the orange nylon fiery bright when compared to the undyed, heavy fabric that was the standard tent-cloth on L'Rau.
Marya opened her tent flap. She hesitated before going through and looked from Greenberg to Koniev. Daylight was fading fast now, and campfires were not enough to let the master merchant be sure she flushed, not with her dark skin. Had it been Jennifer, there could have been no doubt.