“Because their bodies will rot and spread disease through all of us! Plant them and let them make next year’s crops rich, men! And remember the songs your village sage taught you. Sing them while you lower their bodies down and cover them up. We don’t want their ghosts walking, any more than their diseases, or the Fair Folk summoning them forth to be mindless slaves!”
The raw soldiers blanched, and turned to start hunting.
“It’ll keep them from having the shakes for a little while, at least,” Cort told his master sergeant. “Yes, but the weakness will be worse when it hits, for having seen so many dead bodies in a single day,” Otto predicted. “At least they should lose their stomachs pretty early on, so we’ll have an excuse to send them off to rest.”
Cort remembered his first battle and shuddered. “I suppose they have to go through it all, don’t they?”
“If they want to stay in this trade, they do,” Otto returned. “Of course, after today, all three of them may decide to resign and take their chances with their boss’s draft.”
“I wouldn’t blame them for a second,” Cort said grimly.
“Then again, today they’ve seen how the boots were driven on in front of the bouncers, to take the worst blows and the highest death count,” Otto observed.
“And seen how you and I led our men and took our chances right along with them,” Cort said. “I wouldn’t blame them for quitting, sergeant, but their chances for living will be a lot better with us.”
Otto nodded. “You’ve lived almost four years since you joined up, sir, and I’ve lived nearly ten. We’ve both seen comrades fall all around us, but nowhere nearly so many as if we’d stayed home and fought for our bullies. No, all in all, I’d rather be a sergeant than a brute.”
Cort knew that “brute” was only the bosses’ name for a noncom, but he appreciated the double meaning anyway.
“But you, sir, you’ve seen how the bouncers may be wounded and captured, but seldom killed.” Otto looked up at his young master with a glint in his eye. “Your chances for long life are better with a bully instead of a captain, at least until you start your own company. Why stay?”
“Because I’d rather have a quick grave than a long prison term while I waited for my bully to save up the ransom money,” Cort answered shortly.
That wasn’t it, of course, and by Otto’s approving nod, he knew the sergeant knew it. It was simply that Cort couldn’t have brought himself to have driven plowboys before him to their deaths—and Otto knew that, too.
He turned away, wrenching his mind away from his embarrassing lack of hardness. “You take half the men and search our ground to the east, sergeant; while I take the rest to the west.”
“Yes, sir! Ho! Squads one and two! With me! Squads three and four! Follow the lieutenant!” Cort started off, back toward the knoll where the Blue Company’s flag stood, eyes on the ground now. Even from this distance, he could see the occasional plain rough-woven tunic of a serf who hadn’t been a soldier. His mouth tightened in a grimace; he tasted bile. There were always a few plowboys who didn’t move fast enough and were ground to mincemeat between the two armies. There were always a few serf women whom the soldiers found right after the battle, when blood lust and plain lust were both high, and those women were ground up in a different way, before an officer or bouncer could stop it-if he wanted to stop it. It was tragic, but there was no help for it; it happened so often that it was just part of war.
Over the horizon from Cort, in a pasture screened on two sides by woods and on the third by a mountain, the great golden ship came spinning down to the ground, light as a ballerina, in the middle of a pasture. It was so noiseless that even the cows sleeping nearby didn’t look up.
The ramp extended, sliding down from the ship to the ground. Gar led the mare down its slope, Dirk following with the stallion. They had caught and tamed the two horses in a wilderness a thousand miles away, but had only been gentling the beasts for two weeks. They were still half-wild, but Gar was a projective telepath, so the mare went quietly under his spell. The stallion jerked his head against the bridle, though, rolling his eyes.
“Spare a thought for my mount!” Dirk called. Gar glanced back, and the stallion quieted. They came down onto firm ground, and both horses seemed to relax, though their flanks still quivered. “Not bad for their first spaceship ride,” Dirk said. “Did you have to keep them hypnotized the whole way?”
“Probably not,” Gar said, “but it was only a fifteen-minute hop, so I kept them in trances just to be on the safe side.” He raised his voice a little. “Back to orbit, Herkimer. Stay tuned.”
“I will await your communications, Magnus,” said the resonant voice of the ship’s computer. It called its owner by his birth-name, not the nickname he had won on his travels. “Good luck.”
The ramp drew back in, and the huge disk rose silently, spinning away into the night, until it was only one more star among many.
“How far to the nearest castle?” Dirk said. “About a dozen miles, but there was a battle going on there this afternoon, and the troops seemed to be celebrating as we were coming in for a landing,” Gar answered. “We might do better to head for the nearest town.”
“Let’s hear it for city lights.” Dirk mounted.
So did Gar. They rode off side by side toward the dim track that Herkimer’s night-sight program had shown them.
“How about this,” Dirk suggested. “We ride together until we’re sure the way is reasonably safe, then split up to spy out the lay of the land and what’s on it.”
“My instincts are against it,” Gar said, frowning. “There’re too many evils that can happen to one of us alone.”
“Yes, especially on a planet like this, founded by a group of very idealistic, quasi-religious anarchists. I guess they managed to stay peaceful, living under colony domes, long enough to Terraform the continent.”
Gar nodded. “Then, when the land was ready for the seeds of Terran plants, they opted for the primitive life, going out to farm and live in small villages of prefab huts, with no government higher than a village meeting.” He sighed. “How could they possibly have thought it could last?”
“They figured they could all just imitate the saintly lives of their sages,” Dirk reminded him, “and that would keep them from hurting one another or offending one another—or so say the historical notes in the databank. Voilà! No need for government!”
“Not exactly hardheaded realists, then.”
Dirk nodded. “I’ll bet they were determined not to depend on high-tech agriculture or sophisticated birth-control techniques.”
“But they did depend on human nature being considerably more virtuous than it is,” Gar said darkly.
“So they fell back into a medieval standard of living.”
“They were probably idealistic enough not to mind the hardships,” Gar sighed. “I wonder what went wrong?”
“What went wrong?” Dirk asked. “Just look at those pictures we took from orbit! Castles on the hilltops with people in satins and furs walking the courtyards, packs of men in armor on horseback, and people in rags plowing the fields! What do you think went wrong?”
“Well, yes, that much is obvious,” Gar admitted, “but I’d like to know the details. They do seem to have strayed into some form of government.”
“Only locally,” Dirk said grimly. “How many battles did we spot from orbit? A dozen?”
“Seventeen,” Gar admitted. “None of them very big, though.”
“Tell that to the men who died in them! And if we just happened in on a day when seventeen battles were in progress, what are the odds that it was an ordinary day?”