Jonnie sat there for a long time, crying. He hadn't been able to speak, to tell Bittie how wrong he was. He was not a bad squire. Not Bittie. Never!
After a while, Jonnie picked the boy up in his arms and went down the hill. He laid the body very gently on the seat of the ground car.
He went back and picked up the dead body of the Russian and carried it to the car and put it in.
Windsplitter had seen him from a distance and came up, and the other horses, over their fright now, approached.
Jonnie put the dead boy on his lap and drove very slowly toward the Academy. The horses, seeing him go at that pace, followed. The little cortege crossed the plain.
It took them a long time to make the trip. Jonnie stopped at last beside the trench where the sixty-seven cadets had fought the last battle so very long ago. He just sat there holding Bittie's body.
A cadet sentry had seen them approach. In a little while cadets started to come out of the buildings. Word spread further and more came.
The schoolmaster, from an upper window, saw the crowd gathering around the ground car and went out. Dunneldeen and Angus and Ker came up to the fringe of the crowd.
Jonnie got out, holding the dead boy. He wanted to talk to them and he couldn't speak.
Several truckloads of Russians suddenly roared up to a halt and they spilled out, joining the crowd.
Several cadets raced back to the armory and came out with assault rifles and shoulder bags of magazines and began to pass them around to men who were looking in the direction of the compound.
An angry mutter was rising higher and higher among them.
Several cadets raced back to their rooms to get personal side arms and came back, buckling on belts and loading magazines.
The thunder in the mountains reverberated now and then across the plain and an angry, cold wind whipped around the mob.
A truckload of Russians who had swung over by the compound arrived back and stopped in a geyser of dust. The Russians were shouting and pointing toward the compound, trying to say what was over there now. No one could understand them.
A small ground car raced up from the direction of Denver, spraying clods of dirt as it screeched to a stop. The pilot officer in charge of drones jumped out, a stream of drone printout pictures crackling in the wind as he forced his way into the crowd, trying to tell them it had all come through on a drone overfly, trying to show people what had happened. He had ripped the printouts and the discs out of the machines and come at once.
A Coordinator was finally able to make himself heard. He had gotten now what the single Russian truck had seen at the compound. “The Brigantes are all dead over there! A whole commando!”
“Is that Psychlo Terl still alive over there?” somebody shouted.
There was an angry roar from the crowd. Several surged forward to see whether Terl was visible in the pictures.
“He's still alive,” shouted the Russians' Coordinator who had gotten the information from the truck.
The crowd surged and some started to climb into the Russian trucks. The Russians had been drawn up in a line by a Russian officer and they were checking their rifles on command.
Colonel Ivan, who had come to stand near Jonnie, was gazing, stricken with guilt, at the face of the dead boy. “The Psychlo dies!”
Jonnie had finally gotten a grip on himself. Still holding the boy he climbed to the top of the ground car. He looked down at them and they quieted to hear him.
“No,” said Jonnie. “No, you must not do anything now. In the star systems of the universe around us there is a far greater danger than Brigantes. We are fighting a dangerous battle. A bigger battle. We have made a mistake and it has resulted in the death of this innocent boy. I killed his murderer. We cannot undo the mistake. But we must go on.
"In that trench there, sixty-seven cadets died, fighting the last battle of the Psychlo invasion over a thousand years ago. When I first saw that trench, it gave me my first hope. It was not that they lost, it was that they fought at all against hopeless odds. They did not die in vain. We are here. We are fighting again. You and your fellow pilots control the skies of
Earth.
“I will make a request of one or another of you in times to come. Will you honor those requests?”
There was a massed stare. Did he think they would not? Then there was a concerted roar of assent. It took minutes for it to quiet.
Jonnie said, “I am leaving you now. I am taking this boy to Scotland. To be buried by his own people.”
Jonnie got down off the car.
The pilot whose ore carrier had been readied for the Russians was pointing it out to the Russian Coordinator.
They loaded Jonnie's horses. They found Stormalong's kit in the ground car and put it aboard.
The Russians took over the body of Dmitri Tomlov to take it home.
Jonnie climbed to the cockpit of the big ore carrier, still holding Bittie.
Before he closed the door, he looked down at the crowd and said, slowly and clearly, “It is not the time for revenge.” And then he added a bitter, grim "Yet!"
The crowd nodded. They understood. Later it would be an entirely different matter.
The huge plane rose and turned in the gray, storm-discolored sky. It dwindled and was gone.
Chapter 10
A much more serious crisis awaited him in Scotland, one that threatened to wreck all his plans.
Pilots on the ground talked the ore plane down through the dark swirling mists of autumn. The Scots had begun to rebuild Castle Rock in Edinburgh, cleaning up and trying to restore the ancient buildings that two thousand years before had been the seat of
Scottish nationalism and that was now being called its original Gaelic word: Dunedin, “the hill fort of edin." Jonnie landed in a park below the Rock, just in front of the ruins of the ancient National Gallery of Scotland.
Swarms of people had been there to meet him and gillies had been hard pressed to clear space in the throng for the plane to land.
Unfortunately, the drone pictures of the compound fight had come in on the Cornwall minesite recorders, and they had been rushed by mine passenger plane to Scotland long before Jonnie's arrival. The Scots were making good use of the vast amounts of transport taken from the Psychlos, and flatbeds were being used as buses now that trainee machine operators were back home.
Bittie's mother and family were there and Jonnie gave over the corpse to
them to dress and prepare for a funeral. Pipers were wailing a lament, drums beating its slow and doleful cadence. Women in the crowd were openly crying and men were beating their fists together as they dwelt on what they conceived to be the necessity of war.
It was nearly dark. An honor guard of kilted Highlanders approached and its officer courteously told Jonnie he was there to escort him through the crowds to a meeting of the Chiefs. They had not yet restored the parliament house on the Rock; the Chiefs, brought hastily in from the hills, were meeting in the nearby open park before the ruined Royal Scottish Academy.
To the mournful cry of pipes, Jonnie walked toward the space. It was lit with a towering bonfire in its center. The flame's glow was flickering over the buckles and swords of Clanchiefs and their retainers. It was an assembly with only one, single-minded purpose:
WAR!
Belatedly, Robert the Fox, just in from Africa, rushed to Jonnie's side. They were already on the outskirts of the assembly, the honor guard opening the way, heading for some raised stone slabs that served as a rostrum. Clanchief Fearghus was coming forward in courtesy to escort him to this rostrum.
“Do you want war?” said Robert the Fox into Jonnie's ear. “I think not! It would ruin all your plans.”