XI
Undaunted, in the strength of his vastly superior weapons, by the two reserve regiments—actually, in practice, training commands—of pikemen and the half-troop of light cavalry, Jay Corbett finally set up his headquarters in the spacious, stone-built house of Earl Devernee, bringing in a couple of heavily armed squads to garrison it and leaving Gumpner in charge of the camp and their hostages.
In the absence of the hostage earl, Corbett quickly noted, Lady Pamela Grey—Earl Devernee’s half sister—seemed to rule over the glen rather competently, in his stead. He was impressed with his less-than-willing hostess, mightily impressed. He found her to be intelligent, quick-witted and, when she wished to be so, charming. She also was very strong-willed, with a keen and deeply embedded sense of justice and morality—of what was right and what wrong, by her standards.
Her son, who served as Corbett’s guide and companion as the officer searched the nooks and crannies of the glen for any sign of Erica and her Ganiks, shared her strict senses of justice and honor, of responsibility and duty. The grave, one-legged, fourteen-year-old combat veteran was, in Corbett’s mind, a thoroughly admirable young man, a credit to his mother, his dead father and his people; but he could not but wonder if Ensign Thomas Grey would ever come to rue and regret so early a loss of childhood, so sudden a transition into the responsibilities of maturity. He sincerely hoped not.
A week of searching and of questioning Skohshuns of all stations and ages, civilian and military, of both sexes, at last convinced him that Earl Devernee had indeed spoken the full truth at their initial meeting—Dr. Erica Arenstein and the Ganiks she now led had departed the glen long weeks ago, bound for the field army. Now he must march fast in the wake of the wagon train that had borne them southeast, but he wanted to arrive unannounced, without the large and powerful Skohshun army being apprised that he was bound toward them.
This matter could have been simply enough handled by the shooting of every horse in the glen, but to do so he and his two squads would have been obliged to penetrate some of the narrow, twisting defiles quite deeply and would likely have had to fight their way back, killing or wounding a sizable number of theoutraged Skohshuns in the process, so he chose an easier method of achieving the same end ... or so he then thought.
During the night before the departure of him and his two squads from the house of which Lady Pamela Grey was the temporary chatelaine, he tried several times to mentally frame the words he would say to her in parting, telling her of just what he must do to protect his command, to provide security on the coming march; but each new speech rang lamer than the one preceding it in his mind, and when at last the morning came, he simply thanked her for her courtesies and bade her farewell.
When he released Earl Devernee, however, he laid it flat on the line to the nobleman. “Mr. Devernee, I’m now going after Dr. Arenstein and her party.”
“Do you know the road, General Corbett?” the earl blandly asked. “If not, I can supply you with a few guides.”
“Thank you, but no,” Corbett grinned in reply. “You have already supplied me with a fine map from the office in your house. My compliments to your military cartographers—they do first-class work with primitive equipment.”
The earl nodded once. “Thank you, sir. You are, of course, more than welcome to the map. I know well that you could easily have taken much more, had you so desired, slaying anyone, everyone who might have opposed you.”
“I’m a soldier, Mr. Devernee, not a bandit,” said Jay Corbett. “And while killing is often my job, it seldom if ever has been my pleasure. But I have my command to protect, too, Mr. Devernee, and so I am serving you fair warning that any messengers you try to send on ahead of me to give your Brigadier Maklarin word of my approach will be most harshly, most fatally, dealt with—not of my desire, for I admire you and your people, but of my necessity.
“Further, because I know that you will try to send gallopers, and my warning here be damned, I’m going to make it as difficult as I can for you and for them. I have seen every inch of the glen and the steeps that surround it, and while it might be just barely possible for a skilled rider on a very surefooted mount to get over those steeps in a very few places, it would take a drooling lunatic to try it to begin, and when he reached the outside, he would have lost a goodly bit of time, for I would be well on my way.”
“You mean to leave a force, then, to hold this entryway to Skohshun Glen, general?” inquired the earl, with a worried frown.
“No, Mr. Devernee,” replied Corbett. “I have already made my preparations and I will shortly blow down the cliffs on either side of that narrowest section of the entryway. By the time you and your people have cleared it sufficiently to ride a horse through it, my business with your field army should be over and done and I should be marching back south with Dr. Arenstein.
“I reiterate, sir, I greatly admire you and your people and I wish you and them success in all endeavors—save those that bear upon me and mine—so please do not consider the thing I now must do as a hostile act, for it is not; rather, it is a military expedient, a necessary act of bloodless destruction. Do you understand me, Mr. Devernee?”
The earl sighed and smiled wanly. “Yes, General Corbett, I do; I truly do understand you, more, I think, than you understand me. I have learned much of you, you know, in conversations with your officers, notably Colonel Gumpner. I deeply regret that we two are not, cannot be, allies, for I think we were cut of the selfsame bolt of the cloth of honor.
“You have done and will do that which you feel you must for the welfare of those you rule. I have done and will assuredly do exactly the same, as God wills me the strength to do it. I am not and have never been a soldier, a fighter, and precious few of my forefathers have been, for we are the civil rulers of the Skohshun people. But I have lived with and among soldiers for all my days. I have seen the good and the bad, the brave and the cowardly, the competent and the incompetent, the careful plodders and the glory-hunters, and I have learned—I pray God—to winnow the grain from the chaff.
“I judge you to be a superlative officer, general, an officer who demands much from his subordinates, but even more from himself. You probably get everything you ask from your officers and other ranks, too, general, for one and all they love and worship you to a degree that is almost sacrilegious. They will allow you to drive them cruel hard, but only because they know that you drive yourself even harder, that you return their love and that their individual and collective welfare is paramount in your mind and your decisions.
“My late brother-in-law, Sir Edmund Grey—God keep his gallant soul!—was a man much like you, and his loss was a bitter cruel one to endure. But at least poof Ed left a fine son who has already, at the age of only a bit over fourteen years, brought added luster to his distinguished name and house.”
“Yes,” Corbett nodded, “Ensign Grey served as my guide in my search of the glen. He is indeed a fine young man, and any parent would be proud of him.
“But, now, Mr. Devernee, we must be on our way, shortly. You and your retainers please exercise due haste in getting back, well back, into the glen. Get those soldiers off the lines of cliffs, for I well know just how tricky rockslides can be, and the slide that my devices precipitate may well result in sympathetic slides all along those cliffs. Also, you’d be well advised to keep your people out of that entryway for at least a day, for rocks may continue to fall at odd intervals for some time.”
As young Thoheeks Bili of Morguhn sat planning out his sally against the Skohshuns, great, dark-gray banks of rainclouds were blowing down from the north. There were severe downpours three or four times that night and misty sprinkles in between, and the beefed-up patrols on the city streets and the members of the enlarged wall watches all cursed the chilly, unpleasant weather and scoffed at the reasons for their being forced to bide out in it.