Slowly, she nodded. Hal felt he should say something to refute such an opinion but there was no easy short way of doing it. In any case, it was too late. Amanda was already answering. "All right," she was saying, "I wouldn't be around to stop you, anyway, if it comes to that. Now, if you're satisfied you've got everything you want to know before we take off, you can start setting us down-" She tapped the screen where the closer view now revealed in one comer the fire-blackened wall of some ruined homestead, rather than the living villa they had seemed to view from a higher point of inspection. "Right away, ma'am," said Simon, sitting down to the controls. "Hat," said Amanda. "Come on back and get dressed." "Redressed, you mean, don't you?" said Hal, following her into the stateroom. "I've already got clothes on." "Redressed by all means, if that's the phrase you prefer," said Amanda, handing him a brown sackcloth penitential robe, similar to the one in which she had left Kultis. She started to slip out of her coveralls and back into a robe of her own. "How about you?" she went on. "Are you satisfied you know everything you need to know? You aren't rusty on your short-language and signals after three years at a desk?"
She was referring to what was basically a secret language built up and passed down from one generation of children under twelve years of age to the next. It gained and lost words from generation to generation, and was different from family to family. But the children of neighbors as close to each other as the Graemes and Morgans of Foralie had practically a language in common. The reference to signals was to the silent body language, varying from minute to large physical movements, which the Dorsai as a Splinter Culture had refined into a second tongue they could use to converse, unnoticed, even as bound prisoners under the noses of captors. "Not in the least," said Hal. "Be sure then to pay attention if I shout 'court,' whatever else you do. The people manning the garrisons that the Others put in here live for reprisals."
She was specifically alluding to the effective, short, one syllable descendant of the ancient cry of "quarter", which the old Dorsai professional soldiers had early put to use to advise each other in the midst of combat that they should disable only, and if possible avoid killing, those with which they happened to be fighting at the moment.
"I'll be listening," said Hal. "Don't worry." "I never worry," said Amanda, and he was sensible enough not to argue the point with her.
Dressed in their unflattering garments, and carrying bags with drawstring tops that held all their other possessions, they stepped out of the ship twenty minutes later into the spicily soft and warm night atmosphere of Kultis.
Amanda had picked their landing spot well - not that Simon would have done badly if the decision had been left up to him. A tall stand of trees shielded them from the road and they had landed in the darkness of one roofless room of the burned villa they had seen in the vision screen. Its walls lifted above the spacecraft and hid it further in shadow. "Good luck," said the voice of Simon from the darkened port. The outer lock door of the port closed and the ship fell silently upward, out of sight.
Amanda's fingers caught hold of the sleeve of Hal's robe, held and towed him out of the shadow into the relative illumination of the cloud-dimmed moonlight, and from there, on through a ruined doorway into further shadow again...
And suddenly they were under attack. The sounds of feet rushing across grimed flooring, the rustle of clothing, were adequate warning, along with the stink of breath and uncleaned bodies. The outburst of yells that came as their attackers closed around Hal and Amanda was clearly intended to be one of triumph, and in fact Hal found himself caught by at least three people at once, two aiming at his upper body and one at his legs. At the same time, high-pitched to carry over the other voices and noise, came the sound of Amanda's voice. "Court!"
Hardly fair, thought Hal, more than a little irritated, as he spun away from those trying to hold him, breaking the finger of one who would not loosen his hold and throwing a second into a tangle with the third, leg-level attacker. Here he was, in almost total darkness, barely hours after the three years at the desk Amanda had talked about, set upon by an unknown but certainly large number of attackers, and within moments of landing, she was telling him not to hurt these people too seriously. Those who were now earnestly trying to grab and hold them did not smell like garrison soldiers who might be eager for an excuse to indulge in acts of reprisal-
His first feeling of annoyance was wiped out without warning in a sudden upsurge of something like joy within him. Joy at having something real and physical to come to grips with after the past years of fighting imponderables and unknowns. His reflexes from his training under Malachi Nasuno, the Dorsai who had been one of his tutors as the boy Hal Mayne, and his far greater training as the young Donal, growing up and working as a professional soldier - these all but forgotten memories took him over. He began to whirl among his foes, tangling them up with one another and putting them down with throws wherever possible.
An excruciating and sudden bang on the right side of his skull changed things abruptly. The lightless room seemed to spark for a moment within his own head and then gray out around him, abruptly changing his feelings to a simple, instinctive yearning for survival. The only thought that stirred in his suddenly dulled brain was that he should have sensed coming the blow that had hit him, and avoided it. Reflexively, he had already dropped to the floor, gathering himself into a ball as he did so and rolling sideways. He came up against something and hastily spun away. The Exotics, he knew from experience, had liked homes with large rooms in them, and the houses he had seen in the screen of the ship from above had been empty shells. Therefore, there should be nothing much between the walls to impede him unless it was some other human being. Moreover, it only made sense that those who attacked him and Amanda would have let them get into the center of a room, so as to come at them from all sides at once.
He did not think all this out consciously as he was spinning away from whoever or whatever he had touched. Rather, it was a conclusion reached just above the level of instinct. He needed time for his head to clear. It did, and with his return to clarity came the beginnings of a burning anger at himself, as well as a return of the unhappiness that had been growing in him this last year and more. The fact he had been given no more than part-time instruction by a Dorsai as a growing boy on Old Earth, and that it had been a hundred years since, as Donal, he had been personally in action, did not excuse him. His lacks were clear.
He was no longer a Dorsai in the sense of the fighting potential of that name. Any adult, properly schooled Dorsai would have been moving with his ears open, would have built and carried in his head as he fought a lightless mental picture of what his opponents were doing, and been ready for that blow.