But the man was not plucking blossoms now - and plainly had not been for a couple of weeks, at least. Local scavengers had been at his body. What was left of it now swung in the light breeze, suspended by the noose from which he had been hung.
Below him was a printed sign showing large block letters in red on white.
DO NOT TOUCH OR REMOVE, BY ORDER OF THE COMMANDANT OF THE GARRISON.
Hal was suddenly reminded of such executed corpses dangling from makeshift roadside gallows in Hawkwood's time, with similar notices. The idea then, of course, had been that the body of the individual who had been hung should serve as a warning and a deterrent to other criminals. Here, where deterrence was not the object, the sign was simple savagery and sadism on the part of the Occupation troops.
Hal did not touch the body. There was no use, and to do so would merely serve as an announcement to any soldiers returning this way that others besides the madman existed in this area. He turned and headed back up the road at the same pace he had used since he had parted with Onete.
Only the morning had gone by. He decided to use the rest of the day in generally surveying the terrain, not only so he would know it in the future, but so he could make some informed guesses as to how the troops would spread out and move through it, when and if they came.
Accordingly, he now made side excursions to right and left out from the trail. The soldiers, under the impression that the Chantry Guild would be in the forest rather than above it, would look for evidence of signs of traffic to and from the location of its headquarters. Not even they would expect an obvious connection of trails linking that headquarters with the visible footpath he now followed. They would be likely to simply follow the footpath as far as it seemed to them to exist. Only after it had disappeared would they then probably form a skirmish line and begin to sweep through the greenery area beyond, which they would have divided on their map into blocks of territory, running right to the foot of the cliffs.
It was well that Onete had chosen a place to sit for Cee that was some distance beyond and off the line of the trail toward the cliffs. It was not so good that she had chosen a spot relatively close to the entrance under the huge boulder, leading up to the ledge.
There were advantages in such a close position, of course, She, like the foragers, could literally be watched from the ledge, using a viewscope adjusted for distance viewing, in fact, lately, Artur spent what moments he had to spare during the day doing just that, to catch what glimpses he could of Cee. Also all Guild members, when they were below, were trained to glance up at regular intervals to where they knew the ledge to be.
Although the ledge was invisible from the lower ground, to someone who knew where its outer edge should be, it was still easily locatable, and if whoever was below saw a bush growing on that edge where normally no bush grew, the warning to get immediately back up to safety was clear.
Even Hal himself had been checking the position of the ledge, hourly, without being more than barely aware he was doing so. Reminded of the warning bush now, he looked for it, even though the most recent hour was not up, but there was no bush there.
No, Onete's location was admirably suited from the standpoint of Onete's own safety. But if the soldiers had anyone among them who could read even the most obvious of sign, the marks of Onete and Cee's visits to that location would tell whoever it was that people had been there, recently. The soldiers, accordingly, would search more carefully in the region about that spot, including up to the cliffs, the boulder and the secret entrance.
Hal did not really think that even such a tracker, if they had one, would suspect that the apparently small shadowed hollow under the great boulder was anything more than that. The slope of loose rock just below that entrance did not hold the marks of the goings in and out of Guild members, who were always careful to move some distance on the rock, along the base of the cliff, before they left it individually at different points to enter the jungle.
The chances of the soldiers finding their way to the ledge, consequently, were slim. But unfortunately the evidence of Onete's meetings with Cee would still have directed attention to this area, and if there were some of the Others on the Exotic worlds they might have the imagination the soldiers lacked - to direct a search closely along the cliff-front, investigating every nook and cranny until they crept in under the boulder and found the route to the ledge. To Bleys Ahrens, himself, the evidence of Cee and Onete's meeting would simply suggest immediately the likelihood of a secret dwelling place on the cliffs above.
However, there was no quick way now to hide that evidence. There remained the business he was engaged in now, which was putting himself empathically in the boots of the soldiery, and from their point of view working out how they would go about covering the terrain he was now surveying.
He had automatically - one back to his training as the young Donal, and that of the young Hal under the tutorship of the Dorsai, Malachi Nasuno, on Old Earth. For the moment everything else had been put aside and he thought and reasoned only according to that early training. As a result something connected with that way of thinking came automatically to his mind. It was a part of the multivolume work on tactics and strategy, which had been the lifework of Cletus Grahame, Donal's great-great-grandfather. "... the importance of knowing the terrain where encounters with enemy forces are likely is impossible to underrate,'' Cletus had written in the volume titled FIELD USE OF FORCES. "The commander, whether he expects to have to operate defensively or offensively over that terrain, gains a tremendous advantage by knowing it personally and intimately. It is not merely enough to glance at a visible area and relate it to a map displayed in a viewer. Large elements, such as rivers, gullies, impenetrable undergrowth and such, are obvious features to be committed to memory - but this is only the beginning of the advantage to be derived from the Commander's going out in person to cover the area. "If this is done, then a great many smaller, but infinitely useful bits of knowledge may be acquired that may well make the difference between success and failure in any action. The quality of mud on the riverbank, the exact depth of a gully, the character of the impenetrable undergrowth - such as a tendency of part of its vegetation to stick to the clothing of enemy passing near it or a emptying to penetrate it - all these are items of information that may be turned to account, not only in helping to build a picture of how the enemy will be channeled and directed, delayed, or aided in moving through the area, but in deciding how the enemy forces may be led or forced into a situation where they must surrender, or may be easily taken prisoner, giving the bloodless victory that is the hallmark of the fully capable commander.... "
Hal frowned for a second as he loped along, his eyes noting and his memory automatically cataloging what he saw as he move back and forth through the jungle across the route the soldiers would be led, by conditions of the terrain, to come.
Something was nagging at the back of his mind. There should be something more to the passage from the text than that. Something that was of importance, not to the present moment, but to his larger, lifetime search, and yet, he had the page of the ancient text from the Graeme library on Dorsai clearly in his mind's eye and those paragraphs were the extent of what was pertinent there to what he was doing at the moment. He made a mental note to search his memory again on that subject when he had leisure and turned his whole attention back to the business of studying the ground he was covering.
He was almost to the cliffs by this time. The next pass would take him past the foot of them. He broke off his traveling to and fro to make a turn back to where he had left his sandals on the bush. Since this took him close to where Onete was sitting, he swung wide in his approach, and covered the last hundred meters or so silently and cautiously so as not to disturb Cee if she were there.