"No." He sobered. "But I heard about it first from Malachi when I was very young. It seemed perfectly natural to me, then, that they could do it, being Dorsai."
"Nothing happens by reputation alone," she said. "Each district - we didn't have cantons in those days - had to decide how to defend itself. Cletus left only Arvid Johnson and Bill Athyer, with six trained men, to organize the defense…"
She fell silent, her eyes gazing down upon the slopes below. He watched her, still trying to understand what she was aiming at. Even seated, her body had an erectness that no man could have possessed without stiffness; and her face had the quality of a profile stamped on a silver coin.
"Amanda…" he said, gently.
She did not seem to have heard him; and he felt a clumsiness in himself that made him unsure of prodding her further. Beside her, in his much taller, larger-framed but gaunt, body, thinned down by the experiences of recent months, he felt like some dark bird of earth-bound flesh and bone, bending above an entity of pure spirit. But as he waited, her eyes lost their abstraction and she turned to him.
"What is it?" she said.
It crossed his mind to wonder if perhaps he should avoid further mention of the Defense of Dorsai - as it was called in the histories.
"I was just thinking how much you look like that painting in your hall - was it of the first Amanda? It could be a picture of you."
"Both the second Amanda and I look like her," she answered. "It happens."
"Does it just happen that she had her picture painted at the same age you are now?"
"No." She shook her head and smiled, almost mischievously. "It wasn't."
"It wasn't?" He gazed at her.
"No," Amanda laughed. "That picture in our hall was made when she was a good deal older than I am now."
He frowned.
"It's true," she said. "We age very slowly, we Morgans. And she was something special."
"Not as special as you," he said. "She couldn't be. You're end-result Dorsai. She lived before people like you had been born."
"That's not true," Amanda said swiftly. "She was Dorsai before there was a Dorsai world. What she was, was the material out of which our people and our culture's been made."
"How can you be so sure of what she was - nearly two centuries ago?"
"How can I?" She turned her head to face him and looked at him strangely. "Because in many ways I am her."
The last few words came out without any particular emphasis; but they seemed to ring in his ears with an unusual distinctness. He sat as he was, careful not to move or change his expression, but his inner awareness had just been alerted.
"A reincarnation?" he said, lightly, after a moment.
"No, not really," she answered. "But something more… as if time didn't matter. As if it's all the same thing; her, there in the beginning of this world of ours; and I, here…"
And now the feeling came clearly to him that her reason was out in the open, that she had told him - warned him, perhaps - of what she had brought him here to be warned about.
"Here at the end of it, you mean?" he challenged her.
"No." Her turquoise eyes had taken on a gray shade. "The end won't be until the last Dorsai is dead, and wherever that Dorsai dies. In fact, not even then. The end is only going to be when the last human is dead - because what makes us Dorsai is something that's a part of all humans; that part the first Amanda had when she was born, back on Earth."
Something - a fragment of cloud across the white dot of the sun, perhaps - shuttered the sunlight from his eyes for a split second. There was some connection between all this she was presently speaking of, the lost house of Foralie, the Defense of the Dorsai and herself, that was still eluding him.
"You think so much of her," he said thoughtfully. "But it's the Cletus Grahames and the Donal Graemes that the rest of the worlds think of when they talk about this world."
"We've had Graemes as our next neighbors since Cletus," she replied. "What's thought of them, they earned. But the first Amanda was here before either of them. She founded our family. She cleared the out-of-work mercenaries from these mountains before Cletus came; and it was when she was ninety-three that she held Foralie district against Dow deCastries' troops, who'd landed here, thinking they'd have no trouble with the children and women, the sick and the old, who were all that was left."
"So, she was given charge of Foralie district?" he said. "Why her? Had she been a soldier once?"
"No," she answered. "But, as I said, during the Outlaw Years here, she'd led the way in clearing out the lawless mercenaries. After she did that, and other things, with just the noncombatants to help her, the rest of the districts followed her example; and law came to the Dorsai. She led when Dow came because she was the one best fit to command in this district, in spite of her age."
"How did she do it?"
"Clean out the outlaws, or defeat deCastries?"
"Not the outlaws - though I'd like to hear about that sometime, too," he said. "No, how did she defeat deCastries when all the experts then and now claim there was no way a gaggle of housewives, children and old people could possibly have done it?"
Amanda's gaze went a long way past him.
"In a way you could say the troops did defeat themselves. Did you ever read Cletus' Tactics of Mistake?"
"Yes," he said. "But when I was too young to understand it well."
"What we did was in there - it was a matter of making them make the mistakes, putting our strength against the weaknesses of the invaders."
"Weaknesses? In first-line troops?"
She looked at him again with the gray tint to her eyes.
"They weren't as willing to die as we were."
"Willing to die?" he studied her. "Old people? Mothers - "
"And children. Yes."
The armor of sunlight around her seemed to invest her words with a quality of truth greater than he had ever known from anyone else.
"The Dorsai," she said, "was formed by people who were willing to pay with their lives in others' battles, in order to buy freedom for their homes. It wasn't only in the men who went off to fight. Those at home had that same image of freedom, and were willing to die for it."
"But simply being willing to die - "
"You don't understand, not being born here," she said. "It was a matter of our being able to make harder choices than the soldiers sent in to occupy us. Amanda and the others in the district who were best qualified to decide sat down before the invasion and considered a number of plans. All of the plans meant casualties - and the casualties could include the people who were considering the plans. They chose the one that gave the district its greatest effectiveness against the enemy for the least number of deaths; and, having chosen it, the ones who had done the choosing were ready to be among those who would have to pay for its success. The invading soldiers had no such plan - and no such will."
He shook his head.
"I don't understand," he said. "I suppose it's because I'm not a Dorsai."
She looked at him for a moment, like someone who considers saying something, then thinks better of it.
"Then you don't understand the first Amanda?" she said. "I think you'll need to if you're going to talk to the Grey Captains."
He nodded, soberly.
"How did it happen?" he asked. "How did she - how did they do it? I have to know."
"All right," she said, "I'll tell you."
And she did. Sitting there in the sunlight, listening to her talk of a past as if it was something she herself had lived through, he thought again of what she had said about the first Amanda and herself being the same person. The story was a simple one. Dow's troops had come in and bivouacked just beyond Foralie Town. The first Amanda had gotten their commander's permission to continue with a manufacturing process in town that was necessary to the district's economy; and the process, according to plan, had flooded the atmosphere of the town and its vicinity with vaporized nickel carbonyl. One part in a million of those vapors was enough to cause allergic dermatitis and an edema of the lungs that was irreversible. In short - a sure death.