“So we don’t wait for the flyer,” said Ram Odin.
“It’s time for us to get on with our mission,” said Noxon. He held out his hand. Ram Odin took it.
Noxon sliced rapidly forward in huge leaps, until he reached a time with human paths nearby. Then he sliced his way ahead until their original marker appeared. And beyond. And beyond. Until there were paths of people in airplanes flying overhead. Lots of them.
That was when they hiked their way out. Within a half hour, they were among tourists.
“Of course, we don’t have passports,” said Ram Odin.
“What’s a passport?” asked Noxon.
“Believe me, Noxon, up to now we’ve only been dealing with time-shifting, the laws of causality, computers that lie, and perfidious talking mice. Now we’ll be dealing with bureaucrats. This is when it gets complicated.”
CHAPTER 19
Council of War
The time-shifters and their friends gathered beside the stream where the Larfolders assembled to tell tales, to learn to walk, and to make decisions that required speech. Their intention was only to greet each other, as Olivenko returned to them from Odinfold, and Umbo, Loaf, and Leaky from Ramfold.
Inevitably, they gave an account of themselves. Loaf and Leaky had a baby to explain—though of course it was Umbo who did the explaining, because he had rescued Square before removing the future in which he had been born. That tale could not be told without a mention of the Rebel King, and of Captain Toad, the ugly soldier who was leading raids all over Stashiland.
“I don’t know if we should go to war,” said Param, “merely because it seems we’ve already done so.”
“I think we always intended to,” said Rigg. “Why else did we send Olivenko to study military history and strategy? Why else did you need to learn to slice backward as well as forward in time?”
“But now that we’re face to face with it,” said Param, “I don’t know if I have the stomach for it.”
“Maybe that’s why the people I met spoke only of the Rebel King,” said Umbo.
“Even that is significant,” said Olivenko. “Rigg’s the son of King Knosso. Shouldn’t they be calling him ‘the rightful king’?”
“Only after we win,” said Umbo. “Right now, if Haddamander’s soldier came through town and somebody remembered you ever saying ‘the rightful king’ about Rigg Sessamekesh . . .”
“You’re missing the point,” said Loaf. “‘The Rebel King’ isn’t referring to Rigg. Rigg is obviously Captain Toad, and he isn’t making any claim to the Tent of Light. The Rebel King is the husband of Queen Param.”
“I was afraid of that,” said Umbo.
“Though at some point,” said Rigg, “Param and you really should make it official. The sooner you have an heir, the better.”
“That’s . . . practical,” said Umbo.
“And really intrusive,” said Param.
“You know you have to go to war,” said Olivenko. “Rigg and Ram Odin decided the Walls aren’t coming down—we all agreed to that, once we heard the things they learned. But we still have to live somewhere. For now, the Larfolders are providing us a refuge, mostly because they don’t spend that much time on land. But Larfold has mice all over it.”
“Not to mention mermasks in the water,” said Param. “If we tried to live here, our children or grandchildren would envy the Larfolders their life in the sea, and they’d ask for mermasks and leave the land and become . . .”
“Become a different kind of human being,” said Rigg. “It wouldn’t be a tragedy, but it’s not wrong for us, as land dwellers, to want our children to build lives on the land.”
“Vadeshfold is empty,” said Loaf.
“But it has wild facemasks in the water,” said Umbo.
“There’s an obvious solution to that,” said Loaf. “Anyone who has a facemask like mine will be immune to the wild facemasks.”
“But not everyone can bear them,” said Leaky. Her tone of voice was emotional, bordering on anger.
“I’m only saying,” said Loaf, “that we shouldn’t think of Vadeshfold as empty.” He touched his facemask, which was still obvious, even though it had gone so far toward converging with a natural human face. “Someday, there may be people who want to live with these as closely as the Larfolders live with their mermasks. Vadeshfold should belong to them.”
“All of this is pointless,” said Param, “if Noxon doesn’t prevent the destruction of Garden.”
“True,” said Loaf. “But only in the sense that nothing we do will last for more than a few years. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t fight to give the people of Ramfold some hope of relief from General Citizen.”
“From Mother, you mean,” said Param.
“We don’t know how much influence your mother still has,” said Olivenko. “She might be as much a prisoner now as ever.”
“Wouldn’t it be nice to imagine that she isn’t guilty of any of King Haddamander’s oppression,” said Rigg.
“We know better,” said Param. “If anything, she’s the one goading him to be more and more cruel.”
“That’s not an unreasonable guess,” said Rigg. “But the people Umbo met spoke only of King Haddamander, just as they spoke only of the Rebel King and Captain Toad.”
“Meaning that Mother and I have become unimportant,” said Param.
“Meaning that war is the business of men,” said Olivenko, “as it always has been, even when women fight alongside us.”
“What worries me,” said Loaf, “is that we might move in circles here. Umbo went into the future and learned that there’s a Rebel King, and a Captain Toad who leads raids all over Stashiland. But we still haven’t decided if putting Umbo forward as king is a good idea, or that our war should consist of doing a bunch of raiding. The Sessamids didn’t conquer and unite all of Stashiland—the whole of Ramfold, eventually—by raiding. Raiding is what they did when they were still a tribe of horse-riding nomads from the northwest.”
“It would be easy to take note of the decision we apparently already made, and spare ourselves the trouble of discussing it,” said Ram Odin.
“I’m not quite sure that you are part of the decision,” said Param.
“I forgot that I was speaking to a queen,” said Ram Odin.
“What you forgot,” said Param, “is that you are not part of our company. You tried to kill Rigg. He may have forgiven you, but I don’t trust you or whatever advice you give.”
“He hasn’t forgiven me,” said Ram Odin. “Because he also killed me, and whereas I have no memory of my attempt on his life, he has a very clear memory of—what did you do? Stab me? Break my neck?”
Rigg sighed. “He’s teasing us both,” said Rigg. “And we’d be fools not to listen to his counsel, because he knows far more than we do about Ramfold and all the others.”
“But he also lies, and tells the expendables to lie to us.”
“True,” said Rigg. “So let’s ask another source of information. Olivenko, what would you advise us to do, as our student of military history?”
“I came with two plans,” said Olivenko. “And the guerrilla campaign by Captain Toad was one of them, though the name isn’t one I would have chosen.”
“How is that plan supposed to work, since there’s at least one version of the future in which we chose it?”
“Guerrilla campaigns can’t bring victory by themselves,” said Olivenko. “But if you run it properly, you can win over the people while humiliating and terrifying the government. The foolish way to do it is to force the villages to feed your men and assassinate anyone who opposes you, so that all the villagers obey you out of fear—and betray you the first chance they get.”
“That’s why I was surprised to learn we had chosen it,” said Rigg.
“I doubt that you did, because, as I said, it’s foolish. Fools resort to those tactics because they expect the people to support them voluntarily, and when they don’t, the rebels become angry and take vengeance. But you’re not fools. You know that the villagers can’t pay taxes to King Haddamander and to the Rebel King. When they hid their meager supplies from Haddamander’s tax collectors, they weren’t saving it for us and our army.”