Darkness fell. Olz stood by with torches, and at regular intervals Farrari dispatched one to light the way for the olz with full grain bags. “Home! Quickly!” Finally most them were gone. Stragglers kept arriving, but Farrari left them to figure out for themselves what they were do.
After formulating so many unsuccessful experiments, he could not believe that this one had worked. It seemed utterly unreal to him, never happened, but the depot supervisor would have only shattered crocks to show for a vast quantity of vanished grain and on the highway the torches were marching north. It would be morning before the first word of the uprising could reach anyone capable of dealing with it, two additional days before the army could arrive, and long before then the olz would be peacefully at work in their fields or wandering about hopelessly lost. In either case the rascz would be befuddled, a lengthy investigation would be required, and with any luck at all a portion of the kru’s army would be occupied indefinitely. As a bonus, the olz in the lower hilngol would eat well that summer and might even have a reserve of grain for winter. It was, Farrari told himself, a most successful beginning.
He filled his own grain bags, strapped them to his extra grilz, and took the south fork of the highway.
At dawn he changed mounts and rode at top speed until he sensed that his gril was tiring. Then he stopped to feed and water the grilz before he raced on. He still met no traffic, but he began to overtake refugees. He happened onto the first group unexpectedly as he topped a hill—a durrl and his dependents, the women and children in wagons with a few belongings, the men riding grilz. It was too late to turn aside, they had already seen him, so he swept past them and quickly left them far behind.
Later he passed other groups without arousing so much as a questioning look. To the fastidiously law-abiding rascz, the mere fact of a durrl’s assistant racing along the highway with four grilz was proof enough of his right to do so.
A surge of wild exhilaration displaced his alarm. The rascz were fleeing from the olz! They seemed to be taking their time about it, as though they knew that even a narmpf could keep ahead of walking olz, and they obviously had the air of people going somewhere, rather than of running away from something, but even this sober afterthought could not diminish his satisfaction. The rascz were refugees!
On the second day he saw the highway ahead of him filled with the kru’s cavalry. He turned aside and waited in the safety of a lane until the column had passed, not wanting to find out whether soldiers might have a more highly developed sense of curiosity than ordinary citizens. Later he met more cavalry, and on the following day he made a wide circle to avoid the garrison town that was the refugees’ objective.
He continued south, riding hard by day, alternating his grilz, walking them through the night, and avoiding the occasional town, until both he and the animals were exhausted. Somewhere off to the west the city of Scory stood smugly atop its invulnerable hill, and he was impatient to get there. He snapped the harness and urged his gril to greater speed.
In the remote southeastern corner of the lilorr he began again. He stole grain bags and cached them, and when he had enough he pronounced the magic word, “Come!” and led an entire village of olz from the night-fire. And another. And another. At dawn he separated the young, the sickly, and women with young children and turned them back, because this army had much farther to go. He got the olz onto the highway and headed north, and he ranged widely both day and night, recruiting olz and searching out deserted durrl headquarters to plunder for food and grain bags. He exchanged his worn-out grilz for grilz the durrlz had abandoned in their sudden flight. He saw no durrlz, no rascz. Again the alarm had spread instantaneously on the first glimpse of the massed olz.
He began to experiment. He selected an ol of unusually large stature, positioned him at the head of the column each morning, and had him make the gesture of movement and call out, “Come!” By the third morning Farrari was no longer needed to get the march started.
At night Farrari scattered his olz among the local ol villages, marching a delegation to rob the local durrl of the necessary food. The crowds were so huge around the nightfires that sometimes the cooking pot was emptied and refilled all through the night.
And at dawn the chosen leader would take his place in the highway, gesture, mouth a word, and the march would recommence. On the seventh morning Farrari watched the olz out of sight, and then he led them. He traveled south until he reached an east-west highway, and then he raced west at top speed. Toward the river.
Again he traveled day and night, and this time he met no one, overtook no one. The highway ended in sight of the immensely broad, swift river. He could not coax the grilz into the water, so after securing a piece of quarm log from the nearest ol village he turned them loose, made a bundle of his clothing, and as soon as darkness fell he pushed the log into the water. Choosing a pattern of stars to steer by, he struck out for the opposite shore. Grueling hours later he landed far downstream. He rested the next day, stole a gril and a bundle of grain bags the following night, and after a day of reconnoitering he appeared at an ol nightfire. “Come!”
Now he singled out only the most able looking males. The next morning, when he reached a north-south highway, he had a mere hundred ol following him, but they were the best looking olz he had ever seen. He appointed a leader and got the column started.
Toward Scorv.
Farrari watched his army’s progress with tortuous uncertainty. At some moment before it reached Scorv, this swelling crowd of passive, plodding slaves had to become one of two things: a genuine army with weapons, or an enraged mob that could carry all before it with the sheer weight of its fury and numbers. He would hide in the zrilm and watch the olz shuffle past, desperately searching each face. He needed a spark, or the magic word that would produce a spark. “How do you make a man hate?” he mused.
They slouched along the highway with the same awkward, shuffling walk they had used for more generations than any IPR historian had been able to count, and they could not be hurried. They held the long grain bags clumsily in front of them. Once Farrari halted the column and took the trouble to place each ol’s bag over his shoulder, and the following day the bags again were carried in front of them.
The march was taking them farther from home than they had ever been. If they thought of this, if they speculated at all as to why they were marching, their faces revealed none of it—nor anything else. They had been told to march; they marched.
Farrari needed a spark.
He began to collect all the weapons he could find, but he wrapped them in cloth, making untidy, unrecognizable bundles of them, before he gave them to the olz to carry. A rasc seeing a spear bearing of wouldn’t wait to find out whether or not the ol could throw it—and the olz could not or would not throw spears.
They did not need to become skilled. A thousand olz throwing blindly from behind a zrilm hedge could decimate a squadron of a hundred rascz trapped in a lane. But though the olz would hold a spear, carry a spear, or drop a spear on command, they would not throw it.
Even a distant rumor of marching olz continued to put the
