'You will go when Du warms the earth so that the new, green grass comes.'
'I will go now,' she said. 'Why must I wait?' There was no answer. 'May the dus curse you all,' she shouted, and her voice echoed back to her. She fell to her knees and faced the green pillar.
'Duwan, Duwan, they torment me so.'
She would have spoken more in complaint, but her eyes fell from the pointed peak, where his head had once been, from the point where once his fiery eyes had flashed, down to a point not far above the ground. A small movement had drawn her eyes. She gasped. The mossy green covering split before her eyes and she saw one finger. A finger! And it was not raw, or decayed. It had pale green, healthy, living skin.
'Duwan,' she screamed, reaching for the spot, finding that the mossy covering was tough, so tough that she could not tear it.
'Peace, daughter,' said the thought voice of Sema the elder. 'Do not disturb him, for he still sleeps.'
'He's alive?'
'He is with us. Be patient, daughter.'
'It is not a full conqforce,' Dagner told Duwan the Elder. The old Drinker had not weathered the winter well. He moved with difficulty. The hardening had reached past his hide and was affecting his joints, his flesh, his bones. 'The scouts have all returned, and fresh ones have been sent out. They estimate that there are more than two thousand armed men, with a support group of more than two hundred slaves guarded by lightly armed conscripts. Their movements indicate that they are making a methodical search. They send out groups of about one hundred in various directions, surrounding a given area, a valley, for example, and then sweep all toward the center. One of our scouts was thus encircled and did not escape.'
'Was he a good warrior? Would he have talked?' Dagner shrugged wearily. 'Who can say what a Drinker will do or say when he is peeled rapidly? We must assume that he talked. Du knows that I probably would if they were taking my hide.'
Duwan the Elder nodded gloomily. He could field an armed force of less than a thousand warriors. He was not ready, and he had feared the coming of the thaws and the warm, sunny weeks that followed. But he had no choice, or, at best, some doubtful choices. During the winter he had questioned the free runners who were now a part of his force. He had learned that to the west were the impenetrable, high, always snow-capped mountains. To the southwest, the desert. To the north, he knew, were the dense forests and beyond them the tundra. He could not move west. He could not move to the south. Should he move to the north?
'We will attack the separate groups,' he said.
He called in his group leaders. 'To kill the enemy, to prevent him from chasing us down here in these hills and throwing all his strength at us at once, we must move quickly.'
A young leader moaned. He remembered the grueling training marches of the winter, through the snow and cold, when Duwan the Elder had pushed them to the limit of their endurance and beyond by reminding them that it was the enemy's mobility that had trapped the army in the canyon.
'The enemy moves swiftly,' Duwan the Elder said, 'but we can move even more swiftly. We will move as a body, and attack as a body. Behind us will come the females, the young, and those who do not, as yet, have arms. Their function will be to strip the battlefield of all weapons, all scraps of metal. We kill, they salvage, and as weapons are captured, our force will grow.'
'Run, run, run,' a young warrior complained, as the first elements of the army left the western valley. 'I'd rather fight than run. Run all day and all night and then fight. Does he think we're dus?'
'He thinks you are Drinkers,' an officer bellowed. 'Save your breath for the running.'
The encirclement was made with some units at a full run so that they arrived at their assigned points panting, out of breath, dripping sweat. The unit that had had to run faster and farther met the enemy first, a group of just over eighty well disciplined guards, and in their exhausted condition they took quick losses until Duwan the Elder, driving his unit hard, closed on the enemy's rear and the swords were aimed at enemy throats from two sides. It was quickly over. Leaning on his longsword, realizing that he was not as young as he once was, Duwan the Elder stiffened when a scout came pounding onto the battlefield.
'Two escaped,' the scout panted. 'Come, you can see them.' Duwan the Elder followed the scout to a sheer drop, a precipice of faulted stone, and looked down into a river valley to see two blue uniforms, dim dots in the distance, moving rapidly. He had to look harder to see Drinkers in pursuit, so far behind that it was hopeless, for in the distance he could see the massed blue of the main enemy force.
He summoned his leaders. Old Dagner was grunting with the effort of walking. 'They know we are here,' Duwan the Elder said. 'Now our only advantage is that we can pick our own ground.'
He chose well. At the western end of the valley the stream had eroded its way down through native rock to form an
