“Be interesting to see what happens in Voorstod, won’t it,” said Dern. “You heard about that?”
Harribon nodded. “Sal Girat told me. I’ve been going over to keep company with Sal quite a bit lately. She says her mother went to Voorstod. Also Sam. Plus the little Wilm girl. Only reason I could figure for the little Wilm girl to go was … well. Is that what they went for?”
Dern shrugged elaborately. “All I know is what I feel in my bones, Topman.” He turned back to the burials to see a large orange cat drop a final ferf into the grave be fore the last few spadefuls of earth covered it. Spiggy was watching the cat curiously.
“There,” yowled the cat. “That does it.”
Spiggy said something yowllike in response, which Dern interpreted as, “Thanks for your help.”
“So we’ll all bury our people up here from now on,” said Dern.
“You feel that in your bones, do you?”
“You brought it up, Topman.”
Harribon Kruss rubbed his neck and smiled, wryly. Yes, he had brought it up. And from now on, they’d all bring their people up. Because it seemed like a good idea. Because it was a way, a convenience, a kindness.
• It took two days for the search-and-seize line of troops to cross Green Hurrah. Many of the people of Green Hurrah were known to men of Karth’s command. The army had been stationed in Jeramish for years, and they had made repeated forays into Green Hurrah, encountering the people who lived there on almost a daily basis. Persons who could not be identified or vouched for by trusted inhabitants were sent to the rear, under escort. Three camps had been set up at the border of Green Hurrah, and two of them were already swollen with internees from Ahabar. By nightfall of the second day, the line of men had reached the coast on either side of the thin neck of Skelp, and barriers were being constructed across that neck and all along the shore.
Across the main roads leading into Skelp, barricades had been set up—deep ditches, fences, overlapping suppressor fields to bring fliers down. Other suppressor fields covered the coastlines to either side, and beyond the fields were automatic weapons to bring down anything coming from the sea.
“What if people from Voorstod tried to go straight out, north?” asked Sam, curiously, pointing at the top of the chart. Across the room, Saturday and Maire sat at the table, remnants of a midafternoon meal scattered before them. Maire was slumped deeply into her chair in an attitude of dejection.
The Commander reached for another chart, showed Sam a line of coast north of Voorstod. “Icecap,” he said. “Beyond that, open ocean. Beyond that, the province of Caerthop and more guns. East and west, gunships with suppressors. They’d have to go straight out, off Ahabar, to escape this blockade.”
“Can they?”
“Not that we know of. No Doors. No intrasystem fliers.”
“No army?”
“No. They’ve always advocated terrorist tactics, not battle. Their biggest group is their Faithful, the brethren of the Cause led by that group of fanatics they call the prophets. If you ever want to meet a wildman, meet a prophet. But, in addition to the Cause, there are probably a hundred splinter groups, all of them devoted to terrorism of one kind or another, some of them with only half a dozen members. One nice thing about them, they’ve never been able to work together. No man of Voorstod takes orders from any other man of Voorstod. Has to do with their Doctrine of Freedom.”
“Uhm,” said Sam, who had never listened when Maire had explained the doctrine. “How many do you think there are in there who would fight you?”
“Fifty thousand Faithful, anywhere from twelve to eighty lifeyears old. Whipped up by their prophets, they’d run naked into the guns; I’ve seen them do it. Other groups? A few hundred each, maybe a thousand in the largest of them.”
“And how many in your army?”
Karth snorted. “Three million, if we call up the reserves. I’ve a million men involved in this blockade.”
“Then there’s no question you can go in and crush any opposition.”
“No question.”
“But many will die if you do.”
“Before we got there, they’d kill all the Gharm they could get to, I imagine. Plus many of the women and children. These men are the kind who would kill their slaves and families rather than let us free them.”
“No matter what the women want?” The question was surprised out of Sam. It was not one he wanted an answer to.
“Women have no rights in Voorstod except under System law. It always surprised me that they let their women leave. I always expected to hear they’d locked them up.”
“Too much trouble,” said Maire, roused from her dejection. “More trouble than we were worth, so they said.”
“But no longer?” Karth asked her.
“You’ve got to understand they’re a puritan people, Commander. Sex is a very powerful taboo among Voorstoders. They delay it and forestall it when they can. The prophets of the Cause tell them sex is power, and being celibate stores up their power. The priests tell them married sex is all right, but only that. Both priests and prophets tell them not to look at women, not to think of women, that women are evil snares of the devil. And all women past puberty wear robes that cover all of them but their eyes. So they wouldn’t have been inclined to hang on to us, not until now.” She sat up, rubbing her head.
“We were commodities, not valuable ones, but there comes a point at which there probably aren’t enough boy babies being born to make up for the Faithful who die,” she said. “Sam suggested that, and the more I think of it, that has to be it. That’s why they wanted me back, so I could keep others from leaving with my songs. But I fiddled around, making plans,
