invaluable connection with the court and a lifelong patron. Of course you should do it.” He added, with a gesture of finality, “You have no choice.”
The trap had closed; there was no way out. Arne protested feebly, “I would have to neglect my work at a critical times.”
“You’ll manage,” Egarn said. “Anyway, it won’t last long. Peerager matings never do. I didn’t have any choice, and neither do you.” He dismissed the subject with a shrug. “Look—I want to show you something.”
He hurried Arne back to the large len’s flickering picture. Gevis stepped aside so Egarn could take the controls, and with practiced precision the old man turned knobs that moved the meticulously carved wood gears.
The picture changed to a different street with fewer cars and much smaller buildings.
“These places mean nothing to you, of course,” Egarn said. “What you saw before was downtown Rochester, New York. This is a small town in Ohio. I have been there—I recognized it immediately when I chanced on it. It helped me with my calibrations, and it is the place I am going to send Roszt and Kaynor. It has a bank that should be easy to rob. They can buy a car there and be in another state before morning. Then they can settle somewhere and learn something about living in the 20th century before they go to Rochester.”
“When will this happen?” Arne asked.
Egarn raised his hands wearily. “There is so much for them to learn, and they are still having serious problems with the language. They will have only one chance, and they must be as carefully prepared as possible. With everything going so well, I have to resist the temptation to rush things.”
“Certainly you shouldn’t send them before they are ready,” Arne agreed.
Later, Arne took Egarn and Inskel to the sleeping room, where they could talk undisturbed, and told them of his conversation with Fornzt.
“It wouldn’t have been possible to do this earlier because we didn’t have the materials,” Inskel said. “Now we can do it easily, thanks to Fornzt’s explorations. My work here is almost finished. There isn’t anything I can contribute to Roszt and Kaynor’s education. I easily can make the necessary duplicates.”
Egarn nodded. “It is well thought of. Inskel can begin with the smaller parts. The larger ones can be made in the new workroom when it is ready. Will it be located somewhere else in the ruins?”
“Yes, but somewhere remote from here. You and Inskel can escape to it if everything else fails.”
“Roszt and Kaynor, also,” Egarn said. “From this time on, they will be more important than we are. But why do you suddenly bring this up now? Do you sense some kind of danger?”
Arne smiled. “You must remember I was trained from childhood to consider not only what will happen but also what might happen. So I keep looking ahead, and I plan for the bad as well as the good.”
“Fortunately for us,” Inskel said, and Egarn nodded.
Egarn returned to workroom, but Arne held Inskel back for a few private words. “The attitude of the new prince, and the fact that the ten peers have finally been persuaded to cooperate, may make it possible to write the history of these times far differently than we anticipated.”
“It is almost the first cheerful news I have heard in my lifetime,” Inskel said. “But we mustn’t forget the Peerdom of Lant and its enormous army. Unless Lant can be defeated, this land has no future.”
“Exactly. But I don’t want Egarn to launch his mission until we find out what is going to happen.”
“Yes. Yes, I see what you mean. We have no obligation to save some other civilization by destroying ours. If we are capable of achieving our own bright future, that is what we must fight for. Egarn looks at this differently. The other civilization he wants to save is his own. I agree with you completely. Nothing need be said now, but if Egarn tries to rush things, I will insist that Roszt and Kaynor aren’t to be sent anywhere without your consent.”
Arne took his leave of them and hurried away. The walk back to Midd Village always seemed much longer in the dark, and this one seemed longer than usual, but at the end of it he finally was able to go to bed.
He spent the next day catching up on his work and talking with various villagers whose opinions mattered to him. He wanted to talk with Deline again, to tell her—but there was nothing he tell her except that he still wanted her to wive him and he hoped she would wait until her sister had tired of him. A passionate woman like her could find a mate easily. He wished—but what he wished didn’t matter. Egarn and the others were right. He had no choice.
When he returned to Midlow Court, he told the land warden, “Now I am ready to take your advice. I would like to confer with the prince.”
The land warden smiled happily. “I will bring her here. If you come to an understanding, the palace will be no place for a newly-mated couple. The peer is unconscious much of the time. Servers tiptoe and whisper, and happiness would seem like treason. You can use my lodge as long as you like.”
To Arne’s suprise, the days, and tenites, and monts that followed were reasonably happy ones. He was intensely lonely for Deline—the more so because he spent so much time with her. She remained the capable assistant, was politely cooperative in everything—and as distant as she could be under the circumstances. Probably she had already taken another lover. If she had, she continued to practice discretion. The village gossip never mentioned her.
The prince was a sympathetic and understanding companion who listened intelligently to everything Arne could tell her about the peerdom’s affairs and whose concern for them matched his own. In public, Arne addressed his new mate as “Highness” and knelt to her like everyone else. In private, he called her “Ely”—from her first name, Elone—but he could not bring himself to use the terms of endearment that he had lavished on Deline. The prince responded with a wholly unexpected passion, and probably it was unfair of him to compare her daily with his memories of her sister, but he could not help it. She was ecstatically happy, and he had to seek his own happiness in that.
They visited the peer whenever she was alert enough to talk with them. She delighted in seeing them together, and she clung to Arne as the one person capable of guiding her peerdom through dangers most peeragers were incapable of imagining. Arne had been the prince’s consort for three monts when Elone Jermile announced joyfully that she was pregnant. It was cause for celebration at court because the peeragers were always apprehensive of the turmoil that would follow if a peer died with no one to succeed her.
Lashers and no-namers continued to arrive from the other peerdoms. Working with Arne, Bernal imposed an organization on the army and a rigorous conditioning on the troops. His optimism grew daily.
Then a message arrived from Inskor, brought by a scout who had ridden his lathery horse all the way from Easlon without stopping. The armies of Lant had broken through.
14. ARNE (2)
Beyond the southern border of the Ten Peerdoms, chains of steeply sloping, wooded hills marched southward on either side of long, narrow valleys. The trees often spilled down the hillsides to crowd the banks of the small streams that ran below.
“The Lantiff are on horseback,” Inskor’s message to Arne said. “They will follow the low ground. We need cover, so we will keep to the hills. Our object is to set trap after trap, lose battle after battle—and make each of the Lantiff’s victories so expensive it will seem like a defeat. They will keep trying to encircle us. We must make them think our army is much larger than it is.”
The Lantiff’s formula for victory was a simple one. Their charging vanguard bristled with multi-pronged lances and flashed with gleaming, slashing, curved swords. Every thirtieth Lantiff was an officer, apparently unarmed, and it was these officers who wielded the deadliest weapon, the tube of lens that some unsung Lantian len grinder had invented. Its beam knocked the defenders senseless, after which the Lantiff surged forward to overwhelm an unconscious enemy.
It was an ideal tactic for troops with minimal intelligence. The Lantiff never had to think at all. They never sent out scouts; never varied their scheme of attack an iota. They had no need to; they were invincible. They tasted victory after victory, and no one bothered to tell them about the occasional defeats Lant suffered. They attacked with deliberation; they conquered even before they made contact with the enemy; and then they occupied themselves with more important matters such as pillaging undefended towns and villages. What the opposing
