if to see if he were hollow, and whispered secrets to him in the harsh and grating voices of fairy-tale ogres. He’d begun, in fact, to settle into the rhythms of Huntsville’s life, to forget the burden of his destiny, to think of himself as a man among ordinary men again. . . .
But Kan-Kuk called for him again in the spring. He woke at midnight to hear the echo of Kan-Kuk drumming on a river-rock, out beyond Huntsville’s edge. He gathered up his men. The sharpshooter Sam Hart, who’d lost an eye in the fighting at Onakha, stayed behind with a local woman, and the General swallowed his sorrow and pride and envy and gave them both his blessing.
— Come away, General.
—Is it time?
—It is.
—Do you remember when you first came to me?
—It was only moments ago, General.
—Forty years for me. More than that. A lifetime. Long enough for a civilization to come and go.
—I remember.
—I lay on the field of battle after Asher. Wounded in the shoulder by a lucky shot and bleeding badly. Under the stars, in gorse and briars, by the bridge. Our first defeat. It might have been the end of us. The death of the Republic, before it was born. I told myself it would not be. It would not. I called on all my will and . . . And then you came to me. At first I thought I was mad.
—You are mad, in your way. That’s why we chose you.
—Beneath your warrens there was a city. I have not forgotten. And we made a deal.
—Yes. I gave you what strength I had. I helped you make the world over.
—You did.
—I warned you it would not be enough.
—Forty damn good years, though. Or near forty.
—Now it’s time, General. You owe us your services. We have waited long enough.
— Too long. I know.
—Come home.
—Why me?
—You know why.
—You’ll give me the weapon?
—Not a weapon.
—What then?
—You’ll see.
They went up out of Huntsville, and through ancient woods, just a few miles west of the ruins of what had once been Founding, the first colony in the West. They went up into the foothills north of Founding, looking for a particular sullen hunchbacked mountain by the name of Self’s Mount.
—There. And beneath it.
—I am an old man.
—You promised. We gave you forty years.
—I honor my promises. But I am an old man, and frightened.
They went up, and up. They spent a day hunting around the foot of a cliff face of golden brown stone. It caught the sun; its crags and outcrops, its caves and eagle nests cast stark shadows, made its surface as ornate as a cathedral. It was square as a big-city bank. Birds came and went overhead like congregants, like clerks. It was the last homely thing in the mountain. They scrambled up a lunar waste of scree; they delved through the ocean-floor shadows of a crevasse that cut up into the mountains at steep unnatural angles. Kan-Kuk went ahead of them, always, on fierce striding legs, turning his head full of sun-red eyes to glare back at them, urging them on. They stumbled across a wolf pack, hungry and maddened by the long winter, and lost young Martin Hulme. If that was the most fearsome guardian they faced, they agreed, they’d be lucky; and they burned Hulme’s body. Kan-Kuk said
—We are near. Do you hear it?
—No. But I don’t doubt it, old friend, I don’t doubt it at all.
—You will be tested.
—No doubt. No doubt.
“Sir. We ain’t alone up here, sir.”
The General followed Deerfield up onto the scarp in the windless lee of which they’d made a brief camp. At Deerfield’s gesture, the General crouched among the mossy rocks. Deerfield pointed down over the valley. Black ants crawled over the scree below. . . . “The telescope, please, Mr. Deerfield.”
“Yes, sir. Sir, I count twenty-two of ’em.”
“Yes, Mr. Deerfield. Ah. Aha. Twenty-two men of the Line. No vehicles. No Vessels overhead.”
“I reckon we can take ’em, sir. I been watchin’. They’re lookin’ for someone. I reckon they followed us up from Huntsville, sir. But they don’t know where we are yet. If we strike first, we can take ’em before they can bring out their bombs or their gas or all that.”
Deerfield’s instincts were generally sound—but he was a hunter, a trapper, he saw no further than the immediate kill. He did not understand the stakes, or the weight of responsibility on the General’s old shoulders. They could not take risks now. .