The Chantry Guild

CHAPTER 32

He went back to their room and discovered that Amanda had already risen and left. He found her having breakfast by herself at a small table in the building's dining room and joined her.

Actually, he wanted nothing to eat, and she, after a single wise look at him, said nothing, not even "good morning." Instead, she merely smiled and continued her own meal, leaving him to sit and do what he wanted, which was merely to enjoy the early day with her, along with the other breakfasters. He let himself be immersed in the chatter in the dining room and the sounds from the kitchen. The sun, shining in through the windows of the room to brighten all around them, wrapped him in an unusual sense of happiness.

When she was done, she rose. He went with her. Taking her tray with its used utensils and dishes to the disposal slot, she pushed it through. Then, smiling again at him, she led him outside and parted company with him, going off herself in the direction of Amid's office.

He was left to his own devices, and found himself happy to be so. Kultis, around him, had never seemed more bright and fresh. Its colors stood out at him, as if just washed by a brief summer shower, from the sky overhead to the gravel of the paths underfoot.

He roamed about the ledge. There was a lightness to his body, and the sense of the illumination he had just received lingered in him. For once, he felt strangely free of purpose. It was as consciousness had been cut loose, like a towed dory from it behind a small longboat, to drift at the whim of soft winds and gentle waves under a bright sun.

He smiled. The image of the loose dory pleased him. The implications of what he had found were too massive and momentous for his mind to handle logically, and so that part of him had been set free temporarily by the more capacious mental machinery behind it, that moved in creative and other areas where the conscious, with its rigid patterns and logics, could not go.

The day, accordingly, passed like a pleasant dream. Either Amanda, or Amid, or someone among the others must have passed the word to leave him to his own devices. None of the Chantry Guild members approached him or tried to draw him into conversation, for which he was grateful.

His thoughts slid between wonderings at small things in his surroundings - from the quaint shape of a pebble among the gravel at his feet to the living design of a variform leaf or blade of grass, or their native equivalents that he came upon. Architecturally, they were all beautiful, and he was a little surprised he had failed so utterly to appreciate them before.

Interspersed with these were other things observed, or remembered - bits and flashes of scenes from his past. Images from his boyhood and manhood as Donal Graeme, from his brief life as Paul Formain and his present life as Hal, all these came and went in his head like bits of a serial recording.

Something within him guessed, but did not struggle to verify, at the possibility that these things he recalled were reflections of what his deeper mind was fitting into the matrix of his lifelong search, from what he had come to understand this morning. But he did not investigate this, did not question it, and it did not matter.

It was like being on a vacation. It occurred to him with a small shock of surprise that he had never really had a vacation, since he had been a schoolboy on the Dorsai. From the time he had left his home world he had never let go of his life's commitment for even a day. It was a strange feeling to be so cut loose now, even for a few hours like this, to be content with the distance he had come so far, when the end was still not yet reached. Though he could see it clearly, now.

As the morning grew into noon, he drifted toward Amid's office. When he stepped inside it at last, he was surprised to find it, for once, empty. Then it came to him that Amid, himself, might well have run short of sleep, these last forty-eight hours, and be in his own quarters, resting.

In any case, he had not come here to see Amid, but because of the memory of the recording of Jathed to which he had listened. He began to search both his memory and the office, and finally came across a filing cabinet with the name "Jathed" on it. There was a box of recording spindles in the second drawer from the top.

He took the box with him to Amid's desk and seated himself in a chair near it with the control pad Amid had searched for and found earlier. It was a standard desk unit and in a moment he had the first of the recording spindles in the control pad's magazine. Jathed's voice, apparently from several years earlier than the tape Hal had listened to before, sounded immediately in the room.

As he listened, he examined the other spindles. They were dated in order over a period of some twelve years. He started with the most recent ones and began playing them in reverse order to their dates of recording. Sitting in the empty office, he listened to the resonant, compelling voice of the founder of this reincarnation of the Chantry Guild.

He did not need to listen to more than half a dozen, however, before concluding that there would be little advantage to him in hearing them all. With the exception of two which were histories of Jathed's early life, dictated in an unfamiliar, elderly voice that might have belonged to Amid's brother, they were essentially repetitions of what were basically two or three customary lectures delivered by Jathed to audiences consisting of disciples, or others with an interest in what the cantankerous, but remarkable, man had to say.

In effect, the message of all of these was simple enough. Jathed believed that each person who had the necessary faith and self-discipline should be able to enter a personal, extra universe exactly like the physical one that surrounded him, except that in this other universe, the will of the person involved could accomplish anything wanted by merely determining it should be so. Furthermore, if that will was powerful enough, Jathed apparently believed that the effect produced in the extra universe could be duplicated in the universe of reality by convincing the minds of others that the alteration applied to the physical universe also.

In short, he believed in a personal, extra universe, and that the so-called real universe was no more than an agreement among the human minds existing in it.

It was in this latter view, about the real universe, that Hal found himself disagreeing with the other man.

It was true that when he had been Paul Formain, three hundred years before, he had experienced the night of madness brought upon a city by the original Chantry Guild of Earth, under its founder, Walter Blunt - that original Guild which had become the parent of Kultis and its sister world and the whole Exotic culture. It had been a night in which he had seen a monument melting down like wax, a stone lion decorating the balcony of a building lift its head and roar, and a hole of nothingness appear in the middle of a street. A nothingness of such utter blackness that his eyes refused to focus on it.

That, and history was full of miracles witnessed by crowds, as well as smaller, so-called "magics" seen by small groups of people gathered in confined spaces for just that purpose.

And, finally, there was the sound of the breaking light on the first recording of Jathed Hal had ever heard.

Nonetheless, Hal held to his own view of a single, separate, creative universe that would be a tool, not just a box of conjuring tricks, for humankind.

The only strong point he shared with Jathed was that the other must also have experienced a moment of revelation in which the absolute truth of the transient and the eternal being the same became undeniable. But from that point they had each built different ways, if with much of the same material.

In any case, his mind would not work with the problem right now. It was a refusal, but a different sort of refusal than he had experienced at the Final Encyclopedia before coming here.

That had been a blockage, a painful situation in which he went over the same answers time and again, on each occasion finding them unworkable. This day was a pleasant moment of rest along a route that he now knew to be correct and to run straight to his goal.

But his mind would not wrestle with that problem - or any problem, just now. He put the spindles in their box back where he had found them, the control pad back on Amid's desk, and went out.

Later he was never able to remember, without a great deal of effort, how the rest of that day went for him. In part he did not really want to investigate the memory, only recall it fondly as a sort of pleasant blur. At any rate, by the time night had fallen and he had at last taken something to eat and drink, he was back, seated in Amid's office in one of its few armless chairs, with a musical instrument in his hands.

The fire was alight in the fireplace and the instrument was someone's reconstruction of a six-string classical Spanish guitar. It was enough like the instrument he had played and sung with on his trips to Port, during the period when he had been a miner on Coby, to suit him.

The guitar had been offered to him, rather shyly, by one of the Guild members, who had said Amanda had suggested he might enjoy having it for a while. Indeed, he did. He wondered what part of the almost occult understanding in Amanda had prompted her to make such a suggestion. In any case, he had ended up here with it, seated beside the fire in the evening.

The lights were turned down, so that almost the only illumination was from the fireplace itself. He was letting his mind and his fingers wander together, in whatever direction his memory took him, which for the last half hour had been to the ancient ballads and songs out of the past centuries of Old Earth. Songs he had learned there, as a boy, from books and recordings in the library of the estate where he had been brought up.

Amid and Amanda were seated in chairs before him, listening, and so, too, surprisingly, were a number of the members of the Guild, who had slipped in quietly over the past hour or so, taking more distant chairs - so that they were all but lost in the moving shadows cast on the wall by the flames of the fire.

Most surprisingly, among those there was Cee. He had not noticed her entering. He had only become gradually aware of her sitting with Onete in a couple of chairs against a far wall.

Since that first moment when he had discovered her, she had moved closer and closer to him, until now she was seated on the floor, almost at his feet. He had not caught her in movement once. She had made each tiny shift toward him at a time when his eyes were briefly off her, inching toward him, until she was where she was now.

He was careful not to look directly at her. But now it was not necessary. She was near enough so that he could examine her face out of the corner of his eyes. There was no more friendliness showing in it than there had been during the hard trek up the mountainside with Artur on the stretcher - but a great deal of wonder and fascination.

He had drifted off into the singing of old English and Scottish ballads, learned long ago out of the collection made by Childe in the nineteenth century.

How much such songs could mean to Cee, he had no way of imagining. The Basic tongue universally spoken nowadays on all the worlds was a descendant of the English language as it had been spoken during the latter part of the Technological Age, of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Its archaic word forms would be a little strange to the young girl, but most of it would still be understandable. Only, what she would make of the medieval Scottish and English accents with which he was pronouncing the words, and with those words which were in dialects now dead and forgotten, he could not guess.

He slid into Sir Walter Scott's Scottish version of The Battle of Otterburn, which was a little less loaded with unfamiliar words...

It fell about the Lammas time,

When the muir-men won their hay,

That the doughty Earl Douglas went

Into England to catch a prey.

He chose the Gordons and the Graemes,

With them the Lindsays, light and gay,

But the Jardines wanna with him ride,

And they rued it to this day.

And he has burnt the dales of Tine

And part of Almonshire,

And three good towers on Roxburgh fells

He has left them all on fire...

This time Hal saw her move. It was a small shift, to only slightly closer to him, but the fact that she had allowed herself to be seen moving was enough to show that she had ceased to care about whether or not he would catch her at it. A new light of interest had come into her eyes. Clearly, this one was to be a song about fighting and destruction. Somehow, by chance - or was it by chance, entirely? - he had picked a ballad that particularly woke her interest.

She was motionless now, watching and listening. He continued to study her upturned features. It was a grim little face, in some ways. Again, he was reminded of the similarity between her protective reaction toward Artur, and his own reaction years before in that moment when, as Donal, he had heard of his uncle James's death. Perhaps his development since was an indication of the development to come in her. It was warming to think so.

He wished that there was some way that he could reach her with words, to tell her that the road she had been forced to follow so far need no longer be the way she must go. That he had followed one like it, himself, and, even though he had accomplished all he had set out to do in that direction, it had not brought him to the end he wanted.

But he knew that, even now, though she might listen to and enjoy his singing, she would probably not listen if he tried to talk to her - she would probably not even stay close to him if he tried talking to her. If he could stay here at the Guild for a long enough time for her to grow into the ways of the Guild members, the day might come when she would listen. But he could not stay here, just for that, just for her, no matter how strongly in this moment he might want to reach her with the truth. There were larger tasks calling him away. But his progress with them might in some way be a pledge for hers, into the new human future.

From covert glances around him, he read puzzlement and some little consternation on the faces of some of the older Guild members there, listening to this story of iron and blood in this place where both by their heritage as Exotics and by their own choosing, they were committed to an attitude of nonviolence.

Just as it was with Cee, it was impossible to explain to them that the proliferating forces of history, conflicting, joining, altering each other's paths, had shown that the human race was not yet free of violence, that the laws, the authorities, the many ways that had tried in the past to end it, had overlooked the stark fact that it was something that must be dealt with inside each individual, herself or himself. And to deal with it, the individual had to understand it.

So he sang on, letting the verses of the ballad recount its version of that dark and bitter encounter between two armies of men, whose only excuse for fighting each other was that they wished to fight, in a place and at a time where neither land, nor anything else but who should win, was at stake.

He sang about how the Earl Douglas, son of the king of Scotland, having ravaged along the border, came at last to Newcastle, the home of Percy, the English Earl of Northumberland. It had been another Percy - called Hotspur - who had been immortalized as a character in one of the plays by Shakespeare.

At Newcastle, the Scottish force had been stopped. For all their numbers, they had had no way to take the fortification that the castle represented. But there was skirmishing just outside it...

...But o how pale his lady looked,

Frae off the castle wall,

When down before the Scottish spear

She saw brave Percy fall...

...And some symbol - a pennon, a sword, something of symbolic value - was taken from the English to be carried back into Scotland as a trophy, something the Percy swore should not happen. So an appointment was made for the two forces to meet at Otterburn, some distance away in the Cheviot hills, where the Scots would wait for the English....

...they lighted high on Otterburn,

Upon the bent so brown

They lighted high on Otterburn,

And threw their pallions down ...

And settled in for the night.

But during the deepest hours of darkness, an alarm was sounded to the young Earl Douglas.

... but up then spake a little page,

Before the break of the dawn.

O waken ye, waken ye, my good lord,

For Percy's hard at hand!

'Ye lie, ye lie, ye loud liar,

Sae loud I hear ye lie!

The Percy hadna men yestereen

To dight my men and me ...

There was a small noise during a second's pause of the guitar's ringing and Hal's voice. The door to the office was opened from the outside as someone came in. But, caught up in recalling the lines of the song, Hal did not look to see who it was. For the next verse was one that had rung, echoed and re-echoed down the years, not only in his own ears but those of many other writers and poets...

... but I have seen a dreary dream,

Beyond the isle of Skye,

I saw a dead man won the fight,

And I think that man was I-

He broke off abruptly, and the vibrations of the guitar strings faded away into the silence of the room. For the person who had entered stood cloaked and tall inside the doorway of the room, a darker black shape against the dimness there, and though he could not see its face, Hal knew who it was.

So also did Amanda, for she got up quickly, turning to face the door. "Forgive me, Guildmaster," said Old Man, slipping around the figure to stand in front of it, "but this visitor says he has come a long way to talk privately with Friend." "Yes," said Amid, and the tone of his voice told Hal that he, too, had recognized the newcomer. "I'm afraid we'll have to end the entertainment for the evening. I'd suggest the rest of you leave now." "No reason for me to interrupt things," said the deep, compelling voice of Bleys Ahrens. "I can wait." "No," said Amid. "If everyone else will please leave?"

"I'll stay," said Amanda. "You might like to stay, too, Amid." "I'd prefer to," said Amid. "I have a responsibility to all that happens here." He looked at Hal. "But I don't want to intrude?"

There was a touch of humor in Bleys' voice as he threw back the hood of his cloak and stood, a head and shoulders above everyone standing around him. "Everyone can stay, as far as I'm concerned."

But the Guild members were already moving out of the open door behind the tall man. Only Cee stayed where she was, ignoring Onete's beckoning. Cee's eyes on Bleys did not hold the implacable gaze she had turned on the Occupation forceleader and on Hal, but they held the steady look of a wild animal ready to attack if it was approached. "Stay, Amid," said Hal, setting the guitar aside. "Come in, Bleys. Sit down." "Thank you."

He came over and settled himself in the chair directly opposite. He threw back the rest of his cloak, revealing himself in dark jacket, trousers and shirt, in every way unremarkable except for the personality with which he somehow invested these clothes. Amid was still at his desk.

Amanda had moved back, into the fire-thrown shadows over by the exit door. Standing there, she was nearly invisible to those nearer the flames. "You can come and sit with us, Amanda ap Morgan," said Bleys. "I'm not here to try to do any harm to Hal. He and I know that it'd make no difference to history if either or both of us died. The historical forces are in motion. We're only the aiming point of each side." "Perhaps. Perhaps not," answered Amanda's voice. "I'll stay here, thanks." "It's all right, Amanda," Hal said with his eyes unmoving on Bleys, "I don't think he'd try to kill me, here - even if he could. "Come now," Bleys smiled, "do you think that if I'd come, seriously intending to do away with you, I'd have come at all unless I was sure I could?" "If you were to try," said Amanda, and her voice had a curious, remote sound, almost an echo to it as if she spoke from a far distance, "you'd never leave this room, yourself, Bleys Ahrens." "It's really all right, Amanda," said Hal, still without taking his eyes off the man opposite. "I'm safe." "Perhaps now, if you say so," said Amanda. "Five seconds from now, who knows? I'll stay here."

Bleys shrugged and concentrated on Hal. "Surprised to see me?" he asked. "No," said Hal. "Clearly, the pictures taken by that flyover were studied after all." "Yes. You didn't really expect to leave the Final Encyclopedia for one of the Younger Worlds without my hearing about it eventually, did you?" said Bleys. "You can't shut off all traffic between the Final Encyclopedia and the surface of Old Earth, and no matter how reliable the people making the trip back and forth, information is going to travel with them. Information leaks, and the leakage reaches me, eventually, since we're always watching you there at Old Earth."

Amid got up from his chair and added a fresh couple of split logs to the fire, which flared up more brightly as the new fuel crashed down among the half-burned wood below it. With the gradual addition of other bodies to the room while Hal had been singing, the temperature had risen in the office, and then, when the door had been opened to let nearly all of them out, cooler air outside had swept in. There was a chill about them, now, and to Hal it felt even as if a breath of coldness had reached out to him from the folds of the cloak Bleys had just flung back.

Hal studied this man, leader of those who called themselves the Others, those who now controlled all that mattered of the Younger Worlds through their powers of persuasion - powers so effective as to seem almost supernatural, and which had set the people of those worlds to the task of conquering Earth.

He had met Bleys in person only at rare intervals in his own life, beginning with the time of the murder of his tutors and his own near capture by Bleys and his gunmen. The last time had been more than three years before, when Hal had first gathered nearly all the people of the Dorsai world, and the wealth and knowledge of the two Exotic ones, safely within the phase-shield Hal had caused the Final Encyclopedia's engineers to set up, enclosing and protecting it, and Earth.

But all those moments of confrontation were etched unforgettably in his memory - and he thought likely in Bleys' as well - for the two of them were oddly alike in many ways, and both had felt those likenesses, as though they might have been close friends if they had not been predestined foes.

So now, he noted the changes in the other man since their last meeting between the two walls of the tunnel opened in the phase-shield to let them meet. For either to have touched the milky whiteness of these walls, then, would have meant being drawn into it and destroyed, the touching body spread out evenly through the physical universe.

The impression of strength and burliness Hal had noticed for the first time then had developed even further in Bleys - even while in appearance Bleys' height and slimness were still the same. He had been almost elegant in that slimness, when Hal had first seen him, at the killing of Hal's tutors. He could not be called "elegant" now.

Instead, a force that was invisible, but very powerful, now radiated from him. It was strong enough that Hal could almost feel it, like the heat from the fire, and it challenged by its mere existence, challenged and attempted to dominate all those about Bleys.

For a long moment Hal was baffled at how such a thing could grow in the man he faced - and then he realized. Each time before that Hal had met Bleys, it had been obvious that the Other possessed great personal power. But the difference now was that he had taken a step further, the ultimate step. He no longer possessed nor controlled power. He was power.

Now most of the people of ten Younger Worlds looked and listened to him as if he was, in some way, superhuman. They did not merely obey his commands willingly. They rushed to follow the voice that would send them to die, if necessary, to destroy a Mother World they now believed had never given up an ancient desire to conquer and enslave them - an Old Earth, backed by the black magic of the Final Encyclopedia and ruled by the evil will of an arch-demon named Hal Mayne.

Hal reached for some compensating power within himself, but did not find it. He was not daunted by the strength now in Bleys, and he did not doubt that his mind, his will and imagination, was as strong as the Other's. But he could not feel a similar counterforce in himself. If it was there at all, it was as something entirely different, for all that he stood as Bleys' opposite number, the equal and countering chess piece on the board of History.

At the same time he was grateful that he had not met with Bleys, robed in power and certainty as he was, a couple of months ago when he, Hal, had been at his lowest ebb in the Final Encyclopedia. Or even, that they had not had this meeting before this morning's sudden explosion of understanding in Hal, the revelation that had come as the sun had risen above the mountains and the dewdrop burst into its explosion of light.

As it was, now he looked at Bleys from the viewpoint of eternity and found that which the other possessed to be infinitely small and transitory in that context. "What brings you?" Hal asked. "You can't really be expecting any change of attitude on my part?" "Perhaps not." Warmth now flowed from Bleys instead of the push of personal power. He could charm, and he knew it, even though everyone in the office at the moment knew that all but a fraction of his abilities in that respect were composed of hypnotic and other techniques developed by those same Exotics Bleys was now trying to destroy. "Perhaps not," he said again, "but I've always believed you'd listen to reason, and I have an offer, one you might want to consider. " "Offer?" "Yes. Let me establish a little background first. One of your tutors, who I most wrongly and mistakenly allowed to be killed - you'll never have forgiven me for that-"

Hal shook his head. "No," he said, "it's not a matter for forgiveness. I can see now why it happened. At the time though, their murder triggered off the way I'd felt about another, earlier death. So I wanted to destroy you, then, as I'd wanted to destroy whoever was responsible, in that earlier time. It wasn't until I had to live through that sort of loss a second time, with you, that I started to understand retaliation's not the answer. No, forgiveness is beside the point, now. Which changes nothing as far as you and I are concerned."

Hal had seen Bleys' eyes narrow ever so slightly at the mention of an earlier grief, and felt a touch of annoyance at possibly having betrayed himself to the Other's acute mind. No one could match Bleys in catching and pursuing an incautious slip. But then the annoyance evaporated. There was no way, even with Bleys' own self-developed equivalent of intuitional logic, that the man opposite him now could trace Hal back to the life of Donal Graeme. "An earlier grief?" echoed Bleys now, softly. "As I say, it's beside the point now," answered Hal. "What about my tutors?" "One was a Dorsai. He must have made sure you learned something about military history, as far back as civilization tells us anything about it?"

Hal nodded. "Did he ever mention a man who lived in the fourteenth century, one of the first military captains, condottiere as the Italians named them, named Sir John Hawkwood-"

Hal jumped internally, though he kept his face calm. What sort of black magic in Bleys had made him bring up that, of all names? Then his thoughts calmed. Their minds of necessity ran on parallel tracks toward a mutual end. It was not as unlikely as it might seem that they should both have considered the same historical character in the same short span of time. It could mean nothing at all that Bleys had happened to mention him now. Moreover it was Bleys' way to go at things obliquely. He would hardly have brought up his main purpose in coming, this quickly. Best to wait and see what was behind the mentioning of that name. "Oh, yes," said Hal. "I'm not surprised," said Bleys. "A sort of medieval Cletus Grahame, wasn't he?" "I suppose you could say that. Why?" Hal said. "There's a story about him - a bit of poisonous gossip, actually, only important really because it could be repeated and believed by some people who didn't know better, even after hundreds of years. I just wondered if you knew it - about two of his soldiers he was supposed to have found quarreling over a nun they had caught-"

"...and he cut her in half, then said something to the effect that now there was part for each of them?" Hal nodded. "Yes, I know that particular bit of false history." "I can't understand it." Bleys' tone was close to musing. "You'd think the sheer physical impossibilities involved would be enough to make anyone see through such a story. I suppose the reader is supposed to imagine that this man Hawkwood neatly divided the victim at the waist with one swipe of his sword, then delivered his single line of dialogue to the two soldiers and walked off, leaving them both stunned and deprived. None of those who repeated the story can have had the least experience with butchering animals for food. I had, as a half-grown boy on Harmony, and I boggle at the idea of hacking through that much flesh and backbone with one swipe of a fourteenth century broadsword. Even if the victim cooperated as much as possible by somehow miraculously keeping in place and on her feet until the operation was complete and the soldiers stood by with open mouths, it's humanly impossible. In real life it could have taken him minutes." "More than a few minutes," said Hal, "given the mild steel of the weapons of that time, and the probable lack of edge left on his sword after whatever fighting they'd all been in. Since it was only with the soldiers drunk and blood mad after taking a city or castle, that even the worst of them would have indulged themselves in such license. But that's the least of such an event happening in real life."

Bleys looked at him amusedly. "The least?" he asked. "Yes," said Hal. The knowledge stored in the Final Encyclopedia was coming back to his mind. "Hawkwood isn't called the first of the modern generals for no reason. He was the most businesslike of the early condottiere. He knew the people he fought against today might be the people he'd be fighting for tomorrow. So he made sure his men never ruffled the sensitivities of local civilians, except under the conditions of outright war. That was one of the reasons for his success, apart from the sensitivities other elements of his life show. He kept a strict discipline over his hired soldiers, and hanged any one of them caught infringing even minor local laws." "But of course," said Bleys, "as you say this must have happened during the sacking and looting of a just conquered city. " "In which case he wouldn't have been present at such an incident at all," said Hal. The memory of being Hawkwood as he walked in the circle had come to life again in his head. "He was a man of the fourteenth century and a combat professional. His actions and letters don't show him as the type of man who'd do anything as ridiculous as what that story has him doing, any more than a present day Dorsai would slaughter or torture prisoners. "

The dry note in Hal's voice had not been enough to hide the emotion underneath. To his annoyance once more with himself, he saw Bleys had been quick to hear it. "Torture and slaughter were involved in that earlier grief of yours, you mentioned?" "No," said Hal.

Torture had had no part in the death of James. But evoked now by Bleys' acute question, the memory of Donal's older brother Mor, dead after torture at the hands of the deranged William of Ceta, had come inevitably back to mind. It was a memory he, Donal, should have foreseen arising out of any discussion with Bleys such as he was having now. He had been too deep in the wood to watch out for all the trees. He would never be able to escape the knowledge that he had been at least partly responsible for Mor's hideous death. "In any case," he interrupted his own thoughts now, "Hawkwood wouldn't have been there in the city at that time under any circumstances." "Perhaps you'll tell me why not." Bleys smiled. "As you know, my own military education is limited." "I wouldn't have thought so," said Hal. "But, if you want me to spell out what might have happened - after months of besieging a city, after inaction and boredom, living for weeks on end in the mud and stinks of their lines, with a shortage of food and drink from a surrounding countryside, scoured clean of supplies so that they were almost as starved as the people in the city, the attitudes of the besiegers became as savage as the attitudes of wild animals toward the besieged. One hour after the city was taken, the rank and file of soldiers conquering it would have been roaring drunk and blood mad, on whatever wine or other drink they had managed to loot." "Yes." Bleys nodded. "That sounds like the human animal I know. What was there to say that their commanders weren't equally drunk and mad among them?" "The fact that when it was all over, in a day or two, those commanders would need to lead these drunken madmen again, as sober and obedient soldiers," said Hal. "But they waited until the drink was gone, the raping and looting was over, and the hangovers had taken charge, before they tried it. Raging wild in the conquered city, any of the troops, even the most loyal and trustworthy, were as likely to turn on their commander as sharks in a feeding frenzy. One of the earliest things a military leader learns, even today, is never give his subordinates an order they might not obey. So the medieval leaders stayed well outside wherever the looting and such was going on after a taking. They couldn't change what was going on in any case-"

He broke off suddenly. "So," he said. His eyes looked directly into Bleys'. "It was a possible sacking of Earth you came to talk to me about." "That's right," answered Bleys. "Don't tell me you haven't thought of that possibility, once - as it's bound to, eventually - the number of ships we can put into an attack is such they can make a simultaneous jump through the shield and smother any resistance, even that of your Dorsai. This, too, is a siege, and the same sort of attitude we've been talking about is developing on my side of the phase wall."

He paused. "I'm willing to do whatever's necessary to put the human race back where it belongs, on Old Earth, for a few thousand years until it's had time to mature properly," he said. "But I don't like blood baths either, so I thought we should talk."

And he smiled at Hal.