IF WE LIVE

Part Two: The Banners Said Forever

They crossed into Valen. The border was unmarked, but up ahead they saw humped rows of mountains. The craggy Hightops were a cloudy presence in the air above lesser ranges, a denser blue on the blue of the sky. “The mountains cut the country into three parts,” Kel said. “This part here is called Stada. It’s mostly just a thin strip in between the Green Mountains and the ocean. West of the Greens is the Vale itself, a great, wide valley that runs all the way to the northern sea. Then you’ve got the Blues on the west side of the Vale, and on the other side of them is Hallen. It’s a bunch of valleys between the Blues and the Hightops; and another bunch just over the Hightops called the Westfall, that’s sort of tacked onto Hallen.”

 The road took them across the river Val and up to a looming knot of mountains. But no pass or saddle appeared. Plott asked Kel where the road went. And how did the river get through the mountains? “Through Adzeseye,” Kel said. “And the road goes along side of it. You know what an adze’s eye is? Like the hole in a hammerhead. Which is a real good name for the place – it’s really something.”

They came to the village of Inow. It clustered around a fort which blocked a narrow cleft in the mountains. The cleft was Adzeseye gorge, and the fort was a toll gate. Functionaries officiously inspected Kel’s party and consulted an elaborate schedule of rates for adults on foot, children, horses, unloaded wagons, wagons with short and long beds, and wagons loaded with various kinds of goods. “The abiding sign of a civilized people,” Peterson said. “They have bureaucrats.”

They paid their toll and went into Adzeseye. The road wound along the river’s eastern flank. It climbed over shoulders of rock, leaped chasms on arched bridges, and passed under overhanging cornices. It was revetted and shored with immense stones, and it had to be. The river was fighting the road; the river was fighting everything in Adzeseye. It thrashed and boomed in its rocky bed. It filled the air with mist and flying droplets. Everything in the gorge, including the travelers, was covered with dripping water. But Kel said they ought to see it in the spring. “It’s lowish now. When it’s high with run-off from the mountains, it’s what hell would be like, if hell turns out to be a river. It comes right up to the road, and sometimes over; and it’s so loud you can’t hardly hear a thing for a day after you get out.”

They went through the village of Passot, a mirror-twin of Inow, and saw the valley beyond them. “The golden Vale,” Kel said. The valley stretched away to the blue distance. It was a rolling trough filled with the dusty green gold of ripening wheat. To the west, a large lake reflected the snow tipped peaks of the Hightops. Kel said the lake was called Hallenwater. “The mountain straight across from it is Daybreaker. It’s so high that the sun shines on the top of it before it clears the Greens; but Daybreaker’s just a baby compared to Big Mama, the highest Hightop of all. She’s away behind those clouds to the southwest, in the part they call the Knot.”

They reached the town of Hallenwater, which stood on the northwest shore of its lake. Kel took them to a house set in the foothills of the Blues.  It was a rambling place with sections built of stone, brick, and timber: the comfortably muddled product of generations of living.

Kel beat on a door. “Hey, Sissy! Your best brother’s here.”

An elderly woman looked out from an upstairs window. “Sweet life,” she muttered. She shouted to someone inside. “Sissy! Your devil of a brother’s come back again. This time he’s got a whole army with him.”

Kel’s sister was a handsome woman with a serene manner. Her husband Larens was very tall and thin. He had a keen, honed look, like a much-sharpened knife.

A confusion of introductions was made. Sissy invited them in for supper. Kel started telling her about his adventures and explaining who the spacers were. A tall, thin person darted past the dining room. “Come here, Laury,” Sissy said, “We’ve got company. And you’re late again.”

 Laury wore a man’s coat and pants. They hung loosely on her long, lean body. She obeyed Sissy with a reflexive sulkiness. Then she saw Kel. She grinned and leaped on him with a whoop of delight. Kel hugged her ferociously. He pretended to try to lift her off her feet, straining as if she weighed tons. “Well, maybe you ain’t so little anymore. Sure you ain’t got a bunch of bricks in your pockets?”

Kel did the introductions again, “And this is Davy Richard. ” Laury looked up at him. Surprise and interest showed on her expressive face. Her gray eyes looked directly into his. She quickly assumed a vastly indifferent casualness.

“You noticed, did you?” Kel said. “Yes, he is taller than you. A whole hand taller.”                    

 Laury kicked Kel’s ankle and said she couldn’t care less. What difference did it make? Kel returned to his story of their adventures. Laury glanced frequently at Richard. Before they went to bed that night, Kel told Richard that Laury was his favorite relative. Some might say she was a little wild, and she did have a warmish temper — like that time she tried to horsewhip the High Judge. But she hadn’t known who he was. She was really a wonderful girl.

The next morning Richard went outside. He sat on a bench and looked up at the Hightops. Laury approached him. “Say. Would you like to go for a ride? To sort of see the country? We’ve got a neat little trap. It’s really fun to ride.”

Richard looked at her. Laury was about twenty. Her red-blonde hair was drawn back in a long pony-tail. Richard nodded. “Sure.”

 The trap was a light two-wheeled cart. It was made of thin, carefully fitted pieces of wood and suspended on metal bow-springs. It looked disturbingly fragile. “Don’t worry, ” Laury said. “It’ll hold us. Mama’s two oldest brothers raced in it last time they were down, and they’re both nearly as big as Kel is. Course, they did break a wheel.”

Laury was full of nervous energy. She harnessed a horse and told Richard about the trap-racing she had done. She said Halleners preferred harness races to that lowland horseback kind. Her long, narrow hands were constantly busy, and her step was more a jump than a stride. It was easy to see why she was thin.

 Richard sat carefully on the trap’s seat. Laury sprang aboard. She clicked to the horse. They rode among farms and woodlots. Laury waved to passersby and talked constantly. She said that her father Larens was Judge Laughlin, the chief magistrate of Hallen. “That’s how come to know all these people. Just about every day somebody’s coming up to see daddy and telling him about how somebody else’s trying to steal their land. Or sneaking animals onto their fields to eat up their grass. Or cheating them in some sort of way. Halleners’re real keen about getting everything they figure is rightly theirs. “

Laury drove up to an overlook on the edge of the Blues. She pointed out places of interest. “See that sort of notch in the mountains? That’s the Highgap, the way to the Westfall. There’s other gaps, but they’re up in Avenshan, the northern part. That’s where us Malins come from.” She pointed up the valley. The land there lay under a gray tent of clouds.

“They say we’ve been in Avenshan forever. Kel says it only felt that long. He says the finest sight in Avenshan is the road out.”

Richard smiled a little. He looked out at the mountains. Laury gave him an irritated glance. “Well, I guess we’d better be getting back.  I got a lot of work to do. You want to help out? “

 Richard shrugged. “If you like. I guess I could use something to do. “

 “Well, you’ll get plenty.” Laury drove back to the farm. “We’re really pretty hard pressed. We breed horses on our place; hay’s our only real crop, and we already got that in. But we still need to put it up, bring in corn, fix everything up for winter, and help my sisters get their corn in. Lots to do.”

Everyone rushed to get the harvest in. Richard rose before the morning alpenglow touched the tip of Daybreaker. He worked past sunset. He saw the stepped rows of harvesters scythe lanes of crisp, neat stubble in the golden fields. He lugged bales of hay, sacks of grain, and did other heavy work. He stood aside and watched the Halleners celebrate the harvest with dances, parties, and athletic contests. He said little.

But Laury kept talking at him. She filled the brooding voids left by his silences with gossip about the intricate love-lives of the Malins and their horde of friends and relatives. She spoke of her own lovers with unselfconscious frankness. Her voice rose when she recalled their arguments; her movements were filled with angry energy. Her eyes glistened with tears when she got to the unhappy ending. All her love stories had endings. “Which is the unhappy part for me. I guess I fall in love pretty easy, but it seems like I just can’t learn to climb back out of it.”

Richard nodded. He gathered up the firewood he had been splitting. Laury sighed. “Leave that for a while. I want to show you something. “

They got their horses and rode up to the high pastures. Where the sheep used to graze, Laury said; they didn’t really need it for the horses, but mama just couldn’t bring herself to sell land… “And it’s really something on a day like this. When you get a sunny day after a hard rain, and then the air cools – well, there it is. Ain’t it fine?” They rode into the pasture. Richard saw a low ground-fog forming. The wet earth was still warm from the day’s sun. It exhaled a mist into the cool, quiet air. The fog collected in the field’s hollows, forming bluish, insubstantial lenses and shadow-pools. Laury and Richard dismounted. They could see the Hightops over the ponds of mist. Their peaks were wreathed in clouds, but the sky above them was lighted by the sunset. It darkened overhead.

Laury sat with her chin on her knees. “I guess you really loved that Miry. “

Richard nodded.

Laury unfolded herself. “The reason I said it is because they want me and you to get together. ” Richard looked at her. Laury nodded. “Sure. Don’t you see it? Kel keeps telling me how low poor old Richard is. Talk to him, he says; so he won’t feel so lonely. He’s got some tricky political thing in his head. Something to do with you and your friends. But you’re foreigners – the strangest sort of foreigners – so wouldn’t it be neat if you took up with the Judge of Hallen’s daughter. Sort of fit you in. And, well, they’re all getting worried about me. About me and my fellows. Mama and daddy’re scared I’m going to get knocked up by some useless little shit or try to marry a bone-headed cocksman. And as they’re pushing me at you anyways. . . “

 “You thought you might as well give me a try.”

  “Yeah. I guess I’m saying — hell, I don’t know what I’m saying. Maybe that I’ll leave you alone if you want me to. I’m always thinking I’m in love, but I guess I never loved anybody like that. It must be terrible.”

Richard stared into the mist-pools. “I told her I loved her, but I’ve said that many times. It seemed a simple way to please women. But she meant it. And I feel so strange about it. Guilty or something. Maybe because I didn’t know that I might have meant it too until after she was dead. But it made her happy. And God knows she needed it.” He told her about Miry’s tortured love for Morik.

Laury wiped tears from her eyes. “That’s awful.”

Richard was disturbed. “Don’t. Please don’t cry. I don’t want it like that.”

 “I can’t help it,” Laury said. “I’ve never been able to be all cool and level, and that’s about the worst thing I’ve ever heard.”

Richard hugged her with sudden, nervous intensity. Laury gasped at the strength of his grip, but she allowed him to pull her against his chest. Richard held her as if he were comforting her. But his head slipped to her shoulder. He sighed, half-lifted her, and pressed his head against her breast. Laury leaned back and put her arms around him.

“That’s done it,” she said. She pulled open the top of her coat.

Richard lifted his head. “I’m sorry,” he muttered. “I didn’t mean to grab you like that.”

“Well, I meant you to. You’re a big man, you ain’t ugly, and you felt it so strong — maybe you could feel something like that for me. Nobody ever has, though they’d say so, just like you did. I guess they thought I was just an easy lay. But I’ve got a feeling that whatever it turns out like with you and me won’t be easy.”

“Yes,” Richard said. “I have the same feeling.” He put his hand in her coat and kissed her neck.

She shivered with pleasure. “I know a place we can go.”

She took him to a shepherd’s hut. Dry straw and kindling lay ready in a small fireplace. Richard put his coat on a bed frame laced with thongs. He watched Laury spark the straw alight. She gave him an approving inspection. “You sure are big. How tall’re you?”

 Richard translated his one hundred and ninety three centimeters into local units. “About nineteen hands.”

“I’m eighteen hands, and I have been ever since I was fifteen.”

Richard nodded. “And it bothered you.”

 “You’re damn right it did. Taller than all the boys, flat-chested, even skinnier than I am now… Course, I got over it.”

“You sure did.” Richard kissed her. They struggled with their layers of clothing. Richard got Laury out of her coat, a smock, a sweater, and opened her blouse. He eased her trousers down. Laury shrugged out of her blouse.

“You’re beautiful,” Richard said. He sounded a little surprised. Laury had a lean, lithe figure. The bones and flat muscles of her slender chest showed beneath the tight skin. She had small breasts with pink nipples. She stood firmly on broad hips and long, smoothly muscled legs. Her handsome face was enlivened by large eyes and a mobile, expressive mouth. Her pale skin was dusted with freckles.

“What legs you’ve got,” Richard said. “You have the longest, slimmest calves I ‘ve ever seen.”

“Let’s forget about slim,” Laury said. “Long I got used to, but I’m still wishing I was a little rounder.”

“You’re round where it counts.” Richard untied the drawstring at the waist of her underpants. They pulled one another down to the bed. Laury urged him on her with her long arms and legs. The leather thongs creaked under them, but neither heard.

Richard lay against her and looked into the cloud-gray of her eyes. She slipped a slender arm around his neck. “You sure know how, ” she whispered. “About the slickest touch I ever come across.”

Richard smiled, “You’re pretty hot stuff yourself.”

 “Hey, that’s a real smile, not just to show you heard what I said. Am I helping You any?”

 “Yes,” Richard said. “And I want you to help me some more.”

“So do I,” Laury said. “Lots more. But not up here – it’s getting too cold. Let’s go back to the house.” They got up and dressed. “You know which my room is? Just in case you might want to come by. . . “

“No,” Richard said. “Why don’t you take me there? Just so I’ll know where it is.”

 “I was hoping you’d say that.” They got their horses and rode down the mountain. “Be a little strange: I’ve never had a man in my own bed. Always before I’d sneak out to places like that hut, the hayloft, and such.”

“Hay makes me sneeze,” Richard said.

Laury laughed. “Well, we wouldn’t want that. Not when things were getting good. We’ll stay out of haylofts.”

In the fall Peterson and Ema set up a crude laboratory in one of the Malins’ outbuildings. Plott was working with smelters and smiths. The three spacers were planning an industrial revolution. Hallenwater, Plott said, was a kind of cottage-shop steel town. The innumerable streams running down from the mountains powered mills, bellows, and trip hammers all over the province. The smiths knew how to make a good carbon steel, but they used traditional, small-scale methods. Plott aimed to show the ironworkers how to mass produce steel. Ema and Peterson were working on the necessary chemical techniques.

Kel was intensely interested in the spacers’ experiments. He loomed over Plott’s shoulder to squint at white-hot steel, gagged on the chemical stenches produced in Peterson and Ema’s laboratory, and asked a hundred questions. He wanted to know when the spacers would make guns.

“I don’t know,” Richard said. “But I doubt that it’ll be any time soon. We don’t have the money to make something like that, “

“That ain’t going to do. Morik’ll know you could make guns – and he ain’t going to just sit back and let any other country get things like that. I believe the little bastard always meant to try to take Valen, and any chance that we could get guns’ll make him come all the sooner. We got to have something to stop him. “

Richard nagged Plott into making some gunpowder. He packed it into a grenade loaded with bits of scrap. The grenade impressed Kel: the barrel they put it in was blown to fragments. Kel imagined swarms of grenades being thrown at charging Stableners with catapults.

But Peterson didn’t want to make gunpowder. ” It’s a cranky, inefficient explosive, a crude, messy propellant, and it’s too much trouble to make. What we need is nitric acid. With it we can make true nitro explosives.”

He recited an explosive litany. “Nitrocellulose and nitroglycerine for cordite, ballistite, and gelignite; TNT and all the other tri-nitros from coal tars; even things like DINA and RDX.”

“Wonderful,” Richard said. “A bright new day is dawning in Hallen.”

Peterson was annoyed. “You’re the one who wants the damned stuff. I’d much rather spend my time working on my textbooks.”

 “Sorry,” Richard said. “I know you would. But I’m afraid we’re going to need the explosives. How do we make them?”

“They have saltpeter,” Peterson said. “That’s how we made the gunpowder.”

“Some of the iron ores they use are pyrites,” Plott said. “You can smell the sulfur in them. Cook them, run the fumes through water: sulfuric acid. Combine with nitrates: nitric acid.”

“Good thing you remembered all this chemistry,” Richard said.

“We didn’t,” Peterson said. “Ema did.”

Plott nodded. “She will have her vengeance.”

The grenade piqued Sissy’s interest in the experiments the spacers were conducting in her outbuildings. The use of buildings, she said, entitled the Malins to part ownership in the Spacers’ enterprises. After intense bargaining, she got a tenth share and bought an additional fifteen percent.

Plott hoped to use Sissy’s money in his steel-making projects. But Kel told Ryker to push to make explosives. “We’re going to have to fight. And we’re likely to lose. I been talking to people, trying to warn them, and most won’t do anything. He sighed. “It’s hell to get people to do anything different from what they’ve always done.”

“At least we’ll get the explosives.”

“Yeah, but that’s about all.” Kel looked up at the sky. “The snow’s coming. We’ll have to wait till spring to do anything more. “

The snow came. It deeply covered fields and pastures, forcing stock raisers to provide their animals with feed. The big draft horses the Malins bred loomed over the short winter days; they seemed always to be standing expectantly by their feed troughs. Every mouthful the Malins shoveled into their barrel-sized bellies had to be dug out of silage pits, lifted down from the hayloft, and carried from grain bins; every drop of water they drank had to be pulled up from a deep well, and brought in bucket by bucket; and all the manure they produced had to be mucked out. “Summer, fall, and spring, I love horses,” Laury said. “But winter makes me hate their wet, snuffling noses and great, chomping jaws.”

Richard helped Laury with her chores. In the evenings they joined the others in the big room which served the Malins as kitchen, dining room, and parlor. Sissy and her women friends did business there, intently bargaining over land, livestock, and feed grains. Larens and his cronies talked politics. Kel regaled every possible listener with tales of warlike Hastableners and the vicious ambitions of Morik Ayvens.

Laury leaned against Richard. “Believe I’ll go on to bed,” she whispered. “I’ve heard enough of Kel’s Stablener stories.”

Richard waited for a discreet moment. Then he followed Laury up to her bedroom. It was a narrow, unheated cubby. Their breaths puffed out in thick clouds. White frost grew on metal surfaces. They hurriedly removed their outer clothes and got under the blankets. Laury hooked a long leg over Richard’s hip. “In Hallen, we say that winter is the lovers’ season.”

“I can believe it,” Richard said. “It’s the only way to get warm. “

 “Not the only way,” Laury said. “But it sure is the best.”

In the mornings Richard worked with the other spacers. They stuffed ceramic pots with explosive and bits of metal. Laury and Sissy organized local potters to make the ceramic casings for the grenades. Richard got Plott to design launchers.

“We need money,” he told Kel. “We can’t make this stuff to scale without some kind of government contract.”

 Kel sighed. “You mean the state? You’ve heard me and Larens talking? You know the Lands own the state?”

Richard nodded. He had learned that Valen was ruled by the wealthy families of the Land party. Larens belonged to an opposition group called the River party, and he often railed against the corrupt, arrogant Lands. “But why wouldn’t the Lands back us? If they own the state, they have the most to lose. “

“Maybe they would, if they believed us. But I can’t even get Larens to see that Morik means trouble. They’re going to have to see the pointy end of the stick.”

Richard was baffled. “How’s that going to happen?”

“Morik’s going to do it for us. I just hope it’s plain enough for even those Land fools to see it.”

The winter was ending, and the first travelers to cross the Hightops came to tell Judge Laughlin that Hastableners were nosing around the western borders. The riders had worked their way through the forest countries, a federation of cantons lying between Valen and Hastablen. The Westfallers were alarmed, and they wanted Larens to do something. Keep them bastards away from us. Larens and Kel went to Val City to talk to the High Judge.

They came back frustrated. “The bastard’s moving into Willen too,” Kel said. “But you know what those Land assholes said? Maybe he’s just taking a hold on Willen. He’s going to get a grip on them, instead of letting them do what they want like the Lastab keptas. Seems the cunning devil sent them a letter saying that was all he was doing, and writ in his very own hand, which they thought was really something. A Hastablener that can write! They say trying to push him out of Willen’d start a war we ain’t ready to fight.”

 “What about the west?” Richard asked. “Aren’t they going to do anything about that?”

“Not if they can help it. But they know they can’t stop me and Larens from rousing a bunch of fighting men, so they made us a deal. We got to have money, and the only place to get that kind of coin’s from the road tolls, which Larens ain’t supposed to fool with. They said he could use the toll money if we didn’t really call out men; just got them here and there, scattered so it won’t look like a real army. The fools hope that’ll make Morik think it’s just wild young fellows going over to look for a fight. “

 “That’s not so bad,” Richard said. “It’s really all we can manage. We don’t have time to supply and train a real army.”

 “The time narrows us down,” Kel agreed. “Even more than you’re thinking. All Morik wants in the forests is a clear road to the Westfall, and he ain’t going to have to fight a big war to get that. Some of those foresters’ll deal, and the rest might not last more than four-five weeks; so we got to get in there just after the fighting starts and make it a real tangle.”

 “All right,” Richard said. “What do you want me to do?”

“You make the weapons and teach people to use them. I’ll get the fighting men. “

Richard used a detachment of Valen Guards as a training cadre. They were professional soldiers, men long accustomed to doing things by the numbers, and they soon learned to handle the grenades. They practiced with the light launchers and long-range catapults Plott made for them. They were fascinated by the grenades, but many of the veterans doubted their effectiveness. The Hastableners, they said, attacked in massed, bolting charges. Their hot-blooded horses could begin their gallops at distances well beyond the range of the catapults. They were so swift that their riders might pass through grenade barrages without significant losses.

Richard took the soldiers’ advice and faced his grenadier platoons with men equipped with armor, pikes, and swords. But Kel and other Hastab hands said that the enemy riders might attack the pikemen with a close-in volley of arrows, javelins and throwing axes. Richard and Plott decided that they needed a short-range weapon.

 The problem led them to invent the shotgun. Plott and the smiths turned out short, welded up tubes reinforced with steel bands. The weapons were large-bore muzzle-loaders. Their heavy loads of shot were packed in nitrated paper cartridges with the powder and priming. The guns were clumsy, crude, and dangerous, but they were ferocious short-range weapons. They tore stout planks to splinters.

The Halleners loved the shotguns. “I can see how the grenades’re going to work,” Kel said. He hefted his shotgun. “But I can feel how these things’re going to work. This is just the sort of thing we’ve been needing. Though it’d be better if they’d shoot at things further away. “

“A lot of things could be better about them,” Richard said. “I’ll be happy if they don’t blow our arms off.”

Richard trained a shotgun cavalry to get the best use out of the new weapon. The troopers would make sudden, darting charges at the enemy, fire their horrible weapons at close range, then wheel back to the shelter of a covering force of conventional cavalry. On the defense they dismounted and stood among the armored foot soldiers coating Richard’s grenadier squads.

 Kel was impressed by Richard’s tactical arrangements. “Looks good,” he said. They watched squads and troops miming their tasks. “And it better be. Tomorrow, you start for the Westfall. The Hastableners’ve got themselves into some kind of fight in the south forests, and we want to get over there quick. Figure out all the grenades and stuff you need and talk to the marshal about moving it. I’ll gather the troops.”

Richard went to see the marshal. He was Tov Korvey, Hallen’s police commissioner, bailiff of Laren’s court, and commander of the province’s militia. The marshal was nearly ninety, almost blind, and so spare that he looked as if he would have trouble standing; and he did carry a cane, but it was a rod of iron a fingers width thick. He waved Richard to a chair with the massive instrument. “That you, Kel?”

Richard identified himself . “Sorry, boy. I tell what I’m looking at mostly by shape nowadays. And you and Kel’re just the same shape. What can I do for you?”

 “I need supplies and wagons for the trip to the Westfall. I also need a steady wagon train to keep grenades and ammo flowing over the mountains.”

“I already got the food, horses, and wagons for the march, and I got other wagons to start making a dump in the Westfall; but I don’t know how many it’ll take to keep it filled up. I ain’t used to a kind of weapon that gets used up in fighting.” The marshal didn’t really approve of the new-fangled weapons.  Swords and lances were good enough for him. But he raised his voice to a shout. “Laury! Come in here, darlin’. We need to do some figuring.”

 Laury appeared. She acted as the marshal ‘s messenger and secretary. The job gave her an excuse to ride pell-mell all over Hallen.

They settled down to several hours of staff work. How many grenades and shotgun cartridges Richard’s men would use in a week. How many pack horses and mules it would take to move the supplies over the rough and wandering roads of the forest countries. How much a week’s supplies weighed, how much space they would take up, how many wagons would be needed to move the supplies, how many animals to pull the wagons, and how much feed they would need.

The old marshal’s mind and memory were keen. He knew every fighting man in Hallen, and he was almost as familiar with the wagons, draft horses, and teamsters. “Don’t bother yourself about it when you get there,” he said. “You just tend to the fighting, and I’ll get you everything that can be got.”

Richard finished his work and went out. Laury caught up with him. “I’m going with the marshal when he moves to the Westfall.”

Richard took in the flat determination of her tone. “I hope you’re not planning to deliver messages. Everything I’ve heard about the forest countries makes it sound as if it’s going to be a messy, confused sort of war. It won’t be safe anywhere.”

“I can take care of myself,” Laury said. “I’m one of the fastest riders in the country. And you won’t be safe either. “

“No. I won’t be safe; even though I’ll have a thousand armed men around me. The kind of dispatch riding you’re talking about is a very different thing. ” He looked at Laury. She was stubborn, but a little uncertain. “I know I can’t stop you, but I’d like to ask you not to – for my own selfish sale. Please, cher. “

“Well,” Laury said. “If you’re going to put it like that…. I guess the marshal’ll need somebody to read the messages and write what he wants done.”

“Right. Though he might choose somebody who can see better than he can.” Laury was very nearsighted.

“I see fine when I get close. Like this. ” She stood on tip-toe and pressed herself against him, giving him a direct, gray-eyed stare. “I heard Kel telling his soldiers that there’s lots of friendly, fine-looking women in the forests. So I thought I’d better make sure you didn’t run off with one of them. You know how I’m going to do that?”

 “Yes,” Richard said. “But you go ahead and tell me.”

  “I’m going to give you all you can handle. And when you done all you think you can do, I’ll suck your cock till you got to have some more. I’m giving you fair warning, big man: I’m planning to eat you up.”