It was an obvious joke. Kit snapped his beak angrily at Shona. Then his beak came open again, and his head swiveled to stare at the map. “I think you’ve got it!” he said. “If we arrange to have the dogs and the Cows somewhere central, not at Derkholm, so that we can keep crossing the paths of the tours—”
“Hang on,” said Lydda. “That means us camping out somewhere. I’m going to stay here.”
Kit’s head swiveled at Lydda. “You are not. We need everyone. And if Callette’s going to be flying about planting clues—”
“I’ll commute,” Callette said, entirely disregarding the fact that half the clues were over on the east coast, hundreds of miles away. Everyone except Lydda and Kit looked at the map and wondered how Callette thought she could do it.
Lydda raised her beak at Kit’s swiveled glare. Most unusually, the crest on her head came up too, golden and fierce. “Dad needs a proper nurse,” she said, “not stupid Fran. I’m going to look after him. I want to be a healer, anyway.”
She and Kit glared at one another, and the crest on Kit’s head slowly rose to match Lydda’s, black and spiky and twice the size. Elda gobbled and said timidly, “I want to stay here, too.”
“After the other night,” Shona said, “no one’s going to let you camp out, Elda.”
Blade had gone on staring across the map, ignoring the rest of them. It seemed to him that Kit had not mentioned the one thing that seemed most important. “I know what we need to do most,” he said, “and that’s get those soldiers along to the base camp in Umru’s country, now, before they kill one another or anyone else. Dad’s not going to be well enough to get them there before the first battle anyway. Can’t we do that as well?”
“Oh, gods! More stupid suggestions!” Kit screamed.
“It makes sense, you know, Kit,” Don said, leaning over the map. “We can’t be in sixty-three places at once. But if we take the army and the animals and keep going north from here, we’ll be able to devastate the country and cut across the paths of the tours to do their adventures from wherever we happen to be.”
“That’s right!” said Shona, rather surprised about it.
“Trust Don to find the lazy way,” Kit snarled. But his beak turned toward the map, and his crest slowly lowered as he saw that the idea could actually work. “I’d been wondering what Dad meant to do about the soldiers,” he confessed. “And this could be how he planned to work it.”
“And I promise to fly out to you from here,” Lydda put in, “whenever you really need me.”
“Huh!” said Kit. “I can just see you! Emergency on King Luther’s borders, we send for Lydda, Lydda sets out. We cope with the emergency. Three days later here comes Lydda, smack, plomp, exhausted, useless. Too late, anyway. You’d better start getting some flying practice for once.”
“Leave her alone, can’t you!” said Callette.
Everyone relaxed. The difficulty seemed to be over, and Kit was squabbling normally.
TEN
FIVE DAYS LATER EVERYONE was wishing that the dragon had never been born, or that it had fallen out of the sky on its way to Derkholm, or that there had been some other way to help Derk.
“Like sending a message to Mr. Chesney to say the tours were canceled this year,” Don suggested, irritably ruffling his neck feathers against the rain. “He couldn’t have killed us, after all, and this might.”
Their great straggling procession had only got halfway to the base camp, a whole day behind Kit’s schedule, and they had had every kind of difficulty on the way. Barnabas had set up the camps for the soldiers what he considered a day’s march apart. Blade and Don were still wondering how anyone made men—even men who wanted to—walk that fast. They had been many miles short of the camp the first night anyway, because of setting off late in the morning after Kit’s council, and had to park the horde of soldiers in a bare field near a large village. But the villagers were not helpful. They barricaded themselves into their houses and refused to let Blade have more than one cartload of bread, and they demanded cash for it. Luckily Shona had brought every scrap of money she could find in the house. The villagers took all of it, on the fairly reasonable grounds that the soldiers had trampled over their fields, and claimed that Blade and Shona owed them for the bread. It took all Shona’s bardic powers of persuasion to make them let Blade enter the debt on his machine with buttons.
“And now we simply have to get to the next camp tomorrow,” Shona said as they returned to the field with Nancy Cobber harnessed to the cart.
Kit meanwhile had worked away with what he hoped was the correct magic to keep the soldiers safely confined in the field. Probably, as Kit ruefully admitted the next morning, he was more successful with the sixty or so large campfires he had made to keep the men warm. At any rate, they had to leave the lot still burning merrily when they set off again, and there seemed no reason why the fires would ever go out. But the worst of it was that they had not bothered to count the soldiers the night before. They were doing that all the time now. That first morning it was clear that nearly a quarter of the men were gone. Blade kept guiltily thinking of all the horrible things those missing men were probably doing now, but they had no one to spare to go and look for them. They just had to keep slogging on with the rest of the horrible mob. They had the tour schedule to keep to.
The soldiers were even more horrible than Blade had thought. They were inventively, jeeringly, mutinously, murderously horrible. It was probably only because the drugs took time to wear off that Blade, Shona, and the two griffins got them as far as the next camp on the second day. They did not want to walk. They made this plain on the third day by all willingly leaving the camp and then just sitting down in the mud outside. Some of the soldiers now had quite severe scratches and gashes where Kit and Don had flown at them and pecked them to make them move. Those with the scratches, as far as Blade could see, boasted about them for the next two days. Pecking had not shifted one of them. Kit in his exasperation remembered the campfires and, deciding this was one thing he might be good at, flew down and enveloped the sitting men in an illusion of fire. It looked a bit pale and ghostly, but it got most of the men on their feet. It did not get them moving. “It ain’t real!” they called out, and started to sit down again. It was only when Shona, in sheer fury, turned the carnivorous sheep among them that they moved. They ran, some of them with charming little white sheep attached to their legs or backsides and the rest shouting about monsters.
This was the one time that the sheep had proved in the least useful. For the rest of the time they were almost as much trouble as the soldiers. They ate everything meaty—rabbits, mice, voles, birds—and would not walk while they were eating. They had to be carefully penned up at night or they tried to eat the dogs. In the end Shona drove them along in the same kind of magical reins that Kit and Blade had had to invent for the soldiers.
The reins were long pieces of thread unraveled from Shona’s bardic robes, and they were Shona’s own idea. The magic was mostly Kit’s, though Blade had helped. By that third day Shona hated the soldiers even more than Blade or Don did. They called remarks at Shona all the time. Some of the remarks could have been flattering, but even those were remarks about what Shona was like under her clothes and what ought to be done with her. The other suggestions were horrible. Luckily Shona was riding Beauty, and Beauty still refused to go within more than a hundred yards of the soldiers, so Shona was spared hearing most of the remarks clearly. But she heard enough. On the third evening she made the mistake of trying to practice her violin where the soldiers in the camp could hear her. They instantly put rude words to the music and sang them at her, very badly. The next day their remarks were even lewder.
It was in the dawn of that day that Shona screamed that she was going home unless someone thought of a way to march those men until they were too tired to talk.
“You think of a way,” Don told her irritably. None of them was getting enough sleep. “You’re the bard. You’re supposed to have ideas.”
So Shona thought of the reins, and to everyone’s relief, they worked—or they worked if they were strung across the opening in the camp where the soldiers had no choice but to walk into the reins as they left it, and if Don or Kit flew ahead, dragging.
Even so, that fourth day, the soldiers contrived to set fire to a field of grain, a hillside, and a wood as they passed through. No one knew how.
“Who cares?” said Kit. “They’re supposed to be ravaging the place.”