Visitors

Chapter 19 Council of War

The time-shifters and their friends gathered beside the stream where the Larfolders assembled to tell tales, to learn to walk, and to make decisions that required speech. Their intention was only to greet each other, as Olivenko returned to them from Odinfold, and Umbo, Loaf, and Leaky from Ramfold.

Inevitably, they gave an account of themselves. Loaf and Leaky had a baby to explain—though of course it was Umbo who did the explaining, because he had rescued Square before removing the future in which he had been born. That tale could not be told without a mention of the Rebel King, and of Captain Toad, the ugly soldier who was leading raids all over Stashiland.

“I don’t know if we should go to war,” said Param, “merely because it seems we’ve already done so.”

“I think we always intended to,” said Rigg. “Why else did we send Olivenko to study military history and strategy? Why else did you need to learn to slice backward as well as forward in time?”

“But now that we’re face to face with it,” said Param, “I don’t know if I have the stomach for it.”

“Maybe that’s why the people I met spoke only of the Rebel King,” said Umbo.

“Even that is significant,” said Olivenko. “Rigg’s the son of King Knosso. Shouldn’t they be calling him ‘the rightful king’?”

“Only after we win,” said Umbo. “Right now, if Haddamander’s soldier came through town and somebody remembered you ever saying ‘the rightful king’ about Rigg Sessamekesh…”

“You’re missing the point,” said Loaf. “‘The Rebel King’ isn’t referring to Rigg. Rigg is obviously Captain Toad, and he isn’t making any claim to the Tent of Light. The Rebel King is the husband of Queen Param.”

“I was afraid of that,” said Umbo.

“Though at some point,” said Rigg, “Param and you really should make it official. The sooner you have an heir, the better.”

“That’s… practical,” said Umbo.

“And really intrusive,” said Param.

“You know you have to go to war,” said Olivenko. “Rigg and Ram Odin decided the Walls aren’t coming down—we all agreed to that, once we heard the things they learned. But we still have to live somewhere. For now, the Larfolders are providing us a ­refuge, mostly because they don’t spend that much time on land. But Larfold has mice all over it.”

“Not to mention mermasks in the water,” said Param. “If we tried to live here, our children or grandchildren would envy the Larfolders their life in the sea, and they’d ask for mermasks and leave the land and become…”

“Become a different kind of human being,” said Rigg. “It wouldn’t be a tragedy, but it’s not wrong for us, as land dwellers, to want our children to build lives on the land.”

“Vadeshfold is empty,” said Loaf.

“But it has wild facemasks in the water,” said Umbo.

“There’s an obvious solution to that,” said Loaf. “Anyone who has a facemask like mine will be immune to the wild facemasks.”

“But not everyone can bear them,” said Leaky. Her tone of voice was emotional, bordering on anger.

“I’m only saying,” said Loaf, “that we shouldn’t think of Vadeshfold as empty.” He touched his facemask, which was still obvious, even though it had gone so far toward converging with a natural human face. “Someday, there may be people who want to live with these as closely as the Larfolders live with their mermasks. Vadeshfold should belong to them.”

“All of this is pointless,” said Param, “if Noxon doesn’t prevent the destruction of Garden.”

“True,” said Loaf. “But only in the sense that nothing we do will last for more than a few years. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t fight to give the people of Ramfold some hope of relief from General Citizen.”

“From Mother, you mean,” said Param.

“We don’t know how much influence your mother still has,” said Olivenko. “She might be as much a prisoner now as ever.”

“Wouldn’t it be nice to imagine that she isn’t guilty of any of King Haddamander’s oppression,” said Rigg.

“We know better,” said Param. “If anything, she’s the one goading him to be more and more cruel.”

“That’s not an unreasonable guess,” said Rigg. “But the ­people Umbo met spoke only of King Haddamander, just as they spoke only of the Rebel King and Captain Toad.”

“Meaning that Mother and I have become unimportant,” said Param.

“Meaning that war is the business of men,” said Olivenko, “as it always has been, even when women fight alongside us.”

“What worries me,” said Loaf, “is that we might move in circles here. Umbo went into the future and learned that there’s a Rebel King, and a Captain Toad who leads raids all over Stashiland. But we still haven’t decided if putting Umbo forward as king is a good idea, or that our war should consist of doing a bunch of raiding. The Sessamids didn’t conquer and unite all of Stashiland—the whole of Ramfold, eventually—by raiding. Raiding is what they did when they were still a tribe of horse-riding nomads from the northwest.”

“It would be easy to take note of the decision we apparently already made, and spare ourselves the trouble of discussing it,” said Ram Odin.

“I’m not quite sure that you are part of the decision,” said Param.

“I forgot that I was speaking to a queen,” said Ram Odin.

“What you forgot,” said Param, “is that you are not part of our company. You tried to kill Rigg. He may have forgiven you, but I don’t trust you or whatever advice you give.”

“He hasn’t forgiven me,” said Ram Odin. “Because he also killed me, and whereas I have no memory of my attempt on his life, he has a very clear memory of—what did you do? Stab me? Break my neck?”

Rigg sighed. “He’s teasing us both,” said Rigg. “And we’d be fools not to listen to his counsel, because he knows far more than we do about Ramfold and all the others.”

“But he also lies, and tells the expendables to lie to us.”

“True,” said Rigg. “So let’s ask another source of information. Olivenko, what would you advise us to do, as our student of military history?”

“I came with two plans,” said Olivenko. “And the guerrilla campaign by Captain Toad was one of them, though the name isn’t one I would have chosen.”

“How is that plan supposed to work, since there’s at least one version of the future in which we chose it?”

“Guerrilla campaigns can’t bring victory by themselves,” said Olivenko. “But if you run it properly, you can win over the ­people while humiliating and terrifying the government. The foolish way to do it is to force the villages to feed your men and assassinate anyone who opposes you, so that all the villagers obey you out of fear—and betray you the first chance they get.”

“That’s why I was surprised to learn we had chosen it,” said Rigg.

“I doubt that you did, because, as I said, it’s foolish. Fools resort to those tactics because they expect the people to support them voluntarily, and when they don’t, the rebels become angry and take vengeance. But you’re not fools. You know that the villagers can’t pay taxes to King Haddamander and to the Rebel King. When they hid their meager supplies from Haddamander’s tax collectors, they weren’t saving it for us and our army.”

“So what is Captain Toad doing in his raids?” asked Rigg. “Considering that if I’m Captain Toad, I’m no soldier.”

“You could be,” said Loaf. “It takes training, but if there’s one thing we have, it’s time enough to do whatever we want.”

“Training would be good,” said Olivenko, “but what I had in mind was a place of refuge and a source of supplies. And here’s where Ram Odin becomes part of whatever we do. In ordinary guerrilla campaigns, the rebels have to hide. Since they’re constantly being betrayed by people who want the reward money, they have to move frequently. They can’t bring their wives and children. They can’t farm or even store up food against the winter.”

“You want a safe refuge on the far side of the Wall,” said Ram Odin.

“Where Ramfold, Vadeshfold, and Larfold come together, the land is fertile and there’s plenty of rain and good streams.”

“Some have facemask spores in them,” said Ram Odin.

“I think you’re perfectly capable of eradicating them from any stream you choose,” said Olivenko. “All I ask is that you pull back the boundary of Vadeshfold and make an enclave that isn’t inside any of the three wallfolds. Then when we recruit fighters for the rebel army, they bring their families. They farm. They hunt. They make weapons. They train. They stockpile food.”

“That could take years,” said Loaf.

“But you can always give yourself years,” said Olivenko. “Don’t make this enclave now. Make it ten years ago. The people we recruit will be the ones who are angry—their number will increase, but we can start small. The first recruits will clear land. They’ll have children. One village will turn into two or three or four.”

“Ten years ago,” said Loaf, “the People’s Revolutionary Council was the government, and the only people who hated them and wanted to rebel were former nobles like General Citizen and Param’s mother.”

“But we won’t recruit people ten years ago,” said Olivenko. “That’s just where we go to build up supplies. You bring the first recruits to the place ten years ago; then you bring later recruits to nine years ago, and eight, with each new increment clearing more land, farming more food, mining more ore, making more ­weapons. Your raids capture food and weapons and you bring them back to whatever time you need them. So the earliest recruits will have ten years in the enclave, but the newest will only arrive when there’s plenty for them to eat, and only with time enough to train them.”

“So we raid today, then bring the supplies to the enclave at the time we need them,” said Umbo.

“Your timeshaping is what sets you apart from other ­rebels, you see,” said Olivenko. “There’s no reason not to use your ­abilities. General Citizen or whatever he’s calling himself—he can hunt for you all he wants, but you’re not only outside the wallfold between raids, you’re also three or five or eight years in the past.”

“It’s going to take some real care not to bring people back to a time before they came to the enclave,” said Umbo. “It won’t do to have them meet themselves. Or to have you or any of us making new copies of ourselves.”

“We’ll keep a calendar,” said Rigg. “We’ll organize each cohort according to their time of recruitment, and make sure we always bring a group home from a raid to some time after they left on that raid.”

“Everything in proper order,” said Olivenko. “And we’ll also schedule the raids on various arsenals and stockpiles for times when they’re not looked for.”

“What would happen,” said Umbo, “if our first raid were the most recent—say, last Thursday—and our next raid was a week before that, and the next was two weeks earlier. So that every raid is the first one and we always have surprise.”

“I don’t know,” said Rigg. “Wouldn’t that make it so they were ready for us on the earlier raids after all?”

“Not if a timeshaper is always with each cohort,” said Umbo. “The successful raid already happened in the timestream of the timeshaper, and it can’t be changed by having the next raid take place earlier. Can it?”

Rigg pressed fingers to his forehead. “Just when I think I’m beginning to understand how this works, there’s some crazy new idea that changes everything.”

“It’s simple enough,” said Param. “Do one raid, and then do the next one earlier, and see if it changes the previous-but-later raid.”

“I’m still not in love with raiding, even if it works,” said Rigg. “I’m not really a killer. I only did it once, and I didn’t like it.”

“But that’s the whole point,” said Olivenko. “If it’s always a surprise, you might be able to arrange every raid so that you don’t have to kill anybody. You can look for a time of minimal wariness. Nobody watching. Everybody drunk or half the garrison out of town. Or it could be a herd of cattle being driven to where the meat will be butchered to feed Haddamander’s army.”

Umbo laughed. “Oh, I think we’re going to love trying to move whole herds of cattle through time.”

“We still have to get them across all this country,” said Loaf. “With all the times we’ve used the flyers, you may not understand yet how very big each wallfold is. If you raid on the opposite side, it can take weeks. And the whole country is settled.”

“It’s settled now,” said Rigg. “But we could move the herds or the soldiers or the families or the weapons far in the past. During the years when the colony was new. Nobody would discover us because we’d slice time a little, just enough to disappear.”

“There’d be a stretch of country where all the grass was gone and cow pies were everywhere,” said Loaf. “You’ve never seen the ground behind a military supply herd.”

“By the time any colonists see it,” said Rigg, “it’ll be nothing but meadows with some very fertile patches.”

“Exactly,” said Olivenko. “By shaping time the way you do, you can avoid all the things that make rebels angry and desperate. You can keep killing to a minimum. But it will happen. Somebody will be a hero and you’ll have to kill him. This is war, and no matter how careful we are, people will die. And not always soldiers who oppose us. Besides, plenty of soldiers will wish they could join us, but they’ll still have to fight us when we show up.”

“I’m trying to imagine this,” said Umbo. “Say we’ve done fifty raids, and the most recent one, as far as Haddamander and the queen are concerned, is really the very first one we did. When we did it, we took the garrison completely by surprise, because they didn’t even know there was a rebellion, because they knew of no previous raids. But now it’s the fiftieth raid, so they had to be aware of it—and yet the actual events can’t be changed, because the timeshaper was there and so the outcome can’t be undone.”

Rigg tried to imagine it. “I wonder if they’ll behave, during the actual raid, exactly as they did when it really happened—with them knowing nothing. But afterward, they’ll remember that they should have been alert against possible raids because there had already been forty-nine. They won’t have any explanation for King Haddamander. ‘I don’t know why the men weren’t on alert, O King-in-the-Tent. I warned them, I posted them, but when the raiders came, nobody was at his post and everybody acted as if there had never been a raid before.’”

“Off with his head,” murmured Param.

“By the fiftieth raid,” said Umbo, “maybe General Citizen will be used to the fact that we always achieve surprise and he’ll stop executing the commanders for their inexplicable lack of preparation.”

“So when our fifth raid turns the first one into the one that Haddamander thinks is fifth, he’ll execute the commanders who let him down. But then when our twentieth raid, much earlier, turns that first one into the twentieth raid, they’ll already know the pattern and that first commander won’t be killed after all.”

“The more raids we do, the more lives we’ll save,” said Param.

“What matters,” said Olivenko, “is that it will be General Citizen who’s executing his own officers and men. He’ll be made to look like a fool, and his soldiers will be frantic with despair, because no matter how much they prepare, they’re always taken by surprise.”

“If the physics of it actually work the way we’re supposing it might,” said Rigg.

“It feels like cheating,” said Leaky.

“It’s war,” said Loaf. “Any time I can find a way to cheat so I win without losing so many of my men, I’ll do it.”

Olivenko smiled at Leaky. “I’ve read a lot of military history, Mistress Leaky.”

“Leaky. No ‘mistress,’” said Leaky.

“The commanders who are called geniuses are the ones who won by maneuver rather than brute force battles. The ones who thought up ways to surprise the enemy and get them to surrender or run away. The ones who ended up with an intact, undamaged army while the other side is captured or dispersed, hopelessly disorganized.”

“So this will save lives on both sides,” said Param.

“It might,” said Olivenko. “And the fact that in the future Umbo visited, they talk about raids all over Stashiland, it suggests that we liked the outcomes enough to keep doing them.”

“This is all good,” said Loaf. “It gets us supplies and demoralizes them, but it doesn’t win the war. In fact, our most experienced raiders will be the ones in the very first raids that Haddamander’s army runs into.”

“This is just a way to build up our strength while we train. To gather supplies, demoralize and confuse the enemy,” said Olivenko. “Remember that those experienced raiders who take part in the raids that Haddamander thinks are the earliest ones don’t come back to the enclave at that earlier time. They always come back after they left. So our soldiers will experience everything in the right order. So at the end of our ten years of raiding and training and building up supplies and weapons, it will have been only a couple of years in Stashiland. That’s when we suddenly show up with a large, well-trained army, only a few weeks after the raid we did first, which they think was most recent.”

“So there’ll still be a battle,” said Param.

“Probably more than one,” said Olivenko, “though we’ll do our best to win a decisive victory the first time. But when you actually commit to battle, you can’t predict the outcome. We might lose. Again and again.”

“But if we lose,” said Umbo, “couldn’t we go back and fight it again, using what we learned?”

“You tell me,” said Olivenko. “I’m not a timeshaper.”

“This is where King Umbo comes in,” said Loaf. “Instead of taking the whole army back in time—which would hardly work, considering that it doesn’t do any good to take the bodies of the dead back in time—instead of that, Umbo, you simply appear to yourself before the battle and tell yourself—the way you always have—what went wrong, so we can take countermeasures and try it again. That will erase the battle we lost so it never happened.”

Param nodded. “So the raids will all happen and be remembered. But when the battles come, we’ll keep repeating each ­battle until we get it right.”

“Unless Umbo is killed,” said Rigg.

“Well, he can’t be,” said Olivenko. “He has to stay in a protected location.”

“If I’m in a protected location, how will I know how the ­battle went?” said Umbo.

“Not a protected location,” said Param. “He and I will be in the midst of everything, but slicing time so that we’re invisible. If we lose, I slice us forward even faster till it’s all done, and then we go to the place where he can warn himself what’s about to go wrong.”

“And then you continue to live in that future where you lost,” said Ram Odin.

“No,” said Loaf. “Maybe a version of her will, but she will definitely be with us when we get Umbo’s warning, and so the real Queen Param Sessamin will always come through in fine shape. Look, I must have been beaten up, arrested, probably killed dozens of times, judging from Umbo’s warnings. But here I am. If there are versions of me living out a very terrible life to the bitter end, I don’t know about it because those versions of reality don’t exist anymore.”

Param laughed cynically. “Is the same thing true of the end of life on Garden? If Noxon succeeds in figuring out why the Destroyers come from Earth, and stops them, does that mean that only one version of the future has a happy ending, but there are still dozens of versions in which everybody dies?”

“I don’t know,” said Loaf, “and I don’t care. Because I’ll be living in the one where Noxon saved the world. Just as I’ll be living in the version of history in which the Rebel King Umbo and the rightful Queen Param Sessamin prevailed over the pretender King Haddamander and the Mad Killer Queen Hagia Sessaminiak.”

“Sessaminiak,” said Param. It was the title of a Sessamid ruler who was rightfully deposed because of crimes or madness. It had happened only a few times, and in each case the Sessaminiak former King- or Queen-in-the-Tent was killed in a gruesome, lingering way.

“We don’t have to treat your mother the way the other Sessaminiaks were treated,” said Olivenko.

“Yes we do,” said Loaf. “Or the people will think she deserved leniency, in which case, why was she deposed? Or they might think that somehow her life was saved and you’ll be facing pretenders for the rest of your lives, and your children after you. There’s a reason for ruthlessness in the business of government and war. But don’t worry, Param. You won’t have to do it yourself.”

“I will stand and watch whatever is done,” said Param. “Or I’m not worthy to be Queen-in-the-Tent.”

“This whole royalty business is the crappiest job I can imagine,” said Umbo.

“The job of captured Rebel King is much worse,” said Loaf. “And the job of Param’s husband might be pretty good.”

To Rigg’s surprise, Param reached out and took Umbo’s hand. Apparently something like real affection had grown between them while he was gone. That was good. But it was also sad. Because so much could still go wrong, and one of them might easily die. The more they loved each other, the harder it would be to bear.

Or maybe not. Maybe it would make everything better, for one to lose the other knowing there was a strong bond of love between them. Rigg had never loved anyone that way. Except his love for Father. It had nearly destroyed him to lose Father. Even though it turned out to be a lie, it was real enough for at least a year, before Vadeshex met them beyond the Wall and told them that Father was only a machine called Ramex.

It’s better to lose someone you love, thought Rigg, than to have no one to lose.

“I think,” said Loaf, “that it’s about time we heard the other plan.”

“What?” asked Umbo.

“Olivenko said he came with two plans. He told this one first because in the future you saw, it seems to be the plan we chose. But there’s another plan.”

“It’s simple enough,” said Olivenko. “We still build the enclave. We still gather soldiers from the time when Haddamander’s oppression does the recruiting for us. We still bring their families with them. We go ten years into the past and build up supplies and an arsenal and we train the soldiers into a superb fighting force. But we give not a breath of a hint of where we are or who we are or what we’re doing. People disappear, but nobody knows where they’ve gone, and there’s not a single raid. Then one day an army appears out of nowhere, and Haddamander is completely unprepared and he’s destroyed in a single shocking battle.”

“Yes!” cried Param. “I choose that one!”

“No you don’t,” said Loaf, “and Olivenko knows why.”

Everyone turned to Olivenko, who shrugged. “I said that we train the soldiers into a superb fighting force. But of course that’s not possible. You can train them to be athletically robust, but if that battle against Haddamander’s soldiers is the first time our men see combat, chances are very good that they’ll break and run at the first sign of blood.”

“But the training,” said Param.

“Training doesn’t prepare you for the man standing in front of you trying to kill you,” said Loaf. “It doesn’t prepare you for the arrows hailing down on you and there’s nowhere to hide but you have to stand your ground or the battle is lost before it begins.”

“So we go back and try again,” said Param.

“That only works if your army is already hardened and experienced. If the only problem was a failure of tactics or strategy, and by changing that, using the same soldiers, you can change the outcome. But if the problem is the soldiers themselves, then the warnings don’t work. They won’t remember the battle they lost. It will still be the first time they face an enemy.”

“But will the raids really prepare them?” asked Rigg.

“Yes,” said Loaf. “I’ve led men in battle. They don’t have to have fought a huge army. They just have to have fought somebody. They have to know what it means to stand their ground, to fight loyally beside their comrades. To depend on each other. And to win.”

“So there will be killing in the raids,” said Rigg.

“There’ll be fighting,” said Loaf. “That’s all we need. Yes, a few will die—with luck, only the enemy. But we’ll train our men not to charge in and slaughter the enemy. We’ll train them to disarm captives and control them. We’ll train them for as bloodless a victory as possible. Out of those defeated, demoralized soldiers, we might find many recruits for our own cause. But yes, if they face soldiers who stand and fight, then our men will have to kill them until the rest of them stop fighting. Or nobody’s standing.” Loaf looked around at the others, as if the fierceness of his gaze would convince them.

Olivenko was nodding. “Loaf has fought in war. I never have. But I’ve read about battles till I nearly went blind, and it’s the simple truth. Training is essential, but it’s not enough. You have to blood your soldiers. Maybe not all of them, but enough to hold the fabric together on the battlefield. Things don’t always go your way, even if you achieve surprise. There has to be a cadre that will stand their ground, someone that the others can rally around. That brave cadre is never composed of green troops. It’s always composed of tough veterans.”

“So the raids are to gather supplies and weapons and demoralize the enemy,” said Param. “But they’re also to turn some of our soldiers into those tough veterans.”

“Then there’s no choice at all,” said Umbo.

“There’s a choice,” said Olivenko. “If we take the second path—a green army that appears out of nowhere—I think we have a good chance of winning. Better than even odds. But Haddamander’s soldiers have experience—even if it’s only terrorizing villagers or beating down pathetic village revolts. They’ll know the sight of blood. And they’ll know the terrible things they’ve done, so they’ll believe that their enemy will have no mercy on them if they lose. There’s a chance they’ll have the cadre of veterans that the rest of the army rallies around. I give them one chance in three of winning.”

“Not good enough,” said Rigg.

“If we have a thousand soldiers who’ve taken part in raids,” said Loaf, “what does that do to our odds in that battle?”

“Less of a surprise,” said Olivenko, “because Haddamander will know that there have been fifty raids. But we’ll still choose the time and place of battle. It’ll still be the first time we came with ten thousand men instead of fifty or a hundred. And we’ll have a core of a thousand veterans. I think our odds are four out of five.”

“Four out of five isn’t that much better than two out of three,” said Param, sounding a little outraged.

“It’s war,” said Olivenko. “Nothing is certain.”

“Besides,” said Loaf, “Olivenko’s making up those numbers anyway.”

Olivenko chuckled. “Yes. I’m putting numbers on my gut feelings. And even though so much depends on what the individual soldiers do, it also depends on how they’re led. On how much they love the Rebel King and the Young Queen. On how much they trust Captain Toad, who led them on all those miraculous raids. On how much Captain Loaf shouted at them and terrified them during training. And on how well we plan the battle itself.”

“Which is where you’ll come into it,” said Rigg.

“I’m a scholar of war now,” said Olivenko. “Not a commander.”

“But the key adviser in our councils of war,” said Rigg.

“None of us can match your knowledge of past wars,” said Umbo. “Just as none of us can match Loaf’s experience in battle.”

“After a few dozen raids,” said Loaf, “you’ll pass me right up. It’s not as if I took part in any great war. I’ve done some bloody fighting, but there were never more than a few hundred on each side. And I never commanded more than a few score of men, and even that was only after the real commander died and I took over in the field. The logistics of a truly massive army—”

“Another reason to learn from raiding,” said Olivenko.

“And something else we’ll have to learn,” said Rigg. “I seem to have been nominated to lead troops in combat, and I don’t know if I can do it. I’m not a fighter. Father raised me to be a diplomat. Or maybe just a bureaucrat.”

Loaf barked out a laugh. “What do you think the commander of an army is? It’s ninety percent bureaucracy—babysitting petulant commanders and dealing with their rivalries, planning where everybody will go and how and when they’ll march to get there, making sure their weapons and their food all arrive where they’re supposed to go. We’ll find men and train them to help you, but then you’ll have to manage them and their ambition and their fear.”

“Do you imagine that you’re encouraging me?” asked Rigg.

“I’m telling you that it’s the job that Ramex trained you for,” said Loaf.

Maybe they were right, thought Rigg. Maybe he would find out he was up to the job. Or maybe he wouldn’t.

Rigg turned to Ram Odin. “You’ve been awfully quiet, Ram Odin.”

Ram Odin nodded gravely. “I didn’t want you to think I pushed you one way or another.”

“Well, now we need to know. What do you think?”

“I’ve spent ten thousand years or so, popping in and out, ­visiting here and there. All the wallfolds. I’ve seen bad governments and good ones. Ugly wars and fairly clean ones, as wars go. I think your plan is as good as any I’ve seen, and I think you won’t just be trading one group of thugs for another. My only new advice is this. Don’t choose the officers who’ll serve under you solely on the basis of their military ability. They can’t be ­idiots, of course, you have to be able to count on them. But when the war is over, your highest commanders are the ones who will know how to go about bringing down a government and setting themselves up at the head of a new one.”

“How do we test them for lack of ambition?” asked Rigg.

“Oh, I’m not suggesting you choose men who won’t try to do that,” said Ram Odin. “I’m suggesting that you choose men who, if they rebel and succeed in killing Param and Umbo and you and starting a new dynasty, they’ll be likely to govern fairly and well.”

“So even if it’s a personal disaster for us,” said Rigg, “it won’t be a disaster for Stashiland.”

“It’s the least you can do for the people, don’t you think?” said Ram Odin.