An Empire Unacquainted With Defeat Read Free Page B

burdens. He observed the abbreviated Battlefield Ritual rather than the hour of meditation and exercise he pursued under peaceful circumstances. Later he would do it right.
    He started for the door.
    His neck tingled. He stopped, turned slowly, reached out with an Aspirant's senses.
    A man wearing a horned helmet was watching the stead from the grove surrounding the Klecklas' spring. He didn't see Tain.
    Tain considered, shrugged. It wasn't his problem. He would tell Toma when they were alone. Let the Freeman decide what ought to be done.
     
V
    The sun was a diameter above the horizon.
    Tain released the mule and roan to pasture. He glanced round at the verdant hills. "Beautiful country," he murmured, and wondered what the rest of his journey would bring. He ambled a ways toward the house. Rula was starting breakfast.
    These people rose late and started slowly. Already he had performed his Morning Ritual, seen to his travel gear and personal ablutions, and had examined the tracks round the spring. Then he had joined Toma when his host had come to check the sheep.
    Toma had first shown relief, then increased concern. He remained steadfastly close-mouthed.
    Tain restrained his curiosity. Soldiers learned not to ask questions. "Good morning, Steban."
    The boy stood in the door of the sod house, rubbing sleep from his eyes. "Morning, Tain. Ma's cooking oats."
    "Oh?"
    "A treat," Toma explained. "We get a little honeycomb with it."
    "Ah. You keep bees?" He hadn't seen any hives. "I had a friend who kept bees . . . ." He dropped it, preferring not to remember. Kai Ling had been like a brother. They had been Aspirants together. But Ling hadn't been able to believe he hadn't the talent to become Tervola. He was still trying to scale an unscalable height.
    "Wild honey," Toma said. "The hill people gather it and trade it to us for workable iron."
    "I see." Tain regarded the Kleckla home for the second time that morning. He wasn't impressed. It was a sod structure with an interior just four paces by six. Its construction matched the barn's. Tain had gotten better workmanship out of legion probationers during their first field exercises.
    A second, permanent home was under construction nearby. A more ambitious project, every timber proclaimed it a dream house. Last night, after supper, Toma had grown starry-eyed and loquacious while discussing it. It was symbolic of the Grail he had pursued into the Zemstvi.
    Its construction was as unskilled as that of the barn.
    Rula's eyes had tightened with silent pain while her husband penetrated ever more deeply the shifting paths of his dreams.
    Toma had been an accountant for the Perchev syndicate in Iwa Skolovda, a tormented, dreamless man using numbers to describe the movements of furs, wool, wheat, and metal billets. His days had been long and tedious. During summer, when the barges and caravans moved, he had been permitted no holidays.
    That had been before he had been stricken by the cunning infection, the wild hope, the pale dream of the Zemstvi, here expressed rudely, yet in a way that said that a man had tried.
    Rula's face said that the old life had been emotional hell, but their apartment had remained warm and the roof hadn't leaked. Life had been predictable and secure.
    There were philosophies at war in the Kleckla home, though hers lay mute before the other's traditional right. Accusing in silence.
    Toma was Rula's husband. She had had to come to the Zemstvi as the bondservant of his dreams. Or nightmares.
    The magic of numbers had shattered the locks on the doors of Toma's soul. It had let the dream light come creeping in. Freedom , the intellectual chimera pursued by more of his neighbors, meant nothing to Kleckla. His neighbors had chosen the hazards of colonizing Shara because of the certainties of Crown protection.
    Toma, though, burned with the absolute conviction of a balanced equation. Numbers proved it impossible for a sheep-herding, wool-producing community not to