"It is time we take up our positions," he told his band of dartsmen. "Let us go in hope."
Kiwa-san, Takeko's father, stepped forward to pronounce a benediction upon the little company. "The Enlightened One, speaking at Rajagriha, spake, saying: 'Remember one thing, O beloved disciples, that hatred cannot be silenced by lies but by truth.'"
The irregulars, heads bowed, replied, "Namu Amida Butsu," Glory to the Amida Buddha! Hartford, though his training as an Axenite trooper had left him as untouched by religions as by microbes, joined the prayer, feeling that a degree of celestial interest in their stratagem would not be unwelcome.
The camelopardists vaulted into their saddles, adjusted their legs in the boot-like gambadoes, and slapped the reins to head their giraffu toward the ravine where the endgame would be played. Hartford rode at the head of the band, Takeko beside him. The others were dispersed at wide interval, a precaution against the veeto-platform's swooping over the horizon to surprise them en route. As they left Yamamura, the women and children of the village were leaving from the other side, together with the men too old to go out with the guerrillas. Yamamura was being abandoned until the outcome of battle made itself known.
The canyon that led up the mountain's groin had once been the deep-cut bed of a stream. Collapse of over-beetling rock had formed a vault over the stream, which was consequently underground. Soil had filtered into the rocks, and bamboo had taken root. In result the lower ravine was a green enfilade hardly wider than a hallway, the walls on either side rising squarely from its floor. Well within the pass, set into the left-hand wall as one rode down from Yamamura, was a niche very like the tokonoma or honored alcove of a Kansan home. In this alcove, some fifty feet from the bottom of the pass, was set the great bronze image of Buddha, the Daibutsu of Kansas.
Further down, below the Daibutsu-niche, the canyon became irregular. Along either side, some ten feet from the floor, were ledges marking the fracture planes along which ancient avalanches had calved. It was from these shelves that the Kansans hoped to ambush the men from First Regiment. The narrowness of the ravine, and the overhang of willow trees—these growing in clefts of rock, fingering their roots down to the subterranean stream—were enough, Hartford prayed, to prevent the veeto-platform's pilot from spotting the Kansans lying in wait with their blowguns.
Hartford disposed his troops on the shelves, checking to see that each man had a good field of fire and adequate cover. He glanced at the sun, the Kansan timepiece. It was between six and eight in the evening, he judged, the Hour of the Clock. He pressed his ear to the radio-receiver. Short-range, the safety-suit radio picked up only occasional orders from Axenite officers and non-coms. Twice Hartford caught the name, "Lieutenant Felix." He smiled, feeling mixed emotions. Felix had been his old Platoon Sergeant, and they would face each other in an hour or so as enemies. Very likely the fifty troopers chasing Ito Juro and his fellows toward the canyon included men of the Terrible Third Platoon, his old command. Hartford checked to see his bitcher worked and waited the arrival of the message-blabrigars with fresh news.
XI