“I gave orders yesterday for the troops to be ready to move at three hours’ notice, sir. Did you warn the camp, Harilek?” He turned to me.
“Yes; Philos sounded a horn as I came away, and the men were turning out. I told my people to be ready in an hour.”
“Then we can be away within the three hours, sir. Milos’s mounted troops under Stephnos must go first, and find out in which direction the enemy are heading, and then get news back to meet us along the main road. He may meet them anywhere after the sixth mile out.”
By this time the alarm was sounding all round, and outside the courtyard was filling with horses as mounted man after mounted man came clattering in seeking orders from Andros. I have never seen such good methodical staff work outside a modern force. I could almost forgive Andros his plume of mauve-bound eagle feathers as I listened to his quick, incisive orders given in a cool, level tone, and watched messenger after messenger race down the steps, swing into the saddle, and away out of the gates. The man was not only a born soldier—he was that far rarer being, a born staff officer.
I went up to our quarters, and calling Payindah told him to come with me, leaving my kit to follow with a couple of my men. Wrexham and Forsyth were nowhere to be seen. The latter had gone off with Stephnos, who had a job in which his heart delighted—to wit, the command of Milos’s own mounted troops. Firoz said that Wrexham had ridden off early with one of Kyrlos’s officers who ran the engineers. John took a keen interest in their weird contraptions, portable catapults, and endless mediæval contrivances for siege-work, more particularly in the quaint battering-ram, a huge iron-shod tree—the trunk of a full-grown pine, I think, it was—that took twenty men to swing it. Despite his early training and his civil avocation, Wrexham is at heart a soldier, and nothing pleased him more than pottering round and comparing notes with the old scarred man who filled the post of what one might call “Master of the Ordnance” to Kyrlos’s army.
When I got back to the hall, Payindah with the rifles following, Andros hailed me.
“You say you told your people to be ready to move in an hour, Harilek?”
“I did, Andros. Do you want us to go ahead?”
“You muster nearly four hundred, do you not?” He was a wonder at remembering figures.
“Yes.”