“Yes, so Alec promised. But what brings you back, John, and what’s the news?”
“Fine. We chivied the Shamans right back to their city after a week’s running fight through their hills. Filthiest tangle of knife-edges and precipitous gorges you ever saw. We took a minor knock or two, but on the whole we hustled them good and proper. Not many Shaman prisoners, but a lot of Brown Sakae. Stout savages like Pathans. Kyrlos says he’s going to civilize them when he’s done with the Shamans. Your pal Henga is up there—with the vanguard generally. He’s a tiger and no mistake. Country up there is too bad for horses, so I deserted Stephnos and joined with Henga. He and I had a tophole picnic last week.”
“But what have you come back for? It’s not like you to miss a healthy scrap.”
“Healthy scraps are off for the moment. As the learned used to say in the war, ‘the front has stabilized.’ In other words, we are sitting on three sides of the Shaman city—huge great walls and a devil of a ditch. The fourth side is sheer mountain near the gate where we found Aryenis. Kyrlos had two shots at assaulting the place, but they took tea with us over it. Now he says he’s going to starve ’em out, but I think he’s a bit of an optimist. They must have months of grub there. But it’s just like a bit of an old book. Boiling lead, hide-covered towers, catapults, and battering-rams.”
“Seems to suit you all right. But for the third time what’s fetched you back? If you tell me it’s to inquire after my leg, I’ll say you’re a d——d liar.”
“I’ve come back rather hurriedly with some of Kyrlos’s sappers to get engineer stores. I didn’t think they’d get in for weeks and months at the rate they were going, and, having a brain wave or two, I talked with Kyrlos and Andros. Live man, Andros. The upshot was that I and my engineer pal—you know the funny bloke with the crooked nose—with twenty picked men left Shamantown day before yesterday en route to Miletis. They’re spending the night at Aornos, but I thought I’d sleep here if Paulos could give me a shake-down and they can pick me up in the morning. Aryenis says she can fix me up all right: gone to see about it now.”
“What are engineer stores in this country?”
“Tell you in a fortnight’s time. You’ll be fit enough to sit a pony then, and can come and see the beano. If my calculations are right, it’ll be worth seeing. Hulloa, here’s Firoz come to make salaams.”
Firoz, beaming all over, his steel cap adorned with a plume of cock’s feathers from a dead Shaman, and his waist girt with a gay-woven belt from a similar source, entered to pass the time of day and give me a lurid account of the war—a first-class article according to him.
Wrexham borrowed Payindah to help him at Miletis. “I’d like to have both of them with me for the next ten days if you can spare him,” he said as Firoz went out.