"So quickly? How can you?" Cole laid down his fork.
"They will be waiting in the forest top all around the periphery, in places where we are already building weapons dumps. In the first days of harrying, we will stage in the fighters."
"Morgan will visit each group in the forest top and sing our history," Bidgrass said from the head of the table. "On the evening of the climactic night, as Hoggy Darn rises, they will take a sacramental meal of stomper egg. At no other time is it eaten on this planet."
Mrs. Vignoli looked down. "Garth!" Arscoate said.
"The lad must know, must take it with us," Bidgrass said. "Lad, the real reason for not killing from the air is that the people need to kill personally, with their feet on the ground. So our poetry has always described that last, great fight. I must personally kill Grandfather Stomper."
Cole toyed with his knife. "But he is only a metaphor, a totem image—"
"The people believe in an actual individual who is the stomper counterpart of Garth here," the general broke in. "You know, Mr. Cole, the stompers we kill ordinarily are all females. The males are smaller, with a white crest, and they keep to the deep forest except on Hoggy Darn nights. Maybe the frenzy then has something to do with mating—no one knows. But Garth will kill the largest male he can find. The people, and I expect Garth and I as well, are going to believe that he has killed Grandfather Stomper in person."
The general sipped water and looked sternly over his glass at Cole. Cole glanced at Pia, who seemed lost in a dream of her own, not there to them.
"I see. A symbol," he agreed.
"Not the less real," Arscoate said tartly. "Symbols both mean and are. Garth here is a symbol too and that is why, old as he is, he must be in the thick of it. He is like the ancient battle flags of romantic pre-space history. People before now have actually seen Grandfather Stomper. I am not a superstitious backworlder, Mr. Cole, but—"