“So that louse Mughorck was sending out secret commando raids to get you Flatfaces angry,” Yorick growled. “No wonder you sent a spy.”

“Wouldn’t you?” Rod countered. His eyes narrowed. “Come to think of it, maybe you have.”

“Who, us?” Yorick stared, appalled. “Make sense, milord! This is like walking in on a hibernating cave bear and kicking him awake! Do you think we’d take a chance like this if we had any choice?”

“Yes,” Rod said slowly. “I don’t think you’re short on courage. But you wouldn’t be dumb enough to come walking in without a disguise, either—especially since at least one of you speaks good Terran English.”

Beside him, Tuan nodded heavily. “I think they are what they seem, Lord Warlock—good men who flee an evil one.”

“I’m afraid I’d have to say so too,” Rod sighed. “But speaking of good men—what happened to the Eagle?”

Yorick shrugged. “All he said was that he was going to hide.”

“And take his gadgets with him, I hope,” Rod said grimly. “The enemy has entirely too many time machines already.”

“ ‘Enemy’?” Tuan turned to him, frowning. “There is naught here but an upstart hungry for power, Lord Gallowglass.”

“Yeah, one who thinks Gramarye looks like a delicious dessert! If that’s not ‘the enemy,’ what is?”

“The futurian totalitarian,” Fess murmured through the earphone implanted in Rod’s mastoid, right behind his ear, “and the futurian anarchists.”

“But you know my devious mind,” Rod went on, ostensibly to Tuan. “I always have to wonder if there’s a villain behind the villain.”

Tuan smiled, almost fondly. “If this suspicion will aid thee to guard us as thou hast in the past, why, mayst thou ever see a bear behind each bush!”

“Well, not a bear—but I usually do see trouble bruin.”

“Optimists have more fun, milord,” Yorick reminded him.

“Yeah, because pessimists have made things safe for ‘em. And how do we make things safe when we never know where the enemy’s gonna strike next?”

Yorick shrugged. “Mughorck can only field a thousand men. Just put five hundred soldiers every place they might hit.”

“Every place?” Rod asked with a sardonic smile. “We’ve got three thousand miles of coastline, and we’d need those five hundred soldiers at least every ten miles. Besides, five hundred wouldn’t do it—not when the enemy can freeze ‘em in their tracks. We’d need at least a couple of thousand at each station.”

Yorick shrugged. “So, what’s the problem?”

Rod felt anger rise, then remembered that Neanderthals couldn’t manipulate symbols—including simple multiplication. “That’d be about six hundred thousand men, and we’ve…”

Yorick stopped him with a raised palm. “Uh… I have a little trouble with anything more than twenty. If it goes past my fingers and toes…”

“Just take my word for it; it’s a lot more men than we have available. Medieval technology doesn’t exactly encourage massive populations.”

“Oh.” Yorick seemed crestfallen. Then he brightened. “But you could post sentries.”

“Sure—and we did. But there’s still the problem of getting the army to where the raiders are in time to meet them.”

“It can’t be all that hard!”

Rod took a deep breath. “Look—we have to move at least as many men as your whole village.”

“What for—to fight just a lousy thousand?”

“I don’t think you realize just how much of an advantage that Evil Eye gives your men,” Rod said sourly.

“Not all that much. I mean, one man can only freeze one other man. Maybe two, if he pushes it—but not very well.”

Rod stared at him for a moment.

Then he said, “One boatload of your men held a small army of ours totally frozen.”

“What!?”

Rod nodded. “That’d be about, uh, two hands of my men for every one of yours.”

Yorick stared at his outspread fingers and shook his head. “Can’t be. No way. At all.”

Rod gazed at him, then shrugged his shoulders. “Apparently, somebody found a way to do it.” He remembered what Gwen had said about the lightning.

“Then figure out a way to undo it,” Yorick said promptly. “You Flatfaces are good at that kind of thing. We can show you how the Freeze—what’d you call it, the Evil Eye?—we can show you how it works.”

“That might help…”

“Sure it will! You gotta be able to figure out something from that!”

“Oh, I do, do I? How come?”

“Because,” Yorick said, grinning, “you can manipulate symbols.”

Rod opened his mouth to answer—but he couldn’t really think of anything, so he closed it again. That’s what set him apart from ordinary men. He just smiled weakly and said, “Manipulating symbols doesn’t always produce miracles, Yorick.”

“I’ll take a chance on it. You just tell us what we can do, and we’ll do it.”

“Might they not be of some value with our force?” Tuan inquired.

Rod turned to him, frowning. “Fighting side by side with our soldiers? They’d get chopped up in the first battle by our own men.”

“Not if we were to employ them to slip ahead of our main force to reconnoitre the enemy’s forces. Let us train them in the use of longbow, crossbow, and lance, and send them ahead to wreak havoc ere we arrive.”

Rod shook his head. “The nearest knight would charge them in a second. They’re not exactly inconspicuous, you know.” Suddenly his eyes widened; he grinned. “Oh!”

“Oh?” Tuan said warily.

“Yeah. If they stand out too much to do any good here—then we should use them someplace where they won’t!”

Tuan’s face slowly cleared into a beatific smile. “Aye, certes! Train them well, and send them back to Beastland. Then they can attack this Mughorck’s men unbeknownst!”

“Well, not quite. Just because they all look alike to us doesn’t mean they look alike to one another. But they could hide out in the bush and recruit some others from among the disaffected, and…”

“Aye! Build up a small army!”

“Well, I wasn’t thinking on that scale…”

“Couldn’t manage an army.” Yorick shook his head. “Fifty men, though, I might be able to get—but that’s fifty, tops.” He glanced back at his colleagues, then up at Rod. “That’s all our hands together—right?”

“Right.” Rod fought down a grin. “But put ‘em in the right place, at the right time…”

“Aye, fifty men who know the lay of the land.” Tuan’s eyes kindled. “ ‘Twould be well done indeed, Master Beastman.”

“ ‘Yorick’ is good enough,” the Neanderthal said with a careless wave of his hand. “Fifty, I think I could get. Yeah. We could hide out in the jungle on the other side of the cliffs from the village. no more than fifty, though. Most of the men have wives and children. That makes a man cautious.”

Rod nodded toward the other Neanderthals. “How about your guys?”

Yorick shook his head. “All bachelors. We wondered why the Eagle didn’t choose any of the married men for his cadre—and I don’t mind telling you, some of the ladies were pretty upset about it.”

“Don’t worry—it was nothing compared to how they would’ve squawked the first time their husbands had to work late.” Rod thought of Gwen with a gush of gratitude. “So they thought Eagle was a misogynist?”

“No; he turned handsprings anytime anyone married. And if one of the Inner Circle got spliced, he was even happier. Kicked ‘em into the Outer Circle, of course—but he always said the guy was being promoted, to husbandry.”

“Odd way to look at it.” Rod mulled it over. “Maybe accurate, though…”

“It is a job, all by itself,” Yorick agreed. “But the lack of dependents sure came in handy when we had to leave town in a hurry.”

“Think the Eagle had that in mind all along?”

“I’m sure of it—now. So, we’ll get bachelors for this guerrilla force, for you—but what do you want us to do with them?”

“Thou must needs assault them from their rear, whilst we storm in from the ocean,” Tuan answered. “Then, mayhap, we can bring thine Eagle from his aerie.”