Marching about on the dusty drill ground, while a Hennes instructor shouted at them, was boring rather than arduous, but he kept them at it, hour after hour, in the hot sun, while the dust rose up in clouds and they grew thirsty and tired. He was trying to bring them to an extreme of physical exhaustion, but again there was the problem of their differences. The platoons of solid, stolid Hennes showed few signs of fatigue, while the Thores, in any case undernourished, were in a bad way, and the Nean-thes were falling and fainting. They could not all do the same drill. It appeared that this problem arose every time with the new recruits, but apparently the Hennes always thought that this time things would be different, and were taken by surprise that what was happening was exactly what always happened.

From now on the Hennes would begin two hours before the Thores, and then there would be an hour before the Neanthes joined in. And that set the pattern for the month of drilling that was needed to turn Mara and the others into soldiers. She neither liked it nor disliked it. Soldiers had to be trained, and a soldier was what she was now — though not for long, if she could help it.

Suddenly everything changed. There was a raid to the east one night, and there were prisoners. Mara's hut was needed and she was ousted from it, and watched while four Thores were hustled in to take her place.

She was ordered to march north with a company that was to replace watch-guards on the northern frontier. She was expecting to hear something from General Izrak before she left, but there was nothing: she had only been of interest to them for one reason.

At first they marched through grasslands broken by clumps of thorn trees; but when they camped on the first night they were on the edge of a great plain broken by hills which next day, as they marched down on to it, they could see was no longer the sandy or reddish soil around the Hennes camp, but a dark earth, fibrous, growing sparse, low plants. A wind blew straight from the north into their faces, carrying showers of this earth with it, and soon all the soldiers had tied cloths around their lower faces to breathe through. All that day they marched through low, lumpy hills with an occasional Thores village, and that night they had come up from the plain and were again on a rise, and ahead was a desolation of rough hills and broken ground. This was the last day's marching. That evening, ahead, stood a line of watchtowers, each on a rise; and around each was a camp, more of a village, since there were huts, not tents, and a great blaze of sunset lit most luridly a flatness between the towers, where earth moved and blew about, seeming to heave, like a creature, and little hills whose tops were briefly lit with a ruddy glow before the sun plunged down and there was an absolute dark; and then into the black overhead the stars came, not glittery and clear, but dim, because of the dusty air.

The company separated, moving off to different watchtowers. Mara went to the farthest, and to the very top from where the watchfires could be seen burning here and there in the darkness. This was the extreme northern frontier. Ahead was the territory of the Agre Northern General, which stretched as far as Shari, about ten days' march away. Far away was a line of answering fires, the enemy's. For all Mara knew, Dann was there — her enemy. Well, it would not be for long — and why did she think that? she questioned herself, most uncomfortably. It was because she had never stayed anywhere for long, had always been moved on by some pressure or danger; but everyone knew that the soldiers sent to the frontiers were sometimes there for years.

There were two platoons, or twenty soldiers, at this outpost. They were Neanthes and Thores, mixed — the Hennes did not like frontier-watch-ing — and under the command of a Thores woman, Roz, who had been captured as a child and had never known anything but the army. This outpost was well ordered, efficient, clean, and Mara knew she had been in very much worse situations than this one. Soon, she was in a hut by herself, and was able to be on watch-duty, usually with people she liked. Commander Roz put people together who got on, and she saw to it that her soldiers on the whole did the duties that appealed to them. Mara liked being on watch, so that was what she did. Others collected firewood, fetched water, repaired huts, or cooked. Not that there was much to cook: once a month runners came from the Hennes camp with supplies, but they lived mostly on bread, dried fruit, and vegetables. Sometimes the commander ordered a couple of soldiers to go out and see if they could snare a deer or a couple of birds, but there wasn't much wildlife now, in the dry season. This was the third dry season since Mara had left the Rock Village.

She was often on duty alone on the tower. Regulations said there must always be two on watch; but even when there were, one would usually be asleep. Along this front there had been no fighting, no raid, not even an "incident" for years. A spy was the worst they had to fear. When Mara was on duty the Commander often came up. She was fascinated by Mara, as Mara was with her. She remembered little of her life before her capture, aged eleven, had always been a soldier, had always known where her next meal was coming from, and what she was to wear and do. She was not "in" the army, she was army. She listened to Mara's tales of her vicissitudes with her hand pressed to her mouth and her eyes wide above it, and she giggled nervously when Mara laughed and said, "You don't believe a word I am saying." Whether she did or not, she would say, "Tell me about the house with the spiders," or how the sky skimmer crashed, or how people lived in the River Towns. She had not been out of the Hennes camp, ever, except on watch-duty, had never heard of sky skimmers. Particularly she wanted to know about the flash floods, and it was pleasant to talk about flowing waters while the dust storms blew from the north.

Mara stood alone on her tower and listened to the dry whine of the wind around the corners and struts of the old, shaky building, and heard the thud, thud, thud of soil hitting the base of the tower, where it piled on a bad night as high as the shoulders of the Thores soldiers — who cleared it away in the morning — or to the waists of the Neanthes. All around this tower was a thick layer of the blown, dark earth, and as soon as the rains began vegetables would be planted, which would race into maturity, because this was fertile soil. Mara stood with her back to the south lands, or "down there," and saw the dim lights of the watchfires, that went on for miles east and west and, across a hollow of dark, the answering Agre fires. She listened to the soldiers singing below: the delicate, keening songs of the Neanthes, the Thores songs, whose words, when you listened carefully, were the double-tongued complaints of a subject people afraid to speak openly. On some nights, when the winds were not blowing, these songs seemed to rise like a many-voiced plea along miles of the frontier; and on a still night, threads and shreds of song came from the enemy lines.

One night, coming off watch-duty, she saw a movement among the heaps of dirt around the base of the tower and, then, a gleam of eyes. She leaped forward and hauled out a terrified wretch who wept and begged as she held her knife at his throat. "Be quiet," she said. "Tell me, what news of the Agre Southern Army? Do you know anything about General Shabis?" "No, I don't know anything." "Do you know about Tisitch Dann?" "No, I told you, I don't know anything." "Then what is the news along your sector?" "Nothing, only that your army is going to attack Shari." "Is that what you're spying down here to find out? Well, you can go back and tell them that it's nonsense." And she let him go to creep back to his lines.