THE MASTER MARCHES

      Joaquin Smith was marching.

      Hull Tarvish leaned against the door of File Ormson’s iron worker’s shop in Ormiston, and stared across the fields and across the woodlands, and across to the blue mountains of Ozarky in the south. There is where he should have been, there with the mountainy men, but by the time the tired rider had brought the news to Selui, and by the time Hull had reached Ormiston, it was already too late, and Ozarky was but an outlying province of the expanding Empire, while the Master camped there above Norse, and sent representations to Selui.

      Selui wasn’t going to yield. Already the towns of the three months old Selui Confederation were sending in their men, from Bloom’ton, from Cairo, even from distant Ch’cago on the shores of the saltless sea Mitchin. The men of the Confederation hated the little, slender, dark Ch’cagoans, for they had not yet forgotten the disastrous battle at Starved Rock, but any allies were welcome against Joaquin Smith. The Ch’cagoans were good enough fighters, too, and heart and soul in the cause, for if the Master took Selui, his Empire would reach dangerously close to the saltless seas, spreading from the ocean on the east to the mountains on the west, and north as far as the great confluence of the M’sippi and M’souri.

      Hull knew there was fighting ahead, and he relished it. It was too bad that he couldn’t have fought in Ozarky for his own people, but Ormiston would do. That was his home for the present, since he’d found work here with File Ormson, the squat iron-worker, broad-shouldered as Hull himself and a head shorter. Pleasant work for his mighty muscles, though at the moment there was nothing to do.

      He stared at the peaceful countryside. Joaquin Smith was marching, and beyond the village, the farmers were still working in their fields. Hull listened to the slow Sowing Song:

      “This is what the ground needs:

      First the plow and then the seeds,

      Then the harrow and then the hoe,

      And rain to make the harvest grow.

      “This is what the man needs:

      First the promises, then the deeds,

      Then the arrow and then the blade,

      And last the digger with his black spade.

      “This is what his wife needs:

      First a garden free of weeds,

      Then the daughter, and then the son,

      And a fireplace warm when the work is done.

      “This is what his son needs —”

      Hull ceased to listen. They were singing, but Joaquin Smith was marching, marching with the men of a hundred cities, with his black banner and its golden serpent fluttering. That serpent, Old Einar had said, was the Midgard Serpent, which ancient legend related had encircled the earth. It was the symbol of the Master’s dream, and for a moment Hull had a stirring of sympathy for that dream.

      “No!” he growled to himself. “Freedom’s better, and it’s for us to blow the head from the Midgard Serpent.”

      A voice sounded at his side. “Hull! Big Hull Tarvish! Are you too proud to notice humble folk?”

      It was Vail Ormiston, her violet eyes whimsical below her smooth copper hair. He flushed; he was not used to the ways of these valley girls, who flirted frankly and openly in a manner impossible to the shy girls of the mountains. Yet he—well, in a way, he liked it, and he liked Vail Ormiston, and he remembered pleasantly an evening two days ago when he had sat and talked a full three hours with her on the bench by the tree that shaded Ormiston well. And he remembered the walk through the fields when she had shown him the mouth of the great ancient storm sewer that had run under the dead city, and that still stretched crumbling for miles underground toward the hills, and he recalled her story of how, when a child, she had lost herself in it, so that her father had planted the tangle of blackberry bushes that still concealed the opening.

      He grinned, “Is it the eldarch’s daughter speaking of humble folk? Your father will be taxing me double if he hears of this.”

      She tossed her helmet of metallic hair. “He will if he sees you in that Selui finery of yours.” Her eyes twinkled. “For whose eyes was it bought, Hull? For you’d be better saving your money.”

      “Save silver, lose luck,” he retorted. After all, it wasn’t so difficult a task to talk to her. “Anyway, better a smile from you than the glitter of money.”

      She laughed. “But how quickly you learn, mountainy! Still, what if I say I liked you better in tatters, with your powerful brown muscles quivering through the rips?”

      “Do you say it, Vail?”

      “Yes, then!”

      He chuckled, raising his great hands to his shoulders. There was the rasp of tearing cloth, and a long rent gleamed in the back of his Selui shirt. “There, Vail!”

      “Oh!” she gasped. “Hull, you wastrel! But it’s only a seam.” She fumbled in the bag at her belt. “Let me stitch it back for you.”

      She bent behind him, and he could feel her breath on his skin, warm as spring sunshine. He set his jaw, scowled, and then plunged determinedly into what he had to say. “I’d like to talk to you again this evening, Vail.”

      He sensed her smile at his back. “Would you?” she murmured demurely.

      “Yes, if Enoch Ormiston hasn’t spoken first for your time.”

      “But he has, Hull.”

      He knew she was teasing him deliberately. “I’m sorry,” he said shortly.

      “But—I told him