Just in front of me rode a yellow-haired giant on a white pony, who carried a green banner with an embroidered device, a bear, Paulos’s own mark. As I looked back--despite my ill-humour--I could have smiled at the idea of me, Harry Lake, with many years of soldiering and six years of war, as the modern world knows it, behind me, war of machine-gun and rifle, of heavy howitzer and aeroplane bomb, of tank and armoured car, riding with a following that might have come straight out of the pages of an old history book. Steel-capped, mail-shirted men on rough ponies, tall, bobbed-haired, hawk-faced bowmen in leather jerkins, nodding spear-points and dancing gleam of mail-ringed caps; and behind me, with my trumpeter, Payindah in mail with his anachronistic magazine-rifle slung over his shoulder, his straight Greek features and his wheat-coloured face alive with the joy of coming battle. For here was I riding at the head of what was for the moment my own following, and the banner ahead bore almost my own crest, save that the bear on my signet ring carries a chain. And the reason of my position was a note which Paulos had sent me the day after I had listened to him thought-reading, bidding me come again and see him quickly, for he desired me to help him in a small matter. I told Aryenis, but my lady had found important matters which prevented her coming, despite her insistence the previous day. The upshot of my visit was his wish that I should lead the men from his lands to the war, since he had no son to lead them and no man of sufficient standing among his following to whom he could entrust the command. I pleaded my ignorance of Sakae, my lack of knowledge of their customs and their methods of war, and the fact that I was a stranger in the country. He would take no refusal. “Regarding the matter of the language,” he had said, “the officers and some of the N.C.O.’s speak Greek. For the matter of our methods of war, there is to my mind but one kind of war--no matter what the weapons be. At the last it is the man who is ready to close and anxious to kill who wins. From a leader all we seek is bravery and the knowledge of men. The first you have, or Aryenis would not be here now. The second you have also, unless I have lost my gift of character-reading. And for the fact of your being a stranger--that you are not. Your name is known in all my villages. Such things do not depend upon time, but upon deeds; and my people--who love Aryenis--speak of you as one of ourselves. My folk will follow you for her sake as well as for your own.” The coincidence of the device on his banner and the friendly reception I had met with from his landholders, who officered the levies which he sent to the war, clinched the matter, and so you see me with thirty mail-clad mounted men and four companies of stout bowmen, each eighty or ninety strong, riding into Aornos near the head of Kyrlos’s army.