I went up to our quarters, and calling Payindah told him to come with me, leaving my kit to follow with a couple of my men. Wrexham and Forsyth were nowhere to be seen. The latter had gone off with Stephnos, who had a job in which his heart delighted--to wit, the command of Milos’s own mounted troops. Firoz said that Wrexham had ridden off early with one of Kyrlos’s officers who ran the engineers. John took a keen interest in their weird contraptions, portable catapults, and endless mediæval contrivances for siege-work, more particularly in the quaint battering-ram, a huge iron-shod tree--the trunk of a full-grown pine, I think, it was--that took twenty men to swing it. Despite his early training and his civil avocation, Wrexham is at heart a soldier, and nothing pleased him more than pottering round and comparing notes with the old scarred man who filled the post of what one might call “Master of the Ordnance” to Kyrlos’s army. When I got back to the hall, Payindah with the rifles following, Andros hailed me. “You say you told your people to be ready to move in an hour, Harilek?” “I did, Andros. Do you want us to go ahead?” “You muster nearly four hundred, do you not?” He was a wonder at remembering figures. “Yes.” “Well, that’s too weak to do much by yourselves, but, if you get off in an hour, Stephnos will be through you half an hour later--say, two miles out--and then following him you will be something for him to come back on if he’s driven in. Do you know that little hill by the eighth mile that commands the road?--the one we looked at yesterday.” “Yes,” said I. We had ridden out there the previous day, and remarked on its possibilities for defence. “Well, make for that as fast as you can go. If you can get there before the enemy, you will be able to hold them awhile--perhaps until we can get up to you. In any case you will delay them. I know all Paulos’s men are good bowmen, for he is always making his people practise. We come as fast as we can.” “Right. I shall be away in little over half an hour.” Kyrlos was listening to it all, nodding gravely from time to time. As I turned to go, he called to me, and walked across the hall to the door. “Andros has given you a post of honour, my friend. You will meet the Shamans’ main onslaught, and you will have to fight as hard as you have ever fought in your life, I think. But it is the only place they can pass just there, and if you hold them till we come, it will be so many the more of our villages and our people saved. It seems unfair to put a guest in the post of danger, but, since you ride at the head of Paulos’s men and by so doing become one of us, I am glad that Andros has suggested you for such a very honourable task. If you come through, you will have even more honour among our people than you have already. God guard you, Harilek.” He smiled very gravely at me as I touched my cap to him and went down the steps.