He stroked the back of her hand and she pulled it away. "An old song runs through my head," she went on. "A prophecy that Grandfather Stomper cannot be killed while outworld blood pumps through any heart on the planet. I feel like my own enemy, like ... like your enemy. You should not have come until next _Gorbals_. Flinter, _stay away from me_!" He talked soothingly, to little avail. When they parted he said heartily, "Forget those silly prophecies, Pia. I'll look out for you." Privately, he wondered how. * * * * * Cole sat beside Pia and across the food-laden table from General Arscoate, a large pink-faced man in middle life. "It's an old and proven strategy, Mr. Cole," the general explained. "When Hoggy Darn starts we will harass the enemy from the air in all but one of the fourteen sizable open spaces in Lundy Forest. That one is Emrys Upland, the largest. They will concentrate in Emrys, more each night, until the climactic night of peak frenzy. Then we come down with all the men and women we can muster and we kill. We may go on killing stragglers for years after, but Grandfather Stomper will die on that night." "Why not kill from the air?" "More firepower on the ground. I can only lift ninety-four flyers all told. But I will shuttle twenty thousand fighting men into Emrys in an hour or two on the big night." "So quickly? How can you?" Cole laid down his fork. "They will be waiting in the forest top all around the periphery, in places where we are already building weapons dumps. In the first days of harrying, we will stage in the fighters." "Morgan will visit each group in the forest top and sing our history," Bidgrass said from the head of the table. "On the evening of the climactic night, as Hoggy Darn rises, they will take a sacramental meal of stomper egg. At no other time is it eaten on this planet." Mrs. Vignoli looked down. "Garth!" Arscoate said. "The lad must know, must take it with us," Bidgrass said. "Lad, the real reason for not killing from the air is that the people _need_ to kill personally, with their feet on the ground. So our poetry has always described that last, great fight. I must _personally_ kill Grandfather Stomper." Cole toyed with his knife. "But he is only a metaphor, a totem image--" "The people believe in an actual individual who is the stomper counterpart of Garth here," the general broke in. "You know, Mr. Cole, the stompers we kill ordinarily are all females. The males are smaller, with a white crest, and they keep to the deep forest except on Hoggy Darn nights. Maybe the frenzy then has something to do with mating--no one knows. But Garth will kill the largest male he can find. The people, and I expect Garth and I as well, are going to believe that he has killed Grandfather Stomper in person." The general sipped water and looked sternly over his glass at Cole. Cole glanced at Pia, who seemed lost in a dream of her own, not there to them.