Kelmer Faronya had been having nightmares. He'd felt better about himself after the night of the mortar attacks. He'd done his job in the face of heavy fire, and stayed as long as the others. But on several nights since then, he'd had recurring dreams in which the grenade once again landed in front of him. In one of them, Jerym had thrown himself on it to save him, and it had exploded. Then Jerym's corpse had followed him everywhere in the dream, mangled and bloody and grim. He'd get in front of Kelmer, stand in his way, take Kelmer's seat at the table. There was no escaping him. The dead mouth moved, but no words came out. The dreaming Kelmer was sure that the message it mouthed was horrifying, that if he ever heard it, he too would die. Meanwhile the corpse decayed. Pieces sloughed off. He could even smell it! Finally, with a horrid resonance, the words would start: "Kelmer . . ." And he'd waken sweating—with the smell of putrefaction seemingly still in his nostrils! It seemed to Kelmer that odor had never been a part of his dreams before.
More terrifying, though, was the one in which the grenade landed and Kelmer ran. And running looked back—to see it rolling and bouncing after him! He would run and run, but always it followed him, getting nearer. And implicit in the dream was the certain knowledge that if it caught him—when it caught him—it would explode. He tired. Actually it was as if the air thickened, making running almost impossible, and his legs grew heavier, harder to move. Then, looking back, the grenade would be closer, almost at his heels. Sparks flew from it! He knew with dead certainty it was about to explode.
That's when he'd waken, sweating and panting, a wakening that was like a reprieve.
It was twelve days after the action, and he'd just dreamed of the rolling grenade for the third time. He lay on his cot at Shelf Falls, wide-eyed and gasping, when the thought struck him. The dream, it seemed to him, was a warning, a premonition. In the next action, or the one after that, or perhaps one later, a grenade would kill him. And somehow—somehow he would cause Jerym's death! There was no doubt in his mind that this was so.
So when, on the next day, a message came from Romlar that he was to come to Burnt Woods, he felt like a prisoner pardoned. For Burnt Woods was far away from combat, and Jerym wouldn't be there.
Romlar had a different kind of assignment for him. The repeated successful strikes at Komarsi brigade bases, followed by the raid on Komarsi army headquarters at Rumaros and the destruction at Linnasteth, had rejuvenated the Smoleni. Even Belser had come around to an activist position. He'd approved the training of Smoleni ranger units, men selected for their wilderness skills, their marksmanship, and their warrior auras. Troopers would be their cadre.
Kelmer was to record some of their training on video cubes as part of regimental history. Selected parts would be distributed to other countries on Maragor, as public relations for Smolen.
Beyond that, he was to record civilian survival activities. These had been underway earlier at backcountry villages, but now the refugees had joined in. He took cubeage showing trees of certain species being felled, the bark stripped from them and carried in pack baskets to village houses and refugee camps. There the inner bark, the phloem, was scraped off and pestled into pulp that would be added to flour for baking. Centuries earlier, "bark bread" had kept their ancestors alive when they'd hidden in the forest, and the process had been passed down in stories and history books.
That wasn't all. Crews with scythes hiked to wet meadows in the forest, where they cut hay and stacked it to dry on racks made of poles, so the horses herded up from the Leas could be fed that winter.
There was even a pair of crews sawing roivan trees into five-foot logs, splitting staves from them, and cross-stacking the staves to dry. They could be shaved and carved into bows, against the time when ammunition might run out. Still others cut and peeled osiers from stream banks and fen margins, and straightened them, to be made into arrows if the need arose.
Concussion grenades were thrown into lakes, stunning and killing fish. These floated to the surface, and were gathered in baskets for drying or smoking.
More important, it seemed to Kelmer, were activities near Smolen's northernmost village, a tiny place named Jump-Off.1 The border lay only forty miles north, forty miles of true wilderness. The Granite River flowed out of it, south through Jump-Off; the river was the only road there. In summer the village was reached by boat, in winter by skis, snowshoes, or sleigh.
Tiny as it was, and more than two hundred miles north of Rumaros, Jump-Off nonetheless had strategic importance. Smoleni diplomats outside the country were negotiating secretly with the governments of Oselbent, The Archipelago, and Selmar for food and munitions. Oselbent was a long and mostly narrow country, mountainous and incised by fjords, living largely by its fishing boats, merchant marine, and mines. It feared Komar's army and fleet, and would like to see her militarism broken. Especially since, with the Smoleni coast occupied, Oselbent had Komarsi forces at her southern border. And it seemed to the Oselbenti that once the Smoleni surrendered, the Komarsi would be tempted to conquer Oselbent, or make a tributary of her. Besides, Oselbent, like Smolen, was a republic, of which there weren't many on Maragor.
But to antagonize Komars could be fatal.
The Archipelago was another republic. And more important, from the Smoleni and Oselbenti point of view, she had a strong fleet. If she could be gotten to sign a mutual defense pact with Oselbent . . . But she had her own vulnerabilities.
Selmar was the kingdom to the south of Komars, and a considerably more limited monarchy. No friend of her northern neighbor, she'd lost the last war they'd fought, along with some of the planet's diminishing iron mines. Potentially she was as strong as Komars, but suffered serious political and economic problems that a new constitution and king had only recently begun to ease. If The Archipelago were to sign a favorable trade agreement with her, the Selmari economy and morale would substantially improve, and Komars would find a revitalized old adversary on the south. One worrisome enough that Komars might be reluctant to extend her northern war to Oselbent.
If a mutual defense pact could be engineered between Oselbent and The Archipelago, and a trade pact signed between Selmar and The Archipelago, then surely, covert assistance agreements could be worked out for Smolen, with The Archipelago as the main supply source.
To Kelmer Faronya, a young man of the Confederation, all this seemed very very foreign—something out of a novel—and beyond photography.
The other problem of foreign supplies was getting them into Smolen, now that her coast was occupied. This was one the Smoleni could do more about, and one readily recorded on cube. Jump-Off was fifty-four miles from the border with Oselbent, and seventy-five miles from the town of Deep Fjord, which was a busy, even somewhat congested, harbor. The Falls River, which emptied into the fjord, was the site of a large hydroelectric development, which supplied the power for a large plant that manufactured nitrogen compounds, notably nitrate fertilizers. (Ironically, it was also a major supplier of nitrocellulose for the Komarsi munitions industry.) On the plateau above the fjord, and near the border with Smolen, were mines producing iron and magnesium. Thus a railroad climbed its way up from the fjord almost to the border.
Ships of many nations came to Deep Fjord, including ships from The Archipelago. It was the logical transshipment point for supplies to Smolen, if an agreement could be reached.
The problem of getting such supplies to the Smoleni army might seem to be worsened by the nature of the terrain, for that part of Smolen was largely peatlands—fens, moss bogs, and muskegs—but to the Smoleni, that provided not difficulty but opportunity.
An army engineering officer and a logging operator took Kelmer to photograph part of the supply road they were "building" to Oselbent. Actually they were building nothing, nor did they need to. What they were doing amounted mainly to staking the route, marking it with tall flagged rods. So far as possible without adding much length, the route was marked across open fens and moss bogs. Where these were absent, it mostly passed through muskegs—forested swamps. In much of the muskeg, the trees were sparse and stunted, and little obstacle. Sometimes, though, it was necessary to flag the route through heavier muskeg, where crews had begun to clear the right-of-way with saw and axe.
Over the years, trains of large sleighs, drawn by giant steam tractors, had been used in Smolen to haul logs on frozen rivers. Now, if the diplomats succeeded, similar trains would be used in winter to haul supplies from Oselbent across vast roadless swamps to Jump-Off.
Here and there, non-swamp intervened—mostly glacial till and outwash, and rarely low outcrops of the underlying rock. Kelmer visited one of these, a neck about a hundred yards wide, fifteen miles east of Jump-Off. A small crew was camped there, with axes and saws to fell trees; picks and shovels to dig with; dynamite to blow rock and stumps; and small, horse-drawn drag scoops to move earth and broken rock. They were cutting a narrow roadway almost to swamp level, so the sleigh trains wouldn't have to climb. On hard-packed snow, one great steam-powered crawler tractor could pull a whole train of large, heavily-loaded sleighs, if the road was level.
There already were steam tractors at Jump-Off, barged up the Granite. More could be brought as needed. A large crew of men was converting logging sleighs into cargo sleighs, building 20- by 8-foot cargo boxes of planks on the heavy skids and cross-bunks, which were hewn or sawn from tree trunks. The only metal in the sleighs were spikes and bolts, nuts and washers, stout chain-and-ring couplings, and stake pockets.
The only road maintenance equipment was drags made of logs split or sawn in half lengthwise, and bolted together with braces into a V-shape twelve feet wide at the tail. Dragged along the route in winter, by either horses or teams of native erog, they would pack the snow. Beneath soft snow, the swamps froze, but the frost was often honeycomb frost that would not bear weight. By contrast, where the snow was packed, the peat would freeze six- to eight-feet deep, and hard as concrete.
Kelmer left impressed, more by the resourcefulness and matter-of-fact attitude of the people undertaking all this than by what they were doing. He'd discovered a backwoods mentality, and hoped that the diplomats, in their way, could match it.