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"Doberman can fix up your ears so they match," Silvertip said, pointing to the Bear with the docked ears.
"Want me to go look for it, sir?" Preville asked, perhaps desperate to get away from the combat-hyped Bears.
"You, with the iodine. Spare a little."
"Absolutely, Major," the bear said, exhibiting what was perhaps the deepest voice Valentine had ever heard in Southern Command.
"What's your name?"
"Redbone," the Bear said.
"Thanks, Redbone. Good shooting with that pistol. You don't give lessons, do you?"
"I can make time."
* * * *
Valentine could turn the hill over to the Guard infantry now. With a few platoons posted on the bluff and some more companies spread out in those woods, the flanking column could bust itself to pieces in this manner, and every moment his forces on the west side of the river would grow stronger as men, vehicles, and legworms crossed, platoon by platoon.
With the brigade across and flanks well secured by river and lime-stone cut, the men could afford to relax and swap tales of skirmishes against Moondagger scouts. The Moondagger columns, discovering that Javelin had escaped the bridge choke point, skulked off for the sidelines like footballers who'd just given up a fumble.
The Wolves were coming in with reports that they'd turned tail.
"A mob. That's all they are," someone ventured.
"Like most bullies, they're toughest against people who can't fight back," Valentine said.
"What happened to the third column?"
"Don't rightly know, sir," Moytana said. "Some of the scouts thought they heard explosions a mile or two to the east. The column turned toward them, then reversed itself, then turned back again east before it swung around south to where they were when we were first watching them. That's all they saw before it got dark."
The work of Ahn-Kha, perhaps, with ambushes or miscellaneous sounds of destruction getting the Moondaggers marching in a circle, chasing the noises of their own troop movements.
Valentine wondered what would have happened back at Utrecht if they'd united with the Green Mountain Boys. The Moondaggers had come to oversee a surrender, not wage a war. If only Jolla hadn't felt overwhelmed by the responsibility of command.
He'd leave the might-have-beens to the historians and armchair strategists. He had to check on his commanding officer.
* * * *
For two days the column crept southeast as Bloom recovered from her taste of Bear blood.
The doctors complained that it made her even more restive than usual.
The Moondaggers hovered in the distance, keeping in between the brigade and Lexington.
Valentine wondered what sort of orders and threats were passing between various Kurians, high Church officials, and the Moondagger headquarters in Michigan. Bloom was soon up to half days in her jeep after one more Bear-blood transfusion.
Valentine, now that she was on his mental horizon, suddenly saw Tikka everywhere: giving orders to her fellow Bulletproof, cadging for strips of leather to effect repairs on tack and harness, giving advice to the cooks on the best way to quick-smoke legworm meat.
Perhaps it was just his libido, but she always seemed to be reach-ing, squatting, climbing, or bending over, the muscles of her backside tight in jeans and legworm-leather chaps.
She caught him coming out of the wash tent after dinner and revealed a glass flask tucked in her summer cotton shirt snuggled up next to a creamy breast.
Valentine had seen hundreds of liquor advertisements while pag-ing through the tattered ruins of old magazines, but for all the tales of subliminal depictions of fornication in ice cubes, he'd rarely so wanted to reach for a cork in his life.
"I came here to collect on a promise," she said, taking the kerchief out of her hair and letting the carmel-colored curls tumble into into a waterfall splashing against her shoulders.
"Or are you going to Cin-Cin me out of my reward?"
