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Its soul is another matter.
The Moondaggers have stepped up their harassment. They shift south and west faster than the brigade can move, herding the column north when it wants to go south.
It's too dangerous to send out patrols. Only the Wolves and Cats leave the column. Even Valentines company keeps close, scavenging such towns and camps as they temporarily occupy. Even Vette, who grew up in Kentucky, was lost near Campbellsville.
The men are bearded, dirty, tired. Their rope may not have run out yet, but the tattered end is in view. Much of their artillery marks the line of retreat along the Cumberland Parkway, destroyed and abandoned as ammunition ran out. Wounded, sick, and injured are either hidden with the underground or carried along. The engineers, with their usual flair for improvisation, have rigged the leg worms with yolks that allow them to carry wounded swinging from hammocks, a smoother ride for the injured than the ambulance trucks.
They're far from home, far from sound, and far from those dreams of becoming ranchers and whiskey barons. It's all they can do to keep moving, keep securing bridges and hill gaps, and keep the rear guard supplied in its endless leapfrogs while delaying the Moondaggers behind and at the flanks.
* * * *
The Moondaggers may have begun the campaign as little more than a well-organized mob of killers, but they learned quickly under hard lessons.
Either that, or more experienced formations and commanders were sent to reinforce the division harrying Javelin. It seemed each day they grew more and more aggressive, bringing their route of march closer and closer to the brigade, sending small units to harass the flanks and rear.
The ranchers remained quiescent all around. If anything, it became harder to beg food from the brands. They either fled the brigade's approach or were found to be garrisoned by the Moondaggers. Scouts and the Cats heard a good deal of complaining about the Moondaggers helping themselves to supplies and paying with New Universal Church Guidons personally blessed by the Archon of Detroit. Or long harangues from missionaries asking for warriors willing to fight in the Gods' Holy Struggle.
"Holy Struggle to keep from taking him for a drag behind my worm," Duvalier reported an outrider from the Gunslinger clan grumbling. "He started talking about how my wife could be thrice blessed by faith, submission, and pregnancy."
They fought three skirmishes, and each time were forced to retreat by the Moondaggers bringing up reinforcements by truck. They dug in triple lines of entrenchments on good ground to move a little more north, until their line of march was north-northwest. The roads they needed to take came under long-range artillery fire, and the bridges and fords they wanted to use were mined or destroyed.
Then came the day when the scouts returned from the outskirts of Bowling Green with a special one-sheet newspaper speaking of a pitched battle in Pennsylvania. "Wreckers" (Kurian propagandists were growing tired of the word "terrorist"; with years of use it was losing its punch, so they were increasingly substituting "wreckers" when they discussed the Cause) out of New England had been soundly beaten. Over a thousand captured and the rest scattered in a panicked flight north. It was dreadfully specific in its maps and photographs.
"I don't suppose any of your old Church buddies are in these pictures," Valentine said to Brother Mark.
They went on emergency short rations that day. The legworm clans had stuck a wetted finger in the air and knew which way the wind was blowing. Even the Bulletproof began to suffer desertions. What was worse, sometimes they took their worms with them.
Valentine's company became a productive set of food thieves. They learned to filch from the edges of far fields, creeping in and digging up carrots and sweet potatoes and wrenching off a husk of corn here and there.
* * * *
Valentine sat in the headquarters tent, eyes closed, listening to a news broadcast from Louisville. They were interviewing an author who'd just completed a new study on drug use among youth in the old United States. The main news had to do with a record harvest in the Dakotas, where farmers had overfulfilled their goals by sixteen percent. Locally all they reported was the opening of a new facility for freeze-drying legworm quarters.
He'd started listening because one of communications techs reported hearing a blurb that train service between Nashville, Louisville, Lexington, and Knoxville had been suspended due to flooding. Militia units were being called up and deployed to save communities from the rising floodwaters.
The fall weather had been the one thing that had been kind to the brigade in their trip across Kentucky. Such an obvious lie gave Valentine hope that the legworm riders were attacking the lines.
They hadn't repeated the announcement.
Then Duvalier was tapping him on the shoulder.
"You know your plan to have the legworm ranchers fight the Moondaggers?"
"It's more of a hope than a plan," Valentine admitted.
"Well, maybe the Kurians are waiting for the same thing to happen to us. Or their generals, high Church people, whatever. A lot of them believe their own propaganda. They probably think we're stealing ev-erything that isn't nailed down on this march. When we're not doing that, we're chopping down trees so we can stomp the baby worms."
"How did you come by this?"
"I sat in on a Church question night. Ever been to one of those?"
"I don't think so."
"They're pretty interesting. You write down questions and a priest picks them out of a box and answers them."
"That's a foolproof system," Valentine said.
"The questions smacked of being preselected. Right after a ques-tion about our column was another one asking what was being done about it. You haven't killed a bunch of Strongbows, did you?"
