When, later in the day, the other two hidden contingents reported a similar story, Suriyawong relayed the information back to Ambul. While he waited for the next triggering event, he had his lookouts make a particular point of searching for any sign that Virlomi herself was traveling with any of the three armies.

There was no mystery about it. She was traveling with the northern-most Indian army, riding in an open jeep, and the troops cheered when she passed, moving up and down the line—slowing down her own army’s advance in the process, since they had to move off the road for her.

Suriyawong heard this with sadness. She had been so brilliant. Her assessment of how to undo the Chinese occupation had been dead on. Her holding action to keep the Chinese from returning to India or resupplying when the Persians and Pakistanis invaded had been of Thermopylaean proportions. The difference was that Virlomi was more careful than the Spartans—she had already covered all the back roads. Nothing got past her Indian guerrillas.

She was beautiful and wise and mysterious. Suriyawong had rescued her once, and cooperated in the little drama that made the rescue possible—and played upon her reputation as a goddess.

But in those days, she had known she was just acting.

Or had she? Perhaps it was her intimations of godhood that had caused her to reject Suriyawong’s overtures of friendship and more-than-friendship. The blow had been painful, but he wasn’t angry with her. She had an aura of greatness about her that he had seen in no other commander, not even Bean.

The troop deployments she was showing here were not what he would have expected from the woman who had been so careful of her men’s lives in all her previous actions. Nor from the woman who had wept over the bodies of the victims of Muslim atrocities. Didn’t she see that she was leading the soldiers to disaster? Even if there were no ambush in these mountains—though it was absolutely predictable that there would be—an army this ragged could be destroyed at will by a trained and determined enemy.

As Euripides wrote, Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.

Ambul, knowing how Suriyawong felt about Virlomi, had offered to let him command only that part of the army that wouldn’t face her directly. But Suri refused. “Remember what Bean said Ender taught. ‘To know the enemy well enough to defeat him requires that you know him so well you can’t help but love him.’”

Well, Suriyawong already loved this enemy. And knew her. Well enough that he even thought he understood this madness.

She wasn’t vain. She never thought she’d survive. But all her plans kept succeeding. She couldn’t believe that it was because of her own ability. So she thinks that she has some kind of divine favor.

But it was her abilities and training, and she isn’t using them now, and her army is going to pay for it.