“Not him,” replied Aspe. “Get me fodder.” He squinted down the river road, where the army stretched and coiled for a mile or more. “Starbridges. Who’s on the elephant? Read me their flags.”

His adjutant lifted a pair of field glasses. Above the carriage on the elephant’s back rose a pair of fluttering white ensigns. “Thanakar and Micum Starbridge,” he said.

“I’ve never heard of them.”

“Transport corps,” said his adjutant. “One’s a doctor. You shouldn’t waste him, sir.”

“Is he brave?”

“Of course.” A list of obligations was sewn onto each flag. “Fourth degree, both of them. They were born under the same sign.”

“Fourth degree?”

“Up to and including loss of life.”

“Good. That’s handy. What about obedience?”

“You can see it. It’s that red crescent on the commissar’s flag. The doctor doesn’t have it. He’s a . . .

cynic, it says. He believes in . . . nothing.”

The colonel frowned. “He sounds like a fool.”

“No, sir. You can see from here. Fifth degree intelligence. It’s that triangle right at the top of the flag.”

But Aspe was no longer listening. He was singing for his horse, and it lifted its head where it was drinking by the river. Then it neighed and came running, and Aspe seized one of its horns as it ran past and swung himself up into the saddle. When he reached the road he spurred it to a gallop, even though that part of the valley was crowded with animals, and men standing and sitting, and waiting for something to happen.

Men scattered in front of him, leaping for safety off the shoulders of the road, rolling in the dirt out of reach of his flying hooves.

“Who is this madman?” asked the doctor.

The elephant took up the whole road. When it saw the black horse coming down on it so fast, it trumpeted in terror and raised its blobby nose to the sky. The commissar stood up in the carriage and prodded it with his spike, distracting it into giving up all plans to flee or die. It just stood there, trembling and sweating, while the colonel reined his horse back on its haunches in the road in front of them. He raised his whip above his head.

The colonel’s voice was harshness without substance, the words like coarse dust in a breath of wind.

Thanakar couldn’t hear him. The noise of the army was too thick around them, and the elephant seemed to sweat vibrations of thrumming terror through its pores. Aspe cursed and dismounted stiffly. His knees moved stiffly when he walked. It was as if he were only comfortable on horseback, but he grasped the ladder that hung from the elephant’s back, and swung himself up, and stood on the beast’s head while it bucked and swayed, his gauntlets on his hips.

“Starbridges,” he said. “I need spies. Ride through that notch and tell me what’s behind. I am Aspe.”

Thanakar peered ahead. “You fear an ambush, Colonel?”