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move mine army to the battlefield ere the beastmen come to it, High Warlock?”
    “ ‘Fraid that’s beyond even my powers.” Rod had a brief, dizzying vision of Tuan’s knights and men-at-arms clustered onto huge antigravity plates, skim-ming over the countryside; but he manfully thrust it from him, remembering that technology comes in whole chunks, not just bits and pieces. If he taught them how to make antigrav plates, they’d figure out very quickly how to make auto-matic cannon and television chains—and how much chance would democracy have in a land whose king had the technology for totalitarianism, and whose people still thought loyalty was the supreme virtue?
    Right—about as much as a camel in a glacier. “But you don’t need magic to do it—just a complete force of horsemen.”
    “Why, how is that?” Tuan looked worried; to him, “horseman” meant “knight.”
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    “Well, I know it sounds like heresy—but you don’t have to have just the cap-tains mounted. Common soldiers can learn to ride too.”
    Tuan stared, scandalized.
    “Not on full-scale war-horses, of course,” Rod said quickly. “The rankers can ride ponies. They can go just as fast as the destriers on the long haul, where they keep it down to a canter, if they don’t wear much armor. And you can keep the whole force right there, in Runnymede, since it’s pretty close to being the center of the island. Then, when my witch-sentries send word, you can just yell, ‘Horse and hattock! Ho, and away!’ and they can be mounted up and gone in ten min-utes. Then, if you keep alternating canter and trot and give each soldier a spare mount, they can be anywhere within Gramarye in two days.”
    “And the beastmen could land within one.” Tuan scowled, chewing at his lip. “E’en so, the idea has merit. A thousand men would suffice; certes these beast-men will not bring more. Then I could keep five such forces, placed so that any one of them could be at the seacoast in either of two provinces in less than a day.” He turned a beaming smile on Rod. “I’ truth, ’twill succeed! And if the footmen must ride, what of it? When they come to the field, they can dismount and fight as they always have!”
    And, Rod realized with a sinking heart, the King would have discovered an excellent means of enforcing his will on the barons, whether they liked him or not. But what else could he do? Let bogeymen gobble up the taxpayers? “I think it’ll work, Your Majesty.”
    “But a name! It must have a name!” Tuan’s eyes glowed with excitement. “They will fight better, these soldiers, if their force doth bear a name that may ring down the ages!”
    Tuan was good at that—these little bits of nonsense that ultimately made a great deal of difference: honor, chivalry, things like that. Men fought harder for these intangibles than for cold cash, frequently. If Tuan said his men would fight harder if their regiment had a famous name, Rod wasn’t going to argue.
    “How about the Flying Legion?”

    “Will this truly be an army, my lord?” Gwen stood beside him on the hillside, looking out over the little valley that had sprouted tents and horses.
    “Only the vanguard,” Rod assured her. “Tuan’s still got his standing army of five thousand—and most of them are standing because they don’t know how to ride. Here we’re gathering a thousand good riders from all over the island, ones who already have some experience in war. Tuan’s going to recruit another five thousand pedestrians for the main force, though.”
    Far below, a lieutenant shouted, and his squadron leaped into a gallop, charg-ing down on another hapless unit with wicker swords.
    Gwen watched and shuddered. “They are not terribly deft, my lord.”
    “I said they were experienced, not talented.” Rod turned away and strolled along the flank of the hill, holding her hand. “Give ‘em a