So, leeling like a hypocrite, she cheered and clapped her hands. One of the standard-bearers grinned at her. Why not? She was a pretty girl not far from his age. The Westside flag had a bear on it. Part of the bear seemed to come from the one on the old California state flag, part from the UCLA Bruin. That left it looking fierce and friendly at the same time, but the Westsiders didn't care.

“How big is this army?” Liz asked her father.

“I don't know.” He shrugged. “A couple of thousand men? Something like that.”

“Are they enough?”

Her father shrugged again. “We'll find out,” he said, which wasn't what she wanted to hear.

The cheering got louder. Here came Cal and his dog Pots. The beast looked as if it could eat half the Valley's army all by itself. Behind Cal came a horse that carried armor for Pots. The chunks of iron looked like the ones that had protected horses back in the days when knights were bold and life was nasty, brutish, and short. (Hobbes, Liz thought, remembering AP Euro.)

Cal waved his big white Stetson. “We'll get 'em!” he shouted to the people. “They won't come past us!”

“Ils ne passeront pas,” Dad murmured. “That goes back a couple of hundred years. I wonder if he knows.”

“Ask not what the Westside can do for you,” Cal added. “Ask what you can do for the Westside!”

Liz 's father stirred again. That one rang a bell with her, too. She remembered grainy black-and-white video from the middle of the twentieth century. Even across almost a century and a half of changing hair and clothes styles, she remembered thinking how handsome John Kennedy was. Maybe he hadn't been the greatest President. Nobody'd cared much, then or later. An aura of glamour surrounded him to this day.