Marian had once said she was unsuited to Cofflin's job because she was a hammer… and saw all problems as nails. But she's a very good hammer, and some problems are nails, he mused, and went on aloud: "I think we can prod the Sovereign People into some action now, though." His statement was only half ironic. The people were sovereign here, very directly. "The screaming about how we're spending too much on defense ought to die down a little, at least. Marian?"

Marian Alston pulled out a sheaf of papers. "Here's what I propose," she began.

Little of it was a surprise to him. Contingency planning cost nothing, and he had a limited discretionary fund to work with for more concrete preparations. At least we could lay the groundwork, since the Alban War. The new Marine regiment was coming along fairly well, from the reports-young Hollard was a doer, and the Republic had grown enormously over the last eight years, in numbers and capacities.

Cofflin wondered grimly what Walker and his renegades had been doing in those same years. Walker wasn't the kind to let grass grow under his feet, damn him. If they didn't do something about him, eventually he would do something about them.

"Oh, sweet fucking Jesus Christ on a Harley," William Walker muttered in English, before dropping back into archaic Greek. "Seventy alternative meanings?"

Thick adobe walls kept the heat at bay, but light lanced in like spears of white through small, high windows. The room was a rectangle, whitewashed plaster on the walls and hard-packed earth covered in gypsum on the floor; it smelled of the damp clay in a tub, and of clay tablets drying in wicker baskets.

The Achaean scribe sat patiently on his stool. "Yes, lord," he said, humoring the newly-come stranger the High King had set him to serve. "There are seven tens of meanings for this sign."

His pen was a reed with a sharp thorn set in the tip, and his writing surface moist clay pressed on a board. The thorn scratched a circle divided by two straight lines, like a four-spoked wheel.