"Well, looks like this is where we part company," said Drake a little later. The humans were gathered at the edge of the village, where the ridge continued south. "I'll see you back in Fort Battleaxe."

     "Some hope," said Pars. "Are you absolutely sure you won't change your mind?"

      "Absolutely sure," said the priest. "My Lord's will must be done."

     "Then we won't see you again." said the ranger flatly. "Say goodbye, Boris."

     "Don't be so bloody pessimistic," said Gallit reprovingly. "This man has been trained by the great Resalintas himself, and by me. I think he might just make it back." He turned to the young priest. "Take care of yourself, you bloody fool, and good luck. We'll be waiting for you back in Ilandia."

     "I'll be there," promised Drake. "I'll be there in time to fight beside you against the Shads. Count on it."

     They shook hands all round. The Sergeant, the ranger and the two common soldiers. “Good luck,” said Private Grey, squeezing the priest’s hand painfully hard. “If I wasn’t in the army I’d stay and help you.”

     “Me too,” agreed Cheston. “But if war’s coming we may be fighting side by side on plenty of future occasions.”

     “I look forward to them,” replied the priest. “We will send many sinners to judgement together.”

     He then said a brief prayer that they would all be safe and victorious until they were reunited, and then Gallit led the others south, along the ridge and away from the village. Drake watched them go for a while, raising a hand when they paused a moment to wave back to him, and then he turned to the lizard men. “Well,” he said, “Let’s get started.”

☆☆☆

     The lizard men lost no time and made preparations immediately. They put Drake aboard one of their larger reed boats, and four of them rowed him away from the reed community out into the swamp, followed by a flotilla of smaller boats containing a total of fifty lizard men. After an hour or so they passed another reed village, about the same size of the first, where they stopped while one of the lizard men explained the situation to the local karderan, getting his enthusiastic support as well. The karderan agreed to send messengers to all the other villages in the area to spread the word and make arrangements for their young adults to report to Drake for training. Soon, every lizard man village in their patch of territory would know and be joining in.

     Back in the boats again, Drake asked the lizard man in front of him, whose name was Skaralla, how many villages (or cities, as the lizard men called them) there were in their territory. "Lotss, lotss," he replied proudly. "Ass ‘any ass there are sstarss in the ssky."

     Drake thought that was rather unlikely, so he asked him to name them. The lizard man reeled off twenty five names, saying afterwards, "You ssee? Ass ‘any ass there are sstarss in the ssky." Drake said he was very impressed, while thinking that all he had heard about the lizard men's mathematical abilities were correct. They were intelligent enough in the normal realms of everyday activities, but they had no skill with numbers.

     Now then, he thought, if all twenty five villages were the same size as the ones he had already seen, then that meant that there were between three and four thousand lizard people in all. Therefore, he could expect several hundred trainees at least, possibly as many as a thousand. Not all at once, however. The lizard men had told him that the pakin-kho sent the occasional spy in to keep an eye on them and make sure they weren't up to anything, and they would be sure to notice the absence of so many lizard men and grow suspicious. They would have to work out some kind of rota system, with about a hundred or so coming each day, a few from each village so that no one village would be missing more than four or five or so. Even if the pakin-kho noticed the absence of so few lizard men, a believable excuse could easily be made up to explain it.

     A few hours later, Drake saw a small area of woodland ahead of them, and concluded that this was the place to which they were heading. It was an area of about half a dozen square miles raised up above the general level of the swamp, in which the ground was a little firmer and drier, allowing a small forest of mangrove trees to grow. The reed boats came to rest among their tall arching roots and Drake and the lizard men got out, sinking up to their knees in the water. As they made their way into the forest, however, the water grew shallower and the ground became firmer until they were walking on solid earth.

     After a few minutes of walking, they came to a group of a dozen or so buildings made of mangrove wood, very similar in size and shape to the reed buildings he had already seen. "'Any yearss ago, we tried living here for a few yearss," one of the lizard men explained. "Now you will live here until we defeat the fissh ‘en. You'll like it here, very ‘uch like hu'an houssess. ‘Een e''ty for ‘any yearss, old and decre'it, ‘ut we ‘ake it good again. We work very hard, ssoon ‘e good ass new. Then, to'orrow, firsst warriorss come for you to train."

     Drake nodded and watched in amazement as the fifty lizard men dashed here and there, mouths agape and tongues flapping, their tails waving behind them, fixing up and repairing the wooden buildings that had fallen into a rather poor state during their long years of neglect. At the rate at which the lizard men were going, though, they would be back in good condition in no time! They could work really fast when they wanted to, he realised. The common conception of these creatures as lazy and sluggish was quite wrong. Their hard work made him feel guilty just standing and watching, though, so he went to join in.

☆☆☆

     It took nearly three months to give the lizard men the most rudimentary fighting skills. With one hundred of them coming every day to the makeshift training ground in a clearing a hundred yards away from his temporary home, and with a total of a thousand lizard men to train, that meant that each individual lizard man received only ten days of intensive training. Compared with the five years of training that all regular Beltharan troops received, that was very little indeed, and combined with the fact that the lizard men were anatomically very different from humans, moved in different ways, had different strengths and weaknesses, and the fact that he knew almost nothing about how to fight pakin-kho, he was in fact teaching them almost nothing of any practical value.

     What he was doing, however, was giving them confidence, and that, as any commander knows, was one of the most important factors in any battle. In fact, although this particular lizard man community had lived a pacifistic lifestyle for several generations, their own basic fighting skills had not been completely lost, merely forgotten, and under Drake's tutelage their ancestral memories gradually began to come back. More and more often, as the weeks went by, the young priest was surprised and delighted to see them reinvent moves and tactics that had been forgotten for well over a hundred years, and that were still used by the more typical, warlike lizard men who inhabited the rest of the swamp.

     He would have liked to carry on for another month or two, but Skaralla turned up unexpectedly one day, telling him that there was no way they could meet that month's quota of bulrush resin. Just lately, they had had to search further and further afield to find enough of that particular variety of bulrush and now there just wasn't enough left. The rebellion would have to be in two weeks time, when the next delivery was due. Drake sighed and agreed, and together they began laying plans for the great uprising.

     When the six pakin-kho arrived two weeks later, therefore, Drake and a hand picked team of lizard men were lying in wait for them. Standing up to his chest in soupy green swamp water, the young priest got his first view of the lake creatures as they swam past. They were green and scaly, with the heads and bodies of fish, complete with huge glassy, unblinking eyes, large gill flaps and tendrils hanging below their gaping, toothy jaws. Where their large front fins should have been, however, were a pair of very human looking arms which gripped weapons made of a strange greenish metal, mostly spears and tridents. He couldn't see much of their lower bodies, but knew from the lizard men's descriptions that they had a pair of stumpy but muscular legs with webbed feet and a short finny tail. Those legs, he knew, were normally used for walking around on the sea bed (or rather the lake bed). They could walk around on land, but only slowly and clumsily. If they could be lured up onto the land, they would be at a great disadvantage, but unfortunately they were much too intelligent to fall for a trick like that. The battle, when it came, would be fought in the water.

     "Now remember," whispered Drake. "We want to take them alive if at all possible. There’s much they can tell us that I want to know."

     The lizard men nodded in reply, and then swam silently out into the lake, moving like crocodiles, propelled by the sinuous motions of their long, muscular tails. They split into two groups, approaching the small group of pakin-kho from both sides. They kept pace with the aquatic creatures, keeping one eye on the human priest as they did so, and when they reached the place where they’d planned the ambush Drake gave a hand signal. Two more lizard men leapt out of the reeds ahead of the fish creatures, screaming and brandishing their weapons. The startled pakin-kho jumped up in alarm, and the lizard men swimming in the water took advantage of their distraction by leaping up and pouncing on them, bringing wooden clubs down hard upon their heads.

     It should have stunned them, even if only momentarily, but it didn't. The pakin-kho whirled around in the water and lashed out with their tridents, disembowelling one lizard man and opening a deep gash in the arm of another. Drake winced as he watched the engagement, studying the tactics used by the aquatic creatures, noting their strengths and weaknesses. For a moment he thought about going to the aid of the lizard men, but he held back. It was important for the lizard men to win this victory by themselves, thereby gaining confidence. He relaxed with relief as the lizard men rallied and attacked again, therefore, using the moves Drake had taught them at first, but then using moves that came naturally to them. Moves that were imprinted in their genes and that suddenly seemed as natural to them as breathing.

     Two minutes later it was over, with all the sea creatures and one lizard man dead, and Drake finally had something concrete to teach them. He had hoped to take at least one pakin-kho alive to interrogate, but they had learned a good deal anyway and he was well satisfied with the outcome.

     "Now we wait," he said, examining the arm of the injured lizard man and tying a strip of cloth around it.

     "Lasst ti'e, their ar'y ca'e ten dayss after we killed their ‘esssengerss," said Skarilla.

     Drake nodded. "That gives us just about enough time to teach your warriors what we learned here and prepare to meet them."

     "They ssent a thoussand, and you ssaid there will ‘e a thoussand of uss to ‘eet the'. It will ‘e a closse thing."

     Drake nodded again, but privately he doubted that they had sent so many last time, or would again this time. He had long since noticed that the lizard men were incapable of counting above sixteen, that being their total number of fingers and toes, and a thousand could mean any number above a hundred, or even above fifty. That was good. They would need a substantial numerical advantage to overcome their lack of fighting experience and general pacifistic lifestyle. Ordinarily, lizard men could easily hold their own against any creatures that walked on two legs anywhere in the world, but these were no ordinary lizard men and he wondered how they'd been able to survive so long against the much larger numbers of more ordinary lizard men with whom they shared the marshes.