The Red-Stained Wings--The Lotus Kingdoms, Book Two

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The Red-Stained Wings--The Lotus Kingdoms, Book Two Page 16

by Elizabeth Bear


  At least the local technology in mobile siege engines did not yet run to cannon. There were a few inside the walls of Sarathai-tia—designed on imported knowledge and placed by Ata Akhimah. Anuraja’s forces did not seem to be bringing any across the river.

  You took your blessings where you could get them. The last siege the Dead Man had endured, during the final throes of the Uthman Caliphate, had involved more than enough cannon for a lifetime.

  His borrowed horse kept up with Hathi and her passengers easily. He could not see well enough past the vanguard to have much of a sense of when Mrithuri’s sally would make contact with the invaders. But the infantry were not yet running with lowered spears, chasing the whirring chariots. The rank of archers had not yet begun to let their volleys fly. So they were not yet in range for the charge.

  What he could see was most of the makeshift pontoon bridge, and watch the boats that made it up dip and toss as men scrambled to reach the near shore, racing against the defenders who came to cut the bridge adrift, or burn it under them. The archers would have flame arrows.

  They would do what they could. Sarathai-tia would not be easy prey.

  “There they go!” Ata Akhimah yelled from her perch astride Hathi’s neck, legs tucked behind the great, flapping, freckled ears. Her position offered the superior vantage. It was a moment more before the Dead Man saw what she had—the wheat-field wind-ripple of spears lowering in ranks. The thump of running feet, the chorus of shouting voices, the pounding of horses’ hooves followed a moment later, delayed by distance.

  The cavalry and chariots were all Mrithuri’s. Anuraja’s horses could not cross that pontoon bridge.

  Hathi ambled forward, waving her trunk cheerily at all the fuss. She was unperturbed by the clash of arms, the shouts of warriors, the screams and groans of the injured.

  It was strange, the Dead Man thought, to be far enough from the battle that it seemed … not unclean.

  Mrithuri’s archers—closest to Hathi, at the back of the sortie—loosed in rows, then ducked beneath the rectangular shields of stiffened hide carried by their aides. A moment later, a return flight feathered the earth around them. Hollow thuds, like rain on a broken drumhead, resonated from the shields. A few of the longest-ranged fell near enough to Hathi to give the Dead Man pause.

  Apparently to give the Wizards pause as well, because on the rug behind Ata Akhimah, Tsering-la raised his hands and allowed a nimbus of lemon-white light to spill from them. It swirled through the air like ink in water, surrounding Hathi, extending to enclose the Dead Man as well. It painted an enormous target on them, of course. But Tsering-la and Ata Akhimah were already riding an elephant.

  “How did I get to be Speaker to Wizards?” the Dead Man muttered to himself grumpily. But he followed as Ata Akhimah turned Hathi to the right, paralleling the course of the combat away from the river.

  “What do you see?” the Dead Man yelled up to them.

  “A lot more men than I expected,” Tsering yelled back. “I’ve no idea how they’ve gotten so many soldiers across that joke of a bridge this quickly!”

  “Maybe some swam along it on the upriver side?” the Dead Man suggested.

  “Maybe they’re not all there,” Ata Akhimah replied. “He has got a sorcerer, remember. It wouldn’t be his first time using illusion against us.”

  “Kithara Raja,” the Dead Man said, remembering a conversation with Mrithuri where she has explained just such a stratagem. “That will waste some arrows.”

  “But if we can tell our men to charge,” said Akhimah, “there will be gaps in the enemy’s shield and spear wall.”

  “Aye, but they won’t know where they are until they’re on them.” Their shielding light flickered with the intensity of Tsering’s emotion.

  “Well,” the Dead Man said ruthlessly, “the weight of the charge should push them through regardless.”

  Akhimah nodded. She whispered into her hands, then pointed. There was a ripple in the air as her words flew to Pranaj, Mrithuri’s new general, promoted since Madhukasa died taking an assassin’s bullet for his queen. The Dead Man could not hear her words, but he saw the result. The rear rank of Mrithuri’s foot soldiers, beyond the line of archers, seemed to shiver as if they were one eager animal. There was a pause, a moment of stillness. Then, like a wave cresting on the shores of the White Sea, the stillness broke. And fell forward with a renewed momentum, crashing into the banners of the army beyond.

  The Dead Man could see very little. Dust rose everywhere, choking and obscuring—dust! In the rainy season! And his task was not tactics on this day, he reminded himself. It was to assess any threats to the Wizards, and Hathi, and keep them safe.

  More dust from the hills to the right. He pointed to draw Akhimah’s attention; he could not see the cause. The source was concealed.

  Another flight of arrows sleeted around him, deflected away from the Dead Man and his horse and Hathi and her Wizards by those swirls of pale gold light. The Dead Man glanced at his charges and caught Tsering-la in the middle of a gesture like wiping a window free of steam. It seemed as well to wipe away the arrows that would have fallen among Mrithuri’s archers. A moment later, the Dead Man felt a gust of wind sharp enough to make him grab the saddlebow, and understood how it was done.

  He reined his horse alongside Hathi’s enormous head. She reached out and poked him in the arm with a flexible, fibrous trunk-tip, nearly unseating him. It seemed like an affectionate gesture nonetheless.

  He drew a pistol into his left hand, on the side away from those he guarded. Mrithuri’s men seemed likely to turn Anuraja’s men back at the shore, and burn the boats, as they hoped. What the Dead Man could see of the line was moving away, pushing into the invaders, pushing them back.

  It seemed too easy. Until the screaming began.

  “Hold fast!” Pranaj bellowed. “Hold fast, damn your eyes!” His voice carried, amplified by the Wizards’ works.

  A twist of wind carried a new sound of hooves to the Dead Man’s ears. He understood, perhaps. He thought he did, as the defending line in front of him crumbled as if in an avalanche. Anuraja must have sent his cavalry upstream, and forded them, and brought them back down the near bank in concealing terrain.

  “Fall back!” he yelled at the Wizards. His voice did not ring like Pranaj’s. But then, it did not have to.

  Thunderously, Hathi turned. The Dead Man had never seen an elephant whirl before. It was as earth-shaking, as ponderous as he would have imagined—and far more quickly done.

  “If we run, it will be a rout!” he yelled. This might be a battlefield, but even in the chaos of war it was hard not to notice an elephant running away.

  Ata Akhimah seemed to understand. She touched Hathi on the neck and the elephant responded, walking on a long diagonal toward the city gates, but not fleeing the field of combat.

  The Dead Man glanced over his shoulder. Mrithuri’s archers loosed again. They too were drawing back: not exactly in calm order, but not quitting the field in a frenzy, either. Not discarding weapons and armor.

  The Dead Man shuddered. He’d seen such flight before. He did not care to see it ever again, though the image of that past time came to him intrusive and unbidden. Battering at his self-control like a great tree trunk swung against the gates of a keep. His borrowed horse caught his mood and spooked and shied beneath him. He stayed on her as much by luck as skill and shook himself, chastising himself for inattention. He calmed her with shaking hands, thinking everything in this life is borrowed.

  The life itself, most of all.

  Fatalism claimed him, familiar and soothing. He spoke the secret name of his god into his veil, and that calmed him also.

  A little.

  Enough, maybe. How calm did you need to be to watch what you cared for die?

  Maybe he would be blessed to fall first, this time.

  Stop it. All would be as God willed, for Her own reasons. Acceptance of—obedience to—Her will was acceptance of his own fate. He mig
ht die here. If he did, then dying would be over. And what awaited then was just an end to pain, as the priests of Kaalha in Messaline might say.

  He glanced over his shoulder again at the shrieks and clamor. The line was still holding, though it was falling back almost fast enough to count as a retreat. Being driven back, step by blood-soaked step. The Dead Man could see the enemy horse now. They had tried to flank the defenders. They had succeeded, after a fashion, but Mrithuri’s charioteers had managed to swing around and meet them force to force before they could close the crushing grip of the pincher. Some of the screaming was the unbearable screaming of horses.

  It was Pranaj’s voice alone holding the line now. Almost by force of will, as if he sustained each of his men with his own hands, pressed them forward, held them up. But if the enemy horse were willing to turn their backs on the charioteers, take the losses and ride pell-mell down on the Wizards …

  They could reach—and probably destroy—the little contingent the Dead Man guarded.

  Something shattered in the globe of light before the Dead Man’s gaze. Bits flew everywhere, scattering like the sparks from struck flint. The largest portion bounced and rolled away like an enormous parody of a child’s toy. It would have crushed through Mrithuri’s archers and the rest of her men if Tsering-la had not reached out with both hands, and with a grunt of effort somehow … hefted … it aside. It went bounding over Mrithuri’s line and slammed into Anuraja’s, scattering real soldiers—some of them in pieces—and passing ghostlike through phantoms.

  The shield of yellow light was gone. Tsering-la leaned forward, bracing his hands against Hathi’s back. “Fuck, I think I pissed myself a little.”

  The Dead Man watched the bounding thing go, realizing too late what he saw. It was a huge boulder, a stone chipped into a sphere. A cannonball.

  A cannonball from within the defenses of Sarathai-tia. Friendly fire, and it had nearly flattened Mrithuri’s Wizards all at once. Fortunes of war.

  “Your shield!” the Dead Man yelled at Tsering-la, as the sky above the armies was darkened by a flitting pall like the rising of an enormous flock of starlings. The Wizard swore again, and raised his hands with the expression of a man who would like to double over around a cramp. The light shimmered up, ragged and flickering at first, barely seeming to solidify before the flight of arrows spattered from it like rain from a window. The shield was tattered and incomplete, leaving the Dead Man in mind of the torn veils of light that wavered across the night sky in the far cold northlands where he and the Gage had journeyed once.

  Tsering-la tried to push it out, to stretch it over Mrithuri’s men. He moved like a man with a bullet in him, or one who has torn a muscle in his groin. Jerky, clutched around his middle. But still striving.

  Maybe Wizards had some toughness in them after all, and the Dead Man had been uncharitable. But there were more arrows behind the first flight, and streamers of that first flight were raining through the gaps in Tsering-la’s shield like sunlight ribboning through the gaps in a cloud.

  “Where the hell is he getting all these archers from?” Akhimah asked angrily.

  Tsering-la’s reply was right. “I’m not sure there are any. Or that many, anyway.”

  “They’re not arrows,” the Dead Man said, letting his spyglass drop upon its cord. “Or at least, they aren’t arrows anymore.”

  He reined his horse back, watching the black, streaking blurs writhe from their arced trajectories and twist into flocks that moved with the will and volition of birds. Even more like starlings.

  Whether they were birds, or arrows, or something else—they curved and feinted and fell with savagery, pecking and shrieking, upon Mrithuri’s men.

  Carrion birds. He raised the spyglass again. But not crows, and not ravens. Something dull black, not shining, with a more sharply hooked beak, though not much bigger.

  The men shrieked in turn. Even from this far away, the Dead Man could see that the ones who were swarmed waved their arms wildly, swatted, shrieked, and either broke and ran or fountained blood and died.

  The Dead Man stood in the stirrups, craning his head up to the Wizards. Tsering-la, his complexion thunder-green with strain, shook his head.

  The Dead Man swallowed.

  “Fall back!” he shouted. “Tell Pranaj to fall back! Fall back within range of the guns!”

  It wouldn’t get them to the bridge. It wouldn’t get the bridge demolished. It wouldn’t keep the noose of the siege from closing around Sarathai-tia. But it might keep the army alive long enough to rally and make another push.

  It was a testament to Pranaj’s ability that the retreat remained as orderly as it did.

  Before the gates, behind the collapsing front of the army, Hathi and the Wizards made their stand. They would have time to fall back, if worst came to worst. Perhaps even time to make it within the gates, then hold the portal long enough to close them.

  The Dead Man struggled to believe Mrithuri’s people had another push in them. He turned his mare in a tight circle as she fought the rein. He could see the improvised bridge from where she yanked the bit and sidled. It was just a little more than a cannon shot away.

  It seemed very close.

  There was nothing to prevent him from just riding up to it and setting it on fire. A matter of minutes was all it would take. Except there were two warring armies and a pitched battle between here and there.

  Inconvenient, that.

  There has to be a way.

  Well, no, there didn’t. The Dead Man wasn’t naive enough to recite soothing platitudes to himself without that moment of correction. Where there was a will, he knew from harsh experience, there was often no result but sorrow. And the good guys—in that rare circumstance where anything like an actual good guy was determinable—were by no means predestined to win.

  But it also wasn’t over until the last tactical miscalculation was registered and the last hilltop and tower fought for. He’d seen a lot of stunning defeats and last-minute victories in a career that spanned over forty years of active service, from the time he was a lad of ten. Most of that service, he admitted to himself, on the losing side.

  But maybe not this time.

  What the hell. It was worth a try. What did he have to lose except the inevitable specter of defeat, after all?

  Above and behind him, the cannons thundered. It was a sound so long familiar it did not even draw a flinch.

  The Dead Man stood in his stirrups to watch the war. He peered through engloving light to see that Pranaj was firming his line. The charioteers had pushed the enemy horse back, and now Anuraja’s cavalry had lost the advantage of flanking. The defenders seemed to have found their stride, and recollected their will in the teeth of the realization that half or more of the enemy were phantoms.

  Will alone could not win a battle. But lack of will could lose one.

  Tsering had gotten his shields re-ordered. The shrieking flocks of arrow-birds passed overhead, eyes coral and glowing with hate, feathers like clotted blood. Most of them could no longer get through. The Dead Man would see, sometimes, blood on the beaks and talons of those that had succeeded.

  “Fuck that sorcerer,” he snarled.

  Akhimah grunted a laugh. “You first.”

  And now the cannonballs ripped over the defenders’ heads. They plunged through the enemy line, and their passage made it manifest through slaughter which men were real and which illusion. The illusionary ones did not shred apart and scream so redly.

  Cannon were an unholy weapon. An arrow could pierce; a spear could paunch; a sword could sever. These were all terrible things. But none were such a red pen writing wanton destruction as a cannonball. Especially—the Dead Man winced, but for the love of his own life and the rajni’s resisted averting his gaze—especially when the trajectory of the ball fell short and it crashed through the friendly line as bloodily as it might the enemy.

  And they were no more unholy than the arrow-birds.

  Oh, well. No war was per
fect, except perhaps the war in the afterlife aspired to by the fabled warriors of the north. They believed in a heaven of endless, joyous carnage, with resurrection and feasting to end and celebrate each eternal day.

  The Dead Man’s current mood was that he’d gotten enough of carnage in this lifetime, and that he’d prefer to spend eternity reading.

  In the meantime, however: here was a war, and it was once again coming toward him.

  “Fall back!” he yelled to the Wizards, and spurred his reluctant horse toward the defending line.

  * * *

  The defending line was collapsing. Mrithuri, from her eyrie on the walls, could see it all. The cannon had brought them a respite. But she had not enough men to drive a rally, and though they had managed to hold longer than she expected after that unexpected cavalry charge, and though the illusory greater numbers of the enemy no longer paralyzed her people with fear—every bowshot aimed at an enemy that did not exist was wasted. Every sword-cut and spear-jab targeting a phantasm opened the delivering warrior up for retaliation by a real man.

  Her men were doing well that it wasn’t a rout. But it could still become one.

  “We won’t get the bridge cut this way,” Yavashuri said at her shoulder.

  Mrithuri made an angry, inchoate noise. Her head felt fuzzy and full of distractions. She needed clarity. She needed her snakes.

  “Where is Chaeri?”

  “Rajni—”

  Mrithuri turned over her shoulder and skewered her advisor on a glance. “Moralizing is less than useful now. Send her to me. I will be in my stellar.”

  * * *

  Mrithuri shouldn’t snap at the old woman so, and she knew it. Rajni or not, cruelty did not win you loyalty, though fear could net obedience. It was an uncreative obedience, however. One that was afraid to seek solutions on its own. She stalked some of her fury off, Syama pacing at her heels.

  By the time Mrithuri reached the breezy broad-windowed room at the top of her palace, she was deciding how to apologize. She still intended to do what she must, but she wanted her advisors to challenge her. Biting their heads off was not the means by which to ensure this.

 

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