“As it was, they conceived an elaborate scheme and divided themselves into three parties, all disguised as my guards. One party set fire to the roof. The second would rescue you from the fire, and when they were safely out of the house the third would dash up and stab you. Even with all these foolish complications, they might have done their work if it had not been for Apelles. He saw that the second party were not the new watch of guards, but impostors, and gave the alarm. The man who wounded him also knocked down the ladder in the struggle. One man fell from the ladder and the other man was trapped and burned to death on the roof.”
Tylara could not keep back a smile. Her would-be murderers seemed to have been a pack of prize fools. Had Yatar addled the murderers’ wits to save her?
“Have you—is there anything you may tell me of who hired those men?”
“Matthias, priest of Vothan, fled the camp before True Sunrise,” said Strymon. “Several of his men went with him. They passed the northernmost of our outposts before the alarm, and told the officer of the guard that they were on urgent business for the High Rexja.”
“I suppose that can be called the truth,” said Tylara. “Fleeing from the headsman is certainly best done in haste.”
Strymon’s smile was forced. “My lady, how much do you know of Ta-Meltemos?”
She shrugged. “We hear stories—”
“Yes, yes. Stories you are too polite to repeat. They are true. My fathers seems in good health, and has a sweet and forgiving nature. But—” Strymon swallowed hard. “He cannot find his way from bedroom to throne room without a guide, and lately we do not even dare have him appear on state occasions.”
“I had heard,” Tylara said gently.
“The last time, he rose from the throne to question the High Marshal of Ta-Boreas about sweets and children’s toys.”
“Then you govern the land.”
“I confess I do not. I have always been a soldier. You must understand, until recent years Wanax Palamon was as good a king as ever ruled our land. It was only when he—changed that Toris took new advisors, and the first wars between Drantos and the Five Kingdoms began.”
“Your brother—”
“Was much younger then. Lady, Ta-Meltemos is ruled by Chancellor Rauros. He was sent to us by Issardos, and found much favor with my father during his declining years. Now he is sometimes—Lady this is not easily said. There are times when Palamon recognizes no one but Rauros. Not even his sons.”
“It cannot be easy, living in such a court. I see now why you and your brother would prefer the field. In your place I would do the same. Prince Strymon, do you believe that Rauros knows of this plot against your honor?”
Strymon pressed his lips into a thin line. “I do not know. But I will know.”
“How?”
“Yes. That is the question, is it not? The only men I can trust are soldiers with no more skills at intrigue than I have.”
You need a woman. I will find you one. But for now—“There are priests of Yatar whose loyalty is to honor and the gods. They might serve you well.”
“Priests of this new religion?”
“It is not new, Highness. It is the religion of the starmen. We—New Christians—honor all the commandments of Yatar. We also recognize His Son, the Christ.”
“I must think on this.”
“Of course. For now, we must think again who is behind this plot. The High Rexja—”
“Again, I do not know. I can say nothing against the High Rexja. Nor can Teodoros.”
“You asked him?”
“Yes, my lady. My brother says he doesn’t know anything about plots.” Strymon shrugged elaborately. “I would be surprised if he did. It is not in his nature.”
“Issardos,” Tylara said carefully.
Strymon nodded. “It would not surprise me if Chancellor Issardos had a hand in this. It would insure war to the death between Ta-Meltemos and Drantos. If half what you say of Lord Rick’s abilities is true—and Matthias has, it seems, seen Lord Rick in battle—then I might well die in such a war. That would leave Teodoros on my throne.”
“As Issardos’ puppet,” Tylara said softly.
Strymon sighed. “I love my brother, but—yes. I can trust Teodoros, but without me to guide him, he would be no match for Issardos. I doubt Issardos would care if Teodoros ruled over ruins and beggars, so long as he could not disturb the peace of the Five Kingdoms.”
“Issardos is a fool,” said Tylara. “The Time will disturb everyone’s peace, and the skyfolk will do worse.”
“Perhaps a fool, but a dangerous one.” He straightened and squared his shoulders. “You will sleep and wake surrounded by my guards, and eat and drink nothing that has not been tasted first.” Strymon raised his voice. “The baker who prepared the honeycakes and those who sought your life last night have an appointment with the headsman. Their bodies will be cast into the middens and their heads borne through the camp by heralds crying out ‘Here be hardy traitors, who sought the lives of the Crown’s prisoners.’ ”
Strymon looked around the tent, then lowered his voice to a true whisper. “That should discourage the faint-hearted. With Matthias gone the stouter spirits have no leader. If these measures are not enough, I swear by Yatar, Vothan, and Hestia that I will release you without a ransom and send you to your husband.
“Yet I would not do that before we have talked further. I have thought on what you said yesterday, and I have listened to my own priests of Yatar tell about the Time. It seems it has never been easy for the Five Kingdoms.”
“This my husband says.”
Strymon fell silent. Then he turned and paced the length of the tent. For a moment he stared at the tapestry of dragons spitting skyfire onto a melting city. Then he took a deep breath and turned to Tylara. “My lady, there may be ways to bring peace to the Realms of Drantos and Ta-Meltemos.”
Tylara caught her breath. She was not wholly surprised. But I thought it would take much longer. Inwardly she thanked Matthias and Issardos for making her work easier.
Now I know why the gods spared me. Am I fit for this task? Dayfather, Warrior, Mother, you have given me back my life. Now give me strength and wisdom to use it in your service.
23
Rick Galloway looked at the map on the camp table in front of him. An inkwell, a dagger, and a pair of gloves held down the corners and kept the hot wind off the Westscarp from blowing the map as well as the dust all over his tent.
If maps had faces, Rick decided, this one would be wearing a sullen frown. He remembered telling his “General Staff” classes that you should always look at a map when you couldn’t think of what to do next. The map would almost certainly tell you something.
The problem was that the map wouldn’t always tell you anything you didn’t already know. The map in front of him was a case in point. The blue pins showed the twelve thousand men of his Army of Chelm exactly where they’d been the day before, and the day before that, and the day before that. Same thing with the red pins for the twenty-odd thousand men in the High Rexja’s Army of the West.
It wasn’t the odds that bothered him. Two to one wouldn’t be enough against star weapons and Tamaerthan archers. Some of the enemy captains were veterans of Sarakos’ campaign, of course; they would have seen the archers and the weapons in action, and might have worked out tactics to make them less effective. Still, tactics wouldn’t hold troops together if the one-oh-six started dropping WP into their formations from five stadia away. Black magic did a lot to wreck morale—at least the first time around. Rick was pretty sure that if he was willing to use up most of his ammo, he could keep the Army of the West from fighting again, at least for another six months.
The problem was, the High Rexja’s captains had learned something even more important than how to meet star weapons—they’d learned scouting. Maybe they’d always known something—a lot of their cavalry was light stuff, mounted on centaurs or scrubby little hacks like Scots border horses. Those ponies could scatter
across country and live on forage where heavy cavalry mounts would starve.
Certainly they’d learned a lot from a year of fighting the Westmen. The ones who’d survived were light cavalry of a quality that Rick had hoped he wouldn’t see on the other side for quite a while. A dumb hope, he now realized—nobody but Yatar could make sure that your enemies would always learn slower than your friends, and Yatar seemed to be sitting this one out.
So he couldn’t hope to take Captain General Ailas by surprise and defeat him in detail. Ailas would get word in time and pull his three “divisions” together. Or maybe he would hold with two and send one around Rick’s rear. He might even just stay where he was, with his army divided into three for better grazing and water supplies, and wait for Rick to move—forward or back, it didn’t matter. As long as Rick and his men were here in the west while the main army of the Five Kingdoms crunched into Drantos farther east, cutting it off from Rome, Ailas was helping win the war for his king without killing a single enemy!
It didn’t help that only half of Rick’s army was cavalry, and their mounts weren’t in the best shape. The rains had stopped and now the streams were drying up. Before long Rick might have to move his army just to stay near water.
What I need is the Tamaerthans. Pikes and archers. Then I could move them up, and to hell with Ailas. He can attack good pikemen with heavy cavalry and get his lunch, or he can hang back and let the archers have at him. Either way—
None of it mattered though, because he didn’t have the archers and pikemen. Ganton did. And I hope to God he uses them better than Morrone did.
I’ve got to get up there where the real action is. This is nothing but a holding operation.
As for here, he’d have to do something soon enough or withdraw without a fight, and that would lose him his reputation for invincibility. When that went, a lot of men would go with it, some because they wouldn’t follow a leader who wasn’t lucky, but a lot more because they didn’t want to abandon their lands and would swear fealty to Toris to keep them.
Tylara wouldn’t like that. Wouldn’t she ever. If they ever sat down and had it out over what she’d done with her junior-grade ninjas, she’d be able to claim that he’d betrayed his own men and her just as badly. Stalemate—and from there Rick could see things going in a lot of different directions, most of them labeled “from bad to worse.”
He looked at the map again. Lost reputation or not, he’d better put the army on the move before it had to move to stay near water. Then there’d be too good a chance of Ailas cutting him off from water and doing to at least a part of his army what Saladin did to the Crusaders at the Horns of Hattin.
The key to the campaign was that damned light cavalry. Ailas had been using it to scout in front of his army. Suppose he had to watch his rear? “Damn right,” Rick said aloud. “Now who do I send?”
There weren’t many candidates. The striking force had to be all cavalry, and there was a good chance it wouldn’t be coming back soon. That ruled out leading them himself, but the leader would have to know modern tactics and weapons. Somebody who would be obeyed by both mercs and Tran soldiers, and knew the territory well enough to make a small force do the work of a big one.
Exactly one man matched that description.
“Jamiy!”
His orderly appeared and saluted with a click of heels. (Rick wondered how much of his income from bribes Jamiy spent on new boots that would click properly.)
“My compliments to Lord Murphy, and I’d be pleased to see him at once.”
“Sir!”
* * *
“—stays dry for another couple of days, the water in Dead Gunkel Lake will be down enough for us to march along here.” Ben Murphy traced a line on the map with a forefinger.
“That’s pretty close to Ailas’ Second Division, isn’t it?”
“There’s a couple-three klicks of scrub and thicket just above the shore, between the lake and the camp. Even bandits don’t go there very much. It’s full of patches of quicksand and something that must be a wild cousin of madweed. Stinks like it, thorns like it, and it makes you crazy if you put the sap in booze.”
“They could still get wind of your movement, and put an ambush at Gorgon Pass to cut you off.”
“Not if we have a couple of heavy weapons along. Blast ’em out with a mortar or the Carl Gustav, and pick ’em off with one of the LMG’s as they run.” He frowned. “Mortar’d be better, I think. We don’t have to have it in line of sight, now that I’ve taught some of the local kids flag signals.”
“Sergeant Murphy, what the hell makes you think you’re going to have any heavy weapons at all?”
“Captain, I’ve been thinking it over. I know there’s a risk of losing them. but if I don’t get some of the big magic, my people might start wondering if they’re being sent on a suicide run. I may not be able to get them out of the camp, let alone keep them from running away if it hits the fan. And look, we can do a lot more damage with some heavy firepower. I think you want to stomp the bastards, not just tickle them!”
“What you really mean, Sergeant Lord Murphy, is that you won’t order your people out without heavy-weapons support.”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
Sure. And now what? I don’t need a crisis just now.
Jamiy’s blank expression matched Murphy’s. Rick hoped no one could ever pry this story out of him. It would make a story to tell, all right, one of the starmen bargaining with the Lord Rick. Shades of Parsons’ and Gengrich’s mutinies!
Not really, though. This wasn’t an officer dealing with an insubordinate NCO, it was the Captain General of Drantos dealing with a bheroman who owed it to his people not to put them in needless danger. Murphy couldn’t really do much else. But I bet the SOB. is having fun.
“Okay, Lord Murphy. You can’t have the Carl Gustav anyway, and I’d rather give you some rifle grenades than an LMG. You shouldn’t have to face a massed attack. We’re damned sure going to have to if it comes to the crunch.”
“Captain, if you give me an LMG I think I can beef up my force with Mad Bear’s Westmen. They’re used to raiding, and if they think they have some really big wizards on their side . . . Besides, I think they’re not too happy sitting around camp half the time.”
True enough. Despite Mad Bear’s oaths, his three hundred warriors weren’t really pulling their weight in the campaign, because nobody except Ben and a couple of his men-at-arms knew how to handle them. Not many in the army trusted them, either. There’d been a few nasty incidents—not too many, considering that a lot of men in the camp had lost homes and kin to the Westmen, but enough to worry about.
“I’m going to have to be sticky about the LMG, Lord Murphy. What about some rockets?”
The bargaining went on long enough for Rick to send Jamiy for more wine. They compromised: a section of First Rockets with twenty-five rounds, and Second Engineer’s portable ballista with twenty bombs, but no LMG. Ben would take two hundred and twenty-five Westmen warriors; the rest would stay in camp to protect the women, children, and remounts.
“That’s five hundred men, near enough,” Rick said.
“Yes, sir—”
“It’s enough. During the Civil War Ben Grierson covered Grant’s advance on Vicksburg with not many more, and he had to face a lot better men than Ailas has.”
“That right? Yes, sir. I’ll try. There is one more thing—”
“Yeah?”
Murphy poured himself more wine. “I want your permission to swear blood-brotherhood with Mad Bear.”
“Holy hell—why?”
“Captain, the thing is, if I’m blood-brother to Mad Bear he can never fight against you again unless I release him from his oath to me. Or you release me from mine to you.”
Better not ask what else Murphy might feel released him from his oath to his Captain General. “You’ve got a point. Go on.”
“It’ll also help in picking the men to go, ’cause they’ll all want to, and I may hav
e to order some to stay behind. They’ll take it better if I’m sworn to Mad Bear. Besides, I may have to order night marches. Mad Bear doesn’t worry about demons as much as he used to, but a lot of his people do. If I’ve sworn never knowingly to put a warrior in the path of demons . . .”
“Okay, okay. Swear anything you think you can keep without having to rebel, only tell me about it afterward. Fair enough?”
“Sure thing, Captain.”
After Murphy left, Rick considered the new lesson he’d just learned. It wasn’t the stupid mercs who were dangerous. There were some who thought modern weapons could let them live as petty kings, but they weren’t the problem. It was the smart ones, like Gengrich and Murphy. The ones who knew how to give loyalty as well as take it.
The ones who knew how to be feudal lords.
* * *
Ben Murphy scrambled out of the warm, muddy stream. Rough-barked branches and sharp blades of grass scraped and pricked his bare skin. Hell of a skinny-dipping party. Not a girl in sight. And Dirdre wouldn’t like it if there was. It was funny how possessive she was now that they were hitched. Even funnier was the fact that he didn’t mind. Dirdre was a damned fine woman, even if she probably wouldn’t ever forget Lafe Reznick. Reznick had been one hell of a good man. One of the happiest days of Ben’s life at Westrook was the day they dedicated the shrine to Lafe, so that all the young men could come ask his spirit to bless their weapons and give them courage in war—
“Come, brother-to-be.” Mad Bear’s voice broke into his thoughts. “It is time to run.”
They loped up the north side of the little valley. Ben gritted his teeth as the stones and scrub punished his bare feet, but pushed himself as hard as he could. He didn’t want Mad Bear to have to hold back for him.
By the time they reached level ground, Ben had worked up enough of a sweat to satisfy any reasonable god. Wouldn’t old Father McCarthy have a fit if he heard that!
He stumbled and nearly fell as a root snagged his left foot. He didn’t need Mad Bear’s warning cough to remind him that falling on his face now would bode very badly for their blood-brotherhood. Murphy emptied his mind and settled down to the run.
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