by David Drake
“I doubt many who were in those boats with you think that, Raj,” Gerrin said soberly.
“Learning by experience can be prohibitively expensive,” Raj said. “Next, the Brigaderos we sent back to East Residence. They’ll need to be retrained, and then they’ll need officers. We won’t be in charge of that, but between us I think we can have some influence, and it’d be a shame to waste material that good under incompetents. Messers, I’d appreciate it if you’d each prepare me a list of men you think suitable, and we’ll see what we can do. Next, promotions, demotions, and gold-of-valor awards.”
They worked their way through the huwacheros, toast and kave, then through a round of kave and cigarettes. He saved the disagreeable signing of death-warrants for last. There was always someone who didn’t believe the stories about how hard-ass Messer Raj was about mistreating locals. None from the 5th Descott this time, thank the Spirit . . .
“Does that wrap up the military end of it?” Raj said. He looked out the window; with a little luck, he could get his butt into the saddle this afternoon and do some hands-on work. A chance to avoid Bureaucrat’s Bottom a little while longer.
“All but the Star question, oh Savior of the State,” Gerrin said. “When do we get on with the rest of the bloody campaign?”
“According to the latest dispatches from East Residence,” Raj said judiciously, “negotiations between the Ministry of Barbarians and General Forker are proceeding, mmmm, in an orderly but discreet fashion due to turbulent elements in Carson Barracks. Interpret that as you will.”
“Meaning, Messer,” Dinnalsyn said sourly, with the experience of a man brought up in East Residence, “that Forker can’t decide whether to crap or get off the pot, because the barb commanders are running around rubbing their heads and wondering what hit them. And the Ministry bureaucrats are sending each other memos consisting of competitively obscure literary allusions and strings of references to precedents back six hundred years. Which is probably what their predecessors were doing six hundred years ago when we lost the Old Residence to the Brigade in the first place.”
“Pen-pushers,” Zahpata said, striking his forehead with his palm.
“I’m assured that the relevant experts are working earnestly for a peaceful solution to the issues in dispute,” Raj went on dryly.
“That bad?” Kaltin said. He tore open a roll. “With the relevant experts working for peace, you know we’re going to have war, Messer—but not until the worst possible time.”
“Bite your tongue, Major,” Raj said. “My estimation is that between them Forker and the Ministry will do exactly that, string things out until the onset of the winter rains and then decide to fight after all. Decide that we should fight.”
This time the curses were genuine and heartfelt. With local variations the whole Midworld basin had a climate of warm dry summers and cool-to-cold wet winters. The northerly sectors of the Western Territories got snow, and the whole area had abundant mud. On the unmaintained roads of country under barbarian rule that meant morasses that clogged dogs’ feet, sucked the boots off men and mired guns and wagons. Plus foraging would be more difficult, that long after harvest, and even hardy men were more likely to sicken with chest fevers if they had to sleep out in the rains. Disease had destroyed more armies than battle, and they all knew it.
Spring and fall were the best seasons for campaigning; early summer after the wheat harvest was tolerable, although bad water meant cholera unless you were very careful about the Church’s sanitation edicts. High summer was bad. Winter was a desperation-only nightmare.
“Nevertheless, if it has to be done, we’ll do it,” Raj said. He quoted from an ancient Civil Government military handbook: “Remember that the enemy’s bodies too are subject to mortality and fatigue; they are initiated also into the mysteries of death, as are all men. And even their rank-and-file include a good many landed men, their reservists particularly, who won’t be used to living hard. I want us ready.
“Ehwardo,” he went on. The last living Poplanich looked up. Raj tapped several red-covered ledgers beside him. They had the Ministry of Barbarians seal on their covers, with the odd grain-sheaf subseal of the Foreign Intelligence division.
“Coordinate with Muzzaf and see what you can do about these intelligence reports. I want digests, including what new information you can get from local sources. Chop out the political bumpf and verbiage and the unfounded speculation; give me hard information. Manpower, weapons, road conditions, weather patterns, regional crops and yields and foraging prospects, what railroads the barbs have running, local landowners and Sysups and how they lean.”
“General,” Ehwardo said, already looking still more abstracted. Raj nodded; Thom’s cousin was one of the few noblemen he knew who really appreciated numbers and their uses.
“Messers . . . to work.”
The room felt larger after the officers had left, with a clack of the heel-plates of their boots and a jingle as they hitched at their sword-belts. Historiomo cleared his throat and glanced at Suzette and her protegé.
“Messa Whitehall has my complete confidence,” Raj said.
“Ah. So I was given to understand.” A long pause. “I am to understand, then, that the Most Valiant General is pleased with mine and my colleagues’ work?”
“Pleasantly surprised,” Raj said. “It’s important to this war that we have a secure and productive forward base; Stern Isle is the obvious candidate.”
He ran his hand over a preliminary report on land tenure on Stern Isle as it had been under the Brigade and would be with the massive transfers of ownership following the conquest. Dry stuff, but crucially important. Cities and trade were the way a few people made their living and the odd merchant grew rich, but land was absolutely crucial to everything. Not just that the overwhelming majority everywhere were peasants, land tenure was the foundation of revenue and political and military power. His own studies, his instincts, and everything Center had taught him agreed that there was nothing more useless than an unconsolidated victory. Conquest without follow-up would crumble away behind him.
The problem was that he was to expert administration what say, Colonel Boyce was to combat command—he could recognize it when he saw it, but lacked inclination and talent himself for anything but the rough-and-ready military equivalent. Which was to the real thing as military music was to music.
“Yes.” Historiomo pushed his silver-rimmed glasses up his nose. He was the sort of soft little man you saw by the scores of thousands on the streets of East Residence, with carefully folded cravats and polished pewter buckles on their shoes and drab brown coats. So nondescript it was always a bit of a surprise to see him, as if you’d never met him before.
“Yes, Chief Administrator Berg did tell us that you and your household were not the general run of military nobility, Most Valiant—”
“Messer will do.”
“Messer General, then.”
“Berg,” Raj said with a cold smile, “struck me as being not in the ordinary run of bureaucrat. Once he’d been convinced that I wanted him to cooperate, but intended to get the job done whether he did or not.”
“Indeed.” Historiomo took the glasses off again and polished them. His voice grew a touch sharper, as if the blurring of vision removed some constraint. “You find us of the Administrative Service, ah, excessively cautious, do you not, Messer Whitehall?”
Raj shrugged. “I have a job of work to do in this world,” he said. “To do it, I have to take men as I find them.”
“We’re used to being despised,” Historiomo said with polite bitterness. “The military nobility always have; it’s find us supplies for twenty thousand men, or why aren’t the roads ready? But do they listen when we explain? Never. They worship action at the expense of thought, and think that you can overcome any problem with a sword and willpower. They impose solutions that make problems worse and we have to work around the wreckage. Or a Governor shoots his way to the Chair and then thinks he can order us t
o do the impossible. We’re the ones who have to tell them no.
“The patricians—” he cast a cautious look at Suzette; the urban nobility was her class, and that of Chancellor Tzetzas “—make an art of intrigue and a god of form at the expense of content. They monopolize the great offices of State and plunder them without shame or thought for long-term consequences, and we take the blame. And everybody mocks us, our forms and paperwork, our fussy little precedents. Yet who is it that preserves the institutional memory of the State, who keeps the Civil Government from turning into another feudal hodgepodge of squabbling barons? Who keeps things together and the public services functioning through defeats and civil wars and bad Governors? We do.”
“Agreed,” Raj said.
Historiomo started, cleared his throat and fiddled with his pen-case.
“Messer, I’m called the Sword of the Spirit of Man. That means I know what you can’t do with a sword. I’m not the pen, the voice, or the conscience of the Spirit. I’m the Sword; I chop obstacles out of the way; I keep the barbarians from burning the cities around the ears of people like you. I do my job; and when I find someone else who can do his, then I don’t care if they’re nobleman, patrician, clerk, merchant. Starless Dark, I don’t give a damn if they’re Colonists or barbs.”
“Most Valiant General,” Historiomo said, rising and neatly stacking his document boxes before fastening them together with a leather strap, “I won’t say it’s a pleasure to work with you. Alarming, in fact. But it is a relief, I assure you, Messa Whitehall.”
He bowed deeply and walked out with the strap over his shoulder.
“Well, that’ll teach us not to judge a scroll by the winding-stick,” Suzette said. She bent over the crib beneath her table. “I think this young lady needs to be changed, Fatima.”
When they were alone, she smiled at Raj. “And what, my darling, is my function with the Sword of the Spirit?”
“You keep him from going completely fucking insane,” Raj said, smiling back.
“So far.”
“So far.”
CHAPTER TEN
“You are all conspiring to drive me mad,” Filip Forker said, pulling off the light ceremonial helmet and throwing it to the floor with a clang. “Mad, mad!” Shocked murmurs rolled for a moment down the long chamber, until the armored guards along the walls thumped their musket-butts on the floor. Once, twice, three times; when they returned to immobility, the silence was complete.
Attendants closed in around the Brigade monarch; one passed a damp cloth over his face, and another got in a lick with a polishing cloth at the thin silver breastplate the slight little man wore. A minister murmured in his ear; after a while Forker’s face set in an expression of petulant resignation, and he sat again.
“Go on, go on.”
Even the high arched ceiling and meter-thick walls of the Primary Audience Hall couldn’t take any of the muggy heat out of a Carson Barracks summer. The temperature outside was thirty degrees Celsius, and the city was built out of dark basalt blocks and set in the middle of a swamp; in winter the building would be chilly and dank instead, for all the great arched fireplaces at either end of the Hall. The skylights sent shafts of light ten meters down into hot gloom, with the wings of insects glittering as they crossed from shadow into sun. Very little light or air came in through the narrow slit windows.
The men who had built—ordered the building—of the Hall hadn’t exactly intended it as a fortress. If anything, it had originally been designed to hold large assemblies for public address, and incidentally to intimidate petitioners. Standing off attackers had not been far from the builders’ minds, though, and ordinary comfort just wasn’t something to which they had attached much importance.
The Civil Government embassy rose from their stools below the Seat and bowed, hands on chests.
“If Your Mightiness will deign to examine these documents once again,” their leader began again, with infinite patience. “Much will be made clear, as clear as the Operating Code of the Spirit.”
His Namerique so perfectly adjusted to upper-class Brigade ears that it was more conspicuous than an accent, coming from a dark clean-shaven man in a long embroidered robe. A gesture suggested the age yellowed papers on a side table below the Seat without the vulgarity of actually pointing.
“You will see that by agreement between your . . . predecessor His Mightiness General Oskar Grakker and the then Admiral of the Squadron Shelvil Ricks, in the time of our Sovereign Lord and Sole Autocrat Laron Poplanich, Governor of the Civil Government of Holy Federation, may the Spirit upload the souls of the worthy dead into Its Nets, the bulk of Stern Isle was granted as dower property to Mindy-Sue Grakker and the heirs of her body and Shelvil Ricks. Which is to say, the Admirals of the Squadron, which is to say—since ex-Admiral Connor Auburn has been persuaded by grace of the Spirit to lay down the unseemly usurped sovereignty which Geyser Ricks unrighteously seized—which is to say, the heir is our Most Sovereign Mighty Lord Barholm Clerett, of the Spirit of Man upon Earth. In no way, most Mighty General, could the repossession of Stern Isle therefore be held a usurpation or aggression; for on the contrary righteousness consists of acting rightly—”
The voice droned on for another twenty minutes of rhetorical strophe and antistrophe, spiced out with appeals to truth, justice, reason and comparisons to events that no Brigade member in the Hall besides Forker himself had ever heard of. Unlike most of his nation, General Forker had had a comprehensive classical education; it was one major source of his unpopularity.
At last he broke in peevishly: “Yes, yes, We will read your position paper, Ambassador Minh. At our leisure. These matters cannot be settled in a day, you know.”
“Your Mightiness,” Minh said, bowing again in profound agreement.
“Who’s next?” Forker asked, as the Civil Government ambassadors bowed themselves backward, as neatly choreographed as dancers. Despite the heat and the prickly rash under his ceremonial uniform, the sight mollified him a little.
They know how to serve, he thought.
“Your Mightiness, the inventor and newsletter producer Martini of Pedden, currently dwelling in Old Residence, desires—”
“No!” This time Forker brushed aside the helping hands as he rose. “When will you learn not to waste my time with trivialities?” The minister leaned close again, but the Brigade ruler interrupted him: “I don’t care how much he paid you. This audience is at an end. We will withdraw. Send the Chief Librarian Kassador to my quarters, after I’ve had a bath.”
Stentor-voiced, a Captain of the Life Guards called: “Hear the word; this audience is at an end. So orders our General, His Mightiness Filip Forker, Lord of Men.”
The great hall echoed, cracking as the guards stamped their musket butts again on the floor and then brought the long weapons to port arms. Two platoons along either wall marched up to the Seat and out across the vacant space between the petitioners and the commander’s dais, then did a left-wheel to face the crowd. The captain snapped another order, and they began to march forward in slow-pace: with the foot remaining poised for an instant before it came down in a unified hundredfold crash. It was a showy maneuver and perfectly timed. It also let everyone get to the big doors at the rear in an orderly fashion, without allowing any loitering. Nobody who saw the Life Guards’ faces doubted that getting in their way would be a bad idea.
Forker and his entourage left by exits in the high arch behind the Seat. The remaining men were officers and nobles too important to be hustled out with the bulk of the petitioners and not close enough to Forker to leave by the VIP entrance within the royal enclosure. They made their own way out the main doors, as the Guards countermarched back to the walls and settled into position again. Footsteps echoed, with most of the sound-muffling human bodies out of the barnlike structure. Banners hung limp above their heads in the still, musky air. The bronze clamps that held ancient energy-weapons to the walls were green with verdigris; the lasers themselves were as bright as
the day reverent hands had set them there, down to the stamped 591st Provisional Brigade on the stocks.
“What do you know, Howyrd,” Ingreid Manfrond said, lowering his voice slightly as they walked out past another line of guards onto the portico. “His Maybeness actually made a decision without countermanding it.”
“Wrong, Ingreid,” Howyrd Carstens replied.
His friend wore the fringed jacket and tweed trousers of an off-duty noble, the leather strips ending in gold beads; there were gold plaques on his sword-belt, rubies on the elaborate basket guard around the hilt, and his spurs were platinum. The sword-hilt and the hand that rested on it had both seen real use. Carstens was in the green-gray-black uniform of the General’s Dragoons, with Colonel’s insignia.
“He must’ve settled something with the grisuh last night,” the officer said. “This was to confirm it publicly. And he chickened out; probably afraid we’d hack him to pieces on the Seat.” A rare occurrence but not entirely unknown in Brigade history.
They paused and lit their pipes, two gentlemen with gray in their beards and long clubbed hair talking idly in the shade of the portico on a hot summers day, beneath one of the three-story columns hewn in the shape of a Federation assault landing boat. Ushers came and returned their revolvers: nobody but the Life Guards carried firearms inside the Hall.
The parade square ahead of them was five hundred meters on a side; the black bulk of the Palace behind them, the four-square Cathedron of the Spirit of Man of This Earth to their left, with its façade of glass mosaic, and the Iron House of War to the right. Dead ahead to the north was a gap, where the road ran down off the artificial mound into the main part of the city. Canals were as numerous as roads, and the houses were squat two-story structures with few exterior windows but a good deal of carving and terracotta-work painted in bright colors. Carson Barracks was the only major town in the Western Territories built wholly since the Brigade arrived down from the Base Area two centuries after the Fall.