ather carefully prepared the ground inside the narrow canyon pass between Nicea and Eribulus, the place he intended to fight either his or Selin's final battle. The open fields of Bithynia to the south had 2,600 years earlier given Alexander the Great the room to outmaneuver Darius's Persian hordes. Father had no intention of facing Selin's relatively enormous army of fifty thousand on that fabled battleground and turning the Turkish bantam into a second Alexander, as Selin's superior numbers and his swift-moving cavalry would make short work of our soldiers in open country. Our only advantage lay in the fact that Selin no longer had any way to contact the Empire's observation satellites, nor did he have any aircraft; he was thus as blind as we were. In the rocky cliff above the pass and to our left Father's scouts had located a small pathway that was inacces sible to horsemen and heavy infantry. There a single file of lightly armed troops could advance unseen from the canyon floor. Father sent five thousand Boers onto the high pathway and set the remainder of his men in the narrow defile at the bottom of the pass where only ten men could stand shoulder to shoulder. Father's plan was to draw Selin into the constricted pass and check his advance while the Boers moved along the high path; from their vantage point the light infantry would rain down grenades and incendiaries upon the enemy below them as our men advanced to cut off the one possible line of retreat. In their rush to escape the trap in which their overly aggressive general had placed them, Selin's men would panic; those not trampled in the headlong retreat would be cut down from above or overtaken by the organized advance of Father's heavy infantry. To improve their position, the men at the front of Father's army dug four shallow trenches before their lines so that Selin's men would have difficult footing as they drew near and would in effect be fighting upslope and down while our men would shower them with bullets from the sure footing of a section we had leveled off to give our troopers a firm place to stand. Our men had removed the heavy armor plates from several disabled vehicles from our old base at Van City; these plates they buried upright in front of the leveled ground, which gave them some additional protection from enemy fire. Kneeling behind the upright shields, our men could kill their foes at twenty feet, while their opponents would have to close to point-blank range to do us any damage.
While they waited, our soldiers made themselves as ready as they had made the patch of earth where Father had chosen to make his stand. They rubbed greasy fire retardant over their faces and forearms to protect them when the flames started. Those few with long hair-mostly men from the East-tied their tresses atop their heads as part of a strange ritual they had learned from their warrior fathers, who had in turn learned it from their fathers. Each made his final prayers to his particular gods; they kissed their amulets and their hens' feet, and some made the sign of the cross, for although Christianity was no longer prescribed in the army, the men were allowed to consider every possibility in those anxious moments when they could hear Selin's troops approaching. While everyone could still hear, the men shouted encouragement to each other and said good-bye to those they had served with for many years.
In the last hour of the morning, our men saw the drab breastplates of Selin's troopers moving toward them. I was far to the rear of Father's army, yet I could hear the enemy soldiers banging their mail fists off their body armor and making thunder echo off the canyon walls. They called out to Father's men to surrender as Father's soldiers had called out to the deserters in the Rockies.
"We have the real emperor on our side!" they shouted. "Don't fight! Come over to us!"
Father had set his best, most experienced Boer soldiers at the front. They held their fire until the men opposite them had reached the shallow trenches and had to drop their eyes to direct their feet; then Father's select men pressed close to the carbon armor plates and fired into Selin's ranks. Their sabots had been powered with extra packs of methane boosters, and they sped their shaped loads through the first three enemy rows, impaling man against man. The Boers overhead simultaneously hurled thousands of incendiaries onto the close-packed enemy, and those who looked up could only watch the lethal spheres descend upon them. Father's men in the very front did not give an inch to the crush of Selin's superior numbers; those behind them passed forward loaded clips of ammunition and allowed their comrades to fire volley upon volley into the stunned enemy. Within seconds of the battle's start the four trenches at our front were filled with the dead and dying, creating a barrier over which Selin's men could not advance. The larger army could not charge over the piles of their fallen comrades without exposing themselves to more volleys of supercharged sabots. At the same time they could not engage the light infantry creating the hailstorm striking them from above. The thousands of foot soldiers and mounted cavalry at the rear of the enemy army pushed farther into the narrow pass and jammed the troops before them into even tighter ranks and rendered them yet more helpless before our weapons.
As these events were unfolding inside the heart of the canyon, Selin sent thousands of his lightly armed auxiliaries up the same high pathway the Boers were using. I had anticipated this move before the battle began and had advised Father as to what he should do. The Boers' advance guard had lain in hiding on higher ground and caught Selin's auxiliaries by complete surprise when the latter men tried to clamber up the far end of the trail. Our troops had taken the crest of the mountain first; the enemy had the steep uphill slope before them and were nearly as helpless as the heavy infantry trapped on the canyon floor. Selin's auxiliaries fell off the cliff walls in fiery clusters of hundreds when they blundered into the Boers' barrage of incendiaries. From the rear of our positions I could see them cascading down the sheer gray wall and onto their compressed allies. The confusion among the enemy was total. Unable to strike at Father's soldiers, Selin's men attempted to fight their way through their own ranks while their enraged general screamed at the personal guard around him to press on. The cavalry at the enemy's rear literally rode down the infantry before them and fired their sidearms into the backs of their comrades until the heavy infantrymen turned and killed them. The little Turk's personal mounted guards, composed entirely of several thousand members of his sun-worshiping clan, rallied about their beaten general to protect him from their army's breakneck retreat.
At this moment of absolute triumph, when Father's army had emerged as if from the grave to win a complete victory, an officer on Father's staff ran back to him and caught him by the forearm.
"You have done it, my emperor!" the man exclaimed. "Your victory this day will live for a thousand years!"
"We're not through yet, sir," said Father. "You see that green flare from way down the pass? That is the signal I've been waiting for! It means that hothead Selin has sent his entire force past my Boers! Push the men on! We have them all!"
Father drew his pistol and charged into the ranks. His men cheered him as he surged toward the front lines. He gaily waved back to them as if he were strolling through a parade review. The soldiers lifted up their rifles in celebration of the victory that was apparent to them as well as to the enemy.
"On, boys!" Father shouted. "We'll show this rabble what real PanPolarians can do!" he told his army, which was composed mostly of alien mercenaries and most of whom could not hear him above the tumult anyway.
The rows of men pushed onward for Father's sake. Father ignored the pleas of his officers to fall back. Bullets and shrapnel pellets were flying about him as he drove onward over the heaps of enemy dead at the trench line, over the last organized lines of Selin's infantry, into the roiling mob the beaten enemy army had become. Hundreds of enemy soldiers, who only minutes before had beckoned Father's men to surrender, threw down their arms and let themselves be captured. Father took off his helmet so the men in both armies could see how he had contempt for danger. His bald white forehead and his sunburnt face had the leathery look of every veteran serving long years in the sunny eastern provinces. He was one of his men, and his men were such magnificent warriors they were destroying an opponent who outnumber
ed them by nearly three to one.
In those happy minutes, when he knew he had beaten Selin, Father was the undisputed emperor of the northern world. Everything that had happened to him and his family and the powers gathered against him no longer existed. He had endured the likely prospect of his death and the scorn of the powerful and their scheming, and he could still say to himself, "I will arise tomorrow in spite of everything I faced today! Defeat was a dream, a dream for others now, not for General Black! What are these frightened men retreating before me? Are these the same ones who last night sat at their campfires and boasted of bringing me to Selin in chains? They are shadows! Let them melt into the other shadows in the Earth's dark crevices! They will plague me no more!" He knew then why in every statue of an emperor the ruler's gaze is elevated above the vision of other men, for in those happy moments Father, the former sergeant, could look down the narrow pass, beyond the present carnage, and glimpse the same glittering prize only a very few had seen before him.
Whatever he saw, fate did not allow him to gaze upon it for long.
Strong winds arising from the sea and rushing across the land are common in that portion of the world. Within the constricted mountain passes of northern Anatolia these winds are severely compressed and can be made as strong as a wall of water rushing from a broken dike. Such winds can knock a strong man flat on his back if they take him by surprise. During those sweet moments when Father had won the battle and made himself emperor, one such wind charged into the pass between Nicea and Eribulus. The Boers on the high ground were nearing the end of the pathway and about to cut off the whole of Selin's army when the unlucky wind hit them straight in their faces. The unexpected blast knocked several of the light infantrymen off the cliff altogether, sending them to their deaths in the canyon below. Others among them were knocked back onto the high pathway, even as the flames were pushed forward onto more of Selin's trapped men. In the ensuing confusion, Selin and several hundred of his personal guards turned and sped toward the open end of the canyon. The Boers were able to recover their footing in a few seconds and to surge forward once more. Our men still cut off the line of retreat for the vast majority of the enemy in the narrow defile, yet Selin and some of his relatives escaped into the open country to the west ahead of our advance. The Boers fired their rifles at the fleeing little Turk and his cohorts, and they did kill several of the horses, although at that range the bullets bounced harmlessly off the enemy's body armor.
Word of Selin's disgraceful retreat quickly spread through the trapped mass of the enemy. Within minutes those in the front of the broken mob were attempting to surrender to us and pleading for favorable terms, promising to commit to Father's cause. At first Father's men continued to slaughter Selin's defeated army. Father had to demand his senior officers run forward and order the men to cease firing. Even then the command had to be relayed to the Boers on the high pathway before the firing ended several minutes later. Then we made the enemy march single file from the canyon and made each man give up his armor and weapons as he passed through our ranks. For eight long hours the surviving forty-one thousand enemy soldiers made their way to our rear, and only then did Father have any horses with which he could mount a pursuit of Selin. By then, as could have been expected, the other emperor was far away, and we had no hopes of catching him. The thousand mounted infantry we sent after Selin returned to our camp during the night with only a handful of the little Turk's relatives to show for their effort, and none of them had any notion of where Selin might be.
"I cannot trust any of you," was Father's judgment upon the forty-one thousand prisoners, some of whom had earlier been members of Father's army.
"But I will spare you," he told them. "The Lady Sophia instructs us to forgive even those who have sinned against us."
Father was not doing the defeated men any favors by letting them wander into the hills of Anatolia. Unarmed former soldiers of the Empire set free in a rebellious province were marked men. The indigenous peoples of Turkey, like those in North Africa and western Asia, were rising against Pan-Polaric rule and could be expected to kill any soldiers they got their hands on. Our own force of seventeen thousand marched west toward the Bosporus and the relative safety of Europe, wherein most of the people were not Muslim and had not rejected rule by a Pan-Polarian emperor-not yet anyway.
Father had by then lost sight of whatever it was that he had glimpsed down the canyon when the battle was being won, and we traveled in a much gloomier frame of mind in spite of the victory we had won.
our years before the battle in the pass a messenger had flown to Father in Turkey inside a coughing, sputtering, propeller-driven airplane and had told us Father had been named cospeaker of the Senate.
"You are to remain here," the messenger informed him.
That was such a curious order even my unworldly father thought it was odd.
"Shouldn't a speaker of the Senate serve his term in Garden City?" he asked, as the Senate normally elected two such officers to preside over their affairs every two years.
"The chamberlain Cleander bids you remain where you are," said the messenger.
"Cleander bids me?" said Father. "Shouldn't the emperor be the one giving the orders?"
"The emperor is preoccupied," said the messenger, and explained no more.
Father was a gentleman and did not ask with what the emperor was occupied.
"Am I a speaker for foreign or domestic affairs?" asked Father, for such were the separate obligations of the two offices.
"Does it matter, sir?" asked the courier with a shrug.
Seven months later another messenger visited Father on the Eastern frontier.
"Congratulations, Peter Justice Black," said this second man. "You are speaker again." (As befitted a man in jeweled armor, this courier was more formal than the previous one and he kept his hand over his heart while he addressed Father.)
"Again? I thought I still was," said Father.
"There have been six others since you were last in, sir," said the messenger in the fancy armor. "There could be some more by the time I get back home."
"Why has Cleander given me this honor?" asked Father.
"He said you did well the last time you were in office, sir," replied the messenger.
There would be twenty-five cospeakers that year. Most of the other officeholders would purchase the great honor from Cleander for a few days at a time. Father's first consulship had been a gift from the fuel factor Mr. Golden; his second term in office occurred because Cleander had, by a fortunate turn of circumstance, murdered the gentleman who was speaker at the moment, and the chamberlain needed someone to hold the position for as long as it took to seek new bidders. Rich men remained eager to have the title (particularly when Cleander intimated they should purchase the position from him or perhaps die an early death), and within a couple weeks' time someone with ready cash took Father's place.
We heard nothing more from Garden City until November, when we received notice that Father was to return to the capital; the emperor needed him. The tenor of this summons, brought to us by a man on a fast sailing yacht, was not threatening, it was in fact slightly pleading, and for once we returned to Garden City without the usual anxieties that destination inspires in travelers, albeit we had to make the journey on the same sailboat that had brought the messenger to us in Turkey.
At Tampico we heard that Father had been not only speaker but a prefect of the City Guardsmen for six hours nearly two years earlier. A merchant on the ship with us revealed the incident to us for the first time as we pulled into the harbor.
"Cleander says to the Concerned One," the man narrated, "`General Black's got the guards this morning till I get the old prefect buried and a new one elected.' He always gives you these positions, sir, while he's waiting for another offer. Around the first hour of the afternoon some bigshot buys the post for a couple days, and you're out without knowing you was in, don't you know?"
"I was in the East at the time, sir," sai
d Father.
"What's that got to do with the price of cheese?" asked the cheeky fellow. "I tell you this, my lord, that Cleander could sell water to the fish. He's the cleverest man in the city, which makes him the cleverest man in the world, doesn't it?"
After the emperor, Cleander had certainly made himself the richest man in the Empire. The former chicken farmer of dubious heritage had done well in the three years since his conversation with Father in the garden. He had continued to live as humbly as a Hindu holy man as his wealth and the number of his crimes grew; for a residence, he maintained a small house built onto a wing of the palace much as a toadstool is fastened onto the roots of a mighty tree. He still never wore garments more extravagant than his plain gray suit. A stranger from a distant land would not suspect, unless he were told, that this slender reed of a man controlled the administration of the entire faltering Empire or that all the leading men in Garden City feared the serene, unimposing Cleander might any day decide to kill them and sell their positions to someone else. It was he, and not the emperor, whom Father first called upon when we entered the central section of the capital and noted for the first time that millions of wood fires inside the millions of homes had created a smoke cloud to replace the carbon monoxide haze that once had lingered over the city.
The Martian General's Daughter Page 15