Helm

by Steven Gould

  Koss smiled. “Definitely covert. Two men per station, I’d say. Light traffic to be sent twice a day. Be careful with the sight lines—we don’t want interceptions.”

  “Yes, sir. We’ll send the men in as peddlers, merchants, and perhaps a pilgrim or two. Standard code?”

  “No. Break out the next series from cryptography and route all traffic as if it’s going to Apsheron—whoever you put there will retransmit on the covert line.”

  “How soon?”

  “Before the first arrow flies. That gives you three weeks.”

  “It shall be done.”

  “Good. Carry on.”

  The halvidar saluted and left. Koss looked at the map again, at the two stewardships between Laal and the Plain of the Founders. Both of them were part of Greater Noram, and Malcom de Toshiko of Pree was so close, he was like family. Napa was also close since all three stewardships shared a border with Cotswold. They’d all come to each other’s aid in the years of border fighting.

  Laal took the brunt of it, though. The mountains of Pree and Napa went right up to the Cotswold border. Only Laal had low hill country south of the Cloud Scrapers, with only the Black River as a geographic barrier.

  So why does Dulan want to hide communications from his two closest sister states and his own liege?

  They did the march from Noram City to the plain in five days, even though it was the same distance they’d traveled in ten days with Arthur de Noram’s party. Gahnfeld was happy. “Now this is a military pace.”

  When they crossed the border between lesser Noram and Napa, the areas of fecundity became more widespread, interspersed with rocky barrens rich in lichens, tough wire grasses, and stubby, gnarled bushes. Villages, farms, and inns were few and far between.

  After the midday break, when the Eight Hundred were well under way, “I’m taking the Seventh ahead,” Leland told Gahnfeld.

  “Sir?”

  “Having trouble hearing?”

  “No, Warden. How far ahead?”

  Leland laughed. “Not far. We’ll rejoin you before supper. Maintain this pace,” he said, then asked his horse for a canter.

  Gahnfeld watched Leland’s standard-bearer and the two four-man squads of his personal guard fall in behind him. Leland slowed when he reached the Halvidar of the Seventh and called something. The halvidar gave one startled look back at Gahnfeld then raised his signal fan and signaled with a series of quick arm motions.

  A squad from the front of the Seventh shot ahead down the road, passing the Eight Hundred’s point riders, and two other squads went left and right, as flankers. Then the remaining eighty-eight men moved from the trot to a canter, then to a slow gallop.

  They kicked up a great deal of dust, and Gahnfeld pulled his bandanna over his nose and mouth until the light breeze carried it away. They were out of sight in ten minutes, beyond the next gentle hill.

  Gahnfeld watched the dust of their passage for a few minutes, then gestured with his signal fan: Order of March: Hostile country.

  Almost immediately the Fourth and First hundreds, traveling at the rear, just in front of the freight wagons, pulled to the side of the road and stopped, making way for the wagons, whose drivers cracked whips to move them ahead, into the main body of the caravan. The First, now at the very rear, detached a quarter of its men to fall back a full kilometer. The Sixth, now leading, sent a quarter of its men up, as point. The Third sent a quarter of its men out on the right flank, and the Eighth sent the same out on the left flank. Archers riding in the body of the caravan strung their bows.

  I don’t know what you’re planning, young Leland, but you’ll not take us by surprise.

  They passed several likely ambush sites over the next two hours, low passes through hills, areas with overlooking high ground or enough scrubby bushes to hide men. The last likely site, a dip through a rocky wash lined with a garden of house-size boulders, was safely past and the entire column was traversing a rocky plain of brown grass and lichen affording little cover. The flankers had moved ahead, racing toward a low ridge in the distance, to check it for hidden dangers.

  There was a signal from the forward scouts on the road: Commander returning.

  A few minutes later Leland and his personal guard topped the ridge and rode down toward the column. Gahnfeld rode forward and met them fifty meters in front of the column.

  Leland was smiling and Gahnfeld, irritated, saluted and said in his most formal voice, “Did you have a good ride, Warden?”

  At this, Leland laughed out loud, slapping his knee. “What’s the matter, Myron? Afraid I lost the Seventh?”

  Something like that. “I’m sure the Warden knows best. However, if it wouldn’t be too presumptuous of me, I would like to know where they are.”

  Leland looked back over his shoulder, at the ridge. “Well, about ten of them are two klicks up the road with all of the unit’s mounts.”

  Gahnfeld nodded. “And the rest of the men?” Leland gestured left and right. “All around you.”

  Gahnfeld looked around him at the empty plain. “And where might that be?” Leland took his battle fan from its saddle sheath and spread it, then gave the distinctive butterfly motion that meant advance.

  Around them, on both sides of the road, the ground shifted. What had seemed to be patches of grass or shrub resolved into poncho-clad soldiers. In addition to the green and tan ponchos, the soldiers wore circles of fish net threaded with tufts of grass and branches of shrub. They held their bows, strung, arrows nocked. Their faces had been darkened with dirt and charcoal.

  The nearest one, hidden a mere five meters from the road’s edge, was the Seventh’s halvidar. He was grinning openly. “One of the point scouts rode right over me,” he called, spreading his poncho and pointing to a hoof print near the lower edge. “Luckily, I wasn’t under that part of the poncho.”

  Gahnfeld opened his mouth several times but he could think of nothing to say.

  Finally he lifted his signal fan and gestured forward, Recall scouts. The humor of the situation finally overcame his irritation and embarrassment. “Well done. Very well done. I think the scouts, though, will walk the next two kilometers, while your men ride back to their mounts. Perhaps this will get them to examine the landscape a bit closer in the future.”

  He swung down from his own horse and stepped forward, holding out the reins to the Seventh’s halvidar. “And you might as well start with mine.”

  Chapter 14

  SEI: MOTIONLESS, INACTIVE

  At the Black River, on the northwest edge of the plain, Leland and Gahnfeld, riding ahead with the point scouts, surveyed the water running under the bridge.

  “This is the Black?” The river, a narrow, violent series of rapids, looked nothing like the broad placid river on the southern border of Laal.

  Gahnfeld nodded. “Yes. Five major rivers and a host of smaller ones join it before it reaches Laal. The Ganges is a bit bigger, but it’s just as wild.”

  Leland looked at the bridge. The wood was newly milled but the stone breastworks at either end looked old. “Did they just rebuild this?”

  “A year ago. Nullarbor held the plain last summer but lost it in the fall. When we hold the plain, we burn all the bridges across the Ganges, on the other side of the delta. When the Rootless hold it, they burn the bridges on this side.”

  “Sounds wasteful.”

  “Wastes trees, saves lives,” Gahnfeld said.

  A unit of Noram infantry was stationed at the bridge. In addition, a coronet and mounted squad from Marshall de Gant’s headquarters unit was waiting to guide them to their station on the Ganges, on the other side of the plain. “Coronet Parker. I’m to be your liaison officer.”

  “Pleased to meet you. Halvidar Gahnfeld here is my executive officer. He’ll introduce you to my unit commanders.”

  IN WAR, DEFENSE IS HARDER THAN OFFENSE.

  So, we’re an expert at war?

  NO. WE SAW Seven Samurai TOO MANY TIMES.

  What?

>   NEVER MIND.

  The sacred plain was really gently rolling hills rising from the Black to the middle of the plain and then settling back toward the Ganges. They passed freshly harvested fields of corn, soybean, peanuts, wheat, and maize. Loaded grain wagons, headed east, passed them several times, headed for granaries on the safe side of the Black. Even if the Rootless took the plain, they wouldn’t get this year’s produce.

  At the end of two hours they’d crossed half the plain and stopped for a rest.

  “So, that’s them, eh?”

  Gahnfeld, silent beside him, just nodded.

  The ceramic ablative skins of the shuttles were untouched by the passage of time. They stood, squat blunt shapes, vines growing over their landing gear, poking up into the dark empty holes of the spent solid-fuel thrusters. The noses were pointed at the sky, and the doors, large sections of bulkhead, were opened permanently out, revealing cavernous interiors stripped of salvageable materials over three centuries before.

  ONE-WAY CARGO PODS. AEROBRAKING—ONLY ONE CHANCE TO LAND. CHRIST! WHAT A RISK, BUT THERE WAS NO CHOICE, WAS THERE?

  If you say so.

  From a large barracks built off to one side, the caretakers came out to answer questions, solicit donations, and keep the wandering soldiers from climbing on the shuttles. Leland wandered closer to one group of young soldiers and listened to the singsong repetition of one caretaker’s voice.

  “—ty years the Founders lived on this plain in peace, building a golden society in peace and harmony. Rebuilding the population lost during the first winters. Then Josh Townsend had his vision, his infamous revelation. His cult of New Luddites smashed the computers, the imprinters, the four working helicopters. They torched the cultivating equipment and called for the abandonment of technology, the ‘demon that destroyed Mother Earth.’ It took most of a day for the rest of the settlement to organize and stop them. Before they were captured, the cultists had taken over half the original library and, unable to burn or tear those books, cast them into the Ganges.

  “The cultists were over a thousand strong, nearly one-tenth of the population. For their sin, they were cast out, to travel the barrens across the Ganges, where naught but thin grasses grew between rocks and gravel, where no one piece of land would support them, doomed to wander with their flocks and horses lest they deplete the land and starve. To that place without trees, Nullarbor, to be forever without roots.”

  The Rootless no longer spurned technology completely—they’d added steam tractors to the land they farmed in the south, but they were still largely nomadic and gave lip service to Josh Townsend’s original injunction against any technology not powered by human or animal muscle.

  One of the recruits asked a question. “What do you do when the Rootless hold the plain?”

  “The same. Our function is sacred. The Rootless recognize this.”

  Leland wondered if Josh Townsend’s vision was described as an “infamous revelation” when the Rootless came to view the shuttles, but he didn’t ask.

  He caught Gahnfeld’s gaze and said, “Time?”

  Gahnfeld nodded and clapped his hands together, then signaled assemble with his fan.

  They moved on, reaching the Ganges an hour later, then turned upriver. They passed some of the earlier units already established at the fords, places where the combination of low ground and shallow water would make the river passable in a week or two, when the water fell.

  Staff Coronet Parker led them to a place where the ground rose steeply and pointed out a flagged pole sticking in the ground near the road. “Here’s where your post starts, Warden. There’s another marker a kilometer and a half upstream. They just finished cutting the fall hay in the fields on the other side of those trees.” He indicated a thin line of trees running from the river to the road.

  They couldn’t see the river from where they were—the ground rose toward it and, at the top of the rise, thick stands of pine and birch grew.

  “I know this post,” Gahnfeld said. “The river is uncrossable here. Even when the water drops, the cliffs make it secure. Why have the Eight Hundred been assigned here?”

  “I believe,” Coronet Parker said, “that Marshall de Gant intends to use your mounted infantry in reserve. This post is central to fords upstream and down.”

  “Ah. That makes sense.”

  Leland stared at the trees at the top of the hill. “Get started on the camp, Gahnfeld. I want to take a look at this cliff.”

  Parker went with the unit to show them latrine sites and the wells dug by previous units.

  Leland, escorted by his guards, threaded his way through the wood at the top of the rise. The trees grew all the way to the cliff, though a trail, several meters back, paralleled the edge. Leland dismounted and walked the last bit.

  The river was twenty meters below, a wild cascade of rapids beneath rock walls that rose steeply on both sides. The opposite cliff was slightly higher and about twenty-five meters across the gorge. The trees on the other cliff top were smaller and less dense, accenting the differences in fecundity between the sacred plain and Nullarbor.

  Leland leaned over the edge. Below, the gorge was actually wider where the water had undermined the cliffs.

  It wouldn’t take much, Leland thought, to throw a bridge across the cliff tops, but, he supposed, both sides were probably alert to such an action. As if to illustrate the point, he saw a flash of brown and white downstream and pulled back, slipping behind a tree and waving his escort back into the wood.

  Across the gorge, a small party of the Rootless trotted into sight, paralleling the cliff top and scanning Leland’s side of the river. He counted nine of them.

  A regular patrol, or are they looking for us in particular?

  They wore leathers and their saddle quivers were full. Their double-recurved bows, shorter than the straight longbows carried by Laal troops, were strung and ready. They continued past, apparently without spotting Leland or his men.

  He returned to his men and they rode along the cliff trail, at a slower pace than the Rootless. When they’d reached the point where the hillside dropped back down to join the river, they could see tents on their side of the river and soldiers filling sandbags. He spotted the banner of Scotia.

  “Ah—Mildred de Fax’s pikes and archers. This must be where our stretch peters out,” Leland said. He turned back away from the river and rode through the trees back to the road. Sure enough, the second flag was there. They returned to the unit as they were making camp.

  Gahnfeld saluted when he rode up. “There’s a small farmhouse in those trees that we’re setting up for you.”

  “What happened to the owners?”

  “They clear out every fall. If we keep the plain, they’ll come back after the snows drive the Rootless south. In the past, it’s understood that such properties are left in as good a condition or better when the campaign is over. Unless we’re retreating under fire, that is.”

  “I see. I want sentries along the cliff, hidden, every fifty meters. Regular posts. Have the watch officer record all enemy activity as he makes his rounds. I want a summary three times a day.”

  “Yes, sir. Every fifty meters. We’ve a kilometer and a half so that’s…thirty men, plus watch commanders. Three-hour shifts?”

  “You know best. I’d like a staff meeting after supper.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And speaking of staff meetings, should I be calling on Marshall de Gant?”

  “Next week, sir. Coronet Parker told me there’ll be a staff meeting after the last of the units arrive.”

  “So we can do as we like for a few days. Excellent.”

  Chapter 15

  IRIMI: TO ENTER

  Leland had unpleasant memories of the Needle as he climbed the tree. It was a giant fir, thick with needles. In the spaces between the branches, his men had lashed extra steps and handholds. He couldn’t see up and he couldn’t see down. All around was a sea of dark-green pine needles.

  But
, unlike the Needle, Leland could feel the tree move.

  Finally he saw the platform above, the observation post. He stuck his head up through the hole and the two men crouching there saluted but didn’t stand—that would be dangerous. One moved aside to make room.

  Branches had been bent, pulled into place and lashed, to make a living screen, blocking the platform from observation across the river. They could see out, though, over the lower trees between them and the river, and the still-lower trees on the other side.

  The tree cleared its fellows on all sides, rising another eight meters above the platform, but, at this height, the trunk was only as thick as Leland’s thigh and the stiff breeze was making it sway noticeably. Leland clenched his teeth and gripped the platform firmly.

  “So that’s it, eh?”

  The coronet in charge said, “Yes, sir. You can see it more clearly in the telescope.” He handed Leland his collapsing spyglass.

  Leland pulled it out to its full length and peered ahead. A gap between two trees on the far cliff top showed a patch of stretched canvas, probably a tent, and the passage of many men and horses. This wasn’t at all unusual. The Rootless had been arriving for the last three days, setting up tents a prudent distance from the river and picketing their horses. Looking upriver and down, Leland could see the dark tents and the rising smoke from fires.

  The river was still dropping and not quite passable, but arrows had been exchanged across the water and a sentry from Acoma had been killed.

  Leland focused the glass and watched. The tent was large and opulent, about a kilometer back from the river. There were guards and men who waited outside to see someone within.

  “Maybe it’s a brothel?” Leland suggested.

  The coronet laughed. “Haven’t seen any women, sir. But there’s some big chief in there. A lot of the men waiting are commanders in their own right. See the sashes?”

  Leland could see them. The men waiting wore woven sashes across their left shoulders down to their right hips. They didn’t carry bows but were often attended by others who did. Unarmed men offered them food and drink while they waited. It was hard to tell from this distance, but they seemed like older men with touches of gray and white in their hair and beards.