by Robert Adams
Of a day, Sub-strahteegos Thoheeks Tomos Gonsalos and Senior Captain-of-brigade Thoheeks Portos of Pithahpolis, willingly, smilingly handed over their cutlery to the zealous troopers, then passed in to find Bralos seated in a backless chair, his weals all shiny with unguents, conferring with his senior lieutenant, Hymos.
Drawing up stray chairs, the two visiting officers asked for wine, and Hymos himself went to fetch it, for the two bodyguards still were close to their squadron commander and the two visitors were, after all, unarmed and presumably friendly, besides.
"How is the empanelment going?" asked Bralos.
Portos snorted. "Slowly, thanks to that obtuse old man, thank you. He wants it packed with his toadies, naturally, and we are just as dead set that it will be packed in no such way, but a fair, honest aggregation of honorable gentleman-officers. It helps us mightily that you hold the ranks—civil and military—that you do, for the most of the old man's proven toadies are untitled and low-ranking young men, and we can all thank also the narrow-arsed Ilios for much of that, for he didn't like Pahvlos' old staff, said that they all were aged and ugly and, for all their experience and expertise, not at all the kind of men that should be always around. Of course, the infatuated Pahvlos indulged the whims of the little pooeesos, and now he shortly will be hoist up by his own catapult.
"You see, the panel may consist of any number of officers above the minimum of eight for hearing of a case against any captain-of-squadron or -battalion; however, the panel must be entirely composed of officers of your rank or higher. In order to be even considered, a man of lower than your military rank must be your superior in his civil rank."
"So the Grand Strahteegos," put in Tomos Gonsalos, "has found himself to be lodged between a rock and a hard place, to his distress. Almost every officer of your rank or higher has recently come to fear or hate and despise the Grand Strahteegos, and we have stoutly fought off his every attempt to insinuate officers not technically qualified for inclusion. We have received, today, earlier, a tentative roll of the panel. Of the ten, seven are men well known to you: me, to head it; Portos, here; Biszahros and Ahzprinos; Nathos, the elephant-man; Pintos, the senior quartermaster since Pahvlos booted him from off his staff because his looks didn't please sweet Ilios; and yet another former staff officer, Lahreeos."
"And the other three?" queried Bralos. "What of them, Tomos?"
Tomos grimaced as if he had just tasted something a bit rotten. "Until three days ago, Captain-of-staff Gaios of Thehsmeeyee was a mere lieutenant, not even a senior lieutenant, he'd not been in the army long enough to have earned a senior lieutenancy; he's one of Pahvlos' and no mistaking it ... but we may be able to find a way of disqualifying the bugger yet. We can't be sure of the other two—they could be his, they could be ours, they could be strictly neutral, too, men who'll make a decision based solely upon testimonies and evidence heard and seen."
"Why not Guhsz Hehluh, or Pawl Vawn?" asked Bralos. "There's the captain of the artificiers, too, for that matter; Nikos is a good man."
Tomos sighed. "Because the first two are not Ehleenohee, and because Pahvlos declares that all three are mercenaries, not his regular troops, and are therefore completely unqualified to sit on the panel and try a regular officer."
"Now, wait a damned minute," protested Bralos heatedly. "The last I heard from that old bastard was that I was a mercenary who had had regular foot-guards assaulted by other mercenaries. If you need a witness, just go ask Ehrrikos, he was there."
Tomos flashed a glance at Portos, and then both nodded. Tomos said to Bralos, "Be that as it may, for the nonce, the Grand Strahteegos has declared and avowed before us both that at no time did he truly consider you and Wolf Squadron to be anything save regular Ehleen light cavalry. He states that it was you and you only he tagged with the name 'mercenary scoundrel' and that if that appellation was not properly understood by you and others, he now regrets it."
"Is it then so?" said Bralos. "Then, pray tell me why the old bugger has not paid this squadron's wages in going on six months? I and Wolf Squadron seem to be and have been mercenary troops when it pleases this lying, conniving Grand Strahteegos, but regular Ehleen troops when it does not so please him."
"Well," put in Portos, "there's precious little we can do about that matter at this juncture. But who knows what the futures of any of us may hold? Rest well and long and recover quickly as you can, son Bralos, for by this time next week, we just may have agreed upon an officers' panel to settle everything . . . I hope and pray."
Tomos shrugged. "Hopes and prayers are all well and good, my friends, but judging only upon what has happened, and not happened, recently, I must be pessimistic and conclude that the firm choice of a full panel may take longer than merely one more week."
However, before any panel of officers could be formally invested, the most displeased Grand Strahteegos played one of his hole cards, ordering almost all of Council's army on the road to Sahvahnahspolis, far and far to the east of the Consolidated Thoheekseeahnee. It was a march that no single officer or man in his command was at all anxious to undertake, calling as it did for some two or three days and nights of marching through and camping in swamps and salt fens which happened to be the territory of huge, scaly, predaceous monsters, deadly snakes, strange and hideous fevers, bottomless concealed pits of quicksand and, by far the worst of all the terrors awaiting them, the barbarian swamp-dwellers or fen-men.
Not a few of the officers and soldiers were terrified at thoughts of even entering that dim, damp, death-crawling realm of the sinister fen-men, who were seldom seen and who killed from a distance with blowgun darts steeped in poisons—estimates of the actual distance, accuracy and lethality of the poisons varied greatly, dependent mostly upon just how close was the individual speaker to fear-induced hysteria at the time of the telling.
But it was cold, hard, incontestable fact that entire companies and battalions of well-armed and -led troops had marched into those fens that bordered most of the eastern and southern coasts and never returned, their bodies not even being found, nor any traces of their weapons and equipment. Such incidents as this had most recently occurred during the infamous "March of Royal Conquest" of the late, unlamented and last king of the Kingdom of the Southern Ehleenohee, which land was now metamorphosed into the Consolidated Thoheekseeahnee of Southern Ehleenohee. Leading his vast host of hundreds of thousands, High King Zastros I had marched into the southernmost lands of the Kingdom of Karaleenos on an ill-starred, poorly planned military operation that had ended in disaster and the deaths of him and his queen on the banks of the Lumbuh River.*
On the march north, however, when harassed on his right flank by fen-men, he had sent units into the swamps after the raiders. Smaller units had been lost entirely; of larger ones, ten to fifteen percent of the original units had returned, stumbling from out the swamps all bearded and filthy and starved, afflicted with strange fevers, skin diseases never before seen by the eeahtrohsee, bloody dysentery and degrees of madness that bred sleeping and waking nightmares. When he once had debriefed a few of the officer-survivors of the largest unit to come out of the swamps more or less alive, High King Zastros had never again sent troops into the deadly swamps and had, indeed, seen that the march-route of his columns was narrowed so as to be well to the westward of the peripheries of the salt fens and the barbarians who dwelt therein, for all that it slowed the progress of his horde considerably.
That the Grand Strahteegos Thoheeks Pahvlos was now clearly intent on forcing his entire army into another patch of these brooding places of death was, in the eyes of his already more or less disaffected men, but more evidence that their once-revered commander had changed, drastically and for the worse, and now meant them all no slightest good. Even so, they had taken their oaths, sacred oaths, and so they all, perforce, felt that they must obey . . . all, that is, save for the individuals who found or made the time and the opportunity to take hopefully-permanent leave of their insane co
mmander, the army and all.
The traditional Ehleen punishment for apprehended deserters was simply death—by hanging or decapitation, usually. But despite his well-earned reputation as an army traditionalist, there was nothing traditional about the manners in which the Grand Strahteegos dealt with deserters or with any other common soldiers who chanced to break one of his new plethora of rules and edicts—which seemed to ever expand in quantity, even as the earlier ones became ever stricter.
In the little cleared space behind army headquarters, wherein he and Ilios, his catamite, lived in a suite of ground-floor rooms, he had had erected two whipping-frames of heavy lumber, a rack and a massive table fitted with straps and manacles. There, shaded by an awning, he and Ilios would sit and drink cooled wine and nibble at fruits and bits of cheese or crisp biscuits while men were slowly whipped to death or permanently crippled on the rack or blinded with sharp stakes or otherwise mutilated while chained and strapped to the bloodstained table. And the men used so atrociously for his enjoyment were not deserters, but mere troopers who had tried to visit women beyond the perimeters of the sprawling camp, had been caught bringing women into the camp, had been apprehended with unwatered wine or any other potable than wine, had been caught with pipes, tobacco or hemp in their possession or had transgressed in any way against the hordes of near-senseless rules and regulations that his brain continued to invent and his staff continued to churn out for distribution to his command.
For deserters and those guilty of crimes of a truly capital nature, the old commander had had the official army execution site adjacent to the drill field enlarged to include four permanent poles for crosses, two double gallows, and a raised platform fitted for either a whipping-frame or an impalement stake; another platform held the frame of a rack and a table that was the mate of the one behind his headquarters building. Beneath each of the platforms were low sheds wherein were kept the smaller but necessary implements— braziers, whips, pincers, branding-irons, manacles, straps, ropes, prepared oaken impalement stakes, an assortment of sharp knives of various sizes and shapes, hand-bellows for making coals burn hotter, iron bars for breaking bones, mauls for pulping hands or feet, differing sizes of pliers for drawing or breaking off teeth or for tearing out tongues.
Now the common soldiers drilled beneath the shadows of wheeling buzzards and of flocks of black carrion crows winging swiftly to the grisly feast which awaited them, dangling from gallows-beams or roped to crosses, pretenderized by floggings and savage tortures.
At two meetings of senior officers of the army with their Grand Strahteegos, old Pahvlos had blamed the increasingly high incidences of sell-back of rank among officers and desertions of common soldiers on a general breakdown in discipline engendered by excessive coddling of the troops. A prime and flagrant example of this distressing trend was, he noted, that of the thief and mutineer Captain Vahrohnos Bralos, onetime commander of the lancers of the Wolf Squadron. He had then harangued his captive audience for almost an hour, each time, on the deadly dangers to discipline and order of treating the common soldier like more than the dumb, unfeeling, seldom thinking brute that he actually was. Such dangerous and larcenous officers as Vahrohnos Bralos, he noted, who frittered away ill-gotten monies on such things as expensive clothing, extra—and completely unauthorized by traditional practices—items of armor, food as good as some junior officer messes, better wines than the army could afford and even tobacco, were underminers of morale among the unindulged soldiers and the very bane of an overall commander's existence.
The senior officers heard him out—what else could they do?—but the few who took his diatribes to heart had been of his personal clique before he had begun. Most of the officers recognized just what he was trying to accomplish and knew full well just why he was trying to accomplish it. Unimpressed by him, they all knew exactly why their soldiers were deserting or trying to desert or purposefully injuring themselves; they were doing so for the same reasons that so many junior officers were either trying to sell back their ranks or just resigning and riding off to their homes the poorer. The combination of old Pahvlos' dogged determination to convert the entire army to total abstinence from women, unwatered wine, and the use of either hemp or tobacco if he had to flog, maim, mutilate or kill half of them to do it would have been enough, but with a useless, senseless march into the swamps and salt fens looming in the near futures of them all, it did not take an intellectual giant to perceive that Council's army, now commanded by an obvious madman, was become a distinctly unhealthy place in which to remain longer. Indeed, not a few of the senior officers were thinking seriously of early and quick retirement to their lands or cities, had the old man but known.
Far-flung expeditionary forces had been summoned to return to the base camp under the walls of Mehseepolis, and as these smaller units trickled in to be confronted with the hosts of new rules and list of now-forbidden activities—each one, to the minds of the average man, more nonsensical and stupid than the one preceding it—and the halved pay and the frenetic activity in preparation for an extremely dangerous expedition that, were truth known, no one but him responsible for its inception really anticipated with any emotions save fear and horror, whole bodies of not only common soldiers but sergeants and specialists began to desert. They went over the perimeter by dark of night, or they did not come back from errands or details outside the heavily guarded military enclave. Members of units sent out in pursuit of deserters took to not returning, and it was found that punishing the officers in charge of these units did nothing but to increase the rate at which junior officers departed the army.
At length, the mess had begun to stink so foully that Council was moved to calling as full an assembly as possible and hearing a move to force the retirement of its Grand Strahteegos. But old Pahvlos owned vehement supporters on the Council and, as a thoheeks in civil life, was himself a member. He had, of course, hotly defended his methods of discipline and punishment, refusing to retire, regardless of his age, which was approaching eighty years, and his supporters on Council had spoken so forcefully in his defense that Council Guardsmen had had to be summoned three times to break up brawls between noblemen. Several duels and at least one attempted assassination had been the eventual and only result of the session, and the disgusted chairman, Thoheeks Grahvos, had ended by dismissing everyone with nothing in the way of business settled.
With the captains of both lancer squadrons under arrest, confined to their respective quarters and awaiting hearings by a not yet formed board of officers, the Grand Strahteegos dispatched orders to Senior Captain and Commander of the Cavalry Brigade Thoheeks Portos to appoint the senior lieutenant of each squadron acting-captain-of-squadron and have them take over command during the campaign, wherein the lancers would as usual ride point, flanks and rearguard, back up the scouts whenever necessary and, themselves, scout out from the perimeters of nightly camps. This order resulted in both senior lieutenants immediately selling back their ranks and in one departing the camp soon thereafter. Nor would any of the troop-lieutenants deign to take over their function even when offered them at no cost.
That had been when the Grand Strahteegos had decided to merge the seven troops of lancers into a new "great squadron" and place it under the command of one of his favorite staff officers, Captain Gaios of Thehsmeeyee. This signal honor the tall, willowy officer sought to decline, first pointing out that he was more than fulfilled in his present function, then mentioning at some length his unworthiness for such an honor and his patent inexperience in command of combat troops. These points being all poopooed by old Pahvlos, the staff officer had first offered to sell back his rank, then begged the army commander to allow him to forfeit his investment and revert to lower rank. He was brusquely refused and ordered to pack his gear, mount his horse and ride over to the heavy cavalry enclave, present himself to the commander of the brigade of cavalry and tell him that he was to henceforth be captain of the great squadron of lance
rs.
Seemingly dutifully, Captain Gaios mounted his horse and rode off, leaving his servants to pack his effects, but he did not ride into the cavalry enclave; rather was he last seen headed west on the main trade road, having left a hastily scrawled letter of resignation on his writing desk.
The Grand Strahteegos still was fulminating against the cowardly and backbiting Captain Gaios when Captain-of-brigade Thoheeks Portos—outwardly grave, but secretly gleeful—dropped the next bit of bad news.
"My lord Strahteegos, Captain Chief Pawl Vawn of Vawn says that no one of his Horseclansmen or prairiecats will be on the Sahvahnahspolis operation; rather are they all preparing to return to Kehnooryos Ehlahs, saying that they have been absent long enough from their wives and families. Before they go, Captain Chief Pawl demands that he be paid the seven months' pay now due them. He adds that he must have the full amount agreed upon in his original contract with Council, not the half-pay that now is being given other units."
The old man's face darkened perceptibly and veins began to bulge ominously in his forehead, but before he could commence an outburst, Captain Thoheeks Portos, with skillful cunning, dropped the other shoe.
"Moreover, my lord Strahteegos, Captain Guhsz Hehluh refuses to go anywhere for any purpose until the month's pay owed his pikemen is paid along with six more months in advance, their beer ration is restored to replace the watered wine, they are given back the right to come and go as they wish, on and off the campgrounds, on their off-duty hours and are no longer hindered or harassed in their bringing back, possessing and enjoying hwiskee, brandy, winter wine, honey wine, double beer, ales, hemp and tobacco. Captain Hehluh states that if your paymaster does not pay him all that he wants in full and to the last half-copper, then he will march his full unit into Mehseepolis under arms and demand the money of Council."