The Sea of Grass

by Gilbert M. Stack

  Marcus touched his shoulder. “Señor, I’m not pretending things aren’t bad, but we are going to hold the savages back. Your family will be safe and we’re going to get all of that crystal to your father-in-law in time for Lord Totila’s daughter’s wedding.”

  Alberto shoveled another load of dirt out of the deepening ditch up onto the wall. “You’re a good man, Tribune. I believe you when you say it to me, but…”

  “That fear,” Marcus told him, “is what pushes us to win. Keep digging the wall. I’ll ask Lord Evorik’s wives to check on your family when they take a break from tending our injured.”

  “Carmelita and little Gaspar are already with the Gota ladies,” Alberto told him. “They have been most kind, especially for Gota. It’s just…”

  “I know,” Marcus agreed. “So do what you can now, but be sure you rest when you’re told to. We can’t so exhaust ourselves that we don’t have the strength to hold the—”

  “Tribune!” a legionnaire shouted as he ran toward him. “Tribune Cyrus sent me to find you and tell you something is happening!”

  Marcus suppressed the flash of rage that rose up within him. Didn’t Cyrus have any common sense? Sending a man running through the fort like this for anything short of a renewed assault was idiocy.

  He raised his voice so that everyone around him could hear what he said. “I’d better go check on this. They’re probably just attacking the walls or our makeshift dam—which is exactly what we want them putting their time into.”

  Reassurance offered, he strode quickly off to find Cyrus.

  ****

  “Look at them!” Cyrus pointed at the far wall through which the dammed creek once flowed. Standing atop the wall were several hundred savage warriors, each armed with their short bows and a quiver of arrows, waiting for the defenders to sally forth and try and interfere with the men gathering below.

  “Good!” Marcus observed. “They’re going to waste time on the lake.”

  “Waste time?” Cyrus asked.

  “You do recall that we wanted them to spend time doing this?” Marcus asked him.

  “Yes, but—”

  “Would it have been better if they tried to charge us again through the water?” Marcus interrupted him. “Yes, it probably would have been. But no one thought they would be that stupid—not when it’s this simple to drain the water away.”

  As usual, he was answering one man but addressing all within hearing. “But they waited a long time to do it. This is not going to be a simple task for them. It’s unlikely it will finish draining by sunset and maybe the outer fort will still be flooded tomorrow morning.” The Tribune smiled. “How many of you think the savages will be anxious to come charging up against us again before the lake is totally drained?”

  “Not with the way their mad leader was throwing lightning around yesterday,” one of the legionnaires on watch duty commented.

  “That’s right,” Marcus agreed. “So we get another day to strengthen our defenses and they get another day to think about how many of them are going to die when they attack us again.”

  As they watched, a group of male savages made their way to the dam and stood around thigh deep in water looking at all the rocks. Teetonka appeared on the wall in his elaborate headdress and pointed vigorously at the obstruction but the men did not act on his suggestion.

  “What’s going on?” Marcus asked.

  “They don’t think that moving those rocks is man’s work,” one of the legionnaires who had been stationed at Fort Defiance said.

  “How so?”

  While Teetonka gestured more and more angrily at the damn, the legionnaire stepped forward to explain his comment. “Men’s work and women’s work are strictly divided on the Sea of Grass. Men hunt, they make weapons, they ride, and they take care of their horses. Women and children do pretty much everything else. Those men think it’s beneath their dignity to dig up those rocks.”

  “Then where are the women?” Marcus wanted to know.

  “They probably also think that it’s too dangerous in the fort for the women folk to come do the work,” another legionnaire volunteered. “I mean, just look at all the bodies floating in the lake water. You’d have to be an idiot not to be worried about what we could do to them if we wanted to.”

  The man had an excellent point. “Are you saying that Teetonka won’t be able to get his people to move those boulders?”

  Even as Marcus finished speaking, the sizzle of the shaman’s lightning broke the stillness of the morning. The twenty or so savages standing in the water went cruelly rigid and then collapsed in death.

  Everyone, savages and civilized men alike, stared at the bodies for several seconds before the legionnaire who had explained the customs of the Sea of Grass to Marcus leapt higher on the wall. “That’s the way you crazy savage!” he shouted. “Keep doing that and we won’t have to kill anymore of you.”

  He turned to Marcus with a smirk and never saw the bolt of lightning that picked him off the wall and flung him more than ten feet into the inner fortress.

  Teetonka started shouting again, pointing angrily at the pile of boulders. Marcus couldn’t understand his language but his intent was inescapable. Slowly, very slowly, warriors put down their bows and made their way down into the water among their dead companions. Then, working together, they began to pry at the submerged stones.

  ****

  “It goes down a lot faster than it came up,” Marcus observed.

  “That’s always the way of things, isn’t it?” Severus responded. “It’s harder to build than to destroy.”

  “Philosophy, Severus?” Marcus asked.

  The Black Vigil shrugged. “Just common sense.” He gestured at the spot where the water poured through the wall again. “It still did what you wanted it to—helped give us our first victory and then bought us an extra day on top of that.”

  “I’m hoping for a bit more than a day,” Marcus said. “A little standing water in the morning would be much appreciated. I want the ground wet when the savages return. We may not get a lot of mud where the grass is growing, but in the trenches and the new walls—anything that makes it harder to climb up to us is for the good.”

  “It all depends on when they come,” Severus told him. “If that Teetonka has any sense—and I’m not sure that he does—he’ll wait three days to attack. Today to let the water drain, tomorrow to let the ground dry out and then I’d bring up the dust storm and start pounding us with lightning for another day.”

  “You think he can use the lightning that long?” Marcus asked.

  “We saw it go on at the Battle of the Thundercloud for hours. I’d use it to keep us from sleeping the night before the attack and I’d send my warriors in silently through the dust an hour after dawn.”

  Marcus thought about it a moment before agreeing. “That’s what I’d do too, but you don’t think Teetonka will follow that plan, do you?”

  “No, I don’t,” Severus said. “The man is too angry. It’s like you told the officers a few days ago. Angry men lack discipline. I think he’ll come tomorrow. I think he wants to come tonight, but he’ll wait until tomorrow.”

  “He has to be worried that reinforcements will come.”

  Severus shook his head. “I don’t give much credence to Lord Evorik’s eight to twelve days. I don’t know how large a force Topacio can raise, but it’s going to need to be bigger than the one they sent with the legion to reinforce Fort Tertium. If you’re riding to attack five thousand savages you’re going to want at least five thousand men. So you’ve got two choices. You raise a host of Gente infantry to go along with your Gota cavalry, or you reach out to neighboring cities and ask for help from their cavalry. Either way, that takes more than eight to twelve days. We’re on our own, Tribune. The way to win this siege is to suck them up against our walls and kill them.”

  Marcus considered what Severus had said and was disappointed to realize he agreed with him. In his gut he’d always known that the ho
pe of reinforcement was a weak one, but he regretted its loss just the same.

  “What do you think about Fort Tertium?” Marcus asked. “Are they dead or still holding out like we are?”

  “Could be either,” Severus told him. They are deep in the Sea of Grass and currently cut off from resupply. It’s actually good strategy for Teetonka to leave them behind and come deal with the relief force and now us in Fort Defiance. Fort Tertium will wait.”

  “Or they could have rushed them during a dust storm and the whole garrison could be dead,” Marcus countered.

  “Either one is possible,” Severus agreed. “It doesn’t make a difference to us either way. We’ve got Teetonka and his savages here and they aren’t going away.”

  Day Twenty

  Outnumbered Ten to One

  The wind picked up with the dawn, bringing the now familiar prickling sensation to Marcus’ flesh. Someone, Teetonka or his shamans, was using magic. He no longer had any reasonable doubt that that was what the sensation meant. Somehow, surviving the explosion of Kekipi’s strange eight-pointed medallion had made him unusually sensitive to the arcane. And that new temptation told him that the primitive magi among the savages—their tribal shamans—were stoking the wind with their magic.

  He turned away from inspecting the teams of drivers moving the merchant wagons behind the new inner wall so that he could look out over the middle wall to see what the savages were up to. There was still some water ranging from a foot to a couple of inches covering the ground of the outer fort and it wasn’t likely to get a heck of a lot lower unless the savages opened up holes in the southern wall. Even in ground as flat as the plains there were subtle gradations across the bailey of the fort which caused water to pool more deeply in some places than others. There was also, interestingly enough, a noticeable downward slant of the ground which presumably started with the mountains to the north and continued on to the salt pan to the south. The difference within the confines of the fort was probably no more than eight inches but that was sufficient to leave the southern part of Fort Defiance flooded.

  As to the savages, they were not really doing anything yet. A few hundred still sat on the walls in groups of fifty or so, ready to shoot at the Gota cavalry if Marcus should try to set them loose in the bailey again. Other than that, there was no sign of them at all until a quarter of mile or so beyond the walls where their camps began to speckle the landscape. They weren’t mounting their horses yet, so for now at least, the wind did not denote urgency.

  He went back to examining the wagons. In a perfect world he would move the horses within the walls as well, but a besieged legion fort in the northern range of the Sea of Grass was about as far from perfect as a man could get. No, he wasn’t going to have room for all the horses and frankly wouldn’t have taken them even if he did. Atta hadn’t like this when Marcus explained it to him, but even the pigheaded Gota warriors could be made to see sense.

  When the lightning started, and Marcus had to believe the lightning would come, the horses were likely to panic and there was no way the defenders could cope with more than four hundred frightened horses bucking and thrashing in terror inside the tight confines of the defenders’ final stronghold. That would be a recipe for disaster even if the savages wouldn’t choose that moment to charge the final walls.

  Not that there was room for the animals within the inner most walls anyway. Out here in the middle area, they had space to move around a bit if they needed to. In the inner walls they would be standing together as if in the stalls of some massive stable. Bringing them inside just wasn’t feasible and that was before Marcus considered the problem of how they would feed them.

  So he watched the drivers park the wagons in small groups, separated from each other as much as was feasible to minimize the chances that all would burn when the lightning started catching them on fire. It was a rare moment of peace for him since the siege first started and he relished it precisely because he knew it wouldn’t last.

  ****

  “Tribune?” Seneca Liberus called. “Tribune? Where are you, Sir? Red Vigil Calidus told me you were over here by your Green Banders.”

  Several of the men laughed as the clearly befuddled Acting Magus stepped right past Marcus as he called out for him.

  Green Vigil Phanes took the opportunity to divert attention away from the dressing down he’d just received for the sloppy state of his men’s armor. Marcus didn’t expect it to be clean under these conditions, but he’d been damn clear that armor would be worn at all times once the dust storm had risen. He wasn’t going to let his men be caught unprepared for battle, even if it meant strengthening the new inner wall with a breast plate on.

  “What’s wrong with you, Seneca?” Phanes snapped. “You just walked past the Tribune!”

  Seneca turned at the sound of the Green Vigil’s voice and jumped back in shock to see Marcus standing there beside him. “I’m sorry, Tribune. It must be the dust. I just, I didn’t see you.”

  “That’s obvious!” Phanes scowled.

  Try as he might, Marcus didn’t see anything to like in Phanes. He was a lazy little man at heart who enjoyed the power he wielded far too much to ever make a good officer. And he didn’t seem capable of learning from his more experienced superiors. “See that your men are properly armored, Green Vigil,” he told him. “Acting Magus, walk with me.”

  Seneca fell in step beside the Tribune as they walked away from Phanes. “Now what do you need?” Marcus asked him.

  Seneca nervously licked his lips. “Someone out there—maybe several someones—has started to work some very powerful magics. I’ve never seen anything like it, although I have read about such things. Frankly, the fact that I can see it without any preparations on my part is really scaring me.”

  Now that Marcus thought about it, the now-too-familiar pins-and-needles feeling that had returned to him with the wind this morning had become noticeably stronger. “So you think what?”

  “That Teetonka is summoning his thundercloud. I think the lightning is going to start falling on us soon.”

  Marcus nodded thoughtfully. It was the only thing he could think of also. “A couple of times now, you’ve mentioned the possibility that you might be able to interfere with the storm. Would you expand upon that please?” Marcus actually found the idea implausible. Seneca was just a student after all, but if the lad really could do something to help them he would be foolish to discard the possibility out of hand.

  Seneca licked his lips again. “I’m not sure I really can. You see, one of the things we’re taught is to see the flows of magic. It takes practice. Experienced magi can do it almost instinctively because we naturally see magic in the world around us anyway. This innate ability—it’s not really a sixth sense its sort of part of our natural eyesight—is one of the signs that a person can learn to wield magic. I mean, how can you manipulate something you can’t sense? You understand?”

  “Yes,” Marcus assured him even as he wondered what this meant in regard to his new sensitivity.

  “So this is very important in magical combat. One magus decides to throw fire at another and being able to see those weaves of magic coming together lets another magus know what sort of shield to raise to protect himself. Understand?”

  Again Marcus nodded.

  “I can’t do that yet,” Seneca admitted. “That kind of instantaneous reading of the magic in the world around us is actually fairly advanced. Part of the difficulty is the speed with which everything happens in combat. But a greater difficulty is the need to be able to read the flows while actually staying alive and doing other things. Students like me learn to read the magical energy by slipping into deep meditative trances. We light candles. We burn incense. We lose our awareness of the conscious world and we start to see things.”

  He shifted his weight awkwardly from his left to his right foot. “But I can already get glimpses of these flows, you understand? They are so powerful that I’m catching glimpses of them without meditating
. And what I see—it’s not just super powerful. It’s really complex. I sort of imagined that there would be three or four or maybe six lines of magic shooting up into the thundercloud and that I could watch in my trance until I got the timing right and then push at one of those strands with all my might and knock the lightning bolt away. Maybe I could even hit the savages with it. Then Teetonka and I could have a little duel—not me trying to kill him, but me trying to deflect his blows. But…it’s way too complicated. It’s like he has already spread out a huge net around him and I just wouldn’t know where to begin.”

  Marcus nodded thoughtfully. He hadn’t really expected Seneca to pull a rabbit out of the hat to save them, but he appreciated the young man’s integrity in telling him the truth. “What would happen if you pulled one of the strings of the net?”

  Seneca shook his head. “I honestly have no idea. It’s so complicated that losing one or two strands for a short time might not have any impact at all. Alternatively, it might cause things to blow up on him, although that seems unlikely. What I’m almost certain would happen is that in a net this big, he would not only detect my interference but locate where I was physically attacking him from. And with a man as powerful as Teetonka that probably means I’d be dead pretty quickly after I tried.”

  There was fear in the young man’s eyes but not cowardice. Marcus felt fairly confident that he would go ahead and attack Teetonka’s spell if the Tribune asked him to. But what purpose would that serve at this time?

  “If you think you can do it safely, you can meditate and observe the net, but you are not to interfere with it without my permission. Do you understand? You’re the only person available to me who can help me understand the magical side of this war. I don’t want you risking yourself without my permission.”

  The Acting Magus saluted Marcus.

  “Good! Now if you’re convinced the lightning is coming, I have to move forward with building the next phase of my defenses.”