The Free Legion had become better known and most of the men wanted to talk about warfare and the “War months” of Earth, War, Destruction, Chaos and, to some degree, Water. Were we done for the season? What about next year? Did we have national objectives? What would we do if someone actually did attack one of those little villages we make when we camp?
Halfway through the evening, Glennen, Rennin and several of the other nobles pulled me aside.
“We need your advice, Rancor,” Glennen said. I’d expect this, but again I saw the actor in Glennen – the politician in the king.
I inclined my head. “I am your servant, Majesty.”
“Please,” Rennin groaned. “It is bad enough you pay him more tithe than any two of us, do you have to get us respecting him, too?”
We all laughed, Glennen less so. He wanted us to be serious. I could see Ancenon slipping in to the side of the conversation. The Uman-Chi seemed not to like my appointment, despite his ties to Trenbon. Good enough for him, not for others. Ancenon wanted control.
“That is what I wanted to discuss, Rennin,” Glennen said. “Thera was a load on the economy before Rancor’s earldom. Now it is my highest producer. I want to know why.”
“Taxes,” I said, simply.
Groff, of Andurin, shook his head. “I already tax as much as my people can bear,” he said. “I take almost sixty percent. Any more and I will have revolt in the streets.”
“I tax fifteen percent,” I told them. “Flat.”
They were silent. Even Glennen didn’t expect that, and he knew my strategy.
The Baron from Elephos said, “You must be running side businesses, then.”
I shook my head. “I personally own almost all of the wharf space in Thera, but I tax myself 15% on that, as well.”
Rennin coughed. “You tax yourself?”
I nodded.
Glennen held up his hands. “Wait, you say you tax less, and yet you collect more tax than anyone here. Thera, which produced nothing by way of revenue, is rich.”
“Correct, your Majesty.”
“Impossible.”
“You can’t have more from less.”
“Nothing works that way.”
I laughed. How could I explain Reaganomics to people who had never heard of economics?
“It works, doesn’t it?” I asked, simply.
Whenever I’d tried to explain this everyone’s eyes glazed over, no one got it. They just couldn’t grasp the idea that you could take less and get more.
They all looked around the lavish mansion (built without a silver coming from tax money, but they didn’t know that) and back at me. These facts seemed hard to embrace but a lot harder to argue with.
“People invest when they have money,” I said. “You make more money on growth than you do on a stagnant economy, and smart businessmen will go where they can do smart business.”
Blank stares. I had done it again. I had been over this and over this with Shela, and she sort of got it, but not really. At least that is what I thought.
Yet she introduced herself to the conversation anyway. “Is my Earl describing his ughronomics to you all?” she asked, smiling. The word didn’t translate into any Fovean language.
They all nodded. “I thought I recognized the pained expressions,” she said. Then she looked at me. “May I, my Lord?”
I nodded, curious.
“You all fish?” she asked of them. Most of them nodded.
“Do you catch more big fish, or little fish?” she asked.
Rennin frowned. “I try to catch big fish, but yes, I usually end up with small fish.”
“So there are likely more small fish than there are big fish,” she said.
They all nodded.
“So if I want to catch fish, I would do well to have a net with small holes, because otherwise, I will only catch the big fish – the small fish will swim through, and I won’t have as much fish.”
“But there is more meat on the big fish,” Groff pointed out.
“True,” she agreed. “But if I catch ten, one pound fish or one, eight pound fish, how am I better fed?”
Again, they all nodded. I could see a hole in that argument, but I didn’t want to point it out.
“In Thera, we realized we could find more meat on many small fish, and by that we mean small business,” she pointed out. “Big business, like big fish, can pay big taxes, but that isn’t where your life-blood is. Small businesses can’t survive when you take their gold and silver as fast as they can make it.”
“So you take less,” Glennen said.
“Yes, your Majesty,” she said, smiling with perfect, white teeth. “And these fish stay, and they grow, and they pay more taxes.”
“Thus the small fish become big businesses,” Groff said, smiling.
“Who collectively pay more taxes than the original businesses ever could,” Rennin concluded, “at a smaller rate, but from much more.”
By Jove, I think they got it!
Could this be the girl who came off the Andoran Plains in a leather thong? I looked at her through different eyes from then on, seeing a Lady in a white gown, grown up in one society, embracing another. How much more adaptable was she than I?
“Of course,” Glennen said, “if you take nothing, you have nothing – you have a breaking point.”
“Is that your fifteen percent?” Groff asked.
“It must be,” Rennin asserted.
“I wouldn’t be comfortable taxing less than fifteen percent,” a Baron said.
Welcome to tax reform in the eighty-first year of the Fovean High Council. Ancenon pulled me aside as the nobles chattered eagerly to each other and no longer needed me in their conversation. Shela followed.
“You are the revolutionary,” he said.
“One tries.”
“It is a simple thing, once you see it working,” Shela said.
“But didn’t most of your citizens come from their cities?” he asked.
I nodded. “The new ones. And, yes, some may go back, when their homes adopt the same tax strategy.”
“If they don’t move back then these tax cuts won’t work,” Ancenon said. He was more intelligent than I, but then, he’d had hundreds of years to cultivate that intelligence. “If they do, then your city is doomed.”
I shook my head. “Only if there is one hundred percent employment, Ancenon,” I said. “So long as there are poor in the streets, then there are people to hire. So long as there are people to hire and businesses can afford to hire them, business grows. So long as businesses grow, it works.”
“And the poor can come in from other nations,” Shela added. “Perhaps you may need to look to your own borders, Ancenon. Your Uman people may see greener pastures across Tren Bay.”
Ancenon just smiled at that. “No one would give up his or her Trenboni birthright to be an Eldadorian,” he scoffed.
How many English said that about colonial America? I asked myself. Tides change, they always do.
“Change is the only constant,” I told him cryptically. He had nothing to say to that and neither did I.
The mock battlefield shone wet with dew, the morning cold. Grass made the fighting harder than did hard-packed earth, but that is what you want for practice.
Shela and my Wizards stood with me. I had broken my men into squads of ten, each controlled by a Sergeant. For every five Sergeants, I’d assigned a Lieutenant, and for every ten Lieutenants a Captain who answered to me.
I structured the light horse differently – they fought under Two Spears who, as my blood brother, became a Captain. He was incredibly loyal and gifted – the cavalry under him, two hundred men, twenty sergeants and four lieutenants, moved as nimbly as dancers when we practiced.
The Free Legion assembled five hundred yards from us, in heroes’ style. Heroes’ style is just that, a group of men running onto a battlefield like heroes, fighting whomever they come across. This is why distinctive uniforms can be so important in big battles:
it keeps your men from accidentally killing each other.
Genghis Kahn, the dwarf Mongol who conquered Asia, convinced his men to fight in groups of nine, instead of heroes’ style, and it became the key to his success.
My squads had four shield men, each with a short, stabbing sword, in front of three men with long swords. Behind them were three more men who fought with pikes, or wicked spearheads on long poles. We marched in varied rows, far enough apart so that a catapult shot or fireball couldn’t take out more than one group at a time.
In anticipation of today’s event I had hired two hundred Aschire archers to supplement the two hundred Wolf Soldiers I already had. The Aschire bowmen were better and had been coming to my coliseum for months to train my archers, thanks to help from Krell and Evokain. I had a good working relationship with the Aschire, buying their wares and shipping them in exchange for gold, which they needed. When you knew them, it was easy to love the Aschire. There had a fragility to them, hidden under a homicidal toughness that you really never wanted to invoke.
I held back with the archers because I needed to direct the magic. A lot of generals fought alongside their men; their bones testified to it on battlefields everywhere.
With a war cry, the Free Legion charged my Wolf Soldiers. We began the march forward to meet them, the light horse holding back with the archers until I decided where they were most needed. Both sides had rattan swords – a substance like bamboo, although heavier and more flexible than simple wood. It hurt to get hit with it, but it wouldn’t kill you. The ends of our arrows were wrapped. Magicians would create illusions of their magic. The warriors wouldn’t actually kill each other.
“First volley, when in range,” I called to my archers. Four hundred men and women pulled back as one, the Aschire more easily and gracefully than my Wolf Soldiers, but not much so.
The Free Legion kept sprinting, we kept walking. They would meet us more tired – let them. Three hundred yards became a long way to run for someone in armor, carrying heavy weapons.
About thirty yards before both sides met, my archers let loose. Some arrows arced higher than others, letting men position their shields for the first, direct volley, and get caught unawares by the slower, arcing one. Their own archers were moving to one side to catch the flank of my troops. Arath must have seen the flaw in my shield wall defense: a weak right side.
I had seen it, too. I sent Two Spears and his light horse down the right side. They were also archers.
The arrows fell and the first two lines of Free Legion soldiers fell with them, pretending to be dead. Their fellows ran over them, and were taken by the higher volley, never expecting it. They, too, fell “dead.”
The visiting nobility applauded politely from a gallery, set off to one side. The sun rose behind them, burning off the dew.
The archers loosed again just before the two armies clashed. The Free Legion momentum stopped my Wolf Soldiers in their tracks. Wood grated on steel as they fought to overcome the shield walls. My men backpedaled as swords and pikes bristled from all portions of the shield wall defense. Shields pushed together kept the Free Legion swordsmen at bay. While they waited for openings, pikemen “killed” warriors at the front from a safe distance. When arms reached around shield walls, swordsmen scored “kills” from that same protection. Two units of ten from the center of my Wolf Soldiers were simply overwhelmed. Other units pushed forward to replace them, and the center began to waver.
“Now?” one of my Wizards asked me. I nodded.
I kept my strategy simple: don’t engage, and don’t fight them. Make them come to you, make them expend all of the effort to try and kill you. When they were tired, clean up. Until then, make life difficult and frustrating, and keep the men alive.
My Wizards engaged – lightening crackled down onto the Free Legion, dispelled before it could touch the soldiers as Dilvesh countered. The purpose, of course, had not been to attack the troops – it had been to occupy the powerful Druid.
Three mock fireballs arched toward my troops. Shela dispelled them. The ground began to shake and Wolf Soldiers lost their footing, but my other Wizard quelled that too.
Two Spears overran their archers, then turned into the side of the Free Legion’s defenses, slashing at their sides and firing arrows. If these had been lancers, they would have done hideous damage; for now their long swords and arrows left “dead” wherever they went. Shela dispelled mock lightning and enchanted arrow-fire against the horse for the most part, though there were casualties.
I ordered our center reinforced and pushed back against their superior numbers, now closer to our own from the casualties they’d taken. Their warriors were already tiring – Arath should have known better than to start the battle with a charge.
Dilvesh tried to get the ground beneath us to go soft, but Shela toughened it against him and one of the Dorkan Wizards took over protecting our light horse. We had lost about two hundred fifty men and they were down to almost three thousand by now. The Free Legion soldiers, fighting heroes-style, were like wave after wave of a human sea, breaking up on the rocks of my squads of ten. If this had been a real battle, they would be trying to keep the men rallied.
I gave the order for our forces to fall back fast, about forty-five degrees from the center, to the left and right respectively. Here we really demonstrated the power of these squads. I could give an order to every single one of them at any time, and Arath could only shout to his soldiers or blow trumpets for them.
My warriors retreated smartly from the Free Legionnaires, opening up their center and looking for all the world like they’d broken. Before Arath could stop them, his men gave chase, only to be drawn into the center of my army and encircled. Those little squads were more nimble than his hulking army. This maneuver cut off my light horse, which went after the officers instead, but I had effectively encircled the Free Legion soldiers now with less than half their numbers. Because most of their men were to the center they couldn’t meet me at more than man-for-man, and organized warfare prevailed against heroes-style. The Wolf Soldiers pressed them into an ever-shrinking ball, dropping arrows on them the entire time.
Nantar threw down the Free Legion banner. Arath swore loud enough for me to hear him, D’gattis only a little less so.
We drank mead together. I had invited my Captains to join us as a reward. Glennen, Rennin, Groff, Yerel, the Duke from Uman City, and a Baron or two were there.
Everyone wanted to talk about squads of ten.
“I want you training the entire Eldadorian army, Rancor,” Glennen said. “I will move you to the capital and make you Duke of Eldador.”
“Hey!” said Hectar, Duke of Eldador. I’d have been upset too.
“Your first loyalty is to the Free Legion,” D’gattis said, maybe too firmly. Ancenon remained silent.
“I will train with you wherever,” Arath said. “If I can learn that fighting style, I can teach it. Then we have two forces to work with.”
“That is the smartest thing I’ve heard all day,” Thorn said.
Shela gripped my hand. We loved the mansion in Thera, and she wanted her children to be born there. I said as much.
“This is a lot more important than where your children are born, Earl Rancor Mordetur,” Glennen warned me. Rennin sat oddly silent, likely remembering that he had threatened to sack my city.
“Not to me,” Shela asserted. I silenced her with a firm grip on her hand. It let her know that I didn’t plan to betray her.
“I’ll accept the Ducal position,” I said to Glennen, seriously. “War knows that Thera should be a Duchy now. And I’ll train Eldadorian and Free Legion commanders – from Thera. That is not negotiable.”
“You swore fealty to me, Rancor,” Glennen said.
“And Adriam bound you to us,” Drekk countered – the most assertive he had been so far. He looked sideways at the Eldadorians and added, “Who will you choose, when coin is paid for us to march against them?”
“What?” Glennen s
aid, standing. The others stood with him.
“Well, that was about stupid,” I said to Drekk.
“I would hear you answer that question,” Drekk persisted.
“As would I,” Glennen added, hotly. What a nightmare! This had been intended as my masterstroke.
Free Legion and Eldador squared off against each other with me as the reason why. I had moved from comrade to commodity in a moment. A week ago anyone here would have laughed, but my Wolf Soldiers, a young force, had just humbled three times their number in Free Legion soldiers, and the Free Legion were mercenaries.
Mercenaries with a name for themselves as being good at what they did.
I stood and yelled for quiet – they ignored me. Things were being said, or were about to be said, that were going to be hard to take back.
I looked at Shela, she stood beside me.
The room fell quiet in an instant. The woman whose strength derived from Power and desire found herself in her element.
When I had their attention she released the spell. I don’t know what crimes I’d committed against my liege lord, but I didn’t think I would find out with Shela there.
“I am an Eldadorian noble,” I said to Glennen, who crossed his hands over his chest and smiled.
“And I am a member of the Free Legion,” I told my allies, who were already starting to frown.
“I will have no part of any action against either,” I told them all. “We would all do well to remember that our forces are camped here, our supplies come through here, and the bulk of our troops are from here. So long as these are true facts,” and here, I looked meaningfully at both sides, “I see no future in any campaign against Eldador by the Free Legion, or against the Free Legion by Eldador.”
“I have no problem with that,” Ancenon said quietly.
“Then I don’t see where I would,” said Rennin, who did a healthy trade with us. Glennen just nodded.
I had lost some ground on both sides, but I was still standing. We were able to agree that I would be receiving generals from Eldador and Arath from the Free Legion, and that I would be compensated. As well, I’d made myself a Duke. Glennen gave me the ring off his own finger as my Ducal ring.
Indomitus Est (The Fovean Chronicles) Page 42