by Roland Green
Since this arrangement meant an absolute minimum of troop-reshuffling, both Armies could be on the march within ten days, their advance guards even sooner-with a little help from Galzar and a little more from Lytris, the hawk-faced Weather Goddess. The two Army commanders would probably find it prudent to hold their own councils of war before they moved, but even these shouldn't take too much time. The strategy of the campaign was being kept as simple as possible-partly because nothing complicated was necessary, partly because Kalvan didn't entirely trust Ptosphes and Chartiphon to get grand strategy right the first time they attempted it.
The Army of the Harph would move southeast by whatever route offered the easiest going for the heavy equipment that also let it rest its right flank on the Harph itself for protection and fresh water. It would advance straight at Harphax City until the Harphaxi Army marched out to be fought and smashed. Not just defeated, but smashed, routed, driven back to the walls of the City and made useless for the rest of this year and maybe the next.
Meanwhile Ptosphes would wait by South Mountain keeping track of the whereabouts of the Styphoni, discouraging their scouts and foragers as vigorously as possible, destroying any unsupported detachments he could find, but above all keeping his army intact, united and between the Styphoni and the heartland of Hos-Hostigos.
"Are we supposed never to face up to them in battle?" Chartiphon growled.
Kalvan would have like to say "No, not until I come to join you," but to say that would be such an insult to both Ptosphes and Chartiphon, not to mention their Princely lieutenants, that he'd have real trouble getting their cooperation. If only this war could have been postponed until he'd finished training his subordinates. Political quarrels in the enemies' camp had given him a few badly needed weeks, but he needed years.
"Not unless you are sure of winning, or at least of not losing too many men," Kalvan said. "Remember you are defeating them every day your army is there in front of them, ready to block their advance or strike them in the rear if they turn again me. The Harphaxi are the easy ones to reach, push into a fight and knock right out of the war. The Ktemnoi have plenty of room to maneuver, they're not defending home territory and they can be reinforced as long as Great King Cleitharses can hold Styphon's House up to ransom in return for more help in the holy war."
Once the Harphaxi forces were smashed, Kalvan would take the Army of the Harph across the river, establish communications with Ptosphes and coordinate an attack on the Styphoni from both front and rear, with at least a two to three advantage in numbers to the Hostigi. The Ktemnoi should be badly mauled, and King Cleitharses taught an expensive lesson about the cost of making war on behalf of Styphon's House. The invaders might even be destroyed outright-
"-and if that is the case, we may even have peace as a naming gift for my daughter's child," Ptosphes said, nodding slowly in approval as he lit his pipe. "Hos-Bletha has always been a moon late and a crown short in fights outside their borders. Hos-Ktemnos and Hos-Harphax will have precious little left to fight with. Hos-Agrys will be more concerned with guarding its back against the Zygrosi and scooping up loot from the ruins of Hos-Harphax. We could really have peace with everybody except Styphon's House itself. And Dralm knows that would be no bad thing."
"Amen," Kalvan said, as heartily as his father had ever ended a prayer. "Now, the only thing left to discuss is how to provision two armies instead of one."
Logistics had been the bane of most pike and shot armies back otherwhen, and things were obviously no easier here-and-now. As Napoleon once said, "An army marches on its stomach." Armies of more than twenty thousand men had large stomachs indeed.
Standard fare for each soldier was about two pounds of bread or grain a day, supplemented by about a pound of meat, beans or some other protein-rich food. For a force of some twenty-five thousand this meant thirty-seven and a half tons of foodstuff a day, not including boiled water and a ration of beer or wine.
Nor did this include hay and grain for the horses who ate eight to ten times as much as a man. Each army had about ten thousand cavalry and artillery horses, including remounts, and more than eighteen thousand horses and oxen to pull its three thousand or so carts and wagons. Even if each man carried four day's rations on his back or mount, Kalvan's most optimistic estimate only gave the armies twelve to fourteen days' supplies. They were going to have to find a way to supplement those rations without making bitter foes out of their present enemies and future neighbors.
At least they would be an army on the move; a large stationary army in a pre-industrial society had a choice between dying of starvation or dying of disease. Kalvan remembered the case of Louis XIV and his armed party of three thousand, who'd had to delay their departure from Luxembourg for two weeks because the main French Army had exhausted all food and forage along their intended route.
Here-and-now armies supplied themselves by the time-honored method of stealing everything that wasn't nailed down and by looting the local peasantry's barns, pens and pantries. This was cost effective, but otherwise undesirable, since it turned soldiers into bandits and caused public relations problems that had more than once led to the independent discovery of guerilla warfare. Probably the most successful pre-Napoleonic system of logistics had been Albrecht von Wallenstein's program of "contributions." This program was a polite way of extorting money from enemy civilians to pay for an army's supplies with a promise of eventual restitution, but only if the attacking army won! A consideration which gave enemy non-combatants really mixed emotions about the course of the war and their undermined morale.
"Brother Mytron, I want you to take your artisans off the paper project and have them make wood chips about the size of a Hostigos Crown."
Everyone looked at Kalvan curiously, waiting for him to pull another rabbit out of his hat. One of these days he was going to reach into that hat and dismay everybody, including himself, by finding it empty. But thank Dralm, it hadn't happened yet.
"We will use these wooden 'crowns' to represent real gold Crowns."
Chartiphon looked scandalized and Ptosphes' lower jaw dropped to where it was about to scrape the floor. Kalvan had just introduced a form of paper money into a world where it had been hard currency or barter. The closest they'd come to soft currency had been letters of credit, mostly to Styphon's Great Banking House which had branches in the major towns and cities. He had a feeling that his great-grandchildren were going to hate him for this.
"Chartiphon, I want you to set up a quartermaster battalion for the Army of the Beshta. Phrames, you do the same for the Army of the Harph. I want both battalions to have plenty of wooden crowns. Upon entering enemy territory, the quartermasters will be responsible for circulating letters to every town, village and hamlet under our control. These letters will ask the council leader or headman for a monetary contribution for the Royal Army of Hostigos."
Chartiphon looked appalled. "Were I to hear of a man bringing such a letter into Hostigos, I would have him hanged. And set the rope myself."
More harshly than he intended, Kalvan snapped, "Would you rather have your soldiers running wild all over the countryside, robbing and looting isolated farms for their own benefit?"
Chartiphon looked sheepish. "No. It's-just hard for me to see how any man could take such a letter seriously."
Kalvan smile was so grim that even Rylla stared. "You're wrong, Chartiphon. The letters will threaten death by hanging to anyone who doesn't comply. We will send out squads of cavalry to gather the contributions. At any village or town that refuses to obey, the leading men of the town will be executed, their houses looted, then burned. I expect it will only take three or four such examples before our letters are taken very seriously-indeed."
Rylla was looking at him as though he'd just turned into one of Styphon's devils.
Hestophes was the first to smile. "I think it will work."
"So do I," Harmakros said. "At least it will work if we can keep thieves from making false tokens and passing them o
ff as the real ones."
"We'll use a machine to cut a pattern in each token, one so complicated that it will take a counterfeiter too long to copy it to be worth his while," Kalvan said. "We'll also keep records of how many tokens went to each place. If they turn in two or three times that number after the war-well, the hangman will have some more business. Also, the next time we have to do this we can have the tokens made out of iron."
The rest of the military men were now nodding in agreement. Mytron refused to meet Kalvan's eyes. He mentally crossed his fingers that he would come around in time. Then concluded, "We'll give them the tokens in return for gold, silver, jewelry and food. They can redeem them after the war for gold Crowns, courtesy of Styphon's House. We'll use the money we collect to buy supplies from local merchants and farmers. With the magazines we've already established in Sask and Beshta, we should have enough supplies to let us engage both hostile armies. Now all we have to do is win the war!"
II
Rylla didn't look up from her loom as Kalvan entered the whitewashed room. It was the first time he'd even seen her at a loom so she must have just started and needed to concentrate on her work.
She'd also put on old clothes for her weaving. In fact, her gray dress was almost a rag, with rents here and there showing the bare skin underneath. It was dirty, too. That bothered him. Rylla took great pains to keep herself and her garments clean. The dress was cut off just below the knees.
And there was an iron ring around one ankle that was attached to a chain ending in another ring set in the wall-a ring that looked heavy enough to restrain a full-grown bull. Above the ring hung a tapestry showing Styphon hurling balls of fire down on a writhing armor-clad figure surrounded by cringing, flaming demons.
He gasped, and Rylla turned, showing a lip freshly cut, a burn on her chin, a left eye blackened and swollen almost shut. He realized the skin underneath the iron ring was raw and-
"Nooooo!" Half gasp, half shout, Kalvan's cry woke himself up. He had just enough self-control not to cry out again once he realized he was awake. He was sweating as if he'd just stepped out of a Turkish bath, and for a long moment he was afraid he was going to lose his dinner.
He didn't-not quite. Instead he forced himself to lie still and breath evenly while he tried to drive the latest nightmare out of his mind. Seeing Rylla dead in battle or during childbirth was bad enough. Seeing Rylla a brutally mistreated slave in Balph was indescribable.
After a while he realized he wasn't going to get back to sleep. If he stayed tossing and turning half the night-well, the nightmare might be indescribable, but if Rylla woke up and saw him, he was going to have to describe it. Either that or pretend nothing was wrong, and he knew that his chances of getting away with that were about the same as his chances of storming Harphax City single-handed.
It wouldn't help Rylla either to know what was on his mind, or know she was being lied to. For the first time since she was a girl, she was afraid for herself, not for her father or her soldiers or Hostigos or for her husband, but for herself and the baby she carried. Out of that fierce pride Kalvan knew almost too well, she was trying to hide her fears. But sometimes when she thought no one was looking she dropped her guard.
He knew nothing short of canceling the war, so he could be home when the baby was born, would really help Rylla. But he could at least make sure she could wrestle with her own demons without having to worry about his as well.
He swung his feet out of the bed, listened to her breathing again, then tiptoed to his wardrobe, pulling on the first clothes that came to hand. He would probably look like a scarecrow, but this wouldn't be the first time he'd spent a sleepless night prowling Tarr-Hostigos. It was beginning to be said that this was another ritual by which he communicated with the gods. There were some that claimed he was Dralm's half-human son, a demigod they should worship. He tried his best to curb these rumors, being well aware of how the Persian concept of the god-king had perverted Alexander the Great and taken him away from Greek tradition and Aristotle's teachings.
Kalvan, unlike Alexander, was not at all comfortable with being deified; it would not only be corrupting for him and his dynasty, but bad for his subjects as well. Verkan had told him about King Theovacar, a despot whose unbridled ambition was to be absolute ruler of the Grefftscharr and the Upper Middle Kingdoms. He suspected Theovacar would find the idea of god-hood greatly to his liking.
It was a bright moonlit night and Kalvan was recognized the moment he stepped outside the keep. Since he wore both his sword and a short-barreled artilleryman's pistol thrust into his belt, the guards made less fuss than usual about letting him wander out on his own. He knew there would always be half a dozen pairs of eyes watching him, but as long as they kept their distance and the mouths attached to those eyes stayed closed everyone would be as happy as could be expected under the circumstances.
He checked the priming and load in the pistol, then started walking. The night breeze blew past him, drying the sweat on his skin and bringing the familiar smells of Tarr-Hostigos: mold, stone, stables, close-packed and seldom-bathed humanity, and the ghosts of burnt grease and roast meat. From beyond the walls of the castle, the wind brought the smell of smoke from the nearest campfires, as well as the sound of singing. He stopped to listen and made out a new version of an old song. "Hurrah! Hurrah! We'll burn the bastards out! Hurrah! Hurrah! We'll put them all to rout! We'll steal their pigs and cattle, and we'll dump their sauerkraut, As we go marching through Harphax!"
Campfires dotted the slopes of the Bald Eagles on either side of the gap down to Hostigos Town. Around the town itself lights glowed from the doors and windows of the new barracks and from establishments catering to the less authorized needs of the royal soldiers. Far beyond the town, the brightest glow of all told Kalvan that the Royal Foundry was hard at work. No more artillery for now, but there were fifty other kinds of metal work that any army needed, and never enough of any of them.
Brass was still unavailable at any price, but iron was pouring in from Kyblos. The highly valued Arklos plate was under the Ban of Styphon, but Pennsylvania had always been iron rich, and someone in Hos-Hostigos would soon be making comparable armor. Note: design a working blast furnace and send a model to Prince Tythanes.
For a good blast furnace they'd also need to build a working steam engine to drive the air pumps necessary to produce the 'blast' of air. And a better source of heat than wood. Coal mine: start as soon as war ends. Coal was threaded throughout the Appalachian Mountains; they even knew about it here-and-now, although it was primarily used as a medicine.
Many of the campsites were on wooded land, since he discouraged pitching tents in the fields of working farms. Every acre sown and harvested was another small victory after the Winter of the Wolves, and the farmers defended their crops as fiercely as their wives and daughters. Kalvan made a mental note to draw up fire safety regulations to prevent forest fires, then remembered there had been plenty of rain the past month; no danger of setting the woods on fire for a while.
He also remembered that some of those campfires were on land that had been wooded until war, the Winter of the Wolves, barracks building and the foundries all made their claims on the trees. The farmers would be getting a lot of newly cleared land if this went on; he and Ptosphes would have to set up some regular method of awarding claims to avoid bloodshed and even feuds. He would also have to do something to make sure the new land didn't erode with its topsoil cover gone and in the long run he'd have to encourage using less wood for heating. Heating and fuel, another reason for mining coal. Maybe he could even tinker up a steam engine for the paper mill?
Maybe, if he not only won, but survived the war. There was also nothing he could do to be sure of that-or at least nothing he hadn't done already-except see about getting as much sleep as he could without the nightmares. Not that there was much that he could do about his dreams. He would just have to depend upon time or luck for that and hope he got it. A Great King who was so tired he
could barely sit in his saddle was not doing his job in war or peace.
Kalvan was making his fourth circuit of the walls of Tarr-Hostigos when he happened to look down into the courtyard. The two men whose movement drew his eyes were in the shadow of the wall for about twenty paces, but something in the way they walked…
Then they came out into the moonlight and Kalvan laughed softly. Down below were Ptosphes and Phrames, neither of them talking to the other. Phrames looked like a man suffering from acute indigestion; Ptosphes looked more like a man facing hanging at sunrise.
It was some consolation to know that he was not the only leader of the Hostigi spending a sleepless night.
It was also some consolation to remember that while he, Phrames and Ptosphes were all spending sleepless nights, they had more respectable reasons for doing so than Prince Balthames of Beshta. He was rumored to be pacing his castle's halls over the fact that Princess Amnita might be pregnant with a child who couldn't possibly be his. That would be enough to irritate even a Prince like Balthames whose moral fiber had the consistency of wet Kleenex.
Have Klestreus send agents into Beshta to find out if there is any truth to these rumors. Once in his cups, Sarrask of Sask had complained that his daughter, besides being willful and moody, would on occasion falsely report being pregnant to punish him when he refused to accede to one of her demands. Another reason, besides the obvious dynastic one, why Sarrask had been willing to marry Amnita off to a sodomite like Balthames.
Definitely a consolation only to have only minor matters like life and death to worry about. In fact, it was enough of a consolation that by the time Kalvan had completed his fifth circuit of Tarr-Hostigos, his eyelids and feet were becoming remarkably heavy. By the time he'd finished the sixth, he felt as if he needed to prop his eyes open with his fingers and lift his feet with a block and tackle.