Tathea

by Anne Perry

  By sundown Tathea once again looked over a blood-soaked field littered with the wounded and dead, but this time the Shinabari forces had not retreated far, and their camp was still in sight. There was nowhere for them to go except to retreat towards Thoth-Moara.

  Ra-Nufis came to stand beside her. She noticed with concern that he was limping. She glanced down at his roughly bandaged leg.

  “It’s nothing,” he dismissed it. “Only a cut.” He looked at her closely.

  She smiled at him. “A few bruises. I shall be black and blue by morning.” She turned to stare across the desert again, towards the Shinabari camp dark on the horizon. “They’ll raise more soldiers from the towns, won’t they,” she said. It was a statement, not a question. She was voicing her anxiety simply to share it.

  “Yes,” he replied gravely. “But they’ll be raw, and with no discipline and very little spirit.” His voice was heavy. “They’ll be slaughtered when they hit the battlefield because they are ignorant of challenge or struggle. Years of overprotection have done that to them.”

  She did not answer for several minutes. It was bitter knowledge. She gestured towards the Shinabari camp. “Doesn’t he know that?”

  “Probably,” Ra-Nufis replied. “Perhaps it has been so gradual it has passed him by. Sometimes one does not see such a decline. There is no steepness in the stairs to hell.”

  She looked at him quickly. “Where’s Alexius?”

  He pointed behind him to the left.

  She thanked him and walked through the groups of soldiers scattered on the sand, close in groups around fires, huddled under blankets and with cloaks pulled tight round their shoulders. Alexius looked up as she came within the circle of the firelight. His face softened when he recognized her, and he made a gesture of invitation for her to sit.

  She accepted, glad of the warmth. She had not realized how sharp the air was already, and it was barely dark.

  He waited for her to speak, sensing the burden in her.

  “Ra-Nufis says the new men they’ll get will be so callow they’ll be slaughtered without even knowing how to fight,” she said quietly, not meeting his eyes. She hated having to admit this in front of a Camassian. These were her own people she was speaking of. She should have defended them, or if she could not then she should at least have kept silent about their weaknesses, but circumstances did not allow, and she resented that.

  She looked up at Alexius. “Do we have to slaughter them?”

  “Not if they surrender,” he answered her. “I’ve spoken to some of the prisoners we’ve taken. The general is Sol-Nahidri.”

  She nodded. He had been one of Mon-Allat’s best military leaders. Hem-Shash, realizing the country’s peril, had obviously had the sense to recall him. He must be over sixty. He had made his name in the great campaigns in the time of Mon-Allat’s father. He was a man scarred and grown gray in desert fighting. The tactical error in the battle today was his subordinate’s, not his, but the whole army would pay the price.

  “What else did the prisoners say?” she asked him.

  “Not much. They are frightened and confused.” She heard the pity for them in his voice. Could he imagine the thoughts whirling in the heads of soldiers who had never tasted real defeat before, whose country had not felt the tread of a conqueror’s foot in a thousand years? They still could not grasp that it was real, that they would not awaken in an hour and discover it was merely the product of too rich a meal or an uncomfortable bed.

  She looked down at her hands. “What about the next battle?”

  He was watching her. “It will be bigger than this, and far worse. There could be ten thousand dead. God knows how many injured or maimed. Why do you ask? Do you want to turn back?” In the firelight there was no acceptance in his eyes of such a possibility.

  “No.” She stared at him. “But why do we have to fight a battle, all that rage and terror and pain, in a gesture that will make no difference to the outcome? We will still conquer, only there will be fewer left alive to start to rebuild.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Why perhaps?” she said sharply, leaning forward. “Of course!”

  “Not of course,” he answered gravely. “Surrender and defeat are not the same. Maybe on the day it seems like it, but a beaten people are different to govern from one that has yielded before it had to and has kept its legions and its weaponry intact, even its chain of command.” He leaned fractionally towards her. One of the men put another piece of palm wood on the fire. “You must look further than the bloodshed of the day, Thea. There are all the tomorrows to think of as well. If you are to govern Shinabar afterwards, you must make them believe you have both the right and the ability to do it. One sign of weakness, and someone will rise against you.”

  She shivered. “And if I kill ten thousand men who did not have to die, who will love me for that? Apart from the questions, can I do it, and should I?”

  “Sometimes it is necessary.”

  She stood up quickly, holding her cloak round her, and turned away.

  “Do you want to have to fight it all over again in another year or two?” he asked tartly. “How many lives will that cost? Even presuming you win?”

  She looked back at him slowly. His face was shadowed red in the light of the flames from the new wood, but she could see his eyes quite clearly. He was right, and they both knew it.

  “I have sent a message to Sol-Nahidri.” He smiled slightly, little more than a softening of his mouth. “But I doubt he will come. He knows even better than you what the battle will cost, and he would avoid it if he believed he could.”

  “Did you say that I was with you?” she asked curiously.

  “No, but he will know that.”

  That had not occurred to her, but of course he would.

  “Sit down and eat,” he offered. “The answer will come soon enough.”

  She obeyed, but she was restless, starting at every footstep, turning to watch every shadow that passed, waiting.

  “Why doesn’t he answer?” she said, standing up to stretch her legs, unable to sit any longer. “Are you sure the messenger got through?”

  “He will talk over with his commanders what to say before he replies,” he explained. “Just as you and I are talking.”

  “You haven’t asked me what to say!” she challenged.

  He smiled broadly. “Are you going forward or back?”

  “Forward! You ...” She let out her breath in a sigh and a reluctant smile in return. “Yes, all right.”

  The answer came after midnight. Sol-Nahidri would meet them by the standing stone between the two camps. Two men should come from either side, unarmed.

  The moon was high in the unclouded desert sky, and they needed no torches. Their feet made no sound on the slithering sand.

  Sol-Nahidri was older than Tathea remembered, and she realized with a jolt that it was eight years since she had seen him. He was grayer, the lines in his face deeper, and he walked with a slight limp. Although Alexius was the general, it was at Tathea he stared when they stood a few yards apart, hands at their sides, cloaks wrapped close against the cold.

  “I did not think when we last parted that when I met you again it would be on the battlefield, my lady, and beside a Camassian general,” he said grimly.

  “Had I been Empress, and not an exile and a widow, you would not have.” As soon as the words were out, she despised herself for having said them. Vengeance was not the only reason she had come. She saw the bitterness in his face and understood it was already too late to repair what he thought of her. “If I could have come in peace, I would have.”

  “So you come in war?” His grizzled face was bleak with contempt, and he gestured with a heavy arm to the watch fires to the north and south of them and the sleeping legions of men in their tens of thousands, darkening the sand.

  This was not how she had meant it to be. What could she say now to retrieve anything?

  “I came to return us to the way we used to be, to
the honor and the labor and the justice we once had—”

  “Under your rule?” he cut across her, his brows raised sarcastically.

  “No,” she answered flatly. “Perhaps we have not had these things in twenty years. They do not come without going back again to the principles we used to cherish, and to an understanding of paying for what we want and laboring to build it.”

  “And you are going to teach us that, those of us who are left alive?” he inquired cuttingly.

  Now she was equally angry. “Yes, I am! And there will be more killing only if you are bent on it! We do not outnumber you, but our weapons are stronger, and our men are better disciplined and have the heart and the courage to fight.”

  “Our men?” He raised his voice now all but shouting at her. “Since when are Camassians ‘yours?’”

  “Since you chose to let your own land slip into tyranny, idleness, and self-pity!” she snapped back. “There is no innate virtue in being born in any one place rather than another! Worth lies in what you are willing to fight for and believe in, what you do, not where you do it!”

  Now his voice was ice cold. “Perhaps to you, my lady. To me and to all my army, our land, our culture, and our people are dear, and we will lay down our lives to defend them if you force us to it.”

  “Then tomorrow there will be ten thousand men dead who are alive tonight,” Alexius put in, his voice tight with the pain of having failed, even though he had expected no less.

  “So be it!” Sol-Nahidri replied. “But believe me, more of them will be Camassian than Shinabari!” And he turned on his heel and left, striding back over the hard sand in the moonlight.

  The following morning, just before dawn, the Shinabari attacked. The battle raged all day and into the darkness and with the following sunrise resumed again. Tathea fought side by side with other soldiers. They protected her perhaps more than they would a man, but in the hot blood of conflict with its roar and clash, the bruising weight of blows, the pain and the fear, and above it all the anger, she slew as many as those around her. That she was less injured than some was only in part due to their loyalty to her; mostly it was the fortunes of war.

  By noon of the second day the field as far as the eye stretched was darkened with bodies living and dead, and both sides were too exhausted to struggle any further. Sol-Nahidri was forced to capitulate. His losses were enormous. The ten thousand Camassian dead were eclipsed by the slaughter of Shinabari, many of them young men force-marched from towns, soft and unused to the sword. Their fathers had learned in a harder school, but these had not known any reason to push themselves beyond the comfortable.

  Tathea stood among the fallen with Alexius beside her and gazed on a charnel house. Her body ached till every movement was pain. Her skin was raw with sweat and dried blood. Her leather armor was heavy and suffocatingly hot. She was gashed and bruised and filthy. The tears ran down her face and she could not stop them.

  At her feet a Shinabari youth lay grotesque, one arm hacked off, the ground around him dark and stiff with blood. He looked no more than a boy, smooth-skinned, little muscle on his body. He was only a few years older than Habi would have been. She saw his hands were blistered where they held the unaccustomed weapon.

  “He died without even having measured himself against life.” Her voice cracked as she spoke, drowned in tears. “God knows how many more. If this is victory, what can defeat be?”

  Alexius put his arm round her and pulled her gently closer to him.

  “Having to do it again tomorrow,” he answered her. “It is easy to say fight, until you see the reality. But there are some things worth paying even this much for.”

  “Are there?” she questioned with terrible doubt. “Is this not the Enemy’s work ... here?”

  His arm was tight, holding her close to his body. “This is the ruin of flesh.” He spoke every word with a terrible gravity. “This war is only a shadow of the real war, which is for the ruin of souls. God can raise these men again, more perfect than they were before, with bodies that never corrupt. But even God cannot re-create a soul that sees light and darkness and chooses darkness. You taught me that yourself.”

  She put her arm round his waist. “And what have we chosen ... creating this?” she whispered.

  The first carrion birds were wheeling overhead, dipping lower with each turn.

  “A bulwark against the barbarian,” he replied. “A chance to begin again, with the Book to guide us.”

  She did not tell him what the old man in the desert had said. The Book had been given to her to teach all people, especially her own. She stood beside him in silence, the heat burning her skin. There was much to do, and she should go and start it, so should he, but these few moments of respite, of being at one in the enormity of emotion, were better than rest, sweeter than clean water, and necessary to make the burden bearable.

  Tathea entered Thoth-Moara at the head of a triumphal army. Alexius had asked her if she wanted to ride. It would be more fitting for the Empress. She thought about it and weighed her decision with difficulty. She remembered her first sight of Isadorus on his white charger in the City in the Center of the World and the awe that had rippled through the crowds as he passed. Even she had felt something of it and been sharply aware of his power. And it was the Shinabari custom to ride.

  But riding would separate her from the rest of the army, the men who had fought their way from the sea on foot. No horse had carried her that distance. She had walked, as they had, slept on the ground, fought every battle, carried her own blanket and sword. Her armor was chipped and dented from use, the leather stained with blood. Her feet were bandaged still. This was not a ceremonial parade; it was the final seal of a conquering army as it took the capital city of a crumbling empire defeated on the field.

  She would march in on foot, a soldier among soldiers. She had earned the right to do that, and it would be good for Thoth-Moara not to forget it.

  So wearing her gashed and blood-marked armor, her feet blistered and her legs aching, carrying her sword at her side, she walked at the front of the massed columns of the legions, but bareheaded, so she would be recognized.

  They came in by the north gate, hewn out of rose-pink sandstone, towering twice the height of the walls and wide enough for five chariots to ride abreast. In the days of the great Isarchs it would have been defended to the last, even with enemy armies at the door. But now the people had no heart to pursue a lost cause, and certainly no will or courage to defend Thoth-Moara street by street, house by house. They stood lining the way, faces sullen, eyes angry or downcast, silent not out of respect but from fear. It was in the lines of their bodies and the way the women kept their children close to them and the men stood open-handed, as if to show themselves weaponless.

  The city itself was as she remembered it, vast with soaring buildings, great flights of shallow steps one could have ridden a horse up, monolithic pillars and slabs, carvings of men and beasts twice life size, pictures in exquisite bas-relief. But it was somehow shabbier, dustier, as if those who had once loved it had grown weary and become indifferent.

  It was not the triumphal procession she had once dreamed of. There was no sense of glory, no color but the scarlet of plumes and cloaks. There were no trumpets, no cheering, just the tramp of tens of thousands of weary, aching feet moving in perfect unison.

  Afterward some of the legions peeled off to various quarters of the city to make sure there was no resistance and to find food and billets for the men. They were now an army of occupation. There were a myriad tasks to be completed; the immediate needs were only the beginning. Over time there would be a whole new administration to institute; stragglers from the defeated army to find and if necessary disarm, even imprison if they were disposed to continue to struggle in guerrilla fashion. This was only Thoth-Moara; there might be other armed factions, militia, or renegade troops in the other major cities to the south that would not capitulate.

  Tathea entered the palace with Alexius beside
her and a thousand men behind. The great walls soared above the courtyards and fountains in cool marble and granite with a familiarity that brought her a sudden thrust of pain. The years of exile vanished as if she had left only yesterday. She forgot her beaten and bloody armor and the sword at her side. She could have been wearing purple silk as she walked under the great portal and through the lily-carved pillars.

  On either side of her, copper-helmeted guards slowly lowered their spears in recognition. They wore white linen and ceremonial armor. They kept their eyes down, but there was a sharp jerk of the head as they saw Alexius’s Camassian helmet with its scarlet plume, even though he carried it in his hand. The air was cool after the blistering sun and the unsheltered heat of the desert, but not even the music of falling water or the smell of damp stone and flowers could hide the tension.

  In the Great Hall of Audience Tathea stopped and gazed around her. The room was three hundred feet long, and almost as wide. The ceiling, forty feet high, was supported by immense columns hewn out of stone and carved with scenes from two thousand years of Shinabari history. But it was different from her memory of it. She stood motionless, trying to discover what had changed. The steps at the far end were the same, the great twin lapis thrones, the alabaster dogs on either side with their proud heads and pricked ears, the blue silk curtains that moved with every breath, billowing like clouds.

  Then she noticed that the standing torch brackets were gold. In Mon-Allat’s day they had been copper. Now there was gold everywhere, not only the torch brackets but in collars round the dogs’ necks, on the clawed feet of the thrones. The anklets round the servants’ legs were gold, even on the rings and hinges of the sandalwood chests by the east and west walls. Hem-Shash had not spared himself any luxury.