The thought was interrupted by the return of that day's officer of the watch, with the dispatches brought in by the scouts. He bowed in deference. Mara gave him permission to speak before her guest, saving herself the trouble of sending word across to the Xacatecas camp later.
'No findings to report, my Lady,' the armoured man recited, his plumed helm crooked in one dirty elbow. 'One man was injured in a rockslide, and two more were killed in an ambush. The wounded are being tended in the camp by the south mesa. The other five bands of scouts found nothing.'
Which added up to a loss that had no purpose, Mara concluded in silence. Needled by the progression of useless days, useless deaths, and no sign of change beyond attrition, she found her patience at an end. The nomads were just toying with them — about this Kevin was correct — but to sit and wait without action was unacceptable. Mara excused her tired officer from duty, then met the dark, sardonic eyes of the Lord of the Xacatecas. 'The Acoma offer one company, to march out in a foray beyond the foothills. My First Strike Leader, Migachti, will command, and a half patrol of cho-ja will go along to act as message bearers between here and the main camp.'
Lord Chipino of the Xacatecas inclined his head. He set his tesh cup on the low table, between the stone-weighted corners of the map scrolls, and the slates, and the ground-down ends of chalk, and reached for his sun-bleached helm. 'To the honour of our houses, and the ruin of enemies,' he intoned. 'I will send a company also, and a gift, to recompense for your cho-ja, whose abilities I cannot match from my own ranks. The hive on our lands had no warriors to spare, with the unrest of House Zirentari on the northern borders of our home estate.'
Mara did not venture the fact that she had bargained with her own Queen to breed extras; one did not divulge the unnecessary even to friends, for in the Great Game today's allies could be tomorrow's bitterest enemy. She arose out of politeness and bowed to her social superior, though between herself and the Lord the forms were not always observed in private, ‘I waive the need for the gift.'
Lord Chipino studied her, squinting slightly in the spangled light thrown off by the pierced designs of the sconces. 'You are wrong,' he said gently, as he might perhaps have corrected a daughter. 'A woman in the beauty of her youth should never be permitted to languish in a desert without gifts.'
Mara flushed. She found no words to cover her intense moment of self-consciousness, so Lord Chipino smoothed over the embarrassment for her. 'Hokanu made Isashani promise to see that your charms were not forgotten in this desolate, barbarian land.'
The Lady of the Acoma laughed, freely, which was a change after two years that felt, in isolation, like captivity. 'You and Hokanu both are flatterers!'
Chipino turned his head, then shoved his helm over rumpled grey hair and left the chin strap hanging. 'Well, it's true there are no women here to exorcize that failing of mine. I'd flatter the querdidra mares, if I could.' He shrugged. 'But they spit. Do you spit? No? I didn't think so.' Then the true compliment came, underhandedly, so she would not brush it off in a change of subject. 'Hokanu is a man of shrewd sense, and fine taste, else Isashani would have shown him and his questions out her door, you can be certain.'
The gift, when it came, was a copper bracelet, wrought in the form of a shatra bird on the wing, and set with a solitaire emerald. It was beautiful, made specially for her, and at a cost beyond the worth of a mere half patrol of cho-ja, even were such warriors to die in the course of their duty. Mara laid the jewellery back in the velvet-lined box it had been delivered in. 'Why would he do this?' she asked what she thought was an empty tent.
Kevin spoke up from behind her shoulder, making her start. 'Chipino admires you, for yourself. He wants you to know that.'
Mara's frown deepened. 'Lord Xacatecas? Why should he admire me? He is of the Five Families, preeminent in the Empire. What does he hope to gain from a house under siege by the Minwanabi?'
Kevin shook his head in a flash of impatience and sat on the cushions beside her. He reached up, lifted her masses of loose hair, and gently began to knead the tense muscles in her shoulders. Mara leaned into the caress with a sigh and surrendered knots of tension she had not noticed were there. 'Why should he?' she persisted in reference to the Lord of the Xacatecas.
Kevin's hands rested warmly on either side of her chin. 'Because he likes you. Not because he has designs on you -though I'll wager he might indulge in a little discreet dalliance if he thought you were of a mind. But he has no overt designs on you, or your house, or what gain he might make in the Great Game. Lady, not all of life is bloody politics. Too often you seem to forget that. When I consider your gift, and Lord Xacatecas' motives, I see nothing but a man the age of your father who is pleased with you, and who wishes to give you something that you yourself seldom do: a pat on the back, because you are competent, and caring, and well loved.'
'Well loved?' A wicked smile curved Mara's lips, which Kevin echoed. His hands moved gently and slipped the clothing from her shoulders. Together they sank back into the cushions in the soft warmth of the flamelight, and their passions kindled in swift and wordless rapport.
The patrols marched out the next morning, to a blast of horns blown by the cooks from Lord Chipino's compound. So long had the Xacatecas troops been stationed here that they had taken on the nomads' custom, used to inform the gods and the enemy that the day began in triumph. An army marched at sunrise, and the fanfare was intended to make its enemies tremble.
In the months that followed, nothing happened quickly. Mara took to waiting on the heights in the lookout nook manned by the scouts. The windswept table of rock had no shade, so she exchanged her woven straw headdress for a boy's helmet, wrapped with a gauze-thin silk scarf. As the days passed, she grew as adept as her warriors at spotting the trailing puffs of dust that signalled the return of a cho-ja messenger. At such times she would send a runner slave to inform Lord Chipino, then scramble down the rocky trail at speed to meet the incoming warriors. Her legs grew as firm as any boy's from such climbing where litter and slaves could not bear her. Lujan was a wise enough commander to observe that the Lady's presence had the effect of inspiring his men to diligence. Unlike many Tsurani nobles, this Lady gained thorough understanding of the conditions under which her sentries and patrols addressed their duties. She did not demand that they keep impossible hours under the noon sun, nor did she complain when the heat waves off the distant sands obscured the visibility and caused conflicting reports. Although she vastly preferred finance to warfare, she made it her business to study the fine points of strategy and supply. She had as good a grasp of their predicament as any of her officers, but her innovative perceptions could not affect what seemed to lack purpose or pattern.
The reports sent back by the companies assigned to patrol in the desert did little to relieve the border deadlock. One small cache was discovered, and destroyed, along with the nest of nomads that protected it. Two more months passed in fruitless search, and then another, spent chasing down false leads. The cho-ja brought word of an oasis gone dry, and the remains of a stock burrow that had been uprooted in apparent haste. The patrol who gave chase to see if they could overtake the nomads who had deserted the site exhausted themselves in a fruitless march. Of those who remained to investigate, two soldiers were injured when the ground gave wayover a pit trap. Infection claimed the life of one; the other was sent back by litter. He would never walk again, and requested honourable suicide by the blade. Mara granted permission, and barely managed not to curse Chochocan for the waste of a fine man.
Another season passed without event. The Lady of the Acoma grew sharp-tempered with brooding.
'We should send out more soldiers,' she snapped to Kevin, while combing her hair with sweet oils, since water for baths was wasteful and one had to remove the dust somehow.
The Midkemian paused, then pointedly went back to restringing a broken lace on his sandal. This discussion had taken place repeatedly, and each time he had insisted that a march from the mountains in s
trength was what the enemy desired of them. The words had been said. But the one fact that would have lent his advice credence remained an unvoiced secret. Month after sun-blazing month, Kevin bit back any comment that might reveal his prior military experience. To admit that he had been an officer in command on the field in Midkemia was to ask for a sentence of death.
Yet even ignorant of his past, Mara did not discount his opinion entirely; though she was the more impetuous of the two family rulers charged with border patrol in Dustari, it was Lord Chipino who brought up the need for aggressive tactics at the last.
He came into her tent just past twilight, bringing the smell of charcoal fire and roast chal nuts that he had been sharing over coals with his Strike Leader. 'I've had word from the desert companies,' he opened without bothering with social ceremony. 'They captured a nomad trader, and I think we have a lead. At least, we know where large caravans from the other side of the desert have been leaving off grain parcels.'
Mara snapped her fingers for servants to set out warm tesh. 'My cho-ja say the same, but add that the sand smells of footsteps.' By now all had learned to trust the fact that the insects could scent traces of the oils the nomads used to cure their sandal leather. 'The caravans are no falsehood sent to lead us astray.'
She gestured to her sand table, which through nearly two weary years had come to dominate the front chamber of her command tent. Over the course of the campaign, the mountains had been levelled and re-formed to one side, allowing space for the broad, undulating valleys of desert dunes that lay beyond the border. The topography was done by a wizened old man with a squint, paid exorbitant rates to be absent from his large family and trade in llama. But on that table, paid out in pins with beaded heads, Mara knew the location of every one of her soldiers. 'Let us compare what we know,' she invited Lord Chipino in what had lately become an evening ritual.
But, in a departure from the routine, she and the Lord began a parley that lasted deep into the night. Their voices rose and fell with planning, over the moan of the wind across the tent ridges, and around the sigh of the draughts that rippled the hangings and fanned the embers in the light sconces scarlet. Lord and Lady reached an accord without argument: come the morning, they would each call up another company. Leaving two companies of mixed troops to keep the border, they would journey with the rest into the desert and join the army there. A faster patrol would hasten ahead, with orders to pursue the newest leads and locate the nomads' main supply caches.
'When we arrive with the two new companies,' Lord Chipino concluded, 'we will have an army of a thousand with which to formulate our attack.'
He rose, his multiple shadows thrown by the cho-ja lights swooping across flame-patterned carpets. 'Better we attack in force than sit like poets in the heights. To wait out the year is to give those barbarian nomads more honour than they justly deserve.'
That night, Kevin lay sleepless in the dark. He listened to Mara's breathing and the endless moan of the winds, and the creaking of the lines that lashed the tent. To leave the mountains with an army would be a mistake; he knew it. But a slave in the Empire was accorded no honour, and his voice would not be heard. But where the Lady of the Acoma went, so he would go also. He loved her too well to stay behind.
The huge centre pole crashed down, and what seemed acres of canvas billowed slowly down to the ground. Kevin dashed, tripping, over a mound of rolled throw rugs and all but knocked over Mara.
'You'je taking the command tent?' he asked, using his own clumsiness as an excuse to capture her in an embrace.
Mara raised her eyebrows in reproof. 'But of course.' She sounded as if carting chests of tapestries, carpets, sconces, and braziers into a hostile and barren desert were a foregone conclusion. 'The Acoma are not barbarians. We do not sleep on the ground like peasants, unless we are travelling in disguise.' She waved at the swarms of servants who laboured to dismantle her dwelling. 'Lord Chipino's tent is far larger. By the size of our pavilions, the nomads will know they reckon with great families.'
Kevin pulled a face. 'And seeing the size of your respective tents, they will run like jigabirds from trouble?'
Mara's brows rose a notch higher. 'They are not civilized.'
'Meaning if they were, they'd run like jigabirds,' Kevin qualified.
'You have a habit of repeating the obvious.' Mara pushed impatiently at his hands, which were stroking her intimately through her thin robes. 'Not now, busy man. When I insisted that you stay at my shoulder, I did not mean bed sport in plain view of gods and sky.'
Kevin backed off, smiling. 'The querdidra drivers have rounded up their herds.' He glanced at the growing piles of chests, carpets, and cushions. 'Are you certain you have enough pack saddles for all this stuff?'
Mara looked exasperated. 'One more comment, and I'll have you carrying a share like a bearer slave. Very likely you belong with them anyway, as punishment for incurable insolence.'
Kevin bowed with mock deference and hurried off to help bridle the insufferable and fractious-tempered six-leggers. 'By damn, we'll be lucky to have this army marching before sundown,' he muttered as he passed out of earshot.
In fact, it took until noon. The army under Lord Chipino and Lady Mara moved off to a fanfare of horn calls and the snap of querdidra drivers' goads. The litters of the Lord and the Lady moved in the centre of the column, surrounded by the protection of their soldiers. With cho-ja patrols leading and following, and an advance guard of scouts, the columns wound their way downward from the heights and into the dense heat of the flatlands, looking more like a merchant's caravan than an army.
The pace set was brisk, despite the unrelenting heat. Once the mountains fell behind, the warriors marched over the loose, ever-shifting sands, their progress marked by a rising trail of dust that was visible for miles in all directions. Any nomad child with eyes would know that a large force was moving against them, and sound carried far on the winds. Secrecy was impossible in any event, with the dunes devoid of plant life or shelter of any kind.
Barren tables of rock thrust up through the sands, wind-carved into fantastic shapes, and sliced by deep-chasmed arroyos that sometimes held springs in their shadowed, almost cavelike depths. Any of these might hide a camp of enemies. The tribes would be watching the armies of the Acoma and the Xacatecas, trying to determine whether to stay where they were and stage ambush, or to slip away under cover of blown dust and nightfall, to avoid getting bottled up inside and slaughtered.
The land was unsuitable for pitched battle of any sort, Kevin decided. Superior numbers were the only assurance of victory, and no one could guess how many desert clans were allied for the campaign against the Empire. They could be holed up in the rocks on all sides, or they might melt away, invisible, while the army marched itself to exhaustion in search of them. Gouging loose sand from beneath the straps of his sandals, and feeling the blisters starting underneath, Kevin swore. If you were a desert man armed with long knives and poisoned arrows, your tactics in provoking a large war force made sense only if you had a trap out there, carefully set, and awaiting the army to spring it. The whole thing reeked of long-range planning.
Yet Mara stayed reluctant to see reason. 'The desert tribes cannot be bought,' she said, under the stars, when at last they made camp. It was too hot and still yet to retire into the command tent, and slave and Lady sat com-panionably on a carpet, snacking on dry wine and querdidra cheese. 'There are too many tribes, and too many split loyalties. Wealth has no meaning to a chief if he cannot carry it with his tents.'
Kevin conceded this point in silence. He had observed enough of the desert men taken captive to appreciate the point. They might be diminutive, but they were as fiercely proud as the dwarves of his homeworld, and argumentative as a sand snake: they tended to bite first and worry about survival after. They were children of a harsh country, where death walked behind every man. Most would jump through fire rather than betray their tribes; and their chieftains, as near as Kevin could see, fought and killed on
e another as readily as they raided the Tsurani border.
'We should sleep soon,' Mara said, interrupting her barbarian's brooding. 'We shall have to be well up before the dawn to allow the servants enough time to dismantle my quarters.'
Kevin shook grit from his tunic and cursed as it contaminated the last few swallows of his wine. 'We might sleep right here,' he suggested.
'Barbarian!' The Lady laughed. 'If there was an emergency, how would my Force Commander find me?'
'If an assassin chanced to come for you, that could be an advantage.' Kevin arose and extended a hand to lift her.
'Show me the assassin who could get through Lujan's patrols,' Mara retorted, slipping comfortably into his arms.
Which was true enough, Kevin reflected, but not in the least reassuring. If the nomads had intended to send assassins, they would have done so without baiting a whole army.
The next week's march led them into a country of rocky tablelands and dunes crowned with broken clutches of boulder. The army was hemmed in by poor footing, forced to straggle through deep sand in a twisting succession of narrow valleys. The place had a canyonlike feel not at all to Kevin's liking, and even Lujan voiced doubts. But messengers from the advance troops rushed in with excited word that there was a cache, a large one, as well as a sizeable force of desert men encamped on the hardpan on the other side of the hills.
Mara and Lord Xacatecas held parley and decided to press on.
'The cho-ja do not get mired in this sand,' Mara explained to Kevin when the latter questioned the decision. 'They are fast and fierce, and the heat does not slow them. One company of cho-ja is worth two of humans in this desert, and what can the barbarians do as counteroffensive against that?'
There was no ready answer. The army marched on until night fell over the land and the copper-gold moon of Kelewan rose and bathed the dunes in metallic light.
Mara retired to the comfort of her command tent and the soothing voice of a musician, while Kevin paced the camp perimeter and wrestled with conflicts of his own. He loved the Lady; she was in his blood, and nothing could change that. But did he love her enough that he should risk his own life? The Midkemian walked listening to the talk of the warriors and the banter that passed between them. The language might be different, but soldiers on the eve of a conflict were no different here from those in the Kingdom of the Isles. Honour notwithstanding, the warriors of Mara's army diced and joked and upbraided one another; but they did not mention death, and they avoided talk of loved ones left home on the estate.
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