“More significant than Goorangoola . . . very good hard sheep’s-milk cheese. . . .”
“The Republic of Tasmania . . .”
“Now, that means something.”
“New Zealand . . .”
Toa grinned and thumped the butt of his great spear on the deck-planking. “Chur!” he said, obscurely. “Tu meke!”
“Major power, about a million people, but it’ll take them a while to get stuck in,” Pip observed.
Órlaith ran down the list. “We’re getting thirty warships of various sizes, including five or so to match our frigates. And an expeditionary force of three or four thousand; they’re calling it the Commonwealth Brigade.”
Pip nodded. “We call Oz in general the Commonwealth.”
“I hope we’re not supposed to provide the supplies!” Thurston said. “I’m not aware of any operation that ever failed because someone used too many troops, but there are plenty that did because someone used so many he couldn’t feed them. That happened to Napoleon, even. We’re at the thin end here.”
Órlaith started handing the papers to Naysmith and Thurston who read them and passed them on; their aides were making frantic notes.
“And they’re sending supplies . . . in excess of what they’ll need themselves, in fact . . . rice, wheat, milled sorghum, hardtack, salt pork, dried and tinned vegetables and fruit . . . and compressed fodder pellets. . . .”
“That will really help,” Thurston said eagerly, scanning the papers for hard numbers. “Ah, very nice. I do like having a reserve for emergencies. Which there always are.”
Naysmith nodded agreement. “We can switch our own carrying capacity to other items.”
Órlaith nodded as well. “That will really help. . . . Oh, and Princess Philippa is now a Colonel in the Capricornian army, and a Major in Townsville’s. . . .”
Órlaith raised an eyebrow, wondering why it wasn’t a colonelcy in both. Townsville was ruled by Pip’s grandfather with her father as the heir, already in charge of day-to-day administration.
“When it comes to Colonels, in Townsville there can be only one,” Pip said. “The army goes straight from Major to Brigadier—Colonel is the ruler’s title, my grandfather’s and then my dad’s when he goes. It might as well be King, but my grandfather is a stout Windsor loyalist. He was over the moon when they sent him a letter appointing him governor-general and representative of the Crown.”
They exchanged a glance; from their discussions it had been that that made Pip’s father decide to send her off around the world to see if she could snaffle off a Windsor prince.
Life’s little ironies . . . she thought, and went on aloud: “And you’re officially liaison between this Commonwealth Brigade and the naval contingent and our forces, I see.”
“Well, someone has to do it, and I’m on hand, with links to both camps . . . and a baby in Montival’s camp. . . .”
John was looking insufferably smug as his wife smiled; he’d been even more besotted since the birth of young Princess Sandra, and it had been a genuine wrench for him to leave. Órlaith didn’t see the point, since babies at that larval stage mostly did nothing but eat, sleep and excrete, but presumably it was different when they were yours.
She met Pip’s gray eyes and arched a brow; a slightly carnivorous smile replied. Princess Philippa Balwyn-Arminger had just acquired her very own power base in this war, and one which would give her weight in years to come as well.
Oh, that child was well-named, if she’s anything like her mother!
“My Uncle Pete and Aunt Fifi . . . honorary relatives . . . are coming in person, since the Darwin and East Indies Trading Company is handling a lot of the shipping. One last hurrah . . . and probably sniffing for salvage contracts.”
The admiral and the general looked at each other. Pip chuckled.
“Don’t worry. The Darwin and East Indies Trading Company is a perfectly legitimate firm . . . which has also had strong ties to the King of Capricornia’s intelligence services. They’ve done various errands for Birmo since before I was born. They’re reserve officers in the Royal Capricornian Navy . . . and rogues, but honest rogues.”
Pip’s face was softer for a second, with the fond amusement of a young adult for an indulgently-loved elder member of the family. The elder members in this case were apparently slightly reformed corsairs, but what mattered was who’d dandled you on their knee and told you stories and given you dreams.
Órlaith put her hand on the hilt of the Sword. She didn’t like the sensation of information being . . .
Ground up and reshaped, she thought. Like grain going through a mill with buckets and conveyor-belts, or flax in a factory. But it’s certainly a major time-saver.
“Here’s what we’ll do,” she said.
When she finished—adjutants were still scribbling—both the commanders were looking at her. Thurston had a reminiscent smile on his face, doubtless memories about her father from the Prophet’s War. Naysmith blinked slowly; she was probably remembering things veterans had said about the same conflict. John and Pip were both grinning from ear to ear. Reiko gave one of her very, very slight smiles and nodded her head.
“How I wish we had the Mirror!” she said, but in her own language, which nobody here but her followers and Órlaith could understand. “If it could do that, we need to use it, not simply have it in a shrine.”
Órlaith nodded her head and caught the eyes of the general and the admiral in turn. Thurston probably already had the information from past experience, but it wouldn’t be tactful to single Naysmith out. The Royal Navy was a single force that answered to the Crown and it had been built up since the Prophet’s War ended; when Montival needed an army beyond the Guard regiments, it had to be assembled for the purpose just as her father had to beat the Prophet Sethaz himself.
“Please, let me be clear, Admiral Naysmith, General Thurston. This”—she tapped that palm on the hilt—“does not make me infallible. It doesn’t tell me where the enemy is, except through what we know. And it doesn’t tell me anything at all about their intentions. I can still make mistakes; I just can’t make them because I’ve forgotten a pertinent fact or terrain feature or without knowing the probable consequences of my actions.”
Naysmith smiled. “I’d accept those limitations, Your Majesty,” she said dryly. “If I could only get them.”
“We’ll need more scouting parties,” Órlaith said. “And I’ll be going ashore tomorrow after the first wave secures the perimeter.”
Behind her Heuradys sighed slightly.
* * *
• • •
Dzhambul went forward on his belly like an eel, parted the hard thorny scrub ahead of him and peered through the gathering darkness. This slope had probably been forest at one time, since he came across large well-rotted stumps now and then, though right now it was covered in a six-foot fuzz of scrub with occasional rings of saplings. Most of the brush seemed determined to sink thorns right through his mail and padded jacket and into him, or to make him sneeze with its pungent herbal smells. The only thing he raised was his head, to look down the slope towards the road; there was another half bowshot of scrub, and then a steep falloff of tumbled rock that was almost but not quite a cliff, where the vegetation was much more sparse.
It was an excellent road, built by the ancients but carefully kept up—the man-eaters were good at things like that. A battalion’s worth of spearmen was marching down it in the dimness right now from one of the mountain fortresses ringing Pusan, in an aura of dust and sweat and rancid oil and leather and metal, the scent of war. Behind them came supply carts pulled by oxen, and field-catapults drawn by six-horse teams, all plodding stolidly along. Every tenth man held up a torch tied to the end of his spear, which put them twelve feet above the surface of the road, and together with the three-quarters full moon gave more than enough light for marching on a road.
Much more interesting were the other three scouts who were looking down on the same sight just below him. One was holding up binoculars, except when he put them down and made signs with his fingers. The others would lean close to make sure they saw the movements in the dark, then one would write notes on a pad.
That must be some sort of language of signs, Dzhambul thought; he’d heard of such things. How clever! And useful for work like this. I must remember that.
All three of them were dressed well for night work, and they’d been very careful. At this level of scouting, luck and numbers helped, and one of Börte’s Hawks had stumbled across their trail and fortunately not revealed herself.
One of the strangers, a slight girl in dark leathers with some fringes, might have been a Mongol as far as her looks went. The other two were more like Russians, or what the books and stories said Europeans and Americans and Australians looked like; Dzhambul found it less odd than most Mongols would, since his mother had been Russki. Their clothing was of the same cut and color, like a uniform—Mongols didn’t wear them since their ordinary clothing was usually pretty much the same with minor differences by taste and clan, and just as practical for war as it was for herding and hunting. But some of their neighbors did.
The Han love uniforms for some reason. So do the man-eaters.
The Russki-looking two wore loose trousers and coats of mottled fabrics, with knee-boots and jerkins of tough-looking rough-finished leather. The tunics were probably mail-lined from the way they draped, and they had light flare-necked helmets to hand, covered in the same multihued cloth. He thought one of them had that extremely odd yellow hair like sun-bleached grass, and the other a long scar on his . . .
. . . no, her face.
Sex was sometimes surprisingly difficult to tell in circumstances like these, but the way she was lying made the shape of her backside apparent, and his judgment in such matters had gotten much better after a month around Börte and her Hawks.
It had been a bit startling to realize that he’d thought he was seeing people’s faces and bodies, when in reality all he was doing was looking at their clothes and filling in details from memory without bothering to really notice things. That made the old stories about women passing themselves off as men more believable.
Probably easier still among people where women don’t wear pants, he thought.
All of them had swords and knives and bows, with odd little differences of detail like wearing their quivers over their backs rather than at the rear of their belts. It all looked efficient enough. They also all carried light hatchet-like axes through a loop at the small of the back, which was interesting.
I’ll bet those are throwing axes, he thought. Hmmm.
They kept on taking notes and observing the man-eater column. Dzhambul began working his way back, which was even more difficult than the other way, especially if you had to be very quiet. After a hundred yards or so he came to a slightly broader place where he could turn on his belly and go headfirst until he was out of hearing distance of the strangers.
Gansükh met him there, also on his belly, and Börte was another shape in the darkness.
“You found them?”
“Yes, and they were looking at the Miqačin like scouts sizing up an enemy. Doing it fairly well, too. And the enemy of my enemy . . .”
“May be a friend, or at least a useful tool,” Börte said clinically.
“Let you and him fight, and I’ll take the loot,” Gansükh added, grinning.
Dzhambul nodded. You couldn’t afford to be too picky, when you were fighting enemies who outnumbered you—and the Miqačin did, by a considerable margin. Or at least they outnumbered the forces his people could spare from all the other military problems they had, which wasn’t quite the same thing but had about the same effect. Nobody loved the man-eaters, but then again, not many of their neighbors liked the Mongols and their program of taking back anything that had ever been theirs, either. Particularly when all the territory they lived on had been under Mongol rule at one time or another; half the earth shared that history.
An ally or two would be nice. We’re effectively allied with the Japanese, even though we have no contact with them and know nothing except that some of them are still alive and still fighting. These other strangers seem stronger than that. We need to know more.
“Let’s go have a talk with them under favorable circumstances,” he said.
The strangers had left their horses more than a mile off, in a little ravine they’d blocked with brush, hobbled . . . and trained too well to make much noise. The Mongols waited until the foreigners came, with silence and craft enough that they’d have been undetectable to anyone who hadn’t known the destination. They started to pull the branches loose—two of them, with the other waiting with an arrow on the string. He and Börte and her second-in-command, and who he considered something of a harridan despite her extremely inappropriate name, “Odval,” which meant Chrysanthemum Flower, stepped forward. They were all three unarmed and unhelmed, with their hands up.
Gansükh had been very unwilling to let Dzhambul do this in person, but he himself spoke no language except Mongol, apart from just enough of Hànyǔ and several other tongues to say how much and hands up and show me your money/food/horse/soldiers. Dzhambul had carefully refrained from saying that the zuun-commander was also extremely unsuited to a diplomatic negotiation because his basic attitude towards all foreigners could be summed up as:
Who dares to approach the Kha-Khan’s man, except crawling on his belly begging for mercy?
He brought Börte and one of her Hawks because no women bore arms among the man-eaters, except for (stories said) the inner guard of their ruler’s harem. Their hair was done in traditional women’s style, with a number of braids woven with colored wool and bound with a headband, which made it more obvious.
“Sain uu. Bid amar amgalan irlee. Mongol kheleer yaridag uu?”
That was safe enough. Hello, we come in peace and do you speak Mongol?
The Russki-looking woman, who he now saw had a very creditable battle scar on her face that had probably been made by an axe, had been on watch. She whipped up her bow and began to draw—using a curious three-fingered grip, rather than the normal thumb-ring—and Dzhambul threw up one hand and barked:
“Gölög bolokhgüi!”
The rest of the party didn’t shoot, but they made enough noise letting the weight off their bowstrings that it was obvious to anyone with keen senses that only his restraint had kept them all from looking like a target at a Naadam festival. They spoke among themselves in some liquid-sounding language, and Dzhambul repeated what he’d said in Hànyŭ, Uyghur tili, Russki and several other languages, though leaving out the don’t shoot part.
The scarred woman lowered her bow and took some of the draw off, but he knew from the way she handled it that she could shoot very quickly. The other two kept their hands on their hilts, their faces hard and wary, but he thought that the man, who did indeed have that not-quite-human-looking sun-colored hair, grasped a word or two of one of them.
“Mongol?” he said, pointing at Dzhambul and his companions.
He didn’t pronounce the word the way the Mongols did, but eventually Dzhambul grasped it and nodded eagerly, pointing to his sister and her retainer and then out into the night—there was no harm in driving home the point that the strangers were outnumbered.
All three were young, now that he had a closer look at their faces; younger than him, in fact. The man pointed to his scarred companion; they didn’t really look like Russians, having unnaturally narrow faces and rather large noses.
“Dúnedain,” he said. Then at the other girl, and: “Lakota.”
Then he indicated them all. “Montival.”
Ah, Dzhambul thought, nodding and smiling. Different clans, same kingdom.
He called the others down; they cased
their arrows and helped tear down the barricade of branches, and Gansükh came to stand beside him.
After a moment the . . . Lakota . . . woman spoke: “Bi mongol hel zhaahan medne.”
It took several repetitions before he penetrated the atrocious accent enough for the sense of it, that she spoke a little bit of Mongol, to come through. Dzhambul smiled broadly; it was rare for outsiders to have any at all. They spoke to each other, slowly and carefully and trying until some meaning came through.
He turned to his companions. “Did you catch any of that?”
“Not a word that she said, Noyon,” Gansükh said.
“A word here and there,” Börte replied, and Odval just shook her head.
“Well, she seems to be saying that her grandfather was named Ulagan Chinua”—which meant Red Wolf —“and was one of us, trapped over there by the Change, and that they are Americans . . . or at least from that continent . . . and they’re fighting the man-eaters.”
* * *
• • •
“He’s saying that yes, they are Mongols, and they’re fighting the Koreans, and they want to meet our leaders,” Susan Mika said. “I can’t be absolutely sure, but I’m pretty confident. But we’re not going to get much out of him with just me. He speaks Chinese and something called Uyghur and Russian—maybe one of the Associates from House Stavarov could talk to him?”
“You forget who we’re working for,” Faramir said with a smile. “And won’t this be a treat for her?”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHOSŎN MINJUJUŬI INMIN KONGHWAGUK
(KOREA)
NOVEMBER 26TH
CHANGE YEAR 47/2045 AD
“Halt! Who goes there?”
The three Montivallans leading them reined in, and Dzhambul’s party did the same behind them with a ripple of instinctive coordination. A hilltop ahead of them suddenly had about fifty riders on it; they’d come up over the crest, and they all had arrows on the strings of their bows.
The Sky-Blue Wolves Page 28