Great Kings' War

by Roland Green

  "If I were Soton, I really wouldn't be considering any other way north except the Pirsytros Valley." He drew a finger from Thebra City to the here-and-now Shenandoah Valley, then north up through the valley where it ended in the Princedom of Beshta. "The Valley has good roads—not washed out and pitted by forty years of neglect under King Kaiphranos, good forage, plenty of water and mountains on either side to guard the flanks of the army." This passage had long been a major merchant trading route between Hos-Ktemnos and Hos-Harphax and even the most miserly of princes, such as Balthar, had realized the value of safe and passable highways.

  "We're not planning to move south and attack them on the march," Ptosphes said dubiously. "Why should they worry about their flanks?"

  "They don't know what our plans are," Kalvan said. "But Soton does know that we could do it. Which means that if he's half the general he's supposed to be, he'll be taking precautions against it."

  "If Soton is in command," Chartiphon added.

  Klestreus grinned with what looked remarkably like triumph. "I won't say that everybody in the Army of Hos-Ktemnos will be jumping when Soton says 'frog.' I do say that everybody will be listening to him, and not doing anything he doesn't like without a very damned good reason for it. The Lord High Marshal, Duke Mnephilos and Princes Anaxon and Anaphon all know and trust Soton and are interested in maintaining the military reputation of the Golden Throne of Hos-Ktemnos. The only chief captain I've heard of who might balk is Prince Leonnestros of the Princedom of Lantos who wants a military reputation of his own so he can succeed Mnephilos as Lord High Marshal.

  "Even he won't defy Soton openly. He will be outwardly obedient, then try to claim his share of the glory afterward by spreading rumors about how he advised Soton. If anything goes wrong, he'll claim he saw it coming but didn't want to go against the Grand Master."

  Not for the first time, Kalvan thought that Niccolo Machiavelli would have felt right at home here-and-now.

  "Besides, the Pirsytros Valley makes sense even to someone less battle savvy than Soton," put in Rylla. "If the Ktemnoi move much farther east, they might have to fight with their backs to the Harph or even with half their army on one side and half on the other. Also, they'll be close enough to our Army of the Harph so that if the Harphaxi don't move, Kalvan will be able to turn west faster than we planned and strike at the Ktemnoi. Skranga's agents in Ktemnos City have informed us that Kaiphranos is reluctant to let the Harphaxi Army go on the offensive, despite urgings from Styphon's House and his older son; however, if we move the entire Army south to attack Soton, that dynamic will change and Kaiphranos will be forced to attack."

  "Or face a palace revolution," Kalvan said, with a grin.

  "On the other hand," Rylla continued, "if the Ktemnoi Army moves any further west, they'll be in the Trygath. They'll never be able to move artillery and wagon trains on its trails. I like to think our enemies are big enough fools to try, but I don't think Dralm has addled their wits that badly.

  "No, father, you can wait for them around here—" She tapped the map west of South Mountain near Gettysburg—"and be fairly sure they'll come close enough to be found easily. You'll need the dragoons and as much cavalry as we can space since that's in hostile Syriphlon. You'll be able to forage to the south, but it's also only four days' march from our supply depots in Sashta. You can leave the country behind you intact so that if you do find some reason to retreat in a hurry, you can just go back the way you came. In fact, you even can—"

  Ptosphes burst out laughing, then looked up at the ceiling rafters in mock anguish. "Dralm, Yirtta, Appalon, Galzar—you told me to raise my daughter as a warrior and look what comes of it, she flouts her father at his own Council!"

  Rylla giggled and Ptosphes laughed again more gently. "I sometimes wish I hadn't had to raise you by myself, little one. You didn't have much of a girlhood."

  Rylla shrugged inside her tent-like chamber robe. "Hostigos was only a poor Princedom then, Father. A girlhood for me was something we couldn't afford. Now that I'm a woman, I have everything anyone could ask for." She threw Kalvan a look that would have made him blush if it had been anybody except old friends present.

  Joking aside, even those who wanted to couldn't find a flaw in Phrames and Rylla's logic. Since Ptosphes had his case for a cavalry-heavy army, that made the job of dividing the Hostigi forces a few minutes work with soap stone tablets and pine board note pads. Parchment, never plentiful, was guarded like gold ever since Kalvan's arrival.

  The Army of the Harph would have most have of the Royal Army's "regulars," Prince Armanes commanding both his own Nyklosi Army and contingents from Kyblos and Ulthor—and an impressive quantity of mercenaries, some eight or nine thousand, many recently arrived from Rathon and the Trygath as well as the Upper Middle Kingdoms. Word of the war against Styphon's House was household news everywhere east of the Great River.

  Kalvan would command the Army of the Harph in person with Harmakros, Phrames, Armanes and Hestophes as his subordinates.

  The Army of the Besh would have an even more impressive quantity of mercenaries, half of the Army of Old Hostigos, the princely armies of Nostor, Beshta, Sashta and Sask. Ptosphes would be commander-in-chief, with Captain-General Chartiphon, Prince Pheblon and what everybody hoped would be more help than hindrance from Balthar of Beshta and Sarrask of Sask.

  Each army would have a reinforced company of Mounted Rifles and a few hundred of Harmakros' almost-tame Sastragathi. The grand total Kingdom strength would be somewhere around twenty-six thousand men for Kalvan and twenty-four thousand five hundred for Ptosphes. Kalvan would have about one-third cavalry; Ptosphes close to half, since he had the most traveling to do, but not as good and each would have roughly half of the sixty-odd field guns, some of them more antiquated and unusual than Kalvan cared to depend on, but Great Kings with their backs to the wall can't be choosy.

  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 Kt
emnoi 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 off 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 o
f 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.