The Hand of the Sun King

by J. T. Greathouse

  Oriole studied the pattern of raided villages, furrowed his brow, chewed his lip, and then, as confident as if he were placing the winning piece in a game of stones, jabbed his finger at the map.

  “Iron Town,” he said.

  “Why?” I said, searching my memory for everything I knew of that small blot on the map. “It used to be the site of a mine, now empty, but once the main source of iron for the north of Nayen. It has a garrison, forges, a stone wall--”

  “One that held against a Sienese legion for two years,” Usher said.

  “Exactly.” Oriole looked up from the map. “Iron Town is a symbol. If Frothing Wolf can capture it, and hold it, not only will she have access to the means to better equip her fighters, she will have retaken one of the last strongholds to fall during the conquest. She’ll be able to rally the villages loyal to her, and we’ll have a true rebellion to contend with instead of a few hundred bandits.”

  Usher ran his fingers through his beard, considering Oriole’s words. Oriole’s reasoning seemed sound to me, but I was far from certain. Of the three of us only Usher had ever waged war.

  “Well, Alder,” Usher said at last. “I had my doubts, but this advisor of yours seems worth having along after all.”

  Oriole grinned like Usher had just named him Hand of the Emperor. I felt a swell of pride--on behalf of my friend, and at Usher’s compliment--but with it a painful and unexpected resentment. It was one thing to recognize that Oriole was better suited to the art of war than I was. It was another to watch him make insights that had escaped me, to have my own weaknesses highlighted by the strengths of my friend. I reminded myself this was why I had brought him along, and that I could learn, and that strategy and tactics had never been of interest to me before.

  “Now,” Usher went on. “How should we respond?”

  “We go to Iron Town,” I said, trying to anticipate Oriole’s answer. “Our forces outnumber Frothing Wolf’s. We can hold the stronghold against her easily.”

  “We can,” Usher said. “But if she has taken it before we arrive, we will have to lay seige, and at the onset of typhoon season.”

  “What is our other option?” I said, chastened. “Wait out the typhoons here and attack in late summer?”

  “If we let her take Iron Town, her army will grow,” Oriole said, with a pang of worry, badly suppressed. “We might be in for a long siege, stretching into the autumn, even the winter.”

  And perhaps even next spring and summer, when the imperial examinations would be held again in Eastern Fortress. If this adventure cost Oriole his chance to retake the imperial examinations, he would not have another opportunity for three more years. By then he would be twenty-three years old. Young men who chased the examinations at that age--especially young men with wealth and prospects, who did not need to pass the examinations to find success--were derided as wastrels at best, and outright fools at worst.

  “Oriole is right,” I said. “To quote the sage Traveler-on-the-Narrow-Way, ‘It is best to catch the fallen stone before it dislodges a rockslide.’ We should strike fast. We might reach Iron Town before she does. If not, it will be easier to uproot Frothing Wolf before the villages reinforce her.”

  Oriole nodded and gave me a grateful look. “We might even pin her against the walls while she still lays siege.”

  “Or, if luck turns against us, we might be delayed on the road again, or the typhoons might come early, and our own forces will be harried by weather when we arrive,” Usher said. “If we wait, we can send word to your father and have reinforcements of our own on their way by the time we march on Iron Town.”

  Usher folded his hands and rocked back on his heels, his relaxed posture clashing with the gravity of the decision before us.

  “If we move now, we have a chance to end things quickly,” I said. “If we wait, we cede Iron Town to her. I say we take the chance. Though, of course, you are commander.”

  “I am,” Usher said. “But I think you are right. Tomorrow, we rest and resupply and send a report to Voice Golden-Finch, informing him of our plan and our possible need for aid. The day after, we march for Iron Town, and hope the weather and fortune favor us.”

  With relief plain on his face, Oriole returned his attention to our game. He swept the board with his eyes. I suppressed the urge to gloat while I waited for him to make his move. In three turns, I would have control of the board. His gaze lingered on the subtle angles of attack I had been building toward his territory, and he looked up with a gleam in his eye.

  “Seems I’ll have to stop handicapping myself,” he said.

  His stone clicked onto the board. A move I would never have anticipated, and which seemed at first entirely arbitrary. Until I thought ahead and realized that with that single stone he had reversed my trap entirely.

  Usher chuckled at my baffled expression and glanced at our game.

  “Well, Young Master Oriole,” he said. “Let us hope the rebellion’s plans are frustrated so easily.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Iron Town

  Our banners hung heavy, soaked and dripping, hardly stirred by the wind that whistled through the evergreens and whipped at our cloaks. The walls of Iron Town appeared before us out of the falling rain. The gate was shut and barred. A banner of coarse cloth stitched with a red wolf on a black field hung from its lonely guard tower. Buried latrines, abandoned tent pegs, and the old coals of camp fires littered the clearing around the walls.

  Usher, Oriole, and I huddled beneath the boughs of an old oak, soothing our horses and shivering. Soldiers bustled around us, unloading carts to build a camp atop what Frothing Wolf’s forces had left behind. The slopping of boots in the mud mingled with the ring of hammers and the hiss of knives slicing bamboo into pointed stakes.

  “If not for the rains and that bloody mudslide, we could have pinned them against the walls,” Hand Usher said. He slouched beneath his cloak, peering through the runnels of water that fell from the wide brim of his conical hat. The muscle above his jaw pulsed as he studied the gate.

  “The reports put their numbers between three and five hundred, while we still have nearly three thousand,” I said. “We can destroy the gates with chemical grenades, while you and I rake the battlements and towers with lightning. Our men are tired, but we can still overwhelm the enemy.”

  “We need more information,” Oriole said. “That gate doesn’t look damaged to me. If the people of Iron Town let them in, we might be facing not only Frothing Wolf and her bandits, but the townspeople. This could become a blood bath.”

  A stone settled in my stomach. I was Hand of the Emperor, but the thought of killing hundreds of ordinary people whose only crime was conceding to an attacking force left my mouth dry.

  “Not unlike Lin Twelve-Ox at Clay-River Fortress,” Usher said. “Slaughter is so much less appealing in reality, isn’t it, Oriole?”

  Oriole set his jaw and stared Usher down. The Hand went on miserably studying the stone walls that stood between us and our quarry.

  “At any rate, I need to eat. And a fire,” Usher said at last. “Until we know more, we cannot make a decision.”

  * * *

  Rain hammered at the canvas roof of Hand Usher’s command tent while we huddled inside over bowls of millet gruel and dried fish. A dish that looked like paper pulp, smelled like brine, and tasted like the sacred food of the divines after days without a hot meal. While we ate, Hand Usher unrolled a small map of Iron Town and the surrounding countryside on his camp table.

  He placed a small token carved with a wolf’s head behind the walls. “The rebels are here--however many of them there are.” In front of the gates he set a stack of twelve copper cash, and while he spoke he arranged the coins into an arch. “This is us. Three thousand soldiers in squadrons of fifty. If we had arrived in good weather, with a healthy supply train and the full contingent we brought from Eastern Fortress two months ago, we could have surrounded them and squeezed with crossbow volleys and grenades and bursts of
battle-sorcery.”

  He tapped his fingernail against the last of the coins, then bent that finger and braced it against his thumb.

  “But there were mudslides on the way.”

  The coin tumbled across the table and rolled to a stop against my bowl. Again, Hand Usher braced his finger.

  “The typhoons and mountain roads have made our supply train unreliable.”

  A second coin clinked against the first.

  “And a quarter of our men are sick or injured.”

  He flicked another coin, then drummed his fingers on the map. Heat rose to my face, and I curled my hands into fists. Oriole slapped the table-top, making the coins jump and rattle, then crossed his arms and glared at the map like it was a stones board and he had just lost half his pieces.

  “This is my fault,” I said. “If I hadn’t urged quick action--”

  “You are my subordinate,” Usher said. “Any blame lies with me, but I say we acted reasonably. Aggressively, yes, but the typhoons came early. The gods of Nayen have come to Frothing Wolf’s defense, it seems.”

  “Those gates are strong, but not strong enough to survive grenades and battle-sorcery,” Oriole said, his expression turning dour.

  “The thought of slaughter sits ill in all our stomachs, I’m sure,” Usher said. “It may be necessary--it may not. There is certainly a logic to punishing the people of Iron Town for opening their city to the rebellion. But that is not our purpose.” He tapped the wooden token behind the city walls. “Frothing Wolf should have died or been captured in the conquest. That she survives to wage this petty rebellion is an embarrassment. Without her, I doubt these malcontents would have done more than rob a few merchant’s wagons. She is a thorn in the Empire’s side, and our objective--more than anything else--is to remove her.”

  “And if we assault the gates, breach them, and put the city to the sword, she may well escape, unless we can be sure to shoot down every bird that flies over the walls,” I said, rubbing my right thumb along the scarred ridges on my palm.

  “The witches of Nayen have slipped the Empire’s grasp so many times, often leaving their soldiers behind to die,” Usher said. “A witch on the wing might be tracked by the wake her magic leaves in the world, but it fades the further away she flies. It is a hard thing to shoot an eagle-hawk from the air--even with battle-sorcery.”

  “She knew the Empire would send a punitive force,” Oriole said. “She’ll be ready for a siege--though she may know she can’t win one. The symbol of holding Iron Town through the winter might be enough of a victory to suit her purposes. Another story for her legend. A recruiting tool next time she--or her successor--stirs up these mountain peasants and tries at war.”

  “So, what do we do?” I said.

  “Give her the siege she wants,” Oriole said. “And, while we do, find a way to reach her, and kill her, before she panics and flees.” He tapped the map, to the southwest of the town wall. “There are old mine shafts here. They might go beneath the town wall, they might not. If not, we could start tunneling north, and pop out like moles in the town square.”

  Usher stroked the wisps of his beard. “It’s worth investigating.”

  Oriole grinned. The plan he had outlined--using an overlooked part of the terrain to surprise and corner the enemy--was just the sort of strategy that the mythic hero Su White-Knife would have used to defeat one of his many oafish opponents. Or so I had come to understand from Oriole's constant retelling of those tales during our journey north. At this point certain fragments of the romances had lodged themselves permanently in my mind, occupying space that might have been better used for...well, almost anything else.

  “I’d like to see the shafts for myself,” Oriole said. “The better to advise you and Hand Alder on their usefulness, of course.”

  Usher offered Oriole his ghostly smile. “Naturally. Tomorrow evening, you will take a scout detachment with you, on foot, and report your findings. Now, we should be to our beds.”

  Oriole stood, bowed to Hand Usher, and left the tent. I rose to follow him.

  “You saw the value in him, and that is commendable,” Usher said, stopping me at the tent flap. “But it is inauspicious to fall into the shadow of one’s advisors. You are Hand of the Emperor, Alder, and my second-in-command, yet you wither and let Oriole and I devise all our strategies.”

  Embarrassment prickled down the meridian lines of my arms and legs and tightened my throat.

  “I told you,” I said. “I’m not suited to war.”

  “Nevertheless, you must learn to be a warrior,” Usher said. He gestured toward my left hand. “That is a weapon, and you have been trusted to wield it.”

  I thought of the Iron Dance, the pads of my fingers--now smooth--where I had once worn callouses, the bruises that had blossomed on my thighs and along my ribs, the ache in my muscles after a long night sparring with my grandmother. She had tried to teach me war. It had never interested me as anything but a way to prove myself to her and earn lessons in magic.

  So, too, I perceived the siege of Iron Town. If I had to serve this military purpose to earn a place in the Imperial Academy, among those who dedicated their lives to understanding the deep powers of the world, then I would, though my mind would never leap to the next tactical angle the way Oriole’s did.

  “Of course, Hand Usher,” I said, and left his tent.

  Oriole was waiting for me outside, with the hood of his cloak thrown up to shield him from the rain.

  “What was that about?” he said.

  “I am his apprentice,” I said, brushing past him and making for my tent. “We have things to discuss that don’t concern you.”

  “Right,” Oriole said, falling into step behind me. “Well, how about a quick game to close out the night? We haven’t had a chance to play since Setting Sun Fortress, and you almost had me--”

  “I think we should do as the Hand says and get some sleep.”

  “Oh,” Oriole said. Then, after a pause. “Well then, I’ll see how the men are settling in. Goodnight, Alder.”

  “Goodnight,” I said, without looking at him, and lay awake long after, listening to the rain.

  * * *

  The downpour had faded to a drizzle by morning, but the dark, churning clouds above warned of torrents yet to come. We made what use we could of the mild weather. Usher put me in charge of entrenching our position and surrounding the city, while Oriole spent the day selecting a company of scouts and planning the evening expedition he would lead to the mine shafts. I was grateful for the opportunity to prove myself without direct competition.

  My ignorance soon showed itself, however. We had enough men to surround Iron Town, loosely, but too few to maintain a siege without palisades and patrol lines. The establishment of both was confounded by mountainous terrain, uneven and unwieldy for building, and made muddy and treacherous by a week of heavy rainfall. I rode from entrenchment to entrenchment, making suggestions, but always the squadron captains gently contradicted me. Yes, a palisade there would shield the tents from any archers on the walls--but, given how the water pooled at the bottom of the slope, any digging might dislodge the entire escarpment. Better, and simpler, and less effort, to place the tents further away, and risk extending the patrol line by a few dozen paces.

  After the third such conversation, I resigned myself to approving whatever plans the captains had already devised, though I made them explain their reasoning and pretended to evaluate, consider, and decide. It felt silly, but it would be more foolish to risk the lives of my soldiers by countermanding men with more experience, if lesser rank.

  In late afternoon, I met Usher on my way back toward our main camp in front of Iron Town’s gate. He praised the fortifications I had overseen. After wrestling with guilt, shame, and frustration, I confessed that I had done nothing at all, only approved whatever plans were presented to me. A confession which prompted Usher’s ghostly smile, and a nod of approval.

  “Not every commander need be as clever as Su
White-Knife,” he said. “Most ought to do little more than ensure discipline and compose strategy. Who will know better where to build the latrines than the men who must use them?”

  The sun began to set, and the forest filled with shadows and the thrumming songs of nightjars. When Usher and I reached the main camp, Oriole and his scouts were making ready to leave. They had dressed in dark clothes, with branches tied to their hoods and shoulders, and were armed with only short swords and huntsman’s bows. Better, after all, to slip away from any Nayeni they encountered than to engage and give away our interest in the mine shafts.

  Oriole greeted us with a half-bow. “We’re off, then. We’ll be back before sunrise, whether those mines will be of any use or no.”

  “Take care,” Usher said. “The enemy may have their own scouts in these woods.”

  “Of course,” Oriole said, with a note of excitement. “Any creature we see might be a witch in disguise.”

  “Perhaps it would be prudent to take Hand Alder with you,” Usher said. “He will feel the wake of any witchcraft, and give you warning.”

  Oriole looked to me. “He is welcome, if you can spare him.”

  Usher shrugged. “I leave it up to him.”

  Was this another test? Why lecture me the night before on the importance of establishing myself as a commander, of stepping outside Oriole’s shadow, only to send me along as his subordinate--for what else would I be, when the plan was his and I was along only as a precaution that felt far from necessary?

  “Do Hands of the Emperor often go on scouting missions?” I said. “If any of the birds in their nests or the beasts in their dens were witches in disguise, Usher or I would have felt them already. It is your plan, Oriole. I’ll not intrude upon your glory.”

  Oriole frowned, as though wondering if he should be offended. A needle of guilt prodded at me, but I ignored it. These boundaries needed to be established, if only to meet Hand Usher's expectations. Our friendship would survive, I was sure.