The Complete Empire Trilogy (95 page)

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 Ilama. 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’re 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 companionably 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 one 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.

Dawn broke in a haze of fine dust thrown up by restless breezes. The servants by now had the knack of collapsing the great tents; the querdidra had stopped spitting and grown resigned to their added burdens. Or else they were too thirsty and too wise to waste fluid, Kevin thought, as he worked grit from between his teeth and sipped sour water from a flask. Too soon, the army was gathered into ranks and marching through the defile that wound down between mesas to the hardpan.

The nomads were massed there, waiting, a motley spread of perhaps eight hundred drably clothed warriors, clustered around tribal banners woven in bright colours and embellished with the cured tails of kurek, an animal resembling a fox. Kevin looked on them and felt the skin of his arms crawl with gooseflesh. While the warriors of the Acoma and the Xacatecas formed ranks and readied weapons, he retied the laces on his light, Midkemian-style brigandine and hung close by Mara’s litter. There Lujan, Lord Xacatecas, Mox’l, the cho-ja Force Commander, and Envedi, who commanded the Xacatecas army, held conference. They would
attack the ragtag force of tribesmen; their honour required it, as performance of their duty as guardians of the Empire’s southern border. Kevin wished Tsurani custom allowed a slave to bear weapons; for that this army prepared for disaster he had not the smallest doubt.

‘I will lead my two companies into the valley and attack in a frontal charge,’ Lord Xacatecas rumbled in his bass voice. ‘If the barbarians break and flee before us, your cho-ja company can flank and engage from the rear, and cut them off. If the desert men do not run, then Xacatecas will send a great offering to Turakamu.’

Mara inclined her head. ‘As you wish,’ she intoned formally. Although Lujan would have preferred to send in a mixed company of Acoma and Xacatecas warriors, Lord Chipino had social seniority. His were the more experienced officers, and Mara had made it clear that she desired alliance, not rivalry, between her house and that of Xacatecas. To contend over war honours and protocol would not be to Acoma advantage.

The sun climbed toward noon, and the shadows shrank beneath the rocks. The army of Lord Xacatecas formed up into battle array and aligned itself for the charge. Mara set observers upon the crests of the escarpments on either side and arranged messenger runners to carry dispatches. The air was still, the silence complete; Kevin stood sweating at Mara’s shoulder, almost wishing for the scrape of chitinous shell that the cho-ja made while whetting their bladelike forelimbs to a razor-sharpness for killing. His teeth were on edge anyway, and the sound would have justified the discomfort. Then the horns sounded, and the Xacatecas Force Commander signalled the charge. In a wave, the warriors in yellow and purple broke into a run toward the valley.

Kevin shivered before a horrible, gut-wringing premonition that disaster was about to overtake them.

‘Lady,’ he said hoarsely, ‘Lady, listen to me. There is something I desperately need to tell you.’

Wholly engaged with watching the army that descended at a run toward the hardpan, and the screaming, ragged ranks of desert men who surged yipping to meet it, Mara glanced barely in Kevin’s direction. ‘Let it wait,’ she snapped. ‘I’ll hear you after the battle.’