The Death of Nnanji (22 page)

“It’s all those swordsmen!” shouted the loudest voice. “Used to be a few hundred of the scum and now he needs thousands.”

“People are starving.”

“Not a woman is safe from them!”

“I’ve treated five rape cases in a week, all of them blamed on swordsmen.”

“He only needs them to collect taxes so he can afford more swordsmen!”

Never had Arganari ever heard of holy mothers talking back to their high priest in any temple in the World. He screamed,
“Silence!”
and got it.

“No taxes.” Now they were listening. “Just minutes ago I was granted a revelation by the Goddess. She did not deny what the Fire God had told me. But She said that She would pay the cost. She told me to raise the money by selling off Her—"

He had to shout for silence again. “Lord Pollex needs three thousand marks as soon as possible. The temple will raise this by selling off Her treasure. Start at the back, with the oldest offerings, so living donors are not offended.
You are dismissed!
” he roared.

He should look into these accusations against the garrison, though.

But later, when the Tryst had been driven off.

Chapter 4

The town of Tro was a landmark on the army’s journey. Here it would pay off its three ships. They were seriously overcrowded now anyway, because Wallie, like a spoiled brat let loose in a toy store, had been unable to refuse all the good stuff on offer. He had collected thirty-six more middlerank whizzes who were almost pawing the ground in their eagerness to enlist and get some real sorcerer blood on their swords. From Tro the expedition would cross overland to Ki Mer, from where it would have a long downstream run to Soo. At Ki Mer the snowball would truly start to build.

Tro stood right on the equator. At night the Dream God was barely visible at all, a razor-edge line arcing overhead. Missionaries’ reports on file in Casr had recorded “Road to Ki Mer” for Tro and “Road to Tro” for Ki Mer, but no account of any swordsman actually making the crossing. At the last few provisioning stops, he had learned that the “road” was a jungle trail, certain to take longer than he had hoped. Moreover he arrived on Minstrels’ Day, sixty-seven days after leaving Quo, already a week behind schedule.

Worse still, when Wallie went to disembark, he saw an honor guard lining up on the dock. It was led by a green-kilted Sixth, who presented himself as the Honorable Laruxi, the reeve, and Wallie remembered swearing him into the Tryst eight or ten years ago, when he had been a Fourth in some other town, far away. He was still the steady-eyed, competent, quiet-spoken man he had been then, and once the formal saluting was done, they greeted each other warmly. Laruxi himself was not the problem, it was how he came to be there, on the quay. If the local garrison knew Lord Shonsu was coming, then the sorcerers certainly did, both here and at Plo.

The wizard had forewarned him of the liege’s approach, Laruxi confirmed, even describing the ship he was on. So the sorcerers’ network was working well, but there was no mail from Casr waiting for Wallie. Either falcons had eaten those pigeons or sorcerers had eaten those messages.

He went along to the barracks with Laruxi, inspected the rest of the garrison, complimented him on running a tight ship, and then sat down in a shady corner to drink wine punch and discuss what transportation was available for the journey to Ki Mer.

“Boots, my lord.”

“No mules, no horses?”

Laruxi shook his head. “You might hire half a dozen, but it would be cheaper to buy them here and eat them when you get there.” He paused in the manner of a man wondering how to break bad news. The shine of sweat on his face was due to the steamy tropical heat, but it made him look frightened. “You will need a week at least, Lord Shonsu, and you are going to lose men. Half your company will fall sick, and a third of those will die. The air on the River is healthy, but jungle air brings on fevers.”

“It is not the air,” Wallie said. “It is these pests.” He swatted a mosquito on his arm. “They bring the fever. Those and ticks. Do you know of any other road to the Ki Mer reach?”

“None, my lord. Tro is as far south as this loop goes, and Ki Mer is at the north limit of its loop.”

“Then the sooner we start the better. One hundred and thirty men and ten women.” Plus six chests of gold. “Tell me how to get them to Ki Mer.”

As he stalked back to the docks with his bodyguard tramping at his heels, Wallie found himself in a thoroughly bad mood. He really must do something about the Tryst’s communications. Had the Goddess forced him out of Casr just to show him how urgent the need had become? For the first time he was seriously considering whether he had made an enormous blunder. He had not known the road to Ki Mer was a death trap. He was halfway to Soo and still had been unable to learn anything about what to expect there. A track that was adequate for a mule carrying a sack of rubies might be impassable for an army of thousands, and that could explain why reports of the Soo-Plo connection had come from Katanji’s jeweler friends, not from the Tryst’s records.

Nnanji would not have made this error. Nnanji would have remembered Sutra 804,
On Evaluation of Opponents
, and especially its epigram, “Only Cats Fight in the Dark”.

Wallie had not merely walked into a swamp, he could not even send word to Joraskinta that he would be late for the rendezvous. The last news of Nnanji had been that he had suffered a setback, and that had been two weeks ago. If he had died in the meantime, Wallie should be hastening back to Casr to organize the choice of a replacement or take over the entire leadership himself.

The real problem, of course, was that the Tryst had become too large to operate efficiently. Unless it could find some better means of communicating than the sorcerers’ pigeons, it would collapse altogether. Every great earthly empire—Mongol, Turkish, Roman, and others—had built a fast postal system based on good roads. Roads could not be the answer in the World. To bridge the River even once would be far beyond the technical and financial ability of the People, and a road network would need hundreds of bridges.

Semaphore? The sorcerers had invented the telescope and Wallie had improved it for them, so signals ought to be readable even across the width of the River. Building and manning the thousands of towers needed would be easier than bridging the River even once, but still a staggering burden. Telegraph, then? Simple batteries needed only two metals and some acid, but where to find the miles of copper wire that would be needed? The lines would be vulnerable to sabotage, too, and underwater cables were probably a hundred years away. That left radio telegraphy: batteries, some sort of dot-dash code like Morse, spark gaps, and crystal receivers. The investment need not be great and a ramshackle system like that had worked for decades on Earth until the thermionic tube was invented. He could give them hints on that, even. Yes, once the Kra war had been settled, he would make radio telegraphy his first priority.

When he reached the docks, he found that his army had completely taken them over. This happened every time the flotilla docked. After days of frustration trying to practice fencing in the cramped conditions aboard ship, the swordsmen grabbed every square yard of empty space on which they could set their boots. About fifty couples were clattering about, although he noted with approval that the ships had not been entirely stripped of guards. The crews could not just cut cables and run, taking the army’s gear with them. The dockworkers had withdrawn to the nearest shade to watch.

Wallie located Addis being instructed by a Second, which was practically an insult and not likely to help him much. Vixini was being coached by his mentor. Against a Third, Filurz should have, in swordsmen jargon, time to pare his nails, but he clearly didn’t. To Shonsu’s skilled eye, Vixini was now keeping even the Fifth on his toes. Why in the World was the Goddess pushing the boy on so fast? Was the Tryst going to need another Shonsu in the near future?

They all trusted their liege. He was a hero, he could do no wrong. How was he to break the news to them that they must now cross a fever-ridden jungle?

By the third day of the march, Addis had decided that he would have been much happier as a priest. When he wasn’t being rained on he was being steamed and hot water kept dripping off the trees. His boots leaked, his feet and legs ached. He couldn’t see his real skin anywhere for insect bites. All he ever did see was Vixi’s ass as they climbed steadily upward. He was the smallest, youngest man in the army, and he had to carry Vixi’s bedroll and rations as well as his own, because Vixi was carrying Filurz’s. The high ranks were all laden with bags of gold, or else driving mules laden with bags of gold, which was probably worse torment. It was beneath a swordsman’s honor, he had always been told, to carry anything except his sword. But Shonsu said, “March!” so they marched. Sort-of. Plodded would be more like it, or shuffled: through swamps, under branches, over roots, dead trees, and rocks.

Don’t touch anything brightly colored, they’d been told. Little red frogs, for example, were
poison
! Or pretty green-and-yellow snakes, like one he’d passed with its head cut off by somebody up ahead.

They paused to fill canteens at a spring marked by previous travelers as sweet water. It was bubbling out of rocks, and they hadn’t waded through a swamp since early morning. The forest canopy was getting patchier, and Shonsu had said they should reach the top of the pass today. Two days going down on the other side.

“Well?” Vixi said as they waited in the lineup to get at the water. “Are you enjoying yourself yet?”

Addis considered the question. “Yes,” he admitted. “But I’ll be happier when I can look back on this as the good old days.”

The big guy grinned. “Right answer, swordsman!”

“There’s blue sky up there, see? Let’s all laugh.”

“And rain clouds over there.”

And then something caught Addis’s eye.

“Vixi! Don’t move!”
Cautiously he raised his hand to lift his sword from its scabbard. Rocks underfoot didn’t mean they were out of the forest, and the snake emerging from the bushes at his mentor’s back was as thick as his wrist. It was crawling over a hummock of roots, putting it level with the top of Vixi’s boot, within range of exposed calf. It had black eyes and a forked tongue. It was coiling, as if making ready to strike. Addis had his sword out.
Swoosh!
He slashed and cut its head off. Vixi and two other men leaped aside with shouts.

“Devilspit!”
Vixi said. “Nice one, protégé. Thanks.” He looked a lot less fluttery than Addis felt.

“You are welcome, mentor.” He wondered if the snake had really meant to bite Vixi, or had just come to complain about the noise.

Master Filurz came back from up the line to see what the excitement was, and told Addis he had done well.

Later, as they waded through the next thorn patch in the next-but-one downpour, Addis thought about oaths. The code was an oath, of course, although the swordsmen didn’t count it as such. They spoke of four oaths, numbered in order of severity. The first was a promise of obedience, , as when two leaders of equal rank needed to merge their bands for some task. The second was the oath of tuition, which Addis and Vixini would swear together as protégé and mentor. The third was the terrible oath of battle, which all the swordsmen in the tryst had sworn to their mentors, and so, ultimately, to Shonsu and Nnanji, pledging absolute obedience even to death. Only Shonsu and Nnanji were bound by the fourth oath, the oath of brotherhood, for it was limited to two who had saved each other’s life in battle.

Now Addis recalled that day many weeks ago when he would have fed the fish had Vixi not caught him and pulled him back aboard. Vixi had certainly saved his life then, more certainly than Addis had saved his today, but they were roughly quits, and it felt good that he hadn’t muffed his draw or his slash. A priest would be trained to pray in such situations.

Addis was up to fifty-two sutras now, although he still made mistakes on many of them. Never in his life would he fence well enough to reach high rank, and only Sixths trying for Seventh ever needed to know the last one, Eleven Forty-four, but he had heard Dad talk of it, and he remembered the epitome. It said something like:

The Oath of Brotherhood

Fortunate is he who saves the life of a colleague, and greatly blessed are two who have saved each other’s. To them only is permitted this oath and it shall be paramount, absolute, and irrevocable.

Of course a swordsman saving a comrade’s life meant saving in battle, didn’t it? The piranha would certainly have eaten Addis, but the snake might not have been planning to kill Vixi. Those two little incidents didn’t give them the right to swear the Fourth Oath together, did they?

Or did they?

Chapter 5

Queen Daimea of Plo and Fex was not nearly as good a lay as she thought she was. Pollex preferred a chase before the kill, and resistance aroused him as nothing else did. He found her too disgustingly easy, but she was the queen, so he had to keep her happy for the time being. She was also a sorcerer, as she had whispered to him early in their relationship. There had been a time when swordsmen were expected to kill sorcerers on sight. Those had been the good old days, no doubt.

She wouldn’t say what her sorcerer rank was, but it probably wasn’t high. Pollex’s Kra contact was a bottler in charge of part of the royal wine cellar, and he suspected that Daimea passed her reports to Kra through the same man. For weeks Pollex had been demanding a face-to-face conference with the grand wizard to plan strategy. His entreaties had never even been acknowledged, let alone granted. So one evening he sent for Grundrimp, swordsman of the third rank, but also his cousin and odd-job man. Grundrimp did as he was told and kept his mouth shut.