The Two of Swords: Part 5 (2 page)

And that was that; she was coming with him, and the horrible job facing him suddenly wasn’t so bad after all. He wondered if she’d write and tell her parents, or let them find out from the official bulletins. They’d be furious; they always were. Ladies from fine old Imperial families shouldn’t sleep in tents and shit in ditches. Exactly what they were supposed to do all day nobody had quite figured out yet; be put away in cupboards when not in use seemed to be the prevailing opinion. Raico wasn’t like that; she loathed spinning and weaving, couldn’t do embroidery to save her life, couldn’t sit still and quiet for two minutes together.
Whatever possessed her to go and marry that soldier
— Something her mother would could never hope to understand, that was for sure.

“You’re doing it again,” she said.

He laughed. “Sorry,” he said. “I haven’t seen you for – what, three months? I’m allowed.”

“Husbands shouldn’t ogle their wives,” she said firmly. “It’s not polite.”

“I’m not ogling, I’m admiring.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Admiring is what you do to old buildings,” she said. “Go on. I’ll be up as soon as I’ve seen to everything.”

He stood up. “And anyway,” he said, “I can’t ogle worth a damn if you insist on wearing that tent thing. It’s absolutely guaranteed ogle-proof.”

“Forza, don’t be annoying. Go and get cook to cut you some bread and cheese.”

Much later, when she was asleep and he was lying on his back with his eyes open – when he was at home sleeping was such a waste – he thought about the day he’d first seen her, coming out of the fire temple; taller than her father and brothers, wearing one of those ridiculous golden mushroom hats that were in fashion back then; extraordinary rather than beautiful, but he’d known there and then what the purpose of his life had to be. Even now, after ten years of marriage, she fascinated him; his secret ambition was to spend a day just observing her, trying to predict what she was going to do or say – a good general is never taken by surprise, he anticipates every possibility, but she ambushed him all the time without even trying. He remembered the first time he managed to scrape an invitation to the family’s town house; a whole afternoon of making small talk with her obnoxious mother and father; then, when the whole enterprise seemed lost, he’d launched his forlorn hope. I gather you play chess, he’d said, and she’d given him a look, later he’d realised it was fair warning; yes, she played chess. They had a magnificent coral and ivory set, worth a thousand acres of good arable land. He’d made a soft opening, the way you do when you’re playing a girl, and suddenly he found himself staring defeat in the face – he’d never lost a game except three times, to Senza. Suddenly he realised he was playing for his life. The game lasted three hours, all the other guests had gone home, the servants wanted to lay for dinner and her parents went from vexed to embarrassed to livid; he knew he couldn’t win, but there was just a faint hope of a stalemate, so he hung on, dug deep,
concentrated
, like he’d never done before off the battlefield; and finally she beat him, and as he sat there, numb with defeat and mental exhaustion, she’d smiled at him, and he knew—

Ah well. He’d beaten her twice since then: once on their honeymoon, though he still suspected her of throwing the game, and once on the day she lost the baby. And two out of eight hundred and six wasn’t too bad, against such an opponent.

He turned round and prodded her in the back. She grunted. “Let’s play chess,” he said.

She made a noise like a pig. “Forza, it’s the middle of the night.”

“Hey, so it is. I’ll be white.”

She turned her head; fortunately it was dark, so he couldn’t see the look on her face. “Forza.”

“Please?”

The game lasted an hour. He very nearly made a draw of it, but she caught him when he least expected it.

The pillar was famous, apparently. Three hundred years ago a colony of holy men, sun-worshippers, had lived on top of it. They’d built a huge scaffolding tower, two hundred and seven feet tall, so as to be able to get themselves and their possessions up there. When the sixty stylites, their books and vestments and chickens and instruments of self-mortification had been safely offloaded on the pillar’s flat top, the carpenters down below sawed through the legs of the tower, which came crashing down, leaving the colony alone with each other and God. According to the legend, each man had just enough room to sit cross-legged. There was one rope, for hauling up water and sacks of grain. There they stayed for thirty years until the last surviving stylite untied the rope and let it fall. It was the sun-worshippers’ third holiest shrine, and a quarter of a million pilgrims crossed the desert every year to see it.

Senza had dismounted all the trebuchets, onagers, wall-pieces and heavy scorpions from the defensive batteries on the walls of the City and brought them to the base of the pillar, with two crews to each machine. Just getting such a vast quantity of equipment across the desert was a remarkable achievement. Doing it so fast and so quietly that the nomads didn’t find out until the artillery crews had been pounding the top of the pillar non-stop for six days and nights was little short of a miracle. By the time the nomad army arrived, the pillar was only half the height it should have been, and there was no way of telling which of the countless boulders scattered across the sand at its base were fragments of the sacred rock and which were profane missiles launched by the enemy. As for Senza’s expeditionary force, it had vanished without trace.

When he heard the news, Goiauz the prophet solemnly shaved off his hair, eyebrows and beard, buried himself in ashes and didn’t speak or move for two days. Then he announced that he had been granted a vision of the Invincible Sun in glory. The Sun had told him that every non-believer in the world now belonged to Him, and that it was Goiauz’ duty to go out and bring home the flocks and the herds.

The column that set out up the Great South road wasn’t just an army. It was essential, Goiauz said, that the entire nation should join together in the sacrament. They would follow the enemy’s road to the sea and take their capital city; then, embarking on the enemy’s ships, they would sail to the Eastern capital, then march overland to the West. As he had already demonstrated beyond any possible doubt, the enemy were entirely incapable of withstanding the onslaught and arrow storm of the faithful. He was aware that the two brothers who led the armies of East and West were united against them, and that they were reckoned to be very fine generals. He wasn’t particularly concerned about that. No living man, no matter how cunning, could withstand the wrath of the Invincible Sun, whose power was so great that all those who even looked at Him directly were struck blind. In six months’ time – he, Goiauz the prophet, undertook it – the great work would be complete and the entire world would be filled with the glory of the holy truth.

“I had an idea it would be here,” Forza said quietly.

Dead bodies don’t stink in the desert the way they do in more temperate regions. Anywhere in the empire so many bodies would’ve attracted attention from miles away. As it was, they could easily have passed by without finding this place; you’d never find it if you didn’t know it was there. The nomads had chosen a spot where the ground fell away sharply into a steep-sided bowl; quite possibly there had been an oasis there once, which would explain why someone had been to the trouble of dragging rocks into a circle. The wooden stakes – thirty thousand or so of them, a huge drain on the nomads’ slender reserves of timber – were a new addition, though you could see them as a long-term investment. Wood doesn’t rot in the desert; they could last hundreds of years, as could the sun-dried corpses nailed to them, unless some busybody came along and interfered. Forza made a mental note to do just that, at some point.

“Well,” Forza said, “we’ve found the Erithryans. Though I guess
better late than never
doesn’t really apply.”

No way of knowing how long they’d been dead, though perhaps an expert on the desiccation of human tissue might have ventured an opinion. The absence of visible wounds on the bodies suggested that they’d been alive when they were nailed to the stakes. That made a sort of sense; they’d been given to the Sun god to do as He liked with, and He’d chosen to dry them out like raisins. Indeed. They’d keep better that way, practically indefinitely. Desert logic.

He was upsetting her, he could tell. She didn’t much like gallows humour. His instinct, when faced with genuine horror, was to fight back instantly with a joke, like using archers and slingers in open order to slow up the advance of a pike formation. “What are you going to do?” she said.

He looked back over his shoulder to the top of the rise. “Nothing,” he said. “We can’t bury them, we don’t have time. They’ll keep. Also, I don’t think we want to tell anyone about this. Men don’t tend to do as they’re told when they’re angry.”

She frowned at him. “I’d have thought— Well, motivation.”

“Too much of a good thing,” he said, with just a hint of what he felt. “We’d better get back; they’ll be wondering what the hell we’ve been up to.”

They rode back over the rim of the hollow. The adjutant gave him an enquiring look but he shook his head. “False alarm,” he said. “Right, on we go.”

The whole of the fifteenth book of Cartesuma’s
Life of Forza Belot
is devoted to the campaign against the nomads, but the battle of the Twenty-third Oasis occupies a mere two pages. Understandably enough; all the imagination, vision, technical brilliance and élan was expended in luring the enemy out into the middle of the desert and then reaching the only oasis first and fortifying it against them. Cartesuma describes in loving detail the night marches and the remarkable skill of the navigators, the cunning measures taken to disguise the movements of the army, the triumphs of intelligence gathering and misinformation, and quite rightly makes the point that Forza Belot, in this campaign, completely revolutionised the science of desert warfare, with consequences for the history of the empires that cannot be overestimated. The battle itself, he points out, was practically an anticlimax; for the connoisseur of the Belot style, there’s very little of interest. All Forza had to do was keep the enemy from reaching the water for two days, and this he achieved by the simple expedient of a strong natural defensive position quickly but effectively fortified and defended by an adequate number of archers supplied with a sufficiency of arrows. The genius of the Twenty-third Oasis lay in the preparations, not the fight itself; the battle had been won long before the first shot was loosed, and total victory was by that point inevitable. Having launched wave after wave of horsemen against the oasis, until all their arrows were spent, their horses exhausted, their casualties insupportable, their spirit utterly broken, the defeated nomads reeled away into the desert with what little water they had left and to date no trace of them has ever been found. The prophet Goiauz and a handful of companions were the only survivors, and for obvious reasons they chose not to dwell on the events of the Twenty-third Oasis, ascribing the defeat to the wrath of the Invincible Sun over a catalogue of offences against doctrine committed by the prophet’s political enemies some time earlier.

Fully a third of Cortesuma’s account is taken up with a narrative of the remarkable way in which Raico Belot took command and held the line towards the end of the battle, while her husband was cut off from the army and wandering lost in the desert. For scholars interested in the so-called Raico Question, indeed, this incident provides the only point of real interest in the battle. Pro-Raico authors use the accounts of her conduct of the defence as telling evidence that she was indeed a major contributor to her husband’s success and a considerable strategist and tactician in her own right; the anti-Raico school maintains that by that stage in the proceedings there was precious little that needed to be done except to encourage the men to keep shooting, and to conceal the fact that the general was missing, presumed dead; the accounts of her initiative and inspirational leadership were subsequently either grossly expanded or entirely fabricated by Senzaite historians expressly to detract from Forza’s own achievements and, by giving credit to his wife, to belittle Forza himself. Clearly there is more than a kernel of truth in these allegations, and it is unlikely that, in such a politically charged and sensitive area of Imperial history, the actual course of events will ever be known.

Forza launched a wild diagonal swing at the tribesman’s head; with a grin, he raised his right arm and blocked it easily. Splendid. As quickly as he could, Forza pulled down, drawing the concave cutting edge of the backsabre deep into the tribesman’s forearm. For a moment there was an almost comical look of dismay on the poor fellow’s face, as he realised he’d been taken for a fool; then Forza rammed the point into his stomach and twisted the hilt through ninety degrees. The tribesman’s mouth opened but no words came out, only blood. He staggered a little, then stepped back, then fell over. Well. Served him right for not moving his feet.

Forza wiped the dead man out of his mind, straightened his back and looked round quickly. Five yards away, he saw the last man of his escort shot in the face at point-blank range; the arrow went in just to the left of his nose and the point poked through at the base of his skull. The archer swung round, searching for the next target, not looking down as he fumbled the next arrow from his quiver. There was no time. Forza threw the backsabre at him. Sheer luck, it hit him on the bow hand, side on, with just enough force to loosen his fingers and make him drop the bow. He stooped to pick it up. That meant his chin was at a wonderfully convenient height, a moment later, for Forza’s boot. Forza felt the man’s jaw crack, but that wasn’t enough on its own. Luckily, the backsabre was just in reach, if he was quick. He grabbed it without stooping and swung, missed the neck, hit the side of the head, cutting off the top half of the ear. The man yelled, so still alive, but unlikely to be a problem. Forza looked back and saw a little gap between two rapidly converging tribesmen. I’m not that fast, he thought, I won’t get there in time. Other possibilities, none.