by Dave Duncan
She wondered how big the bribes had been, and if Sakar Semeru’s great-grandfather had been as murderous as he.
“Those oars you pulled today came from Achelone. The planks of the ships you rowed today came from Achelone. The wood of the benches you sat on came from Achelone. Your homes are built of Achelonian timber. Achelonians are our friends and partners! A few years ago, they were attacked without warning. Attacked by the lizard men of Grensdalur, which is a desert land to the east. The Achelonian senate asked for imperial help. I was sent with a small force. I met with Hayklopevi, their warlord.”
She paused a moment.
“The Gren are not human. Hayklopevi is not human! He—it—is taller than anyone here, its skin is gray, and it has six fingers on each hand. The Gren ride on the backs of lizards, and the Achelonians believe that they breed with them, too.”
Irona did not say that their hides were sword-proof. Instead she told them of the atrocities: pregnant women disemboweled, babies impaled, men flayed, towns sacked, prisoners massacred. Those tales—and sometimes truths—were as much a part of warfare as blisters and belly fever. She also mentioned another possibility, a horror unique to the Gren, a liking for raw meat. Specifically there were tales of people being eaten alive by a dinner party of Gren, even babies snatched from their mothers’ breasts and passed around as snacks.
“There was a garrison of Empire troops there. At least a hundred of them were native-born Benesh, like you. Your brothers. So far as we know, they are all dead now. The honor of Benign is at stake, and it is up to us to save it!”
At the end she swore retribution, and they cheered her. It was a good cheer, although she had known better. She turned to dismount from her rock and two oversized, bandaged hands gripped her and lifted her. She was about to explode at this disrespect when she realized they belonged to her son. He swung her down easily.
And then he grabbed her tight and hugged her. He had not done that since he was an infant.
“Great speech, Dam,” he muttered. The lads had cheered his mother! Had he only just realized how special she was, or was he merely flattering her?
“Thank you. And a good hug. I enjoyed that more than the cheers.”
Podakan spun around and walked away.
Later, when the meals had been eaten and tired rowers were spreading their bedrolls, she called the captains and bosuns to a conference around a fire. On land, these men would be her warriors. If she gave them a fair chance, they could win the war for her. If they lost, it would be her fault. She had Dilivost beside her, of course, plus Sazen, Daun, and a darkly suspicious Podakan. Overhead the stars were starting to appear.
She worked her way around the group, naming when she could, asking when she couldn’t. She knew about a quarter of them, and they were pleased to be remembered.
“It’s worse than I told the troops,” she told them. “Five years ago, when the Gren first emerged from the desert, they said they wanted to trade. We had one exchange of goods and then they disappeared. This year they have come again, not in bands as before, but in hundreds. They have leveled villages, burned crops, wasted the land. Maleficence is back and we go to battle monsters, as our ancestors did.”
She was asked how that could have happened.
“We don’t know. We do not know the interior. Because our goddess rules the sea, not the land, we never venture there. What happens to the Rampart Range farther inland? It is possible that Maleficence bypassed the range on the east and found its way into Grensdalur.”
“You mean the Gren were spawned in the Dread Lands?” asked a voice with a Brackish accent.
“It is possible. We must beat them and drive the survivors back where they came from, wherever that is. We must discuss tactics while we travel and study how our ancestors fought Maleficence.” She might have some clues after Sazen finished working through the sacks of historical tablets he had brought along.
The questions died away. They all had hard days ahead, for most captains and bosuns rowed at least half watches on a long journey. She asked Dilivost if he wanted to speak and 678 loyally said she had said it all much better than he could have done.
“Then, finally,” Irona said, “please note my son. Stand up, Podakan. This is Podakan Lavice, my son. Despite his size, he is not yet a citizen, so he will not be fighting. I hope you all understand that very clearly: Podakan will not be fighting! If you see him with a weapon, take it away from him instantly. He can row if he wants, although why he thinks he needs any more muscles than he already has, I can’t imagine. I will employ him as a runner, so he will have to learn all your names. Excuse him if he comes up to you and asks you who you are.”
She held her breath for a moment, wondering how he would react. Just as Veer could recall exactly what he saw. Podakan never seemed to forget what he heard. She did not doubt that he could already reel off all those twenty names correctly, all the way around the circle.
But he didn’t. He just sat down. Perhaps he doubted that real men would be impressed by a party trick. Or perhaps he would rather do his own showing off than be spoon-fed by his mother.
Two nights later they beached at a small fishing village on the mainland and were met by even worse rumors of disaster. Achelone had been overrun, the survivors were streaming south and west, the Gren were heading south, toward Kasuga.
The mood of the fleet grew grimmer, but no one deserted yet. By the time it reached Purace, second-largest city in the Empire and guardian of the mouth of the Bight, Podakan was rowing a full day’s watch—and eating as much as all the rest of the crew put together, according to the bosun.
At Purace the expedition was due to be reinforced by eight more galleys. The governor passed along the locals’ excuses for not being ready yet. Irona told him not to worry, she wasn’t leaving until dawn, so they had plenty of time to get organized. And if the full levy of eight ships and seven hundred men was not ready by then, the governor and all his council were going to be going along to feed the Gren.
Some other allied contingents ought to have reached Purace already, but none had. Irona did not wait for them. She anchored offshore that night and made the crews stay aboard, but half a dozen good swimmers disappeared into the dark. At Purace she spoke with Achelonian refugees, who talked of monsters—deadly, but never clearly seen. The Gren fought only at night. That report agreed with the descriptions of the Shapeless on the cracked and faded wooden tablets Sazen had found in the Benesh archives.
“So we’d better beat them while the days are long,” Dilivost said.
As they headed deeper into the Bight, the mood began to change. The locals feared for their own survival now and were ready to join in the fight. Finding themselves hailed as saviors, the Benesh began to brag. More and more tales of atrocities turned the mission into a cause, a path to glory, history in the making. The fleet grew, as did the difficulty of feeding it, until Irona had to divide it into squadrons, traveling a day apart.
There seemed little doubt that Achelone was past saving and the Gren had moved south, into Kasuga. Rowing up the Huequi River would be pointless, for it would put her behind them, and she could not hope to match their speed overland. At all costs Irona must position her army ahead of them, so they would come to her. At the great fork in the Bight, she turned southward and set course for the Visoke, leaving word for the other contingents to follow.
The Visoke was a fast stream, a test of the men’s endurance, but armies had gone that way in the past. At times the channel was so narrow or swift that the crew had to ship oars and haul the galleys along with ropes, even in some places wading alongside and pushing. Twice they had to strip the vessels down to empty hulls, manhandle them over shoals with levers and brute strength, then reload them again on the upstream side. Podakan never questioned an order and worked till he dropped. At long last she began to see a future for him; for the first time she could even respect him.
“Then stop smothering me,” he said, and walked away.
When they reached Didicas, their voyage was over. They had been traveling for almost a month, but wherever they went from there they must walk. Didicas was a small town, overrun by refugees, mainly women and children. Achelone menfolk had stayed behind to fight the invaders, but nobody knew how many still survived. Nobody knew anything, and that was Irona’s second-biggest worry, after provisions.
She would have to allow at least ten days for the rest of her army to catch up. Dashing ahead in contingents of a few hundred men would be a recipe for serial massacre. Her problem now was to feed and maintain her army until it was big enough to seek out battle, when she didn’t know how big the enemy’s forces were, or where they were. She requisitioned the largest house in the town to be her headquarters and settled in to run her war.
The first thing she did was send out teams of scouts. Too late she realized that she should have started by chaining Podakan to a rock. Her son was nowhere to be found. Did he expect to defeat the Gren single-handedly?
A stream of warships flowed up the Visoke. In the next few days, the remainder of the Benesh fleet arrived, with a dozen allied galleys too. The camp around the town grew steadily larger. Many smaller boats returned, part of the ferry service Irona had organized to clear the refugees out of Didicas and ease the food shortage. Those boats were promptly sent back downstream with more evacuees.
A runner could cover two days’ march in one day, but to return with his report doubled his journey, so the first scouts, limping back at sunset on the second day, could tell her only that the Gren were at least two days’ march away, which might be only one night’s ride for them. They admitted that Podakan had left with them. He had been unarmed and marines must obey orders, so no one had even tried to send him back. Two days later, the second troop returned with much the same information. By then Irona had set up advance warning posts, manned and provisioned.
The Gren lizards could move much faster than a marine carrying rations and weapons, but it seemed the monsters’ sprinting range was limited and they shunned sunlight. Most refugees were able to stay ahead of them, as long as their food lasted. If hunger slowed them, or they stopped to forage, then they got caught.
Irona had been in Didicas a full eight days before she gained some meaningful military intelligence. A young marine named Jailolo Jingbo, a survivor of the Benesh force once stationed in Achelone, staggered into town, haggard and starving.
By then the lack of allied support was becoming obvious. Many mainland cities like Purace and Severny were responding—slowly but convincingly. Support from the islands was conspicuously scanty. Irona summoned a council of war, packing all the allied commanders available into the ground floor of her quarters, a dozen men sitting on the floor, knees up. She sat on one stool and put Jailolo on the other, for he could barely stand. He gave his report in a painful croak. The Benesh and a thousand or so Achelonian troops had opposed the Gren advance and been savagely mauled. The survivors had fallen back on the capital and tried again, three days later. He thought he was the only Benesh to have escaped the massacre that resulted. Irona was inclined to believe him.
What mattered most was that Jailolo gave a warrior’s account of the fighting. He told of the lizards’ speed, which was far greater than a man could run, but only in short spurts. He had seen the lizards’ scaly hides deflect Benesh spears like raindrops, and their jaws bite off men’s heads, helmets and all. He estimated their numbers at between five and six hundred, no more.
“We were told thousands,” Irona said.
“Begging your pardon, ma’am, we decided that their speed confused people. They move around so fast that the Achelonians thought there must be several armies.”
“Will anything kill a lizard?”
“Think lances might, ma’am. I saw a couple of men charge one with a galley oar. They hit it in the throat, and it went down. I don’t know if it was dead, but all its riders fell off.”
Until then, Irona had not even known that a lizard could carry more than one rider. Then she asked the question that had worried her for years.
“What kills the Gren themselves?”
“Hammers, Your Honor. Their hides are as tough as armor, but hit ’em with a sledge and their bones break.”
Her sigh of relief was echoed throughout the room.
The Gren themselves rode into battle on their steeds’ backs, lying prone, so that they were very hard to hit with anything. On foot they fought with their talons, which were poisoned. One scratch sent a man into agonized convulsions, with death following very soon after. Either they had never needed the bronze weapons they had demanded, or they had found a better alternative. Poison might explain why they shunned dead bodies and ate only the living.
Most important, Jailolo reported that the invaders were heading in the direction of Didicas, simply because they were following their food supply and this was where most of the refugees were heading. Irona’s scouts had already identified a possible ambush site half a day’s march to the north. She must stand and fight somewhere, and that would be as good a battlefield as she could hope to find, where the road came through a wide expanse of olive trees.
The Empire had bought off human invaders in the past, granting them lands in return for oaths of loyalty and an annual tribute of fighting men. But the Gren were inhuman, Maleficence incarnate, inspired only by hatred and a yearning to destroy. Never before had such great evil come in force south of the Rampart Range. Irona held the fate of the Empire itself in her hands and tried not to think about that.
“Citizen Jingbo,” she told Jailolo, “you are hereby promoted to sergeant, with back pay due from the first battle against the Gren. We’ll put together a watch for you as soon as you’re well enough to take command.”
Dilivost, as loyal adjutant, called for cheers for the new sergeant. Irona dismissed the meeting and sent Jailolo off with Sazen to be fed, billeted, and interrogated in more depth. Then she looked around the grim-smiling faces.
“What do you think, gentlemen?”
“Lances!” they chorused. They had been shown a slim edge of hope. Two men with an oar had knocked over a lizard—once—and that was all. But no one had seriously tried lances in the Achelonian battles, and hope was what they needed more than anything.
“Go back to your contingents, then,” Irona said. “Put your carpenters and bronze casters to work, and turn some oars into lances. And don’t forget sledges and poleaxes! Bring your best tries here tomorrow at noon, and we’ll compare designs. Also, Vice Marshal Dilivost, I appoint you to work out the tactics and drill we’ll need to use these, and what the men should do when they manage to disable a lizard and have to face dismounted riders. Dismissed!”
She gestured for her deputy to stay and called in Daun Bukit, who had been waiting outside with the day’s figures. He estimated that they now had between eleven and twelve thousand men in the camp. Yesterday’s arrivals had mentioned no other contingents close behind. She might have to fight with what she had now. But if twelve thousand men could not destroy five hundred lizards, then surely nothing could.
“Two ships only from Biarni,” Daun concluded. “Three from Brandur. No word yet from Vyada Kun, or Lenoch. There are rumors that the Genodesan fleet put to sea and was recalled.” Those three major islands all had much larger populations than Benign itself. They could field as many men as their fleets could deliver.
Dilivost could never resist a chance to belabor the obvious. “Perhaps they’re hoping the lizard men can’t cross the sea to get at them.”
“Well, we still can!” Irona said. She could tell from Daun’s expression that he was thinking, as she was, that Benign itself was now dangerously stripped of fighting men. Any two or three of the missing allies acting together would easily overwhelm any defense the Seven would be abl
e to raise. Dilivost wouldn’t think of that in ten years.
“But let’s deal with the Gren first and the traitors later,” she said.
A man walked through the open door and dropped to all fours before pushing himself up to a kneeling position.
It was Podakan, and she hardly knew him. He had his dandy’s hair tied back out of the way, and his face and arms were dark brown. His smock was in tatters, his legs all scratched and bruised. Nagging worry was washed away by a rush of relief that he was still alive and well, followed instantly by illogical fury.
“Rise!” she said.
He struggled to his feet with some help from Dilivost. She resisted conflicting urges to hug him and have him flogged. He seemed both taller and thinner. She gestured him to the stool Jailolo had recently quit, and he slumped down on it. He had a somber, worried air that seemed new, but might only be extreme fatigue.
Daun quietly walked out. He hated to be anywhere near Podakan.
“I’ve been worried sick, of course,” she said.
Her baby giant nodded. “Don’t punish anyone but me, Dam. The others told me to go back but I just did what I wanted to and they couldn’t stop me running along beside them.”
“So they told me. I won’t punish anyone. You’ve punished me enough, and yourself too. Was it worth it?”
“They’ll be here in eight or nine days.”
Her heart stopped for a moment. “You’ve seen them?”
He found that funny and glanced at Dilivost to see if he did. “No one sees them and lives to tell of it, Dam.”
Not true, but almost true. “What did you learn then?”
“I got as far as a ridge they call Height of Land, and I could see the smoke from there. By then I could understand a bit of what the rabble were saying when they tried to speak Benesh, telling me where they were from and when they had left and so on. Putting it all together, it looks like eight or nine days.” Then he repeated a lot of hearsay that she had heard before, and some that Jailolo had witnessed. He was telling her very little new, but it had been a worthy effort and she was absurdly proud of him. She had waited a long time for that sensation.
