The Assassins of Tamurin

by S. D. Tower

  It crossed my mind then that we might lose. I wasn’t exactly frightened at this prospect, but I certainly felt very apprehensive. I wondered if Terem and I would get away if the battle went against us and what would become of Dilara.

  And then I thought: How did Ardavan happen to be here?

  Cold suspicion invaded me. Was this unexpected collision not chance at all, but ambush? Had Ardavan known that Terem was marching on Bara? And if he did, who told himl

  Not Mother, I thought, surely not Mother. Surely she would not have ordered Nilang to betray Terem’s intentions to Ardavan, so that he might trap and destroy us here. She might hate Terem, but it was unthinkable that any Durdana ruler would help an Exile King. What must have happened, I told myself, was that Ardavan had decided not to attack Garhang next spring, as Terem had expected, but to strike at him before winter’s onset. So now here he was at Bara, and so were we.

  I watched the gap between the battle lines diminish. When it was down to a quarter mile, Terem tumed to me and said, “I’m going to see to the cavalry reserve. Get on your horse, be sure you stay with Captain Sholaj, and do what he tells you.”

  He took me by the shoulders and kissed me gently. And suddenly I realized that this might be the last time I’d ever touch him, and that he might die on the bloody, tom earth of the battlefield, and instantly I was stricken by such fear that I could scarcely breathe. It shocked me to my marrow. Did it mean I loved him?

  It was a question I did not want to answer or even think about. All I could do was whisper weakly, “Come back safe, Terem.”

  He nodded and released me. We mounted our horses and he reminded Sholaj that he was to be my escort, an order the young officer acknowledged with poorly concealed reluctance. Then Terem and his bodyguard, with several dispatch riders and the trooper bearing the Rose Standard, rode down to the reserve cavalry positioned behind our right wing. The rest of the staff and I waited, listening to the howl of the enemy pipes and watching the Exiles advance.

  They reached us, and it began.

  I’d imagined, because of the speed with which we’d defeated Garhang, that all battles were over swiftly and that either Ardavan or Terem would be the victor before the sun reached its zenith. But time passed, the fighting went on and on, and then went on some more. Crossbow bolts flew in shoals, pike squares clashed with Exile battalions and drew bloodily back; waves of horsemen collided, milled about, and separated. Signal homs boomed; dispatch riders raced up and down. The din was tremendous: metal crashing on metal, the shouts and roars and screams of two hundred thousand men. Over the cacophony I called to Sholaj, “How long can this go on?”

  “Until they break—or we do,” he said grimly. General Di-rayr had ridden off to see to the left wing, and only six of us remained on the knoll. Terem and the imperial roses were still with the cavalry reserve; I could see the sunlight splintering on the gold.

  Ardavan had held back a mass of horsemen, and now he unleashed it against our right wing. What he was intending. I’m not sure. But he’d probably noted our mounted reserve there and reckoned that his cavalry could beat ours without working up a sweat, and that once he’d defeated our reserve he could roll up our infantry line as he pleased. So out of the aftemoon sunlight came a vast black wedge of horses and warriors, bearing down on our line’s extreme right. It swept aside the tired Durdana riders and poured around the end of the infantry wing, heading straight for Terem and the Rose Standard.

  Horns brayed. The standard surged forward, Terem beneath it, and our reserves made the trot, then a canter, then thundered into a gallop. The enemy redoubled their pace and the two huge masses slanuned into each other like battering rams. My hands clenched painfully on my mount’s reins as I waited for disaster to befall us. No Durdana cavahy had ever beaten Exile horsemen in an even match.

  Our world hung in the balance in those instants. I beheve now that we would have lost the Battle of Bara and all else along with it, if Terem hadn’t been there. His men would not give in while he fought stirrup to stirrup with them, and, httle by htUe, they held the Exiles and then began to force them back. The black mass surged and swirled, and suddenly I saw Exile riders at the far edge detach themselves and ride pell-mell for their own lines. Others joined them and then others, and suddenly the whole Exile cavalry force was in flight, the enemy riding for their lives with ours cutting them down as they fled, leaving score upon score of hacked and skewered bodies in their wake. I held my breath, terrified that our men would lose their heads and pursue the Exiles right into their own hnes. But Terem halted them in time and pulled them back, still in good order, to re-form on our right wing.

  He had saved us for the moment, but still the bloody day went on. I’d never seen a truly savage battle, but even my inexperienced eye could tell that both sides were suffering horribly. Dead and wounded sprawled in windrows between our pike squares and the enemy’s triple line; slaughtered or disabled horses lay everywhere, others galloped riderless in terror, and those still bearing riders were so exhausted they could barely trot. But it could not go on forever. By mid-aftemoon we and the Exiles had fought each other to a standstill.

  What happened next was a most curious thing to see, and almost unknown in the annals of war. The fighting slowly died away, the lines edged apart, and men too exhausted to raise their weapons leaned on their comrades and on their pike shafts, and glowered at the enemy The clang of iron on iron slowly fell away to leave only that ghastly song of a battle’s aftermath, the shrieks and moans of the mutilated.

  Ardavan was no fool. He recognized that his men couldn’t fight any longer and that he risked losing everything if he persisted. So did Terem, and soon after the two armies drew apart, an Exile horseman under a blue flag of parley rode toward our lines. Terem sent a herald to meet him. Then messages went back and forth for a considerable time, but by late aftemoon we and the Exiles had agreed on a truce until the following dawn. Both sides collected their wounded, pulled back to opposite ends of the valley, and made camp.

  But Terem knew the extent of our casualties, and as the dusk thickened he called his brigadiers and senior officers to his tent. Even now I can see him in the rusty firelight, still in half armor, his hair dark with dust and sweat, telling his men they had won.

  It sounded tme enough as he told it, and also tme in itself, I think. We had met the best leader the Exiles had found in a century, engaged him at even numbers, and fought him to a standstill. We had proven that the Army of the East could hold against the best the Exiles could throw at it. Even more important, we had shown that Durdana cavalry could defeat Exile horsemen. Next time, Terem said, we would drive the enemy wailing from the field.

  But, he went on, while the enemy had lost many men, so had we. To fight the next day was to risk throwing away our victory, for ICing Garhang still held Bara, and, given that we’d made war on him, he was very likely to give shelter and support to Ardavan. Moreover, the campaigning season was near its end, and when the rains began we must not be caught in hostile country with no city as a base. So, he concluded, we must be content with this first triumph, and withdraw across the Savath. In the spring we would return with even greater forces, and finish Ardavan for good.

  It was a mark of his leadership that he then asked for their opinions. Nobody was eager to withdraw, since we’d marched with every hope of taking Bara and all Lindu, but we invited disaster if we remained in the field. A few cavalrymen—always the most pugnacious of soldiers—said they would gladly fight in the moming, but the consensus was against them. So Terem said we would retum to the Savath, and that we would start out that very night.

  Few armies could have managed such an orderly retreat, in darkness, after a day of furious combat and a night march before that. The Army of the East did it, which was at least as much of a victory as standing up to Ardavan. We lit hundreds of campfires to make the Exiles think we’d settled in, and then, with infinite labor and weariness, got under way.

  We took our less wounde
d with us in the baggage train, but hundreds were too badly hurt to be moved. These begged to be spared the torments that the Exiles would inflict on them, and we did what we could. I remember one in particular, a young pikeman with a hideous belly wound, who held a comrade’s hand as a second friend slid a merciful knife into his heart. There were too many such scenes by far, but there was no help for it.

  We were lucky that the moon had waned only a little as our vanguard set out for the Savath. By dawn we were miles from Bara, and when Ardavan looked for us that moming, he found only trampled ground and smoking campfires. Our escape was a victory of sorts, but it was far firom the triumph we’d envisioned when we marched out of Tanay, and in the following days I saw the other side of war. We were not a defeated army, cut to ribbons by the enemy and fleeing for our lives, but it was bad enough even so. TTie wounded slowed us down and many died, to be discarded like mbbish beside the road, with only the briefest of rituals to lay their ghosts. Some camp followers died of exhaustion, or straggled away and were never seen again. And on the third day, to add to our miseries, it began to rain.

  Two things saved us from Ardavan. First, we’d hurt his army very badly, and his cavalry was in no condition for a serious pursuit. They did harass us for the first few days, but our horsemen were still their equal and, with their newly minted confidence, drove the enemy off each time.

  Second, Ardavan was busy dealing with Garhang. He didn’t want to leave an unsubdued Bara in his rear while he chased us, so he spent his remaining energy in the capture of that city and let us get away, damaged and bloody, but far from defeated. By the time he’d taken Bara and cut off Garhang’s head, it was too late to catch us.

  Still, Terem’s grand design of seizing and holding Lindu had failed, which was a bitter disappointment. Nevertheless, he thought, as did everyone else in the army (including me, despite my moment of suspicion) that Ardavan’s sudden appearance at Bara was mere unlucky chance. But we were wrong. What had happened was this.

  Terem had indeed befuddled Garhang with hopes of a Bethiyan alliance. Consequently the king had sent half his forces to guard his eastern frontier with Ardavan, who was lurking just beyond it with a considerable army. But the general whom Garhang had put over these troops had heard rumors of the alliance and didn’t like them, and on his arrival he promptly transferred his allegiance, and that of his men, to Ardavan.

  And it was exactiy then, only twenty days after I told Nilang about the planned invasion of Lindu, that Ardavan received word of Terem’s intentions. That word had come from me by way of Nilang; my suspicion that this might have happened, but which I had so swifdy discarded as unthinkable, had been correct.

  But it is no wonder, really, that I did discard the idea. It seemed so unreasonable—what purpose of Mother’s would be served, if her plots only replaced Terem’s tyranny with that of the Exiles? I might have accepted the truth, if I’d known how much further her plans went, but who could have imagined their reach? Certainly not I, being as much in her grip as I was.

  As for Ardavan, his contempt for all Durdana was so great that he could not see Mother as a serious threat, and so did not suspect her ultimate intentions toward him. He was, however, glad enough of the information she’d been sending him since he conquered Jouhar. He didn’t trust her, but he’d acted on the news of Terem’s advance anyway, since it was exactly what he wanted to hear. It put him in a position to surprise and crush the Army of the East, take Lindu from Garhang, and invade a badly weakened Bethiya in the spring. And so he marched west to Bara, where Terem gave him a drubbing he did not expect.

  We were eight days reaching the bridge at Bittersweet. Thousands of Durdana who lived along our line of march followed us west, terrified of the vengeance of the returning Exiles. Many died of cold and hunger on the way, for with the added mouths we were very short of supplies. As we went, I discreetly searched for Dilara, but in the disorder of the retreat I didn’t find her until four days had passed. She looked weary but undaunted. I gave her some bread; she soaked it in a little wine she had and ate it hungrily. Being deft at sewing up wounds, she’d been helping with the injured. But there was no time to talk, and I didn’t see her again until the night we crossed the Savath.

  “I’ll be in Tanay while you are,” she told me then, her face a white blur in the gloom. “Come to the Serpentine Market and find me there if you have news.”

  “I have some now,” I said. “He’s going to put eight brigades into winter quarters in Tanay, and bring them up to strength by taking men from the other ten. Then he’s sending the ten depleted units to Gultekin for reinforcement over the winter. Then we’re going back to Kuijain, where he intends to raise more men, enough for four more infantry brigades and one of cavalry.”

  “I'll send it on.” She secretively touched my hand. “Take care. I wouldn’t want to lose you.”

  “Nor I you,” I said. “When will I see you again?”

  “I don’t know,” she answered, “but you will.”

  Twenty-five

  Terem and I returned to Kuijain on 15 Lesser Frost, two hands after the campaigning season ended. The Chancellery had put it about that the invasion of Lindu was a punitive expedition, intended to warn the Exiles that we Durdana were no longer to be taken lightly. The original intent of freeing Lindu was quietly set aside, and the Battle of Bara was described as a great victory. All Kurjain tumed out to welcome us home and you’d have thought, from the celebrations, that we’d slaughtered Ardavan’s troops to the last man. But the truth was that Ardavan now ruled in Lindu, with the bulk of his army in winter quarters there. Terem’s most dangerous adversary now sat on the east bank of the Savath—the very situation he had wanted to avoid.

  I settled into the Reed Pavilion again, with occasional forays to my villa. I apologized to the Chancellor for vanishing as I had, but he appeared to be amused at my audacity and to consider my escapade a sign of my devotion to Terem.

  The truth of what I felt for him was far more complicated. My fear for his life at Bara had been real enough, and such feelings had not arisen merely because I so willingly shared his bed, as Mother had suggested they might. They’d also grown because we had so many things in common. Some were small, of course: a taste for sticky almond pastries, for the bird paintings of Master Sudai, and for silly popular comedies about mistaken identities.

  But others were not so minor. Terem didn’t think great

  magnates should be allowed to subvert the laws for their own gain, and neither did I. He didn’t think people should go hungry and ragged while their Despots gorged themselves on dehcacies and dressed in gossamin, and neither did I. And he thought it reprehensible that we Durdana should be as weak and divided as we were. To remedy this, he wanted our empire back, and I was no longer perfectly convinced that this would be the disaster Mother had forecast.

  Such speculations defied everything I’d been taught, but they wouldn’t go away. Unhappily, I had nobody to talk to about them, and often wished Dilara were nearby. Yet I knew that even if she were, I could never speak to her about my doubts, for she would certainly not share them.

  And with this, I became even more acutely aware of how much I had changed since I arrived in Kuijain. I had begun to care for Terem; I had begun to imagine a world free of Exiles, Despots, wars, and injustice; and now I was beginning to be wary of my closest friend.

  On many nights now, I slept badly. And in my worst moments, in the hours before the tolling of the dawn watch bell, I acknowledged that Mother intended to kill Terem someday and that I could probably not prevent it. I dealt with this in the only way I could, by telhng myself that it was still too far off to worry about. But it was always there, like one of Nilang’s wraiths trembling at the edge of vision.

  A few days after we got home, Terem told me that the Despot of Brind had sent him a secret proposal. It so happened that the pay of Yazar’s army was severely in arrears, and his men were simmering with mutiny. Unfortunately, Yazar had run out of people to
lend him money, and he dared not raise taxes further.

  Moreover, he noted in his letter, his cousins were of an insubordinate nature and might use the army’s discontent to Yazar’s great disadvantage. He suggested, therefore, that if Terem would supply money to pay his grumbling troops, he would, in retum, name Terem as his heir, both to his estates and to the dais of Brind itself. But until the arrangement was concluded, secrecy was of the essence.

  The offer was very attractive, and Terem told me he intended to continue the negotiations. So the next morning, after he left for work, I went to the villa, then to the Round, and then to Nilang.

  I had to wait in the garden until she finished with a legitimate client. When the man left, she admitted me to her summoning room, a whitewashed cubicle with Taweret signs painted on the walls. I sat on the stool opposite hers, and as usual she asked, “No one dogs you?”

  “No. I’m never followed now.”

  “He may be waiting for you to grow careless.”

  “I’m never careless,” I said, because I wasn’t.

  “What news have you brought for the one we serve?”

  I told her about Yazar and his secret offer. Nilang looked distant for a few moments, as if digesting its implications. I waited.

  Her brilliant blue eyes suddenly focused on me and she said, “You’re troubled by something. What?”

  I stared at her dumbly, fumbling for an answer. What had she perceived in my face? Or could she actually see into my mind?

  I found my tongue, and with an expression of demure embarrassment I said, “Mistress, he keeps me awake much of the night with his erotic appetites. I’m tired, that’s all.” Nilang’s gaze didn’t waver. “I said troubled, not tired. What is it?”