Empire of the East

by Fred Saberhagen

  Mewick’s soft voice announced it simply: “Rolf is dead.”

  Hands turned him over; when his living face appeared under the now-brightening sky, voices exclaimed in surprise.

  Rapidly, now that he had been moved, the life flowed back into his limbs. He sat up, breaking out in a cold sweat. To a flurry of questions, he answered with such explanation as he could give. He did not understand it very well himself.

  Loford, who was the only wizard present, listened with grave headshakings and then conferred with Mewick. Then Loford drew from his bag of magical apparatus a thin slab of wood in two parts, hinged like a folding game board. Loford cleared a little flat space on the ground and put down his board, and on it he cast straws once, twice, thrice, to see in which direction the patrol should move next. No divination was infallible, of course, but Mewick wanted all the help he could get in reaching a decision.

  With each cast the indicated direction was the same. Northwest. Mewick, watching closely, wore a deeper frown than usual. There was, or should be, little that way but unpopulated wasteland for a thousand kilometers or more.

  In response to an inquiring look from his commander, Loford said succinctly: “Ardneh.” Then he murmured the words of the appropriate spell and tried again.

  Northwest.

  “North.” The word came firmly, in the voice of the young seeress, Anita, whose advice was so often hesitant. Prince Duncan of the Offshore Islands, who had been leaning forward in expectation of a struggle to catch some mumbled obscurity, eased back now in his camp chair. Here, many kilometers west of Mewick’s patrol, the dawn was yet no more than a faint promise, and a lamp was lit inside his tent.

  The girl Anita, mumbler though she usually was, had been proven the most reliable oracle that Duncan had yet been able to conscript. With Duncan’s chief wizard Gray now standing at her shoulder, she sat in a chair opposite Duncan’s, her breathing deep and slow and her eyes fixed somewhere over the Western commander’s shoulder.

  “Anita.” Duncan’s voice was insistently reasonable. “Why should we march into the north?” The map of the continent, spread out in his mind’s eye, could give no reason, except possibly to confuse the enemy. Nothing lay to his north but a thousand kilometers of wasteland. To Duncan it seemed likely that some enemy power was working through the seeress now despite Gray’s precautions, trying to lead them into a trap.

  Anita answered: “To win the war. More I must not tell you at this time.” The voice was the girl’s own, which was unusual for one possessed by a power; and this sudden cool assumption of authority was startling, whoever the power might be.

  Duncan’s head lifted. “Are you Ardneh?” he asked sharply.

  “I am,” said the girl, looking at him with an empress’ manner. When herself, she was too shy to meet his eyes for long.

  Behind the girl’s chair, tall Gray turned startled eyes to meet Duncan’s, then slowly nodded: in his opinion it was Ardneh. For the moment Duncan could say nothing. Ardneh had never made contact with him before, but Duncan had pondered long, trying to decide what course he should take when the meeting did take place, as seemed inevitable. He had come to no decision, but now he must; what attitude should he—and, in effect, the entire human West—take with regard to the being who called himself Ardneh?

  It was very quiet inside the tent. The army lay, to protect it against discovery by spying reptiles during the day, within a forest of high-crowned trees. Duncan could now hear the small creatures that dwelt in the branches above his tent, beginning their stirrings of the day.

  Ardneh was unique. No wizard of West or East could understand him. He was subtle, but the power…In the struggle with Zapranoth, the very mountains had been cracked. That much Duncan had seen for himself, afterward. It was as if the obscure Old World quotation were true indeed, that some put into Ardneh’s mouth: I am Ardneh, who rides the Elephant, who wields the lightning, who rends fortifications as the rushing passage of time consumes cheap cloth.

  But could the West take this unidentified power as unquestioned leader, king and Lord?

  Duncan arose and moved to the doorway of his tent, a moderately tall young man with sunbleached long hair and a face that worry and weather had made look older than it was. Moving outside, he ignored, because he was not conscious of it, the salute of the runner waiting before his tent, who sprang up ready for duty. The camp, almost soundless and invisible in the pre-dawn dark, stretched unseen before Duncan.

  Now, on Ardneh’s unexplained—wish, order, whatever you wanted to call it—he was supposed to swing his whole army north, a move for which there seemed to be no military justification. No, there could be no thought of making such a move on trust.

  Duncan spun and re-entered the tent. Facing the girl who was still in trance, he snapped: “What will happen if I do not move the army as you say?”

  Without hesitation Anita replied: “You will lose the war.”

  “How am I to know that you are to be trusted?”

  “By its fruit the tree is known.”

  Duncan grunted. He thought a moment more, then barked orders to his wizards, directing them to prepare alternate means of divination. He watched while they roused the girl from trance, and remembered to say a kind word to her as she was taken out, flustered, shy, and unremembering. Then he called for and quickly ate a hearty breakfast, meanwhile hearing reports brought in by birds just in from their night’s scouting.

  The daylight was not yet full when Duncan left his tent again to stride out through the sprawling camp. He passed among rows of quiet tents, and of men and women sleeping cloak-wrapped on the earth. Some were up and about, readying food for the morning meal, repairing gear, cleaning, washing, inventorying, sharing out supplies. Up in the trees, if you looked for them, the returned birds were visible, brownish gray and shapeless, hiding heads and eyes against the glare of day.

  Now the rows of tents were left behind. Passing a sentry who informally nodded to him in recognition, Duncan entered denser forest. Soon he had reached gloomy thickets through which the eye could scarcely find a pathway. But now as Duncan continued to step forward one bush or another bent itself aside for him, he kept unhesitatingly to the path thus indicated. He had come some fifty paces past the last human sentry before he got a direct look at his pathmaker: a forest elemental, almost tree-like in appearance, raised great gnarled limbs at some distance to Duncan’s left. It was guiding him in turns and doublings, supposedly preventing the approach of any unfriendly power.

  At length the parting of a final screen of bushes disclosed before him a wide, still glade. In the middle of the glade there stood three men, or at any rate three tall forms, seemingly garbed more in darkness and in light than in any human-woven cloth. They were his three chief wizards, Duncan knew, but which of them was which he could not have guessed. The three turned simultaneously to face the Prince as he stepped out of the bush.

  He could not see their faces clearly and did not try. As had been prearranged, in a loud voice he demanded: “Ardneh, Ardneh, Ardneh! Who is he? What is he? Will it be to my advantage to trust his word, to heed his will, to follow where he leads?”

  One magician threw back his head, cowled and faceless, and replied: “If we do not trust and heed and follow him, I see the end of the war.”

  “That has a hopeful sound.”

  “The end of war, the backs of Western men bent hopelessly under the Eastern lash, their babies slain, their women and their lands despoiled. That is the future I see if we reject the power called Ardneh now.” The faceless speaker bowed his head.

  A second spoke: “Lord Duncan, if we do trust the power called Ardneh now, I see no swift end to the war. I cannot see an end at all.”

  “Bah! All things in this world have an end. Still, better an augury of uncertainty than one of doom. What else?”

  The second wizard continued: “I see that fearful things must fall upon our people, if we heed the call that Ardneh sends today.”

  He who had spo
ken first to Duncan raised his head again at that, and said: “You do not tell what all of us must see, that fearful things must fall upon us, soon, whatever the good Prince chooses.”

  Duncan put in, impatiently: “It is war, and we all know what that short word means. Can you add to it aught of fear that we have yet to learn?”

  And the second seer: “This much; I see Ardneh—not clearly, but I know that it is he—caught in the grip of some power of evil stronger than he is, caught and dying whilst our army flees from trying to help. This the result if we listen to him now, accept his leadership. If we do not, I cannot see his death, or even the appearance of this enemy of incredible strength.”

  The two magicians who had so far spoken fell silent now, looking at Duncan, then turning to follow the direction of his eyes with their own.

  The third wizard, who seemed now to stand the tallest, broke his silence. “Lord Duncan, it is all true, what both of them have told you. If we accept the leadership of Ardneh, I see Ardneh ringed about with enemies and dying, and I see you despairing in retreat. And then…that vision ends in some great violence. If we do not accept and follow Ardneh, the vision is even clearer, and, at least to me, even more terrible. For in it the West and all it stands for is no more…”

  “Hold!” Duncan commanded. “All of you! If by your arts you can see these things, must not Ardneh be able to see them too?”

  The three conferred together, whispering. Then the first replied: “It would seem to be not beyond his powers.”

  “Well, then, if he is truly on our side…” Duncan lost the thread of what he had meant to say. Perhaps he was distracted by the way the three faceless wizards were now all turned toward him with a certain new tension in their postures, as if they had suddenly seen something new and peculiar about him.

  It occurred to him also that he should take more time to think about the patrols he had routinely scattered in all directions to see what…no, especially he must consider those working far to the north and…actually, one patrol in particular required some thought. One of the men in it was a black-haired youth, short but strong-looking, named Rolf or something like that. Yes, perhaps he had heard of this Rolf before—some matter connected with technology. Ardneh might well now want this Rolf to do something technological again, since whatever it was before had worked out so well.

  As Duncan thought further he seemed to see deeper into the matter. It came to him, as a remembered secret that should be shared with few or none, that this new technological mission for which Rolf (and the patrol that included Rolf) should be diverted would probably involve a certain object black as shiny ebony, a somehow gem-like thing about the same size as a man’s clenched fist. Ardneh had probably handled a similar thing recently, seen and handled such a thing for the first time, and in the course of that handling had obtained a clue as to the existence and whereabouts of this larger and vastly more valuable one, the true worth of which was not yet appreciated by any human being. It was now in the possession of some adherent of the East, somewhere in a northern desert where the patrol of which Rolf was a member, if they were fast enough and lucky enough, might be in time to intercept…

  So smoothly and with such seeming rightness did this train of thought flow through Prince Duncan’s mind, that only after it had progressed thus far did he awake to the fact that it was bringing him new knowledge, that it must have its origin in some mind other than his own.

  Ardneh? he demanded, silently, but with a concentrated urgency of thought that was the equivalent of a shout. There was no answer, save that the flow of ideas about the gem-like thing, whose existence he had never before suspected, broke off.

  Ardneh, you cannot manage me that way. I will not be controlled. But even as his challenging thought went forth he knew that no effort had been made to control him. He had only been taken partly into Ardneh’s confidence.

  The air within the glade had cleared. The wizards once again had faces, and were pressing round him anxiously. “…Lord Duncan, Prince,” tall Gray was repeatedly demanding. When he saw that Duncan was aware of him, he added: “He came to you directly. Prince, did you not feel his weight?”

  “Yes, yes. Now I have felt him. Listened to him. Whether I believe him is still another question.”

  They pressed him for more information but there was little more that he could tell; Ardneh was still a mystery. He led the others back to the camp, where he plunged alone into his tent for a time to argue with himself amid maps, reports, intelligence estimates. There were strong arguments on both sides but already in his heart he was more than half convinced that soon he would be moving the army north.

  III

  Banditry

  Full summer had come, and Abner, High Constable of the East, with the dust of hard journeying upon his clothes, sweltered standing in the small room high under the sun-beaten roof of the caravanserai. Around him a few quick and silent servants hurried, nimbly adjusting their movements in the cramped quarters to the Constable’s bulky, careless presence. Dust raised by hasty efforts at cleaning still hung visible before the small, high windows in the prison-like walls. The servants were unpacking things and moving the Constable in with practiced efficiency, while he looked around him with distaste. The place had looked more inviting from the outside. It would have been better, the Constable was thinking now, to have camped in the open again; his escort was strong enough to have nothing to fear from bandits, and there could be no sizable Western force in the area. But his companion had wanted to spend a night or two indoors, and to humor her he had agreed.

  Of course he could change his orders and move out again, but he had had a weary day in the saddle and was not minded to wait longer for his bath and such pleasures as the evening might afford. So let it be. In the next room of his little suite, which was of course the least dilapidated of the establishment, he could hear the buckets of bath-water already being carried in. Standing by a window and tall enough to peer down from it, he could see in the courtyard below how the weary loadbeasts of his retinue were being unloaded, watered, and bedded for the night.

  The south wall of the courtyard below was pierced by a single central gate, the only way in or out. On the other three sides were buildings, all the same three-story height. The building the Constable stood in, and the one opposite, were divided into small apartments and barrack-like chambers, the ground floors usable interchangeably by animals or by humans of the lower classes. The building that formed the third side of the enclosure, opposite the gate, contained a tavern, a brothel, a store, and the small quarters of the Master of the Station and his few permanent guards. All the buildings had windows only on their inner sides, facing the central square, and in their outer walls mere arrow-slits.

  Probably a couple of hundred people were now inside the walls, two-thirds of them in the Constable’s retinue. Nor had they seen another living human during the last two days. This remote region of the continent seemed to have been forsaken even by the war. Here and there moved roving bands of outcasts, deserters from East and West. But as for Duncan, his maneuverings, like Ominor’s, were many kilometers to the south.

  The Emperor of the East had assumed command of his own armies in the field, freeing his Constable for another mission, that of learning about Ardneh. The magicians had failed miserably. Abner had the Emperor’s trust, as much as anyone could be said to have it. He was journeying widely in this desolate part of the country to interview people, mostly Eastern officers, who in the past in one way or another had had something to do with Ardneh. More such Eastern people were to be found here than anywhere else, because those who had survived a struggle with Ardneh-inspired forces tended to be under a cloud of failure, and those whose failures were deemed mild tended to be assigned to remote places where nothing important depended on them. Those whose failures were thought grave by Ominor were seldom in any condition to be interviewed.

  Of course Abner might have summoned to the capital the people he wanted to talk to, eyewitnesses who ha
d been engaged in the various battles in which Ardneh was known to have taken a hand. But then they would keep re-working their stories to put themselves in a more favorable light. He had to convince them that information was what he wanted, not more scapegoats. Just talking directly to the High Constable was intimidating enough for most of them.

  A few had other reactions. One of these had engaged the Constable’s interest for reasons that had nothing to do with Ardneh; she had been traveling with him now for half a month. Two days after he met her he had sent home his other concubines.

  The stone walls of the caravanserai were thick, but the fit of the massive wooden doors was far from tight, and now from the apartment next to Abner’s there came plainly the slide and thump of baggage being moved, and the voice of the Lady Charmian in the shrill tones she used with servants. Abner listened. In the very ugliness of that voice, which at other times could hold all the female sweetness in the world, there was a fascination. Even by its incongruity the voice evoked the unbelievable beauty of her face and body. Truly a most remarkable woman, even in the eyes of a man who had his pick of what the East and the subjugated lands could offer. And it was a nice touch that he could blend his business with his pleasure. Charmian had been at the debacle of the Black Mountains. Not that she had been able to tell him much of Ardneh.

  Abner squinted against the lowering summer sun in the northwestern sky. Along the shaded porch of the brothel-tavern, some of its girls were quarreling, and had reached the stage of pulling hair. At the other side of the courtyard, three travellers, evidently some kind of traders, were being let in through the massive, narrow gate.

  …yes, the woman was already assuming a ridiculous importance in his life. Not for the first time, he suspected magic. When he heard the door close behind his servants and knew he was alone he reached for amulets of great power that hung around his neck inside his outer garments. With these devices given him by Wood himself, Abner probed for any indication of a love-charm being worked. But to his passes and mutterings now no answer came. The woman’s magic was no more than feminine beauty and cleverness. No more? Those were quite enough.