The axman had torn off Grebzreh’s silver nose-piece, stealing it for himself, and the warden’s scarred face was pressed bare upon the block. Even now he felt a twinge of pain, and for the millionth and last time, he cursed Jehan Henghmani. It had always been Jehan who tormented Grebzreh, not the other way around.
And now, the ultimate irony: Grebzreh was to lose his head in punishment for the death of Jehan—when all the while Jehan lived, still laughing at him!
The ax came down.
Everything was nothing.
13
WITH HOPEFUL EYES, the youth fixed upon the City of Zidneppa.
In the early morning sun, he could see the city more clearly than he saw himself. Indeed, his own self-image was poorly focused. While he still vaguely regarded himself as a boy, he was in reality quite tall, fully grown. He was an awkward figure though, very lean, with narrow slats for arms and legs. These limbs, and his face and torso, were toned a deep dark brown. He was naked save for a dirty little rag around his pelvis. The rest of him was dirty too, the dust caked white at his feet and knees and elbows. For years, only the rain had ever washed him.
This young tramp, barefoot and without a possession in the world, quivered as he loped down toward the gate of Zidneppa. He was sick with apprehension, knowing this might be the place where he would die. And yet he was flushed with excitement too. What lay at his feet was nothing less than a new world.
He was at the dizzying brink of another great change in a life that had been changed so radically already. The boy he had once been seemed unconnected to the man he had become. And still, he was only at the threshold of his life. What lay beyond that threshold was impossible to know. He could sense only that his years of wandering had been just that: a wandering in the wilderness, waiting for the right time to emerge.
And so at last, after years in the hills and forests and on the roads, he had come to Zidneppa. It lay just ahead, at the edge of the blue expanse of sea. The sight took his breath away.
As he neared the entrance to the city, he shaded his eyes to peer at the soldiers standing guard—and his heart leaped. They were not wearing Tnemghadi armor, nor did their eyebrows converge. They were indeed Urhemmedhins, a simple but staggering fact.
The gaunt youth stopped and his eyes went heavenward. The sight of those men filled him with rapture, pride, and reverence; it was something he had hardly ever dared to dream. “Praises unto Urhem,” he murmured, “thy day shall truly come!”
Tingling and flushed, he resumed his walk, quickening it, throwing one thin leg exuberantly ahead and then the other. The final distance he swiftly closed with a vigorous sprint.
“Hello!” he shouted, breathless, waving his arms.
The guardsmen were taken aback by this apparition coming toward them at a run. But one of them laughed and returned the greeting. Then the youth reached them, panting.
“You’re free to enter,” said one of the men.
“Then it’s true, isn’t it—this city has been taken by Urhemmedhins?”
The guards nodded.
“And the army and the priests have run away, and the big Tnemghadi here are being put on trial? And that you’re giving away free all the grain and rice?”
The youth asked these things with a rising excitement, and each time the guards nodded.
He had come to join them, to join the Urhemmedhin army of Jehan Henghmani. It had grown far beyond the bandit troop that had taken Zidneppa on the fifteenth of Nrava. Its ranks swelled at first with sympathetic townsmen, the army was now enjoying a steady stream of new recruits from all over the surrounding countryside.
“I want to fight the Tnemghadi!” declared the youth.
“Well, we expect they’ll attack us pretty soon. But are you sure you’re up to it?” The guardsman pointed at the young man’s emaciated body.
“Up to it? Listen, my name is Gaffar Mussopo!” It almost stunned him to speak his own name. He hadn’t done so since he had become a fugitive, and it seemed fantastic bravado to finally reveal himself. But he did so fully: “I am Gaffar Mussopo. I am the assassin of a Tnemghadi Ram-Tvahoud!”
The soldier raised his eyebrows. “You killed a Ram- Tvahoud?”
“That’s right. A couple of years ago. I killed the Ram- Tvahoud Uthsharamon Yarif of the Khnotthros lands. And I got away. So what do you say to that?”
Gravely, the soldier nodded. “Come with me.”
The General’s eyes were cool and haughty as he sat erect in his saddle, reviewing the neat rows of his troops.
There were six thousand of them, an even more powerful force than the Viceroy had requested. And they were commanded by General Ezir Zoitthakis.
It was a name calculated to make the defenders of Zidneppa tremble. Ezir Zoitthakis was only twenty-nine years old, but he was already famous, one of the glamorous stars of the Tnemghadi military. He was an impressive figure of a man, tall with the leanness of energy, his sharp black eyes aristocratic and urbane. Zoitthakis traced his lineage back to the Ibarouma Dynasty; his father was the Viceroy of Agabatur, and his mother’s father had been a leading palace official in the reign of Tnem Al- Khoum Satanichadh.
But it was not to his distinguished birth that Ezir Zoitthakis owed his reputation. He had made the army his career, and had early covered himself with glory as a junior officer by rallying his troops to victory against a savage attack by the Akfakh, the northern wildmen.
Now Zoitthakis was the youngest general in the Bergharran army. He was known as a fierce, ruthless leader, who never took prisoners. His watchword was complete destruction of the enemy. He was unloved by his men, who often cursed him for his tough discipline. But no one ever crossed Ezir Zoitthakis, who was looked upon as some demonic force.
Many were those who feared this General Zoitthakis, and one of them was Tnem Sarbat Satanichadh. The Emperor had bestowed high rank on the young man, but knew Zoitthakis wasn’t satisfied. The ambition of such a man would know no bounds. He would surely covet the Tnemenghouri Throne itself.
Indeed, Zoitthakis had closely studied history, and his hero was Sharoun the Sword, the founder of the Satanichadh Dynasty—a man who had come up through the army, and used it to overthrow the decadent Tnem Riyadja Tsitpabana. Sharoun’s descendant Sarbat was regarded as an unworthy heir by Ezir Zoitthakis. He believed the time ripe for history to repeat itself, and he was already casting about for sharp young officers to join his cause.
Sarbat knew nothing of this, but suspected all of it and more. In time, he would have to deal with Ezir Zoitthakis; but for the nonce, he needed a tough, skilled general. If he feared Zoitthakis, he feared Jehan Henghmani too. So he would pit them against each other, and whoever won, the Emperor would have one fewer man to fear.
So late in the month of Endrashah in the year 1181, Ezir Zoitthakis led his army of six thousand into Taroloweh.
On the night of the twenty-fifth, they arrived at the hills outside of Zidneppa.
According to custom, the attack would wait until dawn. Zoitthakis took advantage of the night to array his soldiers on the hilltops, in carefully deployed rows. The horsemen formed the first rank; the footmen would follow them. The bowmen would stand in the rear, to augment the attack with their arrows as the others charged. All was arranged to deliver one terrible, devastating, and conclusive blow upon Zidneppa.
As the night waned, these six thousand crack troops perfected their formations, readying themselves for battle, peering down through the darkness at the rebellious city they had come to crush.
Thus dawned the twenty-sixth of Endrashah.
Through the night, too, the Urhemmedhins were alive with preparations. Long expecting this attack, they now added the final touches to their defense.
Revi Ontondra, the former fish dealer well familiar with the city’s layout, was the mastermind of the elaborate barricades. They were made of dug-up earth, logs
, the hulls of old boats, overturned wagons, bales of hay, and whatever else had come to hand. A few yards in front of this barrier, a narrow little trench had been dug. Behind it stood almost every able-bodied person in Zidneppa, women not excluded.
One of them was Gaffar Mussopo. The youth harbored no illusions about his newfound leader. He knew Jehan Henghmani was not the good and selfless Ur-Rasvadhi, whose battle cries would be love and virtue, but Gaffar didn’t care. It was not some mystical ascetic that his people needed, he believed, but a tough fighter.
Jehan postured as the champion of the people, but Gaffar saw through this. Three years of torture could not have reformed the old bandit, it could only have made him harder and more cynical, using the peasants for his own ends. But Jehan’s sincerity, or lack of it, was beside the point. For once the unscrubbed masses had a strong leader whose own interests were inextricably bound up with their own. Only through the power of their arms and numbers could Jehan realize his aims, and so he was compelled to give them what they wanted. They had food in their bellies and it didn’t matter that the giver wanted something for himself as well as for them.
So they would flock to join his army, to fight to keep what he had given them. And as for the people of Zidneppa itself, they knew what Tnemghadi soldiers did in towns they occupied, they knew the fate of Dorlexa and others that had dared rebel. The people of Zidneppa would resist the Emperor’s onslaught, not only to support Jehan, but to save their city and their lives.
As the sun rose on the twenty-sixth of Endrashah, they looked out from behind their barricades, and they saw the Tnemghadi army poised to strike. Six thousand strong they saw, in close formation on the hilltops, all ready to swoop down upon the city. The horsemen formed the first rank, bristling in full armor, with spike-topped steel helmets and broad shields emblazoned with the dragon Sexrexatra. They were brandishing aloft their long, curved, tempered swords, which caught the first rays of the sun and gleamed like fire. And behind the horsemen could be seen the tips of the foot-soldiers’ pikes, a forest of lethal points.
This great army stood almost motionless in the still morning air. Equally motionless, the defenders watched them and waited. They felt very small. They knew that in eight hundred years countless rebels had been crushed by armies far less powerful than the one now facing them. They knew that never once in eight centuries had Urhemmedhins managed to stand against the mighty Tnemghadi army.
Thus dawned the twenty-sixth of Endrashah.
The still air was suddenly shattered as the Tnemghadi line exploded into its ferocious charge, hurling itself down the slopes with war whoops shredding the air, gaudy banners flying, and blades flashing in the sun.
All at once they came down upon Zidneppa, smashing down upon the city like the breaking of a sudden tempest. The storm’s lightning was the brilliance of their swords, and the thunder was the rumble of their horses’ hooves, shaking the ground. And the rain was the rain of their arrows, coming down out of the sky with the noise of hail.
But Revi Ontondra had foreseen how the bluffs could be used to pepper the city with arrows, and the defenses included roofed bunkers. So while some arrows did strike home, most bit harmlessly into wood or cowhide.
The defenders’ homemade bows did not have the great range of the longbows wielded by the Tnemghadi archers; they’d been given strict orders to hold their fire until the attackers were sufficiently close. Despite the terrorizing impact of the Tnemghadi charge screaming down upon them, not an arrow was let fly.
The shaking of the ground rose as the onslaught neared. The air was thick with dust and noise and the shrieking whoops of the galloping horsemen. The nearer they came, the faster they seemed to move. Only seconds separated them from the barricades.
Suddenly, every Zidneppan arrow was launched at the same instant. And with the attackers charging directly into their faces, hardly an arrow in that fussillade failed to find a mark. If a man was not struck, a horse would be. Dozens went down into the dust, faltering and skidding. Horses reared and stumbled and lost their riders. Others behind them crashed upon the fallen and went down too.
The charge wavered. The wounded, thrashing horses formed a barrier that stopped the others; the obstacles could not be seen in the dust. Horses were backing up and cantering in all directions. More arrows whizzed at them. In seconds, Zoitthakis’ carefully arranged formations were in complete disarray.
Nevertheless, they were not stopped. Hundreds were trampling straight into the city’s defenses. But in the dust and confusion, Ontondra’s little ditch was treacherously inconspicuous. Many were its victims, their horses crashing down with broken legs, throwing their riders over their heads.
Some did get past the arrows and the ditch, and these the Zidneppans attacked with their pikes. Although made only of wood, they could rip open the belly of a horse as it jumped the barricade; and when a horse came down, so did the horseman, often crushed beneath the injured animal.
Hundreds of the Tnemghadi did get through, coming down on the defenders with killing hooves as well as swords. Upon and behind the barricades, a pitched battle developed. But only a fraction of the six thousand attackers arrived, and in the end, they were easy prey for the more numerous defenders. They were slaughtered on pikes and pitchforks.
Meanwhile, the advance continued. Zoitthakis’ archers were useless now. They had stopped their barrage, to avoid killing their own men. The footmen were still edging their way forward, crouching behind their shields to dodge the Urhemmedhin arrows, unnerved by all the death around them. Some of them were falling back. Riderless horses were trotting aimlessly. Many who had gotten a taste of fighting at the barricades began to run away.
General Zoitthakis looked on from the bluffs, infuriated as his army—and his glorious career—were cut to pieces by unwashed Urhemmedhins. As he watched the back ward movement of his troops take hold, the enraged General spurred his horse, so violently that he bloodied its flanks.
Zoitthakis plunged among his fleeing men, cursing at them. His sword hacked away at his own troops as they ran past him. But he could not stop them. His face was a flaming purple, his lips almost frothing as he screamed in vain. The General slashed at a fleeing soldier, and the man parried with a blow of his own pike, opening a wound in Zoitthakis’ forehead that covered his face with blood and almost toppled him from his mount.
Zoitthakis’ screams were unintelligible, and with his eyes clouded by his own blood, he was slashing at empty air. Then an arrow struck his horse, and it went out of control, galloping off in the direction of the retreat.
The dust was beginning to settle, and the Bergharran army was gone. Half of Zoitthakis’ men lay dead or wounded, and the rest were in disorderly flight. But the battle was not over: Jehan Henghmani leaped to capitalize upon his victory. Bellowing orders, pushing the Zidneppans over their barricades and into the field, he led an attack upon the fleeing army, pursuing its stragglers and cutting them down.
The operation consumed the next two days, as Jehan’s men fanned out sixty lim into the hinterlands, tracking down and decimating scattered bands of Tnemghadi soldiers. Along the way, the Urhemmedhins they met cheered them on, and often joined them. In the end, few of the six thousand Tnemghadi soldiers survived, while Jehan’s army was even larger than at the start.
General Ezir Zoitthakis was never captured, nor ever heard from again. He was listed among the missing.
The Emperor no longer had to fear Zoitthakis.
He had to fear Jehan Henghmani.
BERGHARRA—Taroloweh Province, silver pastari or five-tayel piece of Jehan Henghmani as warlord, 1181-82. Obverse: portrait of Jehan on horseback, with Urhemmedhin inscription. Reverse: two cornucopiae. Breitenbach 1982, 32 mm., crudely designed and struck, weak in the obverse lower left quarter and correspondingly on the reverse. Otherwise fine and free of defects. A very scarce insurgent issue. (Hauchschild Collection Catalog)
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4
WITH A GLITTERING eye, Jehan Henghmani looked out across the Province of Taroloweh.
This was truly his land now. Much of Taroloweh belonged to him, stretches of territory where his followers had penetrated, welcomed by the people, distributing among them Jehan’s grain and rice. And the people looked with awe upon this heroic Jehan Henghmani, who had defeated the great Tnemghadi Army.
The Tnemghadi still regarded him as an upstart bandit. But they did not know how to deal with him. They pulled back into their manor houses and marble temples, praying that somehow the monster would vanish from the earth. At Arbadakhar, the Viceroy Assaf Drzhub was trembling, for he knew Jehan was not about to vanish. The monster was even boasting that he’d soon be sitting in the Vraddagoon in the Viceroy’s own chair.
Already, Jehan Henghmani had seized power greater than any Urhemmedhin had wielded in eight centuries. Already, he was the most successful rebel in the Empire’s history. But this was not enough for him: He was not content to lord over a corner chewed from Sarbat’s empire, nor would he limit himself to buying adherents with the grain and rice he had stolen. The Tnemghadi were too entrenched to be rooted out that way. Jehan would not only have to gain the allegiance of the peasants, but put it to work in a concrete way. He needed men for his army, yes, but that was only part of it. The whole populace would have to be mobilized to uproot the Tnemghadi, to uproot them from the land itself.
Thus came the Land Decree of the First Day of the Month of Ksavra, in the year 1181.
The thrust of this decree, promulgated by Jehan Hengnmani, was brief and simple: All owners of land worked by sharecroppers would turn over to their tenants free and clear title to all such lands. The land would be forfeited without compensation. The entire institution of landholding and tenant farming was abolished.
Scribes working at Zidneppa prepared hundreds of copies of this decree in big, clear lettering, and the proclamations were taken by the soldiers out into the countryside, and nailed up on trees and walls. Few of the peasants who saw the actual posters could read, but that was immaterial. The gist of the decree was spread by word of mouth.
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