As Jehan had calculated, the Land Decree of the First of Ksavra had an electrifying impact. Suddenly all of the peasants in the province became aware that a true revolution was being attempted, and that they were part of it.
The decree was issued upon no authority but Jehan’s own military power, which was still actually quite limited. It was one thing to declare the land free, and quite another to make it so. But the point was to plant the idea in peasants’ heads; that alone was an apocalyptic step. The sharecropper system had always prevailed and, however oppressive it was to the peasants, it had always been taken for granted. The peasants had seen their struggle as one of meeting the rent payments and persevering. Never had they considered a struggle to change the system and end the payment of rent altogether. But Jehan Henghmani did not blanch from so revolutionary a concept. He blankly told the peasants that the land was theirs. They must destroy the land barons once and for all, and they’d be free forever.
It was an idea so bold that no one had dared to whisper it before. Now, shouted from Zidneppa, it set the province on fire.
Over the area they effectively controlled, Jehan’s legions went from estate to estate and manor house to manor house to enforce the great Land Decree, to bludgeon the recalcitrant landlords into submission. Usually the arrival of Jehan’s army would incite the local sharecroppers to join in the overthrow of their own lord. The barons’ private armies—some Tnemghadi, some Urhemmedhin— would defend to the death. Sometimes there were lengthy sieges, but always the insurgents would win. In the end the landlords and their forces would be defeated, their manor houses sacked, and the earth taken over by the peasants.
The greatest of the estates in the Zidneppa region was Kalanhi. Its lord, Jhay Parmar Harkout, possessed a considerable retinue of personal mercenaries and servants. His fortified manor house walled with stone was also the headquarters of a regular Tnemghadi army garrison, and hence was doubly defended. The assault upon Kalanhi was the premier battle in the land war.
A major detachment of Jehan’s army led the first attack, and was thrown back with heavy casualties. But meanwhile the peasants from all across the Harkout lands were gathering around the manor house, thousands of them, even old men, children, and women, gaunt and impoverished. Though most of them had never set eyes upon the Jhay and his sumptuous residence, their hatred was ample. They had feared the Jhay, his power had been a mystic force upon them; but now they saw the manor house besieged, the Jhay at bay, vulnerable. They needed no prodding to attack; it was sudden and spontaneous. All at once the thousands threw themselves helter-skelter against the fortifications, flying like moths into a flame. Even Jehan’s hardened soldiers stood in awe of the mindless savagery of their assault, fueled by eight centuries of pent-up resentment. These peasants didn’t seem to care if they were killed; they felt already dead.
And so, emaciated, half-naked, dirty, goggle-eyed, they threw themselves straight into Harkout’s defenders. They were unarmed save for rocks and sticks, but this didn’t faze them. Mowed down by spears and arrows, they kept coming, undeterred by the carnage surrounding them. They kept coming, as though there were no end to them. Old crones with flaccid breasts, swollen-bellied children, the hopeless and the helpless, they charged straight into death.
Like worms after a rainstorm, their pathetic bodies littered the approaches to the Harkout manor house. But there were just too many of them; they could not be fended off indefinitely. The defenders exhausted their supply of arrows, and started throwing stones and even pieces of their own armor at the unstoppable horde. But with the force of a locust plague, it swarmed over the fortifications.
The slaughter inside was as complete as it was inevitable. Not a single soul escaped the vengeance of the aroused peasants. Old Harkout himself limped to hide in a closet, but to no avail. The invaders dragged him out. Never had the Jhay seen people like this, bony, unclean, so mad they slavered. They would not listen to his screams. He was overcome by their stink as they closed in on him, pummeling him with punches and kicks and tearing at his flesh with their nails. Finally they dangled him out of a window by his crippled feet, and from below, they vented their fury on Harkout by hacking at him with knives and pikes.
They kept slashing at his corpse, mutilating it beyond recognition, heedless of the flames that rose around them. And in those flames, some of Harkout’s defilers perished with him.
Aware of the sanguinary consequences of resisting, many barons yielded to the Land Decree. At the approach of the insurgent troops they would open their gates and hand over elaborate documents of title to their lands. But they were praying that they could ride out this storm, and that the Emperor would soon act forcefully to restore order.
With the deeds delivered into the hands of the illiterate peasants, Jehan’s soldiers would move on, wondering whether these ostensibly compliant landlords would renege.
Many of them did repudiate the deeds. But even if the peasants could not read the parchment documents, they understood what was happening, and for the first time they would fight back. They refused to pay their rents and rose up fiercely against the Tvahoud. And of course, the bloodletting was felt on both sides. Thousands of tenant farmers who dared claim the land as their own were burned out of their homes, their crops were seized, and their families were chased off by the barons’ thugs. Violence reigned throughout eastern Taroloweh.
The story was different, however, on the estate of Adnan Khnotthros. He was an old and tired man, ground down by the years of troubles, sick at heart at the poor state of his lands and the impoverishment of his tenants. He was smothered by debts, and it was beyond his ability to remedy the situation.
And so, when the legions of Jehan reached the Syad- Rekked, Lord Khnotthros meekly surrendered everything to them. For centuries his Tnemghadi family had lived and ruled in this Urhemmedhin land, but the time had come to go home. Nothing was left here for the once-proud Khnotthros line. Packing his family and his most faithful servants into wagons, he abandoned the estate and set off northward.
Two days later, on the road, the Khnotthros caravan was stopped by a roving band of dispossesed, many of them former sharecroppers of Lord Adnan. The old lord and his people were forced to watch while their women were raped and their breasts cut off. A pregnant servant girl had her belly slashed open, the foetus pulled out and chopped to pieces. They tried to stuff its remains down her throat before they killed her. Then they killed them all.
This butchery was not an isolated incident. While Jehan’s troops roved through eastern Taroloweh, catalyzing the class war provoked by the Land Decree, that was often superfluous. The peasants frequently took matters into their own hands without waiting for the army. The rising was not even confined to the rural areas; even the towns and cities seethed.
Years past had seen scattered outbreaks like Dorlexa’s, but now the province was ablaze with them. Dorlexa itself was the scene of yet another bloody riot. The Urhemmedhins were lashing out in all directions, but especially did they vent their wrath upon the priests. Everywhere, temples were falling to Urhemmedhin mobs. At Anayatnas the priests, including old Nimajneb Relleth, were stripped naked and paraded at knifepoint, to be jeered and pelted with stones and rotten eggs. Then, one at a time, the priests were tethered behind horses and dragged at a gallop across the hard ground, the pieces tom from them leaving rust-red trails in the dirt.
This was the summer and fall of 1181: a time of blood and fire in Taroloweh.
The Decree of Ksavra frequently brought disaster to the peasants, but this only redoubled their hatred of the privileged classes and their loyalty to Jehan Henghmani. That was what he wanted. He didn’t care if those wretches had food or not, whether they owned land or not, nor did he care how many perished in the holocaust. The death of millions didn’t matter; they were like insects.
Jehan Henghmani, the benefactor of the peasantry, would beam with satisfaction every time a baron burne
d his tenants’ homes and ran them off the land. He beamed at the carnage of their wives and children at the hands of murderous thugs. For every man who survived this nightmare would wind up in Jehan’s army, with a lust for vengeance.
Taroloweh and its people were in flames, and Jehan Henghmani, their champion, was on the rise.
15
HOWEVER VITAL IT was to Jehan’s plans, he knew the land reform crusade was actually not the main event. The Emperor would not long countenance a limb of his domain being severed. While the war against the barons proceeded from victory to victory, putting great stretches of farmland into peasant hands, Jehan was uncertain whether he could withstand the inevitable Tnemghadi retaliation.
With that impending confrontation firmly in view, the ever-growing peasant army was reorganized. It had to be whipped into shape, finally, as a disciplined military machine. Four divisions were created: one of cavalry, the remainder foot-soldiers, comprising in turn two divisions of infantrymen and one of archers. Each of these divisions was commanded by a general: Leopard Ubuvasakh led the cavalry, while Revi Ontondra took charge of the archers; Kamil Kawaras and Hnayim Yahu each commanded an infantry division.
Each of the divisions was further subdivided into a trio of battalions, with the generals left free to appoint their own battalion leaders. One of those so appointed by General Kawaras was the tall, thin young man from the hills who had distinguished himself in the defense of Zidneppa, and who shared Kawaras’ pathological venom against everything Tnemghadi. This was Gaffar Mussopo.
Jephos Kirdahi was given no division to command, but he was appointed a general nevertheless, as Deputy Commander to Jehan. Kirdahi acquiesced in this arrangement; the leader’s purposes were, as ever, obscure to him. Did Jehan fear his troops would not obey a Tnemghadi? Yet, if anything happened to Jehan, Kirdahi ostensibly stood to inherit command over the entire army. How could an Urhemmedhin rebellion be led by a Tnemghadi from Ksiritsa? Did Jehan assume that Kirdahi would simply be shoved aside by the other Generals? And the man was sure that his crimes against Jehan, in the dungeon, were not forgotten. Why did he continue to be suffered here at all?
Kirdahi could not answer these questions, but he knew he must follow Jehan. He could never return to the North; in fact, to leave the encampment at all would be suicidal for a Tnemghadi in this province. The other officers barely tolerated him. Thus did Kirdahi grasp how closely his own fate was entwined with Jehan’s. And he wondered whether that very fact might underlie Jehan’s apparent trust.
It was late in the fall—nine months after the seizure of Zidneppa—that a second imperial army came down upon Taroloweh.
This time, the commander chosen was no young glamor-boy, but instead, as tough a veteran as Sarbat could find: Sureddin Qarafi, victor of the famous battles of Arayela, Hanaleh, and Bouka Lawiy. Qarafi had spent all of his long career fighting the Akfakh; he was no plotter of place intrigues.
The white-haired General closely studied the situation in Taroloweh, and he knew just what he was in for. Unlike Ezir Zoitthakis, Qarafi vowed that he would not be taken by surprise.
Indeed, he was preparing a surprise of his own for Jehan.
Qarafi took closed-mouthed satisfaction as he bent over his maps, his finger circling the port of Zidneppa with its crescent harbor. Then his finger traced slowly up the coastline.
Nevertheless, the battle would open with a surprise for Sureddin Qarafi.
The Zidneppans had not relaxed their attention to the city’s defenses, and Revi Ontondra continued to supervise their strengthening, since the forthcoming attack was expected to be much more powerful than the previous one. Although there wasn’t sufficient time to wall the city, Zidneppa was fortified as much as possible. Its defenders were to be protected by an elaborate series of ditches, obstacles, and breastworks, with roofs overhead to ward off arrows. For the Urhemmedhin archers, the defenses were laced with small apertures, and erected behind them were huge catapults to hurl destruction at the attackers. These catapults would reverse any advantage to be gained from the bluffs overlooking the city.
Sureddin Qarafi’s intelligence corps had gathered all the facts concerning this sophisticated array of defense- works, and the Tnemghadi commander had carefully coached his officers on how they must prosecute the assault to overcome them. So it was not the Urhemmedhins’ bristling defenses that took Qarafi by surprise. The surprise was that they did not rely on those defense-works at all. Instead, they attacked.
Qarafi had arrived at the northern twist of the River Qurwa, about two days’ march from Zidneppa. His army was estimated to number between twenty and twenty-five thousand, perhaps four times the size of Zoitthakis’. This great force camped for the night on the western bank of the Qurwa, while their commander pondered the best way of crossing the river.
It would have been possible to ford the river where it narrowed, a few lim to the south. This would have been a quick crossing, but Qarafi feared losing his wagons in the river, and he was in no hurry. Curiously, the Urhemmedhins had left standing a bridge not far north of the encampment. During the night, Qarafi sent scouts ahead to examine the bridge, and when they reported it sturdy, his decision was made.
The next morning, the Tnemghadi army marched northward along the river, to mass at the western end of the bridge. Of course, the crossing of that narrow bridge was a slow undertaking; the army was able to filter across only three abreast. This did not concern Qarafi, since he had plenty of time.
The sun had reached its zenith in the sky, and approximately half of the Tnemghadi army had crossed. These men waited on the east bank while their comrades continued to march across the bridge. It was a relaxing way to spend the day.
That was when the Urhemmedhins struck.
All at once the forests near the east bank were alive with them as they broke cover and charged, from all directions, into the lounging Tnemghadi. Jehan’s army was outnumbered heavily by Qarafi’s, but the rebels had waited for just the right moment, when the Tnemghadi were divided in half by the river.
On horseback, Jehan Henghmani and Jephos Kirdahi personally led the onslaught. The seven-foot Jehan was alone enough to terrorize the enemy, his face a mangled mass of scars with one burning eye. Screaming, his sword whirling in the air, Jehan galloped directly into the Tnemghadi.
So better to hide, the Urhemmedhins had left most of their horses behind, and most of them now attacked on foot. There were no orderly formations in this battle, no punctilio governing the ensuing close-rank combat. The Tnemghadi quickly recovered their wits, and many managed to mount their horses as the melee got under way. The horsemen took a terrible toll of the rebel foot-soldiers, but the bloodshed was terrific on both sides. They cut each other down, and the dead quickly blanketed the ground.
Meanwhile, all was confusion on the bridge. Scores of soldiers tried to flee back across it, while the officers on the west bank were struggling to move the rest of the army quickly across and into the battle. The result was a squirming mass of humanity going nowhere; many were crushed, trampled, or thrown into the river. At the same time, some of the agitated Tnemghadi commanders were herding their men into the water to swim across; weighed down by their armor, hundreds drowned. The battle itself, too, was splashing along the east bank, and the river was soon running red with blood.
The carnage went on for hours. The Urhemmedhins had started out sweeping the field against only half of the Tnemghadi army on the east bank. But as the fighting was prolonged, there was a constant stream of reinforcements from the west bank.
Finally, the much-abused bridge collapsed with such a roar that it momentarily stopped the battle. More than two hundred soldiers were on the bridge at the time, and almost all of them perished in the crimson waters. The debris of the old bridge was swiftly washed away by the current.
A thousand or more Tnemghadi remained on the east bank. It was pointless now to try to get across, so they
fell back and left the scene. Their comrades, equally stranded on the west side, were heavily outnumbered by the Urhemmedhins at that point. Their massacre brought the battle to a rapid conclusion.
The survivors were somewhat dazed. They could begin to appreciate the cost in lives with which their victory had been purchased; much of their army had been wiped out. Jehan was cantering around, still on horseback, virtually unscathed. The men cheered him, and he saluted them, but he would not give himself over to rejoicing. He had sustained devastating losses, but that was not the only thing troubling him.
“Back to Zidneppa,” he ordered, “we must return at once.” He was uncertain why it seemed so imperative to march quickly homeward, save for a vague premonition that the battle was not yet over.
After a breakneck march, Jehan brought his army back to Zidneppa, and his inarticulate suspicion was proven right.
He found Sureddin Qarafi’s surprise.
Smoke hung in blotchy streamers above the city, and flames were shooting up all over. At first there was no sign of the Tnemghadi; then, the flashing trails of fireballs could be seen, arcing gracefully from the middle of the harbor, to fall within the city.
There were four of them, the largest ships in the Emperor’s navy—quite probably, the largest battlecraft in the world. Like smug bloated behemoths, they sat in the middle of Zidneppa’s harbor. There was no telling how many more Tnemghadi soldiers were waiting hidden in the bowels of the enormous vessels.
This sea attack was a master stroke, rendering useless the city’s whole elaborate defense system. Net only were the Tnemghadi catapults, three to a ship, far more sophisticated in design than the crude Urhemmedhin weapons, but the defense catapults had been installed to face a land assault. Even if these could be turned around to face the harbor, the city’s clumsy artillery was neither strong enough nor accurate enough to hit the ships. The citizens had tried to attack the ships by sea, setting out in their fishing boats, but this likewise proved futile. The open boats were sitting targets for the marksmen on the ships. Indeed, the whole city stood helpless while the Tnemghadi were lobbing a continuous barrage of deadly fire bombs into its midst.
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