by Chris Bunch
“Beggin’ th’ leg — captain’s pardon, sir, but what the hells kind of army have we went an’ joined?”
It was a good question, and became a better one in the next several days. First came Legate Nexo, a rather effete young man who affected a lisp. No, he’d rather not remain with B Troop, but wished to transfer where he’d be, er, among friends of his own sort. I could probably have put him in hack — sentenced to quarters — for a week for insolence. But I would rather have taken him back of the barracks, stripped off my sash, and invited him to discuss the matter in a more direct manner. But I knew an officer of his ilk would never, ever stoop to striking someone with his bare hands, and would have immediately reported me.
As for the 120 men I had under my charge: On the surface, it appeared I was in command of a unit an officer dreams of. I was only five men short of a full troop’s strength, which is always a miracle. Almost all of my men had at least a year’s service, and about half of them were career soldiers. They were all good-sized, the smallest being only five inches short of six feet, and a few even towered over me. They were in the best of health — no one could complain about the quality of our rations, nor the manner in which they were prepared and served.
Our horses were groomed twice a day, well exercised, and fed properly. The harness was always freshly soaped and polished, and the brightwork shone like a mirror.
The men’s turnout was equally spectacular. I ordered a series of inspections, and the biggest offense I could find was a man who hadn’t completely cleaned the blanco off the inside of his helm, where the strap was riveted. I did not chastise him. Even the soles of their boots were blackened before they fell out for parade.
They maneuvered perfectly, and every parade-ground evolution was done precisely, from “Squad … Assemble” to “Pass in Review.” They could raise a cheer and charge past dignitaries without their line wavering more than a foot.
They could … enough!
They were the shittiest group of soldiers I’ve ever had the misfortune to command. Even now, all these years later, I find it impossible to refer to them as “mine,” or “we,” but only “they.” If, Irisu forbid, they had ever been forced to fight a single squad of my sometimes-scruffy, sometimes-underfed, mostly undersized Lancers, the skirmish wouldn’t have been remembered by the men of the Seventeenth.
These “Silver Centaurs” knew nothing of how to fight with their weapons, although they did wonderfully pretty pirouettes when they paraded through the streets of Nicias. Sabers were to be presented, lances were to hang pennons on, and daggers were for ornament.
They stood guard in front of the government buildings in Nicias, but if a mob had charged, they would have screeched and run in dismay, not having the slightest idea of what to do next.
As far as tactics, if I’d ordered them to dismount and advance with bare saber using all cover, I might have been speaking Kaiti. Camouflage, scouting, skirmishes, courier service, flank guard — all the real duties of a cavalryman in war were unknown. The only regimental charge they could manage was across a flat, well-groomed parade field for the approval of diplomats and cheering citizens on holiday.
There was nothing intrinsically wrong with these men. Almost all soldiers are the same; it is their leaders who make the difference. These same men, well and hard trained, could have been as good or better than any Lancers.
But the Golden Helms were as rotten as the Rule of Ten. Domina Lehar was more interested in the mansions and rice fields he owned a day and a half’s journey beyond Nicias to the west, in the delta. The rest of the officers were the same sort of popinjays, fools, and idle gentlemen I’d seen at the lycee, of various ages, ranks, and states of disrepair, and in the Helms there was no one to bring them back to reality.
I’ve heard that in some puffed-chest regiments like the Helms it’s forbidden to discuss business, that is soldiering, in the mess. There was no such ban with the Helms, nor was it necessary. If any of us had talked about our day’s duties, we would have sounded like housewives discussing which brand of polish did the best job on our silver, or else horsedealers nattering on about what someone’s mount might do in the furlong.
The sole exception was a rather disheveled legate three years older than I, who seemed completely uninterested in the latest gossip or horse-breeding, did not drink, did not gamble, and seemed to have little interest in women. Instead he buried himself in history, mostly military, and in the few broadsheets specializing in the military. He’d been eagerly and mistakenly drafted by the Helms because he was the top graduate at his lycee. They didn’t find out until he reported that he’d achieved the position completely on ability in the field or classroom, with never a pin’s notice mentioned about his appearance or failure to suck up to his superiors.
His name was Mercia Petre. Yes, that Petre, for the most part no different as a legate than when he held a tribune’s baton not very long afterward.
I can’t say we became friends — with one exception, I doubt if Petre ever had what conventional people call a friend. But I spent long nights in the shambles he called quarters, sipping tea, studying old battles, re-laying them out so the outcome might be different, and reading all we could find on the Border States, on Kallio, and even Maisir. Part of me may have been bored cross-eyed by the dryness of the books, but this was a necessary part of my trade. I was never bored by Petre’s company, although others were, since he had but one interest, and that was serving the war god Isa.
He was the only pleasure I found in that cantonment during those long, drear months with the Helms.
This situation is a favorite in the romances. It’s a great tale, of a staid, pigheaded formation, and how a brave, stubborn young officer stands true for what he knows to be right, and in spite of hostility hammers his own small part of the unit into fighting order, and then is vindicated when war comes and they all ride out and do something terribly heroic.
Reality, however, was that if I’d tried to behave like that young officer I would have had my head handed to me, most likely on the silver salver the domina had his first brandy of the afternoon served on. I could not chance that. Not after Captain of the Lower Half Banim Lanett and the rõl match with the Lancers.
So I followed soldiering’s oldest commandment: “Shut up and soldier, soldier!” I used the few hours allotted for Commander’s Time to try to teach the men some tactical sense, but because we were never allowed out of the city to practice these tactics, nor was there anywhere to learn city-fighting techniques, I fear my talks only provided the men a chance to learn that most soldierly of all skills — to sleep with your eyes open.
All I could do was wait for the year or so to pass until I was forgotten, and then attempt to transfer back to the Frontiers.
That, and explore the world beyond the barracks, beyond the regiment — the wonders of the City of Lights.
• • •
I have never thought of myself as a city man, nor do I especially enjoy a metropolis. But Nicias is a city to fall in love with.
Its most remarkable feature is responsible for its name. When the first men were created by Umar and sent down to this earth, before he withdrew into silence and let the world be ruled by Irisu and Saionji, they found a roaring pillar of flame, flame from a gas that poured from a spring in the rock. Centuries later, that fire was somehow extinguished, and the gas channeled into pipes that were first laid beside and then beneath the streets of the city. When the fire was relit every house, from mansion to shack, and the streets themselves had and have free light that also provides a measure of heat. Nicias has more fires than other cities, but the citizens count that the price to be paid and especially venerate Shahriya. The supply of gas has never slackened, never run out. There is a legend that the day it does is the end of Numantia and perhaps the world itself.
It’s easy to numb the mind with figures about Nicias — capital of Dara Province as well as of Numantia, sitting on the eastern edge of the Latane River’s great delta, f
orty-five square miles, perhaps a million people, although I doubt if the bravest census taker has ever ventured into the towering, rickety slums of the eastern side or the evil streets of the northern docks that jut into the Great Ocean, nor has anyone numbered the people of the streets who sleep where sundown catches them, wrapped in their single garment.
There are half a hundred parks, from those no bigger than a city square that are owned and maintained by those living around it to the great expanses like Hyder Park or, to the north on the outskirts of the sprawling city, Manco Heath. There are at least twelve branches and who knows how many tributaries of the Latane River that twist through the city. Some of them, like the main navigable branch the ships use, are untamed. Others are channeled into stone banks like canals. Still others run underground, and are used to hurry the city’s sewage to the sea.
I cannot conceive of anyone becoming tired of Nicias. Someone once said that a man could dine at a different restaurant every meal of his life and die before seeing them all. I could cynically add he might die of surfeit or, remembering some of the street vendors I grabbed a hasty snack from, stomach poisoning, instead of old age, but I’ll accept the saying as truth.
Nicias has everything, from cool, quiet streets where the rich have their townhouses to the poorest garrets; shopping areas from twisting alleys with the strangest tiny shops imaginable to stalls to market squares to great emporiums that will sell you anything from a needle to a funeral. But enough — if you wish to know more, purchase a guidebook or, better yet, journey to Nicias and experience its splendor for yourself.
Sometimes I went out on my own, sometimes, when I felt like chancing the riskier parts of the town, I asked Karjan if he wished to accompany me. If he found no other pleasure, he could at least drink enough so I wouldn’t be sneered at for my temperance, and he had an amazingly good bass voice that made him popular in the minstrel bars.
I called on Seer Tenedos, and found him honestly delighted to see me. That became a bit of a habit. If I didn’t have night duty, which only fell once every three weeks in the Helms, and had no other plans, I would drop by the Lycee of Command, which was ten minutes distant, to see if he had any ideas for the evening.
He’d ask how my day went, of which the telling took but boring seconds, and then tell me of his. I assumed he had a Square of Silence cast around his office, since his comments on some of the high-ranking officers he was teaching, or on the staff of the lycee, were scathing.
He’d sacked the other two instructors in the Military Sorcery Department, one for senility, the other for incompetence, and replaced them with young, eager seers as convinced as he was that sorcery must become the third branch of the army, along with the infantry and cavalry.
At first it was the two of us, but in a few weeks there were other officers, students, younger captains of the Upper Half or dominas, clustering around. At this point, his dissection of his students ceased, obviously. Besides, his pupils were more interested in elaborations of his classroom lectures, accompanied as frequently as not by illustrations on a large sand-table he’d had installed.
I stayed well to the rear of the crowd, listening intently. I was fascinated. On the surface, it seemed all he was talking about was bygone battles, demonstrating how a skilled mage might have changed their outcome with a spell of darkness here, a weather spell there, and so forth.
But there was more to Seer Tenedos’s speeches than just history, and it took me a while to realize it. I think that if I’d not known of his hatred for the Rule of Ten and his absolute conviction that Numantia must be ruled by a king or face doom, I might not have noticed. He’d slyly put in a dig about those who live in the past being strangled by its dead hand in the future or, if one of the battles had occurred during the time of the Rule of Ten, how the commander on the ground was the man who saved the day, not the panicked babblers in the rear.
Tenedos was building a corps of disciples to his philosophy. There was certainly no sign of his being rejected and cast into outer darkness. The Rule of Ten had erred badly in making this appointment, as he’d foreseen.
Since the students all out-ranked me, I was beginning to feel most out of place, when Tenedos announced a new schedule. He would only be available for extra sessions twice a week. The other nights he wished to himself.
“One of them at least,” he said, “I promise you I’ll spend with you, Damastes, assuming you’re not tired of the company of a growling magician. I can feel myself getting stale in this damned office. I want to get out, in the streets, among the people.”
It was well he made his plan firm, because he became a favorite of the lecture halls. One interesting thing about Nicians: They would rather go to a hall and listen to one man spiel his ideas or, better, two flail each other as incompetent, barren-minded baboons than visit a gallery or attend a concert.
A side benefit of being the season’s pet philosopher was the number of women who wished to have a private interchange to, as one lovely said, “make sure I properly understand what you’re saying.” That person must have required considerable explanation, because when I saw Tenedos the next afternoon he was exhausted, and begged off our planned outing for the chance for some sleep.
But that was about the only time I saw him tired. He had vast wellsprings of energy, and never seemed to falter.
When we went out of an evening, there was no telling where we would go, nor whose company we would be in. Sometimes it was an invitation to a party that Tenedos had gotten, or, not infrequently, one that came to the “Lion of Sulem Pass” as one broadsheet had called me, which Yonge never let me forget. We were as likely to dine in the halls of the mighty as in some dockside shanty that happened to have the best oysters in Nicias, or to sit listening to four stringed instruments in a hall as watch naked dancers prance around a single man with a guitar and a voice that could move the dead in a wineshop where we carefully sat with our backs to the wall.
Nicias was a beautiful city, but it was not a happy one. There was something wrong, something amiss. Rich people did not go about without an armed guard or two. The populace openly sneered at the wardens and, in the poorer sections where the men of the law went in squads, were as likely to hurl a cobble at their backs and run as not.
Soldiers were not respected, either, but were the subject of imprecations and sometimes, if the Nician was bold and the soldier drunk enough, waylaid, robbed, and stripped.
This isn’t to say injustice was only on one hand. Every street corner held a shouting orator, as likely to be howling obscene stories of whose beds the Rule of Ten slept in as condemnation of the entire system. They were certainly harmless, even if their numbers were worrisome. But the wardens seemed to single out these blowhards as desperate enemies of the state, and smashed them into momentary silence with their truncheons. And the wardens believed that anyone arrested was automatically guilty, and deserved a merciless hiding on the way to prison.
The beauty of Nicias was there, but no one seemed to want to take care of it. The streets needed sweeping, the sidewalks were generally blocked with trash, and too many of the buildings, public as well as private, needed painting and upkeep.
I remembered what Tenedos had said as we rode through Sulem Pass the previous year: “I can feel the unrest in Nicias, in Dara. The people are without leaders, without direction, and they know it.”
I, too, felt this tension, felt as if the city were a great, dry wheatfield, parched by drought, waiting only for a single man with a torch. And I was beginning to believe I rode the streets with that very man.
But very seldom did my thoughts follow those grim tracks.
Laish Tenedos was excellent company. Frequently when he went out he changed into mufti, since, as he said, “wizard’s robes can be off-putting as often as they gain an advantage. I might advise you to follow the same practice.”
Against regulations, I purchased civilian garb, and kept it in Tenedos’s apartments, although I wore my uniform more often than not.
The two of us, sometimes accompanied by Karjan and Yonge, found ourselves in strange byways.
I remember …
… paying a boatman a few coppers to give us a tour of the sewers under the city, roaring along as if caught by rapids in his tiny boat, the curved overhead bricks dank and dripping, rats hissing at us from corners. Yonge got the boatman drunk and we almost lost ourselves for good before discovering an open grating to pry up and get our bearings.
… There was an evening that began quietly, a visit to a small tavern along the river where the first barrel of the famous sweet wine of Varan was available for tasting. Somehow tasting became drinking became guzzling and we ended up in a long snake dance down the riverbank, the Seer Tenedos, in full regalia, roaring drunk at its head, I just behind him drunk only on the laughter and singing, the wardens standing bewildered nearby, hardly stupid enough to club down a magician for being drunk and disorderly.
… We were at a formal dinner party. I was seated next to a pretty, if rather cold-looking, woman about ten years my senior who’d been introduced as the Marchioness Fenelon. Between courses we’d chatted of this and that — I was actually becoming able to make small talk. Then she turned to me, and I saw for the first time the pin she wore on her breast.
It was a solid gold casting of a long cord.
Time froze for me, and I remembered the cavern, another, real, yellow cord of silk around my neck, and the murderous beauty named Palikao.
“What,” I said, my voice as harsh as if I’d been reprimanding one of my men, “is that you’re wearing?”
She started, glanced down at the pin. Then she looked up at me, but her eyes moved away rapidly.
“Oh,” she said, “it’s just … something I saw in a shop and thought looked smart. Just a bauble.”
I knew she was lying.
… We organized an impromptu race among the carriage drivers of Hyder Park, and combed through nearby taverns to find enough passengers to fill them.
