On the hardpan, the sun beat down with the merciless might of full noon. The token Acoma force sent down to Xacatecas’ aid had not significantly altered the odds, except to draw some of the overwhelming numbers of attackers away from Lord Chipino’s shield ring. The Acoma forces soon became as beleaguered as their allies, but with one difference: they had a purpose to their defence. Huddled together in a wedge, they appeared to be fighting as desperate a defence as the Xacatecas; except that, step by gradual step, they seemed to be winning their way closer to their allies.
Not one to miss nuance, Tasaio noticed. His frown darkened. That his enemy should take more losses than strictly necessary just to gain an insignificant bit of ground discomforted him. He might call Mara coward for sending so small a relief force, but he was too cold-bloodedly wise to discount that another purpose beyond fear might motivate her actions. His suspicion was confirmed a moment later when an archer within Mara’s shield wall fired off a signal arrow in a high arc.
Tasaio cursed more fervently when the shaft reached its height, tipped into downward flight, and landed, unrecoverable, in the midst of Xacatecas’ troops.
‘Suppose she has got a message through,’ worried the interfering Strike Leader.
‘No doubt,’ Tasaio snarled. His plot had gone wrong, he was sure of it. There was dust rising beyond the ridge at the edge of the hardpan, which warned of another battle well in progress. His hidden troops had certainly been discovered, which explained much, and none to the good.
‘Quickly, we must call off half of the troops that pin down Lord Chipino,’ Tasaio concluded. ‘Our best chance now is to charge upon Mara’s command position and hope she has engaged the bulk of her soldiers elsewhere. If she has done so, we stand good odds of overrunning her honour guard and killing her. If we act swiftly, Lord Chipino and that ridiculous little company she sent to distract us will have no opportunity to win free.’
The Strike Leader raced off to sound the appropriate horn calls, and Tasaio, slit-eyed, arose from his position and checked his sword belt. With a stiff nod to his battle servant, who accompanied him always, he stalked off to join his warriors. Nothing would go amiss this time, he swore by Turakamu the Red. Against whatever outside contingency might arise, and even should his life become forfeit, Lord Desio’s cousin would personally lead the foray against the notch where Mara had taken refuge.
‘You won’t come out, little bitch. Then I will send killers in after you.’ So saying, Tasaio drew his sword and took his place at the head of the warriors called into position by his trike Leader.
The scout bowed to Tasaio. ‘It is as you suspected, sir. Mara has sent all of her companies around the ridges to attack our forces in hiding. She keeps with her one officer, as honour guard, to stand by her litter.’
‘Then we have her.’ Infused by a glow of confidence and satisfaction, Tasaio dismissed half of the warriors he had called from the battle on the hardpan. ‘Return to support our fellows against the Acoma and Lord Xacatecas. One patrol should be more than enough to ensure the Acoma bitch dies.’
He waved, and the company started forward. Tasaio marched them up the slope toward the saddle between two knolls, where Mara and her honour guard held position. He made no effort at concealment; indeed, it would only be a satisfaction to him if his quarry trembled in fear at his approach. If the Lady broke in terror before his threat, he would bring home to his cousin and Lord the gratifying story of Mara’s shame. Very much he would enjoy seeing her cringe before him at the end.
The warriors crested the rise. Tasaio had time to notice that the curtains of Mara’s litter were drawn closed, her form but a shadowy presence through layers of gauzy silk. Eyes narrowed against sun glare, Tasaio also saw that the honour guard who stood vigil was exceptionally tall, and red-haired. His greaves were too short for his long shanks. The helm pressed over his unkempt locks was not snapped in the heat. As he sighted the advancing ranks of the Minwanabi, he widened eyes of a rare deep blue.
Then, to Tasaio’s ultimate surprise, the redheaded guardsman, who should have been the first pick of Mara’s warriors, gave a gasp of alarm. He plucked at the gauze curtains and whined, ‘Lady, the enemy comes!’
Enjoying the moment hugely, Tasaio signalled the charge. Around him, his warriors leaned into full stride for the attack.
With a strange expression on his face, the Acoma guard braced his spear. Then, as if he rethought the matter, and as his attackers came within arrow range, he dropped his weapon with a noisy clatter, spun on his heel, and ran.
Tasaio loosed a startled laugh. ‘Take the bitch!’ he called and waved his following onward.
The strike patrol raced for the kill, sandals scattering stones as they pressed eagerly into the draw. Tasaio, in the lead, loosed an ululating cry that was half battle yell and partly a paean to the Red God. He dashed to the green-lacquered litter, slashed the silken curtains aside, and thrust his sword deep into the silk-clad figure inside.
A cloudy puff of jigabird feathers burst outward from the pillow his blade impaled. Caught between fury and reflex, Tasaio struck again. Silk split, and a second gutted cushion disgorged its contents into the air.
Tasaio inhaled a lungful of down and cursed aloud. Enraged and forgetful of decorum, he slashed a third time in an explosion of sheer temper. The litter contained only pillows, wrapped up in a lady’s fine robe. The honour guard, the redhead, had too obviously been a slave set up as decoy, and this litter a gambit and a trap.
Tasaio’s mind reasoned quickly, even though he was irate. This minute, hidden in the surrounding rocks, Mara was certainly enjoying a rich laugh at Minwanabi expense.
Tasaio scanned the nearby knolls to glean some clue where to send his shamed patrol of warriors, who were now as mortified and hot for blood as he was. To follow after the fleeing slave was too obvious; Mara surely would be more clever –
That moment, the arrows began to fall.
The man next to Tasaio caught one just above his cheek guard. He fell, clawing at his face. Tasaio saw other warriors stagger out of their ranks, and he himself took a glancing blow to his armour that scored deeply through hide layers before rebounding and leaving him unharmed. His instinctive reaction as a commander was to call orders and prevent a sloppy retreat. His warriors were seasoned. They responded as the trained élite they were and withdrew in orderly fashion into the cover of rocks and outcrops. At once Tasaio began to trace the flights of the arrows, and to formulate a counterattack to obliterate the Acoma archers.
But a clattering of loose rocks sounded on the ridge he had only recently climbed. Distracted by the disturbance, Tasaio spun, and saw the plumed helm of an Acoma officer flash past a gap in the rock. Green-armoured shapes followed, accompanied by the unmistakable hiss of blades being drawn. Voices added to the din, ordering ranks to close in preparation for a charge.
‘They seek to cut us off,’ the Minwanabi Patrol Leader said quickly.
‘Impossible!’ Tasaio snapped. There was no way Mara could have moved warriors so swiftly to flank Tasaio and attack from the rear.
More canny to the ways of his superior than the Strike Leader, the Patrol Leader said nothing but waited for his senior to issue commands.
‘Cho-ja,’ Tasaio said abruptly. ‘She must have kept some of them in reserve.’ They could move swiftly enough in this uncertain terrain – and yet the voices and the noise from beyond the ridge sounded distinctly human. Tasaio hesitated only a moment more. He could not afford a mistake; if Mara had lured him here, surely she had means to cut him off and annihilate both him and his men. And that would spell disaster for his Minwanabi master.
His face would be known, if not to her, then to Lord Xacatecas. He had cut too forward a figure in the War Party not to be recognized. To have the body of so highly placed a cousin in House Minwanabi would be solid evidence of treason. For although this incident had happened outside the borders of the Empire, to treat with the desert men was to support the enemies of the Emperor. Alt
hough Tasaio personally would have been willing, if not eager, to trade his life for the chance to send Mara to Turakamu, he dared not do so in a fashion that left the honour of his ancestors compromised. No, Mara had him trapped. He had but one alternative, however distasteful the necessity.
‘Fall back,’ Tasaio called curtly. ‘Move in good order, but quickly. We must give the enemy no victory.’
The warriors obeyed without question, abandoning the safety of cover. They ran in neat zigzags and suffered renewed assault by Acoma archers as they withdrew toward the hardpan. Their faces showed no expression, in true warrior fashion. So did Tasaio reveal no emotion, but every step that he took in retreat burned. Never had he been forced to flee from the field of battle. The ignominy cut into him like physical pain. He had reviled Mara, until now, as an enemy of his house and people. This moment, that hatred assumed a personal score. For this current shame, brought about by an error in tactics and his own overeagerness and bloodlust, the Acoma Lady must in the future be made to pay. He would hunt her, and all of her issue, until his last breath was drawn. Arrows clattered around him in concert with the suppressed grunts of warriors who fell and died. Tasaio swore as he ran he would arrange her downfall coldly, each plot made and executed in icy surety, until this insult was avenged.
One of the fallen was his personal battle servant. Aware the man no longer ran behind his shoulder, Tasaio cursed yet again. He would have to train another, and that was wasteful, since many candidates usually died before he found one with reflexes quick enough to suit him. Here was another personal score to be settled, another reason Mara must be made to bleed and suffer. Absorbed in his hatred, Tasaio raced across the hardpan without once looking back. And so he did not know, until he reached the safety of the half company he had rashly and prematurely dismissed, that he and his strike force had been routed by a handful of cho-ja and soldiers, who had duped him into the belief he was surrounded. In fact they had carried nothing better than some spare helms mounted on poles, and loose bits of armour dragged on cords through the sand to create plentiful noise and much dust.
The Strike Leader laboriously pointed this out, and though his face was woebegone, and not in the least bit mocking, Tasaio whirled on him in a fury.
‘Silence that man,’ he called to his Patrol Leader. ‘Cut his throat, and take his plumes. You are this moment promoted to his position.’
The Patrol Leader bowed to his superior. No hint of distress showed on his face as he drew his sword to carry out his superior’s orders.
Tasaio glared at the ridge where Mara and her honour guard must lie hidden, mightily enjoying his defeat. The fact that he had Xacatecas surrounded and all but at his mercy did not ease his disgrace. Tasaio did not turn a hair as his Strike Leader was cut down behind him. As if the man did not gurgle out his last breaths on the sand, the cousin of Desio turned his resources to salvaging what he could of the afternoon, by ordering renewed assault upon Lord Chipino and the isolated half company of the Acoma the Lady had sent out as sacrifice. If he could not get at Mara, at least he could ensure that her honour perished with her ally.
And yet, as the sun passed its zenith and descended through the layered dust toward the horizon, Lord Chipino’s warriors held without breaking. Many of them lay dead, but the survivors did not lose heart. Tasaio’s mood worsened when an exhausted runner brought word that the warriors behind the west ridge had been attacked and decimated by Acoma. The east ridge perhaps held its own; no messenger arrived to say for sure. Tasaio sent scouts to check, but none returned.
‘Damn the Lady’s cho-ja,’ the messenger ended. ‘Without them, her victory would not have been possible.’
‘Explain what you mean,’ Tasaio demanded irritably. But a short time later he saw with his own eyes, as a company of Acoma warriors rushed from the valley, between knolls, to come to Xacatecas’ defence. They arrived with impossible speed, mounted on the backs of their cho-ja allies. When they reached the fringes of battle, they dismounted, assembled ranks, and charged with a vengeance upon his troops.
Tasaio’s warriors had been fighting all day in the relentless sun of the hardpan. They had sweated out their freshness and had no edge to bring to bear against this new and unexpected threat. In contrast, the soldiers of Lord Xacatecas took new heart from their rescuers and pressed back with freshened hope. The Minwanabi could not hold them, and once again Tasaio found himself calling the order for retreat.
He spoke between clenched teeth, pale to the point of nausea with mortification. His plot in Dustari was in ruins, an unmitigated failure; and all because he had been outmanoeuvred on the field, a thing that had never happened on Kelewan, nor in the Warlord’s campaign against the Midkemians.
The taste of defeat was new and all too potently bitter. Tasaio oversaw the withdrawal of his army, what remained of it; his stomach churned with the realization that he had destroyed his chances to retaliate. He could not remain in the desert to mount a second assault. The desert men he had sent forth as bait would not forgive his betrayal. The tribes would now be set against him, their chiefs perhaps angry enough to swear blood debt. Though Tasaio looked with scorn upon tribal custom and was not in the least afraid of any retaliation the desert men could call down upon his house, he could not discount their retaliations. All the way to Banganok and the ships that would return him to the mainland, he must endure petty raids as the desert men sought to settle blood score against his company.
That night, sitting tentless and tired in camp between a fold of dunes to the east, Tasaio brooded in solitude. He would take no sa wine to blunt the aches left from battle. He shut out the voices of his soldiers, raised in bitter complaint, as they wrapped their wounds and sharpened the chips from their swords. Above all, he would not look to the west, where the afterglow of sunset was displaced by the glimmer of Acoma and Xacatecas victory fires. Soon enough, he promised, those fires would be as ashes. Soon enough would Mara come to regret this brief victory, for next time he matched wits against her, Acoma defeat would be utter and final.
In the command tent of the Lord of the Xacatecas, surrounded by the soft light of lamps and by hushed conversation between a healer and a favoured wounded soldier, Mara made the bow that was proper from a Ruling Lady to a social superior. Although hers had been the triumph in the day’s rout, she had chosen not to press the acknowledgment of her laurels. She did not wait haughtily in her own tent and insist that the Lord of the indebted house come to her; wisely, subtly, she did not force her new-won position upon a Lord who could potentially cause the Acoma more harm than help were his pride unduly ruffled. Neither did she attempt to ingratiate herself, but passed off her presence as a social visit of little consequence.
‘My Lord Chipino,’ she opened, smiling slightly as she arose, ‘you expressed an interest in my honour guard, and specifically the soldier who betrayed such remarkable cowardice, that Desio’s much praised cousin, Tasaio, was set off his guard.’
Lord Chipino waved away the servant who applied a hot compress to the sore muscles of his back and neck. Glistening with massage oils, and smelling of sweet ointments, he gestured to a waiting slave boy, who slipped a light robe over his body. ‘Yes.’ Chipino fixed bland eyes on a tall figure in the shadows behind Mara, and said, ‘Come forward.’
Kevin stepped forth, dressed in his Midkemian trousers and a loose-sleeved shirt, gathered at the waist with a Tsurani belt of overlapping shell disks. His blue eyes were laughing as he stopped, hands on hips, to suffer Lord Chipino’s scrutiny.
The Lord of the Xacatecas’ eyes widened at the sight of the barbarian slave, whom he had observed often enough in Mara’s tent. And yet, having been told by the Acoma Force Commander that the day’s tactics had been Kevin’s, and that all of them lived and breathed as a result of barbarian logic, he looked more carefully at the man from beyond the rift. Politely he cleared his throat. Since his culture had no protocol for addressing a slave who had been heroic, he settled with inclining his head. ‘Fetch the
lad a cushion,’ he told his slave boy.
One was plucked from the master’s own sleeping alcove. Nonplussed, the Lord bade the barbarian sit. Then, satisfied in his paternal way that the fellow was comfortable, Lord Chipino opened what he held to be a most sensitive topic. ‘You are a slave, and so you were able to run from the enemy in cowardice, since your Lady ordered you to do so, yes?’
To Chipino’s startlement, Kevin laughed. ‘Being a slave has nothing to do with it,’ he said, in his booming Kingdom voice. ‘Just to see the look of surprise on Commander Tasaio’s face was satisfaction enough.’
Lord Chipino frowned, then covered his puzzlement by sipping at the tesh that waited on the tray by his elbow. ‘Yet you were an officer in the army in your own land, or so your mistress tells me. Did you not feel shamed to show cowardice?’
Kevin’s eyebrows slanted up. ‘Shamed? Either we tricked the enemy, or we died. I hold shame to be a pittance beside the permanent state of being dead.’
‘His people esteem life far more than we do,’ Mara interjected. ‘They do not acknowledge the Wheel of Life, nor do they comprehend divine truth. They do not understand that they will return in their next incarnation based upon the honour they acquire in this present state.’
Here Kevin snorted. ‘You people have tradition, but no sense of evolving style. You don’t appreciate jokes as do the folk in the Kingdom of the Isles.’
‘Ah,’ Lord Chipino broke in, the puzzlement on his leathery features relenting as if all was explained. ‘You fled from Tasaio and experienced no shame because you perceive the action as a jest.’
Kevin buried an amused irritation behind tolerance. ‘You could simplify the issue that way, perhaps, yes.’ He tilted his head to one side, raked back red bangs, and added, ‘The worst thing about the assignment was that I could barely keep from laughing outright. Good thing the straps of Lujan’s spare armour were too tight, or I would have exploded in spite of my best efforts.’
The Complete Empire Trilogy Page 81
