'If I were younger,' boomed the Lord in his gravelly voice, ‘I would be minded to give young Hokanu some competition.'
Well, Kevin decided — with a small pang of jealousy — at least the Lord of the Xacatecas seemed charmed by the Lady who desired his alliance.
'For which your beautiful Lady wife would wish me poisoned,' Mara demurred smoothly. 'Is Isashani well?'
'Well, thank you, and grateful for my absence, which keeps her from becoming pregnant again. Turn here,' Lord Chipino instructed his bearers. The company wheeled smartly across a narrow intersection and entered the canopied shade of an open-fronted hostel.
A refreshment bar extended the length of the back wall, and the sides were open framework. Soups, pastries, and assorted blends of local herb brew, called tesh, as well as the usual chocha were sold here. Benches and tables emptied as patrons of lesser rank scurried to make room for their betters, and a flurry of servants in smocks descended to clean up leavings and lay out clean cups and plates. Chipino saw Mara to a seat, took the Lord's place at the head of the table, and set his elbows on the sanded planks, chin rested on his steepled fingertips. He regarded the girl who had routed Lord Jingu of the Minwanabi in his own home, and whose quickness at the game was earning her notoriety. Around him, Lujan's warriors and Xacatecas' were arrayed in defensive formation, leaving Kevin standing with the bearers just beyond earshot of the conversation. He could tell by Mara's bearing that the social chat ended, and that discussion of serious matters began almost immediately. Servants brought food, which was laid aside barely touched, to make room for parchment maps, and a series of slates brought in by a servant in yellow-and-purple livery.
Presently Mara waved for Kevin to come and stand at her shoulder. 'I want you to hear this,' she said, and by her tone the Midkemian understood that she intended to ask his opinion later, when they had time in private for talk.
The afternoon passed in discussion of the previous year's succession of skirmishes, which had resulted in Mara's summons from the High Council.
'There is only one thing to be concluded,' Xacatecas wrapped up. 'The raiders from Tsubar are growing vastly more numerous, and aggressive beyond their normal nature. What I would ask you is, why?'
Mara regarded the older man steadily, thinking. 'We shall find out, Lord Chipino.' She spun her empty tesh cup with her fingers and said obliquely, 'Rest assured, my estates are vigorously fortified.'
The Lord of the Xacatecas smiled to show even teeth. 'Then, daughter of Sezu, we understand each other well. The enemy shall gain nothing of advantage.' He reached out, and lifted his goblet of Jamar crystal in hands that bore no rings. 'To the victory,' he said softly.
Mara met his eyes and nodded, and for some unknown reason Kevin felt chilled.
* * *
The Coalteca had been unloaded by the time the Lord and Lady emerged from their table of refreshment. Mara's palanquin awaited beside Lord Chipino's, and servants had commandeered a herd of pack beasts. These were lightweight, six-legged, and to Kevin's eyes, resembled a cross between a camel and a Ilama, except for the ears, which were scaled and whorled like a lizard's. Mara's wardrobe chests and the tents, braziers, charcoal sacks, oil barrels, and stores and supplies for her army had all been strapped to strange, U-shaped racks that rode the creatures' backs like saddles. The train was a very long one, noisy with the bleat of animals and the calls of swarthy-faced tenders who wore loose scarves at their throats. Drovers in baggy garments striped in garish colours prodded their charges into a straggling order of march; the human and cho-ja companies formed up more quickly, and ascent into the mountains began.
Kevin followed with the rest of Mara's house servants. Distracted by a giggling child who rolled in the gutter by the roadside, he was startled by a splash of warm fluid.
He spun, discovered a white gobbet of saliva dripping from his shirt sleeve, and grimaced. 'Damn it to hell,' he said in Midkemian.
Lujan smiled broadly in commiseration. 'Don't stand too close to the querdidra,' he called in caution. 'They spit.'
Kevin flicked his hand, and shed a foaming mess on the pavement. It reeked unpleasantly, like rotted onions.
'Evidently they don't like your smell,' the Force Commander finished, laughing.
Kevin eyed the offending pack beast, which was looking at him through violet, long-lashed eyes and curling its monkeylike lips. 'Feeling's mutual,' he groused. And he wished it a painful attack of constipation, and thorns in all six of its padded feet. Dustari was going to be peachy, he groused to himself, when the querdidra that carried the supplies seemed to outnumber the soldiers.
The mountains changed drastically as they approached the passes. Forested slopes fell away, scoured by winds and driven sand to bare rock. The smells of sun-heated stone replaced those of greenery and soil, and the land became a vista of bleakness. The high country dropped sharply off into a broken series of buttes awash in vast oceans of sand. The sun burned in a sky pale green with drifts of airborne dust, and cooked the lands beneath to a shimmering curtain of heat waves. The rock itself seemed to smoulder, rough-grained, and textured red, black and ochre. The fires of its forming seemed very recent, and renewed each day with the sharp blaze of sunrise.
In contrast, the nights were chill, with dry gusts cutting through clothing like ice. It became no surprise that the drovers and native guides wore their neckerchiefs over their faces to protect them from wind-driven grit. Centuries of such weather had chiselled the rocks into odd formations resembling towers or stacks of crockery, or sometimes demonlike pillars that seemed to prop up the Kelewanese sky. Kevin and Mara both stared at such shapes in fascination, early on — but not after the first raid by desert men, which happened on the steep trail leading to the top of a pass.
Aware first of a blood curdling yell, and a disturbance in the line of pack beasts up ahead, Mara whipped aside the curtains of her palanquin. 'What's amiss?'
Lujan motioned for her to stay back, and then drew his sword. Mara peered around him and through the ranks of her honour guard saw small, broad-shouldered figures in dun-coloured robes leaping in a screeching charge from a cleft between the rocks. They grabbed the bridles of several querdidra and dragged them, bleating, off the road. Surefooted even on loose stone, the creatures bucked and shied as warriors in Xacatecas colours jumped downslope in pursuit.
Lujan shouted to his First Strike Leader and signalled broadly with his sword. Acoma warriors broke from the caravan line lower down, on a switchback curve below their position. Their sally was joined, then overtaken by a fast-rrioving strike force of cho-ja. Less sure than the insects, the humans fanned out in a wide ring to cut off the desert men, while the cho-ja under their Strike Leader slipped past them and cut in an arc across the path of the raiders' descent.
'Defer to Lord Chipino's officers,' Lujan commanded the Acoma. Then, as the Lord of the Xacatecas called something to Mara from his litter, the Lady touched her officer's sleeve.
'The Lord would have no live prisoners,' she instructed.
Lujan relayed the order.
Kevin watched, wide-eyed, as the cho-ja overtook the raiders. Seeing the shining black insectoids race upslope to take them, with their helmets sitting square on faces that were nothing close to human, and upraised forelimbs lifted like razors to kill, the diminutive mountain men skidded to a stop. They drove the querdidra forward with slaps and curses, trying to disrupt the cho-ja ranks. But Lax'l's warriors were fast, almost black blurs in the sunlight as they swerved around the fear-maddened beasts. And uncannily, they made no sound, beyond the click of hooked feet on broken rock. The cho-ja flowed past the disturbance and came on, while the desert men spun and tried frantically to run.
The slaughter was swift. Kevin, who had never seen cho-ja in war, felt gooseflesh rise beneath his sleeves. He had seen men die, but never disembowelled from behind, with a single stroke of those black, chitin-bladed forelimbs. The cho-ja were deadly swift, and they slew with a machinelike thoroughness.
> 'Your cho-ja make short work of the nomads,' Lord Chipino observed, his grim tone revealing he derived no enjoyment from the deaths. 'Perhaps they will think twice about harassing our supply trains into Ilama henceforth.'
Mara lifted a fan from her cushions and tapped it open, thoughtfully. She cooled herself, more from nerves than heat. Though blood sports did not appeal to her, she did not show squeamishness at the sight of battle and death. 'Why attack so heavily guarded a caravan? By Lashima, can't they see we have your honour guard as well as three companies of warriors?'
Downslope, the Acoma Strike Leader's men were ineffectively trying to round up the frightened querdidra. Lord Chipino dispatched some of his own drovers to help, since their knowledge of the beasts' handling was a necessity if the caravan was to be moving again before sundown. 'Who can say what motivates the barbarians,' he concluded, regarding Mara across the space between palanquin and litter. 'If I did not know better, I would say we were fighting fanatics of the Red God.'
But the Dustari nomads did not believe in Turakamu, or so said the texts at Lashima's temple where Mara had studied during her youth. The increase in border unrest made no sense, and the descriptions of engagements Lord Chipino had offered in the hostel over maps added up to nothing but a profligate waste of lives.
Mara flicked her fan closed. More than ever, she feared for Ayaki, left at home on her estates. She had expected to cross the ocean to provide support and swift solution for the troublesome attacks on the border. Longing for a quick return home, she sensed that the problem was worse than she'd initially thought. She might not be back for the fall planting, and that turned her heart icy with foreboding. Yet she did not speak aloud of her worries. When the caravan regrouped and started forward, she asked to be shown the mountain landmarks. Kevin walked besideher litter, listening to Chipino's best scout name the peaks, the valleys, and the rock tables that sometimes spanned the trail in wind-carved archways of stone.
They need not have been in a hurry to orient themselves to this new, strange land. Time weighed heavily during the months between engagements, and after the novelty of the early weeks the stark, barren valleys sawed at the spirit and the vast desert horizons scoured the soul to insignificance. As often as he could, Kevin retired to Mara's command tent, which, though constructed of layers of sewn needra hide, oiled to keep it pliable against the weather, was nonetheless opulent inside.
'Who passes?' called the guard at the door flap.
Kevin lowered the cloth he held pressed against his face and sucked in a dust-laden breath. 'It is I.'
The armoured guard waved him past with his spear butt. Kevin stooped, ducked through an inner door of fringes that filtered out most of the dirt, and blinked at the abrupt change in lighting. The main chamber of the command tent was lit by torches of oiled rags, supported in crockery sconces on poles jabbed upright into the earth. Hanging from the roof peaks were cho-ja globes, an eerie blue-violet that mixed uneasily with the warmer glow of flame light. The colours of woven rugs, cushions, and hangings sparkled strangely, spiked by starred shadows that formed a mosaic of geometric patterns of their own, as though the belongings and their assorted shadow shapes formed some alien game board upon which people were the players.
Try as he might, Kevin had never been able to liken the Game of the Council to chess; the Tsurani system of honour was far too convoluted a custom for a foreigner to break down into moves. The desert men's strategies, on the other hand, were less opaque. He had studied them exhaustively through the seasons that had passed since their arrival. The nomads sent raiders against the fortified passes, mostly at night, and always in stealth. They sought to wear away at the armies of Xacatecas and Acoma, here through attrition, and there through the nerve-sawing, actionless boredom.
Day after day dawned with no battle, beyond the wasp stings of raiding at night. The forays were just frequent enough, and just well enough engineered, to keep the armies on the hair-trigger edge of vigilance.
The Xacatecas forces had been stretched thin to keep all the minor trails through the mountains adequately guarded. With the support of the Acoma companies, Lord Chipino had hoped the raiders would acknowledge superior numbers and abandon incursions across the borders. Yet the desert men had done no such thing; rather, they stepped up the frequency of their strikes, goading like insects flying at needra bulls.
As the months dragged by with no change, Kevin had been hesitant to venture his full opinion, that the attacks held purpose behind them. He'd had the experience on the field to justify his hunches; but Tsurani killed Midkemian officers taken captive, and in preservation of his life he had never dared to admit his birth was noble to anyone this side of the rift save a handful of Midkemian slaves. Shedding his headcloth and sandals and leaving them for servants to beat clean, he now walked across beautifully woven carpets to where his Lady sat on cushions, a sand table depicting the mountains and the desert border of the Empire spread before her and Lujan.
'There you are,' Mara said, looking up. A river of raven hair spilled loose over one shoulder; she caught it back with a hand like fine porcelain and smiled her welcome. 'We were discussing a change in strategy,' and she nodded to indicate Lujan.
Interested, Kevin quickened his step. He knelt on the cushions opposite the sand table and studied the small clusters of green and yellow markers that represented Acoma and Xacatecas companies. The positions were clustered like chains of beads along river courses, passes, and rocky, steep-sided valleys through which the winds keened after dark. Unless a sentry happened to catch the movement of the enemy silhouetted against stars or sky, he would not hear footsteps; only a chance rattle of gravel, which often as not was set off by wind, and an attack that happened in a flurried, surprise ambush. The knives of the desert men were not metal, but they cut throats readily enough.
'We want to eradicate their supply caches,' Mara said. 'Burn them out. Your opinion is of interest, since you have as much knowledge of the terrain here as any of us.'
Kevin licked his lips, a chill chasing his skin under the sleeves of his shirt and the broad-banded desert robe he wore like a cloak overtop. He looked at the sand map and wondered silently whether this was precisely what the enemy hoped to do: lure their warriors out of the defensible passes and harry them into ambush in the open. 'I suggest again, Lady, that we not sally forth against these desert men. They hold all the advantage in their own country. I say, as I have before, that we let them come to us, and die on our spears with little cost to your companies.'
'There is no honour in hanging back from attack,' Lujan pointed out. 'The longer the Lady is absent from her estates, the greater the danger to Ayaki. To wait through another turn of seasons wins her no gain in the Game of the Council, nor any stature in the eyes of the gods. It is not the fate of warriors to wait idly by while desert men treat their presence like that of querdidra herders, staging small raids at their pleasure.'
'Then you have no use for my opinion,' said Kevin, biting back exasperation. 'I believe there is strategy in the movements of these nomads. You insist there is not —'
'They are barbarians!' Mara cut in. 'They raid across our borders because the land is rich and green. Why should tribes of desert men suddenly organize against a nation armed and prepared against them? What could they hope to gain, except obliteration?'
Kevin heard her anger, and took no offence, aware as he was that the time away from home had stretched out into almost a year, and the separation from her son was wearing at her. Each month the traders' ships made port at Ilama, and Jican's messenger reached her, but no word arrived of an attack by the Minwanabi. She had left her best troops to guard the estate; here, with the ones that remained, she had expected to lend support to Xacatecas, and then be free to depart. But the attack at home had not happened, or at least, if it had, word had not reached them; and on this side of the Sea of Blood, the campaign was unexplainably drawn out and showed no signs of resolution.
'We must find the nomads' suppl
y caches and burn them out,' she insisted emphatically. 'Or else grow old in this wretched waste, and never see satisfaction against Minwanabi.' Her pronouncement ended discussion.
* * *
The scouts went out. They made a five-day sweep of the lowlands that extended into a month of seeking. The nomads could not be tracked across sands continuously shifted by the winds, nor over swept slabs of rock. The Tsurani were forced to search for the smoke of cooking fires in a land that had no trees but imported oil or charcoal for heat and light. The warriors had to lie for days in hiding, scanning the barren horizons for signs of enemy encampments. They marched across smouldering hardpan, and found nothing; just old fire rings filled with ash and burned bones, and sometimes the imprint where a hide tent had stood, or broken bits of discarded crockery. The nomads' caches of supplies remained elusively hidden.
After three unfruitful months, Xacatecas and Acoma soldiers began taking captives. These unfortunates were dragged back to Chipino's tents for questioning. The desert raiders were small, of wiry stature, and often bearded. They smelled of querdidra and sour wine, and they wore leather studded with bosses of the pack beasts' horn and bone. Over this primitive light armour they threw loose-fitting robes in beige colours, tied with beaded sashes that held talismans denoting their prowess and tribe. Very tough, with skins weathered by the climate, few could be induced to talk. The ones that had looser tongues were not highly placed in their clan hierarchies; the caches they disclosed in the following four months were of little consequence; just a few skins of wine and some grains stored in earthen jars. Not enough to be worth losing warriors over, Lord Chipino said to Mara in a frustrated talk after a day spent in blazing sunlight, digging one such cache from the sandy floor of an arroyo.
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