by Bunch, Chris
Something that niggled was the officer chosen to command the First Imperial Guard. He was a mounted infantry — dragoon — domina named Aguin Guil. He’d been picked by the emperor less, I feared, for his abilities than because he was wooing the emperor’s sister, Dalney, and was so favored she’d given up her other flames. Myrus Le Balafre said Guil was brave enough, but had a slight tendency to become excited under extreme pressure.
At least nothing appeared to be happening in Maisir, in spite of the emperor’s suspicions. King Bairan held to his promise of keeping his soldiery two days’ march from the frontiers. The spies we sent across the border reported no sign of troop buildup, either.
Not that the frontiers were quiet. The emperor ordered half of Yonge’s scouts broken into small detachments and sent to Dumyat to serve as border patrollers. The rest of the Twentieth Heavy Cavalry went to Dumyat and set up a base camp to the north, as a reaction force if the scouts were attacked. There was constant skirmishing, but this was with the Men of the Hills rather than Maisirians.
Lany, Kutulu’s nominee for regent in Kallio, was keeping those unruly people quiet, so the emperor ordered the return of the Tenth Hussars and my own Seventeeth Lancers, reinforced with the elite Varan Guards, back to their bases in Urey. They were built to full strength and ordered to patrol aggressively south, into Kait.
Officially the emperor wished to ensure the peacefulness of the Men of the Hills and ensure Sulem Pass, the traditional path between Numantia and Maisir, remained clear. These reasons were true. But there was another. The trade route was the only possible invasion route into Maisir, striking straight across the mountains and wastelands to Jarrah. I wasn’t much impressed with the emperor’s subtlety — surely King Bairan would realize what the troop buildup in Urey was intended for.
Another move he’d made against Maisir must’ve been more sub-tie, since I saw no sense to it. To the west of the Urshi Highlands was another border kingdom, the backward region of Ebissa. Numantia had little interest there, since the land was nearly as mountainous as the Highlands or Kait, and thickly jungled as well. Ages ago, the Ebissans had been fierce warriors, for they conquered deep into Maisir before being driven back to their fastness. They still claimed sovereignty over the land they’d held for only a few years. It was just another of the inflated arrogances of the little bandit areas of the Border Lands. Yet suddenly the Emperor Tenedos announced he’d investigated the matter, felt there was justice and truth to the Ebissan claims, and he was prepared to act on their behalf. Other than to anger King Bairan, I saw no point to this whatsoever. But he was the diplomat, and I was but his soldier.
I saw the emperor infrequently in these days. I was very busy, and he was busier. He’d chosen the tower we took refuge in during the Tovieti rising as his private sorcerous retreat, and had it surrounded with high, glass-topped walls, handpicked guards, and, it was said, the most devilish of magical wards. I sometimes rode past the tower, late at night on my way home. Once I saw flames roaring up, higher than the tower itself, flames in colors I had no words to describe, yet I felt no heat. Another time I saw a tiny dot atop the tower’s roof, bellowing an incantation into the heavens. I heard the emperor’s words clearly half a mile distant, though I knew not the language. What was terrifying was that his ceremony was what the priests name Call and Response. Each measured chant from the emperor was met with a louder, deeper response, and that response seemed to come from inside the earth itself.
Lucan whinnied in fear, and I let her trot off, pulling her back from a frenzied gallop.
If we went to war, there would be even more deadly demons on our side than the horrors the emperor had raised for the fighting against Chardin Sher. I shuddered, remembering a forest come alive, clawing at Kallian soldiers, and the primeval demon from underneath Chardin Sher’s final fortress — and then I thought of Seer Hami’s question of what reward that demon sought for his services.
• • •
I lay on the bed, watching Amiel brush Marán’s hair, admiring the way the firelight cast shadows across her black diaphanous silk gown, and allowed myself lazy lustful considerations of what might happen when they came to bed in a few minutes. Amiel turned to me.
“You know, since Festival,” she said, “I’ve felt no draw to anyone else. Your Captain Lasta, for instance, is a fine sort of man. Before, I might have blinked at him, backed him into a corner, and let him think he was seducing me. But I don’t feel any desire for anyone, anything, but what we have. Why?”
“My sixteen-inch tongue,” Marán said.
“You stole that line from me,” I complained.
“You, sir, have other long things to brag on,” my wife said. “Leave me what I have.”
“Now,” Amiel said seriously, “does this mean Pelso couldn’t give me what I need, from the first day of our marriage to the last? Or does it mean I’m in love for the first time in my life — with both of you?”
Marán looked up at Amiel. “I can’t say,” she said. “But I know I love you. And I want a kiss.”
Their lips met, clung together. I wondered exactly what I felt for Amiel. And for my wife.
• • •
Marán came into my study one evening with a parcel. “This doesn’t pertain to Amiel,” she said. “Only to us. It came from my brother Praen this afternoon.” She dumped the contents of the package on my desk. There was a one-page letter and three yellow silk cords I recognized instantly — the strangling cords of the Tovieti. “Praen found these on our land,” she went on. “Their former owners will have no further use for them. He also said that twelve of their friends were rewarded as these three were.”
I felt anger. So Praen had paid no attention to my warning, and he and the others had hired their warders.
“Something I don’t think you understand, Damastes,” Marán went on. “I may be angry with my family, with my brothers, and sometimes they drive me quite mad. But that doesn’t mean I’m not an Agramónte.”
“I never thought it did,” I said.
“Very well. Then do you understand what it means to me to have swine like this on my land? Corrupting my people?” Her cheeks were flushed, her gaze intense.
For once I thought before I spoke. “Did it ever occur to you,” I said, in as mild a tone as I could manage, “that maybe Praen could make a mistake? That perhaps one, or maybe more, of the people he judged and executed, might have been innocent? That he stepped on their rights as much as any tyrant?”
“Rights,” Marán exclaimed. “I also have rights. I have the right to peace, I have the right to my life, I have the right to my land. Anyone who tries to take those from me … I’m sorry, but I’m going to strike back as hard as I can. As my brother and his friends are doing.”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“No,” Marán admitted. “Praen could be wrong, although I wonder what a magistrate would’ve done if he found the fifteen with these horrible cords. Would the emperor’s justice have been any more kindly?”
I remembered the door-to-door, block-to-block patrols that had killed men, women, sometimes children on the strength of a cord or an unexplained bit of loot when the army pacified Nicias.
“No,” I answered truthfully. “But the emperor’s justice is a system, a system that works, a system that’s in writing, not in somebody’s mind and sword arm, and one most people agree with. If it weren’t, Tenedos would never have reached, let alone held, the throne, with or without the army behind him.”
“Damastes,” Marán retorted, “we Agramóntes ruled our lands as we saw fit, as kings, as queens, for centuries while the Rule of Ten stumbled around. Do you think we bothered to bring evildoers all the way to Nicias for trial? I remember my father sitting in judgment outside Irrigon, bailiffs and swordsmen behind him, ordering people into exile, to be whipped, sometimes, sometimes to be taken away and I never saw them again. What’s the difference between that and what Praen’s doing?”
There was none, which was
exactly my point. But I didn’t want a fight.
“Marán,” I said carefully. “What angers me the most, to be completely truthful, isn’t what Praen and the others seem to be doing. But why does he insist on rubbing my nose in it? Does he want me to go to the emperor, as I threatened?”
“Of course not,” Marán said. “Perhaps he wants you to wake up to what you are, dammit. Damastes, you’re not just my husband, but you’re Count Agramónte. Sooner or later, we’ll have sons, and you’ll have to teach them what the name means, what it’s worth, how proud it is.
“You’ll have to teach them they do have the power of life, of death, no matter what the law of Nicias, which is a long way from our land, says. Praen’s trying to show you what you must become!”
I looked at her, and saw a great gulf, a gulf of years, of riches, of ideas, of tradition, of power, a gulf of life and death I would never be able to understand, accept, or cross. My anger died and, very suddenly, very strangely, I felt like crying.
• • •
There were rumors about the Maisirians: how they brutalized their poor; how any land they conquered was ruined under the boot heels of their soldiers; how they’d distorted our common religion into human sacrifices and the despoliation of virgins; the utter perversity and evil of their ruling class, particularly King Bairan; and so on and so forth. None were worth repeating or chronicling, and all were the usual crap that floats around about an enemy just before the start of a war.
Disaster struck the thickly peopled coastal state of Hermonassa, the next state west of Dara: plague. A man or woman would wake up coughing uncontrollably. Then a burning fever would set in, and paralytic stomach pains. The victim would begin bleeding from every orifice, go into convulsions, and be dead before dusk. Anyone around the victim would be infected, and almost all died as well. A few survived, but before they recovered they wished for death many times over.
The plague would strike here, then the next day ten leagues away, then the day after on the far side of the state. Nothing seemed to stop it. Hermonassa panicked, and the panic spread across the border into Dara, through Dara to Nicias. The plague would be here next. Many people fled the capital, going anywhere they imagined to be safe. But the disease never came; it seemed content to rage in the borders of Hermonassa.
A worse epidemic came with it: a plague of stupidity and incompetence. The governor of Hermonassa and his staff had died in the first days, almost as if the disease had an ability to strike at our most vulnerable points, and their replacements were confused and inept. The medicines Tenedos ordered sent were lost or stolen. The wizards and chirurgeons were delayed by rains or by wagoneers who refused to enter Hermonassa, regardless of bribes or threats.
Numantia responded with all its heart, sending food, clothing, and workers to the distressed state. But nothing seemed to reach the stricken area. Grain rotted on the docks or was ruined in transit. Clothing was misplaced in warehouses, not to be found for many times. Even the emperor’s decrees were ignored or unenforced, and Tenedos raged in futility.
Disorder and mob rule spread throughout Hermonassa, and I was forced to declare martial law. Even the army was hit by this scourge of incompetence, and trusted units broke as if they were untrained recruits on their first battleground. Officers misunderstood orders, obeyed them poorly, or refused them.
I sent in handpicked dominas, men with hearts that could shatter the hardest stone, with orders to straighten out the army, no matter how. Eventually their savagery took effect, and chastened soldiers moved into Hermonassa.
Slowly the plague faded, and then was a memory. But more than half a million Numantians were dead. We sacrificed to all the gods, including the dreaded Saionji, but no seer could find why we’d been cursed, what Numantia and Hermonassa had done to deserve such punishment.
No one knows to this day. No one but me, and the terrible reason took long for me to discover.
• • •
A story came that wasn’t a rumor: Three members of the Numantian Embassy in Jarrah had been expelled by King Bairan for spying. The emperor responded by ordering the entire Maisirian Embassy closed, and its officers escorted by armed soldiers to the border.
Curious, I rode past the shuttered embassy as the Maisirians were departing. The last to leave was the ambassador, Baron Sala.
He stopped at the small flagpole and personally lowered the Maisirian flag. His staff bowed their heads as he did. He meticulously folded the flag in military fashion, then turned toward his carriage.
He saw me, and we stared at each other. His face was worn and tired. He didn’t greet me, nor I him. Baron Sala climbed into his carriage, and a footman closed the door and jumped up on the running board as the coach moved away.
The drums of war were getting louder.
• • •
“I expect,” the emperor said jovially, “to be inspired, nay overwhelmed, by your Guard.” It was warm, the Time of Dews almost over, the Time of Births about to begin, and a breeze ruffled his beard and my loose-hanging hair.
We were on the foredeck of the newly launched imperial courier ship Kan’an, sailing at speed toward Amur, where the emperor and I would witness the first full-scale battle game of the First Imperial Guard Corps.
“My Guard, eh?” I said.
“Of course it’s your Guard right now,” Tenedos said. “I’m assuming the worst. If things go well, and the unit runs like a clockwork soldier, then it’ll become my Guard. Aren’t you aware of how rank works, and in which direction shit flows? By the way, who is to play enemy against the Guards?” he asked.
“Half-trained recruits that we’ve formed into temporary units,” I explained. “For officers and cadre, Yonge’s given me two regiments of his scouts.”
“I don’t see these rapscallions providing much of a threat against trained soldiers in formation.”
“Frankly, sir, they’re not supposed to.”
“Oh?”
“You don’t bloody a horse’s mouth when you first put a bit on him,” I said. “I want these new Guardsmen to come away proud, feeling that they’ve learned something. Then Petre’s instructors will show them how much more they’ve got to learn.”
“Good. Very good,” the emperor said. “Then real battle will make them learn they know absolutely nothing after all.”
I smiled ruefully, and nodded agreement.
“So then there should be no reason whatsoever your Guard won’t become my Guard three days hence,” the emperor said. He laughed and stretched.
“Ah, Damastes, my friend. It does me, does both of us, vast good to get away from that scrabbling nonsense of Nicias. I vow it was nothing but courtiers nibbling at me like rats, or listening to myself drone spells night and day. Sometimes I wondered if this was why we told the Rule of Ten to pack their ass with salt and piss up a rope.”
In this humor the emperor reminded me of the charming rascal I’d vowed to serve years ago.
“Nothing but courtiers and spells?” I asked in my most innocent manner. “Gods, but the nights must have been dreadfully dull.”
The emperor lifted an eyebrow. “Peering through bedroom windows ill becomes you, First Tribune. For one thing, it gives you bloodshot eyeballs. And from what I’ve heard,” he said slyly, “you have little reason to be sanctimonious about what anyone does when he retires.”
So the emperor had heard of our affair. I shrugged, and he clapped me on the shoulder.
“Speaking of court,” he went on, voice turning serious, “I gather some people think my palace has become decadent. I’m encouraging too many scoundrels in gold lace and whores in silk. But I know just what I’m doing. The people love spectacle, and I think it’s important to give it to them. Besides, I rule the greatest empire of all, and I think splendor must be part of that empire. Should we be mousing around in gray homespun and living in hovels?
“No,” he said. “Noblemen and -women, living nobly, are an inspiration to all, especially those who aren’t as favored
. It’s much the same as the sound of marching boots and drumrolls. Anyone whose blood isn’t stirred by the sight of soldiers on parade is dead of soul, and should be returned to the Wheel as a favor.”
It was fortunate Domina Othman, Tenedos’s aide, bustled up with some question, or I might have had to respond to what the emperor had said. I might be a warrior, but I knew that most heard the drum snarl with fear and dread, seeing the dark blood to be spilled, the roaring flames that were now peaceful cities, the women left without husbands, the children without fathers or mothers, that Saionji’s manifestation, Isa the war god, brought.
My emperor, I feared, had forgotten the reality and, true to a worshiper of Saionji, had fallen in love with war.
• • •
The war games were an utter disaster — for the Guard. The plan was simple: The Guard Corps was to advance with three elements in line until it made contact with the “enemy.” Conventional tactics would have had the forward element hold the enemy in place while the second and third attempted to envelop the foe and destroy him.
But I had devised a different strategy, one more suitable for fast, mobile warfare in the vast, open reaches of Maisir. The first element was indeed to keep the foe pinned, but the second and third were to circle the struggle and strike hard for the rear headquarters. That would either make the enemy surrender, break, or form a defensive circle that the battle could move past. The Corps following the spearhead could pause to obliterate the stronghold.
But the first element fell back instead of holding firm. The second got entangled in the first, and the third swung wide but never returned to the ordered axis of advance.
The emperor and I stood in Corps General Aguin Guil’s command tent, and watched him lose control of fifteen thousand men. Our out-of-date maps were covered with symbols no one could understand, runners dashed about, staff officers shouted, and General Guil stood in the middle, mouth opening and closing without any words coming out.
