“Either they’ll run, or they’ll just die.”
“Our morale is pretty high, Glennen,” I said. He had given me leave to use his name in private a week before.
He shook his head. “It is always high when there is food and pay and nothing to do but train. Let them see some blood and half your troops will piss their pants, and the other half will wish that was all that they had done.”
“Glennen, please,” Alekanna scolded him. He smiled to himself, for just a moment looking like a little boy who had just raided the cookie jar, then turned to me. “Better you should let this wife of yours just annihilate the whole city.”
Shela smiled to herself. He often referred to her handling of the bounty hunter that first day. Since then, neither he nor I had heard anything from the Guild. I knew that wouldn’t last. He later admitted that he had received all of his intelligence on me from them. They were committed to me paying for my crime of invoking their name. He had nothing to say about Genna’s involvement and I didn’t know him well enough to press him.
“I think I will leave this to my husband,” she said, “lest he become too fat.”
We all laughed at that.
“Could you do that, though,” Alekanna asked, sheepishly, looking sideways at Shela. “The whole city, I mean, if you wanted to.”
“Pfaugh,” Glennen laughed, before Shela could answer. “She is a little spec of a girl, Alekki, barely old enough to leave her mother’s side. This Lupus here robbed her in the night from her father’s tent, I am sure. Let her be a wife for a few years before she has the meanness in her to destroy whole cities.”
Shela blinked and I chuckled, though I found the joke to be in the poorest taste. Glennen became an even worse sexist when he drank. I used to think of myself that way until I met him.
Shela patted Alekanna’s hand. “Not to worry, Alekki,” she said. “I only go to keep his favor from camp whores. If I kill anyone, it will be him should he find one.”
She said it as a joke and we all laughed, but her casual look toward me told me otherwise.
“Now there is a skill a wife can use,” Alekanna agreed. The talking went into the night, and then we said our goodbyes. It would be months before we saw these people again, if ever. People die in such things as war.
That night I lay with Shela, my head buzzing nicely. Lovemaking had taken longer than usual because we did it through the mead.
“What will you do if your men do bolt, White Wolf?” she asked me. I loved that she called me by this, and War had commanded that no one knew my real name.
“Run faster,” I told her. The usual punch in the ribs.
“Shall I annihilate the entire city, then?”
“Nah,” I told her. “We aren’t getting paid for it. We go in, we start a fight, and we leave. With luck, we pick up some new troops along the way.”
“The Dorkans may not be willing to work with those plans.”
“I have fought Dorkans before. They aren’t so tough.”
“No,” she said, “but there are a lot of them. Their Wizards are trained from birth.”
I rolled over, my back to her. I felt tired and I didn’t like where this was going. “Well, if the going gets really bad, then you can annihilate anyone you want.”
She snuggled up next to me. “Just don’t be in their path if your men start running.”
It didn’t sit well with me, and I lay quiet for a while. Her breath on my shoulder told me that she stayed awake. She knew I needed to talk more, and she would wait me out.
“Could you do it?” I asked, finally. For everything that I had done, seen, heard and been involved in, I don’t think that anything ever took more of my courage than that.
She sighed and didn’t respond to me. This showed weakness and a woman like Shela didn’t want to be with a weak man. She liked confidence, conviction and, yes, a good share of cruelty if called for.
I knew the most exciting thing I had ever done for her had been that night in the stables.
“If enough people wanted it destroyed and coveted it, then likely I could, White Wolf,” she told me. “I am not a power, my god is Power. I am a conduit, much like yourself.”
I turned back over so I could look into her eyes. Her hands were around my shoulders. She looked right into me.
“I am just a man with a sword,” I said to her. I’d borne the burden for so long, such a relief to finally admit to it. “Shela, these things you see in me – “
She caressed my cheek. “You just don’t see them.”
“No.”
“You think you aren’t special, you think you aren’t great.”
“No.”
“And you see my power, so obvious, and you feel threatened?”
“No,” I said again. This formed a crux in our relationship and I wanted her to understand it.
“I don’t feel threatened by you,” I said. “I don’t need to be all-powerful, I have never been the toughest or the smartest or the most dangerous person I know. I don’t stay alive by being that way now.”
I looked into her eyes.
“I just wonder how I am so damn lucky to have you,” I confessed to her. No less difficult than to a priest, I admitted my guilty feelings. “I don’t have a single thing that you couldn’t take from me. You are bound only because you chose to be. From the day I met you, you were actually expected to take my horse, my life.
“Why not?”
She looked into my eyes with that soul-melting stare of hers. Her cheeks were wet, looking at me. She kissed me with salty lips.
“There is now, and there will always be a thing that I can never take from you, White Wolf, and that only you can give me.
“That was it.”
Katarran stood as a walled city with a huge wooden seaport. They had a breakwater to one side and seven ships in their harbor restricting any assault to the land. A narrow plain, less than a mile wide, ran around the exterior of the city, forcing foreign troops to marshal within catapult range of the walls. At fifty feet high, these were scalable with siege towers, but not ladders.
We were a week getting to the marshalling. The Trenboni, the Confluni, the Volkhydrans, the Eldadorians and the Andarans were all here, in armies of about fifteen hundred. The Sentalans were supposedly nearby, although no one knew where
As things would have it, the Andarans were the Long Manes. Kills With A Glance took one look at his daughter and clapped me on the shoulder.
“She looks well,” he told me. “Thin, but well. I would have expected she would be on her way to your first son by now.”
Shela’s eyes welled up with tears; she felt the same way. Her father and I both saw that. I tried to think of something else to say and came up with nothing.
“I am told that your ‘Free Legion’ is hired by the Eldadorians to side with them in this skirmish,” Kills continued lamely. “I would be wary if I were you.”
“Why is that?” I asked, slipping my hand around Shela’s waist.
He indicated the Volkhydran camp with a turn of his jaw. “That lot, that’s why,” he told me. “They see the action as immoral and have vowed to side with the Dorkans if it comes down to it. That’s why we dare not move – not pinned between two armies and unable to attack the one out here first.”
I nodded. One little thing we had forgotten to ask the Eldadorians. I started to realize that the Fovean High Council didn’t hold the sway that Fovean people gave them credit for. Not at the higher levels.
“If Glennen hired mercenaries,” Kills continued, “then he intends for them to die. He will want to use your troops to take the brunt of Volkhydro’s advance against him as his own troops move into the city. Then he can make war against the Dorkans and not start one with Volkhydro.”
Ancenon approached as we were talking, and I introduced him to Kills as the leader of the Free Legion. Ancenon informed me that the bulk of our army had debarked.
“Where do we bivouac,” I asked him, as the Uman-Chi drew me aside.
I wanted to make sure that we were not between the Volkhydrans and the Eldadorians.
“You use these terms,” he chided me. “What is biv – oo – ach, and why would we want to do it?”
I smiled to myself. Shela and her father could be heard arguing; I would have a recalcitrant slave girl tonight. “Bivouac is to pitch a camp with your men, and because we have to sleep somewhere.”
“Ah,” he said, nodding. “Just what I was coming to talk with you about. Well, we have no place to biv – oo – ach, and I hoped that your connections with the Andarans would alleviate this problem.”
I looked across the narrow plain. The armies were all crowded near the entrance to the city - the murder hole at the one huge gate. Other than there, the plains were open. I looked curiously at Ancenon.
“Oh, Lupus, we must be at the main gate,” he told me.
“Why?”
“Because, should there be fighting, then it will be at the gate.”
“And?”
“And we would not want to appear cowards,” he said, as if to a child.
“What do we care?”
He looked dumbfounded. Arath approached us, having seen us discussing the problem.
“Any luck with the Andarans?” he asked.
“We were discussing that,” Ancenon said, looking at me as one would look at a little kid in a lot of trouble.
I could live with that. “No we weren’t,” I countered. “We were discussing why we had to be at the main gate.”
“Oh,” Arath said, nodding. “We have to be at the main gate.”
“Why?” I asked.
Now two of them were dumbfounded.
They had this perception that all of the action occurred at the main gate, and anyone who didn’t camp there would be thought a coward, perfectly willing to let the others do the fighting. I reminded them that we were here on the Eldadorian dime and, at our most basic level, we were perfectly willing to let them do the fighting. In fact, once we picked the fight, then that described exactly what we planned to do.
The entire Free Legion got involved, and it became a heated debate. The problem remained that no one would let mercenaries pitch their tents alongside of their camp, because they didn’t trust the mercenaries to behave themselves. That, to me, made perfect sense, and was in keeping with Kills’ and my conversation. The long and the short of it ended up that we wouldn’t be pitching our tents by the main gate. I picked a spot about two hundred yards from the Andarans and got the men working on bivouac.
The Roman army, when they camped, had a little city that they created just for the occasion. It had pitched walls, a main street, and orderly rows of tents that were very defensible, especially against foot soldiers. From having studied Roman history I knew the gist of what they created, and had our army doing the exact same thing.
It touched off a fight immediately. One of the men, a big Volkhydran, squared off on me when I told him that his tent had been set up a foot out of align with the tent next to it.
“This needs to move,” I told him. Drekk had followed me and watched me now. Ancenon and D’gattis talked with the Eldadorian commander, whom we technically reported to. Shela rode with the Long Manes and I had no idea where anyone else had gone.
“So you say,” he told me. He stood up to his full height, almost mine and as heavy.
“So I say,” I agreed. “Move it.”
“No.”
They wanted to pitch tents on the ground near their friends and have a big fire in the center. We couldn’t defend that, plus we’d be just begging for catapult shot from the city to home in on our cooking fires with all of the soldiers around them. Lob a few choice boulders or some naphtha into the fire and you burn all of those tents to the ground with the people inside.
Somehow, I didn’t think he would be won over by the logical debate, so I smacked him. Open hand, right in the temple. It would have dropped a lesser man, but he wasn’t one.
He threw a punch right into my armor. War knows what he could be thinking, but he hurt himself pretty bad.
He looked at me, holding his hand. “Not the sharpest knife on the bandolier, are you?” I asked him.
“What?”
Slang – I took my shot.
“You’re stupid. Understand that?”
He started to square off again. I’d started to think that I would have to kill him to set an example. I didn’t like that. I knew the other armies were watching and this just reaffirmed for them that we were a bunch of thugs.
Without even thinking of it, I returned to being a First Class Petty Officer in the Navy, and I saw some NUB on his first day on the ship, trying to make his bones at my expense.
I felt my own eyebrows drop a quarter of an inch, my jaw set, as I leaned over the man, invading his personal space, letting him smell my breath as I roared at him, “I asked you do you understand that?”
That snapped his head back. If anyone has ever seen that bumper sticker, “0 to bitch in .05 seconds,” well, I left that bitch a full minute in my dust when I wanted to. It is just that ability to get pissed off on a dime that distinguishes a salty sailor from a wannabe.
“I asked you a question, son! Do you understand me?”
“Um – well, I heard –“
“You will address me as Sir, is that clear?”
That had him bewildered, which was what I wanted. If you want to do something as serious as taking on a superior officer, you better have your feet planted firmly on the ground, so my job became to make sure that they weren’t.
“Yes, sir.”
“I CAN’T HEAR YOU!”
“Yes, Sir!”
“You sorry excuse for the north side of dung heap! Did you think you could stand up to me?”
“No, Sir!”
“Did you?”
“No, Sir!”
“DID YOU?”
“NO, SIR!”
“I will tear out your eyes and piss on your brain if I don’t see this whole row of tents standing tall by the time I am back here, do you hear me, troop?”
“Yes, Sir!”
And now, pitch the voice low, lean forward, my nose just barely touching his.
“May your god help you if I have to repeat myself to you.”
“Yes, Sir!”
Discipline is 50% training and 50% fear of training. Training can be anything from marching to mortal combat. Once I made that clear, I got some more support from this soldier, who in turn enforced it on our other soldiers. Like the wrinkles coming out of a blanket when you stretch it tight, the camp adjusted itself to those perfect rows and square lines that I wanted.
What we ended up with looked like a very Roman campsite and brought curious officers from the other nations over to see what we had done. During the whole time, I hadn’t heard a word from Drekk, but then Drekk usually kept his own council.
“Oh, I wouldn’t do this,” said Kills, the first to come into the camp, and the first to criticize. “What if you have to take flight?”
“We aren’t here to take flight,” I told him. That earned a chuckle from the other commanders who had followed him. “We could hold off ten times our number from this camp. No need to take flight unless 5,001 soldiers show up to lift the siege.”
“And if some other army comes along, and lays siege to you?” another asked, a Volkhydran.
“We break down that bunker, right there,” I pointed to a set of timbers that could be pulled from the dirt walls, “and have at them.”
“And you are nowhere near the gate, Sirrah,” an Uman-Chi sniffed. “What good is being ready to fight when you are nowhere near the fighting?”
“Let the fighting come to us, then,” I said.
Most shook their heads. One pointed out that we had no central location for our foodstuffs, and that the men could steal them at will and then we would be without. It locked us into fighting from one location and prevented heroes from distinguishing themselves. This did not jibe with the local philosophy on tactics.
That night, our men slept exhausted in their tents. I sat with the others in our palisade. The plain, Fovean moon hung over the city, and our cook fires, kept small and covered, dotted our camp. The other nations had huge blazes going, and they were singing and drinking and indulging the separate camp of whores and merchants that had sprung up on the other side of the plains.
Ancenon had carpeted the palisade with furs, divided the living space with canvas walls, and furnished us with folding stools and cots. I sat on one of these, Shela at my feet. D’gattis and Ancenon had brought more elaborate chairs as befitted their perceived stations in life. Dilvesh, Arath and Thorn sat on the floor. Nantar and Drekk were scouting.
Genna sat on a stool opposite me, in a corner of the tent. Her eyes held the same anger that she’d shown since Shela had walked into the tower in Chatoos, but now she’d been left impotent to direct it at me.
Ancenon couldn’t bind her in the Fire Bond, because Adriam might have closed the Fire Bond. Although D’gattis wanted her dead, Ancenon argued against that as well. She’d been bound to us in fealty; she bore our mark in its name. We had called her Clear Genna.
Nothing bound Shela. She worshipped Power. Shela could kill Genna on her own whim and her own responsibility. She had proved that killing didn’t bother her.
But what a waste that would be, losing the most effective reconnaissance that any of us had ever seen. She’d made herself the only person, the only women, to have ever beaten the Confluni in their own land. We would all be dead without her, much as I would be dead because of her if she had her way.
So we gave her a last choice. She could take on her own Bond, under Power, never to act against me or against Shela again in her life, so long as we promised to do the same.
Or that life would end. To her credit she didn’t try to run. She admitted to herself if not to the rest of us that Shela could take her at will. She didn’t plan to die with her back to her rival.
“Bind me then,” she said to us, on the street in the port of Eldador. “Keep me alive if you want to so badly, though I think we all know that it is no kindness.”
Indomitus Est (The Fovean Chronicles) Page 37
