“I was very sorry to hear that your father passed beyond. He was a good man. Forgive me for not coming to his pyre. I'd like to have been there.”
“I know, Lord General,” Probing Gaze replied. “What could you do? You were saving the barbarian Jaguar from an assassin, eh? The Lady Matriarch was kind enough to send your condolences.”
“Bless her golden soul. How's the mate, Lord Gaze?”
“Uh, well, that didn't work, Lord General, sorry to say,” the sectathon said, shrugging sadly.
Seeing the other man's ill-ease, Guarding Bear nodded in commiseration. “I'm sorry to hear that, Lord. Listen, you ought to come for the evening meal sometime, Lord Gaze. You'd like the Lady Water, despite being such an unsociable brute.”
“Unsociable? Me, Lord General? When have I ever refused an invitation?”
Guarding Bear scoffed. “When have you ever received one?”
Laughing, Probing Gaze nodded. “I'm not exactly a brilliant conversationalist, eh?”
“You're not a conversationalist,” Guarding Bear retorted. “How's the Colonel?”
“Scratching his ass, as usual, Lord,” the Captain replied. “He sends his, uh, 'felicitations,' as he asked me to say.”
“So you have other missives as well, eh? We'll get to those later. When's he going to recruit you for spying?”
“He just did, Lord. After I filed those charges against the Traitor, he asked me to become a spy to get me out of the Empire.”
“Good plan, but not necessary anymore, thank the Infinite.”
“I'm going anyway, Lord. I want to try my hand at spying.”
Guarding Bear nodded. “You'll do well, Lord Gaze. Oh, by the way, thank you for getting that information on Snarling Jaguar just before the negotiations. Most helpful, Lord Gaze.”
“Uh, Lord General, I didn't send any information.”
“Oh? Well, who did, I wonder? You don't know what I'm talking about? Odd, I thought you sent it.” Guarding Bear frowned. “Blast, that's twice in the last year. I smell the stench of infiltration. Someone has cracked my courier network.” He shook his head. “I'll find a different courier. If you can, have your couriers checked, eh? Anyway, glad you came, because I have a project for you.”
“Anything to do with the siege, Lord General?”
Guarding Bear smiled. “You'll command the six best Wizards in the Eastern Empire!”
Groaning, Probing Gaze put hands over face. “Infinite help me! I get rid of a soft psychologist, then end up having to spoon-feed five more. Lord General, you really don't know how bad having Spying Eagle under my command was! He made life miserable for the whole battalion.”
“Not the reaction I expected,” Guarding Bear said. “You'll have only six men under your command.”
“You said six Wizards, Lord General—six times as much trouble, eh?”
“Could be. I need your help. Perhaps your experience with Spying Eagle will make it easier.”
“I don't know, Lord,” Probing Gaze said, shaking his head.
“Well, if you don't want it, Lord Gaze, you don't want it. I'll find someone else,” he replied, sighing and shrugging.
“How many Tiger Raiders do you expect to kill, Lord General?”
Guarding Bear grinned. “Infinite willing, all of them.”
Probing Gaze gasped. “How, Lord? No one has ever taken the Tiger Fortress by siege, except with the help of treachery and sabotage. That blasted menagerie animal killed any help you might have gotten.”
Smiling, Guarding Bear gestured the man closer. “Spying Eagle knows how to disable a shield, eh? All the fortress shields are of Eastern Empire manufacture, eh? Healing Hand put to sleep nearly a thousand malefactors in Nest and didn't even blink, eh? With four other Wizards helping those two, we'll give the Tiger Raiders a sleeping potion so powerful only the Infinite will be able to wake them.”
The sectathon Captain Probing Gaze laughed and grinned. “You still need help, Lord General? I want to watch this!”
Chapter 16
Nothing is inherently wrong with conscripting females. In itself. Combining female conscription, however, with a populace suffering from two successive wars, with the moral fatigue of a tyrant Emperor, with a high warrior attrition rate, and with a collective guilt for the destruction of an Empire, results in racial suicide.—Female Conscription: The End of Empires, by Whelping Anarchy.
* * *
Aged Oak, Prefect of Cove, twelfth Patriarch of the Oak Family, and Commanding General of the Eastern Armed Forces, urinated into a bucket. Hot steam rose from his strong stream in the cold morning air.
“Not bad for an old man,” he murmured, content. Shaking off the last drops, Aged Oak put himself back into his loincloth with one hand, his sword in the other.
Approaching, the Colonel Scratching Wolf bowed. “Lord General, the demonstration is ready.”
“Thank you, Lord Colonel,” Aged Oak replied, nodding and turning to join him at the parapet. Both men looked down into the forecourt below.
Ten small warriors faced a similar line of warriors distinctly larger of build and height.
“Forgive me my asking, Lord General, but what can those women do against the best swordsmen in Burrow?”
Aged Oak grinned at Scratching Wolf's question. “Just watch, Lord.”
The Colonel nodded to a subordinate in the forecourt.
The man shouted, “Commence!”
Twenty warriors drew their swords and ten duels began.
The two men on the battlement above watched without a word.
The sound of sword on sword rang out distinctly several times. Warriors tested the reflexes and skills of their opponents with feints and parries. As the duelers fell to serious fighting, the individual blows grew inaudible, as a single drop in a cloudburst.
Quickly, one warrior went down, his leg severed at the thigh. The woman who beat him held her sword above her head. While the other duels continued, medacors carried off the downed warrior to reattach his leg.
Aged Oak glanced smugly at Scratching Wolf.
The fighting continued, the duelers instructed only to avoid blows to the spine, heart, neck and head—the killing blows. Most other injuries weren't life-threatening and easily repaired. The medacors were already reattaching the defeated warrior's leg.
A second and third male warrior succumbed to the blades of their female contestants, one without his sword arm, the other a slash across the abdomen. The latter screamed and tried desperately to put back his intestines. Rushing to his side, a pair of medacors repaired the skin quickly, hustling him off the dueling grounds. The internal injuries required more extensive work.
The remaining seven male warriors looked desperate, the females far more skilled than expected. Suddenly, a male hacked off a female's legs at the ankles. She fell heavily, gritting her teeth and clawing at the ground but emitting not a sound. A male quickly followed her to dirt, his ribcage opened by a long vertical slash. Medacors removed them from the forecourt with dispatch.
Warriors went down so fast after that, the two men on the battlement found the progression difficult to follow.
Quickly the melee was over. Three males and seven females remained standing.
“Those were your best, Lord Colonel?” Aged Oak asked, smirking.
“Were my best, Lord General,” Scratching Wolf replied. “Now they'll beg to fall on their knives from shame.”
“They'll recover from it, Lord Colonel, believe me.”
“Infinite blast you, Father,” rang a voice from the forecourt below. “You said we'd fight the best warriors in the eighth battalion, not crippled old men!”
“You impudent wench!” Aged Oak yelled back genially. “I ought to turn you over my knee and paddle you! Show some respect, eh?”
“Yes, Father,” she replied quietly, frowning. The smallest warrior in the forecourt, less than five feet tall, she had been the first to defeat her opponent.
“Let's review the warriors, eh Lord?
” Scratching Wolf suggested.
Aged Oak nodded and led the way to the stairwell. As they descended, he asked over his shoulder, “Where's the Lord Gaze?”
“On special assignment, Lord General.”
“I want to talk to him. Is he available?”
“Not right now, Lord, no,” Scratching Wolf replied.
“What'd you do, Lord Colonel, recruit him for spying or something?”
“Yes, Lord, but, uh, he won't go north for awhile.”
Reaching the base of the stairway, Aged Oak turned. “How about the Wizard? Did you leave him stranded somewhere also?” He began to lapse into the dialect of Cove, where he'd grown up. Full of seafaring metaphors, the dialect hadn't been easy for him to unlearn. When he became upset, his speech deteriorated.
“Why, uh, if I may ask, Lord, do you want to talk to them?”
“Taint everyday somebody lands a Sorcerer, eh Lord?”
“No, Lord General,” Scratching Wolf said. “Taint.”
Aged Oak glanced askance at his subordinate, wondering if he mocked him. “Infinite blast it, man! You should've known I'd want to talk to 'em! Why'd you cast 'em adrift, anyway?”
“I didn't, Lord. They were, uh, needed elsewhere.”
“Oh, well, uh, sorry, Lord Wolf, didn't mean to—”
“Not offended, Lord. You couldn't know, eh?” Shrugging, Scratching Wolf gestured toward the participants in the demonstration.
The ranks of warriors had reassembled for review. Only the disemboweled warrior didn't join them.
“Thank you, Lords and Ladies, for participating in this exercise,” Aged Oak said. “We're a progressive society in the Eastern Empire. Despite that, we've been slow to incorporate women into the Eastern Armed Forces. Be that as it may, I'll integrate our armies in less than five years. Toward that end, I've started a school in Cove for women who want to become warriors. The ten women here are the first graduates of that academy. Their skill speaks for itself. You men may feel upset that a woman beat you. I asked the Lord Colonel Wolf to assemble his ten best swordfighters. Be proud that you men are among those ten. In losing the fight you've helped prove a winning point: That women can and do fight as well as men. I appreciate your participation.
“Precious Daughter, I think you owe these warriors an apology for that joke about 'crippled old men,' eh?”
“Yes, Father,” she said.
The moment he turned to Scratching Wolf, she stuck her tongue out at him.
“One day, I'll catch that tongue between your teeth,” Aged Oak said, without looking. “Give each a day's hazardous duty pay, Lord Colonel. They've earned it.”
“Yes, Lord.” Scratching Wolf smiled.
“Again, Lords, thank you.” Bowing crisply, Aged Oak stalked off toward the offices of the Colonel, his daughter falling in beside him. “Well done, Daughter.”
“Thank you, Father,” Whispering Oak replied, smiling. She hadn't taken her father's patronym; Aged Oak had mated an unrelated woman having the same surname. “You're a very good instructor—for a crippled old man.”
Glancing at her, Aged Oak laughed. “How's your mother?”
“She's doing 'very well,' Father,” she replied.
“Urgent dispatches, eh? Well, they may have to wait.”
“ 'Very, very well,' she asked me to tell you.”
“All right, then.” Aged Oak slowed a little to let Scratching Wolf catch up to them. “May I borrow your office for a few minutes, Lord Colonel? Then we'll have our meeting.”
“Of course, Lord General,” Scratching Wolf replied.
They reached the command post and entered. Father and daughter ascended the stairs toward the Colonel's offices, the Colonel walking over to an adjutant.
Entering, Aged Oak closed the door behind his daughter.
Out the window, through the haze to the north, he saw the Tiger Fortress, among mountains of similar size. Its cloak of snow gleaming brightly, the fortress looked locked in under ice.
How will Guarding Bear take by siege a structure that hasn't ever fallen to siege? Aged Oak wondered. Betrayal and sabotage had opened the fortress to attack, but the wizardly tiger from the Jaguar Menagerie had caught all the Empire's traitors and saboteurs. How will Guarding Bear do it, even with the Wizards' help?
“Mother sends her love,” Whispering Oak said.
Aged Oak turned toward her and nodded.
“Wishes you were home, as usual,” his daughter continued. “Insurgent activity has decreased in the last few months. Mother thinks that's because the Lady Water swept out Nest. I disagree. I think it's because the wicked wench has gone. Anyway, the school is operating fine. Everyone in Cove knows it's there. It hasn't been the target of insurgents, as you thought it might. Also, now that the conniving wench—”
“You should call her the Imperial Consort or the Lady Pine, eh? We revere nobility for a reason. Flowering Pine may have been a servant for four years, but she's nobility now—and the mother of the next Emperor, eh?” Aged Oak smiled. Her appellations for Flowering Pine amused him.
Whispering Oak hated her. “Oh, that's right, the cuckold elevated the wench, didn't he? As I was saying, now that she's gone, the other servants are coming forward with tales of the slut's midnight liaisons and other questionable activities. I told you something wasn't right about her, Father. Any servant who jumps to serve the Prefect and his son the General—but no one else—has questionable motives.”
“Well, you're probably right,” Aged Oak replied. He shrugged off his daughter's disobeying him. She was as incorrigible as he.
Before coming to Flying Arrow's attention, Flowering Pine had been a servant in the House of Oak. Only twelve when hired, Flowering Pine had made herself indispensable to Towering Oak, Aged Oak's father and Prefect of Cove. As she got older, father and son had come to like having the loquacious, empty-headed female around. Both had asked her to share her pleasures with them. She'd demurred politely, claiming to be too young.
When someone had fatally poisoned the Prefect almost three years ago, the Emperor Flying Arrow had come to Cove for the obsequies. In a private conference between the new Prefect Aged Oak and the Emperor, Flowering Pine had made a charming nuisance of herself, ingratiating herself into Flying Arrow's favor. The Emperor had begun to court her.
Aged Oak had felt pleased, wanting the best for Flowering Pine, whom he regarded as much his daughter as he did his daughter.
Returning from his reverie, Aged Oak realized his daughter hadn't spoken for a moment or two, and turned toward her.
“You haven't heard a word I've said, have you?” she asked.
“Eh? Of course, I have,” he protested. “I just didn't listen. What'd you say?”
“Infinite blast you! I'm sorry I mentioned the slut. I knew you'd do this! The way you'd come home after being away a couple months, fawning over the wench like she was your daughter or something, staying up late trying to get her to hike her robes, sleeping late the next day, forgetting you had a mate and children needing your attentions more!”
Seeing the beginnings of tears in her eyes, he pulled her to him. “My darling, I didn't realize. I'm sorry.”
Pushing him away, she turned to face the window, her shoulders drawn up and shaking with sobs.
Aged Oak felt miserable. She was the last person he'd ever want to hurt. Yet he had, terribly. Tentatively, he put his hands on her shoulders, wanting to turn her around and hold her close. His cheek to her hair, he murmured, “I suppose I ain't been the best father, eh? I love you dearly, and I'd never hurt you on purpose. I have, haven't I? Hurt you badly. I never wanted to. I'm sorry. What can I do?”
“Retire,” Whispering Oak said quietly, sniffling.
Turning her around, he pulled her to him, rocking her gently. “Sometimes, I wish I could. I know you and your mother'd welcome it, but it wouldn't do no good. I'd just get a wind in my sails and off I'd go. Remember how I'd take you with me when I'd go collecting the Emperor's clams? Those were happy
times, eh? I really enjoyed having you with me.”
“I really enjoyed going with you, Father. Remember when you asked why I wanted to become a warrior? Well, I lied. I only wanted to go with you when you went to fight your wars. I just wanted to be near you, Father. I just want to be near you.”
He held her while she cried, shedding a few tears himself. Loving her and wanting to give his girl everything she needed, he realized belatedly that what she needed was the comforting arms of her father.
Just his comforting arms, that was all.
Beneath her insolence and tough demeanor was a little girl wanting nothing more than to be like the one person whom she saw so little of, whom she idolized. Her way of compensating for his absence was to create his presence within her, to emulate the person she needed in her life.
“Thank you,” she said finally, kissing him on the cheek and wiping away his tears. “I never thought I'd see those on your face.”
He shrugged. “I never knew I'd hurt you so badly. I wish I hadn't. I truly wish I hadn't.”
“I know.” Smiling wistfully, she shook her head. “You couldn't have done any different. Can't help hurt those you love. The only alternative is not having anyone around to love.”
He nodded, sighing. “True enough—but no excuse. I love you, Daughter.”
Smiling, she closed her eyes for a moment, a new tear trickling her cheek. “Thank you, Father. You'll never know how precious those words are to me. Oh, you tell me every time you see me, but this time, I know you mean them. I know it.” She kissed him on the cheek, hugging him tightly.
Stepping away, she repaired her face. In moments, she looked as if she hadn't lost her composure completely.
With a flicker of telekinesis, he cleared the moisture off his face and the phlegm from his nose and upper lip. Shutting off half the capillary beds in his face, he took the redness from his eyes. “So, want to give me the dirt on the wench?”
She grinned. “Happily.”
Laughing, he stepped to the door. Beyond it waited Scratching Wolf. “You ought to hear this, Lord Colonel.”
The Bandit (Fall of the Swords Book 2) Page 18
