by David Weber
“But without the Laborers of God . . .”
“And that’s my final point, Your Excellency,” Pahner said quietly. “You have to pull back on the Works of God. They were beautiful symbols during the time of stasis you’ve just been through, but this invasion is going to shake things up, and you’re going to need those workers in other areas. You’ll need them as soldiers, and as artisans working on things you don’t even know yet that you have to produce. Even with your climate, we should have been able to fight this war with muskets or rifles, not pikes!
“You know now, if you think of what the God has told you, the extent of the Wrath of the God. Consult your temple’s records, Your Excellency. Compare the worst ravages of the Wrath to the Hompag Rains which have just passed and judge what is the very worst flooding your God will send upon you, then design your dikes and canals to resist that degree of Wrath. That’s what your God is asking for, no less and, probably, no more. But surely He doesn’t expect you simply to go on building redundant dikes, digging redundant canals, and manufacturing redundant pumps forever when there are so many other things that His people also require.”
“Now he presumes to speak for the God!” Chain snapped. “Haven’t you heard enough treason and blasphemy yet, Your Excellency?”
“Grath,” Gratar said mildly, “if you say one more word without my asking, I will have a guard . . . what was it? Ah, yes—‘feed you your left horn through your butt-hole.’” He gazed at the council member coldly for several seconds, and Grath Chain seemed to shrink in upon himself. Then the priest-king turned back to Pahner.
“And what of the Council?” he asked.
“The Council is a snake pit,” Pahner admitted. “But without Bogess and Rus From to give them legitimacy, they’re a snake pit which will fang itself to death. Dump the problem of the displaced Laborers of God on them and watch them scramble for cover.”
“Make the Council’s members responsible, individually, for their maintenance?” Gratar mused. “How very . . . elegant.”
“So long as you insure that it doesn’t become a form of slavery,” the Marine cautioned. “But, yes, that should work. This sort of thing is more O’Casey’s area of expertise than mine, and I would certainly advise you to discuss the details with her, but I believe that the points I’ve laid out will defuse almost all the major problems. It won’t be an easy time with all the region recovering from the Boman, whatever you do. But if you treat the changes as a challenge to be worked with, it should also be a profitable time. For the city and for the God.”
“And Grath?” Gratar asked, looking once more at the conspirator standing by the wall.
“Do what you will,” Pahner replied. “If it were up to me, I’d say give him a thankless job and all the worst people to do it with, and impose severe penalties for failure. But he’s really a treasure if you use him properly. For example, you’ll probably be threatened by another city-state soon, whatever you do. If that happens, send him there with some funds to destabilize it. If he succeeds, reward him. If he’s found out, disown him and swear that whatever he did, it was never by your orders.”
“But he has done me a service in warning of the coup,” Gratar said. “Surely I owe him something for that.”
“Okay,” Pahner agreed. “Give him thirty pieces of silver.”
“This way is probably for the best,” Bogess said, gazing out over the canals and dikes in the first, faint light of dawn. “However early it is.”
“Well, we need to be to the Nashtor Hills by nightfall,” Rastar pointed out with a shrug. “Better to be hit there by the scattered tribes rather than caught out in the open.”
“And how much of this precipitous departure is to prevent the people from seeing half their army and two of their leaders hustled off into the wilderness?” Rus From demanded with a growl.
The cleric shifted the unfamiliar weight of the sword baldric on his shoulder as he stood between the general and the Northerner prince and looked upon the flood-control works. He wondered if he would ever again see the Bastar Canal. It was the first project he’d worked upon as a young engineer under that old taskmaster, Bes Clan.
“The Boman are no threat to Diaspra; we made sure of that,” Rastar replied, and it was true. The Northern cavalry, with the pillage and destruction of their own cities fresh in their collective memory, had been merciless to the retreating foe. If a thousand Wespar ever made it to their distant cousins, it would be astonishing.
“I had plans,” From half-snarled.
“And now you’ll have new ones!” the Therdan prince snapped. “You’re the one complaining about nothing new. Haven’t you heard the plans of the humans? Rapidly firing guns? Giant ships? Light, wheeled cannon? A ‘combined arms force’? What do you have to complain about?”
The artisan turned slowly to look at the prince.
“What would you give to see Therdan or Sheffan once more? See them shining in the morning light as the tankett calls? See their people going about their business in peace and plenty through your actions?”
Rastar turned away from the cleric’s hot gaze and looked out into the growing light.
“I see it every night in my dreams, priest. But I cannot return to my home; it’s no longer there.” He shrugged, the gesture picked up from the humans, and fingered the communicator on his harness. “Perhaps, in time, things will change and for some there will be a homecoming.”
“Centicred for your thoughts?” Kosutic’s voice was quiet, for Roger was definitely looking grim.
The prince leaned into the armored head of the flar-ta as his memory replayed again and again the sights and sounds and smells of the pursuit. It had been necessary. He knew that. But it had also been hideous . . . and the pleasure he’d taken in it as he poured out his anger and fear and frustration upon an enemy who’d really had nothing to do with creating his predicament in the first place had been still worse. There were dark places in his own soul which he’d never before realized were there, and he didn’t like the look at them he’d just been given.
There was no one else in hearing distance. The Marines and Mardukans were engaged in final preparations for the fast march to the Nashtor Hills, and he turned his head to meet the sergeant major’s eyes.
“I wanna go home, Top,” he whispered. “I just want to go home.”
“Yeah,” the sergeant major sighed. “Me, too, Boss. Me, too.” She gave Pahner a thumbs-up as the captain looked down the long line of march. All the mahouts and cavalry leaders gave the same signal, and she inhaled deeply. It was time to move out.
“The only way to get there is to put one foot in front of the other,” she said, “and I guess it’s that time.” She looked up at the somber prince with a shrug and a crooked smile.
“Time and high time to be trekkin’ again, eh?” the prince said. “Well, here’s to the last march. To the sea.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Dergal Starg waved at the bartender.
“Give me another, Tarl. Nothing better to do.”
It was the fifth time he’d said that, and Tarl was probably getting tired of hearing it. Not that the bartender was going to say anything.
Ownership of the Nashtor mines had been disputed between three different city-states right up until they and the armies they’d kept glowering at one another might actually have been some use. Right up until the Boman had smashed two of the city-states into rubble and cut the mines off from K’Vaern’s Cove, the only one of the three which had ever been worth a solitary damn. But none of those cities had ever believed they could control Nashtor, whoever might officially claim ownership. Those mines were the province of one Dergal Starg. Merchants could merch, warriors could war. But it took a by-the-gods miner to mine, and in all the lands of the Chasten and Tam, in all the Nashtor Hills, there was no miner to match Dergal Starg.
Which was what made the present situation so bitterly ironic, of course. Because what was needed right now was one of those iron-head Northern war prince
s. Or a K’Vaernian guardsman. Or even an idiotic war priest from Diaspra. Because no matter how good a miner you were, a mine without markets was just a hole in the ground that you poured money into.
Sure, a few hundred miners and a group of engineers had been able to create defenses the Boman avoided. Sure, they were able to keep mining, even with the occasional probing foray by the barbarians. But even though the sounds of the surrounding mines and smelters continued to echo through the tavern, they weren’t quite right. At any other time, he would have been down Shaft Five in a heartbeat, for example. He could tell the lazy bastards were lying down on the job down there, but what was the point of working yourself to death, of building inventories, when there were no buyers?
There was none, of course, but Dergal Starg still ran the mines and smelters. And the miners were, by the gods, going to keep on mining right until the mines ran out of food, new picks, and the thousand and one other things they got from the stupid, cheating merchants.
And the bartenders were, by the gods, going to tend, which was why he glared at Tarl when his mug of wine wasn’t immediately refilled. But then he noticed that the bartender was staring over his shoulder with wide eyes and all four hands thrown outward in a gesture of surprise.
Starg turned around to see what the nincompoop was staring at, and froze. The crew which had just walked under the roof of the wall-less structure was a flatly amazing sight, and not just because the mines were sealed off from everyone else in the entire world by the Boman, yet he’d never laid eyes on a single one of them before.
Four of them were obviously Northerner iron heads, two of them wearing some of the nicest ironwork it had ever been his pleasure to admire. The fluting on one of the cuirasses followed the new trend coming out of K’Vaern, picked up apparently from some outlandish place which had never heard of steel on steel. No doubt it reduced the weight of the armor by a good bit, but traditionalists—and Starg, by the gods, put himself in that category—thought it was likely to backfire. The damned stuff was bound to catch the point of a weapon or crack under any heavy pounding, although he had to admit that this armor was as hacked about as any he’d ever seen, and it seemed to have stood the test well. From the look of the wearer, it would probably be a better idea not to make any sarcastic remarks about it, either.
But the ironmongery, however impressive, wasn’t the most interesting thing about the group. One of the iron heads’ companions was a lightly armed, gods-be-damned priest. One of the damned water boys, no less, unless he was mistaken, and a senior one by his gear. Starg had seen a couple of water boy missionaries in his time, but most of them had been youngsters. This fellow was anything but, and the wrench he wore on the golden chain about his neck made him an artisan priest. Artisan priests were like legends; you never saw one outside Diaspra. But that still wasn’t the most interesting thing about the group—that had to be the basik in the middle.
It couldn’t be an actual basik. For one thing, it was too gods-be-damned big, but it sure as the gods looked like a basik. No horns, no claws, no armor—just soft and pink all over. Well, it was wearing some sort of covering, and its skin had an ugly dry look, like a feck-beast’s. But other than that . . . and the helmet . . . it certainly looked like a basik.
The iron head in the fluted cuirass held out one hand, palm up to indicate friendship.
“You are Dergal Starg?” he asked.
“Yeah,” the miner snarled. “Who by the gods wants to know?”
“Ah,” the Northerner said with a weird facial grimace that exposed his teeth. “The famous Starg personality. Let me introduce myself. I’m Rastar Komas Ta’Norton, Prince of Therdan. King, I suppose now. I believe you once met my uncle under better circumstances.”
Starg slumped suddenly, even his belligerence temporarily muted. Kantar T’Norl had been one of the only damned outsiders who hadn’t been totally, by the gods, idiotic. Unlike all too many others, Kantar had always been a voice of reason in the region.
“I’m sorry, Rastar Komas Ta’Norton. I shouldn’t have been so abrupt. The loss of your uncle was a terrible blow to the Valley of the Tam.”
“He died as well as could be permitted,” the Northern prince said, “leading a charge to cover our retreat. We were able to get many of the women and children out of Therdan and Sheffan because of his sacrifice and the willing sacrifice of his house warriors.”
“It’s still a great loss,” the miner growled, taking a sip from his now refilled mug.
“Yes, and hardly the way he would have preferred to leave us,” the prince agreed with another of those odd grimaces. “I suspect that he would have preferred drowning in a wine vat,” he said, and Starg grunted in laughter for the first time.
“Yes, he was a bit of a drinker. It’s a recent vice on my own part, of course.”
“Not according to my uncle,” Rastar disagreed. “He said you could drink a pagee under the table.”
“High praise, indeed,” Starg said. “And now that we’ve covered the pleasantries, where did you come from? The trails are swarming with Boman.”
“The ones to the north may be,” the thing that looked like a basik said, “but the ones to the south are . . . clearer.”
“Who’s the basik?” Starg asked, gesturing at the odd creature.
“This is Captain Armand Pahner of the Empress’ Own,” Rastar said with yet another of those odd grimaces. “And calling him a basik to his face could be a mistake of cosmic proportions. A brief mistake.”
“Captain Pahner and his ‘Imperial Marines’ are the reason that there no longer are any Boman to the south,” the cleric put in, and extended one palm-up true-hand of his own in greeting. “Rus From, at your service,” he said, administering the mining engineer’s second intense shock of the day.
“The Rus From? The Rus From who created the two-cycle pump system? The secondary aortal injector? The Rus From who designed the God’s Lake runoff entrapment system? That was a thing of beauty! I used a modification of it in our Number Nine shaft trap.”
“Um,” the momentarily nonplused cleric said. Then, “Yes, I suppose that was I.”
“So you came up from the south?” Starg asked. “What happened to the Boman?”
“Wespar, actually,” Rastar said, and clapped hands in a shrug. “We killed them.”
“That’s a somewhat simplistic explanation,” From noted reprovingly.
“Accurate, nonetheless,” Rastar argued. “They don’t have enough left to burn their dead.”
“They don’t burn them, anyway,” Starg said distastefully. “They bury them.”
“True,” From said. “A terrible use of land. Can you imagine what would happen if everyone buried their dead? Before long, all the dry land would be overrun with dead bodies!”
“Could we debate social customs at some other time?” the maybe-not-basik asked with a grimace which, allowing for the differences in shape and form, was remarkably like the one Rastar had been making, and Starg finally remembered where he’d seen it before. It was the exact expression a basik made when you had it cornered and were just about to club it. Like it was trying to talk you out of it or something.
“Indeed,” Rus From said. “We brought a caravan through with us. It includes some of the items you ordered from the merchants of Diaspra before the Boman closed the roads.”
“We appreciated that last shipment of pig iron, by the way,” the maybe-not-basik said. “It would have been tough to do everything we had to without it.”
“Yeah, well, normally we do most of our trading with K’Vaern’s Cove,” Starg said. “But they were cut off by then. We just had to hope a caravan would make it back from Diaspra, instead.”
“And indeed it did,” From said. “I’m afraid that few of the mining implements you ordered are included, however. Most of the ones that were complete were converted into weapons. We do have a goodly load of food and wines, spices, and so forth, though.”
“That’s all well and good,” Starg pro
tested. “But we’re going to need those tools soon.”
“And they’ll be completed in time,” From said dryly. “With all the weapons we recovered from the Wespar, there’s much more than sufficient iron to replace the material we commandeered.”
“And with any luck, we’ll be able to get the Boman’s attention so centered on us that they won’t be a problem between here and K’Vaern’s Cove much longer, either,” Rastar added. “There were none on the south side of the hills. Where are they?”
“Mostly still gorging on the corpse of Sindi,” Starg said. “But there are many bands just wandering around, some of them quite large. You’ll find it difficult to pass through to the Cove, if that’s your target.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that,” said the maybe-not-basik. “I think we might just give them pause.”
“You see,” Rastar said, “we’re not exactly a caravan.”
The forces from Diaspra sprawled everywhere around the mines. Most of them were inside the hasty walls the miners had thrown up against the Boman under Starg’s direction. Those of them who were not, lightly armored figures carrying incredibly long spears or lances, were busy erecting another camp adjacent to the mining area. They dug with incredible energy and precision, as if they’d been doing it their entire lives.
“What, by all the gods, is this?” Starg asked, rubbing a horn furiously.
“Well,” the maybe-not-basik, Pahner, said, “I’m afraid we weren’t quite sure who held the mines, so we took the liberty of securing your guards until we were sure. They’re unharmed,” the not-basik added hastily.
“So you just snuck in and took over?” the mine manager demanded, wondering whether he was angrier at the newcomers or at the guards who were supposed to have prevented such things from happening.
