by Bell, Hilari
Fasal and two others were the last into the narrow canyon mouth, where Jiaan and his small army of archers waited for them.
As the canyon narrowed, only three Hrum could enter at a time.
“Fire,” Jiaan ordered, and his own arrow sprang from the bow to bury itself in a Hrum soldier’s throat. The moment his string snapped, he and all the archers in the front row fell to their knees to give the archers behind them a clear shot.
Fasal and his soldiers backed up a step, and then another, as the Hrum in the lead hesitated.
Jiaan didn’t hesitate. “Fire.”
More Hrum fell. The swordsmen turned and ran past him, through the massed archers, Fasal the last of them. His golden-brown skin was pale with exhaustion.
Jiaan heard the archers behind him thud down. “Fire,” he ordered, and more arrows raced out. He had another arrow nocked himself, but when he looked for a target there was no one in the mouth of the canyon. Looking farther, he could see the Hrum retreating toward the wider valley, their shields raised to protect themselves from the arrows that rained down from the canyon’s rim.
But looking over the bodies that lay on the blood-soaked ground between them—far more Farsalan bodies than Hrum—Jiaan knew that the Farsalans hadn’t won. They had been lucky to survive.
JIAAN DIDN’T LET THEM stop until they reached the hilltop he remembered—big enough for his whole force to camp, yet steep-sided enough that the Hrum would be at a significant disadvantage charging up. If they had to carry every drop of water they needed up that hill, then so be it.
“We were careless,” he told Fasal, dropping down to sit beside the weary deghan. They’d had to mount the swordsmen, double, on the chargers just to get them this far, for they were too weary to walk. In some ways the swordsmen were now better off than the many who’d been forced to march through the dark rocks and prickly plants without their boots. Jiaan thought his feet hurt worse than his head, but his heart hurt worst of all, aching with the poisonous grief of guilt. “Careless, and lazy, and worst of all arrogant. What happened to the men who were watching the Hrum camp?”
“Dead or prisoners,” said Fasal. “I thought about that too. It was foolish of us to assume the Suud were the only ones who could sneak through the desert. The Hrum will have scouts too. They probably waited until the clouds covered the moon, then crept through the open ground. After so many nights when nothing happened, the guards would have been bored, and sleepy. I just hope they haven’t paid too high a price for it.”
“I almost hope they have,” said Jiaan bitterly. “Azura knows we have. Where’s Aram? I need a count of the missing.”
Aram would have it, Jiaan knew. Even in the middle of an unplanned march after a battle, both of them in the dark. He had come to rely so deeply on the one-handed man who had feared he wouldn’t be of any use.
Fasal was silent. Jiaan looked around. “Where is Aram? I don’t see him.”
Fasal’s closed eyelids tightened. “He fell. After he tried his trick with the prisoners, he came to tell us to retreat to the canyon when you called for it. That’s why we were ready to move. Some of the Hrum … I guess they were angry. I don’t know.” Tears streaked the grime on his face.
A cold fist gripped Jiaan’s heart, but he took a deep breath, struggling against it.
“So he’s a prisoner. That’s too bad, but the Hrum will just make him a slave, after all. Even one-handed, he’s a useful man. He’ll come back with the others after we win.”
Fasal turned, anger blazing in his tear-bright eyes. “Don’t be such a wretched coward! He’s dead. The Hrum broke though our line, and he was a one-handed man armed with a kitchen knife. They hacked him to bits. He killed one of them while they were doing it, but Aram is dead.”
He buried his face in his arms.
Jiaan laid his hand on Fasal’s shoulder—it shook with silent sobs. He sat beside Fasal, staring dry-eyed into the darkness.
NEXT MORNING, WITH the few men who’d snatched up their boots scouting ahead for any sign of ambush, Jiaan led a party of soldiers back to their old camp to retrieve their gear. Most of the food was gone, of course. Jiaan could replace it from the supplies at their base camp, but what they had lost would add several weeks to the time the Hrum could hold out. Somewhat to his surprise, the Hrum hadn’t lingered to burn the rest of the Farsalan equipment. Perhaps they were too busy licking their own wounds. Jiaan hoped so.
Fasal, grim-faced, silent except for the low-voiced orders he gave, organized the gathering of bodies and the cutting of wood for their pyre. Jiaan left the task to him. Almost a third of Fasal’s swordsmen had fallen last night, dead or so badly wounded that it would be months before they fought again, if ever.
Farsalan deghans believed that the spirit, freed by the dissolution of the flesh, rose to Azura’s realm with the smoke of the burning. Farsalan peasants burned a body to symbolize the Flame of Destruction that takes all things when Time’s Wheel turns, and then turns again so the Tree of Life can grow in the ashes. It was also, as Jiaan’s peasant mother once said when she thought he wasn’t listening, a practical and cleanly way to dispose of a corpse, which was a practical peasant attitude. Watching the smoke rise, Jiaan didn’t care who was right. It gave men a chance to remember and grieve—the last offering they could make to Aram, to all the dead, before gritting their teeth and getting on with the job.
But it was hard to turn his back on that fire and walk away.
THE SUUD FOUND THEIR new camp soon after dusk, shocked and clearly feeling guilty for having abandoned the awkward strangers who were in their care. Jiaan pointed out that the Farsalans weren’t in their care, and that the fight they had died in was a war they themselves had carried into the Suud’s desert, but that seemed to make little difference to the Suud. They had already checked on the Hrum camp, they told Jiaan, and if he would send the order, the Farsalans who were watching there could return. The Suud would not let even a mouse leave the Hrum fortifications without reporting to him the moment it happened.
The Suud scouts had already found three mounds of fresh-turned earth, topped with stones, on the outskirts of the Hrum camp. Roughly where Jiaan had posted his guards. There had been eight men on watch that night. He hoped the other five were prisoners, and well cared for. The Hrum were good for that much. Jiaan was avoiding the one prisoner the Farsalans still held—if he looked into the Hrum officer’s eyes and saw contempt there, he would punch the man in the face.
THE NEXT MORNING, Jiaan himself went out to watch the Hrum camp. “They must have some weakness,” he told Fasal, whom he was leaving in command. “If we watch them long enough, we’ll see it.”
Ordinarily he would have left Aram in charge and taken Fasal with him, but the young deghan had grown up a lot lately—perhaps it was time. And Aram was gone; someone had to take his place.
Jiaan spent the chilly, overcast morning staring at flashes of movement in the brush behind the earthen walls, wishing that the Hrum had been foolish enough to cut those bushes down. He’d hoped to see some sign of prisoners, but he didn’t. He couldn’t even see enough of the tents to determine which one held the commanding officer, though there had to be more men coming and going from there. Would the officers’ tents be in the center, where the brush was thickest? That would conform to the Hrum’s usual method of laying out their camps. But even if they were, what of it? Jiaan couldn’t attack any part of that camp without losing far more men than the Hrum would.
No, he’d been right before. Wait till starvation forced them to leave the desert, and ambush them on the way out. Perhaps the Suud could show him the paths the Hrum were most likely to take, and he could plan assaults along each route. He also had to make certain that the Hrum could never again surprise him as they had two nights ago. Or maybe … could he set some sort of trap, using his own camp as bait? But how? Perhaps Fasal would have some ideas, or the other squad leaders. Even Jiaan’s father hadn’t done all his planning alone. He should—
Th
e sound of pounding hooves interrupted his thoughts, and Jiaan turned to see one of his squad leaders galloping a charger toward the rise.
Jiaan’s heart froze. There was news, and bad news judging by the grim expression on Hosah’s face. The young squad leader was one of their early recruits, a peasant born and bred. He’d been a stonemason before the Hrum had threatened to draft him and eventually his three younger brothers into their army. As he’d said to Jiaan on joining, “Better for me to fight with you now than have all of us going off to fight for the Hrum later.” He had a broad, freckled face, surrounded by a peasants light curls, and his speech was slow and deliberate—slow enough that Jiaan had assumed his wits worked at the same pace. But Aram, who usually preferred veterans like himself, had favored the man—that was why he was a squad leader now.
Hosah tumbled off his horse. He rode like a sack of grain—a sack that had been attached to the saddle by someone who didn’t know his knots. Most peasants rode like that. Jiaan’s worry deepened, and he started down the rise. Most peasants preferred not to ride, for precisely that reason, so whatever was wrong must be urgent. But if that was the case, why had this man carried the news instead of one of the grooms who rode well?
“What is it?” Jiaan demanded as Hosah approached. “What’s happened?”
“Well, it’s not happening yet,” said Hosah with his broad accent. “At least, I hope it isn’t. But I thought you ought to know, sir.” His usually open face was closed—almost sullen. And for someone who’d arrived in such haste, he was certainly taking his time getting to the message.
“What is it?” Jiaan asked again. “Get to the point, please!”
Hosah took a deep breath. “The lord Fasal,” he said, using the title most of the men had dropped. “He means to torture the prisoner.”
“What?”
“He means to torture the prisoner,” said Hosah. “Heating up the fire pokers and all. He says that this man knows the Hrum’s weaknesses if anyone does, and if he’s … ‘asked properly,’ I think Lord Fasal put it, he’ll spill them like water from a cracked cup. But I didn’t think … that is … I thought you ought to know about it. Sir.”
“You thought right,” said Jiaan grimly, stalking past him. “I’ll take your horse. I hope you don’t mind walking back.”
“Not at all,” said Hosah. “Grateful for it.”
A smile touched Jiaan’s lips at Hosah’s heartfelt tone, but it faded an instant later. He vaulted up to the saddle, clapped his heels to the horse’s sides, then clenched his knees around his mount’s smooth barrel as it broke into a gallop. The horse was sweating but not yet winded; it could maintain this pace for the short distance back to Jiaan’s camp without foundering. But Jiaan would have pushed the horse to gallop till it dropped if that would have gotten him to the camp in time. It wasn’t for the tactimian, either. As far as Jiaan was concerned, Tactimian Patrius wasn’t worth the life of a good horse. There were other things at stake here. Things that were worth everything.
HE COULDN’T GALLOP the weary horse up the slope—it would probably have fallen and broken both their necks—so Jiaan ran into the camp on his own feet, panting and sweating from the rapid climb, and probably not looking at all commanding. It might be important to appear commanding, but Jiaan was too angry to care.
Looking around the camp, it was easy to see where the trouble was—a large group of men clustered in a circle on one side of the rise, milling uneasily, and the others were scattered at the opposite side of the camp, as far away from Fasal and his hotheads as possible.
Jiaan wondered, stalking up to him, why Fasal hadn’t used the cooking fires to heat the hooked iron pokers he had taken from the kitchen. Perhaps the innkeeper had refused to allow it. Perhaps Fasal himself had felt that torture and food preparation went badly in the same place. Whatever the reason, forcing Fasal to build his own fire had delayed him long enough to save Tactimian Patrius’ hide—and the honor of Jiaan’s army as well. The irons were still lying with their ends in the coals, though Jiaan could see that the metal was beginning to glow.
Fasal’s men had driven a thick post into the ground, and the Hrum officer sat with his hands tied behind it, facing the fire. They’d taken his shirt, but his skin was unmarred except for a few old scars. The Suud had once bound Jiaan and Fasal in a similar position. Had it been that memory that inspired this? But the Suud never had any intention of carrying out their threat, while one look at Fasal’s blazing black eyes told Jiaan that he wasn’t bluffing.
Fasal opened his mouth to speak, but Jiaan beat him to it. “You will not do this. Not under any circumstances.”
Fasal’s jaw tightened, but his voice was quiet, almost casual. “Why is that, Commander Jiaan? Have you already determined the weaknesses in the Hrum fortifications by sitting and staring at them?” He picked up one of the irons and examined the tip critically.
A murmur of agreement rose from the crowd around him, and Jiaan stiffened. When Fasal had defied him before, the common soldiers had backed Jiaan. But those soldiers had been led by Aram. A pang of loss shook him, but this was more important than grief—more important even than keeping his command, because if he lost this battle, none of the others would matter.
“No, I haven’t figured it out yet,” said Jiaan. “But we will, eventually, between us. Now I have a question for you: Are we better than the Hrum?”
It wasn’t the question Fasal had expected. “What do you mean?”
“Are we better for Farsala than the Hrum?” Jiaan demanded. “Or are you just fighting so that you can be a deghan again?”
Anger flared in Fasal’s face. “That has nothing to do with it! And you know it too.”
“Then is it because you’re pissed at them? For killing your father and all your family?”
“No. Yes! They’ve killed all of us, enslaved those left alive, and stolen our country! Now they want to draft our men to fight in their wars, paid for with the taxes they take from us. And if you don’t think that’s cause enough to fight, cause enough to die as my swordsmen did, then maybe you shouldn’t be here!”
It was a cry from the heart—but Jiaan had learned to think with his head, even as some part of his soul bled for Fasal’s anguish.
“All right, they tax us—but we’ve always paid taxes. And the Hrum provide good roads, and an army that will protect Farsala even better than the deghans did. And the Hrum don’t torture prisoners. It’s against their laws. So how are we better than the Hrum?”
“We’re having no draft,” one of the Farsalan soldiers chimed in. “That’s what I’m here about. I’m not being hauled off to leave my business and fight in Kadesh for the next five years!” A rumble of agreement rippled through the crowd. But some men were silent—the men who’d come, slowly, from the other side of the camp to stand behind Jiaan.
“You’ve here now,” Jiaan pointed out. “Fighting a war in the Suud’s desert, away from your business. And there are no deghans left. Even if the Hrum vanished tomorrow, someone would have to fight off the Kadeshi at the border. So you and your brothers, some of you at least, will still have to fight. And the Hrum don’t torture prisoners.”
“Well, we don’t keep slaves,” another man said.
“No,” said Jiaan. “We don’t. But we’re torturing prisoners. Ask that man.” He gestured to the silent Hrum officer, tied to the post. He looked remarkably composed; only the pallor of his face revealed his fear. “Ask him if being a Hrum slave doesn’t look good to him right now. The Hrum don’t torture slaves, either. So if we do this, we’re no better than the Hrum.”
“I don’t care who’s better,” said Fasal coldly. “I just want them out of my country. If the first step toward that is torturing this man, then I’m not afraid to do it. He has information we need to win! Information that might save our own men’s lives! How can you not see that?” The cooling iron swept through the air in a gesture of furious frustration.
“That doesn’t matter,” said Jiaan. “What matters
is that we have to be better than the Hrum. We have to be. Because if we’re not, then it’s all been for nothing. All the fighting, all the deaths. For nothing, unless we’re better than they are.”
“Your father wasn’t better,” said Fasal. “Your father wasn’t too cowardly to order the torture of prisoners, if that was what it took to win.”
Was that true? It could have been, Jiaan realized. Torture hadn’t been forbidden by the deghans’ laws. But even if it was true …
“That doesn’t matter either,” said Jiaan. “It’s not about my father. It’s not even about the Hrum, in the end. This is about our honor. We have to be better than they are, or it doesn’t even matter whether we win or not.”
Fasal didn’t understand. Jiaan saw it in his face, and in the faces of the men around him. But some of them did. Hosah, still panting and red-faced from having run all the way back, did. And that too mattered. As for the rest …
“I order you”—Jiaan raised his voice—“to release this man. Neither he, nor any prisoners we may take in the future, will be harmed by any Farsalan, beyond what is necessary to keep them from escape. Any man who chooses to disobey this command will be cast out of the Farsalan army.”
He made no attempt to imitate his father’s command voice. This was his own voice—perhaps the first time he had used it.
Fasal’s voice was very soft. “And if we all choose to disobey? What then?”
“Then,” said Jiaan, “you’ll have to find a new commander.” It wasn’t even a threat—it was too true for that, like stating that rock is solid. For a moment he thought it would become reality, but Fasal’s eyes dropped. He tossed the iron back into the fire and stalked away, pushing soldiers from his path. Several of the surviving swordsmen followed him. The others returned to their own tasks, leaving Jiaan standing alone beside the prisoner.
