The women and the warlords coaaod-3

by Hugh Cook

  The audience was at an end.

  ***

  The next day, Yen Olass saw Yerzerdayla at a distance, comforting Celadric after his public punishment. She realized Celadric had bought Yerzerdayla, and at first she was horrified at the thought of such a cold-blooded monster owning such a warm, generous woman.

  But then, when she thought about it, what better fate could Yerzerdayla have hoped for?

  Yen Olass sensed that Yerzerdayla would organize Celadric, and that he would appreciate her incisive intelligence, her poise, her elegance. They might never love each other, but their relationship might, in time, become an alliance of powers: in time, Yerzerdayla might make herself empress.

  Now, if Yerzerdayla had been bought by Khmar… that would have been a disaster.

  What kind of woman would Khmar want?

  Yen Olass lay awake at night, thinking about it. Thinking about the way Khmar had denied Losh Negis the right to claim the flesh of the woman he had bought from the Sisterhood. About the strange meal they had had together. About the way he had let her decide for the pirates.

  The emperor could scarcely take Yen Olass to bed. Whatever her legal status, she was of the Sisterhood. The most powerful men in Khmar's empire were those from the Yarglat clans which had followed him out of the north, and those men tended, like Chonjara, to be true to the old ways. Such men might tolerate oracles, and even make use of them on occasion – but to have their emperor succumb to one? That would be a different thing again.

  Everyone remembered the reign of terror of the Witch-lord, Onosh Gulkan. An oracle who captured an emperor might all too easily remind men of the wiles of the dralkosh, Bao Gahai of evil memory. In the popular imagination, the gap between an oracle and a dralkosh was not so terribly wide. A great warrior, Haveros, had recently been seduced by a dralkosh. An emperor could not be presumed to be immune…

  Yen Olass realised Khmar had chosen the path of discretion for good and sufficient reasons. But she could not help thinking that she was better equipped to live as an empress than as a slave.

  ***

  Lord Alagrace knew why Khmar had put him in charge of the invasion of Argan. Logistics was his speciality, in which no Yarglat clansman could match him; the invasion across the waters of the Pale was going to need an enormous amount of planning and organisation, which made Lord Alagrace the inevitable choice as supreme commander. He accepted his fate.

  But one person who did not accept her fate was the Princess Quenerain. Her father had told her she was going to go to Argan in her capacity as head of the Rite of Purification. She was appalled at the prospect. In effect, she was being exiled from Gendormargensis. She thought her father was punishing her – and she was right.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  In Favanosin, Lord Alagrace, dealing with military simplicities instead of the delicate politics of Gendormargensis, had no need of an oracle to help him. Yen Olass lived alone in a small two-room house, the property of a midwife who had fled when Khmar's troops invaded; she never saw Lord Alagrace from one week to the next. She drew food and fuel from Central Supply, eating well, for as an oracle her rations were those of a junior officer.

  Winter came, and it grew cold. The days shortened, but little snow fell. Instead, pounding rain swept in from the Pale, obliterating the sun. Everything became damp and wet for days on end; fires smoked, the roads were churned to mud, mould clagged the walls, and eyesight itself faltered in the dull everwater light.

  Yen Olass was homesick that winter, dreaming back to the cold, hard snows of the north, and the clear cold skies of the northern winter. The days passed slowly. She made a proper Casting Board, and fashioned 365 Indicators from pieces of wood, but few people came to ask for readings. She grew lonely.

  She had nobody. Even Snut had gone off to war in the mountains, and Yen Olass had said a parting for him. She tried to make friends with some of the local fishermen, so she could go out and help catch gaplax, but women were bad luck in and around boats, so they rebuffed her.

  Draven might have been company of a sort – though Yen Olass had to admit she was a little afraid of him – but Lord Alagrace had requisitioned him almost immediately, providing him with quarters elsewhere, and women and wine as well.

  Draven drew maps and charts from memory, described 136

  wind tides and beaches, inspected ships, advised on rigging, and, once he had mastered sufficient Ordhar to command men in his own right, trained soldiers to be sailors. Lord Alagrace then had to intervene to protect Draven from the wrath of the text-masters, who caught him mixing foreign words with his Ordhar commands; this was unavoidable, as Ordhar lacked the vocabulary for dealing with shipboard life.

  Lord Alagrace was desperately short of the equipment and expertise needed to get an army across the Pale. The navy was almost nonexistent: the empire could scarcely protect its newly conquered lands from pirate raids. Shipyards were labouring on new vessels, while agents acquired others in Ashmolea and the Ravlish Lands, but the manpower shortage had to be remedied, for the most part, by training people from scratch. It is not the easiest thing in the world to turn a soldier into a sailor. Lord Alagrace, in fact, thought it an offence against nature – but it was necessary, so he got it done.

  So Lord Alagrace kept Draven, and never found time to spare so much as a thought for Yen Olass. However, when she wanted something done, she commanded it using the formula 'Lord Alagrace had decreed'. In this way, she got shipwrights to build her a nordigin in which she could keep her Casting Board and her Indicators, she got her chimney swept and she got her front door replaced. Now that she had a door at last, she was not going to settle for second-best.

  Her situation was anomalous. For the moment, Central Supply treated her as an oracle attached to the army. But what would happen when the army moved on? The emperor had named her 'Khmar's own Sisterhood in the south'. But, in legal terms, what did that actually mean? When the army moved on, would anyone have a duty to feed her?

  Yen Olass began to hoard food. She requisitioned an extra daily ration from Central Supply, for 'entertainment'; nobody questioned it. But, as her supply began to mount,

  she grew slightly guilty, and started to set aside half her extra ration for feeding beggars. At dawn and dusk she distributed a little bread and barley-meal griddle-cakes to half a dozen human scarecrows who came to her door.

  Sometimes, Yen Olass thought she would rather have fed birds – or cats – but there were none to be had in Favanosin. The conquering army ate reasonably well, buying up the entire fishing catch and importing food as well, but the local population was starving. The average life expectancy for any stray animal bigger than a cockroach was now only half a day – and even cockroaches found life dangerous.

  This monotonous existence ended at midwinter when Lord Alagrace, his transportation and supply problems shaping up nicely, turned his attention to minor matters such as the question of translators. Here the text-masters had failed him badly. Khmar had authorised Alagrace to take text-masters south of Tameran. However, although many were trained in the languages of Argan – including the High Speech of wizards – none was eager to chance the perilous expedition south. Demands sent to Gendormargensis brought back only excuses, most of which were of a medical nature, impossible to verify or dispute at a distance. Those text-masters who had accompanied the troops to Favanosin, and had interfered ever since, zealously defending the purity of Ordhar, discreetly disappeared when in danger of being ordered south.

  Lord Alagrace, as always, did not despair, but im-provized. His agents had acquired, from the Ravlish Lands, two men who spoke the Galish Trading Tongue, the lingua franca for much of Argan. He would use these to teach others. Among those he requisitioned for his new cadre of translators was Yen Olass Ampadara.

  Veteran soldiers are skilled foragers, with a habit of converting any portable item to their own use. Yen Olass was a natural target for Lord Alagrace's recruitment drive. She, for her part, had mixed feelings about this. On the
one hand, she hated the thought of having to give up her house. On the other hand, the army would feed, clothe and shelter her, and in Argan she would be safe from the Sisterhood, from Celadric, and from the Ondrask of Noth.

  Overall, she was glad to be going south.

  That winter, three ships were lost to the waters of the Pale, but others voyaged to Argan and returned safely. From the intelligence reports brought back by these ships, Lord Alagrace found it would be easy to take his first objective, Trest, a realm with negligible defences. However, his army would then have to cross a swamp to reach the land of Estar, which he had to secure to get a port on the west coast of Argan. Consequently, Lord Alagrace arranged for the supply of vast quantities of sprite bamboo, so his army could make a corduroy road across the swamps.

  Toward spring, small, elite cavalry squads were shipped across the Pale. Their tasks included further intelligence gathering, a little raiding, and the destruction of the temple of Estar, known to be able to call on occult powers for the protection of the land. Argan, that strange and dangerous territory lying beyond the Pale, harboured many minor gods and demons, as well as wizards and other masters of power, dragons, monsters, and ancient strongholds of surpassing strength.

  Shortly before the fleet sailed, a letter from the Lord Emperor Khmar told Lord Alagrace the identity of a spy who had been sent to Argan in the autumn.

  'He was given the task of securing full knowledge of the defences of the nearest useful port on the western coast of Argan, or, in the event of that port being undefended, details of the defences of the ruling city or castle of the land.’

  Lord Alagrace wondered who had drafted this smoothly worded communication for the emperor. How many other people knew the facts? In particular, did General Chonjara know that his enemy, Volaine Persaga Haveros, was now in Estar? Did the Princess Quenerain know? Those three must inevitably meet, and the consequences were potentially disastrous. Was Khmar deliberately putting them to a test of destruction?

  (And having thought of that, Lord Alagrace had to consider this: was Khmar deliberately testing his erstwhile Lawmaker by sending him south with Chonjara as his leading subordinate? Did Khmar anticipate a clash of wills, a struggle for supremacy? And did Chonjara?)

  Whatever Chonjara knew, thought or felt, he played the perfect professional soldier, dedicating his days to the training of his troops. By the time the invasion fleet was ready to sail, Lord Alagrace knew that everything possible had been done in the way of preparation. The night before they set sail, he went to bed with a good conscience – but dreamed of glowering warriors, of towering hill forts, wizards, lethal magic and dragons breathing fire.

  ***

  Just before the invasion fleet sailed, Karahaj Nan Nulador found Yen Olass on the waterfront. He waved a letter which had come from Gendormargensis. Nan Nulador was illiterate, but someone had read him the letter, which he had committed to memory. He gave Yen Olass his rendition of the despatch.

  'Is that what it says?' said Nan Nulador. 'Is it true?’

  Yen Olass read the letter.

  'It's true,' said Yen Olass.

  And Karahaj Nan Nulador allowed himself to rejoice. 'A son! I have a son! You must give a reading for his destiny.’

  So Yen Olass did. This was pure fortune telling, but she had no scruples about that. For the son she predicted life with honour, fame, children, wealth, and death on the field of battle.

  'Death with honour?' asked Nan Nulador, anxiously.

  'With honour,' said Yen Olass, nodding.

  And Nan Nulador was satisfied.

  When Yen Olass boarded her ship – all the translators were travelling together, so their taskmasters could keep them grinding away at their lessons – she thought of the child born far away in Gendormargensis. In a very real way, it was her creation: without her help, the mother would have been stoned to death as a dralkosh, and the baby would have been dead before conception.

  As the ship trudged away from the coast of Tameran, a raft of sprite bamboo lubbering in its wake, Yen Olass wondered if she would ever see that child: and wished it was hers.

  ***

  The crossing of the Pale was uneventful for those who did not get seasick. Yen Olass felt fine, but faked the symptoms to get some time free from mastering the trading tongue, which was full of so many strange words for so many weird things: camels, keflo shell, flying fish, ambergris, batador, walrus hide, elephant, mammoth, markhor, ebony, red coral, pumice.

  Listening to soldiers' talk, she heard stories of battles, forced marches, sieges and sickness, mutiny, punishment, loot, women and drink. Crossbow experts boasted about how they would down the dragon said to lord it over the land of Estar. Yen Olass dreamed of that dragon – and of the soldiers and their women.

  After many monotonous sealeagues, during which Yen Olass grew sick of the smell of hay – her ship was carrying some of the army's reserve supply – Argan came in sight. The southern continent proved to be dull, bleak, and larger than her imagination.

  They anchored off Skua, a marginal settlement lying west of Scourside and east of the mountainous Penvash Peninsula. For two days they did nothing; Yen Olass concluded that wars were not as lively as storytellers pretended. Then they landed, finding the shore churned to mud by horses, men and loads of sprite bamboo. Skua had surrendered without a fight, and a force had gone inland to invest the High Castle of Trest; the main body of the army was already marching for Estar.

  Yen Olass feared the war might end before she saw any excitement, but, riding a hay wagon west, she found the main body of the army camping by the swamps, busy building a corduroy road.

  While they were camped near the swamps, the Princess Quenerain came to see Yen Olass.

  'I want a reading,' said the princess.

  'About what?' said Yen Olass.

  'About the prospects for love.’

  'An oracle gives a reading only where conflict arises between two or more parties,' said Yen Olass, going very formal on her. 'An oracle does not tell fortunes.’

  'I know an oracle who's whored her fortunes through half the army,' said the Princess Quenerain.

  This was an exaggeration, but Khmar's daughter had a point. She could make trouble for Yen Olass if she really wanted to.

  'Very well then,' said Yen Olass, 'since you insist And she told a fortune for the princess. Out of malice,

  Yen Olass predicted that the Princess Quenerain would

  meet:

  '… a tall dark stranger. Very tall. Strong. Vigorous. Riding a stallion, or maybe a stallion riding. Women in love with him. Envy. But he's yours – you claim him. Nobody else can have him.’

  The Princess Quenerain swallowed this down like a cat swallowing cream. And believed it. Well, let her believe it. There would be no lovers for a princess here – unless she chose to lie with a common soldier. Knowing the scandal that would cause, Yen Olass hoped she would.

  ***

  The days went slowly. The road was almost static, like a river of treacle, sogging reluctantly through the swamps at a few paces a day. But, out in the great wide world, things were happening. From usually reliable sources, Yen Olass heard that the temple of Estar had been razed, and that Estar's dragon was dead.

  While intelligence reports came in with such welcome news, the corduroy road pushed on through the swamps. Progress accelerated as commanders and men mastered the necessary skills and teamwork. And then, one day, it was done: and the army advanced, leaving behind it an abandoned camp site with its network of paths, tree stumps, tent pitches, latrines, rubbish heaps, hitching posts, fireplaces, manure heaps and empty hay wagons.

  Crossing the corduroy road was an unsettling experience. The poles of sprite bamboo, laced together to make a road, creaked and flexed beneath the weight of men, horses, oxen and wagons. In places, the bamboo sank below the surface, and Yen Olass had to march ankle-deep in water: for this invasion, junior interpreters did not rate horses.

  When Yen Olass was on one of these water
logged sections of the corduroy road, the army came to a halt. As they waited, the word came back down the line. Up ahead, a cart wheel had broken: there would be a delay. Yen Olass would have had the cart pushed into the swamp so the army could march on: it was ridiculous to delay the invasion while a wagon wheel was fixed. But presumably the carthands were unwilling to trash their vehicle, and there was nobody at hand with sufficient authority to give them the correct orders.

  Yen Olass was not prepared to stand around in the water, even though her boots were by now soaking wet, and could hardly get worse. She pushed her way forward until she could clamber onto a marsh-island which quaked beneath her weight. There she settled herself amongst the harsh swamp grass. Yen Olass had acquired the soldier's knack of making herself at home wherever she happened to find herself. She took off her boots and wrung out her foot bindings. A soldier joined her on the island, which sagged dangerously.

  'No morel' said Yen Olass sharply, 'or we'll sink!’

  From up ahead, she heard the querulous voice of the Princess Quenerain complaining that there was no water. That was typical. For anyone who was really thirsty, there was plenty of swamp water, although admittedly by now it was liberally laced with the mud, spit and piss of a marching army. But besides that, anyone with any sense had acquired a water skin by now, and kept it full. Yen Olass carried such a skin everywhere, tied to her belt – and, in a small pack she carried on her back, she had emergency rations, a blanket and spare woollen clothing. Her spare foot bindings, boot grease, tinder box and various personal items were kept in the inner pockets of her league rider's weather jacket. But then, Yen Olass was used to adapting to necessity, whereas the Princess Quenerain had always been accustomed to the world changing itself to suit her own convenience.