“Would be the first time you ever felt the need to do that,” Arken remarked drily. “Until now you've left that all to us.”
“Don't be stupid,” Sasha told Rael. “You are not warriors, you've shown that already.”
“Any man can be a warrior,” Rael growled, “if he is deprived of something that he loves so dearly as his freedom.”
“If you'd arrived at that conclusion a century or two ago, I might believe you. But this love of freedom you profess, this is an old and shrivelled thing, like an old man's sword arm, withered from lack of use. What you describe is passion. Love for something larger than yourself. This is something you must practise, like swordwork itself. Like courage. You cannot just rediscover courage when it suits you, or honour, any more than you can neglect svaalverd for years and expect it to all come rushing back from memory when you need it.
“You must work at it tirelessly, and with discipline. This is true for great warriors and for great civilisations; even the serrin do this, serrin who believe mostly in peace-they practise it. They debate and philosophise, and they learn arts and study and heal, they know that peace is a difficult and elusive thing that must be pursued relentlessly and with passion. You don't have it. Or perhaps once you did, but now it lies long forgotten.”
“We shall see,” Rael growled. He signalled his companions, and they turned to stride away. Sasha watched them go.
“You must become Queen of Lenayin!” Yasmyn said with fierce satisfaction. “It is your destiny.” Yasmyn, of course, had not understood a word Sasha had said.
“Many are upset to see the Remischtuul fall even though they were not upset merely to see Stamentaast dying,” said Arken. “They did not come out in numbers then, but they may now, with the Nasi-Keth leading. They may not believe that the Steel will kill them, and if there are so many, I fear they may be right.”
“There cannot be an uprising,” said Sasha, with certainty. “We will not have reinforcements from the rest of the Steel for days. We cannot allow it.”
Arken nodded. “What is your order?”
The sun had barely moved in the sky when several hundred Steel and talmaad fell upon the Tol'rhen. Great gatherings of locals, Nasi-Keth, and Stamentaast scattered before the fast thrust of armoured soldiers from the surrounding streets, moving at a full run so as not to give the lookouts more than a moment of advance warning.
Arrow fire came back from across the courtyard, as startled men with bows sought vantage atop steps or from Tol'rhen windows. Most arrows or crossbow bolts cracked off the Steel's massed shields, and did not slow them. Sasha moved in the rear, surrounded by her own company of Steel infantry, eleven strong including herself. She could not see much as they crossed the courtyards, her small shield filling a space between the big ones that protected them from random arrows. It was not as easy as it looked, to move in formation, to make oneself an identical brick in a wall of bricks, and not allow any gap. She was here to command, not to fight, but from behind the wall of shields she could barely see.
In frustration she moved her shield aside enough to see ahead: men were running up the Tol'rhen stairs before the leading line of Steel, others fighting and falling, arrows zipping and clattering about. Around her, men panted harder than she, for running those roads in armour was testing.
The first wave of Steel simply ran over any defenders on the steps and plunged into the Tol'rhen. Now from behind came a mad sprint of talmaad, serrin with bows in hand and swords on their backs racing across the pavings in the Steel's wake. Sasha stopped her squad behind the trees of a courtyard garden, and from that cover sought a view.
Then she saw them-the cavalry, emerging from the courtyard's far side, slipping on the pavings yet blocking the crowd's retreat with their charge. Now most townsmen were running rather than fighting, some huddling for cover, cowering with arms over their heads amidst thrashing hooves and stomping boots. Others fought, and were cut down. Someone was blowing a trumpet, in a vain attempt to muster defenders on the southern side of the courtyard, furthest from the lake.
“There!” Sasha yelled. “Trumpet! I want cavalry on the left! On the left, over here!” The man with the trumpet blew some ear-splitting notes, and repeated, and repeated. Sasha could not see any immediate response-cavalry had their hands full stopping the retreat from the first attack, as had been the initial plan. Cavalry soldiers seemed to be looking for their officers, for confirmation of the trumpet call, only to find their officers busy, or to not find them at all.
Sasha swore. “Go, go! Let's get into them ourselves, the others will follow!” Her men redeployed quickly, herself in the middle, holding her spot in the line. Eleven strong, they made a line abreast, and charged. It was not a mad run like Lenay warriors might make, but a crouched run with small steps, balanced so as not to let the shields bounce around and expose them to arrows. Sasha glimpsed past her shield a force of men running at them rather than standing and waiting.
“Five!” yelled her squad's formation sergeant, and Sasha, warned of this technique, sprinted the last five steps and threw herself into that collision with her shield. She hit someone, felt him stagger back, heard yells and falling bodies as their opponents reeled, caught off guard by the wall of shields that suddenly accelerated into them. Her comrades were moving and striking, jostling her as she tried to control her shield.
She tried an overhead strike, yet now their opponents were coming back, many armed with shields of their own, and an impact sent her reeling back a step.
“Hold!” yelled the man next to her. “Hold and push!” Stab, and a shriek, a man falling bloodily. “Hold and push!” He might have been yelling at her, Sasha thought, but she could not tell. She complied, and an opponent slashed under the shield, she barely slammed it down in time, then a shoulder ram drove her back again…only the soldier beside her anticipated it, and drove his blade through that man's neck.
Something else hit her shield with force enough to jar her arm, and she tried to coordinate a stab with the movements of the man to her right, but he was fast, and the target uncooperative. A spear thrust nearly took her eye out, and a sword edge left a deep gash in her shield rim, and she realised they were being pushed back, eleven against whatever-it-was, and surely now in danger of being outflanked…
And suddenly there were cavalry ploughing through their opponents, striking left and right, and men were scattering. For a moment she thought it was over, until she saw that only a few horses had made the break to assist, and though some men had run, others were circling and coming back, shouting for their comrades to stand firm.
“Circle!” yelled the squad sergeant, and the formation's flanks swung neatly about to make that shape with their shields, as enemies now ran around and at them from behind.
“Fucking stupid!” Sasha announced her displeasure with that, and shrugged the shield off her arm with relief. Free at last, she ran at her opponents on open ground before they could form up. She fake-stepped one, killed him when he guessed wrong, danced out of range of a second's swing, ducked easily inside a spear thrust and ripped him at close range. Uncoordinated attacks came at her, Nasi-Keth now, seeing the chance to claim her outside the shield wall and mistakenly thinking that made an easier task.
There was so much space, after the confines of the formation. She couldn't believe how much, as she danced and tore her way through three in quick succession, then a fourth who had just begun to question the wisdom of being there at all. Some shieldsmen who might have troubled her now backed up in panic, seeing what she'd done, and she faked one into a defensive block that didn't come, took his sword arm instead, then hit another's shield with such force he fell backward, and ran past him as he screamed and begged for mercy. But the others were running now, as more Steel arrived at a run, and the enemies who had encircled her squad died upon those shields, or ran away. A newly arrived formation ploughed into the main body of gathering militia ahead, and so began the next front.
Sasha's squad again encircl
ed her, one now limping, as defenders ahead resisted with commendable stubbornness, surrounding themselves with shields, arranging spears behind those to stab at the advancing Steel, and at the repeated thrusts of cavalry. The cavalry weren't much use against that tight block of defenders, Sasha saw-their horses were slipping on the pavings, and riding into those spears at speed was suicide. Infantry had better success, fighting inside the spears and coming shoulder-to-shoulder, as the Steel liked best. But still the defenders resisted, backed against the mouth of a road, blocking it like a cork in the neck of a bottle.
Sasha looked about from within her phalanx, seeing the rest of the courtyard apparently under control and wondering who she could redeploy to assist here…and then there were arrows flying out from the Tol'rhen, arcing over her head, and landing amidst the defenders. That rain of arrows increased, no inconsiderable range across the width of the courtyard, but the talmaad were judging it to their usual perfection. Unlike the Steel, these defenders did not have enough shields, nor enough aptitude in their use, to cover themselves entirely. Men began falling with terrible regularity as their formation fell apart like a castle of sand in a rainstorm. The remainder dissolved and ran.
The battle was over, but the clean up went on all day. The surrounds of the Tol'rhen, it became clear, were havens of resistance and friendship to the Remischtuul. The rulers of Ilduur had purchased the Nasi-Keth's support with offers of power and money, and the neighbourhood was as wealthy as any Sasha had seen in Andal. Steel now went house to house, breaking down doors, asking after known men and some women, killing any who resisted with force.
Sasha found it far more awful than the battle. She wanted to retreat to some safe place and hear of events by messenger, as some commanders would. But she forced herself to walk the streets past sobbing women and angry, frightened men, past groups of wailing children ushered away for safekeeping while their parents and elder siblings were questioned, often roughly. She saw men beaten, who gave the Steel harsh words. She saw rooms and entire houses ransacked in search of incriminating evidence and hiding places. She saw one young man draw a blade in fury at a soldier who shoved his mother, only to be impaled by another, and die slowly in his screaming mother's arms.
She recalled the serrin youngster whom she'd seen killed the same way on the Night of the Knives, as it was now called, and how she'd wanted to kill the man who did it, and the one who'd given him orders. Now, that last was her.
Weapons were confiscated-stockpiles of swords and armour uncovered in attics, crossbows bundled in chests beneath piles of winter cloaks. Certainly she had averted an uprising here, of major proportions. She walked the streets from one site to another, being seen by the soldiers, and seeing them in turn. As she stood in one room, observing a new cache, she overheard one of her guards in the corridor outside, talking with another soldier.
“Six, she got. Threw off her shield and charged them down, six in as many heartbeats. Most Nasi-Keth, some of them damn good too. Never seen its like-I wondered if she was as good as the tales, turns out she's better.”
Sasha paused before that man on the way out. “What do you think of my shieldwork?” she asked him with a wry smile. It was the same man who had been guarding her right side in the battle.
“Could improve, ma'am, with practice,” he said diplomatically.
“Fucking stinks,” Sasha summarised, and all the men in the corridor laughed. “If I never have to fight in a shield line ever again, it will be too soon. You stick with yours, and I'll stick with mine.”
“If we could get the Regent's army out of formation and with no shields,” the soldier replied, “I reckon you could end this war on your own.”
Sasha's smile vanished as soon as she left the corridor. About her was the misery of the worst thing that she had ever done. Yet she had secured control, and made certain that the rest of the Steel would not arrive in Andal to find the city risen in revolt against her. That would look awful; those men would not be confident to follow her, finding that she did not have this situation in hand.
These men who had fought with her would mingle with the new arrivals, and tell them what kind of warrior and commander this strange girl from Lenayin was. They would tell them of comfortable victories against difficult odds, of battles that should have been painful being unexpectedly painless. And they would tell of those six kills outside the Tol'rhen to prevent her squad from being surrounded, and likely that number would rise with each telling.
She would bring the Ilduuri Steel to Jahnd, and not beneath some uncooperative commander who wished to do things his own way, but under her command, and hers alone. These men would follow her now. Many of them to their deaths, even if they won. And all of them to their deaths if they lost.
NINETEEN
The lands of eastern Ilduur reminded Sasha of the eastern foothills of her native Valhanan, save that where Valhanan descended in great ridges and valleys into Torovan, Ilduur emerged through even more rugged lands into Saalshen itself. These were sometimes called the buffer lands, the only place where serrin and human lands met without the divide of the Ipshaal River. For centuries, even before the rise and fall of King Leyvaan, humans and serrin in this wild place had intermingled, intermarried, and traded, with no apparent discord. The people here called themselves the saaren saadi, which she gathered meant in Ilduuri the “children of heaven,” and in several days of marching through these lands, she had come to see why.
The foothills were steep, and the road wound along ridgelines and often precariously sheer faces. Everything was green, and even now in late summer it rained every day, sometimes heavily. Little villages perched on grand hilltops, with views of the lands about them that made even a proud Lenay catch her breath. Drifting clouds and mist made these places seem to be floating amongst the clouds, and many hillsides were cultivated into terraces the like of which Sasha had never seen before. They grew rice, she was told, and other crops that required much water. When the sun struck an ascending stack of flooded rice terraces at just the correct angle, the whole hillside would gleam like silver.
The saaren saadi welcomed the Ilduuri Steel with cheers, food, and wine. Camping was difficult, the seventeen thousand-strong army stretched along an entire ridgeline exposed to the elements, but there was simply no flat ground upon which to muster a camp. The men did not seem to mind-a good three-quarters were native to these lands, and many passed through home villages, and embraced family along the way. Sasha was not surprised to see serrin here, and many of the Ilduuri humans seemed more than passingly serrin, a hint of exotic colour to the eyes and hair, a pronounced shape to the cheeks.
She was further intrigued to see temples and pagodas atop many peaks, and an abundance of flags above the terraces that she was told were partly for worship, and partly to keep the birds off. This was a native religion named Taanist, after the man who had begun it many centuries before. Some said he was serrin, others said human, and others still that he was of mixed race. Yet his teachings were of cycles and patterns, and seemed to Sasha like the attempt of a human to structure serrin philosophies into forms more easily comprehensible to humans. Emphasised were peace and meditation, and the great cycles of life. Sasha thought that if only it were not such a long journey, Lenay Goeren-yai would come here on pilgrimage, and learn of these people. In all her time away from home, she had never been in any place that reminded her so much of Lenayin, yet with such striking foreignness.
As soon as the high foothills ended, Saalshen truly began. Through thick woods and rolling hills the Ilduuri Steel marched, and serrin came out to watch, offer food and drink, and walk alongside whilst asking questions. Clearly they did not fear the Ilduuri Steel, and had received warning of its arrival. Yet their welcome was, to Sasha, vaguely disappointing, compared to the cheers and enthusiasm of the saaren saadi of the higher mountains. On the other hand, she reminded herself, serrin so rarely went for that kind of enthusiasm in anything. They were pleasant, yet measured, in most things. And here
, seeing a grand army of human warriors in steel armour, marching through their peaceful lands, they were perhaps understandably wary.
The approach to Jahnd became mountainous once more, as the Eastern Reach extended further into Saalshen from Ilduur. It was a range of low mountains, like a wall before them, climbed in a day through a single pass.
Finally, twelve days after leaving Andal, the way ahead dropped into low hills and the most thickly cultivated land they'd seen so far. Before them, on the right side of the valley mouth, a city climbed the hills to sprawl across that promontory of land. Beyond it more hills rose steeply. Sasha smiled faintly as she rode, gazing intently at every rise of rock and cluster of trees, trying to get a sense of the land. Jahnd was built on a hill slope overlooking a river, in a valley surrounded by hills. So far, it looked very promising for a defence. How promising, she'd have to wait until she arrived to determine.
In the valley, crowds had gathered to cheer their arrival. These were mostly human, local villagers spread through the small fields between the trees, a few waving flags that Sasha did not recognise, but guessed represented the city of Jahnd. As the valley grew wider, they passed more farmhouses, then small villages, then large ones. They crossed the river at a stone bridge through a pretty town, and hundreds of townsfolk hung out of the windows, festooned with flags, and showered them with flowers.
Sasha saw many people pointing, at her in particular. She rode alongside a collection of the highest-ranking Ilduuris-a gesture she thought important, as she did not wish to appear the aloof foreign conqueror. Behind her in the vanguard rode Rhillian and Aisha with some other officers, the rest riding at the head of their particular formations back in the column. A few of the talmaad rode along. Many others remained in Ilduur to help escaping serrin or half-castes from those lands. The serrin had not been keen to follow Rhillian, and Sasha wondered how she'd be received amongst her people in Jahnd.
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