Demon King (52 page)

Here is the reality: a seething mass three leagues wide if the countryside was flat enough to permit our locust march to spread out, trailing all the way back to the previous day’s encampment. There were more than just the almost two million men we had under arms. There were the sutlers who peddled their wares from a pack or a wagon. There were the women, some Numantian from every province — and how they reached Penda I’ll never know — and more Maisirians that had joined us along the march.

There were the prisoners, shambling along, barely guarded. Sometimes one or a dozen would break away and run for a concealing ravine. Sometimes we let them go, sometimes archers or lancers would hunt them down, more to relieve the boredom of the march than out of any fear they’d rejoin their army.

We had horses, oxen, half-tame camels from the Rovan deserts, and who knows what. But most of us traveled on foot. Wagons were everything from the emperor’s palatial coach, to ambulances, to supply wagons, to mobile bakeries, to looted carriages, farm carts, and traps.

Under the Rule of Ten the Numantian Army on the march had looked like a city being evacuated. Petre and I had stripped matters to one rule: Everyone who marches fights. No exceptions. But that was too hard, too strenuous, and certainly an officer, especially a ranking one, deserved a few privileges, did he not? So first it was a packhorse, then a wagon, then a small train, and now a rolling madhouse of cooks, bearers, servants, and so on and so forth. I heard that the officers of one regiment had ten horses supposedly to carry their iron rations but which actually transported the regimental wines. I know for a fact — I didn’t discover it until much later — that one general had fifty camels with gear for himself and his aides. Needless to say, none of these luxuries were offered to the rankers.

Only one thing was left of the reformation: We still moved hard, and we still moved fast. We started at dawn, stopped for five minutes every hour, and took a full day’s rest every fifth day. When we halted, an hour before dusk, we took ten-foot-long stakes that we carried with us, each six inches or so in diameter and sharpened on both ends, and built stockades against attack.

We covered four leagues every marching day, and gave no allowances for the occasional ambush. Those who straggled could catch up when we made camp. But all too often they didn’t. Some were taken by the Negaret and partisans harrying our flanks, but more became deserters, hovering on the outskirts, living by their wits and knives. It was these who generally committed the most terrible depredations against the Maisirian peasants. Generally.

Slowly, but very steadily, as steadily as the Wheel turns, we marched south through Maisir.

The Time of Births ended and we were in the Time of Heat. This was hard, dry heat, the heat of the desert, baking down. Dust boiled and hung in the thick, still air. It caked our horses, our bodies, our souls. Those of us in the vanguard weren’t daring so much as we preferred the occasional arrow to choking in the dry, heavy, dust-laden air, seeing nothing but the arse of the man in front of us.

When I rode beyond the main column, I’d see a horseman or six here and there, watching, waiting for a chance to swoop in and cut a throat or rob a wagon. Chase them, and they’d retreat. Chase them too far, and you’d run into an ambush.

It was the Time of Heat, but the weather was strange. It would be bakingly dry, then clouds would flash across the sky and icy rain drench us. Moments later, the rain would stop, and we’d slog through mud until it dried to bricklike hardness, and the dust would float up once more.

The Negaret would mass half a hundred men, and the cavalry would be ready for a counterattack. But the attack would never come. Eventually the cavalry would stand down, only to be shouted to horse the next time a Negaret was seen. Day after day of this, and our horses began dying, drained from never being unsaddled.

Other horses also died because all we could find for fodder was the greenest of rye and harsh grasses. A staple of our diet became roasted or boiled horseflesh. The flankers began looking for either of two herbs — a garliclike root and a low, broad-leafed bush the leaves of which were like searing pepper. Both served to disguise how rotten the meat of our dinner stew was. On our fifth day stops, the army’s bakers labored mightily, but seldom did fresh loaves get completely distributed, especially to the fighting soldiers at the front and flanks of the formation, although imperial headquarters had its share and more.

The sky, impossibly blue or gray, the waiting enemy, and always the
suebi
, stretched on, beyond the eye’s reach, beyond the mind’s recall. Men became solitary, melancholic, walked beyond the picket fires, and someone would hear a strangled cry. His mates would run out, and find a dying or dead soldier, sword or spear stained with his own blood. As I’d seen before, it was generally the young men who died so readily. Most of the recruits hit this point of despair, but if they had the strength to push through it, or if their squad-mates kept close watch, they’d be on the way to becoming warriors.

As for our sick and wounded, those who could still stumble marched on with their units. No one wanted to go to the ambulance train. Soldiers felt their only chance was staying with their mates. We sent heavily guarded convoys to the rear when we could, and established garrisons in the villages. Too often these tiny garrisons, manned by the sick and halt, would be attacked by partisans who gave no man an easy death.

• • •

One day, the emperor was in a cold rage, and no one, including Domina Othman, could determine why. I eventually found out. A coded, sealed message had come by courier from Nicias. Its contents couldn’t be trusted to the heliograph, but had to be hand-carried.

I only learned of them, and the reply, because I used Tenedos’s code clerk for my own secret commands, and he was like many who deal in cryptic matters: He couldn’t bear not telling at least one person the terrible secrets he held. Since I told no one anything, he frequently confided in me.

The message had come from Kutulu. He notified the emperor that dissidents were newly active in and around the capital, with two former members of the Rule of Ten, Scopas and Barthou, for their leaders. They hadn’t considered active rebellion yet, but were talking about whether the emperor needed a supreme council to take some of the burden of ruling from his shoulders, particularly regarding “commonplace matters” of state. They weren’t a threat thus far, but Kutulu was keeping everyone involved under surveillance.

The emperor, I was told, flew into a grand rage and dispatched a courier within the hour back to Nicias. Kutulu had been warned before to stop coming up with nonexistent conspiracies and worrying about senile dribblers of the past, and to concentrate on the real threat — the Tovieti. Since he’d disobeyed this order again and again, he was relieved from his duties in Nicias. He was ordered to one of the farthest provinces — possibly Chalt, possibly Bala Hissar, my man couldn’t remember exactly — in disgrace.

So while the emperor’s finest were dying in Maisir, another of his best was destroyed for doing no more than his duty. But by doing so, Kutulu might have saved his own life. I don’t know for sure, for I’ve heard nothing more of the man.

• • •

Even the tribunes’ morale was affected by the day-after-day shambling across the
suebi.
I was surprised to hear Herne, the most politically careful of all the tribunes, express admiration for how skillfully the Maisirians were managing their retreat, almost as if it were a planned campaign. The emperor raged at him, ending with a snarl that if Herne was so impressed by the Maisirians, perhaps he should consider joining them.

Then he stormed out of the mess tent. Herne looked after him quizzically and murmured, “I can only hope our own retreat shall be as well handled.”

Fire-breathing Myrus Le Balafre overheard his comment, and instead of losing his own temper about the tribune’s defeatism, made a wry face and said nothing.

We finally left the loathed
suebi
for farmland. We were able to find livestock for our dinners, rail fences to tear apart for cooking fires, and, at least for the officers, houses to commandeer for shelter. But with more peasants to despoil, there were more partisans in our wake, and so casualties began mounting.

We paused long enough to cut hay and let it dry for animal fodder, but an army can never halt for long. Within two days, we would consume all provender within two leagues, a day later within four, and so forth, so we were always at the center of a widening circle of desolation.

The sudden rainstorms never ceased, and we wondered if the Maisirians had mastered weather magic, and why our own wizards couldn’t find counterspells.

Then the Maisirians found a new weapon: laying waste to their land as they retreated. Even the green fields of grass were fired, and this could only be done by magic.

Every village would be aflame or have been reduced to blackened waste. But this wasn’t done by magic, but by fierce, determined men and women, who so loved their land they’d destroy it rather than see it held by another. The Maisirians killed what livestock they couldn’t flee with, and spoiled the carcasses with the animals’ own shit. They caved in the wells, except for a few, and those they poisoned. The Chare Brethren were able to counteract some of those poisons, but few of us trusted their magic, so we drank from streams and ponds.

I left the emperor’s tent after a briefing late one night, and it was like day. Ahead of us was blood-red cloud, and flames flared around it. Light shot up in pillars on our flanks, reaching toward the sky, as if the rising lights were columns, supporting the vaults of the heavens.

The soldiers began to dread the Maisirians. They were never sure if the enemy would fight or run, surrender and vow eternal servitude, or smile and cut your throat from the rear. Soldiers must respect and be wary of their foe, or else risk being destroyed through overconfidence. But they must never dread them.

There was also growing respect, for the Maisirians could march on nothing but a handful of grain and a splash of muddy water for day after day, and still fight. When they did fight, they could be incredibly brave. There was the true story of the soldier who’d been badly wounded when his outpost fell to our cavalry. He lay motionless in his own gore for two days, pretending death, never moving, until a supply unit set up its tents around him. He slaughtered fifteen men and women before being cut down.

There were impossible tales of horror: partisan women pretending lust with sharp steel hidden in their bodies; peasants who, when a soldier’s back was turned, changed into wolves or wild oxen.

In revenge, we wreaked horrors on the Maisirians as we went. These weren’t legend, however, but too awfully real.

• • •

The farmland’s end was demarcated by the Anker River. When I’d crossed it, to the west, it had been broad and fairly shallow, with many islets. Here it was deep enough to be navigable, and there was a small port named Irthing. It was about half the size of Penda, and was unburned. I went forward, determined to be with the first elements to enter the town. It seemed deserted, although I could see smoke wisping from chimneys. A messenger came from the emperor saying to be most cautious, for he sensed jeopardy.

I rode with Domina Bikaner, at the head of the Seventeenth Ureyan Lancers, augmented by my Red Lancers. Supporting us was the Twentieth Heavy Cavalry. I planned to strike through the city to the river, take the bridges, which were movable wooden floating structures, and then secure the far shore.

The town was narrow, twisting, cobbled streets with close-leaning buildings and small squares, ideal for ambush — but I didn’t plan to be trapped. We rode into the city at the trot, and funneled, in separate columns, through the winding streets. In my column were the Red Lancers, Domina Bikaner and his command group, plus Sambar and Tiger Troops of the Seventeenth.

I wore a breastplate with an armored right sleeve, an open helm, a small circular shield on my left forearm, the dagger Yonge had given me long ago that had saved my life on many occasions, and a plain double-edged straight sword, plus heavy leather boots with kneepieces. I carried no device, for the only one I wanted was Alegria’s — and I had no symbol of hers but memories.

We were about to cross an empty square when smoke boiled from the road as if the cobbles were lying over a fire. Men shouted, horses whinnied, and no one could see his mate, then the smoke vanished. The square’s far side was blocked with a thick wooden barricade, and the roofs were alive with men and women. Some had bows and spears; others hurled down paving stones. We were trapped as surely as the Tovieti had trapped and obliterated a troop of the Golden Helms during the rising in Nicias.

I seized the bow that was tied to my saddle, hastily strung it, and pulled a shaft from the quiver behind my left leg. An arrow thudded past me and found a target. I spotted the bowman on the roof, and put my arrow into his chest. Arrows and spears clashed against cobbles or struck home, and men and horses screamed. I sent another Maisirian toppling to his death, and then doors crashed open and men charged out, armed with long knives and bills. A Maisirian would fix his hook in a horseman’s clothes, yank him from his mount, and then a knifeman would finish him.

I hung my bow across my cantle and drew my sword. I slashed a reaching bill in half, and with my return stroke took half its owner’s skull away. A knifeman ran at me, trying to gut Brigstock; I kicked his face in and my mount trampled him as he fell. Someone shouted “Tribune,” I automatically ducked, and an arrow hissed past. A second later another shaft struck someone’s armor, bounced free, and fixed itself half an inch deep in my arm. I barely felt the pain; I seized the arrow and pulled it free, ignoring the blood.

More and more Maisirians poured into the square, and I wondered where the hells they were coming from. Then, by purest chance, I saw something. A mislaunched spear flew toward the barricade. But instead of burying itself in the wood, the spear sailed through it. I shouted, “Charge the barricade,” an absurd command, but the Lancers, trained to obey any order, kicked their horses forward.