The Warrior King: Book Three of the Seer King Trilogy (17 page)

Another officer came, Thanet, who’d been a young legate with my own formation, the Seventeenth Ureyan Lancers. He had been invalided home at the beginning of the war with a lung disorder and still broke into uncontrollable coughing from time to time.

Again, I asked the question — why do you wish to join my army?

“Because,” he said evenly, “I’m three generations a warrior and think the emperor misled us into Maisir and, given the chance, would destroy us … and Numantia … once again.” He half smiled. “I’ll say this, but you’ll think I’m browning you off, sir, even though it’s the truth. I’d rather serve under a Seventeenth veteran than Isa himself.”

Him, too, I made domina and set him to forming a new regiment of cavalry I privately vowed to rename after the Seventeenth if they proved worthy of the honor.

These, as I said, weren’t the greatest of my problems.

Bigger problems were the ones that don’t appear in the romances. It’s possible to find a man who’s a good horse trader. But what about one who can buy remounts for an army without either getting stung or deciding to tuck away a few gold coins for himself here and there? The same caution must apply to paymasters and quartermasters.

Or uniforms. I needed half as many seamstresses as I did soldiers, at least for a while. The solution here was to put anyone in Amur who could use a needle to work, and that included quite a few old men and children. For the moment, my army’s uniform would be a simple sleeveless vest in green. As time went on, I’d try to provide complete garb, but the vest might help a man distinguish friend from foe in the frenzy of battle.

Or something that appears simpler — many men, more than are willing to admit it, are adequate cooks. From that group, find me one who can decide the victuals for half a million men and train others to cook them.

I’d wanted to set up central messes, which is far more efficient then the old system of squads messing by themselves, and also avoids a great plague I’d foolishly suggested to Tenedos — that the army become its own quartermaster and resupply itself on the march.

In Maisir, that’d meant every man was a looter, and each time he stole something from a Maisirian peasant, he made an enemy for Numantia out of someone who might’ve stayed guardedly neutral or even become an ally. Also, if all soldiers, not just officers, were given their meals, hopefully warm, morning and night, they’d be stronger and fight harder — and spend more time soldiering instead of scrounging.

But this wasn’t possible, at least not yet, and so the old system continued.

We would be fighting in our own land, and there’d be inevitable thefts and crimes against our people. But I swore there’d be as few as possible, and those would be severely dealt with. Therefore, I sought me a bastard. I could have used Kutulu, but his ability to pry out the enemy’s secrets was too important to waste him becoming a uniformed warder once again.

I finally found a man who’d been one of the magistrates dealing with the Tovieti after the rising was quelled, a harsh man who valued only the law and held no gods or men above it. He could oversee my provosts and the resulting courts-martial, and I could temper his austerity with mercy if I chose. In the meantime, the troops would curse him, and not me.

The largest problem was one I thankfully didn’t have to worry about, because there was little I could do, and that was money. To put it simply — we had none. Or almost none. We paid our soldiers little, and that was in scrip we printed on the Paestum broadsheet’s press, redeemable for gold within a year. If, a year from now, we were still fighting and hadn’t been able to take any cities and loot their treasuries … well, if we were still in the field a year from now, that meant Tenedos had won, and we’d be dead.

The cavalry we sent out foraging also paid in scrip, and the farmers grumbled, as they have since the beginning of time. My response was short: sacrifice for your country and take the paper money, or we’ll just requisition what we need.

Little by little and day by day, the army grew, amid dusty, square-bashing, shrieking warrants, galloping officers.

• • •

Sinait and Kutulu came up with a clever device. She ensorcelled a scrap of polished copper that’d been immersed in the mercury pool of a Seeing Bowl; then a spy slipped through the lines and hid it for two days outside Tenedos’s headquarters.

The copper had been spell-commanded to reflect only one man.

Sinait swore there was no possible danger in using the copper after it’d been retrieved, but I was hesitant.

Sinait said the words, and the bowl came to life, and I jerked, seeing Tenedos walk toward me, deep in conversation with a robed man. I frowned, then remembered the other. It was Gojjam, a sometime member of the Chare Brethren, then the emperor’s direct agent.

“I’ve found a man,” Kutulu said, “who has the talent of reading lips, and he says Tenedos is instructing Gojjam on particulars about his new Corps of Wizards, evidently something like the Chare Brethren or the Maisirian War Magicians, which Gojjam is to head.

“I have the conversation transcribed, if you wish to see it, but I can assure you there’s nothing you need notice, save the existence of this corps.”

I nodded absently, paying less attention to his words than in looking at Tenedos. Gods, but he’d aged. His hair was beginning to thin, and he looked soft, as if he hadn’t taken exercise in a while. Once he looked up, gaze crossing the copper, and I flinched. His eyes, too, had changed. Always hypnotic, now they had the glare of a driven soul, completely fixed on a single purpose, and that purpose beyond the ken of humans.

If anything, he was more frightening than before.

I asked if there was more to be gleaned from the copper and was told there wasn’t. I ordered it destroyed, for I wanted nothing that’d been in contact with Tenedos to be close to me or my officers.

I returned to my quarters, very thoughtful, considering how the yeas had worn at the demon king.

Then I caught sight of myself in a pier glass and smiled wryly. I, too, looked far older than my years, older and a trace haggard. But I refused to admit the hard look in my eyes was anything other than determination and fatigue.

• • •

A number of already-skilled craftsmen came to the army, no doubt wanting to be given sword and buckler. But they were too valuable for that, which I’m sure irked some of them, even though becoming such a specialist vastly increased the chances of surviving the war.

One such was an armorer, and I took shameful advantage of my rank and gave him Yonge’s tarnished and worn dagger and asked him, as a favor, what could be done with it.

A few days later, the man returned. The knife was as new, even its varied woods replaced where chipped, its silver workings like mirrors, its blade gleaming, sharper than when it’d been first given me. Along with it came a tooled leather sheath, whose details matched the engravings on the knife’s blade.

I tried to pay him, but he refused, so I rewarded him in a the traditional way the army has, without his ever knowing it, by making sure his superior promoted him as rapidly as possible.

In idle moments, I got into the habit of taking the knife out and polishing it with a bit of leather, thinking about the work it had done in the past.

And dreaming of the work it’d be given in the future.

• • •

Half a time later, I was on a square, watching Domina Thanet attempt to teach a line of budding cavalrymen walk-trot-charge, trying to be complimentary at how far these peasants and merchants’ sons had come, since none fell off the plowhorses, carriage pullers, and merchants’ pets we were trying to convince ourselves would be war mounts. Seer Sinait rode up, brown robes rucked in her belt, excitement coloring her face.

I handed her my waterbag and told her to drink. It was hot out, and heat stroke wouldn’t significantly improve her ability to communicate. She drank deeply, lowered the bag, and stared at the horsemen.

“Something very odd just happened,” she said. “We’ve been approached by the Grand Councilors.”

“Scopas and Barthou are
here
? In Paestum?” I was equally incredulous.

“No,” she said. “They’re not that brave, nor that confident we’d honor a flag of truce, and honestly I don’t know if we should if we got a chance to grab those scoundrels. They sent an emissary, a Rast Timgad. I note they’re using Maisirian ranks still, although he doesn’t look like much of a soldier.” She was babbling a bit as her mind worked at the problem of what this meant.

“
That ass
— ” I caught myself in time.

“That asshole, indeed,” Sinait finished. “Although I’ve not had the displeasure of meeting him, I know full well what a lickspittle he is from Kutulu. He’s also accompanied by the new head of the Peace Guardians, a dangerous-looking man named Trerice, who says his rank is supreme
jedaz.
”

Trerice had been Herne’s subordinate, and supreme
jedaz
was the Maisirian rank Barthou had offered me.

Sinait managed a trace of a smile.

“They want to meet with the head of the rebels. Tsk. I never realized we forgot to appoint somebody to the position.”

“Kutulu declined to see them,” she went on. “He said he works better in the shadows. So would you care to be our leader?”

“No, but I’d like to see what they’re offering, if you accompany me,” I said.

“I would be honored.”

“Grant a minute for me to give my blessings to these sweaty sorts,” I said, “and we’ll see what these Grand Councilors want.”

• • •

What they wanted, of course, was to see what we wanted. Timgad was as corpse-looking as I’d remembered, ridiculous in uniform.

Trerice was every bit as dangerous as Sinait suggested. He wore the gray-red of the Peace Guardians, but where the late Herne had added lace and jewels to meet his ideas of how a properly dressed commander should appear, Trerice wore no glitter except for his rank sash. He wore both his sword and curving long dagger on the same side, and both sheaths were well-used plain leather. His face was hard, bones close to the surface, and his reddish beard was close-trimmed. His eyes were cold and held mine.

He stayed behind Timgad and kept silent while the Councilors’ emissary sounded us out.

“You truly haven’t chosen anyone to take the throne once you’ve destroyed Tenedos?” Timgad said in disbelief.

“First of all,” Sinait said briskly, “whoever has said that anyone here has any interest in ruling Numantia?”

“How could you not?” Timgad stammered, then recovered. “This … perhaps this news simplifies my mission.”

“In what way?” I asked.

“Well,” he said, his voice growing cozy, “if no one with your rebels has an interest in ruling, it would seem to be logical we should combine forces.”

“In other words, we do your scut work,” I said, “and Barthou and Scopas rule on? Or, rather, they continue to rule at the pleasure of King Bairan.”

“Temporarily, yes, although the noble mission of bringing order to our country is hardly something I would describe as scut work. And I am safe in adding that the present arrangements with Maisir will not last forever.”

“Let me give you a direct answer,” I said, letting my voice rise, although I felt no real anger — these idiots were behaving in character. “Absolutely no! I won’t allow a single soldier of mine to sacrifice his life for a regime as morally empty as yours or for roundheel traitors like Barthou and Scopas.”

“But,” Timgad said, trying to keep calm, “we
must
have plans to preserve order, Numantian society, after Tenedos is destroyed.”

“That won’t be done quite as easily as you seem to think,” I said. “I seem to recall a fable about a man who sold the skin of a lion before he hunted him, and the beast was the victor that day. As I said, once the present danger is taken care of, then we’ll worry about what comes next.”

Timgad was about to wallow further into his morass, but Trerice held up a hand.

“Very well,” he said smoothly. “But is there any reason we can’t ally ourselves, the legitimate armed forces of Numantia, with your soldiers, such as they are?”

I wanted that as much as I wanted a second navel, but the inexorable numbers kept floating through my mind: Tenedos had at least a million men, I had perhaps 600,000 now. The Peace Guardians would add another 750,000, enough to give us advantage.

“Such as they are?” I parried. “I’d rather have my honest peasants, who I know will stand and fight, than those treasonous thugs you command.”

“We can manage without the insults,” Trerice hissed.

“Yes,” I agreed. “We can. I withdraw what I said. How would you plan to dispose these forces?”

“The most logical,” he said, “would be to use your men to fill in my blank files — ”

“No,” I said. “My army … our army … will fight as coherent units, under their own leaders. That is not a debatable issue.”

Timgad began to say something, but Trerice glanced at him, and he was silent.

“What about command?” Trerice asked. “My Peace Guardians will hardly be willing to serve under whoever you’ve made into officers. We do have, as you must know, legitimate, trained leaders.”

“As requested, I’m refraining from giving my opinion of most of the ones I remember,” I said. “However, let me make a suggestion: Bring your forces south toward Paestum, keeping on the west bank of the Latane. I’ll hold a line here against the river.”

“What advantage is there in that?”

Trerice might be dangerous, but he was not a strategician.

“Because Tenedos must destroy me … destroy my army … before he can move on Nicias,” I said patiently. “He will not, cannot, allow a threat in being to exist behind his lines. Besides, you boast your men are well led and well trained, so it’s more logical for them to move rather than me, since they’ll be able to keep proper formations and assemble for combat more readily than my regiments.”

Trerice hesitated, and I wondered how well trained his Peace Guardians really were.

“So Tenedos moves — from, where is he now, still in Bala Hissar? — against your lines,” Trerice thought aloud. “If we can conceal ourselves during the approach, that would make it an easy matter for us to attack his flanks once he closes with you.”