Unholy War (31 page)

13

The Rimoni Empire: Military Organisation

From a low rise, Ramon watched the lines of men and wagons as they snaked through the shallow valley below. They were making slow progress – what had from a distance looked like a dead flat plain turned out to be a rubble-strewn nightmare of wheel-breaking holes and ruts. Even on the poor road running through it they were making barely ten miles a day. That wasn’t enough. A Keshi skiff had been seen by one of the scouts, searching the valley to the west of them; it wouldn’t be long before enemy cavalry showed up. The Efratis River was still at least a week’s journey to the south.

About him were the twenty men of his new cohort. They’d been sticking close to him, though they were all on foot and he was mounted. The terrain made keeping up with him pretty easy. He’d offered them horses if they could get some, but they’d declined. ‘Cavalry are soft bastards,’ they all responded. He suspected they thought the same of magi.

He waved a hand at the tall, deeply tanned officer, Pilus Lukaz. He was Vereloni, from one of the towns lining the Imperial Road; his people were kin to the Rimoni and Silacian, with similarly dark skin and hair. Fourteen years ago Lukaz had run away and joined the legions marching past, en route for the Second Crusade. Now he was a Pilus, the leader of a twenty-man cohort. Lukaz was tall and athletic, with a natural air of command. Ramon was beginning to like him a lot.

He swung down off Lu and slapped the horse’s rump, sending her trotting off seeking forage. Food for the horses was only one of a thousand logistical problems they were having. ‘How are the men, Pilus Lukaz?’

Lukaz chewed over his reply. ‘They are unsettled, sir. Defeat was an unknown to us, and we appear to be fleeing deeper into enemy territory, are we not?’ His deadpan tone never changed, whatever he was discussing.

‘I prefer to think of it as taking the long way home,’ Ramon replied easily. ‘Tell me about your cohort, Pilus.’

Lukaz eyed him cautiously. ‘What would you like to know, sir?’

‘Let’s start with how you array in combat, so I can understand how we will be able to work together.’

Lukaz took his time to reply; there was never anything hasty about him, nothing unconsidered, though he wasn’t even thirty yet. It was part of what made him a leader, Ramon decided, and something he himself might do well to emulate.

‘Well, sir, when we face the enemy, the strongest and most solid go to the front.’ He pointed to a clump of big Rondians. ‘Serjant Manius, with Dolmin, Ferdi, Trefeld.’ He then jabbed a thumb at a pair of blond Hollenians. ‘And Hedman and Gannoval. They anchor us, use their bulk to keep us solid. Once you start going backwards, you’re rukked.’

‘So six in front.’

‘Then another six behind them,’ he went on, ‘smaller men, but reliable. It was the Rimoni who worked out that a man can fight for only a few minutes at a time before he needs a breather. The second rank rotate with the front line as frequently as they can.’ The second-rank men were also clustered together, around a big, genial-looking man with somewhat swarthy features. ‘That’s Serjant Vidran: he keeps them together: the rest of his line are Bowe, Ilwyn and Holdyne, Gal Herde and his brother Jan.’

‘This Vidran looks big enough to be a front-ranker?’

‘Aye, but he’s a little too fond of living – he thinks too much.’ Lukaz clicked his tongue. ‘The front-rankers take the brunt of the fighting, sir, and too much thinking isn’t a good thing. You just shove and stab and rely on the man behind you to pull you out before you run out of steam. But Vid’s smart; he knows exactly when to switch the front and second ranks, so he makes that call, mostly. He’s best exactly where he is.’

‘And the rest?’

‘Eight others, sir: Me and Baden with the standard, then six flankmen, three on either side. The flankmen have to be smarter, because when the enemy can’t break your middle, they’ll try and get round you. The flankmen are our best swordsmen, but they’re usually lighter and faster, not the sort to anchor a line. They’ll look to flank the enemy if we’re going forward, or keep us from being flanked if we’re defending. They’ve got to be good at reading the fight, and reacting.’ He pointed out the third cluster of men. ‘They tend to stick together too, but they’re more rivals than mates. We’ve got Ollyd, Neubeau and Tolomon on the right, Harmon, Briggan and Kent on the left. Stroppy types, mostly, think they know everything.’

‘They give you trouble?’

Lukaz looked a little uncomfortable. ‘They’re all good men, sir.’

‘You’ve got them well-organised: like pieces on a tabula board, all positioned to best advantage,’ Ramon commented.

‘You have to know what you’re working with, sir. The old pilus taught me that. Armies are big, but they’re made up of men: you put them where they understand their role and they’ll do it, most times at least.’

‘I’d understood the Crusades didn’t involve much fighting?’

‘The magi might think that, sir, but with only fifteen magi to a legion, there are a lot of places where we rankers have to act alone, usually against a Hel of a lot more Noories than us. Especially on garrison duty. When a legion gets left to garrison a town, the magi either ask for transfers or down tools and go drinking. They tend to leave the actual soldiering to us.’ He coughed a little self-consciously. ‘No disrespect meant, sir.’

‘None taken. I’m not like that, Pilus.’

‘We’ve noticed, sir. Right from the start, you took an interest – the men like that.’

‘What did you make of Shaliyah?’

Lukaz paused again, considering his words, then said frankly, ‘You magi let us down. Why did you not see the storm coming?’

‘A storm like that takes days to create, and considerable maintenance to hold it together, and you’re right: energy like that should have been detected. But if you know where and when it must strike, you could prepare it out of our “gnostic hearing”.’

‘So the sultan really did know we were coming?’

‘To the day, and for at least a month, I’d say.’

Lukaz blinked at that, then returned to his subject. ‘Also sir, when the fighting started and the enemy magi appeared, all ours went haring off, looking to duel them, leaving the rankers unprotected. If they’d concentrated on protecting us instead, we could have held the line and backed out of the path of the storm.’

That was pretty much what Ramon had been thinking. ‘How should rankers and magi fight together, in your view?’

Lukaz took a while to answer, but Ramon waited patiently. He was getting used to the man’s way. ‘Everything I’ve heard you magi say is that defensive gnosis is stronger than offensive, so those magi who fling spells over half the battlefield are just showing off, wasting energy. Seems to me a mage’s place is not glory-hunting upfront or in the air above, but right in the middle of a cohort, defending the men, sir. Let the soldiers win the battle for you.’

‘That is the opposite of what we’re taught,’ Ramon said.

Lukaz grunted. ‘Apart from a few one-sided scraps in Argundy, the only battles between mage-led legions were back in Noros, during the Revolt. The way I heard it, the Noromen magi did like I’m saying and were the stronger for it. But those big-knob Pallacian magi don’t want to fight as a team with mere rankers: they want to be riding a flying horse out in front of everyone. It’s all duels and glory with them. That might be fine when you’re fighting weaker enemies, but in a close fight, teamwork is what wins the day.’

He fell silent, and Ramon gave him a wry smile. ‘That’s a lot to think on. Thank you, Pilus.’

‘Sir.’ Lukaz went to leave, then stopped. ‘May I speak frankly, sir?’

I thought you were.
‘Of course.’

‘The opium – you saved us with it, but I don’t believe you brought it with us to burn on a battlefield.’ He didn’t wait for Ramon’s response. ‘Four men have died in this legion alone from the stuff, and more than thirty that I know of in others. It is a blight, sir, and I am ashamed that this legion has been associated with it.’

Ramon hung his head. Any number of lies occurred, but they were a long way behind enemy lines and he wanted this man’s respect. Time for the truth. ‘My mother … is a prisoner of a familioso chief, what we call a Pater Nostra, a Father of the Night. I serve him so that one day I can free her, and her daughter to him, my half-sister. He sent me into the legions to arrange and sell the poppy.’

‘Is your family worth the lives of all those men?’

‘It is when I bring down his whole familioso and free my homeland from him for ever.’

‘You can do this by selling poppy?’

‘If I do it right, I can collapse the world around him. More than ten thousand people live in the villages of my home. Are their lives worth less than thirty addicts in a Rondian army?’

Lukaz said slowly, ‘You are a dangerous man, Magister.’

‘To some, maybe – but not to everyone.’ He looked up as a movement in the skies caught his eye, then gave a sudden joyous shout as a square-sailed windskiff came hurtling over the ridge, barely ten feet above the ground. About it were three giant ravens, cawing hoarsely as they darted in to attack, then recoiling from bursts of blue fire.

‘Baltus! Here!’ Ramon shouted, aloud and with the gnosis, and the skiff swerved towards him as the cohort jumped to their feet. A javelin flew, gouging a line of sparks from a gnostic shield encasing one raven, enough to cause it to bank away. The other two rose higher, calling disappointedly, then soared over the column of men. They circled for a minute, then shot away to the north.

‘I guess that means they’ve found us,’ Ramon muttered.

Baltus Prenton guided his skiff towards a flat space nearby and Ramon ran to meet him. The windcraft jolted to a rough, sliding landing, and Baltus sagged in his seat, looking half-dazed.

‘Are you all right?’ Ramon called.

The Brevian Windmaster looked up with exhausted eyes. His face was drawn, his normal jollity almost eclipsed. ‘Sensini! Thank Kore!’

‘I don’t think anyone’s ever used that precise phrase before.’ He’d not seen Baltus since a few hours before Shaliyah, when he’d been ordered to find and lead in a caravan of supply-wagons. Ramon had supposed he’d simply kept flying west after learning the army’s fate, as the wagons certainly hadn’t arrived.

‘I’ve been hunting for you for weeks,’ the Windmaster panted, ‘and I’ve had those Kore-bedamned Souldrinkers after me most of that time.’

Ramon felt a quiver in his spine. ‘Souldrinkers?’

Baltus said grimly, ‘You can tell, if you look at them carefully. There were lots of them, in bird and jackal shape, mostly, on the back trail. They slaughtered the baggage train. I went back to report and found the army gone and the mother of all storms.’ He shook his head. ‘Why didn’t we know the Keshi had magical help?’

‘Who knows? How did you find us?’

‘You can see a lot from the air. I went high as I dared, to avoid the shifters.’ He slapped the side of his craft. ‘My
Birdy
did well, but they’ve got skiffs too – and not all their magi are Dokken, either. They’ve got both, working together.’

‘All the emperor’s enemies are banding together,’ Ramon observed.

‘If they’d caught me—’ He drew a finger across his throat. ‘They’re quick, these Keshi craft with those triangular sails, but their magi are weak, mostly quarter-blood at best. I could out-climb them, and if I called the winds, I could outrun them – and I’ve got a few tricks up my sleeve too, thank Kore.’ He clambered to his feet and stretched wearily. ‘So here I am. What’s the news? Where’s the rest of the army? Where’s Echor?’

‘Well, if I told you that Seth Korion is in control of what’s left of the army, does that give you a measure of how rukked-up this whole expedition is?’

*

Over the next five days, the remnants of Echor’s southern expeditionary force wound out of the broken lands north of the Efratis and onto the floodplain, a vast expanse of silt. During the Moontide the Efratis and its hundreds of tributary rivers usually ran low, though it never fully dried up.

That was the theory, at least. Instead, Seth Korion was staring at the brown torrent raging across the entire floodplain and trying to reconcile it with the crude map in his hands. Around him magi and officers made up their own minds about the best route forward.

‘Why is there so much water?’ he wondered aloud.

‘It’s the aftermath of the gnostic storm at Shaliyah,’ Ramon Sensini suggested, and that harridan Jelaska immediately nodded her agreement, as did Sigurd Vaas. Renn Bondeau agreed too, and he almost never supported the little Silacian.
I guess he must be right, then.

‘So what do we do?’ he said, worried that he sounded weak for asking.

‘We stick to the plan,’ Ramon replied. ‘Fill up the water-wagons, then take the river-road to Ardijah. There’s a bridge there, remember.’ He glanced at his own copy of the map, which had a lot of extra lines and dots on it. ‘Baltus has scouted the way ahead and it’s still clear.’

Seth frowned. ‘I thought I sent Baltus to scout our rear.’

‘Waste of time,’ Ramon replied. ‘He can’t be two places at once, and we need to know what’s in front more.’

‘But we need to know where the enemy are!’

‘We do: twenty miles back. I set some Trip-wards on our back trail and they’re being slowly triggered.’

Seth wasn’t appeased. ‘You changed my order.’