Forging the Sword (The Farsala Trilogy) (27 page)

There was no reason at all to share this with an enemy officer, but the memory flooded his heart.

“Their peasants are half-starved racks of bone, while the warlords feast off gold plates. In some ways the Kadeshi’s slaves are better off! They may be covered with whip scars, but they can be sold for coin, so at least their owners feed them.”

Jiaan paused, remembering the misery he had seen—and his own aching shame at riding past, helpless to do anything about it.

“I talked to one man,” he went on. “A weaponsmith. He actually wanted you to invade.”

And Jiaan had agreed with him.

“Why not?” Patrius asked. “Many of the peoples we conquer are better off in the empire. Most of them, in the long run. Though it looks like Farsala might not discover those advantages.”

“I don’t think I can count on that,” said Jiaan grimly. “Not anymore. Garren has found a way to get more men. A lot more.”

Chains jingled as Patrius moved sharply. “That’s impossible! The senate would never grant him more tacti. Not when … no, not even if he somehow replaced the emperor with his own man. That bargain was made on the senate floor, and it’s public knowledge. Nothing … nothing has happened to the emperor, has it?”

“Not to my knowledge,” said Jiaan, noting that the position of a Hrum emperor might not be as secure as it seemed from the outside. “Garren found another way.”

He told Patrius the story of Garren’s bribe, of Siatt’s plan, and even about the arrival of a senate committee to investigate the amount of money Garren was spending.

“Well, that’s a good thing,” said Patrius. “The emperor will have given them the authority to overrule Garren if he seems to have gone too far. Defending the empire’s honor is part of their charge.”

“Will they care enough to keep him from bribing Siatt?” Jiaan asked hopefully. That would save the Kadeshi peasants—if Siatt wasn’t paid he wouldn’t send them, and he could hardly punish the men or their families for it either.

“I’m not sure,” said Patrius slowly. “They won’t allow Garren to cheat—but is this cheating? It’s not exactly winning with ten tacti, which was the main stipulation the senate imposed, but they also agreed that he could purchase whatever he needed. And if they do forbid it, then Garren’s father might say that the senate is breaking the terms of their agreement and get out of it that way. The committee is going to think about that, too.”

“So they’ll let him take those men?” Jiaan asked. “Even if it means that either they or their families will die?”

“But they don’t know about that!” Patrius exclaimed. “If they did, they wouldn’t allow it. To help people like these men and their families, to bring them into the safety and prosperity of the empire is … is what our army is for, when you come to the bottom of it.”

“What about those who don’t want to be brought in?” Jiaan demanded.

“They may resent us for a time,” said Patrius calmly, “but they’re grateful for it within a generation or two, no matter how hard they fought at first.”

Jiaan snorted.
Grateful? Or just having no other choice, and accepting that?
But Patrius’ voice held so much certainty that he knew it was useless to argue.

“The committee doesn’t know about Siatt’s plan,” Jiaan said, “so they might allow Garren to go ahead with it?”

“They might,” Patrius admitted. “I’m not sure.”

“And the Kadeshi …” Jiaan closed his eyes in anguished sympathy. “The Kadeshi will turn on the Hrum someday and die, either on your swords in battle or executed for treason later.”

“Yes,” said Patrius. His voice was quiet, but beneath the tactimian’s surface calm, Jiaan heard the same grief and horror he felt. “Another commander, hearing their story, knowing why they’d done it … but I don’t think Garren would listen. And even another commander might not allow them to escape the consequences of that. A man who turns on his comrades in the midst of battle … there is no worse crime. Not in military law. If the committee learned the truth, they’d stop it. Our army is a wall to protect such men, not to topple and crush them.”

“Are you going to tell me that the committee would believe
Sorahb, if he sent them a message?” If Patrius said yes, Jiaan would know that the man was lying.

“No,” said Patrius. “Any message from the enemy would be assumed to be a ruse. They’d be more wary of the Kadeshi troops. They might even learn the truth from them, but that wouldn’t help the Kadeshi families. Even if I told them myself,” Patrius went on bitterly, “they’d say that my information came from you and was part of the ruse. Revealing the truth isn’t enough. It might save our forces, but it wouldn’t save the Kadeshi and their people.”

Patrius cared about that too. Men who were willing to make their own bodies into a wall to protect their empire would care, Jiaan realized. For they were their empire’s wall, just as the deghans had been Farsala’s. As his own men were now, he supposed. They seemed so frail, these walls of flesh and will—but to be without such protection, like the peasants who lived under the power of the warlords, would be terrible indeed.

There was nothing Jiaan could do to protect the Kadeshi either.

J
IAAN SENT
S
IATT’S
courier back to his master the next morning with his refusal of the warlord’s “generous” offer.

“You may tell the warlord that I have no more money now than I did last time we spoke,” he told the messenger. “And the other things I said then still hold true. My master, Sorahb, will regard any force of Kadeshi coming into Farsala as an enemy army and react
accordingly. The Hrum were foolish enough to underestimate Sorahb. Ask Warlord Siatt and his friends if they really want to do the same.”

It was true—Jiaan hardly had any money at all. The Farsalan army’s food came from sympathetic villages, slipped through the mountains to the desert by young men hiding from the Hrum’s draft. Jiaan might have been able to raise some coin—perhaps enough to give Siatt his excuse to betray two armies, both of them his enemies, at the same time. That alone was sufficient reason to turn him down. But the real reason Jiaan did so was because he refused to be the one who sealed the Kadeshi conscripts’ fate. He could have tried to betray Siatt in turn, using those men against the Hrum and then keeping the warlords from using them against him. Allowing the Hrum to execute them after the battle was the easiest way, but Jiaan refused to do it. Patrius was right. There was a line an army couldn’t cross, not if it was to remain a wall instead of becoming a shackle around the throat of its own people. Jiaan might not be able to help the Kadeshi, but he refused to make Farsala a part of their destruction. Destroying the Hrum, on the other hand, was his job.

J
IAAN WAITED TWO
more weeks, till the dark of the moon, before he attacked the Hrum camp. He’d worried about the delay, for the one thing Patrius never said a word about was the Hrum’s food supplies, and Jiaan thought they had to be running low. Hunger
might force them to flee, and moving in formation, ready for attack, the Hrum would be far less vulnerable than if they were taken by surprise in the middle of the night.

But Jiaan had wanted all the darkness he could get, mostly to aid the Suud spearmen, who now crept over the open ground the Hrum had cleared around their walls. Despite the Suud’s assurance that they could do it—easily!—and despite the fact that his archers had managed to crawl into arrow range of the Hrum camp, Jiaan had wondered if the Suud could really cross so much space unseen. They had to get very near the walls to throw their burdened spears as far into the camp as his plan required.

But the Suud had been right—even looking at the area where he knew they must be, Jiaan couldn’t see them. And as far as he could tell, none of the Hrum sentries had even twitched.

“Now that I’m knowing them,” murmured Hosah, who lay beside Jiaan in a hollow they had found, “I know it’s not true. But you can see why the miners swore they’d been bred from demons.”

Much as he liked the Suud, Jiaan had to admit that there was something uncanny about their ability to vanish into the desert. Especially hauling bundles of spears and big skin bags of oil. Still … “Nonsense,” he said firmly. “You’ve been working with them for months now. Have you ever seen them do anything magical?”

“No,” Hosah admitted. “Though I’ve heard they worked some magic on those swords, turning them into watersteel.”

“Well, if they did, it’s a magic that’s now being practiced by every swordsmith in Mazad,” Jiaan reminded him. “Not to mention the Hrum. So I hardly think—”

The whisper of spears in flight interrupted him. Many spears—and the way they coordinated that first volley in the darkness truly did seem like magic, even though Jiaan knew that the Suud could see in the dark.

Jiaan could barely make out the Hrum sentries on the distant wall—they hadn’t been so foolish as to ruin their night sight with torches—but he heard them shout as the spears passed over their heads. The warning wouldn’t do them any good, for in the darkness they couldn’t see the small sack of oil each spear carried. Even if a drop of oil from a bag’s loose seam fell on someone and they guessed the truth, there was nothing they could do about it—not in time.

The delay—as each Suud took his large, tight-stitched skin, filled the next small sack, and tied it to his spear—seemed very long to Jiaan. But eventually the second volley arced up and over the Hrum’s heads.

The camp was rousing now, but the Hrum’s enemies were invisible. If Jiaan was lucky, every man in camp would head straight for his post on the wall and be there when the real show began.

Six more flights of spears followed. The earthen banks that shielded the Hrum camp were packed with soldiers, most still donning
their armor and boots, from the sound of it. Jiaan was willing to allow them boots and armor, though it was more mercy than they had given his camp on the night that Aram died. That was the only mercy he would show them.

“Kindle,” he called softly, and heard the command being passed from one group of archers to another.

It was Hosah who dropped a handful of dried grass and small twigs into the thick clay pot where they had carried the embers. He blew steadily into the pot’s wide mouth.

Fire burst forth. Jiaan nodded grimly and held out his first arrow, watching the flames lick the pitch-soaked strip of cloth tied to its tip. He didn’t need to say another word—his arrow would be the next signal. Jiaan nocked it. The fire rippling at its tip hurt his dark-adapted eyes as he pulled his bow and let the arrow fly.

It streaked through the dark like a comet, and dozens of others followed from all around that side—the upwind side—of the Hrum camp. Jiaan was already kindling his second arrow when the first one fell.

They had experimented over the last few weeks. The thin leather bags didn’t always burst when they hit the ground, but the oil—all the oil Jiaan had been able to gather—seeped swiftly through the loosened stitches. The Suud had sent their spears into the most dense patch of brush in this end of the camp, but it still might take a while for an arrow to find oil, and until that happened,
they wouldn’t accomplish much. The fire arrows might ignite a partially dried branch, but they usually didn’t burn long enough to ignite green bushes at all. To make matters worse, it had rained two nights ago—a long, soaking rain that lasted almost until dawn, while Jiaan huddled in his blankets and cursed.

He had considered waiting a while longer, but any winter night in the desert might bring rain, and the moon would soon be growing brighter.

Jiaan fired another arrow. All his archers were firing as quickly as they could, since there was no point in trying to coordinate a volley. The oil wouldn’t dodge.

Jiaan kindled and fired almost a dozen arrows, knowing as he waited for each set of pitch-soaked rags to light that at least some of the Hrum were running for buckets and shovels, preparing to fight the fire they now knew was coming. Patrius had finally told Jiaan how the Hrum were trained to deal with fire in their camp. Even as he watched a distant flame flicker to life, Jiaan felt an ache of guilt for betraying his friend. Patrius had become a friend, he suddenly realized. But Jiaan wouldn’t let that stop him.

The flame leaped and grew, reaching into the bushes around it with greedy fingers.

“That will do,” said Jiaan with satisfaction, lowering his bow. One of the things they’d learned in their experiments was that the green bushes might be slow to catch fire, but once they were burning
well they were almost impossible to put out. “Everyone move to your next position.”

Getting himself to the downwind side of the camp was hazardous, and not because of the beleaguered Hrum. Jiaan fell twice during the first part of the journey and the second time he rammed his leg into a prickly plant. He stopped immediately and pulled half a dozen spines out of his flesh—working by touch was no handicap for that task—but even though he got them out swiftly the irritant that coated their tips had set to work, and his muscles ached and throbbed as he went on.

Moving was easier now—the fire was so big, so brilliant, that even hundreds of yards away its light touched the rocks and plants of the desert floor. When Jiaan looked toward it he was almost blinded, and tears streamed down his face.

The Hrum camp was burning.

Men rushed about at the far end, where the fire hadn’t reached. Some still held buckets and shovels, but more were hastily gathering bundles of whatever they thought it made sense to save. Still more, Jiaan was glad to see, were carrying stretchers to the farthest unburned end of the camp, where they could be extracted quickly when the army was forced to flee.

Their departure was inevitable now. This fire would be stopped by nothing but the earthen walls the Hrum had erected and the cleared ground beyond them—both of which were perfect
for containing the conflagration Jiaan had released. He had pointed that out to the Suud when they had expressed reservations about setting the desert ablaze.

The orange light painted everything, making it look as if the whole of the wide, flat valley were on fire. It shed enough light for Jiaan to see the Hrum’s pack mules skittering over the barrier and racing across the cleared space. Enough light for him to watch as two centris burst over their walls, reforming their formation even as they ran down the left side of the small stream. They probably hoped that a sudden assault could burst through the Farsalan forces, creating an escape route from the cleared ground that had once spelled safety and now formed a deadly trap.