Forging the Sword (The Farsala Trilogy) (9 page)

As soon as they gathered up their wounded comrades, the Hrum picked up their gear and marched out of the small valley, maintaining their formation until there was no high ground within arrow range. When they finally lowered their shields, even at a distance Jiaan could see that they were all back in armor, except for the wounded, who were being carried on shields with more shields laid over them for their protection.

“Good good,” said a Suud boy, coming up to crouch beside him. He was swathed from head to foot in the tightly woven striped robes the Suud wore to protect them from the sun. Even the ends
of the sleeves were tied shut, to keep sunlight from touching his hands. Jiaan had thought their care excessive until, one overcast afternoon two weeks ago when they were trying to get their tents up before the desert’s brief, heavy rain arrived, one young man had become impatient and freed his hands to tie a few knots. His blisters were barely healed, and Jiaan reminded himself again to be very careful to protect his “advisors” from the sun. Not that they couldn’t protect themselves and their Farsalan allies, too, most of the time. Now the boy gestured to the valley below. “Hrum men not two times do this.”

The corpses lay still in the blazing light. The scavengers would be coming for them soon.

“No,” said Jiaan. “He won’t make that mistake again. How do the Suud dispose … what do you do with the bodies of the dead?”

“We bury,” said the boy promptly. “Under dirt, then rocks, so the jackals can’t eat. You want bury the Hrum bodies.”

“Yes,” said Jiaan, “if you can arrange it.” Farsalans burned their dead, and he had no idea what the Hrum did, but anything would be better than leaving them for the jackals. They had been human, whatever else they were.

The Hrum commander might not make that mistake again, but he would make others. Jiaan had planned for it. There would be other bodies, and some of them would be Farsalan. “Yes,” Jiaan repeated. “Bury them.”

•   •   •

T
HE FIRST PART OF
the next plan was to give the Hrum time to become careless again. The exhausted Hrum army had finally made their camp in the center of a wide valley, far enough from the ridges that no arrow could reach it.

“But we could attack them in the middle of the night,” Fasal said. “Charge in on horseback and take them while they’re tired. We have a significant advantage now.”

“We’d also lose men,” said Jiaan. “The Suud have a saying: ‘The desert is the strongest spear.’ If we wait, the desert will do most of our work for us.”

He could almost see the words “a deghan would attack now” flash through Fasal’s mind, but for once Fasal had the sense not to say it. Instead he stalked off to air his frustrations among the younger recruits, many of whom agreed with him.

In one sense he was right—the Hrum were tired now. But weary as they were, they had created a defensible camp and posted many sentries.

Their commander had the good sense to let his men rest over the next few days, allowing the lightly wounded to recover. When the Hrum marched out again they went in patrols of only a few centris, while the rest stood guard over the worst wounded and the camp. A camp that was now protected by a ditch and an earthen bank around all its perimeter, except where the stream flowed in and out.

“We should have charged them that first night,” Fasal grumbled when he saw the new earthworks.

“And let them hide in the bushes and hamstring our horses from behind?” Jiaan asked. “Or hadn’t you noticed how much brush there is in that camp? Enough to conceal dozens of archers, and men who could ambush attackers too.”

He took small comfort from Fasal’s embarrassed blush, for it had taken several days for him to realize how much cover was provided by the tall, stream-side bushes that filled the Hrum camp. Instead of cutting them back, which is what Jiaan had expected them to do, the Hrum were harvesting the bushes that grew outside their perimeter. They used the branches to create screens that would further conceal their tents and the movements of their men from any archers who might creep near.

A few quick experiments had taught Jiaan that no fire arrows would set those boughs alight. Laid in the heart of a blaze, they smoldered and smoked for an amazing amount of time before catching fire, and then burned sluggishly. When he inquired, the Suud told him that the thick-leafed branches would stay green for weeks.

The Hrum’s brush screens, along with the clearing of the bushes outside their perimeter, made sneaking near enough to the Hrum camp to do any good almost impossible. Impossible, at least, for Jiaan’s archers. After watching the Suud trackers for the last few
weeks, Jiaan wouldn’t have bet that there was anything they couldn’t do.

No, his best move was to allow the Hrum enough time to relax their guard and regain their arrogant confidence. So Jiaan assigned a handful of men to accompany the Suud who followed the Hrum patrols, and sent Fasal and most of his men back to their own permanent camp to rest and relax.

He was startled two days later when Isaf, who had gone with the Suud trackers to keep an eye on the Hrum, came running back into the temporary camp.

“Commander!” he gasped, looking around. His eyes were slitted against the brilliant light. “Where’s the—There you are, sir. The Suud sent me to get you. The Hrum have captured a Suud hunting party! They were out on a long hunt and had set up their hutches to sleep out the day. The Hrum came around a bend and ran right into them.”

Jiaan was already donning his ring-studded silk vest. “I thought all the Suud in the area had been informed about the Hrum’s movements. They were supposed to keep out of their way!”

“Well, it looks like some of them didn’t get the word,” said Isaf, wiping his face.

The long dry spell had broken days ago in a series of afternoon storms, but today was sunny, and it was too hot to run. Another man handed Isaf a water skin, and he drank thirstily.

Jiaan closed his lips over his next question. He considered his options—there weren’t many. “Get the men armed and ready to move,” he told Aram.

“But sir, we’ve not more than fifty men here! If we send to the main camp, we can—”

“If we send to the main camp, they won’t come in time to do any good,” Jiaan interrupted. “They can’t get here before the Hrum get their prisoners back to their camp.” Jiaan had been told that the Hrum didn’t torture prisoners, but he wasn’t certain he believed it. He knew that they took slaves.

He turned to Isaf. “Have the Suud hunters been harmed?”

“No sir, not yet. And when I left the Suud—our tracker lads, I mean—they had their spears out and were ready to attack if the Hrum made a move. But there’s only six of them, and the Hrum have three centris!”

Jiaan had only fifty men—and a debt to his allies that was far greater than this.

“Can we ride there?” he asked Isaf crisply.

“No sir, too rough for horses. Almost too rough for men on foot. I had to climb down a couple of cliffs. They’re small cliffs,” he added hastily, “but—”

“Then we’ll climb them,” said Jiaan. He raised his voice. “Everyone! Arm and get ready to march.”

Rushing through the twisted maze of canyons, Jiaan had time
to think that if the Hrum wanted to set their own ambush this was the perfect way to do it. The only thing that kept him running, that made him willing to continue trading caution for speed, was the knowledge that the Hrum couldn’t possibly have anticipated finding the Suud hunters’ camp. Unless they’d somehow made contact with a Suud clan that would accept a bribe? No, surely not. If the Suud—any Suud—turned against the Farsalans, then Jiaan’s army was doomed. All the tribes knew where the Farsalans’ main camp was, and all they had to do was lead the Hrum there.

When Jiaan had first come to the desert, he had thought that the Suud gained their tactical advantage by traveling over the tops of the ridges and rocky buttes. But when he, tentatively, mentioned it, the whole clan had laughed at him. After spending almost a month in the desert Jiaan understood why. The ridges and shattered mesas were too disconnected for anyone to travel on for long; if you tried to do so, you wasted all your time and strength climbing in and out of the canyons that lay between them. The Suud’s advantage, and it was considerable, was that they knew the best routes through the maze and the easiest passes from one route to another. But easiest didn’t always mean easy. To reach the place where the Suud hunting party had camped, Jiaan’s troop had to pass over two ridges—and the descent from one of them was sheer enough to leave him panting with fear as well as exertion by the time he reached the bottom.

It might have been a small cliff compared to the great rampart that separated the badlands from the mountains, but it was high enough that a fall from the top would kill. Jiaan’s first descent into the desert had showed him that this was no place for someone who didn’t like heights. He was only glad that Fasal wasn’t there to see him sweat.

When they climbed the ridge that overlooked the valley where the Hrum had stopped, the first thing Jiaan noticed was that the only place they could fire arrows from was on the other side of the valley, and that the slope there was shallow enough that the Hrum could storm it.

The second thing he noticed was that the Suud, far from being shackled or slain, seemed to be having a very good time.

“The Hrum are feeding them?” he murmured to the hooded Suud tracker who met them at the top of the rise.

“They trade,” the man said. He seemed fairly relaxed about the whole thing, although his gaze never left the scene below. “Hunter have gazelle. Hrum give bread stuff, take gazelle. Cook.”

Jiaan could see that for himself. The carcass was still mounted on its improvised spit, but a Hrum soldier was carving off slices for his waiting comrades. The Suud, who were clustered in the shade of a tumble of boulders, were already eating their portions. Except for the presence of the Hrum sentries it looked for all the world like a picnic—right down to the easy smile on almost every face.

“I don’t understand, sir,” said Aram. “This is the Hrum’s chance to learn where we’re camped. What are they doing?”

“The smart thing,” said Jiaan softly. “That’s what they’re doing. We’ll keep watch all the same, but I don’t think we have to worry about making a sudden charge.”

Just as he expected, the Suud eventually finished their “midnight” feast, and after some further talk with the Hrum commander returned to their hutches to await the night. The Hrum formed up and marched away.

Jiaan sent all but two of the trackers on to continue keeping an eye on them. One he sent to guide his men back to their own camp, though by now they might have been able to retrace the route on their own. The other, who spoke the best Faran of any of them, Jiaan kept to accompany him.

He waited out the long marks until dusk before descending to the valley. No point in two groups of foreigners interrupting the hunters’ sleep.

To Jiaan’s surprise, the leader of the hunting party was a woman. “She says good people,” his guide translated. “Good, because make bargain.”

“They made a bargain?” Jiaan asked in alarm.

The translator shook his head. “Sorry, she says
want
bargain. Hrum people want you people. Us help. Offer knives, spears, cloth—much, much.”

He grinned at Jiaan. “She says Hrum Faran good good, but her Faran not. Hard talk. Hrum man tell her like you tell, Hrum take man for army. She makes only one trade, gazelle for bread stuff. Not two trade.”

The Hrum commander had confirmed what Jiaan had told them about the Hrum’s draft, so they’d decided not to switch sides. The draft was the main reason the Suud had agreed to help Jiaan’s army in the first place, but that didn’t keep his knees from going wobbly with relief.

“Thank her for me,” he said. “Tell her that the Hrum commander told the truth about them taking your young men for their army, and that the Farsalans will never do that. She made the right choice.”

But as he turned away he couldn’t help but wonder if the Hrum commander, in telling the truth, in dealing honorably with these people, hadn’t made the right choice too.

J
IAAN WAITED ANOTHER
five days before setting his second ambush. This one entailed some risk, as he told his men when he returned to the main camp to gather his forces and ask for volunteers. The Hrum would have to be able to see the bait and follow the Farsalans for some time before they became excited enough to abandon the caution they’d practiced for the last week and a half.

He wasn’t surprised when Fasal instantly stepped forward, but
he was dismayed at how many of the newer, more hotheaded recruits instantly followed him. Since horsemanship was one of the main criteria for the men posing as bait, Jiaan accepted Fasal, but he inserted many of his sensible veterans into the party as well.

So far, the Suud trackers reported, the plan was working beautifully. The Hrum had seen the small band of Farsalans at the end of the canyon—only a third of them on horseback!—and dashed off in eager pursuit.

A horse carrying one man, even with two more clinging to his saddle, could outrun men on foot—but as the Hrum knew, a horse so burdened couldn’t keep up that pace for long. Crouched atop the mouth of the long, narrow canyon where his trap was set, Jiaan could hear their hoofbeats approaching. They’d dropped to a trot now, and perhaps it was only in his imagination that it sounded like a weary trot. They would be here soon.

Jiaan turned to the young Suud beside him, wishing he could see his face in the enveloping hood. “Are you ready with the rope?”

The Suud snorted. “Are you kidding? All life, boy, man, I want to push this rock. Old ones not let me. Say no need.”

Jiaan raised his brows at the easy, colloquial Faran phrase—he could guess where the man had learned it. He had to admit it; the peddler was proving useful. Jiaan still hated him, but he could push hatred aside … for a time.

Looking at the boulder, which balanced on a ledge of smaller
stones and looked like it should long since have tumbled into the canyon on its own, Jiaan understood the Suud’s temptation. He smiled at the man. “We will push it today.”