Indomitus Est (The Fovean Chronicles) (52 page)

    
“Ah,” he said, nodding.  “Just what I was coming to talk with you about.  Well, we have no place to biv – oo – ach, and I hoped that your connections with the Andarans would alleviate this problem.”

    
I looked across the narrow plain.  The armies were all crowded near the entrance to the city - the murder hole at the one huge gate.  Other than there, the plains were open.  I looked curiously at Ancenon.

    
“Oh, Lupus, we
must
be at the main gate,” he told me.

    
“Why?”

    
“Because, should there be fighting, then it will be at the gate.”

    
“And?”

    
“And we would not want to appear cowards,” he said, as if to a child.

    
“What do we care?”

    
He looked dumbfounded.  Arath approached us, having seen us discussing the problem.

    
“Any luck with the Andarans?” he asked.

    
“We were discussing that,” Ancenon said, looking at me as one would look at a little kid in a lot of trouble.

    
I could live with that.  “No we weren’t,” I countered.  “We were discussing why we had to be at the main gate.”

    
“Oh,” Arath said, nodding.  “We
have
to be at the main gate.”

    
“Why?” I asked.

    
Now two of them were dumbfounded.

    
They had this perception that all of the action occurred at the main gate, and anyone who didn’t camp there would be thought a coward, perfectly willing to let the others do the fighting.  I reminded them that we were here on the Eldadorian dime and, at our most basic level, we
were
perfectly willing to let them do the fighting.  In fact, once we
picked
the fight, then that described exactly what we planned to do.

    
The entire Free Legion got involved, and it became a heated debate.  The problem remained that no one would let mercenaries pitch their tents alongside of their camp, because they didn’t trust the mercenaries to behave themselves. That, to me, made perfect sense, and was in keeping with Kills’ and my conversation.  The long and the short of it ended up that we wouldn’t be pitching our tents by the main gate.  I picked a spot about two hundred yards from the Andarans and got the men working on bivouac.

    
The Roman army, when they camped, had a little city that they created just for the occasion.  It had pitched walls, a main street, and orderly rows of tents that were very defensible, especially against foot soldiers.  From having studied Roman history I knew the gist of what they created, and had our army doing the exact same thing.

    
It touched off a fight immediately.  One of the men, a big Volkhydran, squared off on me when I told him that his tent had been set up a foot out of align with the tent next to it.

    
“This needs to move,” I told him.  Drekk had followed me and watched me now.  Ancenon and D’gattis talked with the Eldadorian commander, whom we technically reported to.  Shela rode with the Long Manes and I had no idea where anyone else had gone.

    
“So you say,” he told me.  He stood up to his full height, almost mine and as heavy.

    
“So I say,” I agreed.  “Move it.”

    
“No.”

    
They wanted to pitch tents on the ground near their friends and have a big fire in the center.  We couldn’t defend that, plus we’d be just begging for catapult shot from the city to home in on our cooking fires with all of the soldiers around them.  Lob a few choice boulders or some naphtha into the fire and you burn all of those tents to the ground with the people inside. 

    
Somehow, I didn’t think he would be won over by the logical debate, so I smacked him.  Open hand, right in the temple.  It would have dropped a lesser man, but he wasn’t one.

    
He threw a punch right into my armor.  War knows what he could be thinking, but he hurt himself pretty bad.

    
He looked at me, holding his hand.  “Not the sharpest knife on the bandolier, are you?” I asked him.

    
“What?”

    
Slang – I took my shot. 

    
“You’re stupid.  Understand that?”

    
He started to square off again.  I’d started to think that I would have to kill him to set an example.  I didn’t like that.  I knew the other armies were watching and this just reaffirmed for them that we were a bunch of thugs.

    
Without even thinking of it, I returned to being a First Class Petty Officer in the Navy, and I saw some NUB on his first day on the ship, trying to make his bones at my expense.

    
I felt my own eyebrows drop a quarter of an inch, my jaw set, as I leaned over the man, invading his personal space, letting him smell my breath as I roared at him, “I asked you do you understand that?”

    
That snapped his head back.  If anyone has ever seen that bumper sticker, “0 to bitch in .05 seconds,” well, I left that bitch a full minute in my dust when I wanted to.  It is just that ability to get pissed off on a dime that distinguishes a salty sailor from a wannabe.

    
“I asked you a question, son!  Do you understand me?”

    
“Um – well, I heard –“

    
“You will address me as Sir,
is that clear
?”

    
That had him bewildered, which was what I wanted.  If you want to do something as serious as taking on a superior officer, you better have your feet planted firmly on the ground, so my job became to make sure that they weren’t.

    
“Yes, sir.”

    
“I CAN’T HEAR YOU!”

    
“
Yes, Sir
!”

    
“You sorry excuse for the north side of dung heap!  Did you think you could stand up to me?”

    
“No, Sir!”

    
“Did you?”

    
“No, Sir!”

    
“
DID YOU
?”

    
“
NO, SIR
!”

    
“I will tear out your eyes and piss on your brain if I don’t see this whole row of tents standing tall by the time I am back here, do you hear me, troop?”

    
“
Yes, Sir
!”

    
And now, pitch the voice low, lean forward, my nose
just barely
touching his.

    
“May your god help you if I have to repeat myself to you.”

    
“Yes, Sir!”

    
Discipline is 50% training and 50% fear of training.  Training can be anything from marching to mortal combat.  Once I made that clear, I got some more support from this soldier, who in turn enforced it on our other soldiers.  Like the wrinkles coming out of a blanket when you stretch it tight, the camp adjusted itself to those perfect rows and square lines that I wanted.

    
What we ended up with looked like a very Roman campsite and brought curious officers from the other nations over to see what we had done.  During the whole time, I hadn’t heard a word from Drekk, but then Drekk usually kept his own council.

    
“Oh, I wouldn’t do this,” said Kills, the first to come into the camp, and the first to criticize.  “What if you have to take flight?”

    
“We aren’t here to take flight,” I told him.  That earned a chuckle from the other commanders who had followed him.  “We could hold off ten times our number from this camp.  No need to take flight unless 5,001 soldiers show up to lift the siege.”

    
“And if some other army comes along, and lays siege to you?” another asked, a Volkhydran. 

    
“We break down that bunker, right there,” I pointed to a set of timbers that could be pulled from the dirt walls, “and have at them.”

    
“And you are nowhere near the gate, Sirrah,” an Uman-Chi sniffed.  “What good is being ready to fight when you are nowhere near the fighting?”

    
“Let the fighting come to us, then,” I said.

    
Most shook their heads.  One pointed out that we had no central location for our foodstuffs, and that the men could steal them at will and then we would be without.  It locked us into fighting from one location and prevented heroes from distinguishing themselves.  This did
not
jibe with the local philosophy on tactics.

    
Good.  Of course, I moved the foodstuffs.  Not all advice is bad.

    
That night, our men slept exhausted in their tents.  I sat with the others in our palisade.  The plain, Fovean moon hung over the city, and our cook fires, kept small and covered, dotted our camp.  The other nations had huge blazes going, and they were singing and drinking and indulging the separate camp of whores and merchants that had sprung up on the other side of the plains.

    
Ancenon had carpeted the palisade with furs, divided the living space with canvas walls, and furnished us with folding stools and cots.  I sat on one of these, Shela at my feet.  D’gattis and Ancenon had brought more elaborate chairs as befitted their perceived stations in life.  Dilvesh, Arath and Thorn sat on the floor.  Nantar and Drekk were scouting.

    
Genna sat on a stool opposite me, in a corner of the tent.  Her eyes held the same anger that she’d shown since Shela had walked into the tower in Chatoos, but now she’d been left impotent to direct it at me.

    
Ancenon couldn’t bind her in the Fire Bond, because Adriam might have closed the Fire Bond.  Although D’gattis wanted her dead, Ancenon argued against that as well. She’d been bound to us in fealty; she bore our mark in its name.  We had called her Clear Genna.

    
Nothing bound Shela.  She worshipped Power.  Shela could kill Genna on her own whim and her own responsibility.  She had proved that killing didn’t bother her.

    
But what a waste that would be, losing the most effective reconnaissance that any of us had ever seen. She’d made herself the only person, the only women, to have ever beaten the Confluni in their own land.  We would all be dead without her, much as I would be dead because of her if she had her way.

    
So we gave her a last choice.  She could take on her own Bond, under Power, never to act against me or against Shela again in her life, so long as we promised to do the same. 

    
Or that life would end. To her credit she didn’t try to run.  She admitted to herself if not to the rest of us that Shela could take her at will.  She didn’t plan to die with her back to her rival.