Indomitus Oriens (The Fovean Chronicles) (48 page)

             
“Be glad you did,” Jerod countered him. “Because Xareff was going to put you in a cell and send to Vrekk for Wolf Soldiers.”

             
“You don’t know that,” Xinto said.

             
“He is probably right,” Jahunga said. They all looked at him. Jahunga didn’t say a lot, which got him a lot more attention when he
did
speak.

             
“We Toorians know the Duke of Thieves,” he continued, and one of his men nodded. “He doesn’t negotiate unless he can’t take what he wants.”

             
“And he sure as Life’s nipples had us,” Jerod said, drinking mead from a bowl.

             
“I still don’t know why he let us go,” Raven said. This had been bugging her. Since she had woken up on the plains, and confessed to Nina she knew the answer to what Nina called ‘the ultimate truth,’ Xinto had been looking at and acting differently with Jerod, and she hadn’t been able to figure out why.

             
Now he turned out to be some kind of warlord? That made no sense.

             
“Jerod’s father is the most important man in Teher, which is a Volkhydran city on the border with Conflu,” Xinto said.

             
“My father wouldn’t sit by while some Koran trash put his son in a dungeon,” Jerod added, looking into this mug.

             
“The Volkhydran people
are
quick to war,” Xinto conceded.

             
“And he just took your word for it?” Raven didn’t believe it. “Why couldn’t anyone just say—”

             
“No one would just
say
they were Karl Henekhson,” Xinto said, and took another drink of beer.

             
Jerod just kept looking down, saying nothing. Raven looked from face to face, and no one would meet here eyes.

             
“You know about the Battle of Tamaran Glen?” Nina asked her, finally.

             
Raven nodded. Shela had told her about it.

             
“You know about the Hero of Tamara, then?” Nina asked her.

             
“Some legendary warrior or something who turned the battle with the Wolf Soldiers,” Raven said, dismissively. She really didn’t believe it—every battle story that one hero that it turned on.

             
Jahunga laughed. “Even in Toor we know about Karl, son of Henekh,” he said.

             
Jerod stood, shifted his sword on his belt. He stood and walked away without saying anything. He shot a sideways glance at Raven—she caught his eye, looking more guilty than anything, then lost it.

             
Nina looked at her. “You really don’t know?” she said.

             
Raven shook her head—she was getting sick of this.

             
“Jerod is the Hero of Tamara,” Nina told her. “That man is one of the bravest who ever put a foot down on Fovean soil.”

* * *

              Jerod felt so sick of this crap that it burned him inside. Not a week went by when that day hadn’t haunted him, and that had been a lot of weeks.

             
Stomping through Kor’s stinking wharves, not really knowing where he was bound for, he relived it again. Lupus’ small city, himself barely seventeen, never having killed a man before, the pampered son of a warlord whom people were wondering about—whether he had it in him to replace the old man.

             
Henekh had already taken another wife, to try for another son.

             
When those Confluni had swarmed out of the forest, across the glen and into their barricades, his Wolf Soldier guards, one hundred strong, had raised their shields, lowered their pikes and taken them, head on. What amazed him is that they held. Confluni died skewered on hand cut spikes in the dirt around their walls, then to arrow fire from their archers, hiding behind their barricades, then finally on the pikes of their men.

             
His first command, the Wolf Soldiers, one hundred strong, slowly being pushed back by thousands, and winning.

             
The shield bearers fell back as one, a wall over one hundred feet long moving in unison, then separating to allow swords to stab out and kill more men, then pulling back and closing, so pikes could strike again.

             
When it looked like the line would crumble, the Daff Kanaar flooded in from their flanks like water past a dam, taking the Confluni totally unaware, driving them until his Wolf Soldiers could advance back into the breach and stop the flood.

             
Precise as any machine, they did it over and over. Fall back, stab, push forward, slash. The Confluni hammered on them, trying to get around the sides of their barricade where the archers riddled them, trying to get over, standing on the bodies of their own dead. Trying to draw out the rest of the Daff Kanaar and failing.

             
The Confluni had retreated, and then they had come again, but this time with spears.

             
Not normal spears, but long poles born like battering rams held by as many as four men. They smashed through the shield walls, spilling the guts of the swordsmen, the spearmen, toppling the shieldmen as well. The Wolf Soldiers hung on only by the strength of their discipline, some still fighting with the splintered end of a spear protruding from a breast or hip.

             
He needed more, and he needed them now, and he knew where to get them, and that is what made him the Hero of Tamara.

             
They had walked here, and he had been interested in becoming a Wolf Soldier himself. They took anyone. He could join them, change his name, and he could forget about ever replacing his father, ever having to be the leader of his people—just fight and live and, someday, die.

             
In his cowardice, his weakness, he had asked them to teach what they did, and how. The Wolf Soldiers had thought it funny, their leader being taught by the troops he led, but they taught him to march, and the commands they used for advance, for falling back, to wheel to the left and the right. He’d marched as a shield bearer, as a pikeman, as a swordsman. At night when they drilled, he took all of the positions and he excelled at them.

             
And at the same time, other members of the Daff Kanaar, their foot soldiers, saw him, and joined him, and together they all learned the moves, and the basics of the discipline, and the regimen of Wolf Soldiers.

             
So when he needed them, he knew where to get them. He left the ranks, rallied those Daff Kanaar soldiers and lined them up behind his Wolf Soldiers. On that critical retreat, where it looked like the Confluni finally had the momentum to push them back into the small city, Jerod, then Karl, had given the order to wheel to one side, and Confluni crashed right into the ranks of those fresh soldiers.

             
They didn’t fight as well as Wolf Soldiers. They weren’t hard-core killers like Wolf Soldiers but they had the heart, the momentum, and as soon as he could, Karl replaced their casualties with his seasoned troops, interspersing experience where it was needed, taking the pounding from the Confluni and, again, turning them back.

             
“Can you hold them?” the warrior, his countryman, Nantar had demanded of him.

             
“For a while,” he said. “Until these die.”

             
And then the Confluni archers had engaged, and all of the men began falling, arrows raining in and striking them at random, Daff Kanaar and Wolf Soldiers trying to fight with shafts sticking into them, slipping on their own fallen, on their own blood.

             
They pushed the Confluni back. Some sort of spell casting was going on in and out of the little city. Karl remembered wiping the sweat and the blood from his eyes and looking past the Confluni horde to the troops beyond—seeing how many they had left to kill.

Like the god War himself, there rode the Conqueror on his white stallion, in the midst
s of the enemy with the Sword of War cleaving down on shoulders and skulls.

             
Karl hadn’t really believed it when he saw it—it came to him almost like a dream. Blood flowed down Lupus’ face, oozed out of his armor—a dagger protruded from his ribs already. Karl had taken his sergeant by the shoulder and pointed out their commander.

             
“Can you believe that?” he demanded. “Am I seeing that?”

             
He and the sergeant both watched the invincible warrior pit himself against thousands with nothing but his sword.

“He’s showing us!” the sergeant shouted, taking Karl by the
upper arms. “He’s showing us that we don’t have to be afraid—that we can fight outnumbered, and we can win!”

If that had been his message then the
Daff Kanaar lancers got it—they charged head-on into the Confluni and relieved him. Lupus had looked bewildered for a moment, as if this was his fight and they were intruding.

The Confluni soldiers at their front line hesitated, looking for orders, not sure whether to charge again or wait to see how things went on the flank.

Karl had raised up his sword with one hand and screamed his Volkhydran battle cry. It had energized the men around him, and the men next to them, and the men next to them as well. They started screaming, roaring, going wild in their eyes. They called out out for Black Lupus, started screaming things like ‘He rides’ and ‘He conquers,’ and the troops who had fallen back before demanded to push forward now.

             
Karl realized then the arrow fire had stopped. Lupus must have stunned even the Confluni. What madman would attack 10,000 troops like that, with nothing but a sword in his hand?

             
“At them, you bastards,” Karl had roared, his own voice strange in his ears. “Save him! Save the conqueror!
To his side
!”

             
And like a swarm they charged, the Wolf Soldier/Daff Kanaar mix in the vanguard, a howling mass of Legionnaires behind them. Karl saw a woman with half of her arm shorn off, a man with two arrows in his shoulder, charging, killing, holding up their position in the mass, refusing to die until they had done their share of killing.

             
Karl had been one of them. The sword his father had given to him, the two-handed behemoth that had always seemed too cumbersome to wield, felt light as a feather and graceful as a scalpel now. He caught the rhythm of the Daff Kanaari, his sword slashing down in momentum with theirs, tearing guts, spilling bowels, removing heads. The Confluni fell back in terror and found themselves trampled by the Daff Kanaar lancers.

             
The Confluni ranks broke, and from there it became just a matter of containing them. Karl had broken to the right with his men, the rest of the Daff Kanaar to the left, and together they had pushed the Confluni past their leader, their hero, him just staring at them as if Lupus had forgotten the Daff Kanaar had been invited.

             
Later, Karl learned it was Shela, not he, who’d turned the battle, but the men wouldn’t have it. In the aftermath, they called him the Hero of Tamara, and Lupus ‘the Conqueror.’ He had gotten his scar and birthed some kind of legend.

             
Karl spat, walking through these stinking streets with these
stupid
people. He didn’t feel like a legend, any more than he did with his father, who suddenly wanted his council on every move he made, and who had entrusted him with the military of Teher.

             
“I know you,” Jerod heard behind him.

             
He knew he wouldn’t be able to draw his sword in time.

* * *

              Another of the Emperor’s changes to modern society was banking ‘skrits.’ You could go to what was now the Bank of Eldador, and what had once been a moneylender, and you could access your account anywhere in known Fovea, if you knew your bank number and your password. A local truth sayer verified a client’s identity, and then you got your money from the local bank.

             
If you used any bank other than the one where you kept your money, they transferred it for you. Meanwhile you paid only a small fee per month to them to hold it.

             
Those like Glynn with vast wealth could perhaps be paid to leave their silver in the Bank of Eldador, which is what Glynn did. If these Eldadorians found themselves hungry to give away wealth, she certainly found herself wise enough to take it. Every year, the bank took the average of her gold and added two percent to it.

             
Having crossed the Theran plains, they’d come across the city of Desdarre, just north of the Lone Wood. There she wrote an amount on the skrit, and she pressed her thumb over it. She handed the skrit to the Uman ‘sayer,’ whose job it was to manage the local accounts. He sought out a record and then returned to Glynn with a bag of coins.