Indomitus Vivat (The Fovean Chronicles) (36 page)

     I shook my head.  He didn’t get it.  That might be better – let him get it into his head that he didn’t know everything.

     “I picked a fight with the first one to get the second to desert on him,” I said.  “They’re tribes – they feel a bond of honor within the tribe, but not much obligation between the tribes.  The Wet Belly forgot that he had the people he was about to betray sitting right behind him, however.  That was my mistake, too – I should have separated them first.”

     “So you wanted to leave one alive?” Tartan pressed me.

     I nodded.  “It will be easier in the long run this way, but I was afraid I would have a worse fight than I had.  I didn’t expect them all to run like that.”

     “We caught half of them,” Two Spears informed me.  “The rest will be heading for the women and the cattle.  I have men following them – in the morning we’ll take that, too.”

     “So we leave these people to starve?” Tartan asked me.  I caught the look on his face.  The Conqueror had been called a heartless monster, after all, who ate babies.

     I shook my head.  “I think you can guess what happens after that,” I said.

     “But it didn’t go as you planned,” he pressed me.  He leaned forward, and for a moment I saw his father in him.

     Two Spears laughed and clapped him on the shoulder.  “Lad,” he said, “it
never
goes as planned.  If you want to be a good earl or a good general, you do it when your plans fail, and you aren’t rattled and win anyway.”

     Tartan nodded.  If he could get that, then he would be ok.

     We had found their herds as I expected, and their women and old men, tending them.  Two Spears and Shela both assured me that they had grouped their
aurochs together for security.  No one in Andoran had a herd
that
big.

     Seven hundred head, an equal number of horse.  This meant real wealth on the Andoran plains, the makings of a rogue tribe.

     As Thorn had informed me a whole lifetime ago.  Now I just waited for independents to come in and offer to run my herds, and that had been happening all day.

     The tribes traded women and cattle all the time.  Men usually stayed with the same tribe their whole life, unless that tribe was overrun or fell on hard times.  Then it wasn’t uncommon for a tribe to dissolve and its members ply for membership into another tribe.

     They could marry in, or they could go through the ceremonies, depending on who they were and who they joined.  Wet Bellies and Drifters existed so close to each other that they could be interchangeable.

     My rogue tribe called itself the Wolf Riders, and I knew everyone in it, and had been accepted by them all, because they came to me.  I can honestly say that the horses didn’t seem to mind me, the
aurochs remained ambivalent and the two bulls could care less, so long as I stayed away from them.

     As far as anyone was concerned, that made me an Andaran.

     Two Spears didn’t plan to join my tribe, but he gave me permission to marry his sister, and that satisfied one of the two things I had come here for.

     Shela stood next to me, our baby standing between us, looking out onto the natural lake where the Great Mid River met the Safe River.

     “Daddy,” Lee informed me, “it’s pretty.”

     “Yes, it is,” I agreed with her.  Turning to Shela, I asked, “Does it have a name?”

     Shela had her cheek pressed to my chest.  “No name that I know,” she said.  “It’s too turbulent for swimming, and tradition says the fish stay away from the shore.  If someone sailed down here and went east, they would have to brave the Slee and the Swamp Devils.”

     No one did that.

     Her tears felt wet on my shirtfront.  She had been weepy this pregnancy.  At first I thought it might be my deflowering of the Andaran girls, but she assured me that she could care less about that.  She’d accepted a physical act that needed to be done.

     “Ready to be a married lady?” I asked her.

     “I lived very happily as a slave,” she informed me, without looking up at me.  The sun was setting in the west and this view looked really, really nice.

     “Ooooo,” Lee informed us, pointing at the pink colors.

     “You can stay a slave, if you want,” I informed her.    “But it is –“

     Her soft fingers closed my lips.  She knew – no need to tell her.  Stay a slave and I would eventually have to marry someone, and that would mean nothing but trouble.  She knew I loved her.  She might have seen it as weakness, it might have made her warm inside, she didn’t feel ready for that talk and we had our whole lives to get to it.

     Lee hugged her bebe and took a tenuous step toward the water.  The beach mud lay ankle deep, and what child could resist that?

     “Stay away from the water,” Shela warned her, absently.  I had tossed a stick in there and it had
floated off to the south faster than I could have run to catch it.

    
My new ships, my
Sea Wolves
, were out there on that natural lake, crews testing them, plying the wind.  One had snapped a mast before we got here, and another had nearly flipped over when a strong wind caught it broadside and all of its canvas had pulled it sideways.  The ships that had born us here had brought extra wood, and we could pillage the Confluni forest if we had to.  As far as I knew, they didn’t come this far south.

    
One of the Eldadorian captains who were part of the test had told me how impressed he was with the whole thing, and how much he wanted to go forward with it now.  Based on how I’d had to drag him kicking and screaming into the program, that was good news.

     We c
ould see the ships out there, the sun setting past the edge of the lake, turning the sky pink and orange.  Water lapped at the black mud at our feet, the smell of Men and horses washed over us from the camp when the wind changed and took Shela’s black hair.

    
We’d go back to Eldador the Port when the testing completed and update how we built the ships. This sort of testing is invaluable when you’re breaking new ground.  I had a general idea of how wooden three-masters worked but I couldn’t do the job of an architect and I didn’t know enough about it to explain it effectively to someone who could.

     Meanwhile, I had other things to do here.

    
I sat Blizzard on the plains to the east of a village I’d been calling ‘Wisex,’ on the shores of a lake with no name, with Shela to my left and Two Spears to my right, both mounted, and Tartan Stowe on a horse behind me.  A dozen lancers flanked us, most of them Andarans in Wolf Soldier greys, the wind catching their long, black hair and the dour expressions on all of their faces.

     A lot of the lancers were Andaran and most of them weren’t too happy about this new tribe. 
They saw it as an outsider intruding on their ways, which were sacred to them no matter where they lived.  We were facing three tribal war chiefs right now, all on horses and each with no less than a dozen warriors behind them, and none of them looked too ecstatic, either.

     “What are you doing on our land?” the first among them asked me.  An exceptionally fat Andaran sitting a stallion more draft than Andaran, his mustachios hung dow
n to his chest but his head shone bald and glistening in the sun.  He led the Sure Foot tribe from the center of Andoran – the largest and the oldest of all of the tribes.  He’d been appropriately named, “Hungry as a Bull.”

    
My first instinct was to tell him, “Whatever the hell I want to,” but no good came from that angle.  Instead, I said, “This isn’t your land,” which was about as neutral as I could be, considering the situation.  The warriors around me stirred.  There was barely a tribe on these plains that couldn’t go far back and say that they were related somehow to the Sure Foot.  Hungry as a Bull, literally, carried a lot of weight.

     His wife was a sorceress like Shela, and Shela was clearly afraid of her. 

     “We think you need to go back to Eldador, Rancor Mordetur,” he informed me.  The other two chieftains, Angry Lion of Thorn’s Hunter tribe and Black Hawk of the Bear tribe, nodded.  Their warriors shifted on their horses behind them.

     Not ‘White Wolf,’ I noted, as most Andarans referred to me.  They didn’t want me thinking that I belonged here.

     “And what of the
Waya Agiladia
?” I asked them, using the Andaran for my Wolf Rider tribe.

     “There are none,”
spat Angry Lion, a tall, thin Andaran in his late thirties with a bare chest and hair down past his arm pits.  His mustachios weren’t past his chin – he hadn’t been a chieftain long.

     “They can be Wet Bellies or Drifters,” Black Hawk, a sturdy looking man with hair shot with grey, wearing a leather breast guard, his arms poking out muscular from its sides. 

     “Or they can be dead,” a warrior from behind him commented.

     None of the chieftains reacted to him.  I wouldn’t have put up with that from one of my warriors personally, but there you go.

     “I’ve recognized this tribe,” Two Spears informed them, putting his hands on his saddle’s horn, leaning forward so that his long hair touched his horse’s mane.  “I’ve given him permission to marry my sister.”

     “You live in Eldador,” Hungry informed him, his heavy-set face bland.  “You don’t speak for your father’s tribe.”

     “Or you do, and they can die, too,” the same warrior said from behind the chieftains.

     I had my opening.  “Who is this yapping dog, who speaks for you?” I demanded, pointing at the Andaran on his horse.

     Two of these men had been chieftains a long time, and didn’t bite like I’d hoped they would.  “He’s no concern of yours,” Angry Lion said.

     “Then tell him to shut up, so I don’t have to hear him,” I said.

     To my surprise, Black Hawk turned and told the man, “Quiet yourself.”  He frowned deeply but he didn’t say anything.  I’d hoped I could pick a fight with him and then distract the rest from this confrontation.

     That wasn’t going to happen.

     “These people pledged themselves to me to protect them,” I told him.  “I can’t let you attack them.”

     I pointed at the one I’d singled out.  “I can’t let warriors like that prey on them, either.”

     “That isn’t your concern,” Angry Lion informed me.  “You’re not Andaran, you’re not using them to call yourself Andaran, or to call your children Andaran. You’re not bringing your Eldadorian nation here.”

     The
Pequot and the Mohicans and the Cherokee probably said the same thing to English settlers at one point.

     It didn’t work out well for them.

     “You think you can stop me?” I asked them.  “Three tribes?”

    
“You’re weak from fighting the Drifters and the Wet Bellies,” Hungry informed me.  “Your warriors still bleed.  The tribe you call ‘Wolf Riders,’ they have few men left in them, just old ones and children – they can’t help you.”

     “We can call twenty tribes,” Angry added.  “No one wants you here, Rancor Mordetur.  We’ll let you and your Wolf Soldiers leave now, but we won’t let them leave tomorrow.”

     That wasn’t much time to decide. 

Chapter Eighteen

              The Bully On the Block

    
     Being alone and outnumbered didn’t bother me that much.  I’d had plenty of time to get used to it.  I also held a piece of ground that the lake bordered on three sides.  Unless they learned how to fly, they weren’t coming after me except dead on, and I could hold more than twice my numbers dead on.

     Still, the elders in my new tribe had moved the aurochs and the horse herd to the south of us.  I was actually surprised at how few of the Andarans who’d come to this tribe had bailed on me.  Either they were more afraid of what was going to happen to them for joining me than of what would happen for staying with me, or I was a better leader than I gave myself credit for.

     I’d sent a portion of my fleet home and just left the Sea Wolves here.  The sailors weren’t going to be a lot of help in the conflict but seeing the ships leave might make the Andarans think I’d turned tail and run.  They’d come to investigate, and that would give me a few days to dig in better and to put my defenses up.  Preparation takes time and I didn’t have a lot of it.

     Two Spears looked to the east and shook his head when the sun came up the next morning.

     “They will ride straight in,” he informed me.  “A few warriors from each of the tribes.  Already they have five, and twenty more are coming.”

   
Even more tribes than Hungry as a Bull had hoped for, I thought to myself.  Tartan stood next to us, saying nothing, and Shela had set up a tent with ‘the people.’  As the resident holy woman, she had the task of healing the sick, and we didn’t want for them.

    
“When do you think they’ll come after us?” I asked him.

     Two Spears shook his head, his mustachios wagging under his chin.  “Not today,” he said.  “Tomorrow morning I think.  Early.  They’ll have eight tribes by then.  They’ll start riding by and firing arrows – make your people panic, maybe run.  If your people run, they’ll think you’ll leave and they won’t have to fight you.”

     “Which isn’t going to happen,” I informed him.  “But they don’t know that.”

     The Andaran turned to face me.  “I could ride out with a few warriors, get my people, maybe a few tribes…” he offered.

     I frowned.  “You’d never make it over the horizon,” I said.  “If you did, I don’t think your father would risk his people, much less get here in time.”

     Two Spears nodded and turned back to the east.  “I think this will be a bloody fight,” he said.

     I had to agree with him on that.  I might have bitten off more than I could chew this time.

     Throughout history, people in the military looked at civilians as a liability and almost counter-productive to the war effort.  Or they used them to hide among, to force the enemy to kill the innocent to get at their true target, in hope they wouldn’t do it.

     Neither way usually worked out well for the civilians.  I knew that if I sent my new Wolf Riders away, the other tribes would slaughter them to get rid of me.  The Wolf Riders only existed so that I had a legitimate claim on this part of Andoran, but that didn’t mean I was willing to let them be cut down for no other reason.

     War expected certain things of me, but I just didn’t want to believe that slaughtering innocents was one of them.  If it was, He was going to have to communicate that to me directly.

     So rather than send the civilians away or hide among them, I put shovels in their hands and set them out onto the plains between this little village and the open stretches of Andoran.  While my warriors slept and recovered their strength,
women, children and old men turned the soil under the cover of darkness.  I maintained a few squads of horsemen farther out on the plains to keep the curious out of eyeshot, not that I needed to.  No one did anything at night in Andoran.

     Tartan Stowe led them, and I rode out onto the plains an hour before dawn to check on him.  I could see his surprise when I turned up on Blizzard out of the dark.

     He kept a lance with a solid green pennon on it couched in his stirrup.  His eyes were a little red from being up late, but that was to be expected.  He’d had a long night.

     “Your Majesty,” he greeted me.

     “Your Excellence,” I returned.  “Anything to report from the night guard?”

     “Nothing,” he said.  “I’m surprised – I mean, I didn’t expect, um…”

     “What the hell am I doing here?” I asked him, grinning.  The false dawn was cresting the horizon to the East.  Behind me the Andarans were collecting their shovels and picks and returning exhausted to the village we called ‘Wisex.’

     Tartan looked away from me and then back into my eyes.  “Yeah,” he informed me.

     “Better to surprise your watch,” I informed him, “than to let them surprise you.  You’ll be a leader some day, and you’ll appreciate the value of the night watch.  Keeping them sharp is worth an hour’s sleep.”

     He’d been trained by Glennen’s advisors and he knew how many battles had begun with surprising the watch and getting past them.  He knew why I
’d done this.

     Good for him, I thought.  Never good to let anyone working for you get too comfortable in their position.

     “Bring your troops in,” I informed him.  “Two Spears is going to put out some fast riders to warn us before their tribes roll in.  See if you can grab some sleep.”

     He nodded his head.  “Your Majesty,” he said.

     I trotted out past him.  Shela had wanted to come with me, but she’d worked hard yesterday and she needed to be fresh if Hungry decided to risk bringing his wife.  I also usually maintained a Wolf Soldier guard, but if I actually came across anything out here, it would be really, really useful to be able to outrun it.  This was one of those times when it was better to go alone.

     I’d been missing those times without realizing it.

     Blizzard’s hooves beat the soft earth beneath us, the light wind from the temperature change at dawn pulled at his mane.  I rode without thinking of it, but aware of him at the same time.  Blizzard changed my life in so many ways – more than Shela sometimes, though I’d never say that to her.

     I didn’t see anyone from any of the tribes, but that didn’t mean that they weren’t out here.  I could just
feel
that I had eyes on me, in a way that made my flesh crawl.

     Still, it came as a complete surprise when a tiny figure sprung up out of the long grass behind me, sprinted up behind Blizzard and, before the stallion could react, leapt up onto his butt, thin but strong arms wrapping themselves around my middle, heels seating themselves at the horse’s midsection.

     Blizzard reared in surprise and anger.  I leaned forward and grabbed his mane in my left hand, instinctively leaving my sword arm free.  A rearing horse is a very dangerous thing – the animal could flip over backwards and his saddle could break his spine.  He could crush his rider or impale him on a saddle’s pommel.  An inexperienced rider could lean backwards and fall over and be stomped, or trip the horse, or haul back on the reins and pull the horse down on top of him.

     I just swore – I think in three languages.

     Blizzard settled and didn’t try to buck us both off.  I turned in my saddle, as much as my armor would let me, and found the mischievous grey eyes of the Aschire girl who wasn’t supposed to be here – at least, not yet.

     I couldn’t say that she wasn’t welcome.

     An hour past the true dawn, the first of the Andarans trotted their horses up over the horizon to our east.  One hundred fifty of them by my best count, though they mulled around and changed directions quite often, and that made it hard to be sure.

     Nearly two hundred squads of Wolf Soldier infantry aligned themselves on the plains between them and the growing village called Wisex.  Their formation resembled a sideways ‘U’, strong on the flanks and less in the middle in preparation for the sort of sweeping attacks I’d expect from light cavalry.

     Within the ‘U’, one thousand eight hundred lancers sat their horses, pennons snapping on the ends of their weapons.  Many of them were Andaran and knew exactly what to expect.

     The Andarans shot an arrow into the air.  It caught fire after it took flight – a signal that they wanted to speak before the fought.

     And that they’d brought a Sorceress.  Sitting Blizzard, I turned my head to where Shela sat on a stretched hide with two young girls who were serving her as apprentices.  She’d surrounded herself with various pots and piles of things she needed for more challenging spell casting, or at least that’s what I guessed she’d use them for.  She didn’t turn her face up to the sky, but then I had to assume she’d known before the rest of us that
Hungry as a Bull had brought his wife to face her.

     I sighed.  Negotiating was pointless.  I wasn’t leaving and neither were they.  Two Spears sat an Andaran stallion to my left and I said to him without turning, “Hold the line,
and don’t charge no matter what happens.  They might be trying just to kill me to throw you off.”

     “You think then maybe you shouldn’t go?” Tartan voiced his opinion from my other side.  I smiled – about time he started acting like a teen ager.

     I turned to him.  “You want to go instead?” I asked him.

     He straightened, turned his face to the East, and kicked his horse.

     “Whoa, whoa, whoa!” I shouted after him, and gave Blizzard a kick to catch up with him.  Fifty mounted Wolf Soldiers followed after us.  He didn’t stop so I caught him up.

     “You got brave,” I commented as we trotted out together.

     He didn’t turn to face me.  “I’m tired of this,” he said.  “All the posturing, all the threats.  They want to fight, let’s just get it over with.”

     I smiled again.  A new development in his education – his father the tactician was coming out in him, and that was a good thing.  His father, though, was a ‘jump in and fight them’ kind of guy, and that wasn’t going to necessarily win the day here.

     “Let’s see what they have to say first,” I informed him.  That got his attention.  “They know I’m not going to move if I haven’t already, and they haven’t attacked yet.  I have no problem with no more of my men dying.”

     Tartan shook his head.  We followed what was becoming a beaten path down the center of the little peninsula we were guarding.  It had grown wide enough for three horses to ride abreast, so we progressed down it double-file, my riders behind us. 
The enemy had arrows and they were good with them – there was no point in me hiding in the middle.

     Tartan stayed quiet and we crossed the distance to the
Andarans in a few more minutes, the clip-clop of our horses’ steel-shod hooves on hard-packed dirt our only accompaniment.

     Angry Lion and Black Hawk sat their own horses at the head of a few hundred Andarans.  From the looks of things I’d gotten the number right.  They formed a half-circle in front of us with the two chieftains at the center, right in front of us.  My lancers formed up in a triangle behind me.

     I couldn’t keep out of my head the idea that there existed a lot of geometry in all of this.  If I ever got back to my own Earth, I owed my old math teacher an apology.

    
Hungry was nowhere to be seen.  Neither was his wife.  I stopped my horse just within their half-circle, holding up my hand to halt the riders behind me.  Both sides stood quiet, staring at the other.  As I’d said before, there exists a science to this, and I wasn’t going to be the first one to speak, even if the sun went down behind me.

     I didn’t have to wait that long.  “You aren’t going to leave?” Angry asked me, more of an accusation than a question.  The heavier Black Hawk folded his arms in front of himself.

     Beyond him, past a natural rise in the terrain, were the collected tribes they’d rallied, dozens of tribes collected together in a patchwork that stretched back over the horizon, thousands of warriors.

     Now they had me thinking of Custer at Little Bighorn.  Custer also went looking for a fight, as I recalled it.

     The air should be filled with dust from their movement, but it wasn’t.  They moved in each others’ tracks to minimize their signature.  They were clever and disciplined.

     I looked Angry in the eyes and I said, “I don’t run.”

     “You
do
bleed,” Black Hawk informed me, his face flat. “And you
will
die.”

     I allowed myself a little smile.  “A lot of people have said that to me,” I informed him.  “They’re all dead, and I’m not.”

     “Take your people, your Andarans included, and walk to Eldador,” Angry ordered me.  “No one will bother you.  You can leave here.”

     I shook my head and folded my own arms over my breastplate in imitation of him.  I needed this place.  I could leave and come back with more warriors, but they’d do the same, and maybe then I’d have the Fovean High Council involved.  They’d love an opportunity to come after me, especially away from home.
     “Go back and die with your ‘Wolf Riders,’” Black Hawk told me.  He wanted this fight.  He might be the older warrior, the grey in his hair telling, but he was the one with the temper, not the younger Angry Lion.”