The Alliance (7 page)

He understood her hints immediately, leap-frogging to the conclusions she wanted and the first moment of danger had passed. He could still order them hung, but his brain worked now and she had to give it one nudge more. His men’s loyalty was valuable to him. She must use it.

* * * *

Kamran returned to the camp and found it quiet. There were sentries posted and every one was alert, but the rest slept. He grunted his approval and made his way to the fire. There might be tea in the pot he could see steaming gently at its edge.

“You’ve returned, sergeant,” the servant girl said. “Tea?” She rose with a conscious grace and went to the fire, tilting the pot to fill a clay beaker to the brim.

“Thank you.” He accepted it and took a draft of the scalding liquid, long inured to its bite by a hundred campaigns with refreshment snatched whenever available.

The girl, Helene, flinched visibly at his hardihood, but said nothing.

The corporal of the guard appeared at the far side of the clearing and hurried to join them. Kamran noted the glance he exchanged with the servant girl and knew she’d been talking.

“I was visiting the outer piquet,” the corporal explained, and felt relieved when Kamran nodded.

“What are your orders?” Kamran asked.

The corporal stiffened to attention and recited his orders. “Check sentries and piquets at half hour intervals. Companies are to stand to when the shadow reaches that stake.” He pointed a solitary stake in the middle of the clearing.

Kamran glanced at it. The edge of the shadow was an hour away. “Good. Stand easy. We have a Westlander in the second company. Do you know him?”

The corporal nodded.

“Wake him and bring him to me.” Kamran took another sip of tea. The timing was good. His men would be rested and ready when the smugglers arrived.

The corporal returned with a blond-headed man who rubbed sleep from his eyes.

“Have some tea,” Kamran said, and the girl hurried to provide it.

The blond man took the offered beaker and took a tentative sip.

“Would going home be a problem?” Kamran needed to know whether he was on the run from the Westland High Born.

The man shook his head.

“Good,” Kamran said. “Finish your tea.”

The blond man’s gullet must have been the same material as Kamran’s for he finished the drink in less than a minute. “I’m ready,” he said, handing the beaker to the girl.

“Good,” Kamran followed suit. “You,” he pointed at Helene, “put those aside and come with us.” He led the way to a path running up the hillside behind the cave, setting a pace that discouraged conversation.

Fifteen minutes later, he paused at an outcrop of rock the height of a man. “If you lay down on top, within the cover of the bushes, you can see the trail we’ll return along. If it’s us, come down and rejoin your company. If it’s the smugglers…” Kamran turned and used his arm to indicate one of the higher peaks to their right. “Take the women and you’ll find a pass on the left side of that peak leading to your home. The mountain tribesmen will pick up your trail somewhere along the way.” He slipped the rawhide thong over his head and withdrew a crudely worked gold figurine from under his shirt. “When they do, show them this, and say you travel for the Eagle. They’ll see you through the pass and down the other side.”

The blond man took the figurine and studied it. “This is a chief’s totem.” He looked up and seemed to see the three thin white lines on Kamran’s cheeks for the first time. “Yours?”

Kamran nodded.

The girl, Helene, had listened without comment, a rare trait in a peasant woman. Now she stood tall and proud. “I will see he returns this to you when you are victorious.” She’d been too long with the High Born. She even spoke like one.

Kamran ignored her. “You have your orders,” he told the Westlander. “See they are carried out.”

The blond man straightened and nodded. “Yes, sergeant.”

Kamran held his gaze for a second longer, and then turned down the path toward the camp, barely glancing at the girl, whose face had gone white with rage.

He didn’t look up when they trailed into the camp after him, intent on honing a razor edge on both sides of his sword blade. He’d prepared for defeat, now he must ensure victory.

* * * *

Helene was seething. The oaf tricked her into admiration with a magnificent gesture and then ignored her. Worse, the blond Westlander had stared at her and then nodded. He’d recognized her, but she didn’t dare ask. She must revert to the role she’d chosen and sow what doubts she could.

Still, a peasant sergeant-at-arms who’d risen to chief in the mountain tribes’ hierarchy was a rare find. She could find many uses for such a man. She found herself studying his face as he whetted the edges of his blade, a cheap, clumsy looking weapon he probably wielded with deadly efficiency.

He was no peasant. He had racial traits locked in the bone structure she’d seen nowhere else, not even amongst the High Born, who were more racially diverse. She saw hints rather than declarations of origin. His was the sort of face she might skip past in a crowd, only to have her attention nagged by what she’d missed. She’d watched him during the hangings, sensing both his distaste and his sense of duty to the men he’d ordered executed. They were dying at his order and he’d do them the honor of witnessing the event, giving their lives the only crumb of significance he could offer.

A very odd man indeed
.

If he won his victory, she would sleep with him—as much for her pleasure as for his. He was already aware of her sexually. She’d seen his glances at the hints of flesh she’d exposed, seemingly by accident, and battle had a strange effect on men. She’d take advantage of his need to sow his seed after the threat to his immortality.

The prospect excited her in a way she hadn’t felt for years.

The bustle of the men as they roused caught her by surprise. Time was flying with unaccustomed speed. “Come.” She stirred her women. “They’re going out to fight for us. We must feed them.”

She’d tell them about the sergeant’s arrangements when the companies had marched. Until then, they had a job to do.

When she looked around again, the sergeant was gone and the clearing was oddly empty.

“Helene?” One of her women wanted instructions.

* * * *

Kamran watched the companies form up in loose march order. Today would be a sterner test for the levy-men. They’d had their first action and had seen death come to their companions, touching perhaps the man at their right or at their left. They’d felt its cold breath on their cheeks.

Today would be tougher. There’d be no wild melee to carry them forward against a numerically inferior enemy. They’d march to the ambush site and go into hiding, each man alone with his fears as they waited. Then they’d watch a group, possibly equal to their numbers, walk into the killing field and still do nothing until the signal made the bows rain death.

Two companies would form a hedge of spears to prevent escape. The other company, all archers, would loose flights of arrows into a helpless mob—he hoped. If it didn’t work out, the killing would be indiscriminate and there could be more smugglers than he had men-at-arms. His advantages were surprise and discipline. He must make them enough.

Win and these men would follow him anywhere. Fail and they’d all be dead before morning.

All or nothing.

He’d come a long way from his first battle, a shambles of an affair on a planet half way across the galaxy. He’d been part of a raiding party for a group of his father’s friends who’d been little better than space pirates. They’d been outnumbered there too, but automatic weapons against clubs and spears had made nonsense of numbers.

He was seventeen; full of his own self-importance and unaware how inadequately his father had educated him for the wider world. His broad base of half knowledge, so impressive here, had exposed him to ridicule out there. He could talk like the others, but the lack of recognizable qualifications doomed him as effectively as the bloodlines of the High Born. He’d stayed away three years, until he realized he could never catch up with the others around him, and then he came home. He must make his mark here, or not at all.

It had brought him to this desperate battle to forge the tools he must have to succeed.

“Ready to march, sir.” The company sergeants had taken to calling him sir. He didn’t discourage them. It might make them fight a fraction harder.

He nodded and waited for the other companies to report when a movement at the edge of his peripheral vision turned him. The eight women had moved forward as a group, the Westlander trailing them. When they saw him, they curtsied deeply as one, honoring him as they would honor a High Born. The servant girl’s curtsy was the deepest of all.

For a moment everyone was shocked into silence by the enormity of the gesture, and then his men responded, cheer following cheer, spears beating against shields in a crescendo of noise while he stood there and let it happen. He’d committed these people to a desperate venture; anything that gave them comfort had his support. The company sergeants stood smiling, taking their cue from him, until the noise died and then reported their readiness to move.

Kamran stood fully erect, taking on the gravitas of the moment. “Companies,” he roared, and then waited until everyone swayed forward in preparation to move. “March!”

One hundred and twenty feet swung forward as one to strike the ground with a crash. Kamran heard the women calling encouragement, but he didn’t look back.

“They were going to hang you because the economy is too fragmented to support a legal system with its courts and prisons. Justice is summary execution, banishment or a fine. Banishing you would have been pointless, and you didn’t have the where-with-all to pay a fine.” Anneke had called a break mid-afternoon, while Rachael still had the energy for conversation. They sat opposite each other on the banks of a creek, soaking their feet and munching the charcoal burner’s food.

“The High Born…” Rachael began, but Anneke cut her off.

“Squabble constantly over borders and lines of inheritance. They have no internal hierarchy, and it would take an extraordinary individual to impose one because of the network of intrigue and favors binding them to their present state.”

“Then they need the Federation.”

“No one needs the Federation, but the Federation.” Anneke sounded dismissive. “Freedom gives them the right to muddle through to a solution that suits their society, rather than having one imposed on them from another.”

“The Alliance?” Rachael raised an eyebrow.

“Do not interfere,” Anneke paused and grinned, “other than to counter the Federation’s meddling.”

Rachael had the sense they waited for something, for Anneke’s attention strayed occasionally, as if she listened for some illusive sound. If the sky above them hadn’t been so clear, Rachael would have expected a thunderstorm. The atmosphere had the oppressive feel of one about to break.

“We’ll travel by night from now on.” Anneke spoke abruptly, returning from a moment of abstraction. “We’ve reached the settled area. Once we’ve rested, I know a good hide a mile further down this trail. We can rest there till full dark, and then move on all night.”

Her words killed the conversation and they sat in silence until Anneke’s restlessness drove them to their feet. “We might just as well be moving. The sooner we’re there, the sooner we can rest.”

Rachael nodded her assent, unconsciously glancing over her shoulder for an explanation of the tension she felt increasing by the minute. It wasn’t Anneke. She seemed equally affected by the sense of some crisis looming just beyond their perception.

It made them hurry, as if distance might avert its effect. Anneke glanced frequently over her shoulder, not at Rachael, but to the northwest, where a range of hills thrust its way southward toward the sea.

“There’s a pass back there.” Anneke had noticed her attention. “My father called it this land’s Thermopylae. Only the smugglers use it, but it’s the perfect battlefield. He said events would conspire to see it used as one. I’ve a feeling he’s about to be proved right.”

A screen parted briefly in Rachael’s mind she saw the sergeant standing in dappled shadow. He watched a file of men entering an open glade beneath a steep embankment, almost a cliff, with a deep pool at its foot. A crowd had already formed around the pool and the others hurried to join them, shedding weapons and burdens as they went. She heard much laugher and joking. One man had already fallen into the pool and the press of bodies threatened to send others to join him.

She blinked her eyes and it disappeared.

* * * *

Helene joined the Westlander on top of the rock. “How long?” she asked. “The others are nervous.”

He was sitting in the concealment of the crowning bush, apparently relaxed, his arms folded loosely around his knees. “I’d guess the ambush has sprung by now. There’ll be hard fighting at first, people rushing here and there until a leader emerges to assess the situation. If he’s given time, he’ll focus on a breakout, throwing everyone at a single point in the line. If he succeeds, they’ll start rolling back the line on either side and the bowmen on top of the cliff will know the battle’s lost. They’ll fade into the hills and make their way home. The survivors of the spearmen will fall back into a defensive circle and fight to the end. There’ll be no mercy shown.”