Kingdom River

He spoke to them in turn, and most – those in least agony – could listen, even make reassuring faces to comfort him. Two of them tried to make jokes.

'… Sir, didn't think it was possible for a trooper to outrun her horse. But by Mountain Jesus, I was scared enough and did it.'

'Mavis, you were just charging to the rear.' That oldest of cavalry witticisms.

Trooper Mavis Drew had been cut across the belly. The wound was bandaged tight to keep things in.

Sam kissed her on the forehead, and went on down the line. Those who could see, seemed glad to see him.

'Where's Colonel Flores?'

The mercy-medic, a bearded older man, and tired, pointed to the tent entrance. 'Inside, down to the left.'

'He'll live?'

'Live one-handed,' the medic said.

The tent was filled with sunshine glow through canvas woven of the Empire's southern cotton, filled with that light and a soft, multiple hum of agony, the army's silence-in-suffering fallen away. Portia-doctor was with someone, bent over, doing something that made the person's breath catch and catch again.

Sam went down the narrow aisle to the left, and saw, at the end of a row, Ned Flores lying slight on a folding cot. His left arm was out on the blanket, the wrist a fat wad of white bandage spotted with red.

The man in the cot beside his was snoring softly, unconscious.

'Sorry, Sam. Not quite as planned.' Barely Ned's voice, rusty as an old man's, and from what seemed an aged face – no longer a young hawk's, handsome, high-beaked, and cruel. His youth had gone with his wound, and losing.

Monroe knelt beside the cot. 'No, not quite as planned, Ned.

At least three hundred more dead and wounded than planned.' He kept his voice low, 'I sent you down here to lose a battle – to lose maybe forty or fifty of our people, then break off and run.'

'Right… right.'

'That was only between us, Ned. I thought you understood why it was necessary to lose at least a skirmish.'

'I know. Necessary…'

'Our army's always won – never lost – and that's become dangerous. Even more so, now, with the Khan moving on Middle Kingdom. I didn't want him to think us a serious threat, and I didn't want the shock of our first lost battle, my first lost battle, to occur when we couldn't afford it. I thought you understood that.'

'Yes.' A long pause, eyes closed. 'Like cow-sore vaccination against the pops.'

'Then' – careful to speak softly – 'then why the fuck didn't you order the regiment disengaged after the first melee? Behind you was all the room in the world to run!'

'Well… tell you, Sam. Seemed to me… we had a chance to beat the bastards.' Apparently great effort required to get that said.

'Ned, you did not have a chance to beat them – almost seven hundred imperial cataphracts met in a pass at such close quarters? And you weren't sent down here to beat them!'

'My fault.' Flores seemed to doze, then woke with a start.

Sam stood. 'Yes. And my fault for trusting you to obey orders.'

'I know… I lost all those people.'

'Yes, and deserved to lose more than a hand, Ned. You deserved to lose your head.'

'You… can have it.'

Sam bent over him. 'Ned, we've been friends since we were boys on the mountain. But if that order to lose, lose and run, hadn't been only between us – and have to remain only between us – I would have you tried and hanged for disobedience.'

'Don't doubt it, Sam,' Ned Flores said. 'And what a relief… that would be.'

CHAPTER 2

To the Great Khan and Lord of Grass:

Neckless Peter Wilson, elderly and once your servant and ambassador, submits and conveys this report of information concerning the history, winning, and holding of North Map-Mexico by the young Captain-General Small- Sam Monroe – by whose order this is forwarded sealed from all eyes but yours, Great Lord.

Twenty-seven years ago, a band of fugitive Trappers – driven south from the mountains and ice-wall of Map- Colorado by the Cree – stopped to rest at Gardens, the town in forest and of forest.

Their notable persons were Jack Monroe, that mythic fighting man; Catania Olsen, a physician; Joan Richardson, an Amazon; and Tattooed Newton, to be revealed errant third son to the ruler of Middle Kingdom.

Within the year, Jack Monroe was dead – in tales, murdered by a bear jealous of his strength. Within this time also, Newton, with Dangerous-Joan Richardson, returned to the Boxcars' Middle Kingdom, where he came in time to his inheritance. On his death, years later – while arranging a reasonable agreement in Map-Kentucky – Dangerous- Joan was left to rule as Dowager Queen, and remains so today, aged, but no less dangerous.

As these storied ones met their fates, so Catania Olsen, caring for an orphaned Trapper baby, Small-Sam Monroe, traveled down to North Map-Mexico, and into the Sierra Oriental.

In the Sierra, after killing two men – one having attempted rape, the other having tried to steal her goat – Catania Olsen became physician to the savages and bandits of the mountains, and came to be loved by them.

Her adopted son, Small-Sam, grew to manhood in those harsh and freezing altitudes – a world largely peopled, as all North Map-Mexico had been, by North Americans driven south centuries before, as the cold came down. So their language was and is book-English, their ways also informed by those surviving copies of Warm-time books.

The original, the Beautiful Language, now is only spoken in the Empire of Map South-Mexico and Guatemala – and, one assumes, in the continent of wilderness below.

Twenty-two years passed after Doctor Olsen's arrival. Then, the Empire's Duke Alphonso da Carvahal attempted a reconquest of their lost northern territories. This went badly.

In a series of attacks along the western flank of the Sierra Oriental, Carvahal lost battle after battle – never, as the Warm-time saying had it, 'getting his ducks in a row.'

In these battles, the men and women of North Map-Mexico lost two leaders slain. A third, a very young man, was elected for lack of better. This was Small-Sam Monroe, and at the town God-Help-Us, he attacked the imperial forces by night, and defeated them. Then he sent all the common-soldier prisoners south, alive and whole, at the plea of his Second-mother, Catania Olsen, whose name is still praised as a saint's for mercy in South Map-Mexico and Guatemala.

The duke and his officers were disemboweled.

So successful as a war leader that no man cared to stand against him in rule, young Small-Sam found himself acclaimed Captain-General of all the provinces of North Map-Mexico – as they still are named in the Beautiful Language, Baja California Norte, Sonora, Chihuahua, Coahuila, and Nuevo Leon, now united.

He was urged to invade the south as the south had invaded the north, and so destroy the Empire. He refused, on consideration of that ancient stability better left preserved.

Now twenty-seven years old – though looking older – Sam Monroe rules south from the Bravo down into both Sierras, and east from the Gulf of California and Ocean Pacific to the Great Gulf Entire.

He enforces lightly in rule and taxes – but holds the towns, villages, mountains and fields of these fractious and turbulent people as with a fine noose, which lies slack unless tugged against.

He is respected and popular, but treated with caution, since his reasons for violence are often not anticipated