Zeboim swung his huge head from side to side. A deep grunt gusted from his nostrils. Tol’s men cheered him on, while he gave all his attention to the task. Sweat rolled down his face. Zeboim was foremost of the turtles; Tol was close enough now to see the pennants on the tent tops. A solid wall of Ergothian infantry had formed between the tents and the oncoming giants, a gallant, if futile, gesture.
Tol’s men had seized a second turtle but failed to wrest the other two from their owners. Ergothians on the captured turtles took up Tarsan bows and loosed arrows at the two beasts still controlled by the enemy.
Tol exerted more and more pressure with his right foot. With agonizing slowness, the beast bore into a turn until it was crawling straight at another turtle, one still under Tarsan control. Between the slowly converging creatures the air was thick with arrows. A quartet of missiles shattered around Tol’s naked feet and more thudded into the low-walled box that sheltered his upper body.
He glanced back to see the other beast captured by his men had halted for some reason, but even that slight movement stirred Zeboim off his path. Wiping sweat from his eyes, Tol concentrated on keeping the giant on his collision course.
“Stand ready, men!” he shouted.
The driver of the other turtle was so distracted by the general melee that he didn’t notice Zeboim’s approach until it was too late. Zeboim’s nose touched his comrade’s shell. Then he kept moving doggedly forward until gradually his head was forced back into his shell.
When the two domes collided, the impact shook Tol hard, though he was out of the driver’s seat in a flash, sword drawn. His diminished band followed him as he leaped, still barefoot, onto the other turtle. He snagged the rail of the enemy hoarding and swung a leg over it. Only a handful of Tarsans remained on the platform, and when the blood-spattered gang of Ergothians stormed aboard, the archers threw down their bows and begged for their lives.
Three of the four turtles had been captured. The last, the southernmost, experienced a mutiny when the Silvanesti driver proved unwilling to continue the charge alone against the Ergothian tents. Instead, he wheeled his beast away from the fighting and toward the seashore. The archers he carried, unable to control the beast themselves, had no choice but to abandon their perch. The last anyone saw of the fourth turtle and his driver, they were paddling far out to sea.
Their final thrust defeated, the Tarsan mercenaries grounded their arms and surrendered. Admiral Anovenax had managed to escape capture with a small retinue of loyal retainers, and they re-entered the city. But the surviving members of his army of thirty thousand were captured.
Back on the ground, boots and leggings restored, Tol reorganized his scattered forces. Casualties had been heavy. He himself had received a few minor wounds. Loyal Frez had not even a scratch, but word came that Darpo had been gravely injured. Tol found him lying on his back on the ground, shielded from the glare of the setting sun by a wall of fellow soldiers.
Felryn Felryn’s son, cleric, healer and a friend of Tol since his arrival in Juramona, was working on the wounded man. Sleeves rolled back to free his lean brown arms, Felryn probed Darpo’s side gently for the head of the arrow. Darpo’s brown eyes were open, his face moist with sweat. The scar that ran from his left eyebrow to his left ear stood out sharply white against his waxy pallor. His gaze flickered briefly to Tol, but he had no strength to acknowledge his commander.
There was no better healer in the empire than Felryn, not even in the imperial household. Time had thinned his curly hair and streaked its black with white, but the skill had not left his long, powerful fingers. He located the arrowhead and deftly removed it. Darpo gasped. Felryn spoke to him soothingly, applying a clotting powder to the wound. An assistant raised the injured man’s head so he could sip a soporific from a silver cup. Darpo’s eyes closed.
“Will he live?” asked Tol softly.
“I think so, but that is in Mishas’s hands,” Felryn said. “I dress their wounds. It is the goddess who heals them.”
Horns blared, the sound followed by the rumble of hooves. The foot soldiers parted ranks as a contingent of horsemen thundered in. Leading them was a white-bearded warrior with a black leather patch over his right eye. Lord Regobart had lost one eye in a duel when he was a young man.
“My lord!” he hailed Tol. “The day is ours!”
Tol approached the general’s horse, replying more temperately, “The battle is won, anyway.”
Behind Regobart were arrayed some of the highest warlords in the empire. Although their names were a roll call of imperial glory, Tol’s many victories made him their equal. Even so, most of them looked upon him as an upstart, a clever peasant whose martial success smacked of unnatural influences or illicit magic.
Regobart would not allow Tol’s caution to tarnish what he saw as the glory of this day. “The war is won,” he insisted. “I have summoned the city to surrender, and the princes and syndics have signaled their willingness to parley.”
Tol frowned. It was true they had vanquished the last sizable fighting force in Tarsis, but the city’s defenses were still intact, and the Ergothian armies were not equipped to conduct a long siege. In spite of the efforts of the imperial priests, the Tarsan fleet remained in place, a potent threat. If they escaped the bay, they could wreak immense havoc along the empire’s lengthy coastline.
None of these thoughts troubled the warlords arrayed before Tol. Triumph was evident on every face.
“When is this parley to take place?” Tol asked.
“Tonight, four hours past sundown. A pavilion will be erected by the Tradewind Gate.” This was the same gate through which the Tarsans had sortied that day.
The wounded and dead were removed to camp, and thousands of dejected Tarsan prisoners were marched away under guard. Tol paraded them within bowshot of the walls, to make sure the city-dwellers could see their defeated army. The sun, sinking into the bay, bloodied the white stone walls and gilded the hulls of the Tarsan fleet, still held by magical winds and hovering like birds of ill omen.
Tol hated diplomacy.
It was not that he opposed talk. In fact, he rather enjoyed it, and he thoroughly approved of any measure that lessened bloodshed. Unlike the typical imperial warlord, who regarded his warriors as expendable, Tol valued the life of every soldier under his command. Of humble birth himself, he did not ascribe to the notion, common among noble Ergothians of the Great Horde, that dying for the empire was the greatest honor a warrior could achieve. Tol preferred life to honor, as a rule.
Diplomacy, however, was something else again. It required him to wear his formal armor, a flimsy set of plate enameled in imperial crimson, to tame his unkempt hair and beard, and to try to look fierce and amenable at the same time. There would be interminable discussions of boring points of trade, land rights, tariffs, and indemnities; veiled threats and counter-threats would be made, the same ground would be covered and re-covered until a sane man felt like screaming.
In Tol’s tent, Kiya and Miya helped lace him into his fancy general’s armor. The sisters had been with him fifteen years. Ostensibly wives and hostages given by their father, Chief Makaralonga of the Dom-shu tribe, whom Tol had captured in battle, in reality the women were more like big sisters (each was a head taller than he) than hostages. Wives they were not, either. Tol’s heart lay elsewhere.
Tol studied his reflection in a dull brass mirror. Just past thirty, broad-shouldered and stocky, with a square face and long brown hair, he had grown to look very like his father. Even the short beard he sported, in place of the sweeping mustache favored by the empire’s elite, was very like Bakal’s. He suddenly realized he was now about the age Bakal had been when Tol had left the family farm to begin his training as a warrior in Juramona. Where was his father now?
The crimson armor, jeweled dagger, and velvet mantle Tol wore as a warlord and the General of the Army of the North couldn’t keep him from looking like who he was. In spite of twenty years’ service and the favor he enjoyed from the imperial regent, Crown Prince Amaltar, he still felt like an impostor hobnobbing with the high and mighty. The decade he’d spent campaigning in the wilds had only strengthened that feeling.
Kiya flipped her long horsetail of blonde hair over her shoulder and announced, “You look like a bushberry,” naming the bitter, inedible, and bright red fruit of a forest vine.
“A bushberry with whiskers,” Miya added. She had short golden-brown hair and a lighter build than her warrior sister. In charge of Tol’s household and domestic affairs, she had a skill as a haggler which made her the
