When the civilians and the clerics had left, the staff came in and removed the lower table. Lioncel and Armand set up the map easel in its place, and a baron tried again while they were at it:
“My lady Grand Constable, are you sure about the crossbows-”
“Yes, my lord. I am. More to the point the Lady Regent, Her Majesty Mathilda, and His Majesty Artos the First are sure. Any questions?”
He subsided and she went to the map, drawing her dagger to use as a pointer.
“Everything I said to the good burghers was true. What I didn’t dwell on-this sort of thing is how we’re supposed to earn our keep, my lords-is that we estimate that the enemy are still going to be coming straight at us with between one hundred thousand and one hundred twenty thousand men.”
Grunts of frank dismay at the numbers, which were horrific; even a generation after the Change, the far interior was still much more densely populated than the areas towards the coast where the big cities had been, and that translated into more fighting men. She was, within limits, glad that nobody here was gasconading about wading ankle-deep in enemy blood. But then these men had been on the front line for more than a year now. She nodded, a crisp gesture of acknowledgement:
“They’re out to break us this year because if they don’t they won’t be in a position to try again. This has been a slow, cautious, methodical war so far. On our part, it was a delaying action. It won’t be anymore.”
Saints were invoked-which might actually do some good, now-and there was a flicker of men crossing themselves. Maugis de Grimmond shrugged and spoke lightly:
“At least the High King didn’t have to sneak into the Prophet’s domains and throw something into a volcano.”
That broke the momentary dismay, and turned it to grim amusement. Tiphaine nodded thoughtfully to the young nobleman, took a sip from her brandy-spiked coffee cup, put it down and went on. The point of her weapon traced lines above the silk of the map.
“That’s the good part; the bad is that the Temple in Corwin isn’t going up in smoke or falling into a pit and his armies aren’t going to flee in despair either, even though the High King has the Sword. They’re massing here outside Spokane, and here at Lewiston on the Snake, we think to keep their horses from stressing the grazing too badly in either place. They can’t move directly west out of Spokane; too dry once you leave the Palouse and hit the Columbia plateau.”
The red-haired baron of Tucannon nodded: “I hunted antelope there with my father a few years ago. I saw the skeleton of a jackrabbit lying beside an empty water canteen it had been carrying.”
A few chuckles at that; a lot of that country had been irrigated from Grand Coulee, but while the dams still stood the giant pumps that filled the canals had stopped flowing at six fifteen p.m. Pacific time, 1998. Those of the population who’d survived had ended up in places like this, where rainfall or windmills or simple gravity-flow ditches provided enough water. Nobody went there anymore except a few hunters.
Tiphaine waited impassively a moment and then went on: “There’s no fodder there this time of year either. We could hold the north-south line of the Columbia above the bend forever, especially with the Free Cities backing us up and supplies and reinforcements easily available from the Yakima valley and the baronies in the east-slope valleys and the Okanagan.”
Her pointing dagger went south of the great river, into what had once been Oregon.
“The enemy occupied everything south of the Columbia last year, nearly as far as the boundaries of County Odell, after that cluster-fuck at Pendleton-which doesn’t seem to care we now have their precious Bossman prisoner. And Bend fell a bit later, along with the rest of the Central Oregon Rancher’s Association territories. Then the enemy spent months trying to force the passes of the High Cascades into the Willamette, and got nothing but bloody noses from the Mackenzies, Bearkillers and Corvallans. Then they died by the thousands in the winter blizzards because they didn’t pull back in time.”
A set of shark grins, or in a few cases winces; this time they were trying to imagine light horsemen riding into the teeth of those singing clouds of bodkin-pointed death the Mackenzie longbows could produce. Or caught cold and foodless in the huge snowfalls that stretched from October to May at those elevations, with the raiding parties of the Clan slipping through the forests around them like the wolves of Hecate they called themselves.
“Meanwhile the forces that the CORA left behind are waging a cavalry guerilla all over the range country and the foothills east of the Cascades, every inch of which they know, with their families safe in the Willamette and the forts for supplies and refuge. So now it’s our turn. We have strong castles at all the crossings of the Columbia from the Wallula Gap to the Gorge, so they can’t try to cross in strength to the north bank-incidentally, my lords, does anyone want to complain again about the way the Lady Regent forced everyone to spend money and sweat on fortifications and stockpiles the last fifteen years? No? Good.”
Her knife-point moved again, through the rolling lands between the Blue Mountains and the Snake River.
“They have only one option; out of the Palouse and down old Highway 12 from Lewiston to Walla Walla, then to the Wallula Gap and west north of the river.”
“How are they going to get past the river at the Gap?” Tucannon asked. “The castles there are very strong. Not much point in sweeping down Highway 12 and then sitting and watching the fish jump and trying to catch round shot and bolts with your teeth.”
“Invest the castles and then use barges and pontoons to cross the river,” she said. “Unless they can take the bridges up near Kennewick. We have castles covering those, but we couldn’t build enough to cover all possible water crossings.”
The fighting-men looked at each other; a few smiles flickered into being.
Good. They’re starting to see the enemy’s problems, not just ours.
“Well, good luck supporting a hundred thousand men on the other side of the Columbia that way,” de Grimmond said.
Tiphaine nodded. “That’s why we can’t fight the decisive battle here in the Eastermark-”
“Why not?” a baron whose estates were near Dayton said.
“Here they’ll still be close to their bases and they can use the railway and the Snake River to bring up supplies. I’m going to fight one or two battles, making them come to me because they’re in a hurry, bleed them, and then withdraw westward north of the Columbia, harassing them with the river to guard my right flank, and ultimately joining up with the force the High King is putting together back around Goldendale in Aurea County. You will hold this city and your keeps; if they leave enough men to invest you closely… Good.”
“Good?” someone asked.
“Good because anyone sitting in front of your gate is out of the fight just as much as if you’d chopped his head off. Or better, because the enemy still has to feed him. If they don’t invest you closely, come out and raid their lines of supply. And we’re going to scorch the earth; I don’t want one kernel of grain or one sheep left for them-”
That led to howls; they subsided quickly faced with the obvious necessity, especially since the Count backed her energetically, along with de Grimmond. When they were listening again she continued:
“That’s why we’ve built all those castles; castellation makes an attacker’s life a misery. We’ll draw them west, and each mile they advance will make them weaker and drive them mad with frustration, like chewing on meat full of gristle. Then, when they’re stretched out and worn down, the High King will bring all our forces against them in a position he chooses and that they can’t get around. By then they’ll be desperate, with winter coming on and a hostile wasteland behind them; they’ll have to go all-out to beat us so that they can get at our supplies. They won’t be able to refuse battle, which means that they’ll have to fight on our ground and our terms. We estimate that His Majesty, Artos, will be able to muster around eighty-five thousand for the decisive battle. If we win that, we win the war-though it won’t be over that day. And that, gentlemen, is our strategy.”
And I hope nobody is stupid enough to ask exactly where and when Artos plans to hit them. Athena, gray- eyed Defender of the Polis, you who love the warrior’s skill and care and craft in defense of home and hearth and those we are sworn to protect, let this work!
That brought a slight mental stutter; it was the first time she could ever recall spontaneously praying about anything without a deliberate decision, even now that she knew there was something to it. And something touched her then, a feeling of chill relentless clarity like the flicker of a great spear moving faster than a beam of pure light. It was gone before she could be certain it was anything more than her own mind functioning in total focus.
Then she went on:
“Lord Forest Grove has been screening against their advanced elements, and will give you the details on their
