March To The Sea

something moved up behind him.

'Good luck, you two,' Roger said. The prince was riding his huge war pagee again, with that weird creature from the far lands and his war slave up on her back. It was fortunate indeed, Rastar reflected, that the captain's plan didn't require Roger to cross the river. Getting that huge beast on a barge would have been far worse than unpleasant.

The last prince of fallen Therdan looked past the human and his odd companions to the troop of cavalry following along behind the pagee. Chim Pri, the troop leader, was a cousin of sorts, a distant one, but he'd shown great promise on the retreat and in Diaspra. He also worshiped the ground Roger strode on, so detailing his troop as bodyguards—whatever the captain might call it—had been an easy decision.

Rastar was hard put not to grunt in laughter at the sight of the brand-new banner snapping in the breeze beside Patty. It had been Honal's idea to have the thing made, but Rastar had gotten behind and pushed once his cousin suggested it. It hadn't been easy to get it made without Roger's discovering that they were up to something, but the expression on the prince's face when it was formally presented had made all of the secrecy and skulking about eminently worthwhile. Rastar hadn't been certain whether Roger wanted to laugh or shoot them on the spot, which was more or less what he'd expected. What he hadn't expected was the fierce pride the prince's new personal cavalry troop took in their banner.

Rastar watched the stiff breeze blow the dianda standard straight out to display the basik head. Of course, it didn't depict quite a standard basik. This one lacked the timidly inoffensive and stupid expression of the original, and the mouthful of needle-sharp fangs—clearly exposed in a particularly nasty-looking human-style grin—were hardly part of the issue equipment of the garden-variety basik.

On the other hand, they went very well with the incredibly deadly basik who commanded the cavalry riding under it.

'Good luck yourself,' Rastar told him now. 'And try not to get killed. Captain Pahner would do all manner of incredibly painful things to me if you did something that stupid.'

'Coward,' Roger said, and Rastar shook a playful fist up at him.

'Just make sure you're ready when we come scampering back,' Honal put in with a grunt of laughter.

'We will be,' Roger said. 'I swear it.'

Rastar stuck out a true-hand, and Roger leaned down to take it.

'Keep your powder dry,' the human said in a voice which was only half-teasing.

'We will.' The Northern prince spurred his war civan, and the beast easily trotted down the planks onto the barge beside Honal's recalcitrant mount. 'See you in Sindi.'

* * *

'No!' Kny Camsan, paramount war leader of the Boman, slammed a fisted true- hand onto the table hard enough to send half the cups flying into the air and spill wine everywhere. Not that it mattered particularly, for the floor of the former throne room was well over a centimeter deep in food and other debris. The once splendid chamber reeked like a midden, but the barbarians lying on mats of straw atop the mire paid no more attention to the muck than they did to the stench.

'We have those K'Vaernian bastards right where we want them,' the war leader continued in grating tones, 'and I, for one, have no intention of throwing myself at their walls until they're a hell of a lot weaker than they are right now. I am not letting anyone repeat Therdan.'

There was a mutter of agreement at that. The war leader who'd decided that Therdan could simply be overrun with enough bodies had died in the second wave, but Boman in fighting frenzy weren't precisely noted for tactical flexibility, and the waves had continued while the tribal leaders argued over who would replace him. And while they argued, nearly a tenth part of the combined clans had died.

'K'Vaern's Cove isn't Therdan,' Knitz De'n argued. 'And they're just sitting there like knivet in a burrow. They obviously aren't going to send forces out, and if they won't come out to fight, we should strike them now. Instead, we sit in our own shit in this foul city when we should be on the trail to war, not hiding behind walls!'

'He has a point,' Mnb Trag said mildly. The old chieftain was Camsan's closest adviser, but he was also smart enough to appear receptive to the suggestions and demands of others. It was, as he'd shown Camsan, one of the most effective ways to defuse those demands. Unfortunately, it worked better for an adviser or the chieftain of a single clan than it did for a paramount war leader, and Camsan glowered at De'n.

'Let the damned shit-sitters break their teeth on walls for a change!' he shot back. 'If you want to attack K'Vaern's Cove, go ahead, but I shall remain here until they're on their knees. And when they're weak enough, then we'll destroy that city and return to our homes. That's what we swore—that's what you swore—to do. To remain as long as it took to destroy the Southerners once and for all.'

'And that's what we want to do!' Knitz De'n snapped. 'Let the shit-sitters hide inside their walls if they want—we are the warriors of the Boman!'

The women came out with new cups of wine and more cooked meat. The herds of turom and pagee which had supported the city now feasted on its fields, and the Boman feasted on them. When they were gone, the clans would have to move as well, but not yet. And when they did move, Camsan intended to accomplish something no other Boman chieftain had ever accomplished. Which, of course, was the true reason so many of the other clans' women and children were here at Sindi under the 'protection' of his own clan and its closest allies.

Not that he was prepared to explain any of that to De'n. The young firebrand was too arrogant and ambitious to be admitted to all of Camsan's plans. Unfortunately, Camsan knew De'n spoke for a growing fraction of even those warriors in Sindi, so he dared not simply ignore him, either.

'Perhaps there's some point to your argument,' the war leader told the younger tribesman as one of the women replaced his own wine cup. 'I won't rush to attack the walls of K'Vaern's Cove, but we are Boman, and even the sharpest ax grows dull if it's allowed to rust too long upon the wall. I would not have you grow rusty when I'll soon have need of your strong arm, Knitz De'n, and there are reports of League cavalry on the land road from K'Vaern's Cove to D'Sley. Why don't you take your band and go see what's happening? If you find any of those League shit-sitters, kill them for us, and take their goods for your own. Then check D'Sley and make sure the shit- sitters aren't trying to rebuild it or something.'

De'n looked at him for a long moment, obviously aware that he was about to be dispatched on a task which was little more than make-work designed to get him out from under Camsan's feet. Yet his own demands for a more active policy left him little choice but to obey, and so he stood and walked out without another word.

Mnb Trag rubbed his horns as he watched him go.

'We do need to do something soon,' Trag said much more quietly to Camsan. 'He's not the only one complaining.'

'I know he's not,' Camsan responded, equally quietly. 'And I also know that if we sit here long enough, the plague demons will begin to carry off our warriors.' The nomadic Boman had developed very little of the resistance to diseases which city dwellers required, particularly on a planet like Marduk, where no one had ever heard of the germ theory of disease or the necessity for public hygiene. 'But if our prisoners spoke truthfully, then K'Vaern's Cove isn't nearly so well supplied as we'd feared, now is it? And,' the war leader added with an evil chuckle, 'I feel confident somehow that they were truthful with us, don't you?'

It was Trag's turn to chuckle. The greatest prize the Boman had taken in their entire campaign had been the capture of Tor Cant, the shit-sitter whose treachery had united the clans—however temporarily—at last. It was hard to believe that even he could have been stupid enough to allow himself to be taken alive, but Trag had come to the conclusion that there was nothing Tor Cant hadn't been stupid enough to do. It was a pity, in some ways, because for all of his stupidity the one-time Despot of Sindi had possessed a certain devious cunning. He might have amounted to something if he'd had a single sekr of brain or even a trace of backbone to go with that quality.

Fortunately for the Boman, he'd had neither. It had taken him almost six days to die, but he'd told them everything they could ever have wanted to know about his betrayals of his fellow shit-sitters before the first iron had even begun to glow. Most of the 'councilors' and advisers they'd captured with him had taken their cue from