March To The Sea

their despot . . . not that their efforts to buy their lives with their information had worked, of course. But it did mean that Kny Camsan knew all there was to know about both the strengths and weaknesses of his last remaining foes.

'I share your confidence in their . . . honesty,' Trag said after a moment, 'and the K'Vaernian Guard is far too small to be a threat in the field. All they can do is hold their walls, and they won't be able to do even that once starvation sets in properly. But their accursed navy remains intact. Can we be certain that they'll be unable to fill their granaries?'

'From where?' Camsan chuckled scornfully. 'We've destroyed all of the other shit-sitter cities around the sea and throughout the Tam Valley, and the other clans sit on their fields and devour their animals. All they can offer K'Vaern's Cove is more mouths to feed and no food to feed them with.' He clapped hands in a gesture of negation. 'No, Trag, hunger will begin to bite them long before the demons weaken us. Then they'll come out and fight, or they'll go aboard their stinking boats and flee, and either way, we'll take their city and burn it to the ground.'

'And the League cavalry?' Trag asked.

'We'll see,' the war leader said, taking a bite of half-raw civan. 'True, the iron heads had more guts than these worthless Southerners, but there can't be many of them left. I doubt there's anything to the rumors, but we'll see. And if there isn't, we'll send some of the youngsters out to K'Vaern's Cove to see how it's defended. If it looks weak, or if they're beginning to run low on food already, we'll put in an attack to probe their defenses. But I am not going to repeat Therdan.'

Not, at least, until I've taken K'Vaern's Cove, as well . . . and made my position as paramount war leader something more permanent, he added silently. He didn't say it aloud, although that wasn't because he distrusted Trag. His older ally knew all about his plans, he was sure, despite the fact that they had never openly discussed them, and if Trag had disapproved, one of them would already be dead.

'All right,' Trag said after only the briefest moment, 'but be warned. Hungry or not, those damned K'Vaernians have always been too tricky to make me happy.'

* * *

'I can't believe we've gotten this close without these idiots even guessing we're here,' Honal said.

After being ferried across the river, the cavalry had taken back trails up to a point just outside Sindi. Thanks to the reports from the Marine long-range reconnaissance patrols, the Northerners had been able to avoid the scattered clusters of Boman on the north side of the river between D'Sley and Sindi. Not that there'd been many of those clusters to avoid.

Sindi, the undisputed queen of the upper Tam, had originally been built on the south side of the river, but it had long since spread to both banks, taking its impressively fortified walls with it. Before the Boman came, it had been surrounded by vast fields of barleyrice, which the constant rains were rapidly destroying, now that no one tended them any longer. But its true wealth had lain in the fact that it had controlled the only bridge across the river for hurtongs. The bridge itself was a massive stone construction at the heart of the city, wide enough for four pagee or twenty warriors abreast, whose completion, generations before, had really begun the history of Sindi.

Although Sindi had drawn most of its wealth and power from its position on the Tam, the city was actually located at the confluence of three rivers. A smaller stream, the Stell, flowed into the Tam on the western side of the city, where the road to D'Sley crossed it on a narrow stone bridge and then continued on through spreading fields to the distant jungle. The third river, the Thorm, joined the Tam just upstream from the city, flowing down from the northeast and eventually becoming unnavigable not far from one of the Northern League cities.

The cavalry troopers had turned progressively more grim as they drew closer to the destroyed cities which had been their homes, but Rastar wasn't worried. He knew they were fully focused on their target, and he was confident that they understood the mission brief. Which seemed to be working out almost perfectly—so far, at least—he told himself, because Honal was right. The Boman clearly didn't have a clue that they were anywhere near. Before the barbarian invasion, there would have been Sindi cavalry patrols this far out to spot them, or at least workers in the fields, but now there was nothing at all on the north side of the river beyond the city gates themselves. All of the field huts had been burned, and nothing moved here but an occasional basik.

So far, so good.

'It's a hurtong to the gates,' Rastar said. 'Clande, your group will stop here and hold. Get the surprise set up along the trail, and don't let anybody we may have missed sneak up behind us, or we're all pocked.'

'Yes, Rastar.' The young cousin might have argued once that rear area security was hardly the job of a warrior. But the only survivors of the League of the North were those who'd learned the lessons which had made their survival possible, and the hotheaded 'warrior' who would once have argued was one with last season's rains.

'The rest of you,' Rastar went on, sweeping Honal's subordinate officers with his eyes, 'remember why we're here, and don't get too enthusiastic. It's not like there's all that much we can really do if they're hiding inside the city, after all! We'll make a charge at the gate and see if that works. It probably won't, so we'll put some grapnels on the walls. When they start throwing their damned axes, shoot a few of them—but don't, for the gods' sake, let them realize how effective the rifles and revolvers are. When they get their shit together, we back off and taunt.'

'We've heard this before, Rastar,' Honal said patiently and squinted up into the gathering light as the morning drizzle began. 'Let's go.'

The last prince of Therdan looked at his cousin and nodded.

'Let's all be charming lures, shall we?'

'Absolutely,' Honal said. 'Sheffan! Front!'

* * *

'Julian,' Gunny Jin whispered into his radio, 'give me the Old Man.'

'Pahner here.'

'The cavalry are starting the demonstration, Sir.'

'Good. Give me an update if the situation changes.'

* * *

The massive gates shrugged off the thunderous explosion with scarcely a quiver.

'Oh, very nice,' Rastar said. 'They should be convinced they're impregnable now.'

'Yes,' Honal agreed. 'And so far, we haven't even lost anyone.'

That, Rastar knew, would change as soon as the sun rose above the eternal clouds. Already, the Boman could be seen on top of the high wall, running around without apparent direction. A few groups of cavalry had gotten grapnels up on the battlements and were swarming, slowly and carefully, up the lines. As the two commanders watched, a group of barbarians got one of the heavy hook-and-line arrangements unfastened and hurled it over the side. The grapnel, fortunately, didn't hit anyone, but the shower of throwing axes which followed it emptied a few saddles. Nor had all the Boman activity been as pointless as it had looked, and more than one Northerner flinched as a pair of massive hooped bombards fired from a bastion of the main gate in a huge belch of lurid flame and thick smoke. Fortunately, the Boman gunners had only a vague notion of how artillery was supposed to work, and they hit nothing. The arquebusiers who'd finally begun assembling in their covered positions were another matter, however. They were no more accurate than the bombards, individually, but there were far more of them, and more saddles began to empty, while here and there a civan went down bellowing in pain.

'Time to call them back,' Rastar ordered.

'Got it.'

The high call of the glitchen horn rang out through the rain, signaling for the cavalry to pull away from the walls and out of ax range, and Rastar watched with an approving eye as his troopers obeyed.

'Now to do the real work,' he said with a grunt of laughter.

* * *

'They're taunting us,' Mnb Trag said.