Warlord

There were figures in blue jackets beneath the tarpaulins on either side of the rampway. A half-dozen at each, enough to snatch the canvas away and toss it backward. They were city men, like most gunners; it was one of the few branches of the military with a significant number of recruits from urban areas. Most of them had spent time in the bleachers of the bullrings, and they shouted the ancient cry as the cloth revealed the twin fieldpieces.

'Holay!'

PAMM. PAMM. Tongues of flame, pale in the sunlight; jets of smoke, dispersing. Twin cannister rounds, and at sixty meters the shot cones were just reaching maximum effectiveness. Every dog and man in the first four rows went down as if the ground had been jerked out from under them. Hundreds more were following at a flat gallop, closely spaced, none willing to miss the kill after the frustration of the chase. Some managed to twist themselves out of the column, riders and mounts skidding and turning with desperate skill. Some leapt the barricade of thrashing shredded meat, their dogs soaring in arcs that landed with their feet sinking into the mud of the riverbank. Many more added to that barricade, tumbling dogs and riders thrown a dozen yards or more to bounce and splinter their bones on the hard-packed dirt.

A sound over head like ripping canvas; for a moment Raj thought it was just that, as hysterical dogs behind him shredded the sailcloth that had landed on them. A black tree of mud and water blasted out of the shore, close enough to throw spray and gobbets of mud on the ferry's bow. Then another shell landed with deadly precision ten meters further inland, and another, wham-wham-wham, a row of towering black-grey dirt geysers. The steam winch grated, and the ramp swung erect to hide the shore; the shells pumped by steadily overhead as the ferry gained speed.

He looked up to meet Suzette's eyes; they crinkled at him in that slight quirk-lipped smile, so different from the learned charm of her public gestures. Gravely courteous, he took her outstretched hand and bowed over it as he raised it to his lips.

'Three cheers fer Messer Whitehall an' the Messa!'

The men began to whoop, helmets going up on the muzzles of rifles, gunners pounding their handspikes on the deckplanks; even the civilian crew of the ferry shouted and threw up their knit caps.

'Shut up! Silence in ranks!' Raj kept his wife's hand in his; the slender fingers drew caressingly across the heavy calluses of rein and saber hilt. 'We got away from Tewfik again; and that's no cause for celebration. I'm sick of getting away from him; I want him to have to get away from me!' He grinned. 'Cheer my wife as much as you like!'

Chapter Fourteen

'Gentlemen,' Raj said. 'That's the situation. Your Reverence.'

With that he bowed to the Sysup-Suffragen of Sandoral, whose presence was obligatory. It was notable that the County Legate was absent; the head of the County's clergy and Wenner Reed were the only nonregulars present. Aside from the two Skinner chieftains halfway down the table; one of them had his vest before him, hunting lice and popping them into his mouth, and the other was digging at the inlays in the ancient satiny wood with the point of his knife. The battalion commanders were present, none of whom could be slighted-some of the cavalry units felt offended that their infantry counterparts were there at all-and the Companions. And Suzette, of course; after what had happened at the ferry this afternoon, no one had quite had the gall to object.

Raj watched the faces for a moment. Expecting an invasion all winter, preparing for one, was not quite the same thing as knowing the Settler's army would arrive in three days. Even now in this high cool room it seemed remote, unreal beside the glow of sunset and the blinking yellow of Sandoral's lanterns as they showed in the windows of the streets below.

Three days if they were lucky.

'My children,' the Sysup said, touching the Star medallion on her chest, 'I am not a soldier. The temples of the city have been cleared, and my healer-priests are ready. With the assistance of the army's noncombatants, ably organized by the Messa Whitehall.' A nod of the lined, fine-featured head. 'For the rest, we will pray.'

'Messer Reed?' A soft-looking man, if you only noticed the body and face and not the eyes.

'Sandoral was founded as a fortress-city,' Reed said. 'So long as Sandoral holds, the frontier holds, and we deny the Upper Drangosh to the enemy as a route of attack. Our defenses are the strongest in the Civil Government, outside the capital itself; let Jamal and Tewfik sit in front of them, until they starve and their army rots away from disease.'

There were murmurs of approval; the local authorities here had been spending continuously since the last sack, three long generations ago. Sandoral had more than walls; concrete pillboxes studded the approaches, miles of ditch filled with razor-edged angle iron, massive covered redoubts filled with obsolescent but very functional muzzle-loading guns. The Skinners looked around them, bewildered: one stood and began reciting his deeds and those of his ancestors, starting with the last man he had killed. It took a moment to restore order, and Raj felt the eyes on him like the wave-front of an explosion, crushing and twisting.

observe:

* * *

— and the Oxheads were close on the northern horizon. A long earth barrage stood across the valley mouth, with a lake backed behind it; on the hill beside, Jamal's banner stood. This day it fluttered merrily, crackling like thunder beneath a clear blue sky scattered with puffball clouds, the beards and robes of the men who stood beneath cuffing and fluttering as well. They seemed in high good humor; to the south stretched a vast flat plain, laced with the silver glimmer of irrigation canals, patchworked with crops and orchards. Pillars of smoke were spotted across it, bending before the northerly breeze; singular and emphatic where villages and manors burned, smaller trickles from the woodwork of water-lifting wheels, more diffuse where orchards and ripe grain smoldered.

Jamal clapped his hands together with a shout; he was a stout man in later middle age, dressed in a burnouse and ha'aik of classical simplicity, black and white Azanian silk, wearing no weapon but the jeweled dagger whose curved sheath was thrust through his belt. He was almost ostentatiously plain, compared to the peacock splendor of the amirs and generals ranked behind him, the glowing colors of the carpets on which they stood; plumes nodded from turbans clasped with rubies and opalescene, and servants held aloft parasols whose canopies were intricately worked with Koranic verses in pearl and lapis.

'So many fires!' the Settler laughed. 'We have been careless, my sons. It is only courteous we should do what we can to put them out.'

Two younger men in gorgeously embroidered robes nodded and laughed with their father; Ali, slight and nervous-faced with a twitch at the corner of one eye, Akbar fingering his goatee with a plump hand. One-eyed Tewfik stood a little apart in the blood-red uniform of his troops, his face held like a clenched fist, but it was he who signalled to the uniformed engineers. An imam knelt and prayed toward Sinar, and the engineer whirled a crank. Spouts of rock and dirt punched out from the middle of the dam's face, in the center curve where it bent against the huge weight of water pressing down from the mountains. Thunder rumbled back from the stony walls, the ground shook. Then the first spouts of water arched out, beautiful and deadly as their spray cast rainbows across the gorge.

The dam crumbled like a child's sand castle beneath their power.

— and a cart trundled noisily over the cobbles of darkened Sandoral, pulled by men in head-to-foot robes; nothing showed but a slit above their eyes, and they stopped to rest often, although there were only a few bodies in the vehicle behind. 'Bring out your dead!' one called, whirling a wooden noisemaker. 'Bring out your dead!'

Artillery flickered and rumbled, the flashes visible over the roofs of the buildings, because no other light showed; nothing but the orange smudge of a building that had burned down to its foundations. The men pulling the cart ignored it; so did the folk who shuffled from an opened door, carrying a small bundle between them.

'Bring out your dead!'

— and a man lay in a roadside ditch. It was spring, and flowering vines grew across the stumps of trees; thin grass sprouted on bare clay in the fields beyond. The man had been very thin when he died; whoever had hacked