Fall of a Kingdom (The Farsala Trilogy) (20 page)

“With any luck, all we’ll have to do is watch,” he told the groom. “It looks like the Hrum are waiting for something, and our job is to see what it is. Still…Are any of you archers?”

“Two.” The man nodded. “Sanji and Bid. The rest of us are just grooms.”

“That’s fine, for what I want,” said Jiaan slowly. “Look, if we’re lucky, whatever the Hrum are waiting for will come, then our army will arrive and capture them all. But if we’re not so lucky and our army arrives before what they’re waiting for comes, then we’ll capture them and ask them about it. Nicely.”

The ferocity of the old groom’s grin would have done justice to a deghan.

“But if we’re not so lucky,” Jiaan went on, “what they’re waiting for will come before our army does. If that happens, we need to try to keep them from leaving—or at least slow them down.”

“You and seven grooms, sir?” The man’s brows rose. “The young deghan said there was near twenty of them. And he didn’t talk to me about anything but watching.”

“Twenty-one,” said Jiaan. He had to admit, it sounded like too large a number for an aide and seven grooms to handle. “But I don’t intend to fight them. How many horses do you have with you?”

After a few more moments of whispered conversation the groom went back down the hill, shaking his head and muttering. But he’d promised to send the archers up to Jiaan, and he’d said he’d do his best to find a place near the entrance of the Hrum’s smaller valley to conceal the horses as well as might be. Jiaan hoped they’d be within earshot, or his tentative plan would fail completely. Even as he’d given the orders, he felt foolish. With any luck, those orders would never be needed—Azura knew it wasn’t much of a plan, and Jiaan dreaded exposing himself to the other aides’ mockery. But letting the Hrum escape would be even worse, and Jiaan didn’t dare rely on luck.

He’d made certain the groom knew what to do well enough to tell the others, and he’d gotten all the archery support he could. But he’d forgotten to tell the groom that the archers should bring him some arrows! Oh, well, he’d borrow from the others. Hopefully, they’d never need to shoot.

Jiaan returned to his watch. He still felt vaguely embarrassed—half-born peasants weren’t supposed to come up with battle plans. And this plan was lame enough to justify that rule. But if the Hrum finished their business and started to leave, he had to stop at least a few of them so they could be questioned.

Embarrassment didn’t stop Jiaan from stationing the two archers in good positions on the ridge and borrowing a quiver of arrows.

The Hrum soldiers chatted. Their commander paced, caught himself, stood calmly for a while, then paced again.

The grooms probably had their horses in position by now. Jiaan wished he’d been able to post them at the other end of the Hrum’s small valley, to drive them toward the plain where the army camped. But he hadn’t enough men, and—

A man, wearing the bright-dyed tunic and trousers of a Farsalan peasant under his brown cloak, came down the valley. He approached from the border side, Jiaan noticed. His heart began to race.

If the Farsalan army didn’t arrive soon, Jiaan would have to make a decision. A command decision. His hands were trembling.
Just prebattle nerves,
Jiaan assured himself. He kept his eyes on the newcomer.

From his station on the ridge top, Jiaan had seen him before the Hrum did, but within moments, the man had walked right up to them. Was it only because of the wind that he kept his hood up, concealing his face? Several of the Hrum had their hoods raised, and Jiaan’s own ears were cold, but still…
Come on, let’s get a look at you.

It seemed Azura wasn’t sending luck Jiaan’s way. The peasant-clad man—the spy?—went straight to the leader and began to speak without so much as touching his hood. If he’d just turn and look up…

The Hrum commander held out a purse. The man reached out with his right hand, then changed his mind and took the purse with his left.
Payment! So soon?
Jiaan’s breath hissed.
A traitor instead of a spy, Arzhang take him.
A wasted curse, for the demon of treacherous ambition clearly owned this one already.

The soldiers were beginning to stir, packing up, preparing to leave. Having been paid, the spy would give his report. Then the Hrum would depart, taking with them the knowledge they’d come for. It might take marks, but it might take only moments! Jiaan had to interrupt them now, before information could pass.

Jiaan nocked an arrow, drew his bow, and fired into the dirt at their feet. They jumped, all eyes turning toward him.

“That was a warning shot. The only warning you’ll get.” He tried to make his voice sound deeper, calm and commanding. But it came out tense and breathless and sounded very young, he feared.
No matter, keep on.
“We have this valley blocked off at both ends and archers on top of the ridge. Throw down your weapons and move away from them now, and those of you in armor will be treated as prisoners of war.”

The traitor would die, but most soldiers cared little for those who betrayed their people to the enemy, even if they were the enemy in question.

“Stand down now—”

A dozen arrows arced toward him in answer, clattering into the rocks he sheltered behind. He hadn’t really expected them to surrender.
All right, time to supply some persuasion.

Jiaan put his fingers to his lips and whistled twice, praying that Azura’s wind would carry the sound instead of killing it. He loosed another arrow, and the rest of the archers fired with him, but their shots went wide since none of them had had a chance to find the right loft or to see what happened to the wind down in the valley.

The soldiers had snatched up their shields and helmets when Jiaan began to speak. Even as the first shots hurried toward them, they scrambled into formation, a rectangle four men deep and five wide; its lines were so precise that Jiaan’s eyes widened in amazement.

Even as he raised the third arrow, the officer dragged the spy into the center of the formation and snapped a command. The rectangular shields rose into position, the men on the outside of the rectangle holding theirs edge to edge to form a wall and the ones on the inside lifting theirs overhead to form a roof.

Two arrows, one Jiaan’s, hit the shields and skittered off. One struck more squarely and lodged in the wood but couldn’t break through. The Hrum were enclosed in an impenetrable box, so perfectly aligned and swiftly constructed that Jiaan’s jaw sagged in astonishment. It took Farsalan officers a quarter mark of shouting to get the deghans and their support troops to form a sloppy line!

He studied the shield wall, looking for chinks he could send an arrow through, but he saw none. The other archers, down the ridge, had reached the same conclusion. They looked at Jiaan, a question in their eyes:
Now what?

“Wait for the charge,” Jiaan commanded, raising his voice to carry to the Hrum below. “Then we will all open fire.”

As bluffs went, it was a thin one. The Hrum had already started moving toward the other end of the valley, still maintaining that perfect rectangle, when the sound of galloping hooves reached them.

Their formation wavered to a somewhat ragged stop, and the shields wobbled as the men beneath them did something Jiaan couldn’t see. When they fled before the horses, their formation would break. Shields would drop, and the archers could surely hit enough of them that some would still be there to tell their tale when the deghans finally arrived. What was taking them so long? Had Fasal stopped to comb his hair and change his clothes before riding into camp?

But instead of fleeing, to Jiaan’s surprise, the box started moving back, toward the oncoming horses. The men beneath the shields had turned around—that had caused the movement he’d seen. But what were they doing? Did they think they could fight a Farsalan cavalry charge? On
foot
?

Evidently, they did. The box of shields marched back to the wider place where the Hrum had been waiting and stopped, listening to the hoofbeats pounding closer.

Jiaan signaled his archers to be ready and nocked his own arrow. Now that the fighting had begun, his hands were steady. His focus was on the center of the formation, where, presumably, the leader and the traitor would be standing when the shields came down.

What were they waiting for? They’d need time to lower those big shields into fighting positions, to get weapons in hand, to—

The horses burst into the valley and thundered down on the Hrum. Jiaan, expecting it, looking down from above, saw at once that they had no riders, no men with them at all except the grooms who drove them from behind.

As Jiaan had ordered, the grooms turned and fled back down the valley as soon as they saw the Hrum. But the horses, enjoying the run, hurtled onward.

In a movement so precise that it stole Jiaan’s breath, the Hrum’s shields dropped, now positioned to protect their bodies from a cavalry lance rather than arrows from above. The last two lines held their short swords low; the first line canted them upward, above the horses’ backs, seeking the riders who weren’t there.

Jiaan fired arrow after arrow, as rapidly as he could nock, pull, and aim.

Some of the horses, those usually ridden by the support troops, skidded to a stop in front of the Hrum’s line, unwilling to trample the tight-packed men. But the chargers, true to their training, galloped on, knocking the Hrum off their feet, smashing their wondrous formation.

But there were no deghans to follow up on that confusion, to spear and slash at the soldiers in their stumbling disarray.

The Hrum began to laugh, even as several arrows found their mark and men cried out in pain. Jiaan drew an arrow and pulled back the string, holding it ready, his gaze on the milling mass of men and horses. The leader was in the middle—judging by the look on his face, he was swearing instead of laughing. Too many horses bucked and pranced around him for Jiaan to risk a shot.

But where was…? There! The traitor hadn’t fallen under the lashing hooves, but had taken advantage of the swirling confusion to escape, scrambling up the slope of the low hill on the valley’s other side. Jiaan’s first arrow missed, thudding into the earth below the man’s feet—feet that suddenly became swifter. The man swarmed up the slope like a fleeing rabbit.

Jiaan only had time for one more shot, so he timed it, waiting till the man crested the ridge, silhouetting himself against the windy, gray sky.

Jiaan’s arrow leaped from the string, hurtling through the empty air, arcing down…. Too high! So near a miss, it caught in the shoulder of the spy’s cloak, but from the way it shifted with the movement of the cloth, Jiaan knew that it hadn’t lodged in flesh.

Swearing himself, Jiaan turned back to the Hrum, but they’d already driven off the masterless horses. The shields were rising again, and several arrows whirred in Jiaan’s direction, forcing him to curl tight behind the sheltering rocks. He got off only a few more shots before the Hrum marched out of the valley, in good order, carrying their wounded with them.

OVER A CANDLEMARK PASSED before the Farsalan army arrived.

“They got away,” Jiaan told the commander calmly as the panting horse slid to a stop before the boulder where Jiaan sat. The commander wasn’t riding Rakesh now; the gelding was probably winded by all that galloping back and forth. The rest of the squadron cantered past, following the Hrum’s trail, but Jiaan knew their lead was too great.

While he waited for his army’s arrival, Jiaan had recognized how little time had actually passed since Fasal had left and how far the relief force had to come. He didn’t blame the young deghans for their late arrival. Much.

“So the grooms told me,” said the commander. He sounded like Jiaan felt, calm laid over a seething cauldron of fury and frustration. “They’re still trying to round up the horses. Probably be at it for days.”

Was he angry at Jiaan? If so, Jiaan deserved it. He should have found a way to stop them. A better plan of attack. A real deghan would have…“I’m sorry.”

The commander’s brows rose. “About the horses?”

“About the Hrum. I should have stopped at least a few of them.”

“With two archers and five grooms? I don’t see how,” the commander said. “It’s impressive enough that you tried. If you’d succeeded, I’d turn the army over to you and resign.”

Jiaan’s lips twitched, despite his angry depression, and the commander grinned. “Come on, lad, no one could have stopped them with a handful of servants and a ruse. They may not be deghans, but they’re…professionals. It’s too bad we couldn’t interrupt their business, but it’s not surprising.”

“Well, I think we did that much at least.” Jiaan sighed.

“What?”

“The spy, the
traitor,
only had a few moments to give his report before I interrupted them. Though it might have been a short report,” Jiaan finished gloomily. So much for his battle plan. The other aides would laugh their heads off.

The commander leaned forward, his face intent. “Tell me, exactly, what happened here.”

Jiaan told him. It didn’t take long. “But since he escaped, it probably won’t do us much good,” he finished wearily. The anger was fading, taking his energy with it. The frustration remained. “He’ll just meet them somewhere else, and they’ll get the information anyway. So I didn’t accomplish much, did I?”