Great Kings' War (12 page)

Then Hos-Hostigos, with its seven other Princedoms. Reading counterclockwise around Old Hostigos, from northeast to south, they were Nostor (a former enemy turned weak ally), Nyklos, Ulthor (with a port on Lake Erie), Kyblos (with its capital on the site of otherwhen Pittsburgh), Sask (another former enemy now turned into the gods-only-knew what kind of ally), Sashta (a new Princedom created originally as part of the alliance against Hostigos, which Kalvan had allowed to remain in existence as a favor to Sask and Beshta), and finally Beshta itself. That was the map Kalvan had studied most closely; he hoped he wouldn't need to do much if any fighting in Old Hostigos itself.

Finally, the map of the Six Kingdoms (including Hos-Hostigos). From north to south, they ran:

Hos-Zygros—New England and southeastern Canada to Lake Ontario;

Hos-Agrys—New York, southwestern Ontario and northern New Jersey.

Hos-Harphax (or what was left of it)—Eastern Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland and southern New Jersey;

Hos-Ktemnos—Virginia and North Carolina (the richest of the Great Kingdoms); and

Hos-Bletha—From South Carolina to the tip of Florida, part of Cuba, and as far west as Mobile Bay.

Kalvan didn't spare too much time for the Six Kingdoms map either; he'd long since decided it was a waste of time to worry about grand strategy for the war to overthrow Styphon's House. They didn't have enough intelligence about the enemy's plans, potential resources or high command—which for the time being meant the Inner Circle of Archpriests at Balph, the Holy City.

They might have been better off if the "Council of Trent" Styphon's Voice had called last autumn had been held in Harphax City as originally planned. Somebody must have realized that Harphax City was close enough to the borders of Hos-Hostigos to be full of Kalvan's spies, or at least people willing to sell him secrets for the right price. So they had moved the Council, Archpriests, bodyguards, baggage trains, old Uncle Tom Cobbley and all, to Styphon's House Upon Earth—the largest of the golden temples of Styphon. Balph was a two-industry town, trading and religion, with Styphon's House holding most of the cards. A mouse couldn't get in there without being vouched for by three upperpriests; Styphon's House might not understand the military value of security, but apparently it knew how to practice it.

Without knowing what was happening at Balph, it was impossible to tell if Styphon's House was going to step out from behind the Kings and Princes it had always used as front men and wage this war on its own. There were military advantages to either choice.

Making war by proxy was always risky; the proxies might develop minds of their own, as any number of Italian city-states had discovered with their
condottieri
. In fact, the cult of Galzar the Wargod encouraged a general brotherhood of all mercenaries and fighting men, and there was no way Styphon's House could do anything about that without appearing to declare war on Galzar Wolfhead.

Kalvan rather wished they would be that stupid; the war would be over by next winter if Styphon's House made enemies of enough mercenaries. However, he doubted that would happen. Supreme Priest Sesklos might be ninety-two winters (or ninety-five by his reckoning since the Zarthani did not name their children until they reached the age of three; a realistic acceptance of here-and-now hygiene and infant mortality) and past being a war leader, but some of the other Archpriests were said to be shrewd enough to head off militarily disastrous decisions.

On the other hand, the Kings and Princes might not be willing to be Styphon's front men anymore. They would now make their own fireseed, raise their own armies and go to war without the consent of Styphon's House. They still might need gold and silver to pay mercenaries if they wanted top troops. However, other people besides Styphon's House could now provide specie; Great King Kalvan I of Hos-Hostigos, for example.

Styphon's House could probably find a respectable force of allies if it were willing to pay enough, in both gold and power. Styphon was not a popular god, at least in the Northern Kingdoms. Few would fight for Styphon's House cheaply. The price of the rulers' aid might bring down Styphon's House as completely as any defeat in battle.

Except that then the countryside might be overrun by mercenaries whose employers could no longer pay them, living off the land, gradually turning into armed mobs and turning that land into a desert. The idea of the whole Atlantic seaboard winding up like Germany at the end of the Thirty Years' War turned Kalvan's stomach.

He reminded himself sharply that he was speculating much too far ahead of available intelligence and forced the nightmare out of his mind. What about the one man who would certainly fight Hos-Hostigos whether Styphon's House helped him or not?

King Kaiphranos of Hos-Harphax didn't care one whit whether Kalvan worshipped Styphon, Dralm, Galzar or water moccasins like some of the Sastragathi tribes. He did care that Kalvan was in rebellion against him, suborning the loyalty of his sworn Princes and generally committing treason, insurrection, usurpation, riot, robbery and spitting in the public streets. Proper Great Kings put down rebels, and even King Kaiphranos (known to all as Kaiphranos the Timid) considered himself a proper Great King.

What Kaiphranos thought and what he was were two different things. The man was well past seventy, and it was notorious throughout the Five Kingdoms that he'd always wanted to be a flute-maker. He'd never rule and now barely reigned. At best he drizzled. Left to his own feeble devices, he'd barely been able to rely on more than his own Royal Army of five thousand, less than half of it at all well trained or well armed.

His family was another matter. Kaiphranos had two sons, Philesteus and Selestros. Prince Philesteus, the elder, was a soldier with a reputation for courage, which would be more important than competence in the here-and-now army he was leading. Princes and barons loyal to Kaiphranos or wanting to get rich off the loot of Hos-Hostigos would follow him, and so would enough mercenary captains to make a useful difference.

According to Skranga's spies, Selestros was morally destitute and called the Prince of Whoremongers in the wine shops of Harphax City. No one took him seriously, including his father, who'd even stopped paying-off the
mothers
of his bastard spawn. The only people who loved Selestros were the pimps and tavern owners who depended upon him and his cronies for much of their income.

King Kaiphranos also had a younger half-brother, Grand Duke Lysandros, who was that fortunately rare thing, a publicly devout worshipper of Styphon. If Styphon's house sent gold and men to aid Kaiphranos, Lysandros would do his best to see that neither was wasted. That made it far more likely that Styphon's House
would
send the money and men, and make Hos-Harphax a far more formidable opponent.

Kalvan stood up and started pacing up and down the room beside the maps. Rylla, who'd been putting her long blond hair up in a nightcap, looked at him in silence. Then she sighed, handed him his fur-lined slippers, and stood up to join him. He stopped long enough to hold her briefly and kiss her. His list of Reasons Why I Love Rylla would now fill a long parchment scroll. High on the list was the fact that with her he didn't have to pretend to be the sent-by-the-gods Great King Kalvan with answers to everything. He didn't have to be afraid to admit it when he was scared, too tired to sleep or with no idea at all of what to do next.

"Dralm-damnit! Everything—the survival of Hos-Hostigos, you, the baby—it's all going to depend on whether Styphon's House sends King Kaiphranos against us by himself, or waits to get help from Hos-Ktemnos and Hos-Agrys. If they wait, we could be outnumbered three to one."

"We could be," Rylla said. "On the other hand, time lets us find new allies, too. Also, if what one hears of Prince Philesteus' is true, he will be as hard to hold back as a yearling colt. He will attack for the honor of Hos-Harphax, even if he had no hope of victory."

"So it will be a race between Prince Philesteus' sense of honor and Styphon's House offering him enough to make it worth holding back?"

"That's a good way of putting it."

That also should mean a spring campaign against nothing more than a Styphon-reinforced Hos-Harphax. Say, forty-five thousand enemies against forty thousand Hostigi, total strength. Allow five thousand Hostigi left behind in garrisons to defend the Trygathi border, key towns, castles and depots, assume the Styphoni-Harphaxi alliance would risk throwing all their men forward, and the two field armies came out at forty-five thousand enemies against thirty-five to thirty-six thousand Hostigi.

Not hopeless, but not good either. If all the Hostigi troops were up to the standard of the regiments of the Royal Army of Hos-Hostigos or Ptosphes' Army of Hostigos, and all the artillery were the new mobile guns, Kalvan would cheerfully have faced two-to-one odds. They weren't, they weren't going to be, and there was nothing to be done about it.

He could hire more mercenaries, of course. But Styphon's House could easily outbid him, and even if they didn't, the money would be better spent on improving the Royal Army or his Prince's troops. That was another mistake the Italian city-states had made: spending all their money on mercenaries and none on arming and training their own troops. The
condottieri
not only hadn't been reliable, but they hadn't learned how to fight anybody except one another. When the French invaded in 1494, they rolled up Italy like a rug from the Alps to Naples in a single campaign.

So he had thirty-six thousand men, some of them twice as good as anybody they'd be facing, against possibly as many as fifty thousand of unpredictable quality. Definitely not good. Kalvan doubted he could afford a single major defeat, or even more than a couple of drawn battles or expensive victories. He had to destroy his enemies without losing the ability to protect his friends and allies from the vengeance of King Kaiphranos and Styphon's House. Otherwise those friends and allies would dry up and blow away.

He could afford to hire many mercenaries, either. Much of the Royal Treasury would have to go to repairing winter damage, purchasing supplies for the coming campaign and buying more horses and arms. Could he afford to take the offensive, in spite of what the Winter of the Wolves might have done tot their food stock and the draft animals for the wagons and guns?

"We can probably afford it better than anything else—if we can move the guns," Kalvan said out loud. Rylla gave him one of her why-don't-you-talk-to-me-instead-of-just-yourself looks and he explained.

She nodded when he'd finished. "If we can put all of our men into the field, that will lessen the odds against us. Also, if we take the offensive, we can keep all our men together and improve the odds still more. If we wait for the enemy to come to us, there will be calls for a regiment to defend this town and a battery to defend that bridge. If we honor all the requests, we will soon have no army left. If we ignore them, the people will wonder about their safety. Many of the soldiers may desert to defend their homes and families.

"Also, if we keep the army together, it will be easier to send messages. That's almost as good as growing wings on—"

Kalvan interrupted Rylla's dissertation on the principles of war by kissing her again, harder and longer than the first time. For a moment, he was almost sorry that she was pregnant. Still, at first, he'd been upset by the news: his first thought was of losing her to here-and-now's pitiful childbirth practices and sepsis. His second though was that the spring campaign would be long over before she could be in the saddle again—and Rylla was one of Hostigos' Best generals.

She was also someone who couldn't stay out of the thick of the fighting once she got within hearing range of gunfire. A recurring nightmare for Kalvan was finding Rylla the way he'd found a Nostori cavalry officer—shot out of the saddle by a charge of case shot, ridden over by his whole troop, then stripped naked by looters and tumbled into a ditch. He hugged and kissed her again until the nightmare went away.

Rylla looked at the map of Hos-Hostigos again. "We can move food and guns down to the castles in southern Beshta, especially the border castles like Tarr-Veblos and Tarr-Locra, as soon as the roads are open. That way we don't have to move the whole army and all its supplies and ordnance at once, or as far."

A depot system made sense if they were going to take the offensive. It even made sense if by some miracle the enemy struck first. A few well-gunned, well-supplied forts in the path of Kaiphranos' army could tie down a lot of strength. There was even a place he'd heard of near Three Mile Island where there was an old castle, Tarr-Locra that would stop up the Harph like a cork in a bottle if fortified strongly enough. If Kaiphranos wasn't brave enough to move until he had Styphon's aid, the forts could support cavalry units to scout and harass him all the way to the walls of Harphax City.

Harmakros in particular would just love a chance to take his troopers south and singe King Kaiphranos' beard!

"We'll have to be careful to give them adequate supplies and reliable garrisons,' Kalvan said. "It won't do for the main army to march south and be shot at by our guns because the garrisons have been starved out or turned their colors."

"I know the men for the garrisons," Rylla said with an impish grin. "The mercenaries that Balthar's men rode over at the Battle of Fyk. If there's anybody absolutely sure not to love Beshtans, it's those men."

Kalvan agreed and tried to remember the disposition of those troops in the new Royal Army. He had offered amnesty, land and a place in the Royal Army of Hos-Hostigos to the mercenaries who had been captured during the wars with Nostor and Sask; a majority had signed on.

Now he recalled which regiments the mercenaries were with. "They're in the Third and Fourth Regiments of Horse. We can send them to Beshta as part of an observation force under Captain-General Harmakros."

Before Rylla could reply, Kalvan realized that he might finally be tired enough to go to sleep and draped an arm over her shoulder. "Let's go to bed."