Indomitus Vivat (The Fovean Chronicles) (35 page)

     By special, he meant enchanted.  I’d acquired a total of six Dorkan wizards, three Andaran shamen and could get Avek to show up if I needed him. 
Eldador had its own Wizards as well.

     Wood working innovations that I’d introduced, such as the plane, had dramatically increased the speed and the quality of the ships these people could build.  Iron fittings that I had thought of as commonplace were new here, and our smiths were turning out not just the fittings but the molds to mass-produce them.  Dwarves had been contracted to teach our smiths, in return for learning the secrets that I shared here.

     “That
thing
you wanted, that belches our steaming sea water, is almost done, as well,” Karel informed me.  “I don’t know why you want it – you can’t make anything from steam.”

     I laughed.  No, you can’t make much from steam, but with a steam plant, you can move a turbine.  And with a turbine, you can turn pumps and saws and all sorts of useful things.

     Ancenon had asked me once if I could remove the salt from sea water.  Well, yes, I could do that, and I would, and then I could do a lot with it.

     We approached the wall. 
Wolf Soldier guards protected the one entrance past it.  No one was allowed near here, no one could see what I was creating.  The wharves in Thera and Talen were impossible to protect, but the ships were going to be finalized here.

     The Wolf Soldiers on duty were a pair I called ‘the book ends.’ 
Agtar and Belmar, two black-haired, heavily muscled Volkhydrans whom I’d saved from hanging in Ulep.  They were both brilliant Men, competent warriors and knew it.

     “What news?” I asked them as we approached.

     Each made a fist over his heart in salute to me.  “All quiet, Lupus,” Agtar informed me.  Like Belmar, his eyebrows met above his nose, forming a dark ‘V’.  “The masts are up and the Dorkans are chanting.”

     “Well, that’s news then, isn’t it?” Karel challenged him.

     Belmar regarded the little spy.  “No
other
news to report,” he said.

     Two Spears laughed.  He pointed an accusatory finger at Karel, “One day, one of these warriors is going to skin you for that hide you wear,” he said.

     “What is it your King says?” Karel asked.  “Many have threatened, but here I am, and where are they?”

     “Many have threatened me,” Agtar said, standing to one side to let us pass.  A steel gate stood behind him, a single hole in the giant wall, and Belmar unlocked it with a key he wore around his neck, “and they’re all dead, and I’m not.”

     “That was it,” Karel said.  He turned his face up toward me, his blue eyes sparkling.  “My version is better.”

     “So you say,” I informed him, leading the rest through the opened gate.  Agtar closed it behind us and Belmar locked it.

     “I could get past that security,” Karel informed me.

     “You’re getting to see it anyway,” I said.

     He nodded.  “I have some work to do here, though,” he said.  “When is Shela done with the young Earl?”

     There had been a ceremony after breakfast, and we’d elevated Tartan and given him the captured lands from Angador. 
There had been a bunch of peace proclamations, and now all of the dignitaries were going home.

     “They’re picking out a horse,” I said.  “It shouldn’t take long.  She’s got Yeral, Yerel’s daughter, with her.  Yeral knows horses almost as well as Shela.”

     Yerel was a Duke I’d displaced while still the Heir.  I’d promised to foster his daughters and his son.  Yeral had become one of Shela’s attendant ladies.

    
“Shouldn’t take all morning,” I decided.

     “I’ll get him to help me with some resources I’ll need,” Karel said.  “Him and that Hectaro boy, the Duke of Eldador’s son.”

     I nodded.  Karel knew more about that sort of thing than I did.

     I knew more about this.

     We entered the fitting yard, the final stop for ships completed for the new Eldadorian navy.  I was introducing a whole new technology here, and I didn’t want people knowing too much about it until we were ready.

     Uman-Chi Tech-Ships were enchanted.  They could sail against the wind, they could fire some kind of electrical charge, and they could do a couple other things I wasn’t sure of.  The only way to know for certain would be to take them on in combat, and no one did that.

     Their ships were single-masted, because that’s how they made ships here.  They were
clinker-built
, meaning that they used overlapping boards, riveted together and tarred at the joints, for their hulls.  While they could be rowed, they usually weren’t unless they were ramming. 

     My ships were three-masted and nearly twice the size. 
They wouldn’t be able to ram, but their sides were flat-planked and pressed with sheets of copper.  This would give them the maneuverability that the clinker-built ships enjoyed without the leaking.  They could put more sail to the wind so they could be larger and move faster. 

     With steam-powered saw mills and compressed-air nail guns which I had been working on, we could turn them out at close to five times the speed of any other nations.  We could carry more warriors, out-sail our enemies and out-fight them.

     Unless someone caught on to what we were doing and either stopped us or did it first.  That’s why we used the tight security.  These ships came into port from the shipyards on a single mast and the local style of jib, clunky and lurching, slow and difficult to handle.  They’d leave more agile.

     This was
one of the prototypes.  We’d have to figure out the positioning of the sails, the proper way to support the masts, the right size for the rudders.  I knew a lot about this because I’d worked at a marina and I’d studied it a little in learning history, but that hadn’t made me an architect, and the Eldadorians whom I’d put to work on these when I’d become the Heir had balked at a lot of it.  Even now, some of them weren’t sure I could pull this off.

     We’d see.

     “You want me to create this in Thera?” Two Spears asked me.

     I nodded.  “And we need a place to keep them when we’re done,” I said.  “
I was hoping maybe the Scitai-occupied portion of the Silent Isle.”

     Karel turned his face up to me and frowned.  “Not a good idea,” he said.  “We don’t have shipyards, we couldn’t hide them.  If you moor them off of our coasts the Uman-Chi are going to see them, and they’re going to get curious.”

     “You don’t want the Trenboni with their resources to get their hands on one of these,” Two Spears informed me.

     I’d been afraid of that.  “I can’t close off more of this port,” I said.  “I could close off more of Thera, because I actually own it, but then Thera’s going to take a hard hit in the purse.”

     The two of them looked at me like I was crazy.  Slang again.  “It would cost a lot of money to lose those wharves,” I said.

     Both nodded.

     “I need a place to put these things, where I can test them and keep the region quiet about them.  I need to be able to get there fast.”

     “How deep drafted are these?” Two Spears asked me.  Local ships ran shallow – some of them as little as ten feet.

     “We’re guessing twenty-one feet forward, twenty-three feet aft,” I said.  “We haven’t had one with a full crew, but that seems right.  Estimate twenty-five feet to be sure.”

     “So deep!” Karel exclaimed.  We’d walked to the ship’s side, where Uman carpenters and ship-builders were working under the direction of Dorkan Wizards in Wolf Soldier greys.  The Wizards would weave spells into the wood fiber, and the artisans would finish and seal the wood.

     My ships could launch fire – more effective at sea against other wooden ships.  They would be able to protect themselves from spell-casting and soak in the magical energy used against them and use it.  Like the spell that had shielded me from arrows at the gates of Katarran, my ships could throw up invisible shields against arrow fire.

     Their steel-shod keels could shock the water around them – that should be an interesting surprise for whoever tried to swim onboard them.

     Two Spears was smiling.  “If they’re fast, and you’re brave, then I think I know where they can go,” he said.  “And the best part is, you’re going there anyway.”

     I looked sideways at Two Spears.  He was smiling through his long
mustachios.  The scar on his face, the Mark of the Conqueror, was wrinkled in a smile.

     Wow, I thought.  It must be really irritating when I’m cryptic like that.

    
My daughter had been born in Life.  It was a month when battles ended and harvest begun.  People thought of wheat and grain, not swords and blood.

     So when two thousand Wolf Soldier lancers and three thousand foot landed in Andoran between Chatoos and Talen, it didn’t raise a lot of eyebrows.  People were busy with their lives – if Lupus the Conqueror came for the Andarans, he would have sought out their cities.

     On this campaign I brought my slave, my child, my blood brother and young Tartan.  If he wanted to be an earl of a frontier province like Angador, then let him see something of power and how to wield it.

     We’d been ported here in three prototype ships, the one from Eldador
’s secret wharf and two others that had been rushed to readiness.  I’d surrounded them with dozens of my own ships.  We’d passed Eldadorian Tech-Ships but they hadn’t tried to interfere with us. 

     Shela had been quiet for days now
; the two Andaran women as well.  Usually three Andarans would talk each other’s ears off exchanging gossip in the oral tradition, telling and retelling the same stories, making them a part of the tribal memory.

     Not this time.  All of the women sat sidesaddle, an indication that they were expectant with child.

     With Shela, I knew it to be fact.  With the other two, more like wishful thinking.  Little Bird and Sings Softly weren’t real happy with me and had made no secret of it.  Blizzard had snubbed their mares, and I hadn’t been too kind about it, either.  They’d also continued to offer themselves to me until Shela had warned them off, and that was just a slap in the face.

     When you get right down to it, I’m not a real nice guy.

     One of the girls came from the Wet Belly tribe, the other a Drifter.  Both kept to the south of Andoran.  That made it perfect – I wanted to check out an anomaly on the Fovean map and it could be found down there.  We forced-marched for sixteen days, the weather becoming ever colder, seeking out these two tribes in the south.

     My outriders located them –
Wolf Soldiers who had once been Wet Bellies, cast-out from the tribe, thieves in a land where honor meant everything.

     When news got around that I pressed south with that many warriors, tribes sent scouts to pick out our path and to get away from it.  We ignored them.  The Drifters and the Wet Bellies, once it became clear that I was bound for them, brought their resources together, their women miles south of the men, their herds to the west.  They waited for us as the month of Life ended, a line across a sea of wheat, the cold wind blowing tufts of grain like a rolling sea before us.

     “There must be over a thousand between them,” Two Spears informed me.  His sister rode next to him, quiet.  “I had no idea these tribes were so huge.”

     “Supposedly they fight Slee all year round,” I said.  “Small tribes would have had to move.”

     Slee looked like a cross between a Man and a lizard.  They can’t talk but they do fight in groups, and they are vicious.  They eat, among other things, the flesh of Men and Uman.

     “They look ready,” another of my majors, Dev Nevala, informed me.  An Uman woman, she had been Sentalan, and stabbed her lover for cheating on her.  She was faster with her sword than I was with mine – I really liked her.

     “Let them be,” I said.  “Two Spears, order your men to pull bows and arrows.  I want them in groups of twenty, to circle the enemy to the right and left.  Spread out like they are it will take us all day to fight them, and then we’ll be exhausted and they’ll be fresh.  If we can drive them together, we’ll hold them against the foot, and then we can bring our lances to bear on them.”

     “Why not just charge them one-to-one,” Tartan asked me.
Shela had picked him out a spirited chestnut mare with a thick barrel, muscles on muscles in her hind quarters.  He sat her next to Two Spears, on the other side from me. “We have lances, they have swords – they’ll never touch us.”

     “They have bows, and they’re deadly with them,” I informed him.  “Go one-to-one with them over a distance like this and we’ll lose most of the horse and have to try to take them with the foot – in fact, we’ll
never
catch them, and then we’ll leave here with nothing.”

     “So, we break up…” Tartan tried to work it out.

     “We make so many, smaller targets that their line becomes a liability,” Two Spears informed him.  “They’ll break up on their own, and we’ll draw them into the center where we can engage them.”

     Tartan nodded.  That might happen if we fought, of course.  There were no guarantees.  Not in this business.

     I kicked Blizzard’s barrel and he started to trot forward.  Shela followed with the two Andaran women, Tartan and twenty lancers.  Two Spears and Dev held the troops as they unpacked their arrows.  Our supply train, half empty now, trundled far to the rear, a token guard on it.

     Twenty came out from their side, as well.  They were bare-chested, their dark hair free on the wind.  They bore scimitars unsheathed on their saddles and bows over their shoulders.

     Two separated – they would be the chieftains of the Drifters and the Wet Bellies.  The other men would ride behind them.

     Both sides stopped when about twenty feet separated us.  I sat Blizzard, looking the two Andarans over, waiting for them to talk.  If it took all day, I didn’t care.

     There is an art to this.

     “You bring back our daughters,” one said.  From what I knew of And
arans, he would be the Wet Belly.  His long mustachios were shot with grey, his hair beaded at the ends as only they did. 

     “I’m done with them,” I said.

     That got an eyebrow up.  “And the service of your stallion?”

     I laughed.  “For a night with your daughters?  Not likely.”

     That pissed him off – good to see that it wasn’t just a family trait of Kills’.

     “You took the daughters and you didn’t seed the mares?” the other, a Drifter, demanded.
  He was smaller, younger, his mustachios barely to his chin, his hair black as night and his nose like an eagle’s beak.

     “The daughters served to assuage me for the insult,” I said.  “Kills with a Glance of the Long Manes
gave
me his daughter.”

     “We are a much larger tribe than the Long Manes,” the Wet Belly said.

     “Maybe not after today,” I said.

     That got a nervous look at my army.  Those were Wolf Soldiers.  Normally there would be Aschire archers – one could only assume they lay hidden somewhere.  The Aschire were invisible, and the Wolf Soldiers invincible.

     They probably didn’t kid themselves into thinking that they could beat me.  They had fought Confluni, they were no stranger to running now to fight another day.  They might not like it, but it sure beat being dead.

     So the trick was to get them pissed off enough to do something stupid.

     “If you want the daughters, you can have them,” the Drifter informed me.  That got a look from the Wet Belly.  Two women, however, were a small price to pay, and I had been infamously decent to Shela.

     “I don’t want them,” I said.  “They’re defiled.”

    
That
made for an insult.

     The Drifter and half of their men had their scimitars out.  “You city scum,” he spat at me.

     I really wanted the Wet Belly, but I would settle for the Drifter.

     “You have the nerve to fight me?”

     “I will bury you here,” he informed me.

     I kicked Blizzard in the ribs.  He leapt forward.  The Drifter reacted no slower, probably more experienced at fighting in the saddle, definitely less encumbered and a better equestrian than I.

     He came at me from the left, thinking that it would make my lance useless.  Its end whipped before him and peeled him from the saddle before he came within scimitar range.  He
did
manage to hit the lance with his weapon – I had never seen anyone fast enough to do that before.

     I rode over him with Blizzard, turned and leveled the lance at his body.  I might as well not have bothered – he lay dead
, his head crushed in by an iron-shod hoof..

     One of the girls wailed.  The other put a hand on her shoulder.

     Half of the Andarans started forward, thinking combat must be on, and hesitated when the rest of the entourage did nothing.

     “I’ll claim half of his horse, and half of his cattle,” I informed the rest of them. 

     The Wet Belly laughed.  “If you can find them.”

     “You think you’re leaving this field before I know where they are?”

     I could see the look on his face – he would bolt and take his chances.  He couldn’t count on the Drifters now.  They would likely take off and choose a new chief.  A good portion of the men would split the tribe and head for his – I just made him a lot stronger and he knew it.  He probably counted on taking those horse and cattle himself.

     “You run and it will be a slaughter,” I told him.  “Those are Wolf Soldiers – you know what they do.  We’ll be raping your daughters before the sun sets.”

     That got me a look from Tartan.  I’m sure that’s not what he thought he came here to do.

     “And if we give you the Drifters?” he asked me.

     Andarans did that, too.  If I raided and took their horse and their cattle, the Drifters would fight.  What I offered him was a chance not to have to join in on it.  He could peel off his horse, his women and his livestock and be gone.

     That’s what I offered him.  He opened his mouth to betray his allies.

     The scimitar that took him through the spine leapt out of his chest like vengeance.  He spread his arms, and his horse bolted, smelling blood.

     I charged the man, now weaponless, who had done it.  It had been worth a try, anyway.  At least there would be chaos as they figured out who lead them.

     In a fight, I usually didn’t worry that much about myself anymore.  That first time, in the Great Northern Mountain Range, and then in Myr, I had been afraid that I might die, but the more times I didn’t, the easier it became not to think about it.

     Tartan was a different story – this would be his first fight, and I wanted him to engage, but I wanted him to live through it, too.  Andarans are pretty tough, and the warriors he met would be blooded. 

     He charged after me, probably the right thing to do, and skewered the man next to the man whom I did in, who had killed the Wet Bellies chief. 

     His lance snapped, and he fumbled for his sword when two of them charged him.  He didn’t even realize that they had engaged him until he pulled his sword, looked up, and there they were.

     I took one from behind.  The other pinked his arm before he stabbed the man in the face.  His horse bolted from the blood smell, and he ended up carving the guy’s head like a pumpkin, trying to free his sword.  He made the mistake of watching it happen and then he was puking his guts o
ut down the side of his mare.

     That was a
huge
mistake – never barf on your horse.  The warm liquid makes the horse think that it’s hit and it will take off, which is what happened.  So here we had a battle, and Tartan heading east with his feet out of his stirrups.

     “Shela,” I commanded.  I couldn’t leave the field.  She nodded and took off after him.  He wore heavy armor, she didn’t – she would catch him fast enough.

     The two Andaran women took off for their tribes.  Half of that line turned tail and headed south, about a quarter on both sides came for me, and the rest didn’t know
what
to do.

     Dev’s foot actually double-timed it close enough to me where I could leap within our ranks before the Andarans could get to me.  Two Spears had our lancers arcing out west in squads of horse, driving in deserters with arrow-fire and rounding up attackers.  Just as the mounted Andarans engaged the foot, they found themselves surrounded by my lancers and crushed against our shield wall.  Pikemen and swordsmen killed Andaran and horse alike, suffering minimal injury, as our lances ripped them apart.

     It probably took two hours before we marched south again with most of our numbers, a herd of Andaran horses and an embarrassed former prince with a yellow discoloration on the breastplate of his armor.

     “So what did I do?” I asked him.  We’d made night camp in our small city.  We had no wood for spears around the perimeter but had lined up our pikes along the outer wall.  If the Andarans charged us they would lose their first two ranks before they met us.

     “You killed one chief,” Tartan informed me, trying to buff his breastplate, “and got the other to get himself killed, and then they had no –“