Servant of the Empire (38 page)

Downslope, the Acoma Strike Leader’s men were ineffectively trying to round up the frightened querdidra. Lord Chipino dispatched some of his own drovers to help, since their knowledge of the beasts’ handling was a necessity if the caravan was to be moving again before sundown. ‘Who can say what motivates the barbarians,’ he concluded, regarding Mara across the space between palanquin and litter. ‘If I did not know better, I would say we were fighting fanatics of the Red God.’

But the Dustari nomads did not believe in Turakamu, or so said the texts at Lashima’s temple where Mara had studied during her youth. The increase in border unrest made no sense, and the descriptions of engagements Lord Chipino had offered in the hostel over maps added up to nothing but a profligate waste of lives.

Mara flicked her fan closed. More than ever, she feared for Ayaki, left at home on her estates. She had expected to cross the ocean to provide support and swift solution for the troublesome attacks on the border. Longing for a quick return home, she sensed that the problem was worse than she’d initially thought. She might not be back for the fall planting, and that turned her heart icy with foreboding. Yet she did not speak aloud of her worries. When the caravan regrouped and started forward, she asked to be shown the mountain landmarks. Kevin walked beside her litter, listening to Chipino’s best scout name the peaks, the valleys, and the rock tables that sometimes spanned the trail in wind-carved archways of stone.

They need not have been in a hurry to orient themselves to this new, strange land. Time weighed heavily during the months between engagements, and after the novelty of the early weeks the stark, barren valleys sawed at the spirit and the vast desert horizons scoured the soul to insignificance. As often as he could, Kevin retired to Mara’s command tent, which, though constructed of layers of sewn needra hide, oiled to keep it pliable against the weather, was nonetheless opulent inside.

‘Who passes?’ called the guard at the door flap.

Kevin lowered the cloth he held pressed against his face and sucked in a dust-laden breath. ‘It is I.’

The armoured guard waved him past with his spear butt. Kevin stooped, ducked through an inner door of fringes that filtered out most of the dirt, and blinked at the abrupt change in lighting. The main chamber of the command tent was lit by torches of oiled rags, supported in crockery sconces on poles jabbed upright into the earth. Hanging from the roof peaks were cho-ja globes, an eerie blue-violet that mixed uneasily with the warmer glow of flame light. The colours of woven rugs, cushions, and hangings sparkled strangely, spiked by starred shadows that formed a mosaic of geometric patterns of their own, as though the belongings and their assorted shadow shapes formed some alien game board upon which people were the players.

Try as he might, Kevin had never been able to liken the Game of the Council to chess; the Tsurani system of honour was far too convoluted a custom for a foreigner to break down into moves. The desert men’s strategies, on the other hand, were less opaque. He had studied them exhaustively through the seasons that had passed since their arrival. The nomads sent raiders against the fortified passes, mostly at night, and always in stealth. They sought to wear away at the armies of Xacatecas and Acoma, here through attrition, and there through the nerve-sawing, actionless boredom.
Day after day dawned with no battle, beyond the wasp stings of raiding at night. The forays were just frequent enough, and just well enough engineered, to keep the armies on the hair-trigger edge of vigilance.

The Xacatecas forces had been stretched thin to keep all the minor trails through the mountains adequately guarded. With the support of the Acoma companies, Lord Chipino had hoped the raiders would acknowledge superior numbers and abandon incursions across the borders. Yet the desert men had done no such thing; rather, they stepped up the frequency of their strikes, goading like insects flying at needra bulls.

As the months dragged by with no change, Kevin had been hesitant to venture his full opinion, that the attacks held purpose behind them. He’d had the experience on the field to justify his hunches; but Tsurani killed Midkemian officers taken captive, and in preservation of his life he had never dared to admit his birth was noble to anyone this side of the rift save a handful of Midkemian slaves. Shedding his headcloth and sandals and leaving them for servants to beat clean, he now walked across beautifully woven carpets to where his Lady sat on cushions, a sand table depicting the mountains and the desert border of the Empire spread before her and Lujan.

‘There you are,’ Mara said, looking up. A river of raven hair spilled loose over one shoulder; she caught it back with a hand like fine porcelain and smiled her welcome. ‘We were discussing a change in strategy,’ and she nodded to indicate Lujan.

Interested, Kevin quickened his step. He knelt on the cushions opposite the sand table and studied the small clusters of green and yellow markers that represented Acoma and Xacatecas companies. The positions were clustered like chains of beads along river courses, passes, and rocky, steep-sided valleys through which the winds
keened after dark. Unless a sentry happened to catch the movement of the enemy silhouetted against stars or sky, he would not hear footsteps; only a chance rattle of gravel, which often as not was set off by wind, and an attack that happened in a flurried, surprise ambush. The knives of the desert men were not metal, but they cut throats readily enough.

‘We want to eradicate their supply caches,’ Mara said. ‘Burn them out. Your opinion is of interest, since you have as much knowledge of the terrain here as any of us.’

Kevin licked his lips, a chill chasing his skin under the sleeves of his shirt and the broad-banded desert robe he wore like a cloak overtop. He looked at the sand map and wondered silently whether this was precisely what the enemy hoped to do: lure their warriors out of the defensible passes and harry them into ambush in the open. ‘I suggest again, Lady, that we not sally forth against these desert men. They hold all the advantage in their own country. I say, as I have before, that we let them come to us, and die on our spears with little cost to your companies.’

‘There is no honour in hanging back from attack,’ Lujan pointed out. ‘The longer the Lady is absent from her estates, the greater the danger to Ayaki. To wait through another turn of seasons wins her no gain in the Game of the Council, nor any stature in the eyes of the gods. It is not the fate of warriors to wait idly by while desert men treat their presence like that of querdidra herders, staging small raids at their pleasure.’

‘Then you have no use for my opinion,’ said Kevin, biting back exasperation. ‘I believe there is strategy in the movements of these nomads. You insist there is not –’

‘They are barbarians!’ Mara cut in. ‘They raid across our borders because the land is rich and green. Why should tribes of desert men suddenly organize against a nation armed and prepared against them? What could they hope to gain, except obliteration?’

Kevin heard her anger, and took no offence, aware as he was that the time away from home had stretched out into almost a year, and the separation from her son was wearing at her. Each month the traders’ ships made port at Ilama, and Jican’s messenger reached her, but no word arrived of an attack by the Minwanabi. She had left her best troops to guard the estate; here, with the ones that remained, she had expected to lend support to Xacatecas, and then be free to depart. But the attack at home had not happened, or at least, if it had, word had not reached them; and on this side of the Sea of Blood, the campaign was unexplainably drawn out and showed no signs of resolution.

‘We must find the nomads’ supply caches and burn them out,’ she insisted emphatically. ‘Or else grow old in this wretched waste, and never see satisfaction against Minwanabi.’ Her pronouncement ended discussion.

The scouts went out. They made a five-day sweep of the lowlands that extended into a month of seeking. The nomads could not be tracked across sands continuously shifted by the winds, nor over swept slabs of rock. The Tsurani were forced to search for the smoke of cooking fires in a land that had no trees but imported oil or charcoal for heat and light. The warriors had to lie for days in hiding, scanning the barren horizons for signs of enemy encampments. They marched across smouldering hardpan, and found nothing; just old fire rings filled with ash and burned bones, and sometimes the imprint where a hide tent had stood, or broken bits of discarded crockery. The nomads’ caches of supplies remained elusively hidden.

After three unfruitful months, Xacatecas and Acoma soldiers began taking captives. These unfortunates were dragged back to Chipino’s tents for questioning. The desert raiders were small, of wiry stature, and often bearded. They smelled of querdidra and sour wine, and they wore leather
studded with bosses of the pack beasts’ horn and bone. Over this primitive light armour they threw loose-fitting robes in beige colours, tied with beaded sashes that held talismans denoting their prowess and tribe. Very tough, with skins weathered by the climate, few could be induced to talk. The ones that had looser tongues were not highly placed in their clan hierarchies; the caches they disclosed in the following four months were of little consequence; just a few skins of wine and some grains stored in earthen jars. Not enough to be worth losing warriors over, Lord Chipino said to Mara in a frustrated talk after a day spent in blazing sunlight, digging one such cache from the sandy floor of an arroyo.

The Acoma command tent was still under the gloom of twilight. The calls of the sentries as the watch changed mingled with smells of roasting meat that drifted in through the flaps, opened to the cooling evening breeze; charcoal smoke arose in blue puffs against darkening hills, and inside, the smouldering of oiled rags threw cherry-coloured light through the decorative pierced patterns in the light sconces.

Mara clapped hands for a servant to bring the Lord of the Xacatecas some tesh, sweetened as he preferred it. She said, ‘Then you think we waste our time by searching the foothills?’

‘I do.’ Lord Chipino emphasized his frustration with a jerk of his chin. ‘The supplies of the nomads must be held in the deep desert, beyond our scouts’ line of sight, and where no trails exist to leave tracks. I believe we must attempt an incursion with perhaps two companies of warriors.’

The servant arrived with the tesh, lending Mara a moment for thought. She had also come to feel that some similar tactic was necessary, and Lujan supported her. The only dissenter was Kevin, who tirelessly insisted that the nomads might be planning for just such a contingency. She gave a small shake of her head. Why should barbarians
taunt her people to invade? What possible need might motivate them?

‘None of this makes sense,’ Chipino said, tugging the straps at his neck to loosen his dust-caked armour. He scratched the leathery skin of his throat, almost frowning, then wet his gullet with the tesh. Its sweetness rinsed the taste of the desert grit from his mouth and also eased his temper. ‘Isashani wrote to me to say that Hokanu of the Shinzawai came visiting in Ontoset.’

Mara raised her eyebrows. ‘Is your wife by chance trying to matchmake?’

Xacatecas laughed. ‘Perpetually. But in this case with Hokanu’s enthusiastic interest, so it would seem. The younger Shinzawai misses you. He asked after you, more than once.’

‘And Isashani kept score?’ Mara prompted. At Chipino’s resigned nod, she added, ‘What brought Hokanu to Ontoset? That’s a bit far afield for him, I should think.’

‘That’s just what Isashani pointed out,’ Chipino added. ‘The interfering woman suggests that the young man came to trade for spices that can as easily be purchased in Jamar.’

Which implied he had gone specifically to speak with Lady Isashani to hear direct news of Dustari. Mara was unsure how to react to this, not certain that Hokanu’s overt interest in news of her might not simply mask his father’s latest ploy in the Great Game.

The thought was interrupted by the return of that day’s officer of the watch, with the dispatches brought in by the scouts. He bowed in deference. Mara gave him permission to speak before her guest, saving herself the trouble of sending word across to the Xacatecas camp later.

‘No findings to report, my Lady,’ the armoured man recited, his plumed helm crooked in one dirty elbow. ‘One man was injured in a rockslide, and two more were killed in an ambush. The wounded are being tended in the camp by
the south mesa. The other five bands of scouts found nothing.’

Which added up to a loss that had no purpose, Mara concluded in silence. Needled by the progression of useless days, useless deaths, and no sign of change beyond attrition, she found her patience at an end. The nomads were just toying with them – about this Kevin was correct – but to sit and wait without action was unacceptable. Mara excused her tired officer from duty, then met the dark, sardonic eyes of the Lord of the Xacatecas. ‘The Acoma offer one company, to march out in a foray beyond the foothills. My First Strike Leader, Migachti, will command, and a half patrol of cho-ja will go along to act as message bearers between here and the main camp.’

Lord Chipino of the Xacatecas inclined his head. He set his tesh cup on the low table, between the stone-weighted corners of the map scrolls, and the slates, and the ground-down ends of chalk, and reached for his sun-bleached helm. ‘To the honour of our houses, and the ruin of enemies,’ he intoned. ‘I will send a company also, and a gift, to recompense for your cho-ja, whose abilities I cannot match from my own ranks. The hive on our lands had no warriors to spare, with the unrest of House Zirentari on the northern borders of our home estate.’