The Conqueror (25 page)

After a while, they all stood and shook
hands like ladies and gentlemen, and then the Hordesmen went away
again to present it to their commander.

Chapter
Eighteen

It was very quiet, with not much
happening or expected to happen at this time of the night. There
were faint voices in the corridor outside. The twelve foot doors at
the end of the chamber opened. The skylights had all been cranked
open as the hot desert winds had been whipping up from the
southeast, all day long as they normally would this time of year.
The room had barely cooled since the noon-day.

A man stepped hurriedly into the map
room, heels snapping against the hard black tiles. He had an
exhausted looking rider with him, a fellow who hung back by the
door on a wave from the officer.

They turned to see who it was, at this
late hour. He stepped forwards. The officer prostrated himself on
the ground, not rising until Jumalak cleared his throat.

“
Please. Presumably this is
important.”

The man got up creakily, as the floor
was hard and he had banged his knee.

“
My Lord and
Master.”

“
What is it?”

Something about the general’s manner
struck both Jumalak and Verescens.

“
Speak. Out with
it.”

The man trembled visibly.

“
Lords! Sinopus has
fallen.”

“
What?” Jumalak was
stricken.

Verescens’ eyebrows rose.

“
Shit.”

“
It’s true, I am afraid.”
The messenger, for all of his rank, was desperately unhappy to be
the bearer of bad news.

He held a flimsy piece of paper in his
hand. The communications officer rose from behind his desk. He
stood there looking hapless, eyes round as saucers, and one of his
boys strode over to take the dispatch. Jumalak gave a flick of his
wrist and the boy snatched it and pelted the twenty yards to the
communications clearing desk.

After a hurried consultation with the
code-books, they found certain key words, the proper ones for the
putative date on the document, in a careful examination of the
hand-written dispatch.

“
It’s legitimate, oh, Great
One.” It was their best guess.

That was all that could be said for
it.

“
All right, all right.”
Verescens had sort of expected the unexpected.

What a futile axiom that
was.

“
Well. Hmn.”

This observation mostly applied to
other sectors of their campaign and there had indeed been
surprises. The taking of Sinopus had happened months ago and they
all thought it completely secure. Other attacks had failed, for
reasons that were sometimes hard to analyze.

For the most part, they had been the
victim of their own failures to properly acquire and assess
information on the targets. The Emperor was perhaps not the most
valiant of foes, but he was turning out to be a canny general and
his deviousness stemmed from decades of experience including war in
all seasons and in all terrains. His navy was bottled up for the
time being, and yet they were tying down the heaviest of the
Horde’s own battle-fleet units.

“
I suppose you did try to
warn us, Verescens.”

“
Hah.” The sea wasn’t his
forte, but the admirals he had consulted were arguably the best the
Horde could provide.

Verescens wasn’t all that eager to
criticize where his knowledge was so evidently lacking.

The Emperor of the South
had thrown large garrisons into the most strategic towns along
their respective frontier. These tended to be the places with the
best road networks, and their schedule was already off as a
consequence. There was an unfortunate tendency to get sucked into a
long siege when it would have been better to bypass such
strongholds. The coastal fortress of the Massagetaii, a kind of
republican oligarchy, was a case in point. As long as it stood, it
would be a threat in their rear or their flank. And yet it
could
have been
bypassed.

“
Sinopus has fallen.”
Jumalak marveled anew. “When?”

How in the hell did that
happen, in other words?

“
Ten or twelve days ago by
our report, oh, Great Khan.” The general, Verescens couldn’t think
of his name, was at his most obsequious.

“
Very well. Be gone with
you—and see if you can find out more.” Verescens hoped this
wouldn’t be countermanded.

The general groveled in a generally
backwards direction towards the door.

Going by the look on Jumalak’s face,
this might have saved the man’s life.

“
It’s not his fault.” The
Great One’s tone was mildly appraising, and he stared into
Verescen’s eyes for a second.

“
No, Master. It is our
own.”

Jumalak nodded shortly.

“
We need to know more,
Great One.”

“
Yes, try and find out what
you can.” Jumalak studied the paper as the communications officer,
a young captain on the night shift, flushed under his
gaze.

“
Don’t worry, it’s not your
fault.” Verescens might have been talking to a wall, but then the
officer’s eyes came around and he saw the gratitude
there.

He bit back a futile grin.

Jumalak handed off the paper, silent,
chin up, and he moved majestically forwards, went to the left
around the corner of the table and paused to examine Sinopus and
its relationship to the rest of the board.

“
Hmn.”

“
Easy come, easy go, oh,
Great One.”

“
I’m not so
sure.”

Verescens read the paper, nodding as
the points hit home.

“
So what do you
think.”

All Verescens had to go on was the
information provided—and right slender it was, too.

The town of Sinopus, belonging by right
of its legal surrender to representatives of the Great Khan Jumalak
of the Horde, had fallen to naval assault after a siege of six
days, in which over a thousand men of the Khan’s had given their
lives or else been grievously wounded.

The survivors had been put ashore after
a parley with the victors. They were encamped, with good water and
some food and supplies. They were recruiting their strength and
making preparations for the march back to the capital or wherever
they were ordered to go.

As best Verescens as could make out,
the letter had been sent thirteen days ago, which might make the
fall of Sinopus at least a few days before that. The messengers
would have ridden flat-out all the way. The name of a bay and a
village were mentioned, but it wasn’t on any of their
maps.

He wondered how they had done it, of
course. But that was almost self-evident. On the land side, Sinopus
was over a thousand miles from enemy territories. They never could
have supplied a land campaign, and surely they would have heard
about it long beforehand. The Horde had spies and merchants,
ambassadors to all the tribes between here and there. The tribes
were all peaceful on the face of it.

What was startling was that the enemy
had attacked two days before their own invasion had
begun.

“
Verescens.”

“
Oh, Great One.”

“
Talk to us.”

“
This must have taken an
extreme effort by their little alliance.”

“
Yes. Go on.”

Verescens found himself, unconscious of
how he had gotten there, standing by the big map table at Jumalak’s
side.

“
It took a lot of ships.
Ships to take the port, ships to transport our men to land
according to this bargain they have struck—”

“
And...”

“
I wonder where all those
ships are now, oh, Great Khan.”

Jumalak bit his lip.

That was a very good
question.

“
Well, for one thing,
Master-General Verescens. They’ll be jamming men and grain into
Sinopus as fast as they can.” They would be preparing for a long
siege...one would think. It was exactly what the Horde had been
doing, in fact.

“
Maybe.”

“
Maybe?”

Verescens turned to regard his Khan,
who, to be fair, was not a fool by any means.

“
Yes,
master—maybe.”

Jumalak’s mouth opened and he breathed
quietly, and then his eyes fell to the map.

“
You mean you don’t know—my
friend, my teacher, my mentor?”

“
No, oh, Great One.”
Verescens stood staring down at the map, trying to read their minds
from across a thousand miles or more, and many days behind the
times. “I simply don’t know.”

Verescens clasped his hands, and
brought the knuckle of his right forefinger up to his
lips.

He chewed away on it.

It probably changed
everything
, but for the
life of him he couldn’t quite see how. If nothing else, it sent a
certain message. It was also the tactics of surprise. But surprise
for its own sake was little or nothing without some tactical and
strategic advantage. The enemy had simply taken a page out of the
Horde’s book. They had denied the Horde the use of Sinopus, which
implied that they fully understood its significance in the overall
strategy. Someone over there had a pretty good mind.

“
Great One.”

Verescens reached and took a small
counter in the shape of one of their medium-sized war ships. They
had an impressive number in reserve, in their home port of
Artesphihan. They were there for the defense of the port and
capital, and presented an overwhelming obstacle to any would-be
invader. This had always implied the Emperor, in the past. His
ships plied the Great Sea and adjoining waterways, and his naval
forces were formidable enough. For the most part, the Emperor
appeared to be holding his own ships back, waiting to respond to
threats and attacks. His whole strategy was one of an economical
defense—trading land and blood for time on some fronts, and using
the smallest possible naval units in defending key installations.
He was hoarding his resources for some later, perhaps decisive
encounter.

But the Emperor had no wish to war in
the first place, and was—at least so far—relying on a purely
defensive strategy. This is just what the Horde would have wished
for. It was the allies that had revealed themselves to be an
unknown quantity.

He put the little ship down on the
board, a few miles off the coast, just south of Sinopus. There were
already a large number of naval units engaged in the supply and
support of operations along the eastern coast of the Great
Sea.

The invasion of the coastal strip south
of the Heloi had taken place at the same time as the land attack on
the nearest side of the sea. The Heloian land army was negligible.
Both operations required a large number of heavy units. While a
bare fifty thousand men had been landed in the southwestern attack,
they required a disproportionate number of both warships and supply
vessels to maintain them in the position.

The number of ships of either type
remaining in reserve was looking smaller every day.

Verescens took two more of the crude
but colorful wooden game pieces as he thought of them, and placed
them by the other one just off Sinopus.

“
This would be a minimum.
We have to keep an eye on them, Master. And yet they are terribly
vulnerable to a superior fleet, of especially the Heloi.
Windermere, not so much—as for Lowren’s little ships, they have
their uses, no doubt. But I don’t think they are heavy enough to
take on our major naval units except under the most favorable
circumstances of wind, and most likely, vastly superior
numbers...”

“
What about
Windermere?”

“
They have excellent
transports, and a small number of proper warships, all two and
three-masters.” The ships of Windermere were the most seaworthy of
them all, he added. “Their problem is that they are rather more
suited to peacetime use—chasing smugglers and enforcing maritime
law.”

The Heloi relied on single-masted
galleys, but then they had the seamen to man them. The Heloi loved
nothing better than to ram and board, the Windermere ships tended
to stand off and bombard with all sorts of missile weapons,
rock-throwing catapults and then there was their use of fire-tipped
javelins.

Jumalak moved around Verescens, as
another senior officer entered the room and came over. He saluted
in a quick and informal fashion, and took a good look at the men
and the map.

“
So you’ve heard,
Rottewald.”

“
Yes, oh, Great One.” The
fellow chewed a lip and eyed Verescens.

“
Do we know where the enemy
fleet...or fleets are now, sir?”

“
No.”

Verescens rubbed his pointed beard in
an absent manner as he studied the board.

“
In the south...” Verescens
was thinking out loud, but it was not unwelcome.