The Grace of Kings (31 page)

“Lord Garu, the fire wagons have set the gates on fire!”

Kuni looked over and saw that hide-covered wagons were amassed at the base of the city gates. The covering prevented the defenders' arrows from reaching the men underneath, who had succeeded in setting the thick oaken doors aflame.

Inspired by Mata and Kuni's example, the defenders on the guard towers rallied and succeeded in destroying the wagons by dropping heavy stones, but the fire raged on.

“We should have prepared more water and sand,” Dosa muttered.

Kuni cursed himself for lack of experience. He had been so focused on preparing for the siege by gathering food and weapons that he had neglected other basic preparations.

Namen's men pulled back from the foot of the walls. Everyone watched the rising smoke and the flickering tongues of the flames. Soon, the gates would crack and then break open.

“We should line up our troops in the square before the gates,” said Mata. “Once the doors are gone, we'll fight them to the death in the streets.”

Kuni shook his head. No matter how brave and fierce Mata was, he could not stand against ten thousand. He licked his lips.
Water, should have prepared buckets of water.

“Come with me!” he shouted, and ran up to the guard tower above the flaming gates. He began to loosen the belt around his robes.

“What are you doing?” Mata asked, following close behind.

“Shield me,” Kuni yelled. And he climbed onto the ramparts, turned around, squatted down, and began to urinate against the outside of the wall.

The other soldiers immediately got the idea. Some began to loosen their belts as well; others leaned out over the ramparts and raised shields to protect the squatting figures of their comrades. Namen's men, also catching on, loosed volleys of arrows at them. The thunking of arrow against shield sounded like a summer hailstorm.

Streams of urine flowed down the wall and dripped onto the burning gates. Flames hissed and clouds of steam rose.

“Come on, brother, you've got to contribute!” Kuni shouted at Mata, laughing. Then he coughed from the smoke and piss-smelling steam around him. “This will be a real pissing contest.”

Mata didn't know whether he should laugh or get mad. This hardly seemed like the right way to fight a war.

“What, you can't go in front of other people?” Kuni asked. “Don't be shy. We're among friends here.”

Mata sighed, climbed onto the ramparts, squatted behind another pair of raised shields, and let his bladder go.

For two weeks now, Tanno Namen had laid siege to Zudi with an army numbering more than ten thousand.

He had not anticipated the fierce resistance. The defenders of Zudi were unlike the ragtag mob that he had routed at Dimu. This Duke of Zudi, whom he had never heard of, and General Mata Zyndu, a grandson of the famous Cocru marshal Dazu Zyndu, seemed to know what they were doing. They had evidently stockpiled supplies before the siege and now waited patiently behind the walls, like turtles in their shells.

Namen would have preferred to leave Zudi and march on to Çaruza, where the rebel king was. But scouts he had sent aloft in battle kites informed him that Zudi was packed with soldiers, their flashing swords and battle banners filling the streets. They probably equaled his forces or even exceeded them. If Namen tried to bypass Zudi, they could attack him from behind on the way to Çaruza.

To his regret, Namen had brought little siege machinery, relying on his experience of the rebels abandoning the cities and running for the hills as soon as his army approached. The defenders of Zudi made quick work of the few ladders, fire wagons, and battering rams he did have. Now Namen was left without options for taking Zudi quickly: Mining would take a long time, and constructing ballistae and catapults on the deforested Porin Plains was impossible without transporting lumber from the Er-Mé Mountains.

Namen furrowed his brows. An extended siege seemed his only option, but he was confident that he would prevail. After all, he could resupply himself from the Imperial warehouses in Géfica, while the defenders didn't even have access to the surrounding countryside. No matter how much Zudi had in its storehouses, the food would eventually run out.

“Kuni, why are we making such a big deal over a few soldiers?” Mata asked.

Kuni had insisted on holding “victory banquets” every day in the markets of Zudi, where soldiers and civilians who had performed particular deeds of bravery the day before were feted. There was drinking, dancing, and platters of hearty roasted pork and fresh-baked flatbread.

“Everyone's jittery in a siege,” said Kuni in a low voice. He stood up and made another toast, recounting the brave deeds of the soldiers being celebrated that day. His particular retelling added a lot of details that Mata deemed only semitrue, and the soldiers who were its subject blushed and laughed and shook their heads. But the crowd seemed to love it.

Kuni drank and sat down as the crowd cheered. He smiled, waved at them, and continued to whisper to Mata. “It's important that we keep the mood confident and optimistic. The public celebrations also show that we're not concerned about our supplies—important to prevent hoarding and profiteering.”

“Seems to be a lot of effort aimed at keeping up appearances,” Mata said. “Show, not substance.”

“Show
is
substance,” Kuni said. “Look, by having civilians dress up in paper armor and wave around wooden swords in the streets, we've been able to convince Namen's scouts that we have many more armed men here than we actually do. That's why he's still here instead of heading for Çaruza. Every day we keep him here is another day that the marshal can gather strength for the counterattack.”

Mata had disapproved of Kuni's plans, thinking them more akin to theater than warfare, but he had to admit that the results of Kuni's tricks were desirable.

“How much longer can our provisions hold out?” Mata asked.

“We will probably need to start rationing soon,” Kuni admitted. “Let's hope that Puma Yemu does his job.”

Namen's plan for an extended siege wasn't working as well as he had hoped.

While Garu and Zyndu shut the doors of Zudi and refused to come out of the city to face the Imperial forces on the plains in front of the city, Namen found himself constantly harassed by bands of roaming bandits on horseback.

These bandits, or “noble raiders” as they preferred to style themselves, sabotaged the long Imperial supply lines leading from the Liru River. They followed no law of war and caused Namen no end of headaches.

Whenever Namen sent a platoon of cavalry after them, they simply ran away, taking advantage of their speed due to the lack of heavy armor. But whenever Namen's men rested, often in the middle of the night, the raiders would make a great deal of noise and feign attacks
without
actually attacking. They did this repeatedly to keep Namen's men from sleeping and exhausted their alertness.

After a few rounds of this wolf crying throughout the night, Namen's soldiers let down their guard and no longer responded with alacrity to new alarms. But that was when the raiders would
actually
attack. They rode through the camps like a tornado, setting everything on fire, cutting loose all the horses, and generally wreaking havoc and sowing confusion everywhere. But they wouldn't linger to fight. Their only aim was to loot from the carts loaded with food and provisions and spoil what they couldn't take by dousing it with excrement and poisoned water. They also made it a practice to ransack the treasury carts intended to pay the Imperial soldiers' wages.

An army marched on its stomach, and soldiers mutinied without pay. Namen became concerned about how much longer he could maintain such a large army in hostile territory. He had so far resisted forcefully taking supplies from the locals, believing it would make the pacification of reconquered Cocru difficult if the Imperial army imposed too much hardship on the peasants. But as his supplies dwindled, he worried that in a few more days he might have no choice.

Morale sank, and desertion became rampant. The platoons dispatched to chase the raiders down were always a step behind. And since the raiders took care to distribute some of their loot to the peasants in the surrounding areas, the result was that when Namen's men came to the villages to ferret out the raiders, not a single person would help the Imperials. When Namen's frustrated soldiers took out their anger on the recalcitrant villagers, they only managed to swell the ranks of the “noble raiders.”

The raiders infuriated Namen. But he had to admit that whoever came up with this tactic was a worthy opponent.

“Hit-and-run tactics are the province of the weak.” Mata had dismissed Kuni's proposal contemptuously at first. “True warriors do not resort to such dirty tricks. We must confront Namen on the open field and best him fairly and squarely.”

Kuni had scratched his head. “But our job is to protect the people of Zudi. Despite your excellent training, we're outnumbered and our soldiers are too green compared to the Imperial veterans. Fact is, we
are
weak, as you put it, and I don't want our men to die needlessly. What's ‘dirty' about winning?”

It took hours of persuasion, but in the end Kuni wore Mata down. Mata agreed to forgive Puma Yemu for his past acts of banditry—on condition that he convert his gang into auxiliary fighters for Cocru.

“Let's sweeten the pot a little bit,” said Kuni.

“It's not enough that he gets to keep his life?”

“Yemu is like a proud donkey. We have to use both the stick and the carrot to motivate him.”

Reluctantly, Mata wrote to King Thufi to recommend Yemu for the title of Marquess of Porin, with a hereditary march of his own to be specified by the king later.

So that was how Puma Yemu became the Marquess of Porin, Scourge of Xana, Commander of the Whirlwind Riders of Cocru.

“Meeting Kuni Garu was the best thing that ever happened to me,” Puma declared to his followers as he generously divided the spoils of the noble raids among them. “Follow me closely, boys, and there'll be plenty more where that came from. Look at me, a marquess! A lord who knows how to wield men is ten times more fearsome than one who knows only how to wield a sword.”