Traitors' Gate (104 page)

Anji spoke openly of such grave matters, and yet it wasn't clear to Joss if the hierophant and the reeves understood the deeper meaning beneath the exchange.

He replied in kind, saying nothing and everything with a few innocuous words. “It must be the same Bevard Marit mentioned to me. If this Bevard is still in High Haldia, Chief Toughid may find him, for he's gone hunting with Gold Hall's reeves.”

Anji nodded, then addressed the Copper Hall reeves. “Is there anything else?”

“That's all, Commander,” said one. “Chief Sengel wants to know whether to specifically pursue the single cohort that retreated intact to Saltow.”

Anji tapped the map with his whip, touching his own position first before pulling the tip to the thick line marking the River Istri. “We've a day's long march to Nessumara if we force march. It will surely take two days or more for this enemy cohort to reach Skerru from Saltow. As long as we know they are coming, we can adjust to meet them. For now, do nothing but observe. Our first concern is Radas's army in Skerru, which remains substantially intact since the burning of the forest cover drove them back but did not break them. One cohort has retreated from the west bank to join the others at Skerru. Jodoni will write a message detailing my plans. Go, get food and drink and rest. You'll fly out at dawn.”

“Yes, Commander Anji.” They gave Joss, the two chiefs, and the hierophant a polite nod, and took themselves off.

Joss surveyed the map, noting where fresh lines had been inked in. “You're filling in your maps as you march. Didn't we already send you copies of maps from Clan Hall?”

Anji examined the unrolled map with a thoughtful gaze. “You did, and my thanks as ever.” He pushed a knife off one corner and peeled the upper map back to reveal more unrolled maps layered below. “But if you compare, you'll see the Clan Hall maps haven't been updated in years. By combining current observation and the older versions, I have accurate maps.” He raised a hand, and an aide came forward to roll up the maps. “Let me call for food and drink. While we eat, give me your report. Will you fly out at dawn?”

“That's another thing we need to discuss.” Joss took the stool offered and sat next to Anji at the table as trays were brought from nearby fires where rice and meat were being cooked. “Eagles are cursed rare creatures. If we overwork them, we will kill them. And we can't just purchase more from the lendings.”

“If we go too easy, we might lose this war, which leaves us in an equally difficult situation, does it not? We must find a balance.”

“I've released Scar to hunt. I don't expect him to return for at least a full day.”

“Ah.” Anji accepted a pair of cups, into which he poured rice wine, offering one to Joss before he raised his own. “Then you'll be traveling with the army for a day or two.”

“So I will.”

Anji's smile had a flash of warmth that surprised Joss. “I expect to you reeves things look different down here on earth. You'll ride beside me, Joss.” His grin grew sharper, both jest and challenge. “If you can keep up.”

 

T
HE ARMY ROSE
before dawn and moved out in stages. The vanguard, and the reeve messengers, departed at first light; the second stage included Anji's command unit and plenty of spare horses.

“Did you buy every horse in Olo'osson?” Joss asked.

“Olo'osson supplied us with what we needed, just as villages and towns along the West Track supplied us with food and drink so we weren't slowed down by a baggage train.”

They rode at a ground-eating pace, not so very fast but never slacking, and changed off horses twice.

“It's cursed odd to see so many men all in one place,” Joss remarked as they rode along the curve of one of the many low hills sprouting in this part of Istria, where the land rose into a long ridgeline. Their route overlooked yet more untended fields stepped up the hillsides in terraces. No harvest had been brought in this year across much of Istria. Farmsteads and villages sat empty, no sign of life, everyone in hiding or fled. “Did no women volunteer to serve in the army?”

“War is men's business.” Anji gestured to the Qin soldiers and the ranks of local men riding under their command. “Women have other work.”

“Everyone suffers under war,” said Joss, “so I should think it was women's business as well.”

Anji shrugged. “It is better if women do not fight.”

They rode with his usual aides and chiefs. Sometime in the night a new man had appeared, a Qin captain about Anji's age who was wearing very dusty clothes with unwashed hands and face. He'd been introduced to Joss as Targit, captain of the new Qin cohort. He seemed to continually be making jokes in the Qin language, at which the other Qin laughed heartily, but had spoken not one word in the trade language the Qin officers all knew which was so very like the language of the Hundred.

He looked up now with a sturdy laugh. “Hu! Women guard their tents and herds with a riding whip. Better they not have a sword, too.”

Anji squinted at the sky, marking the flight of their reeve scouts, as the others laughed.

Joss pinned down his irritation and tried to speak in a cool voice. “I've been a reeve for over twenty years. Plenty of reeves are women. Maybe some of those above scouting for you are women. Should they not carry swords?”

“Maybe women should not be reeves,” said Chief Deze. “A strange thing, do you not think?”

“How is it strange? The eagles jess reeves according to the gods' will. We don't make that choice for them, and I'm cursed sure that's a good thing, for then a marshal might raise his own son to be marshal whether the lad was a good commander.”

“A man raised from childhood in the expectation of command will learn the proper lessons in his youth,” said Anji. “Those lessons will make him a better commander than one who comes late to it, merely because of a chance act. How much more effective would reeves be if lads were raised around the eagles, knowing they would in time become reeves?”

“Had the gods wished it to be so, they would have made it so. But it is not what they wished. In the empire, I've heard the priests regulate behavior according to the rule of the southern god.”

“Beltak, called Lord of Lords and King of Kings. But I ask you, Joss, do the priests follow the god's wishes, or their own? A priest might say anything, and how are we to know otherwise, if they alone can walk in the inner temple?”

“Priests can become corrupted, just as any man can. But surely a god must, in time, restore justice.”

Anji laughed. “Do you believe so? Then you have more faith in the gods than I do.”

“Do you not have faith in the gods?”

“Ought I to?”

“What do you believe in?”

Anji gestured to the army before and behind him, their ranks impressive for their discipline and number. Joss could not see, much less count, them all. “I believe in staying alive.”

Drums beat down the line. Anji rose in his stirrups and shaded his eyes to look ahead. Men came alert, postures shifting as strung bows were fitted with arrows, swords were drawn, and spears readied. At a word from Anji, Captain Targit cantered off toward the rear. In the distance, Joss heard the clash of arms amidst variegated pitches of shouting and harsh screams, a clamor whose music might have been mistaken for the climax of a festival play if not for its brutal edge. He touched the hilt of his own short sword. Could he
even ride a horse well enough to plunge into a battle? Give him a crowd of unruly malcontents to quell, or a stubborn village dispute to shout down, or a pair of angry combatants to whack into submission with his reeve's baton, and he knew exactly what to do.

But now they were moving and he was swept along. He was going to keep up because he was cursed if he was going to fall behind and be seen to be—the hells!—less of a man. Hundred reeves were as good as any man or woman. Joss had always believed that. He had lived it for half his life. So he clung to the saddle and let his mount—what in the hells was the gods-rotted animal's name?—follow along with the rest as they pounded along the road.

Eagles flagged directions above, and cadres broke off to follow tracks that led them away out of sight, converging on the unseen battle from several directions. Yet by the time they reached the battleground, the skirmish was over and the vanguard had already moved on. Men were stabbing each body to make sure it was dead, stripping good weapons or armor off the corpses and tossing them into a heap to be picked up later. Again, many bows and quivers stacked up; the enemy had been ready for a reeve attack.

Anji surveyed the field. An eagle plummeted, and a horn called warning as horses were pulled back to make an open space for the raptor to land. To Joss's surprise, Kesta approached.

“Joss!” She looked at his horse. “What in the hells?”

“Scar's hunting. I thought to find you at Horn Hall supervising the reeves. Like I told you. Best we not overwork the eagles—”

“Yeah, yeah.” She waved a dismissive hand before addressing Anji. “Commander Anji, there's two more enemy companies ahead, but you can send a cohort around by a cart track and hit them from behind same time as you engage them from the front. After that, there are a few scattered cadres trying to form up along the ridge, but you've a clear shot at the bridge.”

“The rope bridge at Halting Reach?” Joss demanded. “Wasn't that dismantled?”

“Reeves flew the main ropes into place this morning. Now they're building it out at haste.”

“Ah.” Joss nodded at Anji. “You're going to reinforce Nessumara.”

“No,” said Anji.

A second reeve glided low, flagging to let Kesta know that she'd best move out because this one wanted to land and bring a message.

Anji said, “That's all, Reeve Kesta. You've got your orders.”

She rapped Joss on the arm with her baton. “Heya, Joss, don't get into trouble. Are you sure you know what you're doing?”

Someone in Anji's cadre chuckled, and Joss stiffened as Kesta, eyeing him, stepped back. “I'll be going, then,” she finished awkwardly. “I'll land at dusk to Copper Hall.”

She launched, and the second reeve landed with a report from Chief Sengel.

They pushed on as the afternoon deepened. The air shimmered with heat. Men rode without speaking, gazes bent toward the road ahead. The hills steepened. Once again, Joss heard fighting, and again they poured over a slope into the teeth of a battle. Long before Joss got anywhere near the front, the weight of their force pressed the enemy back and back to the rim of a high ridgeline that cut away into a ravine. Between high walls, the powerful Istri River streamed south. The enemy broke, and those who fled toward the ridge were forced to the cliffs until they had no recourse but to throw themselves forward onto the swords of Anji's soldiers or backward off the cliff and into wrathful current of the Istri. Men tumbled into the waters and were dragged down.

Where the road met the rim, heavy ropes spanned the gap in complicated curves. Men out on the span were building out the bridge with planks and reinforcing anchor ropes. As skirmishing groups took off to pursue stragglers from the company they'd just defeated, the rest rubbed down and watered their horses, took a drink, or a piss, or a rest. It was night before Nessumara's defenders secured the last portion of the bridge and and winched it tight. Men and women crossed,
hanging lanterns from hooks, and after them the chief engineer led across four dray beasts weighted with sacks of bricks to test the span. Fortunately, there was no wind.

After a consultation with Anji and his chiefs, the engineer sent her assistants back across with the beasts while she remained behind to direct the crossing. When the dray beasts had gotten two thirds across, the vanguard moved out in staggered cadres. Then it was the turn of Anji's command unit. They walked, while grooms led horses. Joss had crossed this span years ago, and the height didn't bother him although the sway did, the sense that the world did not hold firm beneath your feet.

Wasn't that a measure of these times? Weren't they all suspended above a chasm? The river rushed beneath so loud, its roar echoing and magnified, that no one, not even Anji, spoke one word on the long crossing.

Chief Sengel waited on the other side to greet Anji with a bash of forearms and personally escort him to a warehouse where food and drink waited. Joss got caught in the jostle and gave up trying to keep up with the command unit. Instead, he walked across Nessumara, crossing two bridges over dark canals until he reached the island where Copper Hall lay in slumbering quiet. The gates lay open, and a tired guard—an elderly man—recognizing his reeve leathers, waved him through.

Everyone was asleep except for fawkners busy in the lofts and debt slaves repairing harness and sharpening swords, but they brusquely sent him on his way. They had no time for any man, even one who called himself commander of the reeve halls. His legs were stiffening and his rear in agony before he tracked down Kesta, who had fallen asleep on a thin pallet in the third barracks he checked.

“The hells! Can't I get some rest? I've got to fly out at dawn, Joss.”

“Is Arkest up to it?”

“She's close to her limit, it's true. But—”

“How can there be a but?”

“How can there not? There's room for you. Just take off your cursed boots and maybe wash your feet first.”

There was a bench and table at one end of the barracks, but the lamp usually burning there had run dry. In darkness he washed face and hands and feet, and lay down beside Kesta, her familiar warmth as comforting as a sister's. They were both fire-born and thus forbidden; in truth, it was pleasant just to know you could be comrades. She flung an arm over his torso, and in her light embrace he fell hard and at once into sleep.

He dreamed.

Marit stands at the shore of the Salt Sea, a remote place he'd been only once. Her death's cloak billows in a wind he cannot feel. Beside her stands a slender man of mature years wearing the blue cloak of an envoy of Ilu; Joss has seen this man before, dying in Dast Korumbos, but he looks every bit alive now. Isn't there something uncanny, even wrong, in a man who can die and yet live on after? Who would ever choose to die, if given a chance to keep living?