Artos shrugged. “The Prophet Sethaz has big eyes
right now
, the creature; and Boise aspires to reunite the whole continent.”
“Yah, yah, but—well, you have a point.”
“The point being that a hypothetical threat in seventy years is no match for a very real one right now,” Father Ignatius observed dryly. “As a wise man said, in the long run we’re all dead. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.”
Artos nodded. “Montival’s center of gravity lies very far to the west, west of Corwin. Defending the Lakota territories we could do, at great cost and effort; fighting east of there would be a nightmare, against foes at least as strong defending their own homes and with their source of reinforcement and supply close to hand. As you said, lord Bossman, geography doesn’t change. Geography in the form of soil and rainfall dictate that the High Plains will be thinly peopled, and will have mountains between them and the lands of the Pacific coast. Montival will be loose-knit by necessity, as well as inclination, and the Sioux territories will be a buffer. Now, to business.”
The Chancellor cleared his throat, looked at Kate Heasleroad, and spoke:
“Iowa will contribute fifteen thousand cavalry, thirty-five thousand infantry, a hundred batteries of field artillery, and engineers, support troops and siege train in proportion,” he said. “They’re already mobilized. We’re also prepared to supply rations, fodder and replacement horses for the other contingents while they’re in the field.”
Generous
, Artos thought.
Though they can afford it.
He felt more than saw Matti nod slightly beside him. She scribbled on her pad and tilted it so that he could see without being too obvious about it:
And it establishes Iowa as
primus inter pares
here. Worth it for the long-term effect on the balance of power from their point of view. If they convince everyone of how strong they are, they won’t have to fight to prove it. It’ll show off the advantages of their central location, too. Abel and Kate want Iowa to be the power that settles disputes and holds the scales, but they don’t want to take anyone over.
Kate nodded at her Chancellor’s words. “I might add that the Dominions to our north, all three of them, have agreed to declare war on Corwin
provided
that
we
all do so.”
“Right away?” the Bossman of Marshall said.
“No, but just as soon as our forces actually take the field and cross the border, so that they can’t be left swinging in the breeze.”
“About time the Canuks got their thumbs out,” someone muttered. “Sometimes I think that
they
think we’re hardly better than the Cutters.”
“I don’t insist they love or trust us as long as they’re
with
us,” Kate went on. “And for their own good solid self-interested reasons.”
Mathilda beamed at her, proud and fond, and Artos blinked a moment as he saw Sandra Arminger’s face peering out through hers. They said that you should get to know a woman’s mother before you married her, because she was your fate in twenty years, but . . .
Kate went on: “And I can’t answer as to how many troops that means, but it does secure our northern flank and it can’t hurt.”
There was a murmur of approval. Bill Clements of Richland cleared his throat and spoke:
“Richland, Marshall and Fargo will each contribute a brigade of four thousand cavalry, and their support services and horse artillery. The troops are already moving, and we can discuss command responsibility when they get here.”
And I’m glad that’s Kate and Abel’s job and none of mine
, Artos thought.
Mathilda scribbled again:
Clements is happy that the younger brother of one of his Sheriffs is your brother-in-law. It gives him a link to Montival, which means he has an ally on the other side of Fargo and Marshall, which both outweigh Richland badly. They’ve never actually fought but it’s come close, and Richland
has
had a border war with that smaller realm, Ellsworth I think it’s called. That’s why they’re not here.
He nodded. Carl Mayer of Nebraska rose in turn. “We’ll kick in twenty thousand men, half mounted. Concordia and Kirksville will put theirs under our command; five thousand more total. Twenty-five thousand men. We’re already working on reconditioning the railways, have been for months now. We can push them across Wyoming to the Rockies as soon as the troops can protect the working parties.”
Artos heard Bjarni grunt slightly, as if someone had punched him in the gut and he was hiding the impact. The number of
soldiers
promised here was more than the whole of his people, men and women and children together, and these rulers were casually talking of campaigns across distances nearly as great as those between Iowa and Maine. In the abstract, he sympathized; he’d been stunned by the dense populations here when he came through last year as well.
Bjarni was probably asking himself why he’d bothered to bring his little battalion at all . . . and then reflecting that it was for honor’s sake, and also because while Syfrid of the Hrossings was here, back home the new kingdom was being consolidated by his wife and his uncle Ranulf, who was also commander of his
hird
, his guardsmen. Not to mention the prestige he’d bring back, and the loyalty and tales of the men of all the Norrheimer tribes who’d have fought and fared so widely under his command.
Though the most remarkable thing of all about the Midwest is that even with all these people hereabouts, still they till but a fraction of the land, and it so fine and fertile—only a tenth even here in Iowa where there was no famine and there are as many folk now as there were in the year of the Change. Still less is put to use elsewhere, where things were so much worse in the terrible years.
He’d seen that when he’d come through last year, and again this spring; each farm in Iowa with its farmhouse-manor and dependent Vaki village was an island of fields and tended pastures, surrounded by lush vastness going back to tallgrass prairie hardly used at all, or to burgeoning marshland. That tiny share of the land produced such abundance that even the poor and lowly ate their fill here every day as well, albeit it might be corn bread and fatback rather than steak and asparagus.
Yet before the Change it was cultivated fields to the horizon everywhere around here, and every inch of this lovely black soil under the plow, and each farm worked by a single family. To say
three hundred million
is one thing; to see the soil that fed that host in the ancient world, and with so little human labor, is another altogether!
Regent Catherine Heasleroad took the salute of the march-past gravely, proud in her not-quite-Montival-style court dress on the bunting-draped stand. Her right hand was over her heart as the last of the regiments went by with an earthquake rumble of boots and a ripple of pikes, a flutter of banners and barks of
Eyes right!
Behind her a nursemaid held her son, who was quiet enough with the wide-eyed curiosity of a dry and well-fed infant.
Not bad
, Artos thought as he considered the troops.
They’ve been at work.
It was a warm bright day, humid as it often was hereabouts, and there were plenty of red faces in the ranks going past, but nobody looked out of condition or ready to faint. The recruits had been big hard-muscled young farm laborers for the most part before they were called to war, well used to outdoor labor and handling stock.
And the gear is certainly splendid.
Half the footmen carried sixteen-foot pikes; they’d been converted to the knockdown Montivallan model, so much easier to handle on the march. The rest had crossbows with built-in cranks, and prods made from old automobile leaf-springs. That wasn’t much different from the way many went to war in Montival, but here every man had half-armor; steel back-and-breasts, tassets to protect the thighs, greaves and vambraces and mail sleeves. The smell of coal smoke seeped out of Des Moines, and it was stronger still within the ferroconcrete ramparts of the city wall, where the foundries and forges and workshops were; their capacity to turn out equipment in mass and quickly was astonishing.
As if to punctuate the thought, a train came in sight from one of the gates, pulled by sixteen pairs of big brown oxen leaning into their yokes and keeping the trek-chain tight. The rail-wagons behind were heaped high with fresh-cast round shot in boxes, neatly marked as six, twelve or twenty-four pounds weight; more crates held four-foot catapult bolts, or bundles of the smaller forged-steel type that could be thrown to create bee-swarms, or bundles of arrows. The Iowan Bossmen had built up their armories with paranoid persistence. Even the bicycles resting in endless rows beside the tents were more than half of post-Change manufacture. That meant they were heavier and cruder than the ancient world’s models, but they were perfectly functional for the brawny plowboys who made up the army.
Most of the horsemen were light cavalry, bow-and-shete troops much like Ingolf’s Richlanders save for details. There were experimental units of lancers armed cap-a-pie on barded mounts, but those had been put together since the party from Montival came by last year and described the PPA’s chivalry. He didn’t have much confidence in them. It took a long time to make a man-at-arms who could fight knight-fashion, and training his horses was nearly as much time and trouble.
Their field artillery is fearsome, though, and there’s the Dagda’s own lot of it. Plus the combat engineers, the railroad battalions, the medical corps, the signalers . . . all very formidable. Corwin has awakened a sleeping giant here, one they might have lulled to harmless drowsiness for many years yet if they hadn’t been so heedless in their pursuit of me.
A cold certainty filled him; that compared to the threat of the Sword, even
this
army was as nothing. That was why the Prophet Sethaz had been willing to let all the threads of his intrigues here tangle and break in an effort to kill Artos before he reached Nantucket.
The which he did not do, though not for lack of trying. And now I come for you, ill-wreaker, and on that day you perish. There’s a time for mercy, and a time when mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.
“You’ve whipped them into shape,” he said to the Iowan rulers. “Much better than they were last year, I think.”
Abel Heuisink shrugged. “We’ve all been working hard. It’s doing Iowa good to have something to do
together
, come to that. We spent far too many years bickering with each other.”
Artos smiled wryly at what it was politic to leave unsaid. Thomas Heasleroad, the first Bossman of Iowa and the father of Kate’s late unlamented husband, had seized power in a coup during the confusion right after the Change and ruled with an iron fist. He’d been a tyrant’s tyrant very much in the mode of Mathilda’s father back home, if less given to picturesque trappings. Perhaps nothing else could have brought this land through so undamaged; granted that Iowa had been fantastically rich in food, still it had taken swift, ruthless action by a man with a clear vision and a willingness to smash all opposition in blood to make the transition without famine and plague.
Certainly even here in the Midwest nobody else had so little damage; most lost their bigger cities and a chunk of the countryside near them.
Unfortunately such a man didn’t turn from lion to lamb when the crisis was past, nor cease to play games of intimidation and divide-and-rule, nor had he raised his son Anthony to be any better. The second Heasleroad had won Kate’s love, but then he was the father of her infant son. Everyone else had regarded him with loathing tempered by fear of the State Patrol—which meant Secret Police; even those who backed him for reasons of realpolitik and self-interest had detested him as a man. His martyred memory was much more popular as a symbol of Iowa’s affronted pride than the living ruler had ever been.
“It’s a pity that unity here requires a war,” Artos said tactfully. “But on the other hand, we’ve no
choice
but to fight that war, so you might as well get some lasting gain from it along the way, eh?”
And how many likely lads will be down in the dirt with a spearhead through their guts before it’s over? How many homesteads burnt, livestock slaughtered, tools broken, how many children going cold and hungry? The Gods made men so that they fight now and then, but . . . it’s not so much those like me I mind. I’m a warrior by trade, and I chose to take up the sword—and the Sword. It’s my own choice, and one I make again every day. The most of those who die will be levied by their lords, dragged from the plow willy-nilly, or just caught in the passing of the armies. So we’d best get it over with as quick as we can, and with as little damage as may be.
Abel nodded; Kate sighed, then did the same. He suspected that they were thinking much the same thoughts, and he felt better for it. Some of the Bossmen he’d met . . . well, you didn’t get to choose your allies any more than you did your relatives; he was going to end up with Sandra Arminger as his mother-in-law, for example. And even more disturbing, the ghost of Norman Arminger as his
father
-in-law.
Leading a band into battle, my blade in my hand and my chances no better than theirs, that was one thing. This moving armies like pieces on a chessboard is another, and one far less to my liking. But some men take to it as if it were a bowl of nuts and berries and cream.