Jamal clapped his hands together with a shout; he was a stout man in later middle age, dressed in a burnouse and ha'aik of classical simplicity, black and white Azanian silk, wearing no weapon but the jeweled dagger whose curved sheath was thrust through his belt. He was almost ostentatiously plain, compared to the peacock splendor of the amirs and generals ranked behind him, the glowing colors of the carpets on which they stood; plumes nodded from turbans clasped with rubies and opalescene, and servants held aloft parasols whose canopies were intricately worked with Koranic verses in pearl and lapis.
"So many fires!" the Settler laughed. "We have been careless, my sons. It is only courteous we should do what we can to put them out."
Two younger men in gorgeously embroidered robes nodded and laughed with their father; Ali, slight and nervous-faced with a twitch at the corner of one eye, Akbar fingering his goatee with a plump hand. One-eyed Tewfik stood a little apart in the blood-red uniform of his troops, his face held like a clenched fist, but it was he who signalled to the uniformed engineers. An imam knelt and prayed toward Sinar, and the engineer whirled a crank. Spouts of rock and dirt punched out from the middle of the dam's face, in the center curve where it bent against the huge weight of water pressing down from the mountains. Thunder rumbled back from the stony walls, the ground shook. Then the first spouts of water arched out, beautiful and deadly as their spray cast rainbows across the gorge.
The dam crumbled like a child's sand castle beneath their power.
—and a cart trundled noisily over the cobbles of darkened Sandoral, pulled by men in head-to-foot robes; nothing showed but a slit above their eyes, and they stopped to rest often, although there were only a few bodies in the vehicle behind. "Bring out your dead!" one called, whirling a wooden noisemaker. "Bring out your dead!"
Artillery flickered and rumbled, the flashes visible over the roofs of the buildings, because no other light showed; nothing but the orange smudge of a building that had burned down to its foundations. The men pulling the cart ignored it; so did the folk who shuffled from an opened door, carrying a small bundle between them.
"Bring out your dead!"
—and a man lay in a roadside ditch. It was spring, and flowering vines grew across the stumps of trees; thin grass sprouted on bare clay in the fields beyond. The man had been very thin when he died; whoever had hacked the meat from his arms and legs had had to haggle chips into the bone to get a worthwhile amount. From the look of it, after a while they had lost patience and started chewing.
Raj blinked, the faces returning to focus before him. Smiles from a few of the Companions, sneers or doubtful mutual glances from some of the other battalion commanders, who had heard of his fits of introspection. He shuddered slightly; Spirit knew, a vision of a battlefield was bad enough
. . .
"No, gentlemen," he said, uncovering the map on the easel at the head of the room. "Observe." He tapped Sandoral city. "There are nearly a million people in this County—" probably an underestimate, nobody liked the census takers from the Ministry of Finance "—of which no more than seventy thousand live in Sandoral City itself. It isn't the trade or manufactures that constitute the value of this city, it's the fact that it keeps the Upper Drangosh in Civil Government hands."
His pointer swept downstream. "When Tewfik comes up with the Army of the South, the Colonists will have more than enough manpower to invest Sandoral closely, then burn and kill their way north around us—while the only Civil Government field army in the east sits and eats its boots; a few months, and the dogs will have gone into the stew pots." Not so much to feed the inhabitants, as because each ate more than a dozen humans. "And there goes our strategic mobility.
"The plain truth of the matter is that the Colonists are closer to the centers of their power—" he tapped the stick down on Al-Kebir "—than we are." Moving it two thousand kilometers to the east, to the Hemmar Valley and the coastlands of the Peninsula.
"This land north of Sandoral is the only densely populated and productive area available to support a defense line. If we let them into it, the Colonists can wait for Sandoral City to wither on the vine, no matter how long it takes. And I doubt we'll be able to hold them south of the Oxheads or west of Komar. It would take centuries to rebuild what they destroyed, even if we could." He took a deep breath, closing his eyes for a moment, and then opened them with a brilliant smile that almost fooled himself.
"I am instructed to defend this frontier. The only way to do that is to remove the threat posed by the Colonist field army operating on the Upper Drangosh; which means, to meet it outside the walls and crush it utterly."
Uproar, shouting; cheers from the younger Companions, a slow nod from Jorg Menyez. Suzette met his gaze, her eyes gleaming slightly with unshed tears. Cries of horror from most of the rest. Raj held up his hand for silence, but many of those present were driven by visions of their own; running with the yelping war cries of the Colonist cavalry behind them, he suspected. Death, mutilation, slavery.
"Quiet!" he called.
"
ATTENTION TO ORDERS
."
Da Cruz's bull bellow silenced them more effectively than a gunshot might have. "Commander said quiet, Messers," he added mildly. "Ser."
"Thank you, Master Sergeant. Yes, Messer Reed."
Reed hunched forward. "But you
said
that their armies outnumber you badly—how badly, you don't know. This is suicide!"
"Not if we pick the ground carefully, and see that the enemy come to us."
The militia commander's eyes narrowed: not fear, Raj decided, but the look a man gives an enemy. "How?" he said.
Raj smiled again, rising on the balls of his feet and bending the pointer between his hands.
By praying for a fucking miracle
,
he thought. Aloud, "Messers, I don't intend to fight an open-field battle of maneuver . . . not against an enemy one-third again my strength and more mobile to boot. Instead—" he flipped back the map, showing another of the city and its immediate environs. "I intend to entrench to the west of the city. Even if they have thirty thousand men, Tewfik and Jamal
cannot
invest a perimeter that includes the field army and the city both. Nor can they leave an intact mobile force of fifteen thousand in their rear, and the city with its steamboats blocks the passage of supplies by river. If I move to the west of the city,
they must destroy the Army of the Upper Drangosh or force it back within the walls before they can proceed
."
A hand raised by one of the battalion commanders: Beltin, the 12th Rogor Slashers. "Commander, if we stretch our line so that they can't outflank it, they can punch through. And if we thicken our firing line, they can outflank us; even if we dig in, we don't have the men."
Raj nodded. "Time, space, and force, gentlemen. You know what the terrain right along the river is like; impossible, and worse as you get north. Furthermore, north of the frontier forts—" which mounted huge cast-steel rifles, capable of smashing anything that floated "—we control the river;
that
is why they're building a bridge sixty kilometers downstream.
"They'll have to
march
every meter of the way, tending away from the riverbank. Twenty, thirty thousand men,
possibly forty thousand, but let's not scare anyone
,
as many animals, every one of which has to eat, and still more importantly, drink, my friends. More than once a day. How many thousand liters carried up from the bridgehead?
This—
"
the stick was unsatisfactory; he snapped the tough oak across and stabbed with his finger on a dry riverbed running east just southwest of the city "—is where we'll entrench. Impassable terrain to our left; bad-to-rough to our right, and supplies only five kilometers behind us in the city—and a line of retreat, worst comes to worst. If they move to the west, they make their supply situation impossible and expose their flank to us. If they wait, fine—we're on the defensive.
"Of course," he added, "we'll have to thicken the defenses any way we can. We'll strip the city of all movable artillery—" Reed shot to his feet, genuine horror on his face. Raj looked at him for a moment, lips pulled back from teeth.
Please. Give me an excuse. I won't have even you taken out and shot out of hand for personal reasons
,
please
give me an excuse
.
The Companions' heads turned toward Reed like gun turrets tracking. The civilian swallowed and slumped back into his chair.
"—for the field fortifications. The militia gunners will accompany me; the remainder of the militia will hold the walls. All refugees in the city—" they had been trickling in for weeks "—all able-bodied persons not members of the militia or the medical teams, and all transport animals and equipment are hereby conscripted as labor battalions." He took out his watch. "I expect to begin in about two hours. Any further questions?"
"Sir." Menyez again, frowning down at his notes. "Sir, we'll need overhead protection for the entrenchments." An airburst could turn an open trench into an abattoir, and guns and dogs were even more vulnerable. "Timber, sir."
"There's plenty on the slopes of the Oxheads," Raj said, and laughed aloud at the expressions. "And they've been shipping it down the Drangosh and putting it into buildings for a
long
time, gentlemen; we'll just take it out." Reed looked ill; he was about to lose a considerable proportion of his income, even in victory.
Silence fell, and Raj leaned forward and rested his weight on his palms.
"Messers," he said, deliberately pitching his voice low, watching them strain forward to listen. "You're all fighting men; worse, many of you are cavalry—" a brief flicker of humor "—so you've been raised on stories of victories. Elegant victories, somebody takes somebody in the flank, a commander's nerve breaks, a dashing charge disrupts the enemy's line."
His head turned, singling out one man after another. "Those battles are like two-headed dogs; they happen, but you can't count on them. They usually turn on one side being grossly inferior, in numbers or weapons or morale, training or leadership."
One fist rapped the wood lightly. "We're not fighting barbarians. We're fighting a big, tough army, well-equipped and trained. Men not afraid to die, under commanders who've learned in a hard school. I'll use every trick, every surprise I can—but tricks and surprises will not win this battle.
"There is," he paused, and frowned as he sought for words, "a certain brutal simplicity to most engagements between well-matched forces. We're going to fight that sort of battle, and our only real advantages are interior lines and position. The enemy will march right up to us, and we're going to plant our feet in the dirt and systematically beat him to death. Kill, and keep killing until their hearts break and they run. And
then
,
we will have fulfilled our mission and made this province safe."
A long quiet, even the Skinners sensing the solemnity of the mood. Raj's voice was soft, "Messers, the Spirit of Man of the Stars is with us: I know this,
know
it as if shown a vision. But the Spirit acts through fallen, imperfect men. Through us. So let us do what men may, and suffer what we must like men." Louder, "Meeting dismissed!"
The long roar of falling adobe woke the infant slung across Fatima's breast. She soothed it absently, looking back down the street of officer's billets; hers had been the last to go. Soldiers and conscript civilians surged forward even before the dust settled; mud brick has great strength in compression, almost as much as stone, but it will dissolve back into the earth it was made from under lateral stress. Townsmen shouted, dragging at lumps of clay with mattocks and shovels and picks; the Descotters tossed their lariats to be snubbed to the ends of beams, took turns around the pommels of their saddles and dragged the long baulks of pine timber back into the street, their dogs hunching and tucking their tails between their legs as they backed. Torches lit the faces of men who strained and grunted as they heaved in unison, flinging the rafters onto wagons.
It was the fourth hour past midnight; odd, she thought, for the streets to be lit like day, at an hour meant for sleep. It had often been her favorite time, catnapping between the times she fed the baby, lying quietly and listening to the breathing of the men . . . odd also to be always with men, after so many years in the world of the women's quarters. She brushed a tear from the corner of her eye with her shawl.
"Why are you sad, Fatima?" Damaris Tinnisyn said, heaving a bundle up to the bed of the wagon; Kaltin Gruder's household had been next to Staenbridge's, and they were sharing the chores of moving their gear to the temple.
She stopped to look wistfully at the baby's face for a second, and the other two concubines gathered about to coo and gurgle as well. They were all a few years older than the Arab girl, pretty but harder-faced.
"He's
really
going to adopt him?" Zuafir said.
Fatima nodded. "Papers already made," she said, with satisfaction; there was a certain . . .
solidity
to legal documents; notarized copies nestled in the money belt about her waist that Barton and Gerrin had insisted on, along with her manumission papers. "Raj . . . Messer Whitehall and his Lady stand Starparents."
The other's envy was friendly, without the edge of hostility it might have had if she had used her good fortune to try and domineer. Governor Barholm's wife had started from far lower than they, an outright prostitute rather than an acknowledged mistress: but that was a fairy-story, a tale like Djinn from a lamp or wagons that flew and talking picture-boxes; gentlemen did not marry the girls they picked up on campaign. Fatima's good fortune meant an honorable place for life, and a nobleman's status for her son. The sort of stroke of luck they dreamed of while they scrimped and saved, for a dowry that would make a working-man overlook certain things, or enough capital to open a shop.