329 - The mood of the people

By verekina 9, we had sufficient signatures to call the national vote, even with the mountain passes still closed. Traditionally, the date is set a moon hence to allow discussion, and then the final count happens a half-moon beyond that, but, on my suggestion, Assembly shortened the discussion to a half-moon, since everyone in the nation had been discussing it for a good half-moon already.

That was still a whole moon, though, and my army was already champing at the bit, done with the boredom of the winter rest-time. So was I; the longer we waited, the more Arkans we faced at the border. I sought permission from Assembly to march there and liberate Roskat in the meantime. Since I had to ask publicly, it let the enemy know our intent, but it would hardly have taken brilliance for them to expect it. Assembly at least allowed me to make the request obscurely enough to conceal Mirko’s promise of warriors in return for his nation’s liberation.

Though I did unleash the A-niah with buckets of mamoka kyash over the Arkan camp once or twice, it was not so easy to pull the wool over the eyes of Sinimas Menden as Filias Metras. Part of it was that I found myself disinclined to. With my thoughts purely on liberating my own people, I hadn’t cared a whit what Arkans came to think of me in the end. Now it was in the back of my mind that I might become Imperator. Telling tales to a Pages writer suddenly was plainly wrong. I ended up doing a lot of demurring.

My scouts let me know Barakas had drawn troops in from the other borders of Roskat and from Moghiur and had some forty thousand, to my forty-two and a half thousand, which was more even when you remembered how many of mine were untried. Mostly spared fighting at Eseral and entirely at Thara-e, my Three-Moon graduates would all get their green hands red here.

Even those not blooded in truth were blooded in their imaginations, Azaila told me; he’d commanded them to imagine killing, as well as they could, every half-moon or so. That would help, but it was not the same. I decided to intersperse them into my experienced Yeoli and mercenary units for now and perhaps reunite them later, depending on how they did. This way their seasoned arms-sibs would be eager to aid them, and respect them the moment they earned it.

Azaila, incidentally, worked from dawn to dusk teaching, which everyone was amazed to see from an old man. By all reports, he never even broke a sweat until the weather turned hot.

He picked out those who had enough talent to become elite with further training, setting them to spar me to see if I concurred, and suggesting that I might like to keep them out of the fighting so as not to lose any before they got that training, as is commonly done. I chose charcoal to that. There is no training like the real thing, and here, in one army, it would smack too much of certain people being too good to waste fighting, fomenting envy and division.

Minohaier called Boralaer, incidentally, was on the edge of elite promise in Azaila’s judgment, both by natural talent and the method he was devising to use a sword or spear on the life-force-points. “Your call,” Azaila said to me, with a happy-I-must-toss-this-on-your-lap-because-I-don’t-know-politics grin. I imagined Dinerer’s face, if she knew.

I sparred him again. It would take just a prick with the right mind-set in one of those points to down a warrior, he assured me, but he wasn’t good enough yet with true steel to properly pull such a stab and so had been meaning to test it first on Arkans, next battle. I ordered exchange our steel for wood and told him to do it to me, no matter if I ended up with a bruise. I let him get through by slowing and going far over-loose, and he landed a hard poke on my forearm that sent a lightning-bolt through me. Next I knew I was looking up at sky.

“It’s not like a bodily wound, though,” he said. “If you don’t finish him, he will recover entirely in a quarter-aer or so. So…” He touched his wood to my throat with a kyash-eating grin, and a burst of laughter, with cries of “Chevenga! Killed by a Haian!” rose from the watchers. I couldn’t even lift an arm to fend it off, or get up until he’d stroked and pressed me a little in various places.

Dinerer be cursed, I decided then and there, this was going to become part of war-training all through Yeola-e, not just in the Three-Moon School. My Haian warrior was going to revolutionize our combat craft, no matter how queasy the idea made me, or anyone else. If I had thought about it, I’d have known to expect it.

It was just a matter of arranging it—and not letting him get killed first. He was utterly irreplaceable, I realized with horror, a person who I should not allow onto the field. But he’d asked for that, and I had said yes; besides, he could only fully refine this technique in battle. I just had to take my chances. Best that I assign him to an elite ten but then not send them on any elite missions. Not something you can just order; it took some digging, and shifting here and there of units, to put him under a dekakraseye, setakraseye and milakraseye I could talk into it.

I invited the diplomats along on the march. They were champing at the bit too, to firm up hypothetical conquest pacts with papers and signets, but I kept putting it off as a matter of protocol, saying I could do no such thing even secretly until the vote went chalk. All of them were nudging to expand what they’d get, and the more I put it off, the larger my Yeoli and mercenary contingent would become. Assembly stayed in Thara-e, and we moved the national vote-counting office entire there from Vae Arahi.

My army’s boots had barely tasted the dust of the road out of Thara-e when the Arkans fled the garrison at Pilinai. They did likewise at Sonakat, which is close enough to the border that you could see the circle-stones, at least until the Arkans had rolled them down the slopes to smash. That raised Barakas’s contingent by a thousand or so, so I think it was more likely due to his orders than cowardice, or, as some might call it, sense.

Marching, I felt the mood of the people in more than just Thara-e, where it had seemed fairly solidly chalk. Each town we’d pass through, they’d not only throw wine and flowers (pressed, this time of year) as usual, but raise their hands in the chalk sign or wave white-covered vote-shards. The people who’ll vote charcoal are staying home, I told myself, but from the numbers I knew in each place, the majority was on the street.

Barakas had raised a wall across where the valley narrows, the mark of the border, and encamped there. We encamped just back from arrow-range, and the news reached us: Nyereha had retaken Asinanai. Our entire coast was ours again, except for mopping up. I was so happy to share this with Sinimas that I called him in specially, and even offered to give him two pigeons homing to the Marble Palace to help ensure he made his deadline. They’d been part of Kelkulas’s gear. “Kurkas’s office would willingly forward your message to the Pages, would they not?” I said.

“No thank you,” he said stiffly, with a bit of a look down his nose. “I have a goodly supply of my own.” Just as I was thinking, Did he mean homing to the Marble Palace? he added, “homing to the Pages,” as if he wanted to make sure that was what I thought.

If you just let something slip, I thought, it certainly is interesting. Kurkas would hardly be directly running a Pages man as a spy; that was all done through Irefas and the Mahid in the field, and he wasn’t even interested in bad news that came officially, from what Kelkulas had said in his scraping. That suggested someone else in the Marble Palace. Who? How long had they been doing this? Might they be planning a move against him? I’d have given my fourth sword-hand finger to know.

We’d started the command-council meeting to plan taking the wall when a Niah scout came in with an urgent report. The Arkan barracks in the city of Roskat, no doubt left with a skeleton guard, was in flames. Mirko was seizing the moment right at its beginning. “We’ll do the plan now—no, two plans, one with an attack on their camp and their rear, one without—and enact depending on how he answers our message,” I said.

The wall was gateless but hastily-built, so we decided we’d try the mamoka-ram again, either way, this time soaking the beasts thoroughly beforehand. The fire-arrows at Chinisinal had festered as a defeat in our hearts all winter, far too long, an ill that could only be cured by proving on the field that it couldn’t be done to us again. I realized, as I thought about it, that I would have been wiser to swap the burned ones out for unburned ones immediately, rather than let the beasts and men lick their wounds through winter, as I had. Too much wound-licking can make one feel permanently wounded. My error, and I saw why: I’d let my own failure of that day fester in my own heart. A mistake I should never make again in my life. I had to meditate on it, I saw.

I got trouble I didn’t expect when I assigned the Hyerne to do a spear-thrower cross-fire again, thinking nothing of it. Peyepallo stood up sharply. “Chevaga, my women are angry. I should not have to tell you. It’s been nothing but spear-throwing ever since we revealed it to you, as if we are capable of nothing better. Is our honour nothing to you?” And you a mere man, I heard between the lines.

What they had done had been so great a boon to us that I had entirely forgotten that they considered it the least honourable mode of fighting. Glancing around the room I saw everyone else caught up short too; the Hyerne had been praised to the sky for it, from all I’d heard, from all quarters.

I bit my tongue on what I wanted to say, “Is the way in which you are unique not good enough for me?” and said, “I have been meaning to preserve you because, at first, no one else had the skill. I’ve been trying too hard, I can see. Where do you want to be; first up the ladders?” She gave me a terse, “Of course.”

No matter; I had plenty of people who could use spear-throwers well now, who didn’t consider it shameful at all. (I’d ordered the Hyerne teachers to keep it entirely secret that they didn’t themselves admire what they were teaching, and they’d mostly obeyed, especially teaching men.) I had only a few markspeople who weren’t Hyerne so far, but you don’t need markspeople for a cross-fire. It turned out that the usual Hyerne way is for the first up the ladder to soften up the defense by throwing three javelins before she gets to the top and exchanges thrower for sword anyway.

We’d be at a bad disadvantage until the mamokal broke through, and we could not know exactly when that would be, so it needed something else. “A good many of them have not fought us before, true, omores”? Niku asked me. I signed chalk. “And it’s been a while since we unleashed Hayel on their camp the night before.”

I hesitated, whereas back in Yeola-e I wouldn’t have for a moment. An Imperator, aligned with Hayel-demons? Yet it was the best idea I had. It hasn’t gone chalk yet, I reminded myself.

So I sent a similar message to Barakas, “Surrender or your solas’s worst nightmares will be visited upon them again,” and also a Niah courier to Mirko—the first time I’d sent one behind an enemy position—asking him if he’d be here in time to attack the enemy camp at dawn two days hence, using the signs of our attack as his signal.

We had his answer in half a day. “Yes, though I suggest mine assault the Arkan camp after the Arkans have seen yours coming and deployed on the wall, but before yours close. If I do not hear from you I will assume your agreement and do accordingly. And since it is on pain of death, I will not call you ‘lad’ again.” That last, with the two dots and curve of the smiling face, was to let me know for certain it was him, of course. Doing it that way was my preference, of course, but I had not felt I knew him well enough to ask it of him when we were not even face-to-face. We were planned.