337 - We must change how we did everything

I woke, panting. Niku was up on one elbow, looking down at me. “Were you making love to Kallijas in your dreams?” she asked me. It was before dawn, only half-light, and the night-candle was behind her, so I could not read her face.

“N…no,” I whispered.

“Skorsas? You were very obviously making love, and when you spoke it was in Arkan.”

“No, no… it was… it was this woman…”

She seemed to flinch all over. “An Arkan woman? Purified?”

“Niku… Niku, please…” I hadn’t thought to try to notice whether she was purified. The dream was not fading, but staying as vivid and unclouded as a waking memory, in the way of dreams you know you will never forget in your life. It meant something, something very important; I could not doubt that. “She was not an ordinary woman. She was magical. I need to think about it.”

Niku’s eyes softened, and she stroked my brow and my hair with her hand, half sympathetically, half absently. Because of what she’d said, I’d shied away from telling her the whole thing, but now I changed my mind.

To recount is to relive. I was breathing hard and arching my head back, all but involuntarily, in a moment. She lifted the covers off me to look between my legs, smiling. “She did not finish you—”

“Oh, Saint Mother, yes she did,” I said, and tried, like a monkey trying to paint a mountain, to describe it.

“You came in your mind, but not bodily,” she said. My dreams are always real to me; only now did it occur to me that if I had, the sheets would be sticky, soaking and growing cold against my thighs, and I would not be capable of hardness again yet. “I think we can do something about that, omores.” She was seeing it as a cure to her morning grumpiness as well, I saw. “Close your eyes.”

She lowered herself onto me without gentleness and took firm hold of my throat at the same time, just as the woman in the dream had, though her hand was much smaller. Thinking of Kallijas and Skorsas—and Vaneesh, now, too, she must be—she wanted to feel I was hers.

I was in the earthquake in the fabric of being, the river of history, again in a moment. I came fast as a boy, but so long she sat clenching on me amazed. “Ama Kalandris, pehali, I’m taking the aborting-herb even if I am nowhere near the baby-time of the moon,” she said, when I finally fell lax, feeling as if even my bones has turned to liquid. “You shot up to about my back teeth, I think.”

But too fast for her, I saw, when I could perceive again; her eyes were still hungry, her hips still grinding on mine. I finished her with my tongue and hands, making her fly without a wing. As we lay together like two entangled puddles, sleep tempting us again, the gong of reveille sounded, followed by the new wake-up cry the signalers had invented: “Rise and shine and connnnnnn-querrrrrrrr Aaaarrrrrrrrkohhh!”

Osijitz is a cylinder of a city, built originally within a tall round wall on a small hill so it juts up above the rolling fields around it. It outgrew its wall, though, with houses sprawling out beyond.

We found them utterly deserted. Everyone had fled inside the wall. This land had been Arkan for more than four centuries, the blood a mix of Arkan and whoever was there before, their language and ways effaced within a century, by the usual Arkan practice, and now long forgotten. We were not the longed-for liberators here. We were the invaders, the reavers, the barbarian horde that would kill and despoil and burn all it got it hands on, by the stories they’d been told.

We camped upstream from the city, just beyond its edge. A runner came to me with a message from a setakraseye whose name I have forgotten. “Beloved, my kras says, now that we’re encamped and at ease, there are people taking their leisure by going into the Arkan houses. He says he knows there’s standing orders against stealing, so maybe it’s not what they’re doing, but it doesn’t seem right to him, he can’t see what good they’d be doing, so he thought you should be informed.”

It doesn’t matter how much I study beforehand, I thought. Things will keep coming up that I haven’t planned for. I didn’t even have someone designated to assign to this. I set Krero on it, and he took about fifty of the darya semanakraseyeni.

Grown-ups will be children, sometimes, testing the rules. A few people were caught red-handed with things the Arkans had left. Invariably they argued. “Oh come on, they’d never miss this! If they really wanted it, why did they leave it behind? But they’re Arkans, they’re the enemy, who cares? They stole a hundred times as much from us…” and so on.

Others denied having any intent to steal, truthfully for all I knew. “We’re just… taking the tour! Always wanted to see how Arkans live, what the insides of their houses look like… we’re throwing a wild party and don’t want to disturb people in the camp.” Krero ordered them out, but with no standing rule from me, it had no teeth. “We can hardly tell them they can’t be on Arkan property,” he pointed out, “when we’re camped on a farmer’s field.” Conquest is all about trespassing.

The punishment I’d set for stealing was a reprimand and latrine duty. I put out the word: it was increased to twenty lashes with the Yeoli whip, no matter how small the item, and entering buildings would earn a reprimand and latrine duty. People moaned that it was harsh, and it was, but punishments have to be, if you want to prevent people from doing what they don’t really think is wrong. Semana kra, I told myself. They voted chalk, I do this.

“Next problem, Cheng,” Krero said to me, as the first magnificent smells of dinner cooking over the fires began beating back the usual spring war-camp smells of smoke, crushed new grass, canvas and sweat. “We all know, no touching anyone who’s no threat without orders; but what’s the policy about forming a crowd to jeer them?” I asked him what was going on with my face half-buried in my hands.

“They’ve found this one old man. They’re not going into his house, but he’s on the front porch declaiming something in Arkan, ‘I’m not moving one finger-width,’ I suspect, and he’s drawn a crowd.”

“If that happened in Yeola-e, Yeolis doing it to a Yeoli, what would it be? They’re harassing him. New policy, harassment of non-combatants gets reprimand and latrine duty.” He a-e-kras’d and strode off.

I heard more about it later, at a campfire. He was an old solas—I knew as soon as someone said, “And he had this tiny model of his house, exactly the same, on a little pillar right in front”—and he came out waving a crutch and yelling. Of course they cast about until they found someone in the army who knew some Arkan.

“My son couldn’t make me get out of this house!” the codger was declaiming. “My wife couldn’t make me get out of this house! My doctor, the Sereniteers, the taxman, the city health office, no one’s made me get out of this house, so you think the likes of you are going to manage it, you stinking barbarians!? You can come in here and sack this place all you like and you won’t get me off the smouldering foundations!”

So of course they jeered back, licking their fingers and baring their breasts, with their interpreter kindly translating all, and, like many old people, he let out his story, that he was eighty-nine and won the Imperator’s Rose against the big heathen darkies seventy years ago and Yeola-e had eaten four of his great-grandson’s lives, in between calling the crowd cowards and saying they wouldn’t dare approach him and Aras rust all their swords and he’d put them over his knee and take his crutch to their behinds. A member of the darya had got there just in time before someone went up onto the porch to answer his challenge. Thanks to my own orders, he faced them all down.

Krero was back not a tenth-bead later. “How about their animals?” I smacked my hand across my face again, which means, of course, tell me. “You remember the cat lady in Terera? The one who lived alone with forty or fifty of them—remember we visited her to try to count them?—and shit-boxes everywhere? Turns out Arkans have cat ladies too. Except this woman, I swear, has hundreds. Her house is bigger. And people are—”

“Twenty lashes, same as stealing,” I said. He a-e kras’d and ran this time, making me a little queasy wondering exactly what said people were doing. I called Chinisa, though she was in her leisure-time too. I was going to forget these rule-changes if I didn’t have them recorded.

Hundreds of my warriors did these things before we succeeded in chasing them all out, and getting the sentries to stop people going out of the camp in that direction as well as coming in. I cannot fault any nationality more than any other, except the Schvait, who went nowhere near. The most seasoned mercenaries, oddly enough, stayed away; I understood after thinking about it that they were more experienced in conquerors’ discipline than I was. I am ashamed to say, it was Yeolis as much as anyone else.

We’d marched, so next day we rested, and considered plans. In every city we’d taken so far, if a citizen had happened to spot a sneaking Niah, they’d have helped or at least kept quiet. In this one, it would be instant alarm. The enemy was now not just the warriors, but the residents; we’d have to have plans and policies to counter them. We must change how we did everything.

A party came from Roskat: Vaneesh and an escort. Mirko had won the vote, but only by a little, about fifty-five to forty-five in a hundred, not nearly as firm a mandate for the course he’d laid out as he, or I, would have liked. He’d have to take Fuun in a very high position, whatever danger that entailed, and make some concessions in law to ancient Roskati royal traditions. But it was still a mandate, and so Vaneesh and I had our mission.

I would have liked to celebrate that night, as the Roskati would—even those who had lost, because they could still celebrate that they’d been able to vote at all, and now had a head of state of their own—but we’d likely fight tomorrow. The Roskati I decided to rest, at least on the first day of fighting, if it went to more than that, they’d been so busy in Roskat; now I was blessed with a big enough army to do that, let them carouse. I’d put in an appearance. In the afternoon, I convened the command council.

Another difference; we had no one who’d lived in the city, or knew someone who did, who could tell us how it was inside in better detail than those who’d gone on the raid could. We had to gather all that by Niah scouts and those spies of Ikal, rare as they were, who could pass as mixed-blood Arkans. At least we knew how their larder was.

“Never besiege,” I intoned to someone on the council who suggested it. “A war of speed, remember?” I’d made that whole speech to them the night I’d rejoined the army. “We’re in Arko now; they’ll be much faster to send reinforcements. The worst danger to the Empire is now here; they’ll send them in from everywhere.” As far as we could tell, Barakas had perhaps twenty-five thousand solas in the city.

“They don’t know we’re in such a hurry,” said Arzaktaj. “We could threaten, and it would be a threat with power.”

In Yeola-e, I would have said “Yes, we’re doing that,” instantly. Here I sat thinking, pinching my lip. All was different. They were no longer the invaders, who could afford to take setbacks. They were the defenders of the Empire, who held its safety in their hands. All Arko would look to them to hold firm; it would be in the Pages of the lip as well as the Pages of the Press; they’d be remembered in Arko’s history, one way or the other. Our threat would be a call to their honour.

I wondered if I’d taken the differences into account enough, in my calculations for Assembly.