Robert Adams - Horseclans' Odyssey

Since he had seen his plans so thwarted, Duke Alex had been reduced to insults, libel, scurrilous gossip, the dispatch of an occasional assassin or agitator eastward… and truly meaningless saber-rattling. For he knew as well as did Duke Tchariz that a real war between their two realms would be at best folly and at worst suicidal, for powerful enemies—north, south, east and west—required but the slightest hint of weakness or inattentiveness to ally, descend and try to capture for their own the rich lands, richer cities and strategic locations on the principal east-west trade route.

If it did nothing else, however, Duke Alex’s growls of war caused Duke Tchariz to maintain a larger and better-equipped army of mercenaries than he otherwise would have done. Also, he kept hundreds of slaves and free artisans employed on various fortification and harbor projects. But he could well afford such expenditures, for all that his income had been halved by the knavish thievery of Alex.

His commission to his best and most favored captain to journey eastward and hire on recruits had been in anticipation of the early completion and garrisoning of his newest, largest and most important fortress—a huge and impregnable structure of stone, so situated that its cunningly designed engines of destruction could effectively cover almost all the waterfront of Twocityport and the mighty river itself to nearly midstream. Also, he had had the western terminals of the cables extended from the cable dock to new moorings within the fortress, so that in the event of an invasion by cable barge, his garrison might wait until the bulk of the enemy force were embarked, then sever the cables and send them all downriver on the strong, merciless current.

There had been loud, agonized screams and even a few muted threats when Duke Tcharlz first seized several square blocks of Lower Twocityport and commenced to set his slave gangs to leveling existing structures and even digging out the foundations; but all the merchants and other property owners had been reimbursed—a few, almost fairly. And now, even the most flagrantly robbed grudgingly admitted to the grim beauty of the new fortress, with its smooth and eye-pleasing lines—from the wide, deep, stone-lined and river-fed moat girdling the whole, through the high, thick walls of dressed granite and the cunningly situated and shielded engine emplacements, to the soaring watchtower, higher than anything else in Upper Town or Lower.

What Duke Tcharlz told none of the admirers of his fine new fortification was that although it could give easy lodging to a score of hundreds of warriors, a mere two hundred could hold it indefinitely. He knew this because one of the few men he had ever trusted had assured him of the fact, often relating to him how—long years ago and many miles eastward from Twocityport—he had himself held the archetype of this fortress for nearly two years with that few fighters and had, with his food almost gone, even managed to demand and receive favorable terms for himself and his folk from besiegers who could ill afford a further protracted campaign.

Duke Tcharlz well knew the military expertise of this man and truly respected him as he did precious few others still living. The stark new fortress was but one of his more recent accomplishments in the duke’s service, which, bloody and varied, stretched back more than fifteen years. When Tcharlz’s most efficient espionage service informed him of the imminent landfall of the sailing vessel bearing Captain Martuhn and the new mercenaries from the east, he deliberately invented an errand for Sir Andee, then stationed in his antechamber, and replaced him with the current “guardian,” Sir Djaimz. It would do the strutting young blowhard good, thought Tcharlz gleefully, to have the very dung scared out of him this day. Perhaps then he would waddle back to Duchess Ann—who had knighted him for something or other having nothing to do with fighting or military affairs, and whose spy the duke had known him to be even before he had arrived here—and thus leave the affairs of menfolk to those possessed of balls and beards.

It would have been most impolitic for the duke to openly watch the encounter he had arranged—as much as he would have loved to do so—but he had ensconced himself in the room immediately adjoining, where he could make use of the cleverly concealed peepholes and earholes.

Far, far to the west of the river, out upon that limitless prairieland which men now called a sea—the Sea of Grass— there was unaccustomed movement in the face of the fast-encroaching winter. There, where mosses, grasses and black earth all but covered the broken fragments of the cities and towns, the hamlets and farms, deserted by man and dead for more than half a millennium, were now more men, women, children and their animals than had lodged upon the land in one body for long centuries.

The traders from the caravans had remarked among themselves over the past spring and summer on the remarkable number of “new” clans—clans that had come up from the southern and down from the higher, western plains. But few had thought deeply upon such movement, for it was the way of the nomad clans to wander wherever graze and inclination took them. The traders had simply thanked their luck or stars or gods and accepted the enhanced trading possibilities presented by these new customers.

But the newly arrived clans were not, as the traders surmised, simply following their herds; no, they had been summoned. In an expanse of prairie where in recent centuries a season might have seen three or possibly four clans gathered now were camped more than six-and-thirty of the principal clans of the Kindred. Nor had their chiefs chosen the sites of this coming winter’s encampment, toward which they now were slowly moving. The sites had been chosen and clearly marked out by a man whom few had met but of whom almost all had heard—a war chief of all the Kindred clans, elected by the Grand Council of Chiefs empaneled at a special summer tribe camp three summers ago, a chief named Milo of Morai.

A true scion of the Tidewater or “Old” Ehleen nobility, Lord Urbahnos went to great lengths to avoid forking a horse, bred to his firm belief that carriage or war cart was the only acceptable transport for a refined gentleman. Only in direst necessity would he chafe and bruise his flesh, painfully strain muscles of thighs and buttocks and chance injury to his privates upon the back of some sweating, smelly beast, and never whilst wheeled transport was available. But Duke Tcharlz’s roads, especially the stretches between Twocityport and Pahdookahport, were deliberately a very bane of light-wheeled vehicles—although trader wagons and army vehicles, with their heavy construction, high road clearance and large, powerful teams regularly navigated the miles of ruts and mud and sinkholes. Since Lady Ann too detested riding horseback, this road was another barrier against her undesired presence in the duke’s sumptuous new residence.

Therefore, the Ehleen had left Pahdookahport in the next best thing, to his mind: a spacious, well-padded, covered horse litter slung—at fore and aft—between a pair of rented Northorses. The monstrous iron-gray geldings were rare and hellishly expensive to buy, coming as they did from some land far north of the great inland sea; but the breed were all gentle, smooth-gaited, stronger than draft oxen and, standing an average of twenty-two hands at the withers, perfect for easily bearing a weighty horse litter above the virtual river of mire which autumnal rains and heavy traffic had made of the road to the east. In the wallet attached to Urbahnos’ swordbelt reposed three drafts upon his account at the Ducal Bank of Pahdookahport, all requiring only his signature and seal to render them negotiable, and he hoped to use one or more of these to buy the two valuable slave boys. However, knowing full well the preference of the plains traders for hard, ringing specie, he wore under his clothing a weighty leathern money belt, abrim with ducal gold and Ehleen silver coins. And this was why Nahseer and six other well-armed bodyguards trotted on surefooted riding mules before, behind and on either flank of his litter, hunched and miserable in the chill, drizzling rain despite their oilskins. Protected from the wet by the canvas roof and sidecurtains, from the chill by paddings, pillows and a thick, winter bearskin, the onetime Lord of Kostanispolis sipped delicately from a commodious flask of strong honey wine and mused silently.