Mitchell Smith - Kingdom River

"As you say." Voss saluted, and started to turn his mount away.

"And Howell…"

"Sir?"

"Sorry about the ear."

Voss smiled. And when he smiled – the handsome horse-face with its eye-patch suddenly creased and looking kind – Sam understood what women saw in him. "It's just a fucking ear, Sam. And I've still got most of it."

"True. And, Howell, it was very well done of your people – very well done for cavalry to maneuver so decisively on foot."

"Your idea, sir."

"Ideas are easy, Colonel. But shaping horsemen into infantry formations in the middle of a fight, is not easy."

"The people paid attention – and I was lucky."

"That, too." Sam held out his hand, and Howell leaned down to take it. "Thank you."

I weld them to me. Sam watched Howell ride away, holding the bandanna to his injured ear. As I hammer, polish, and sharpen all my tools and instruments…

Howell Voss would be the man to take the Rascob brothers' place. – Ned Flores had a sense for horses and distance and country. And both old Butler and Charmian were wonderful infantry commanders… But here at the pass, Howell had turned from commanding Heavy Cavalry and Light, to commanding them as unaccustomed infantry. And he'd done it perfectly, as Sam had stood aside – needing only the hint that the imperials would likely come, the second time, in column.

"Good!" Howell had said. "I'll let 'em in – then re-form, and swing the doors shut." The important word in that, of course, had been 'Good!' That swift-reasoned eagerness.

So, a decision taken – and old Jaime and Elvin Rascob both now ghosts, though they didn't know it. It would also be useful – certainly sweet Second-mother Catania would have agreed – to manage Howell and Portia-doctor together at last, so Voss's loneliness didn't end by crippling him as a commander.

New instrument prepared; old instruments discarded. And instruments for what? The peace, and peace of mind, of two hundred thousand North Map-Mexico farmers, shepherds, tradesmen? Was that sufficient reason for the cataphracts dying here at Boca Chica?

How much difference would it make if the Emperor came back up to rule the north? If the Khan came down to rule it? Careless rule, or cruel – how much of a difference? Enough to be worth the deaths at This'll Do, then Boca Chica… and all the deaths in the years before?

No difference now to fourteen Light Cavalry, caught on the slopes by their own avalanche.

No difference to the one hundred and eighty-three troopers killed playing infantry against the cataphracts.

The soft sunny day was fading, laying long shadows across beaten grass, across dead men and dead horses. A fading day, but still warm so far south… Sam took a drink of water from his canteen. He imagined it was vodka – imagined so well that he could taste the lime juice squeezed into it.

Flies had blanketed the dead horse he sat on, and veiled the pinned cataphract's ruined face. This crawling, speckled drapery rose clouding when Sam stood to walk away, and drifted humming along with his first few steps, as if he might be dead as well.

"Am I clever, Razumov?"

"Very, my lord."

"And you will have the courage to warn me when I'm not?… Should that ever happen."

"I will try to find the courage, lord."

"Good answer." The Lord of Grass was in his garden – a summer garden now past the end of its delicate temporary blossoming of sweet peas, pansies, and bluebonnets. The sweet peas were already gone, the bluebonnets and pansies withering in Lord Winter's earliest winds… The garden and its paths were at the center of a small city of yurts, tents, buildings and pavilions set on gently rolling prairie, a few Warm-time miles north of the mound of Old Map-Lubbock.

There had been, not opposition, but complaints at moving Caravanserai from Los Angeles to the mid Map-Texas prairie, only eighteen horseback days south of the Wall of Ice. However, after one complaint too many on the subject had cost Colonel Sergei Pol his breath, there was an agreeable acceptance.

From his childhood, Toghrul had been fond of flowers. "Of course," he'd told his father, when that silent Khan had raised an eyebrow on finding his only son digging in the dirt with a serving fork, "of course, we cannot have the best Warm-time blossoms. None of their hollyhocks, lilacs, dahlias, roses."

His father had watched Toghrul at work for a while, then grunted and strolled away, seeming neither surprised nor disappointed.

Silence had been the Great Khan's weapon. Silence – slow, dark, deep as drowning water. In conference, from the time he was a child, Toghrul had watched his father's silence slowly fill with other men's talk – their arguments, defiances, explanations… and finally, their submissions. Their pleas.

The Khan, a short man, nearly wide as he was tall, would sit listening until at last the others came to silence also. Then, he spoke.

Toghrul's was a different way, from boyhood. He chatted with those who chatted with him, was quick in humor and appreciative of humor in others, so it came each time as the grimmest shock when pleasant conversation ended pleasantly… and the stranglers stepped, yawning, from behind their curtain.

The Lord of Grass bent to examine a dying bluebonnet. "How I wish for roses."

"We can get them, lord, from the south."

"Yes, Michael, we can get them from the south. They will arrive… then die as soon as our north winds touch them. I would rather not have them at all, than lose them."

"They might be kept in warm little houses, with windows of flat glass."

"Michael, I'm aware the coarse queen of Middle Kingdom keeps her vegetables and flowers alive in those sorts of houses, even after summer's over. But the notion of captive roses doesn't please me."

"No, my lord; I take your point. And if we find a painter to paint the most beautiful roses for you?"

"Razumov… Razumov. I would rather not have roses, than pretend to have them."

The chancellor bowed, and left the subject prettily. "The blossom of good judgment, however, is yours, Great Khan, since the Captain-General Monroe has followed his lesson of defeat with a triumph in revenge."

"Yes." The Khan swung his horse-whip to behead a windburned bluebonnet. "A mercy, it was too pale a shade of blue… Yes, a thoughtful Captain-General. He was clever, and I was clever concerning him. Now, I believe we'd better send just enough bad weather to see what shelter he runs to."

Yuri Chimuk – an older man, large, flat-faced, and badly scarred – had followed along on the flower tour, silent. Chimuk had been an officer under the old Khan, and had seen enough death on the ice from Vladivostok to Map-Anchorage – and in slightly warmer country farther and farther south as the years went by – to have lost any fear of it. The old general was one of the few men Toghrul knew, who weren't afraid of him.

"Your thoughts, Yuri?"

"Lord, our serious men are occupied commencing your campaign against Middle Kingdom. Since Manu Four-Horsetails is useless as tits on a bull, send him down to peck along the Map-Bravo. He's capable of that, at least."

Manu Ek-Tam was the old man's grandson, the apple, as Warm-times had had it, of his eye – and already a very formidable commander at twenty-four, having completed, it must be said, an exceptional campaign in Map-Nevada.

"Five thousand cavalry might be too heavy a peck, Yuri. I don't want North Mexico disturbed to war, just when we're striking east. The river people will be troublesome enough."

"Manu shouldn't be commanding five thousand; he's not capable. Give him a thousand, lord."

"So few? You don't want him killed, do you, old man?"