David Drake: Reformer

"Useless bastard," Esmond muttered. "It's the noncoms make the Confederacy army what it is." He grinned suddenly; neither of the brothers had seen three years past twenty. " Useful bastards, those are."

Adrian nodded in agreement, looking at the weathered faces beneath the transverse helmet crests, marching along in ranks with the others.

Several centuries of collective experience there, Raj murmured at the back of his mind, scanning the veterans' faces. A lot of stored knowledge.

"Reinforcements for the Ropen forts," Esmond said judiciously. "Islander raids out that way, I heard."

The last rank of soldiers tramped by, followed by a few plowbeast carts and pack-velipads; most of those were probably carrying the commander's dunnage. Merchants, travellers, pilgrims and peasants surged back into the roadway, the brothers with them; the travellers on foot mostly made way for the brothers, given their gentlemen's cloaks and the loaded pack-velipad behind them. They made way in their turn, for a courier, a noble lady in her palanquin borne by picked slaves who could trot longer than a velipad. . although the armed outriders helped, there. They could smell the towns coming a fair distance before the road arrowed through them. Not from the sewage; Confederates were lavish builders of sewers and water systems.

"Another token," Esmond said, wrinkling his nose and glancing up.

The pole stood leaning slightly in a barren patch of sand by the side of the road, the unevenness giving it a weird demihuman quality. The man hanging on it was suspended twenty feet in the air; the short crosspiece ran through the elbows of his bound hands so that his body slewed forward, twisting at the spike that nailed his feet to the wood. A leather-winged flyer landed, hooking onto the naked body with the small claws on its wings and the longer ones on its legs. The long snaky neck bent and twisted as the toothed jaws poised consideringly. When they lanced home and began to worry loose a titbit the man awoke and began to scream weakly, unable to thrash hard enough to disturb the feasting scavenger. His cousins had taken much of the meat off the bones of the next half-dozen.

"Savages," Esmond muttered. "Why not an axe across the neck, if a man needs killing?"

Adrian nodded, breathing through his mouth. "Probably to keep the rest in order," he said.

Most of the bodies had lead plates nailed beneath, inscribed with their crimes. Runaway slave was the most common, next to incendiary. There were slaves everywhere, of course, but in the heartlands of the Confederacy they outnumbered the free men, sometimes by a considerable margin, the fruits of centuries of conquest.

The velipads were sniffing with interest, opening both pairs of eyes and pulling the rubbery lips back off the stubby ivory daggers of their omnivore teeth.

"Let's keep going," Adrian said. He glanced up; the sun was about a handsbreadth from the mountains on the west, turning their snowpeaks to blood-red. "We can stop with father's guest-friend in Kirsford."

"Better than fighting bedbugs in an inn," Esmond agreed.

For a moment Adrian let himself envy his brother. Now, there's the picture of a hero from the age of greatness, he thought. Chiseled straight-nosed, square-jawed features, six feet tall, broad shoulders tapering to a flat stomach and narrow waist, long legs, every muscle moving beneath the tanned skin like living bronze. And he's not even stupid. Not a Scholar of the Grove, but he'd read the chronicles of Themston on the Pelos War, and Epmon's work on the Art of Battle. Sunny-natured, too; and the gods had stinted him nothing, making him brave as well.

Soon Esmond was whistling through his teeth, a jaunty marching song popular among the Cadets of Solinga; their father's guest-friend proved to set a good table, and they set off early the next morning. The land rolled away before them, sloping to the great central basin that held Vanbert, the largest of all the valleys in the center of the northern lobe. Tall forests of broadspike and oak mantled the mountains and foothills; then came the lush level lands. It was more orderly than an Emerald countryside, lanced through with the straight tree-lined expanses of the Confederacy's military highways and gravelled secondary roads, every town laid out on a grid. Canals looped more gracefully, carrying water from dams in the mountain valleys and spreading it into irrigation channels. The fields were almost painfully green, where great blocks of fruit trees were not flowering; Adrian looked with interest at cherries and apples, rare on the subtropical northern coast.

No olives or citrus, he thought. Must be too cold in the winter.

Here and there a peasant cottage stood, often abandoned and falling down; on hills some distance back from the highway he could make out the groves and gardens of a gentleman's mansion. Four-horned greatbeasts grazed quietly in the meadows, or pulled plows turning the rich reddish earth; herds of baaing fleecers went clumped with shepherds and dogs guarding their brainless vulnerability. Once they passed a field of maize that must have been a hundred acres in a single stretch, with fifty or sixty leg-hobbled slaves weeding in long rows.

Esmond looked and made a tsk sound between his teeth. "I'll say this, when these Confederate magnates are rich , they're rich . How much did it take to get into the highest voting class in Solinga, back in the old days?"

"Four hundred bushels a year, or equivalent," Adrian said, reaching up and snatching a spray of blossom, putting it to his nose for a second before tucking it behind one ear.

"Four hundred lousy bushels," Esmond said, shaking his head. "By the way, you'd better not do that when we get to Vanbert."

"Why not?"

"Because only pansies wear flowers in their hair, among the Confeds," Esmond grinned. "Pansies and girls. So unless you want to attract the attention of some rich old Councillor — other than as a teacher of rhetoric, I mean—"

Adrian laughed and punched his brother on the arm; it was like striking a tree. "You're the pretty one in the family," he said.

They passed the field, and rode under the arches of an aqueduct that ran over the road as it dipped into a shallow valley. Esmond's mouth tightened again as they glanced back along the length of it, where it disappeared into the heat-haze.

"Arrogant bastards," he muttered.

"And you'd better learn to control your tongue, or you may lose it, in Vanbert," Adrian said. "They don't take kindly to Emeralds who don't keep their place."

Traffic grew steadily thicker; by the time they were within a day's travel of Vanbert itself, they rarely managed more than a trot. Everything comes to Vanbert, Adrian quoted to himself. Most of it prosaic: long wagon trains of grain and jerked meat, herds on the hoof stopping traffic — one memorable half-day spent behind a flock of waddling geese ten thousand strong — salt fish, smoked sausage, vegetables, cheeses and butter and giant tuns of wine. Once a fast two-wheeled carriage, with snow packed inside its sawdust-insulated box chassis, passed in a clatter and clangor and cracking of whips. More whips over the shuffling coffles of slaves, walking chained neck and neck with hard-eyed mounted guards, most of those barbarians from the Southron territories. Wagons and pack trains and wheelbarrows and porters, salt and iron and copper, gold and reed-paper and spices, and more races and tongues than he'd thought existed. Once he even saw a man whose skin was black , striding along in an ankle-length robe of cotton, ignoring pointing and whispering and daring small boys who darted in to touch his skin to see if it was real.