Adrian Tchaikovsky - Dragonfly Falling

The Queen acknowledged their arrival with a brief nod. ‘It is as though you are truly part of my army,’ she said drily. ‘I only have to think of sending for you, and at once you are summoned.’

‘We have a certain responsibility for this meeting,’ Che said boldly. It was what Stenwold would have said, were he himself here.

The Queen nodded. ‘Cheerwell Maker,’ she said. ‘Sperra the Fly-kinden. You shall be our translators, should we need them. I do not know, as yet, whether this Ancient League shall speak a language Sarn understands.’

She looked to Scelae, who shifted stance slightly, ready for a confrontation.

‘Speak, O Queen,’ the Moth said, quietly, ‘now that you have called us to you.’

Che sensed hostility radiating from the tacticians, at a possible lack of respect, and only the Queen herself seemed wholly calm. This alliance is so brittle, still, and they have marched side by side for only days. She could sense relations between their different cultures straining and stretching.

‘So tell me,’ the Queen of Sarn invited. ‘What will our battle order be on the morrow?’ She met Scelae’s sharp Mantis glance without hesitation.

The other woman shrugged. ‘We will fight the Wasps alongside you. We know how to fight.’

There was no sound or expression from the tacticians, but Che felt their disapproval deepen until the tent almost reeked of it. The Queen shook her head. ‘We are grateful for your assistance and your support, but we cannot dispose of this matter so casually. Tomorrow shall stand or fall on precise details such as this. The strength of Sarn is in its order, its discipline, each man and woman knowing exactly where they are supposed to be, what they are doing, and what the rest of the army is doing all around them. Your people are known as great duellists, archers, killers. I do not dispute it. They are indeed warriors, but they are not soldiers. In that field, my own kinden have no rivals. Not the Wasps, not the Mantis. Do you deny it?’

Scelae’s expression, her brief glance towards the open flap of the tent, indicated the great numbers of the Ants all around, and the few followers she herself had brought. That was the only superiority she would recognize, but she said nothing. The Queen smiled thinly.

‘Your people will fight their own battle tomorrow, each one of them alone,’ she said, softly but firmly. ‘My people will fight my battle all together, united, for that is our strength. So, tell me, how shall we use you?’ As the Moth opened his mouth to speak she raised her hand in a gesture of such simple authority that she silenced him. ‘I do not cast your alliance back in your faces. I value, more than I have words to say, that your people have come to honour us in this way. I ask the question for no other reason than that I need to know the answer. You cannot move with us. You cannot hear my orders in your minds, even if you were disposed to follow them. Tell me how I may make use of you. Show me, that I can make my people understand.’

After that speech there was a space of silence. Scelae and the moth exchanged glances, and Che found herself thinking, So it is not just the old races that can practise subtlety.

The Mantis woman cleared her throat. ‘I have lived in Sarn for many years,’ Scelae began, ‘and I have some idea of how your kinden think. You are right, of course. In the heat of battle, your orders may not seem right to us, so I cannot guarantee that my people will follow them, even if we could hear them. Tell us then how are you intending to progress the battle tomorrow?’

‘Aggressively, we have decided,’ the Queen said, after a brief silent word amongst her surrounding advisers.

Scelae nodded. ‘Then let’s be plain with it. Any fancy planning and contingencies we come up with now won’t survive a meeting with the Wasp battle line. We cannot hope to react to your sleights and changes and tactics. You, however, can react to ours.’

‘Explain,’ said the Queen.

Scelae leant over the map, but it was obvious that she could make little sense of it. ‘I will split my force and place one half on each of your flanks. We will screen your advance with our bows, and our wings. We will prevent their flying soldiers from wrapping your lines. I have many skilled archers amongst my people. Then, when we’re close to the enemy, we will attack, draw them out, break their lines. Wasp discipline does not match your own. They can be provoked, dispersed. With your mind-speech, you will be able to take advantage of what we can give you. Let us be the spearhead, then. Give your orders based on how we strike. That way you can make best use of us.’

The Queen considered this, still surrounded by the silent counsel of her tacticians. She nodded slowly, a deliberate affectation simply for the benefit of the other kinden there. ‘The idea has merit, although you take a great deal of risk on your people. If you yourselves break rank, to charge or pursue, we may not be able to save you.’

Scelae tilted her head on one side. ‘We are warriors. We fight. We understand all that means.’

The Queen looked down at the map-tables, then up at Cheerwell, the shock of eye contact startling in its intensity. And how many others now look at me out of her eyes. ‘Your comments?’

Che opened her mouth, trying to think, but Sperra said, ‘Messengers, surely.’

‘Little one?’

‘Messengers. If it goes wrong you can send someone out to the League soldiers,’ the Fly-kinden said. ‘You can call them back, put them elsewhere.’ She spread her small hands. ‘Not that I know the first thing about war, anyway, but that’s what I’d do.’

‘You wouldn’t need actual messengers-’ Che broke in suddenly.

The Queen found a smile for her. ‘Yes, we have the same thought. I shall place a few of my fleetest soldiers with each half of your warriors,’ she told Scelae. ‘They at least will be able to hear me, and they can tell you what I. suggest that your forces do. Many things can happen in a battle, and we can never predict them all. I may have need of your warriors in ways we cannot yet consider.’

Scelae glanced at the Moth-kinden, who nodded.

‘Agreed,’ she said, and moved to go, preparing to explain to her people a plan that all the Ants already understood.

Che coughed pointedly. ‘I have. something to say, I think. Something that my uncle himself would say, if he were here.’

The Mantis stopped, looking back at her.

‘Speak,’ the Queen directed.

‘This is something that stretches beyond the battlefield of tomorrow,’ Che said, sounding to her own ears unbearably awkward and pompous. ‘We’re writing history, right now, here in this tent. The three cities of the Ancient League, and Sarn, and Collegium, are all standing together and of one mind. We must remember our common cause. We must. If we turn the Wasps back, then it would be all too easy just to go back to trying to ignore each other, to forget how we have stood here, all together, for one purpose. We should remember that, for as long as we can.’

Scelae, who had so long been a spy in the Queen’s city, smiled bleakly. ‘I am not sure even the threat of the Wasps can bring us to that degree of unity. Let us defeat them first, and see what remains.’

Che slept that night in Achaeos’s arms, clutching at him for security, while Sperra lay as a curled and lonely shape at the other end of the tent. The morning woke Che not with dawn light but with his absence.

‘Achaeos?’ she called softly. There was a noise from outside, not loud, but a constant and steady sound of the Ants getting ready to fight: preparing armour and weapons, the engines of the automotives, the propellers of the fixed-wing fliers, and not a single human voice to be heard.