Without warning, Temujin's muskylope foundered. He flew over its head and fell hard on the cold, grassy steppe. Something hit him in the pit of his stomach. He rolled to a stop, retching and trying to force air into his lungs.
The Saurons with him were not mounted. Nonetheless, this was the third muskylope their burning pace had killed. They called to one another, and held up. One of them walked over to the muskylope. He looked down at the poor gasping beast for a moment, then stooped, took its neck in his hands, twisted sharply. Temujin winced at the sharp pop of snapping vertebrae.
"Fresh protein," the Sauron announced. He glanced over to Temujin. "You all right?"
"I'll live," the nomad wheezed.
"Good." The Sauron detached the bayonet from his rifle, started butchering the still-twitching muskylope. His comrades gathered round for their shares, stuffed themselves with raw, dripping chunks of meat. The Sauron tossed one in Temujin's direction. It landed in the dirt. "Feed your face," the butcher said. The words carried the flat snap of an order.
Temujin ate. His own people, no less than the Saurons, were used to making do with very little and to making that very little stretch very far. The muskylope meat was hot and gamy and tough. He hardly noticed. As the fellow who'd cut it off the carcass said, it was meat. When meat came along, you got outside of it.
Besides, refusing would have annoyed the Saurons. He didn't want to annoy them. Out here on the steppe, they lacked the sophisticated tools of torment on display in the Red Room. Still, what they could do with blades, fire and their own ingenuity was plenty to keep him on his best behavior.
He'd tried to escape one freezing truenight. He was, after all, a man born to the plains, a nomad, not someone whose true home lay in the unmoving Citadel. And, he thought, these Saurons were just Soldiers, not Cyborgs like—Sigrid. He knew he was an idiot, he'd proved he was an idiot, but he could not drive her from his thoughts, from his dreams.
He'd been positive he was away clean. The Saurons' hadn't bothered setting any special guard on him, so he'd just walked off from their camp in the darkness. Once he'd gained a couple of hundred meters, he'd been sure his hunting and battle knowledge would let him disguise his trail so no one—maybe not even . . . Sigrid (that pause again)—could follow him.
He'd gone more than a klick and done some serious but silent exulting when an Americ voice not five meters from him abruptly pricked his bubble of optimism: "Cut the shit, fool. Don't you know I can see you by the heat your body gives off? I'm bored with tracking you, so now you get your lesson."
The set of lumps he'd taken had been painful but not permanently damaging; the Saurons needed him in shape to ride. The fellow who beat him even carried him back to camp afterward, as casual about his whimpering weight as if he'd been a pony. He hadn't tried to run, or to bother the Saurons in any other way, since.
Between mouthfuls of muskylope, he asked, "What will you—Soldiers—do when you get to Katlinsvale?"
The commander of the Sauron force was a scar-faced Assault Leader named Atanamir. He answered, "Scout, take what we need, destroy the rest."
"Just like that?" Temujin said.
"Just like that," Atanamir agreed. "Who'll stop us? Cattle? Female cattle?" He laughed loudly. So did a good many other Saurons.
"Sigrid might be there," Temujin said. "Sigrid the Cyborg."
Atanamir had the full measure of Sauron arrogance, but didn't seem crazy with it, not by Sauron standards, anyhow. He sobered abruptly. "We worry about that as we find evidence of it, and modify plans accordingly. We bring her back if we can, kill her if we can't. Not even Cyborgs outrun assault-rifle slugs."
Sigrid's lean, hard body bleeding, pierced by copper-jacketed lead . . . Temujin made a horrible face, not sure whether he wanted that more than anything else on Haven or dreaded it enough to throw away his own life to prevent it.
His Americ had improved a great deal since he'd involuntarily started associating with the Saurons. It was, he thought, a clipped, compact tongue, utterly without the rhetorical flourishes that made Turkic, for instance, a language in which to rouse warriors to fighting frenzy. Even so, it had terms to describe states and conditions that Turkic could not encompass. One of those descriptions fit Temujin like a good pair of wool socks. He was fucked up.
One of the Saurons finished fixing bridle, saddle and reins to the next muskylope from the string the Soldiers had brought with them. His eyes pinned Temujin down as if he were a cockroach under a boot. "Climb on, nomad."
Temujin mounted the muskylope, flattening along its broad back. The beast tossed its head, snuffled out a long, burbling complaint through hair-filled nostrils and wide, blubbery lips. The plainsman felt it quiver under his weight. Keeping up with the Saurons, even without a rider, had left it worn to the point of exhaustion. Carrying him at that same pace would soon kill it. The Saurons didn't care. To them, it was an expendable resource, and a renewable one at that.
Atanamir rose from his crouch. He wiped blood off his chin as he walked over to Temujin. "How much farther to this Katlinsvale, cattle?"
Temujin knew he dared not lie. The first time he was caught in a falsehood, he'd lose a thumb. The second time, he'd lose some other projection he valued even more. But telling the truth here was not easy, either. "Assault Leader, I beg you to remember I know of this place by rumor only. We should be fairly near, but since I know neither exactly where it lies nor just how far we've travelled, I can give no exact answer."
Atanamir glanced down at something strapped to his leg. "We've come just over 1,300 klicks. Trouble is, that only fills one of your variables. I give you another—hmmm—fifteen hours. If we don't see evidence by then, you'll have to take off your boots whenever you want to count higher than nine."
The plainsman would have found Atanamir less frightening—and easier to hate—if he'd been full of gloating, sadistic anticipation. But he wasn't. He just seemed an ordinary man going about his ordinary business. If that ordinary business involved mutilating Temujin, he'd take care of it without undue fuss or bother, and then go on to the next item on his list.
The Saurons loped ahead, a few a klick or so in front of the rest to serve as scouts, another handful the same distance behind as a rear guard. In the middle were the rest of the Soldiers, Temujin and the muskylopes not yet killed. The arrangement was compact and logical. Even if he'd had Sigrid's abilities, Temujin didn't think he'd have been able to escape.
These other, ordinary Saurons seemed about as far above him in physical prowess as Sigrid had. Of course, they were men, so being dominated by them wasn't so hard for Temujin to take. And they spoke about the object of his affection—or obsession—with great respect and caution. Whatever else one could say, he'd picked a remarkable woman with whom to entangle his fate.
One of the Sauron point men came sprinting back to Atanamir, who ran with the main body of Soldiers. The Saurons' steady, ground-eating lope had already both awed and appalled Temujin. Now he saw a Sauron really in a hurry, and was awed all over again. It was as if the fellow had shot himself out of a bow.
Atanamir listened to whatever the messenger had to say, then let out a call that Temujin hardly heard but which sufficed to bring the spread-out central band of Soldiers to a dead stop. The Saurons' commander waved for Temujin to halt his muskylope. He obeyed. The animal shuddered under him in weariness or relief or the two of them commingled.
"Tell everyone, Gaurhoth," Atanamir said.
"I don't need to tell, Assault Leader," the Sauron scout answered. "They can see it for themselves—there." He pointed to the northwest
Temujin looked—there, following Gaurhoth's finger. He saw nothing out of the ordinary: just more steppe, klicks and klicks of klicks and klicks. He was, however, not a Sauron, for which he fervently thanked the spirits. Whatever Gaurhoth was pointing out, the Soldiers saw it. They grunted as they looked across the plain, then at one another and toward Atanamir.
Some of the grunts had words in them: "Dust."
"Bloody fucking lot of dust, for us to see it that far."
"Lot of bloody fucking nomads then, too."
"Maybe a trick—animals out in front, to make 'em look like more than they are."
"Dragging brush on ropes, maybe." Several more sets of eyes turned toward Atanamir.
The Assault Leader shook his long, fair head. "They're really plainsmen, I think. I was briefed on this before we set out—some sort of expeditionary force moving on the Citadel, if you can believe that shit." The Saurons laughed at the audacity of that, cliff lion-like, with tongues lolling out Atanamir went on, "I hoped we'd be through before we ran into 'em, but their van is moving faster than I figured."
"So what do we do, Assault Leader?" Gaurhoth asked. "Go around 'em? Forgive my saying so, but it would waste a lot of time."
"So it would," Atanamir agreed. He grinned, as if encountering something new and interesting in the course of daily routine. "What do you say we go through 'em instead? I don't care how many cattle there are up there. There'll be a lot fewer of'em after we're done. Let's go."
It was as simple as that. The two sections of Saurons spread out into a long, thin skirmish line and swept forward toward the foes who were still invisible to Temujin. Atanamir and everybody else seemed to have forgotten all about him.
He thought about wheeling his muskylope and getting the hell out of there, but he didn't have the nerve. He was too grimly certain the Saurons would be able to hunt him down and punish him once they were done with the plainsmen ahead. If he rode slowly after them, they could find nothing for which to blame him. He slapped the muskylope's fuzzy side. It snorted resentfully but plodded forward.
Temujin wondered whether Atanamir was crazy with Sauron arrogance after all. At any rate, if he'd had only this relative handful of men under his command, he'd have tried to get some notion of just how big a force he faced before he went and attacked it.
"Damn," Atanamir said mildly, turning the captured weapon over in his hands.
It was a flintlock rifle, about breastbone-high on a man of medium height. The trigger guard was a lever that curled around the grip section of the stock and ended in a loop. Atanamir put his thumb through the loop and pressed down.
"The iron block behind the hammer is the breech?" one of the younger Soldiers asked, like a tyro on a training field, which, Temujin thought, this mostly was.
"Yes." A wedge cammed down and the block slid back along a track that tilted its forward edge up at the same time. "A brass cylinder is sunk into the breechblock, with a rim protruding; the rim fits inside the edge of the barrel, and expands for gas sealage when the weapon is fired."
The Sauron reached down into the dead enemy warrior's bandolier and came up with a paper cartridge. He sniffed at it. "Black powder, meal-ground. The paper is soaked in saltpeter and highly flammable."
After a moment's study the Sauron bit off the end of the cartridge and pinched the torn paper shut. He pushed the L-shaped frizzen forward and let a pinch of gunpowder fall into the pan. The spring-loaded frizzen clicked back over the powder as he moved his hand to push the paper cylinder and long pointed bullet into the brass tube. The action went snick-click as he pulled the lever back to its rest position under the stock. Another snick as he thumbed back the hammer.
"Coming in from the left," another Sauron called.
Atanamir turned without exposing himself over the barricade of dead men, horses and muskylopes ahead of them. Some of them were not quite dead, but no matter.
The Sauron advance had swept into the nomad host like iron shot into a vat of treacle, swiftly at first, then slowing from sheer friction. They were on a slight rise in the steppe now, with a gully on their right flank. Several hundred meters to their front were a line of low hummocks, probably frost-heave from a bed of permafrost such as was common on the steppe; from behind that a hundred or so riflemen were pinning the Saurons down. Further back and all around swarmed mounted nomad warriors. Swarmed was exactly the right word, because the steppe seethed with them even in the dimday twilight—perhaps more so than they would have under bright light, dun masses twinkling with the steel of lance-heads and swords.
Temujin had seen a fair amount of steppe warfare, for a man his age—one civil war, numerous raids, and the endless skirmishing with their Muslim neighbors that the clans subject to his father Yesugai always suffered. At a pinch, his tribal confederation could muster a full touman, ten thousand fighting men. He was pretty sure he could see at least three times that from here—
—and the Saurons didn't seem worried at all. Annoyed, yes. Worried, no. Oddly enough, their calm was contagious. If he'd been in command of this force, Temujin thought, he'd be gibbering with terror behind a stone-faced mask put on to hearten the troops. As it was, Atanamir just looked like someone who'd found a light chore turning into real work and wanted to get it finished.
The rifle fire from the front intensified, big soft-lead slugs going crack overhead or hammering into the barricade of flesh left over from the first assault on the Sauron position. Hooves drummed through the earth; Temujin could feel it through his belly, pressed to the dirt. He looked to the left. A thousand horsemen were charging in on the flank of the Sauron position.
Atanamir adjusted the rear leaf-sight of the captured rifle and fired. Still doll-tiny, a horse crumpled and its rider tumbled free. The standard of yak-tails on a long pole he carried fell into the dirt until another rider bent low and snatched it up.
"Nine hundred meters," Atanamir said, sounding a little impressed. "But it throws very high."
Several others of the Sauron party were firing, with their assault rifles on semi-automatic. The sharp whipcrack reports were a continuous stutter, brass flying out in streams as if the weapons were on full automatic. Men and horses dropped all along the front of the charge, but one Sauron who rose too high to get a better angle fell back with the top of his head clipped off. At three hundred meters the casualties were gruesome; then the horsemen loosed a volley of arrows on high arching trajectories and wheeled around to flee.
Temujin knew a familiar fear, almost homelike, as he heard the arrows whistle. He curled himself into a ball and tried to burrow under the high-peaked saddle of the dead horse in front of him. Thwack. One quivered in the wood and leather not two centimeters from his nose. The springy horn and sinew of the plainsmens' composite bows could send a shaft a long way. More fell all around him, into coarse gritty dirt with a shink sound, or into flesh with a duller, wetter noise. Some of the flesh was living; when he raised his head, he could see Saurons tending to their wounds. One man pushed a shaft through the fleshy part of his leg, then snapped off the head and pulled the wood free. Another dug a point from a comrade's shoulderblade with his bayonet. Both wounded men were expressionless and silent, and their blood stopped flowing with unnatural speed.
"Ammo," Atanamir called. The Soldiers reported; none had more than two hundred rounds left, a total shrinking steadily as they replied to the harassing fire from the entrenched riflemen ahead.
"Noise in the gully," a Soldier called from their right.
Seconds later a pottery globe about the size of a tennis-ball fruit arched up out of the deep wash. The Soldier who'd called out caught it and half-rose to throw it back with a blurring snap. It exploded below the rim of the wadi, a crash of sound followed by screams of pain. The Soldiers chuckled at that, but something else came out of the depths. Arrows, fired blind to arch up and drop, but quite a few of them, and more all the time. The archers were in good cover, and to rise and fire at them the Saurons would have to expose themselves to rifle fire from the west.
"Damn," Atanamir said again. "Mewlip." The young trooper who'd asked about the rifle looked up. "Take this." The Sauron commander tossed him the captured weapon. "Familiarize yourself. Your absolute—absolute—mission priority, should we be overrun at any time on this patrol, is to report back to the Citadel with the intelligence. Bandari rifles, several hundred of them at least."
"Bandari?" Mewlip said.
"Unmistakable—and most Bandari, even, are armed with bows. It costs to make these by hand. I repeat: mission priority.
"Everyone," he said a little louder. "We're pulling back."
Saurons retreating! Temujin exulted. It was a heady thought, enough to make him envy the men out there fighting the patrol. Men who dared to march on the Citadel itself!
Of course, the barricade around him contained the bodies of at least a hundred of those men.
"How?" someone asked, jerking his head behind him. Dust there marked bands of horsemen closing in behind him.
Atanamir grinned. "We'll roll over the lip of that gully and move east along it, right through those fucking bowmen," he said. "They think they've got us pinned. Ought to surprise 'em."
The Soldiers laughed.
Over the next couple of cycles, Temujin seriously began to wonder whether Atanamir was the crazy one, or he himself.
The Mongols had a tradition of herding that went back to Earth, the wonderful world from which their sins or crimes (depending on which shaman you happened to listen to) had caused them to be banished. They guided and used flocks and herds of sheep, goats, camels, horses, yaks, musk oxen, muskylopes . . . if it had hooves (or even the broad horn-soled padded feet of muskylopes), they could master it.
The Saurons were herders of men.
"You wish us to join you in war, men of the Citadel?" Omin Hotal said cautiously.
The Sauron patrol were squatting and eating hugely on the rugs the chief of the White Sheep Turks had set out. Temujin just lay and groaned for the first half-hour or so, before he could gather enough energy to think of food; for the last half-cycle the Saurons had been carrying him, occasionally debating whether it was worth the trouble.
Atanamir looked around. Temujin followed his gaze; the encampment was huge, much larger than the sept of even a great chief like Omin Hotal. The other septs and clans of the Ak-Koyunlu were gathered close, clusters of yurts and herds spreading to all the horizons under the trueday brightness, pounding the steppe to dust and overburdening the wells where warriors quarreled shrilly as they labored to haul up the skin sacks of water. The air was thick with that dust, with the smoke of dung fires and the smell of dung, with the sweat of men and horses soaked into leather and felt. The tribe was mustering for war . . . and not only the tribe. There were big, fair Caucasoid-looking men in camp, dressed as plainsmen but with differences—baggy red breeches, brimless conical caps, many bare to the waist and all sporting crosses and icons about their necks. Their standard of a double-headed crowned eagle stood next to the white sheepskin of the Ak-Koyunlu, their bear-shaped scalp-locked chief sat next to Omin Hotal.
Atanamir stared, until the Turk and the Cossack bowed their heads. "We require your warriors, Omin Hotal, Oleg Cherninsky," he said. "Unfortunately, we do not have enough ammunition with us at the moment to kill all the advancing horde by ourselves, and it is inconvenient to send for reinforcements at the moment. Therefore you will cooperate under our orders."
Both chieftains bowed with hands on hearts. For the first time, Temujin began to understand why the warriors of the Citadel called the other folk of Haven cattle. White Sheep women scurried about with trays of dried meat and flatbread, and skins of kvass. Temujin grabbed a sack and drank thirstily; it wasn't the ultra-strong kara kumiss his own folk brewed, but even Turkish kvass was better than nothing.
"The horde is advancing at about twenty klicks per day," Atanamir calculated. That was good speed, for a force burdened with yurts and herds. "We estimate their numbers at about thirty thousand fighting men, less the several hundred we killed."
Hetman Oleg Cherninsky swallowed. "My stanitsa can muster two thousand sabers," he said, "counting graybeards and lads whose balls have barely dropped. We could send to our kin in other settlements of the Sir Brothers, but that would take too long—ten days." Haven days, say a tenth of a T-year.
"Three thousand," Omin Hotal said. "Four, perhaps five, if our cousins of the Kara-Koyunlu join us."
"They will," Atanamir said, as calmly as a man stating that Cat's Eye would be full in another twenty hours. "With fifty-seven Soldiers"—three had been lost in the clash with the horde—"and seven thousand of your men, the odds are in our favor. We'll sleep, then see to tactical dispositions."
The chiefs left, like schoolboys dismissed by the master. Temujin felt the kvass reviving him; he reached for a bowl of soft cheese and wild onions, scooping up a mouthful with some flatbread and munching on a skewer of grilled goat meat. It was an improvement on raw muskylope, and the serving-wench smiled at him as she ladled out more. Better, much better, the Mongol thought. The Saurons would demand women for their stay—they always did—and with a little luck, he'd get some too.
"They obeyed quickly," he said to Atanamir.
"Of course," the Sauron said, belching and reaching for a bowl of sweet cakes. His angular face looked more gaunt than usual; the past cycle had been strenuous even by Sauron standards. "A guilty man seeks to please."
"Guilty?"
Wordlessly, Atanamir turned the bowl the cakes rested in. It was cast glass, fine work, with an embossed rim of running tamerlanes about the edge.
Bandari-made, Temujin realized—his father had some like it, bought at vast expense from the Pale's traders. The sort of gift an embassy brought, to sweeten negotiations. If the Saurons had turned up a little later, the White Sheep might well have been riding under the banner of the Seven.
Perhaps not. The horde was sweeping across the Great Northern Steppe like land gators, leaving wreckage in their path; the White Sheep would be fighting for their lives and their land, if they did not join it. The Kossacki even more so, for they had a fortified town and farms as well as wandering herdsmen. The followers of the Seven were vacuuming up everything, including the seed corn.
Not exactly a smooth force, Temujin thought a cycle later, watching the last of the Kossacki ride in. He felt much better, well rested and dressed and mounted on a good horse the Saurons had ordered up for him—Atanamir seemed to regard him as something of a pet, these days.
There were several hundred of the shaven-headed warriors in this party, clustered around a two-wheeled cart drawn by a pair of muskylope and crowded with big barrels. The tops of the barrels had been smashed in, and the Kossacki were singing loudly in their harsh dialect of Russki, laden with Turkic loan-words and seemingly divided between the obscene and the scatological. Every once in a while one would spur over to the barrels and sink his head in the potent amaranth vodka without dismounting, coming up red-faced and blowing, long moustaches dripping over gap-toothed grins. Many were swaying in their saddles, and not a few were lashed over them, limp as sacks of grain.
Their hetman laughed, showing a few spikes of teeth. He slapped his keglike belly, bound around with a studded belt that held saber, silver-hiked flintlock pistols and many knives. The gray-blond scalp lock hanging down his back bobbed with his mirth.
"We drink na umor, to the death!" he boasted. "Then we fight—na umor—to the death!"
Atanamir looked at him silently. The chieftain flushed, growled and heeled his horse away.
"Buffoon," one of the Soldiers muttered. Temujin agreed; he shuddered to think what his father or his father's noyons would say to warriors sousing themselves on the eve of battle.
"They'll fight pretty well, for cattle," Atanamir said.
That migrating horde isn't likely to have much in the way of discipline either, Temujin reflected.
Watching the army grow as if from nothing, watching the clansmen follow the Saurons' orders as if they'd never imagined they might do otherwise, made Temujin's eyes widen—he was a chief's son, but Yesugei never dreamt of obedience like this.
At last, curiosity (maybe even a more dangerous fault than a fondness for strong drink or a loose tongue) made him approach Atanamir. "May I ask a question?"
"Ask," the Sauron said; he'd developed a half-scornful affection for Temujin as they'd journeyed together, and tolerated more from him now than he had when they first set out from the Citadel.
"How do you make these men follow your commands? I've had no choice but to do as you say, but there were many of you and only the one of me. Now there are many nomads and only a few of you. Soldiers you may be, but if they turned on you, they could kill you all. Yet they do not turn. Why?"
"The term is military fear," Atanamir answered. On matters military, he spoke seriously, even to one as lowly in his eyes as Temujin. He had the attitude of a shaman spinning tales of the tngri to one who, though never worthy of becoming an apprentice, nevertheless might learn something from them.
The only thing Temujin learned was that his Americ still had gaps in it. "What do you mean, fear?" he asked. "These are warriors you have gathered here. What good would they be to you if they shivered instead of going into battle?"
"Not what I meant," Atanamir said, serious still. "You're right, plainsman—they could wipe us out. But how many of them do you think we'd take with us before we went?"
Temujin considered that. Fifty-seven Saurons, fifty-seven assault rifles in their hands, against plainsmen with muzzle-loaders and bows? "It would be a slaughter to make the women wail," he admitted.
"Bet your ass it would," Atanamir said. "So that's half of what military fear is all about—they know we could hurt them. But it's only half. Suppose we all went to sleep and not one of us woke up while they were cutting our throats?"
Temujin supposed just that, with a bloodthirsty eagerness he did his best to hide from the Sauron hunkered down beside him. It was one of the few pleasant thoughts he'd had since he went, sozzled, from the Sozzled Stobor to the Red Room.
But Atanamir continued, "Even if the cattle knew they could get away with that, they still wouldn't. And that's the other half of military fear."
"I do not understand," Temujin confessed.
"Think," Atanamir urged. "You're not a Soldier, but you're not stupid, either." Now he sounded like a man guiding a boy at his first swordstrokes. When Temujin still looked blank, he asked, "What happens to these cattle if they wipe out two sections of Soldiers?"
Every woman in every clan from here to the Valley of the Dinneh spreads her legs for them, Temujin thought. That was a pleasant thought—it had been a long time. But since that probably wasn't the answer Atanamir was looking for, he kept quiet.
The Sauron said, "What will the Citadel do to them and their clans afterwards?"
A light went on in Temujin's head, cold and bright and piercing as the fluorescents that had glared down at him from the ceiling of the Sauron torture chamber. "Something dreadful," he whispered.
"You have it," Atanamir said. "They know that, down below where they don't think it, they feel it in their bones. So they don't even think about trying to bushwhack us. And that's what military fear is all about: not doing something they might be able to pull off because they know something a whole lot worse would come down on them afterwards. You got it?"
"Yes," Temujin said, and he did. Just when he didn't need any more reasons to be terrified of the Saurons, they'd given him a new one. They were surely chidkur, spirits of the dead that battened on the living. But the wind blew the thought out of his head, and the Saurons remained.
"Cossaki, stanitsa of Cherninsky," the Scout said. "They will fight to bar our path. The Ay-Koyunlu Turks have joined them. Two thousand Cossack sabers, five thousand riders of the White Sheep and the Black; the Saurons are thirty, perhaps twice that—they come close behind."
Hammer-of-God Jackson grunted, making a mark on the glossy enamel of the folding map with his chalkstick. His table was set up at one end of the big tent; crowded within were sixty of the generals, mullahs, chieftains, kings, sultans, tribal presidents . . . whatever . . . that the jihad-crusade-Volkerwanderung had inherited or thrown up. When he turned to the assembled leaders of the horde, most of them were watching him as if he had performed some magical rite. The chilly air was heavy with the scent of sweat, horse and human, and felt, leather, grease, smoke from dung fires soaked into hair and clothing.
Some of them probably do think maps are magic, he reflected with a groan.
"Khans—" that was the safest address for the leaders; he had Turks, Mongols, Dinneh, Arabs, Kurds, Tadjiks, Russki of various sorts, Spanjols, Bo, Ghorkalis, of every faith from the Islamic majority through Buddhism to followers of Christ of ten dozen heretical varieties . . . Hellmouth take it, there were even a dozen Polaki from some island out in the southern seas.
"Here is our situation." His finger traced along the line of the Atlas Mountains from west to east, in the direction the horde was moving; toward the Citadel and the entrance to the Shangri-La.
"We already have the largest host ever gathered on Haven. We are moving across the Northern Steppes like a wind of fire. Behind us even the grass is gone."
No surprise with thirty thousand mounted men, plus their dependents and families and the livestock to feed them, all crammed into the corridor between the foothills and the northern tundra-swamps, just turning treacherous and liquid now that ground level did not freeze hard every dimday. Hammer sent a silent prayer of thanks to his strait God that this was happening in summertime, when the carrying capacity of the pastures was at its height. Even so they were eating the land bare, sweeping up all the remaining grainstocks of the farming valleys, every head of livestock within reach, all the wild muskylope heading north with the season.
"We cannot stop, or we starve. We cannot go back, or we starve. Every people on our path must either join us, or fight to stop us, or starve. The greater our numbers grow, the faster we must travel—or we starve."
Which meant that anyone who could not keep up was left behind; stobor and cliff lions, tamerlanes and land gators were flocking in from half the continent to feast on the leavings, man and beast. Military patrols every stop period kept them from snapping up the rearguards as they slept; nobody had ever seen predators in such numbers, or so bold.
"These Cossaki, and the White Sheep Turks, they have decided to fight rather than join. With their accursed masters, the Saurons—the first real force of the enemies of God we have encountered."
"What shall we do with them?" a man asked. Running Wolf, Hammer noted. Dinneh, one of a small band who had force-marched down from the Tierra del Muerte to join the Seven. "The tribesfolk, not the Saurons."
"God is with us; God is great; God is our strength," Hammer said. He smiled, then, an expression so feral that even the hard men before him blinked at it. "Those who oppose us, fight against Him. And they went in unto that city and slew all therein, both the young and the old, the male and the female, the ox and the ass and the sheep, with the edge of the sword, leaving not one alive to breathe; and Joshua burned the city with fire. So says the Lord!"
A long snarl of approval swept over the armed figures crouched on the rugs of the tent, a rattle of steel and a gleam of teeth in dark faces. The fierce eyes dropped a little when Chaya rose, resplendent in her stainless robes.
"I see . . . I see a pillar of smoke by day, and of fire by night," she said. Her voice was a penetrating whisper, the pale eyes locked on some horizon beyond the red-hued steppe outside. She walked forward, and the crowd parted for her like tall grass before a wind. "They who put their faith in fire, in flame their faith shall be repaid."
They watched her, Hammer-of-God thought, with more reverence than they watched their own imams and bonzes. It would have been a beautifully executed strategy, if he could be sure it was a strategy and not nerve-wracking reality. He had found her in the Waste the night of her first convulsions; the entire army had seen her scream and topple in the throes of prophecy at the oath-taking's height.
Lord God of Hosts, God help us if it's real.
Not the sort of prayers the Elders of his church would have approved of, regardless of all the time they spent braying on about prophecies. Show them the real thing, though, and watch them turn white as fresh dough and begin to shake. He wished he had time to enjoy the spectacle.
He flicked a glance at Karl bar Edgar, standing at Judge Chaya's side. His new wife was with him. Between Karl's medical skills and Aisha's fighting skills, the Judge was as safe as Hammer-of-God could make her.
Don't let her see through me. I have enough trouble with this mob. Another prayer that wouldn't have passed muster in his father's church. Too damned bad. In thy hand only is victory, O Lord God of Hosts. He'd just have to do his best.
Karl nodded—which Hammer assumed to mean "no fits imminent"—and thinned his lips, which wasn't a good sign at all. Even a worn-out old professional soldier could see that the Judge was worn out too. Old, he thought of her, for the first time. He had spent most of his life following the Judge's orders, or conspiring with the kapetein to find a way around them. She had stood like a monument in his life. And now, as he thought he saw it start to fell, he was more afraid than he'd been since the death of the kommandant h'gana who had first whipped him into shape.
"What of the bloody Saurons?" Kemal asked; as one of the Seven he had a rank among the first line of commanders, although only a few hundred of his own people had followed him eastward. Many more from other tribes were sworn to him now.
"We defeated this force once—we can do it again."
"At heavy cost," Kemal said. Four hundred dead, and twice that number wounded. The horde was balanced between exaltation—they had forced Saurons to retreat in open battle—and shock.
Hammer nodded, glad to be back to practicalities. "There are a maximum of sixty left," he said, his voice coldly analytical once more. "Each carries no more than two hundred rounds of ammunition after what they expended in the first encounter. If every third round kills one of ours—an optimistic estimate from their point of view—then each Sauron will kill sixty or so. Thirty-six hundred dead; we can spare them."
There was an intake of breath. "With seven thousand plainsmen fighting beside them, how many shall we lose?" someone asked.
"You swore to the Holy War," Hammer-of-God said. "Nobody promised you an easy task."
Silence fell; everyone knew their only hope was to swamp the Saurons with numbers—a strategy of holocaust, trading a hundred lives for one.
"If three score of them can kill a tenth of the greatest host Haven has ever seen, how may we prevail against the Citadel?" Ilderim Khan said. "There are thousands of the sons of Iblis there, behind great walls."
Aisha leaned forward. "We have shown that the Saurons are not invincible."
Ilderim and several of the older leaders snorted. "Khatun, we took a small outpost of boys, commanded by a tired old man. By a trick. A clever trick, by Allah and the spirits, a trick I shall tell my grandchildren—but a trick. We drove back a force which did not know our numbers or determination. We shall not trick three score of warriors in their prime, ready for a fight."
The others nodded. Warfare on the steppe was a matter of raid and ambush and subterfuge more often than not, but when armies collided . . .
"True enough, by Malak Ta'us," a chief said, a slim dark man with chiseled features and a long embroidered coat.
"Stuff your blasphemous Peacock up your devil-worshiping backside," growled another leader, a thick-bodied man in a shin of scale mail, with a strong hook nose and a bushy beard that flowed down over the steel scales. "If you're a woman, why didn't you tell us earlier? We might have gotten some use out of you."
"Gazakardian Khan!" Chaya said sternly, and the two men came half-erect, clapping their hands to their swords. "Remember your oath!"
Aisha put a hand to Gazakardian's wrist; the thick limb trembled slightly, and the sword sank back in its scabbard with a snick of steel and brass against oiled wood and leather.
"I remember," he growled, looking aside.
"Then make your apology," Chaya said, and turned to the first man: "Which you, Shaikh Hoshyar, will accept with the graciousness of your noble lineage, I am sure."
Sweat broke out on Gazakardian's face. Silence stretched. At last, he said: "I spoke in anger, but my anger should be with the Accursed of God, not you . . . Shaikh Hoshyar."
Hoshyar waved. "The words are gone, swallowed up in the ocean of your goodwill and courtesy, O Gazakardian Khan," the Yezda said. "What is evil, but a word?"
Some of the others smiled at that; Gazakardian's tribe, the Hayq, lived fairly near Hoshyar's Yezadi folk in the foothills of the Tierra del Muerte country, on the northwest edge of the Great Northern Steppe. Being neighbors, they hated each other like poison, of course.
"Be still!" Aisha said sharply to the Muslim chiefs. "These are the words of brave men—it takes more courage to acknowledge wrong and grant forgiveness than to quarrel like fools in the face of a greater enemy. If some of us are nasrani and others follow the Peacock Angel . . . by Allah, we can all agree that the Saurons are under the curse of whatever spirits wish men well."
She turned to Hammer-of-God. "Still, for the good of our cause we must win a convincing victory. The more victories, the more the warriors' spirits will rise—and the more we will conquer."
Hammer nodded sardonically. "Thirty-six hundred dead is the worst possible case," he said. One which might wreck us. The tribes would take any losses necessary to break the Citadel, but they had to believe it. Aisha's rhetoric could whip them into a frenzy, but the khans here were mostly older men, survivor-graduates of a lifetime of warfare in a very hard school. Pessimists to a man. Let them become convinced the thing was impossible and they'd turn on each other in a minute. The biggest horde Haven had ever seen would become the biggest and bloodiest battle Haven had ever seen. All by itself.
"I presume none of you are afraid to fight the Kossacki or the White Sheep?" he said dryly. That brought the expected bristle. Chaya is the impartial Judge, Aisha inspires them—and they can resent me, like a good tough sergeant who makes his officer look good. "Our first task will be to peel as many of them away from the Saufons as we can. Then we make the Saurons come to us."
He flipped over the map and drew on the reverse. "We've fought Saurons before, and beaten them off, although it always costs. Their Dark Lord gives them great warrior skills—but they tend to arrogance and overconfidence. Note how they're driving the fighters of the tribes before them. Their most effective strategy would be to use their Sauron abilities and firepower to break our line in close coordination with their allies—but to them, all who aren't Saurons are cattle to be driven. Here's how we'll proceed . . . ."
This ought to do, Shulamit thought. Nice and high, up here on the hill, so nobody could steal up on her, but with plenty of large rocks for concealment. She unwrapped her belt; it was new, bought from one of the recent volunteers from the Pale. Quite nice, triple-ply sheepskin with the fleece left on the inside, adjustable lacings, a chiseled-steel buckle and plenty of pouches and fastenings. Saber and dagger went within reach, and she looked out over the plain as she unfastened the armor.
Byers' Sun was slipping below the horizon, but Cat's Eye was up and full, plenty of light—enough to tell a dark thread from a light, according to the traditional test. The rolling plain below the rocky hillside was reddish-brown, mottled with clumps of moving humans and animals, out to the limit of sight in every direction. Metal winked at her from weapons and gear; wagons lumbered behind their long strings of muskylope or oxen; trains of pack-beasts drew straggling lines across the plain. Pillars of dust rose from herds of slaughter-beasts and mounted warriors each leading his remounts; the geometric regularity of the Pale's fighters stood out against the vast sprawl of the host, ant-small at two kilometers' distance.
That was where she should be, with the others. The old battle-axe who led the squad she was in, and the others, all sniggering at her for carrying on about Karl. Nobody would take what she said about Sigrid seriously!
Ten minutes later she rose from behind the boulder, readjusting her loincloth and pulling up her trousers with weary discomfort. Just what she needed—constipation in the middle of a war. Then she froze and dropped the trousers again to check.
Oh, no, not now. It was ten Haven days since the last time, sure enough, although she'd never been very regular. Then a wave of relief: no bleeding quite yet. Although she felt bloated and edgy enough. She wouldn't need the packets of moss in linen in her warbag for a T-day or two.
Then she froze again. She'd been very careful about taking her herbs—not that she'd had much reason to be careful the past month or so. Had the Sauron bitch?
Did she want to be careful? The hateful scene at Cliff Lion Springs played itself out again in her mind. Many people—Bandari among them—haunted Sauron culling grounds for abandoned babies; there were even stories of women lying with lone Saurons to get pregnant, to bear children who would have the enemy's strong blood yet be raised human. What if it had been the other way 'round, this time? No Bandari woman had ever gone as tribute maiden to the Saurons—but the ice-bitch might have stolen the seed of the fan Reenans none the less. Blood of the Founder raised in the Citadel!
"Karl bar Yigal fan Reenan, you are stuuuupfriiid!" Shulamit screamed in mingled jealousy and rage, shaking her fist at the sky. The lurch of the trousers round her ankles, and the cold wind on her thighs, brought her back to herself. She had come here for privacy—the last thing she needed right now was constipation jokes from her squadmates—but it was not safe to attract attention alone.
Yeweh and the anima of the Founders. A glint of steel, heading toward the base of the hill. Hotnot riders.
She pulled up the trousers and began the complicated squirm-swing-grab of putting on armor without someone to help. With the skill of long practice she caught the tie at her left shoulder and slipped it into the bronze buckles set into the curved leather plates, then fastened the latches down along her side and bent to touch her toes to make sure everything was working. Shulamit kicked viciously at a rock. It bounded away down the slope and shattered with a crack against a harder boulder. The Bandari meid followed in its wake with cautious speed, but the four strangers still managed to get between her and her string of ponies. Turks, she saw at a glance—Mongols fastened their coats the other way, and these were too sharp-featured for that breed as well. Of the Red Stobor tribal federation, from the markings on their horses; she couldn't place the clan, but the whole kit-and-caboodle had come in to join the trek about two weeks ago, just before they left the oasis. One of them had a flintlock pistol through his belt. They had dismounted, and her own hobbled ponies were on the other side of them.
Spirits damn it, she thought. Hotnots. They were trouble wherever you met them.
"Hello!" one of them called as she walked into hailing distance. The others spread across her path.
"Go bugger a goat," she snarled back, coming reluctantly to a halt. It looked as if she would have to talk to them, after all.
"Have you ever heard of lo-mid-hi?" Shulamit said with vicious sweetness, smiling and knocking the tribesman's hand aside again. That was the third time he'd tried to fondle her butt. Third time is enough. She had told him to go away, the first time. Nobody could say she was stretching things.
"I do not know this word, beautiful one," he said eagerly. Behind him his comrades nudged each other, chuckling and winking.
"It means, handsome warrior—"
Shulamit's right hand rested on her hip; the left was behind her back, pulling out a short rod of iron barstock she kept tucked into a fold of her broad sheepskin belt.
"Lo." A sharp huffing exhalation of breath.
Her right hand shot out, knuckles down and fingers crooked, as her body pivoted away. The heel of the palm thudded into his pubic bone and the strong fingers clenched around his testicles, twisting. The leather trousers saved the nomad a little, but not much. He screamed, high and shrill.
"Mid." A shout.
She turned back toward him on her heel, driving the weight of her body from heel through gut to shoulder behind her left fist as it punched into his sternum. He was not wearing armor, and his lambskin jacket was open to the waist; the hard muscle of his belly shocked at her fist, jarring her wrist. The striking knuckles had been accurately placed in the soft spot all humans have just under the breastbone, though, and the nomad's scream cut off in an agonized hoof as he doubled over. Wonderful what a sap in your hand did when you punched somebody.
"Hi!"
The last word was a shriek of rage as she drove her knee into his face, not as hard as she could have; that would have killed him. Enough to drop him stunned, spitting teeth and bleeding from a broken nose.
"Low, middle, and high," Shulamit said, wheeling on his companions. "That's what you get if you touch Bandari women uninvited."
The flurry of blows had taken less than twenty seconds. Enough time for the nomad's three friends to gape with shock and then drop their hands to their weapons. Shulamit bared her teeth and half-drew her saber; she was in her harness, except for the helmet and shield she'd left on her horse. None of the plainsmen had more than a leather coat . . . and all of them knew the reputation of the People.
"You . . . you . . . that is the gur-khan's son!" one of them sputtered. "You laid hands on the gur-khan's son, you harlot!"
Shulamit's Turki was heavily accented but fluent: "I punched out the gur-khan.s son," she corrected him. Yes, he does have turquoise on his swordbelt, and those are good weapons. A pity he wasn't alone; then she could take them. Fair recompense for the trouble he'd caused her. His horse was worth having, too.
The young Turk was crawling and moaning, one hand to his nose and the other leaving off clutching at his crotch to go for a knife. Shulamit kicked him in the ribs with judicious force and he collapsed again.
Men, she thought. None of them was worth the fletching on the arrow it would take to shoot them.
"And what's he going to do, go whining to his father—maybe his father—that a woman beat him? What's the matter with you hotnots, you don't have enough of the ewes and muskylope mares you usually screw? Gur-khan's son? He's the Prince of Perversion, bothering a human female instead of bending over for his boar-pig brothers as would be natural for him. Go on, go complain to your pork-eating fathers—all forty of them."
The olive faces of the nomads darkened further: son of ten fathers was about as insulting as you could get, in their tongue. They were young men, only a few T-years older than her seventeen, but there was a wealth of experience in the way they drew their curved shamshirs and spread out without wasting words. Shulamit skipped back a step as her own saber came out; the look on their faces was like cold water on the hot coals of her anger. It made her remember she was not really angry at them. She reached across and drew her knife left-handed for want of a shield, crouching slightly and letting the tip of her saber weave in a tight, controlled circle.
P'rknz hammer me for a fool, they really mean it, she thought uneasily. They could kill me. She was far too young to die; there was so much left to do! Dying in a useless brawl was not what she had planned. I'm almost as stupid as Karl.
She would have to lunge; the hotnots wouldn't be expecting it, their own swordplay was all with the edge, body flat-on to an opponent. Shulamit crooked her right knee slightly, keeping her left back and bent ready to spring. Thrusting, the blade should be parallel to the ground so it didn't catch on ribs. Nasty thought, the steel grating on bone. She had tried it on butchered muskylope strung up at the practice ground: part of the drill was to get you accustomed to the feeling. You had to be something special to take on more than one opponent hand to hand, the clan armsmasters said. Shulamit knew she was better than average for her age, but she had fought only once in earnest. Fighting for the Sauron bitch, if only she had known it then.
I wish I'd shot her in the back. Wish I had her assault rifle right now.
The thought reawoke her anger; that and danger narrowed her vision down to a tunnel. She barely heard the hooves clattering on rock behind her. Only the startled retreat of the Turks made her begin to turn.
Whack. The steel-shod butt of the lance caught her between the shoulderblades, banging on the hard lamellae of her armor and throwing her forward. She came up rolling and turning, to meet the same metal driving into her belly. Another gunshot crack, and she went on her back winded and gasping for breath; reflex started to bring her sword up, and common sense stopped it. The stocky figure on the big horse was also in Pale armor, and she recognized the face and markings. Tameetha bat Irene fan Reenan. Not a good idea to draw on her appointed aluf. Shulamit sheathed her blade and tried to rise, wheezing; the older Bandari heeled her mount forward, and its shoulder knocked the girl flying again. This time she landed on rocks, with a howl of protest.
"Shut up," Tameetha barked.
Shulamit rubbed her stomach; the older woman was strong.
The twelve-foot lance swung back as she wheeled her horse between Shulamit and the nomads. Legs clamped to barrel and the big horse reared, the pawing menace of the ironshod hooves sending them scrambling away. The honed edges of the arm-long lancehead caught the light of Byers' Sun as she flipped it up to an overarm grip, prodding the air. One Turk reached slowly toward the bowcase slung at his back. The steel rammed forward to rest a hand's-width from his throat.
"Don' even think abut it, boy," Tameetha barked; her Turkic was understandable, but worse than Shulamit's. "Go hum. Tek yur frien', en go hum."
Silent, they gathered up the gasping, bleeding young man and walked in stiff-backed anger toward the horse. Shulamit rose rubbing her bruised buttocks and decided on a preemptive attack. Preemptive self-defense, the old legends called it
"They started it!" she said, and pointed up to the slopes of the rocky volcanic hill that rose out of the steppe. "I went up there to take a leak and they started bothering me when I came down—I told them a couple of times to go away, but the stupid hotnot kept trying to grab my ass, so I gave him lo-mid-hi, then they drew on me first!"
Tameetha rested the lance-butt on the toe of her boot and leaned forward: "Save the slather for Barak, bat Miriam—and sniffing around him means you're picking a fight with Sannie, too. Yeweh, Christ, and the anima of the Founders, because your Karl is a brainless boy who thinks with his testicles and is ready to fuck mud—that's normal for a male his age—is that any reason you have to act stupid? He screws some shiks, you carry on like the world's ending, in the middle of a war, already. For your information, it doesn't wear out with use! Wake up and smell the tea brewing, you bliddyful of a meid! There's a battle coming on, and I don't need this shit."
"Battle, tanta aluf?" Shulamit gulped.
Tameetha gave her a stobor grin. "Auntie officer am I, now? You hadn't noticed, eh, wrapped up in your more important affairs? Yes, a battle."
Shulamit whistled for her horse. It took three tries; her mouth was dry.