Kingdom River Page 7

  More thunder behind him — odd sliding thunder. Gomez, that idiot, was shouting again.... Ticotin was stuck in shit and would not get out, but Third Squadron was coming. Rodriguez turned in his saddle to wave them on and into a gallop. They'd be in time… but barely.

  He turned to see their bannered ranks now spurring into the gallop — and saw, a moment later, the mountainsides coming down into the pass.

  The steep slopes to right and left were suddenly brown and gray rivers of bounding, rolling, skidding boulders. A torrent of stone was coming down in landslides, great granite monuments tilting, toppling to swell those catastrophic currents.

  Of course. The Light Cavalry archers had stopped shooting only to climb to the ridges… begin those slides of stone.

  The sound was beyond sound; it buffeted Rodriguez like blows. Salsa shied and reared away.

  He controlled the horse — had time to see Davila and his trumpeter, at the head of Third Squadron, both staring up like astonished children as the mountainsides fell upon them. Avalanches of rock, a flood of stone, flowed and thundered down into the narrow pass and over the horsemen. Here and there bright steel wavered for an instant, ranks of men and horses screamed — and were gone, vanished beneath tons of rumbling granite that seemed to come down forever, while dust billowed, eddied in the air.

  ... Perhaps forty, perhaps fifty men and horses — saved by miracles — staggered here and there as the last showers of stone, the last great boulders skipped, crashed, rolled and settled. Several of these horses had broken legs dangling. Many of the men, dust-coated, swaying in their saddles, were shouting warnings — as if what had already happened was only about to happen.

  Rodriguez heard a trumpet call — a call unknown to him — back at the entrance to the pass. He turned Salsa's head and rode that way. Gomez reined up beside him. "How?" he said. "How?" — as if their ranks were equal.

  The destroyed men were still shouting behind them. There were also screams, but not many.

  Rodriguez smiled at his guidon-bearer as if they were old friends, the best of friends riding together. "How? By my misjudgment, and the northerners' commendable initiative."

  "Ah..." Gomez nodded, apparently satisfied.

  At the mouth of the pass, now only those northerners stood — though there were slight disturbances within their ranks as the last of Ticotin's men were pierced with lances or dragged from their big horses to be hacked to death.

  "Yes," Rodriguez said aloud, and meant he'd been right before, to wish to ride into the fighting. "Go with God," he said to his guidon-bearer — drove in his spurs, and galloped out of the pass toward the ranks of his enemies. He felt very well, really quite well... though he was saddened to hear Gomez following, riding behind him. Well, the man was a fool... always had been.

  * * *

  The fighting dust had settled, so the southern sun shone richly to warm the men and horses still alive. Now, near silence lay as if there'd been no noise in these mountains, no shouting, no trumpets, no hammering steel on steel in Boca Chica Pass.

  It was a familiar quiet, the stillness after battle. Sam Monroe closed his eyes, eased his muscles to enjoy it. He was sitting on a dead horse, its skirts of chain-mail dark with blood and shit. Its rider lay with it; he'd been caught with a leg under the animal when it fell, and had been killed there.

  Sam hadn't drawn his sword through most of the fighting. He might have; he'd met several of their horsemen in the battle's dust and fury. It had been odd — perfect Warm-time word. Odd.

  He'd ridden here and there, watching his men maneuver — and so well, obedient to their officers and sergeants as if they'd been veteran infantry, never cavalry at all. Wonderful, really, and all the more appreciated when a man simply rode — his worried trumpeter reining behind — as if terrible noise, dust, savage struggles, and the screams of hurt horses and dying men had nothing to do with him at all.

  He'd met two cataphracts. They'd spurred at him, then passed, never striking — as if he were a person separate from the fighting. At the battle's end, one imperial, galloping blind out of clouds of dust, had come swinging his battle-ax.

  Sam had swayed to the side and away from the ax's stroke — drawing sword as he did — then straightened in his saddle to slash the cataphract just under his helmet's nasal. And as the injured man reined past, spitting teeth and blood, Sam struck again, a back-stroke and much harder, to the nape. Though the chain-mail there caught the sword's edge, the blow's force broke the man's neck, and his charger trotted him away dying, his head rolling this way and that.

  ... Sam opened his eyes to hoofbeats as Howell Voss rode up, looking furious. An ax, that must have been swung very hard, had chopped his helmet's steel, snicked off the tip of his left ear. Voss, bareheaded now, was holding his bandanna to it.

  "Howell…. Lucky for the helmet."

  "I know it." Blood still ran down Voss's wrist. "You want their colonel's head to take back?"

  "No, don't disturb their colonel. Leave him lying with his troopers." There was a spray of blood across Sam's hauberk.

  "You hurt?"

  "Not anymore," Sam said. Just the sort of vainglorious phrase the army would like, with a defeat so thoroughly revenged. The sort of phrase that seemed to come to him more and more easily.

  Small black shadows printed across the battlefield. The ravens had come to Boca Chica.

  "We have two hundred and eighteen prisoners, Sam — we finished the worst wounded. Nine of the prisoners are officers."

  "Behead those officers. And please tell them I regret the necessity."

  "... Yes, sir." A battle-made gentleman himself — his mother a tavern prostitute, his father a passing mystery — Voss had a soft spot for officers.

  "Someone else can do it, Howell."

  "I'll do it."

  "Okay." That strange Warm-time word 'okay.' Yet everyone seemed to know what it meant, without explanation. "We'll let the troopers go. Leave them twenty of their horses for the wounded, and a few bows and battle-axes in case bandits come down on them."

  "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 pe
ace, 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.

  CHAPTER 6

  "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?"

  "It would be a relief to be rid of him."

  "... Umm. We'll say two thousand. Send some of Crusan's people down from Map-Fort Stockton to reinforce Manu. And remind your grandson, Yuri — pecks, harassment, not an invasion."

  Yuri Chimuk got down on his hands and knees — something he'd been excused from doing years before, but persisted in as an odd independence. "What the Khan has ordered, I will perform."

  When the old man stood and stomped away, Toghrul watched him go, absently switching the top of his right boot with the horse-whip. "Your thoughts, Michael Razumov."

  "First, why wake a sleeping dog, my lord? And..."

  " 'And'?"

  "And, second, Yuri Chimuk loves his grandson even more than he loves you."

  "Well... first, the North-Mexican dog must be wakened sometime. And I need to know whether, when kicked, he will run yelping south to the Empire, or east, to Middle Kingdom.... Second, as to Yuri's love for his grandson, it is only required that he blame himself for that brilliant and ambitious young officer's death, when — as it must — that occurs. We have room, after all, for only one genius of war."

  "Is this in my hands, lord?"

  "Not yet." The Khan leaned over a pansy. "Look, Michael, look at this brave little face. A tiny golden roaring lion, pictured in a Warm-time book."

  "It is charming."

  "Do you love me, Michael? You loved me when I was a boy, I know. I used to watch you, watching me."

  "I did love you, my lord, and still do. Being aware that that remains entirely beside the point."

  The Khan laughed, and bent to stroke the little pansy flower. "You are full of good answers, today."

  "And, I regret to say, a question, lord."

  "Yes?" The Khan stood.

  "Map — Los Angeles and Map-San Diego — "

  "The Blue Sky damn them both. What now?"

  "Complaints, Great Khan. Ships do not arrive from the Empire with goods we've already paid for. Buk Szerzinski complains particularly, saying he has a Map-Pacific supply depot with no supplies of lumber, rope, grain, barrels of citrus juice, slaves, steel, or horses. All things to be needed by your generals as Lord Winter comes, and fighting increases in Map-Missouri."

  "The problem being silver money?"

  "Absolutely, lord. Money is the cause. The Empir
e accepts our silver, but discounts it against their gold. Szerzinski, and Paul Klebb in Map-Los Angeles, both claim they pay the full price agreed upon, only to have the dirty lying bank of Mexico City discount its worth, so barely half of what was bought is delivered north."

  The Khan ran his whip's slim lash through his fingers. "Those two are not lying, stealing from me?"

  "They're not nearly brave enough for that, lord. And my men have examined the transactions."

  "So, the Emperor comes to agreements; his orders are sent — but the dirty bank decides. A matter of civilization versus — wonderful Warm-time word, 'versus' — a crowd of savages galloping around in the chilly north."

  "Precisely, Great Lord."

  "Fucking clever currency exchanges and shifting values — gold up, silver down. How are we simple, honorable warriors to comprehend its principles?"

  "Just so."

  The Khan stooped to touch another surviving pansy, one black and gold. "Well, Michael, since we have the savage name, we might as well play the savage game. I will not be caught short at Middle Kingdom's river."

  "Your command?"

  "Arrest the… five most important members of the Imperial Order of Merchants and Factors in both Map-Los Angeles and Map-San Diego. Pour molten gold down their throats. Then ship the corpses to Mexico City, with the note, 'Herewith, lading payments in gold — as apparently preferred. Complete deliveries expected soonest.' "

  "Perfect, lord."

  "Sufficient, let us hope…. Anything else this evening?"

  "Only a last question, if permitted."

  "Yes?"

  "As to your intention, lord, of going east to Map-Missouri to command personally."

  "Oh, I'll wait until Murad Dur and Andrei Shapilov begin to make mistakes, which will likely be soon enough."

  "Then I have nothing further worth your attention, Great Khan." Michael Razumov went to his hands and knees, then touched his forehead to the gravel of the Cat's-Eye Path. He was a fat man, and it was awkward for him.