Hope Renewed Page 5

  “See, unbeliever,” Ali went on. “The pig and son of pigs Barholm—it was not enough that he cheated me of the blood-price of my father’s death, he expected me—me—Ali ibn’Jamal, to sit among the women and do nothing while he conquered all the world. Conquered all the world, then turned on me! Turned on the Faithful! No, kaphar, Ali ibn’Jamal, Guardian of Sinar, Settler of the House of Islam, is not such a fool as that.

  “Tell Barholm I am coming for him.” Ali’s mouth was jerking, and his voice rose to a shrill scream. “Tell him I have something for him!”

  Colonial soldiers were setting a sharpened stake in the ground. They dragged out the Arch-Sysup Hierarch of the Diocese of Gurnyca. He was a portly man, flabby in middle age, stripped to his silk underdrawers. The black giants holding his arms scarcely lost a step when he collapsed at the sight of the waiting impaling stake . . .

  Silence fell around the table. At last, General Klosterman cleared his throat.

  “Well, I don’t think there’s much doubt as to Ali’s intentions,” he said.

  Barholm nodded abstractedly. “General Klosterman, how long would it take to mobilize all available field forces and meet the Colonists in strength?”

  Klosterman paled. Master of Soldiers was an administrative post, but it did give the elderly officeholder a good grasp of the state of the Civil Government’s defenses.

  “Lord, Ali has fifty thousand of his first-line troops with him. If we summoned all available cavalry, we couldn’t field half that in time to meet him south of Sandoral, or even south of the Oxhead Mountains . . . and forgive me, Sovereign Mighty Lord, but the troops we could summon would not be in good heart.”

  observe, said Center.

  This time Center’s projections started with a map. Raj recognized it, a terrain rendering of the Civil Government’s eastern provinces. The Oxhead Mountains ran east-west, then hooked up northward; north of it was the sparsely settled central plateau, and to the south and east was the upper valley of the Drangosh and its tributary. That was densely settled in part, where irrigation was possible; elsewhere arid grazing country, with scattered villages around springs in the foothills.

  Colored blocks moved, arrows showing their lines of advance. He nodded to himself; so and so many days to muster, supplies, roadways, the few railroad lines. Twenty thousand men maximum, perhaps thirty thousand if you counted the ordinary infantry garrisons called up from their land grants. And . . .

  Men in blue and maroon uniforms fled, beating at their dogs with the flats of their sabers or with riding whips. A ragged square stood on a hill, with the Star banner at its center. Black puffballs of smoke burst over the tattered ranks, shellbursts, and Colonial field guns hammered giant shotgun blasts of canister in at point-blank range. Men splashed away from the shot in wedges. A line of mounted dragoons drew their scimitars in unison, flashing in the bright southern sun. Five battalions, Raj estimated with an expert eye. Twenty-five hundred men. Trumpets shrilled, and the scimitars rested on the riders’ shoulders. Walk-march. Trot. The blades came down. Gallop. Charge. A single long volley blew gaps in their line, and they were over the thin Civil Government square. The Star banner went down. . . .

  “Lord,” Klosterman went on, “with humility, my advice is that we throw as many men into Sandoral and the eastern cities as we can. Ali cannot take them quickly.”

  Tzetzas spoke for the first time. “But he could bypass them,” he said.

  Raj nodded silently, conscious of eyes glancing at him sidelong.

  observe, said Center.

  From horizon to horizon, the land burned; ripe wheat flared like tinder under the summer sun, sending clouds of red-shot black into the sky. Denser columns marked the sites of villages and manor-houses. In an orchard, peasants worked under Colonial guns, ringbarking the trees and piling burning bundles of straw against their roots.

  A flicker, and he was outside a city: Melaga, from the look of the olive-covered hills around it. Raw red earth marked the siegeworks about it, a circumvallation with a high wall topped by a palisade. Zigzag works wormed inward from there, each ending in a redoubt protected by earth-filled wicker baskets. Swarms of men hauled cannon forward and dug at the earth. Guns boomed from the city walls, and men died in the siegeworks, but more took their places. Howitzers lobbed their shells into the sky, the fuses drawing trails of smoke and fire until they burst within the walls . . .

  “No, that would be far too uncertain,” Tzetzas went on. “Instead, well, the treasury is unusually full. We could offer Ali twice, three times the previous tribute.”

  Barholm snorted. “After we shorted him on the last agreement? I can just see him quietly going back to Al Kebir, demobilizing his army and waiting for the gold to arrive.”

  “Sovereign Mighty Lord,” Heldeyz said, “he’s not here for gold. He’s here for blood. He’s . . . he’s not going to be bought off. You have to see him—”

  ali would agree to the increased tribute, but remain on civil government soil, probability 97%, ±2. observe, said Center.

  “Filth!” Ali screamed. He strode through the pavilions, kicking over platters filled with whole roast lambs, rice pillaus, fruits, and ices. “You call this a feast of welcome! Filth!”

  The syndics of the town shrank backward, looking around with the instinctive gesture of men in a trap with no exit.

  “That pig Barholm, that two-dinar Descotter hill chief who calls himself a conqueror, it isn’t enough he makes me wait for my tribute, but he insults me too.”

  Ali stopped, smiled, relaxed. The expression was far more frightening than the bloodthirsty madness of a minute before.

  “Well then, we’ll have to show the kaphar what it means to insult the Commander of the Faithful, won’t we?” he went on.

  He eyed the assembled syndics with much the same expression that a farmwife would have, standing in the yard and fingering her knife as she selected a stewing pullet.

  observe:

  A younger Ali knelt behind a girl. Gardens bloomed around them, thick with flowers and softly murmurous with bees; the stars shone above, the only light on the rippling water of the fountain save for a few discreet lanterns. Ali had a hand on the girl’s neck, pushing her face below the surface of the water as he thrust into her. He let her rise for an instant, long enough to take one breath and scream.

  It bubbled out as he pushed her down again. Her hands beat against the marble of the pool’s rim, leaving bloody streaks on the carved stone.

  observe:

  Ali sat at a chessboard, across from a grave white-bearded man. The pieces were carved from sauroid ivory and black jadeite; they played seated on cushions of cloth-of-gold, beneath a fretted bronze pergola that served as support for a huge vine of sambuca jasmine. A slender girl naked except for the filmy veil that hid half her face poured cut-crystal goblets full of iced sherbert. Droplets of condensation stood out on the silver ewer.

  “Checkmate, Prince of the Faithful,” the older man said. “Congratulations. This is your best game yet.”

  Ali looked down at the chessboard, his lips moving as he traced out the possible movements. When he moved, it was so swiftly that the serving girl had time for only the beginning of a scream.

  His hand grasped the cadi’s white beard, and the dagger slashed it across. He threw the tuft of hair in the older man’s face.

  “Sauroid-lover,” he screamed. “You dare to insult me?”

  The old man drew himself up. “You forget yourself, Ali,” he said. “I am appointed by the Settler to guide your footsteps. You must learn restraint—”

  Ali moved again, very quickly. The curved dagger in his hand was hilted with silver and pearls, but the blade was layer-forged Sinnar steel, sharp enough to part a drifting silk thread. It sliced more than halfway through the cadi’s throat. The old man turned, his blood arching out in a spraying stream of red across the priceless silk of the cushions and the white body of the girl. Ali stood silent, panting, watching the body tumble down the alabaster
steps of the gazebo. Then he turned toward the servant, smiling. Blood ran down his mustaches, and speckled his lips.

  observe:

  Ali sat on the Peacock Throne of the Settlers, in a vaulted room whose ceiling was an intertwining mass of calligraphy picked out in gold, the thousand and one names of Allah, the Merciful, the Lovingkind. From a glass bull’s-eye at the apex, light streamed down, mellow and gold, to the tessellated marble floor. Guards stood motionless around the walls of the great circular chamber. Others dragged a man forward; he was stripped to his baggy pantaloons, a hard-muscled man in his thirties with a close-cropped beard and a great beak of a nose.

  “Greetings, Akbar my brother,” Ali called jovially. “How good, how very good to see your face again!”

  The Settler’s brother drew himself up and spat on the marbled floor. “You have won, Ali,” he said disdainfully. “Yours is the Peacock Throne. Bring out the irons and have done.”

  “Irons?” Ali said.

  That was the traditional punishment for the losers, when a dead Settler’s brothers fought for the throne. Only a man complete in his limbs and organs could be Commander of the Faithful; Tewfik was disqualified because he had lost an eye in battle. A red-hot iron fulfilled the same purpose.

  “Irons?” Ali said again. “Oh, may Allah requite me if I should put out the eyes of one born of the same seed, of Jamal our father.”

  Eunuchs brought out a stout iron framework, like a high bedstead with manacles at each corner. Akbar began to bellow and thrash; the guards held him down with remorseless strength while the plump, smooth-faced eunuchs snapped the steel cuffs around wrist and ankle.

  “Shaitan will gnaw your soul in hell if you shed a brother’s blood!” Akbar yelled.

  Ali stood and made a gesture. The guards saluted with fist to brow, and marched out of the great chamber.

  “I? Shed your blood? Never, my brother.”

  Ali stood by the iron rack, stroking his beard. He pulled a handkerchief from one sleeve of his pearl-sewn robe and made as if to wipe his brother’s face; when the other man opened his mouth to shout a curse Ali deftly stuffed the length of silk into it.

  “There. It is unmannerly to interrupt the Settler. Do you not remember, brother, how you boasted to your captains during our brief, unfortunate civil strife—how you boasted to them that I should be sent into exile on an island in the Zanj Sea with only a mute crone to attend me? That a . . . how did you phrase it? A perverted bastard son of a diseased sheep like me did not deserve the delights of the hareem, and that the pearl-breasted beauties who served me would be shared among your amirs.”

  He clapped his hands. A line of women filed into the throne room, the long robes of their chadors brushing the floor and the sleeves hiding their hands.

  Ali turned. “Zufika, Aisha,” he said. “All of you—hide not the light of your faces.”

  Obediently, they dropped the filmy black cloaks to the floor. Several of them were carrying long slim knives; two bore a charcoal brazier between them, holding the metal frame with iron tongs. Others set a stool by the iron frame. Ali sank down with a satisfied sigh.

  “No, I shall not shed a drop of your blood,” he said. “But you surprise me, with this unseemly conduct. Don’t you know it is unfitting for an entire male to look on the faces of the Settler’s women?”

  Zufika came forward, the knife in her hand. “Attend to it, my sweet one.”

  Through the gag, Akbar began to scream.

  “Sovereign Mighty Lord,” Raj said quietly.

  Silence fell; even Barholm checked himself, dropping the finger he’d been wagging under Chancellor Tzetzas’ nose.

  “With your permission, lord, I’ll take command in the East. Superseding the Commander of Eastern Forces and the garrison commandants.”

  There were nods all around the table, even from Gharzia. Right now the high command in the east was the sort of honor you took with you to an unmarked grave.

  “And I’ll take seven thousand cavalry to the border.”

  “Ridiculous—”

  “That’ll strip the garrisons of—”

  “D’you want Ali to march right into East Residence—”

  Raj raised his hand. “Sovereign Mighty Lord, the troops are on their way to East Residence as we speak. Most of the garrison of the Western Territories. Veteran fighters, the cream of our armies.”

  Barholm looked at him narrow-eyed. And the soldiers most loyal to you. The thought needed no words.

  “That’s forty-five hundred men, perhaps a little more. I’ll take another two thousand of the Brigaderos prisoners who’ve been reequipped and organized along Civil Government lines, and some of the battalions who were with me in the Southern Territories campaign and are now attached to the Residence Area command.”

  Gharzia was scribbling on his pad. “Heneralissimo—” he began, giving Raj the title he’d been formally stripped of “—that’ll still leave you well below Ali’s numbers, discounting his infantry and line-of-communications troops. Shouldn’t we pull back more of the Southern and Western Territories garrisons?”

  Raj spread his hands. They were brown with sun, battered and nicked and callused from swords and reins, as out of place in this quiet elegant room as the man himself.

  “That would take too long. Messers, Sole Autocrat, we don’t have the time. Please understand, no matter what I do, the border area is going to get the worst working-over it’s had in a century or more.”

  observe, Center said.

  —and Colonial dragoons rode through a Borderer hamlet, tossing torches through the windows. Fire belched back, red flames and sooty smoke turning the whitewash black above the openings. Here and there a limestone lintel burned with white-hot fire as it sublimed.

  —the last of a line of Arabs picked himself up off a woman and adjusted his robe. She lay motionless in the dust of the street, eyes empty, spittle running down from the corner of her mouth. The Colonial kicked her in the ribs, then called an order to the others. He had the crossed lines of a naik, a corporal, on the sleeve of his djellaba. Two of the troopers picked the woman up by the ankles and wrists, grunting at the limp dead weight. The naik jerked a thumb, and they dumped their semi-conscious victim head-first down the well.

  —bursting charges spouted plumes of smoke and rock and pulverized dirt across the massive sloping front of the dam. It stretched two hundred meters across a U-shaped valley amid dry rocky hills, a stone-paved road on its top and stone and iron gates at one side where the tumbling water of the flume was channeled into a canal. For long moments nothing seemed to happen, and then water sprouted from the surface where the explosives had been laid. It gouted like erupting geysers, turning to rainbow splendor at the edges under the bright noon light. The sappers whooped and danced as the rushing torrent eroded the earthwork of the dam like a lump of sugar under a spout of hot tea. Then the earth shuddered as the dam collapsed in earnest, and the lake headed downstream in a roaring wall of brown silt and tumbling rocks.

  “Yes, yes,” Barholm said. The other advisors were silent as the two Descotters met each other’s eyes.

  “I think I can retrieve the situation,” Raj said calmly. “Provided, of course, I have my Governor’s full confidence. Do I have your confidence, my lord?”

  Barholm’s lips tightened. “Yes, yes,” he said again. He snapped his fingers for a parchment, wrote, signed, extended his hand for the Gubernatorial seal. It thwacked into the purple wax with an angry sound.

  He pushed it across the polished flamegrain wood of the table. Raj picked it up. It was a delegation of viceregal power, requiring all officers and officials of the Civil Government to tender him full cooperation—rare for a commander sent out into the barbaricum, unheard-of within the borders.

  If I smash the Colonials, Raj thought—unlikely as that seemed right now—that’ll be the last strong opponent the Civil Government faces. He’d reconquered the Southern and Western Territories; the Base Area was far away, and the Zanj states
of the Southern Continent even farther. Once the Colony had been beaten back, Barholm Clerett’s position would be safer than any Governor’s in the past five hundred years. Safe enough that he would certainly no longer need a heneralissimo supremo.

  “Yes,” Barholm repeated. “Who could doubt that you have my full confidence?”

  Raj stood, bowing and tucking the Gubernatorial Rescript into the sleeve-pocket of his uniform jacket.

  “Then if you’ll forgive me, Sovereign Mighty Lord, Messers.”

  His face held an abstracted frown as he left the room, ignoring the murmur behind him. Landing five thousand men and thirty guns, with all their dogs and stores, wasn’t easy at the best of times. Getting them straight off the ships and headed east fast without a monumental foul-up would be real work.

  disembarkation would be most efficiently achieved as follows, Center began.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Corporal Minatelli clattered down the steep wooden steps into the hold of the freighter, his hobnail boots biting into the pinewood. The ship was pitching less now that the sails were furled and the steam tug was bringing it into port.

  Minatelli shook his head, still a little bewildered at the sight. He’d grown up in Old Residence, in the Western Territories, and he was familiar enough with fine building. But Old Residence had shrunk steadily since the Brigade conquered it, with forest and groves and nobles’ country-seats spreading over the old suburbs. These days it was just a big city.

  East Residence was a world. It sprawled over the seven hills on all sides of its deep U-shaped harbor: houses and factories, up to the heights where gardens and marble marked the patricians’ quarter and the Gubernatorial palaces. A haze of coal-smoke hung over it, a forest of masts and smokestacks darkened the water; squadrons of low-slung steam rams with their paddles churning the water, big-bellied merchantmen with grain from the Diva country of the far north, or ornamental stone and wine from Kelden, whole fleets of barges down from the Hemmar River. And all over the hills, the tracery of gaslight like fairy lights, still bright in the predawn hours.