An Autumn War (The Long Price Quartet) Page 25

  “Your food, Most High,” the attendant said, and Otah waved the man away.

  By the time Otah’s footmen and horsemen had taken their places between and just behind the wedges of archers, it was bright enough to see the banners and glittering mail of the Galts. Otah’s mount seemed to sense the impending violence, dancing uncomfortably as Otah rode back and forth behind his men, watching and waiting and preparing to call out his commands. From across the valley, the shout and silence came again as it had the night before. Then twice more.

  “Call the archers to ready!” Otah called out, and like whisperers in court relaying the words to lower men waiting in the halls, his words echoed in a dozen voices. He saw his archers lift their bows and shift in their formations. A long shout, rolling like thunder, came from across the valley. The Galts were moving forward. “Call the march! And be prepared to loose arrows!”

  As they had drilled, his men moved forward, archers to the front, footmen between them with their makeshift shields and motley assortment of swords and spears and threshing flails. Horsemen in the colors of the great houses of the utkhaiem trotted at the sides, ready to wheel and protect the flanks. At a walk, three thousand men moved forward across the still-wet grass and patches of ankle-deep mud. And perhaps half again as many Galts came toward them, shouting.

  In the old books and histories, the flights of enemy arrows had been compared to smoke rising from a great pyre or clouds blotting out the sun. In fact, when the first volley struck, it was nothing like that. Otah didn’t see the arrows and bolts in the air. He saw them begin to appear, heads buried deep in the ground, fletching green and white in the sunlight, like some strange flower that had sprung up from the meadow grass. Then a man screamed, and another.

  “Loose arrows!” Otah called. “Give it back to them! Loose arrows!”

  Now that he knew to look, he could see the thin, dark shafts. They rose up from the Galtic mass, slowly as if they were floating. His own archers let fly, and it seemed that the arrows should collide in the air, but then slipped past each other, two flocks of birds mingling and parting again. More men screamed.

  Otah’s horse twitched and sidestepped, nervous with the sounds and the scent of blood. Otah felt his own heart beating fast, sweat on his back and neck though the morning was still cool. His mind spun, judging how many men he was losing with each volley, straining to see how many Galts seemed to fall. They seemed to be getting more volleys off than his men. Perhaps the Galts had more archers than he did. If that was true, the longer he waited for his footmen to engage, the more he would lose. But then perhaps the Galts were simply better practiced at slaughter.

  “Call the attack!” Otah yelled. He looked for his messengers, but only two of them were in earshot, and neither was Nayiit. Otah gestured to the nearest of them. “Call the attack!”

  The charge was ragged, but it was not hesitant. He could hear it when the footmen got word—a loud whooping yell that seemed to have no particular start nor any end. One man’s voice took up where another paused for breath. Otah cantered forward. His horsemen were streaming forward as well now, careful not to outstrip the footmen by too great a distance, and Otah saw the Galtic archers falling back, their own soldiers coming to the fore.

  The two sides met with a sound like buildings falling. Shouts and screams mingled, and any nuanced plan was gone. Otah’s urge to rush forward was as much the desire to see more clearly what was happening as to defend the men he’d brought. His archers drew and fired sporadically until he called them to stop. There was no way to see who the arrows struck.

  The mass of men in the valley writhed. Once a great surge on Otah’s left seemed to press into the Galtic ranks, but it was pushed back. He heard drums and trumpet calls. That’s a good idea, Otah thought. Drums and trumpets.

  The shouting seemed to go on forever. The sun slowly rose in its arc as the men engaged, pulled back, and rushed at one another again. And with every passing breath, Otah saw more of his men fall. More of his men than of the Galts. He forced his mount nearer. He couldn’t judge how many he’d lost. The bodies in the mud might have been anyone.

  A sudden upsurge in the noise of the battle caught him. His footmen were roaring and surging forward, the center of the enemy’s line giving way. “Call them to stand!” Otah shouted, his voice hoarse and fading. “Stand!”

  But if they heard the call, the footmen didn’t heed it. They pressed forward, into the gap in the Galtic line. A trumpet blared three times, and the signal given, the Galtic horsemen that had held to the rear, left and right both, turned to the center and drove into Otah’s men from either side. It had been a trap, and a simple one, and they had stepped in it. Call the retreat, Otah thought wildly, I have to call the retreat. And then from the right, he heard the retreat called.

  Someone had panicked; someone had given the order before he could. His horsemen turned, unwilling, it seemed, to leave the footmen behind. A few footmen broke, and then a few more, and then, as if coming loose, Otah’s army turned its backs to the Galts and ran. Otah saw some horsemen trying to draw off the pursuing Galts, but most were flying back in retreat themselves. Otah spun his horse and saw, back on the field, the remnants of his wedges of archers fleeing as well.

  “No!” he shouted. “Not you! Stop where you are!”

  No one heard him. He was a leaf in a storm now, command gone, hope gone, his men being slaughtered like winter pork. Otah dug his heels into his mount’s sides, leaned low, and shot off in pursuit of the archers. It was folly riding fast over mud-slick ground, but Otah willed himself forward. The fleeing archers looked back over their shoulders at the sound of his hooves, and had the naïveté to look relieved that it was him. He rode through the nearest wedge, knocking several to the ground, then pulled up before them and pointed back at the men behind them.

  “Loose your arrows,” Otah croaked. “It’s the only chance they have! Loose arrows!”

  The archers stood stunned, their wide confused faces made Otah think of sheep confronted by an unexpected cliff. He had brought farmers and smiths onto a battlefield. He had led men who had never known more violence than brawling drunk outside a comfort house to fight soldiers. Otah dropped from his horse, took a bow and quiver from the nearest man, and aimed high. He never saw where his arrow went, but the bowmen at least began to understand. One by one, and then in handfuls, they began to send their arrows and bolts up over the retreating men and into the charging Galts.

  “They’ll kill us!” a boy shrieked. “There’s a thousand of them!”

  “Kill the first twenty,” Otah said. “Then let the ones still standing argue about who’ll lead the next charge.”

  Behind them, the other fleeing archers had paused. As the first of the fleeing horsemen passed, Otah caught sight of Ashua Radaani and raised his hands in a pose that called the man to a halt. There was blood on Radaani’s face and arms, and his eyes were wide with shock. Otah strode to him.

  “Go to the other archers. Tell them that once the men have reached us here, they’re to start loosing arrows. We’ll come back with the men.”

  “You should come now, Most High,” Radaani said. “I can carry you.”

  “I have a horse,” Otah said, though he realized he couldn’t say what had become of his mount. “Go. Just go!”

  The Galtic charge thinned as they drew into range of the arrows. Otah saw two men fall. And then, almost miraculously, the Galts began to pull back. Otah’s footmen came past him, muddy and bleeding and weeping and pale with shock. Some carried wounded men with them. Some, Otah suspected, carried men already dead. The last, or nearly the last, approached, and Otah turned, gesturing to the archers, and they all walked back together. The few Galts that pressed on were dissuaded by fresh arrows. Ashua had reached the other wedge. Thank the gods for that, at least.

  The army of Machi, three thousand strong that morning, found itself milling about, confused and without structure as the evening sun lengthened their shadows. They had fled back
past the northern lip of the valley where they had made camp the night before onto green grass already tramped flat by their passage. Some supply wagons and tents and fresh water had been caught up in the retreat, but more was strewn over the ground behind them. The wounded were lined up on hillsides and cared for as best the physicians could. Many of the wounds were mild, but there were also many who would not live the night.

  The scouts were the first to recover some sense of purpose. The couriers of the trading houses rode back and forth, reporting the movements of the Galts now that the battle was finished. They had scoured the field, caring for their own men and killing the ones Otah had left behind. Then, with professional efficiency, they had made their camp and prepared their dinner. It was clear that the Galts considered the conflict ended. They had won. It was over.

  As darkness fell, Otah made his way through the camps, stopped at what cook fires there were. No one greeted him with violence, but he saw anger in some eyes and sorrow in others. By far the most common expression was an emptiness and disbelief. When at last he sat on his cot—set under the spreading limbs of a shade tree in lieu of his tent—he knew that however many men he had lost on the battlefield, twice as many would have deserted by morning. Otah laid an arm over his eyes, his body heavy with exhaustion, but totally unable to sleep.

  In the long, dreadful march to this battle, not one man had turned back. At the time, it had warmed Otah’s heart. Now he wanted them all to flee. Go back to their wives and their children and their parents. Go back to where it was safe and forget this mad attempt to stop the world from crumbling. Except he couldn’t imagine where safety might be. The Dai-kvo would fall if he hadn’t already. The cities of the Khaiem would fall. Machi would fall. For years, he had had the power to command the death of Galt. Stone-Made-Soft could have ruined their cities, sunk their lands below the waves. All of this could have been stopped once, if he had known and had the will. And now it was too late.

  “Most High?”

  Otah raised his arm, sat up. Nayiit stood in the shadows of the tree. Otah knew him by his silhouette.

  “Nayiit-kya,” Otah said, realizing it was the first he’d seen Liat’s son since the battle. Nayiit hadn’t even crossed his mind. He wondered what that said about him. Nothing good. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine. A little bruised on the arm and shoulder, but…but fine.”

  In the dim, Otah saw that Nayiit held something before him. A greasy scent of roast lamb came to him.

  “I can’t eat,” Otah said as the boy came closer. “Thank you, but…give it to the men. Give it to the injured men.”

  “Your attendant said you didn’t eat in the morning either,” Nayiit said. “It won’t help them if you collapse. It won’t bring them back.”

  Otah felt a surge of cold anger at the words, but bit back his retort. He nodded to the edge of the cot.

  “Leave it there,” he said.

  Nayiit hesitated, but then moved forward and placed the bowl on the cot. He stepped back, but he did not walk away. As Otah’s eyes adjusted to the darkness, Nayiit’s face took on dim features. Otah wasn’t surprised to see that the boy was weeping. Nayiit was older now than Otah had been when he’d fathered him on Liat. Older now than Otah had been when he’d first killed a man with his hands.

  “I’m sorry, Most High,” Nayiit said.

  “So am I,” Otah said. The scent of lamb was thick and rich. Enticing and mildly nauseating both.

  “It was my fault,” Nayiit said, voice thickened by a tight throat. “This, all of this, is my fault.”

  “No,” Otah began. “You can’t—”

  “I saw them killing each other. I saw how many there were, and I broke,” Nayiit said, and his hands took a pose of profound contrition. “I’m the one who called the retreat.”

  “I know,” Otah said.

  Liat had been nursing her headache since she’d woken that morning; as the day progressed, it had drawn a line from the back of her eyes to her temples that throbbed when she moved too quickly. She had given up shaking her head. Instead, she pressed her fingers into the fine-grained wood of the table and tried to will her frustration into it. Kiyan, seated across from her, was saying something in a reasonable, measured tone that entirely missed her point. Liat took a pose that asked permission to speak, and then didn’t wait for Kiyan to answer her.

  “It isn’t the men,” Liat said. “He could have taken twice what he did, and we’d be able to do what’s needed. It’s that he took all the horses.”

  Kiyan’s fox-sharp face tightened. Her dark eyes flickered down toward the maps and diagrams spread out between them. The farmlands and low towns that surrounded Machi were listed with the weight of grain and meat and vegetables that had come from each in the last five years. Liat’s small, neat script covered paper after paper, black ink on the butter-yellow pages noting acres to be harvested and plowed, the number of hands and hooves required by each.

  The breeze from the unshuttered windows lifted the pages but didn’t disarray them, like invisible fingers checking the corners for some particular mark.

  “Show me again,” Kiyan said, and the weariness in her voice was almost enough to disarm Liat’s annoyance. Almost, but not entirely. With a sigh, she stood. The line behind her eyes throbbed.

  “This is the number of horses we’d need to plow the eastern farmsteads here and here and here,” Liat said, tapping the maps as she did so. “We have half that number. We can get up to nearly the right level if we take the mules from the wheat mills.”

  Kiyan looked over the numbers, her fingertips touching the sums and moving on. Her gaze was focused, a single vertical line between her brows.

  “How short is the second planting now?” Kiyan asked.

  “The west and south are nearly complete, but they started late. The eastern farmsteads…not more than a quarter.”

  Kiyan leaned back. Otah’s wife looked nearly as worn as Liat felt. The gray in her hair seemed more pronounced, her flesh paler and thinner. Liat found herself wondering if Kiyan had made a practice of painting her face and dyeing her hair that, in the crisis, she had let fall away, or if the task they had set themselves was simply sucking the life out of them both.

  “It’s too late,” Kiyan said. “With the time it would take to get the mules, put them to yoke, and plow the fields, we’d be harvesting snowdrifts.”

  “Is there something else we could plant?” Liat asked. “Something we have time to grow before winter? Potatoes? Turnips?”

  “I don’t know,” Kiyan said. “How long does it take to grow turnips this far north?”

  Liat closed her eyes. Two educated, serious, competent women should be able to run a city. Should be able to shoulder the burden of the world and forget that one stood to lose a husband, the other a son. Should be able to ignore the constant fear that soldiers of a Galtic army might appear any day on the horizon prepared to destroy the city. It should be within their power, and yet they were blocked by idiot questions like whether turnips take longer to grow than potatoes. She took a deep breath and slowly let it out, willing the tension in her jaw to lessen, the pain behind her eyes to recede.

  “I’ll find out,” Liat said. “But will you give the order to the mills? They won’t be happy to stop their work.”

  “I’ll give them the option of loaning the Khai their animals or pulling the plows themselves,” Kiyan said. “If we have to spend the winter grinding wheat for our bread, it’s a small price for not starving.”

  “It’s going to be a thin spring regardless,” Liat said.

  Kiyan took the papers that Liat had drawn up. She didn’t speak, but the set of her mouth agreed.

  “We’ll do our best,” Kiyan said.

  The banquet had gone splendidly. The women of the utkhaiem—wives and mothers, daughters and aunts—had heard Kiyan’s words and taken to them as if she were a priest before the faithful. Liat had seen the light in their eyes, the sense of hope. For all their fine robes and live
s of court scandal and gossip, each of these women was as grateful as Liat had been for the chance of something to do.

  The food and fuel, Kiyan had kept for herself. Other people had been tasked with seeing to the wool, to arranging the movement of the summer belongings into the storage of the high towers, the preparation of the lower city—the tunnels below Machi. Liat had volunteered to act as Kiyan’s messenger and go-between in the management of the farms and crops, gathering the food that would see them through the winter. Being the lover of a poet—even a poet who had never bound one of the andat—apparently lent her enough status in court to make her interesting. And as the rumors began to spread that Cehmai and Maati were keeping long hours together in the library and the poet’s house, that they were preparing a fresh binding, Liat found herself more and more in demand. In recent days it had even begun to interfere with her work.

  She had let herself spend time in lush gardens and high-domed dining halls, telling what stories she knew of Maati’s work and intentions—what parts of it he’d said would be safe to tell. The women were so hungry for good news, for hope, that Liat couldn’t refuse them. After telling the stories often enough, even she began to take hope from them herself. But tea and sweet bread and gossip took time, and they took attention, and she had let it go too far. The second wheat crop would be short, and no amount of pleasant high-city chatter now would fill bellies in the spring. Assuming they lived. If the Galts appeared tomorrow, it would hardly matter what she’d done or failed to do.

  “There’s going to be enough food,” Kiyan said softly. “We may wind up killing more of the livestock and eating the grain ourselves, but even if half the crop failed, we’d have enough to see us through to the early harvest.”

  “Still,” Liat said. “It would have been good to have more.”

  Kiyan took a pose that both agreed with Liat and dismissed the matter. Liat responded with one appropriate for taking leave of a superior. It was a nuance that seemed to trouble Kiyan, because she leaned forward, her fingertips touching Liat’s arm.