The Conqueror (19 page)

“
According to Lowren, he
can call upon ten thousand mounted warriors, and in any paper
calculation, he can round up a considerable number of volunteer
infantry.”

“
What’s your point,
Master-General Verescens?”

Verescens nodded at the use of the
title, for the Khan and he were not the only ones in the
room.

“
For one thing, they are
just paper calculations, relying only on some rather amateur census
numbers. While I am sure that Lowren is not a fool, and that he has
some rational appraisal of their abilities, I strongly doubt if
they’re half as good as our regular troops.” In most circumstances,
he was thinking, but the Great One knows that too.

Most of our troops. The most
highly-trained would jump off and lead the attacks on several
fronts. The most newly-levied would still be training, or at best
on garrison duty, patrolling the roads for thousands of miles,
protecting official convoys. The list went on, and the need for
large numbers of what were essentially just warm bodies, was still
pressing even in the event of a quick campaign in the face of a
demoralized enemy.

As for the speed at which the Hordesmen
could gobble up territory, that was all guesswork.

This put it essentially in the laps of
the gods.

They stood in a thin circle, officers
in a rainbow of colors and uniforms, eyes and ears agog as their
greatest general and the Khan went through yet another map exercise
for the benefit of senior commanders. Each raised points, and each
raised objections, their words going back and forth as the stalked
about the table, here, there, back and forth. Others put in
questions and comments, and these were dealt with one at a time, as
thoroughly as possible. They took turns playing the demon’s
advocate. Most of the points were well known but bore repeating.
Their troops would come from a thousand different clans, tribes,
nations, and the Khan’s own regular military services. There was a
good representative group there today—all regulars, no auxiliaries
or barbaric chieftains had been invited. Theirs was but to accept
their pay and do what was asked of them; and to observe certain
proprieties when in contact with the Khan’s own people or when
crossing his territories.

“
I think he is
overestimating his own abilities. Even if he could put that many
men and horses into the field at any one time, which I doubt, they
will very quickly melt away.” This was especially true in the case
of summer campaigns, and ever more so in the event of a summer
siege, where the attackers had no amenities in terms of sanitation,
cooking and housing the troops.

They had gone so far as to compose
Tables of Attrition, for their own troops and the enemies they
expected to encounter. The Horde were fairly competent in all
aspects of war and were becoming quite professional in analyzing
their victories and defeats.

It was something new in the art of war.
Verescens thought it was a bit much but had never said so. There
was something to be said for planning, after all. Logistics was
everything, something a good general never forgot.

“
In my very humble
assessment, this represents a negligible force in any conceivable,
set-piece battle. This does not take into account engagements on
terrain and under conditions which might not be of our own
choosing, oh, mighty Khan.”

There was little doubt ten thousand
Lemnian troops could do a lot of damage. They might wipe out small
or badly-handled detachments of regular Hordesmen, somewhere off on
their own and without support.

“
Very well.”

“
Yes, oh, Great One. But
this is not actually my point.”

There was a long sigh from the
assembly, on their feet for at least a couple of hours at this
point and no end in sight. They were going to war, and would acquit
themselves with great honor and gallantry when the time came. Other
than that, most of them followed orders, with great enthusiasm in
some cases and with some degree of reluctance in others. All they
asked was to be pointed at an enemy. Their training and discipline
would take care of the rest.

They fully expected to win and their
units had the captured enemy standards to prove it. They had lost
battles and for the most part survived the experience—there were
the dead and maimed, of course, in any battle.

There, but for the grace of
the gods go I...

“
Go on.” There was the fine
glint of humor in Jumalak’s eyes, for the rather more ordinary
generals all knew that Verescens had never lost a battle save
one—which he had once said was more than enough for him.

“
Lowren.”

“
Lowren has lost a few
battles over the years.”

“
Lowren and
Eleanora...together now, somehow, in a way or manner, which we do
not fully understand. She is great friends with the Heloi, and even
Lowren has been making the rounds of his neighbor’s
courts.”

“
And this troubles you?” If
his general could be somewhat maddeningly intuitive at times, his
master was never very far behind him.

The Khan strolled over and took his
seat again.

“
Oh, Great One. It is just
that other than the Emperor himself...those two are the only ones
to demonstrate any real imagination in the governing of their own
kingdoms. Lowren’s division of his forces at the Battle of the
Otrapopa River was dead against all military doctrine—and it was
also brilliant, and quite frankly resulted in the massacre and
dispersal of the Ju’upiano.”

The Lemni were known for
mounted bowmen and intrepid infantry, untrained in large formations
and yet highly-skilled in the arts of various weapons. According to
reports, they would go into battle with swords, small bucklers,
long-bows, crossbows, pikes, spears, slings, everything in the
barbarian military inventory save the use of poisoned arrows. Every
second archer, especially the crossbowmen, had a boy, or
pavisor,
to carry a pavis,
a tall, square-cut wooden shield propped up with another big stake.
The kid or perhaps a lesser-skilled adult would be loading spare
bows just as fast as he could while the senior archer sniped
away.

They would poison a well or burn a
village in a heartbeat he expected, to deny it to an immediate
enemy force.

To give them proper credit, they didn’t
seem to engage in the mass executions of prisoners, and yet they
weren’t above burning the crops and driving off all stock, or
killing any suspicious males of military age that they came
across—it was said they detested their own deserters as well. In a
vague sense the Khan wondered why the Lemni would even come into
the equation. The concern over Windermere was another matter, as
everyone agreed on the economic basis for that aspect of their
plan. The Lemni were subsistence farmers, herdsmen and fishermen.
Any surplus they had from year to year barely met the combined
needs of trade, a primitive kind of nation-building (they had to
give Lowren full credit for that) and the most minimal
taxation.

There would be precious little left
over for military preparations.

And yet in war, the very smallest
detail often matters the most—for want of a nail a shoe was lot,
and so on, and so forth.

After some thought, the Great Khan took
a good breath and sat up straighter in his chair.

“
Very well. Thank you,
gentlemen. You are dismissed.”

A rumble of grateful conversation
lifted from the crowd of generals and admirals in the room and then
the Khan was left alone with Verescens. The filtered out, still
muttering over what they had seen and heard and of course their own
role in it.

They were wondering how they would
fare.

The general, used to the routine,
waited for the last one to leave. The stone-faced guards closed the
doors to the war room again. The two white-clad men froze into
their unnatural position, spears held at the ready.

“
So, General. What do you
think? What should we do?”

“
About what, oh,
Khan?”

“
About Lowren and
Eleanora—and this Theodelinda person, and whoever she plans to
marry.”

“
My personal suggestion,
uttered with the deepest respect, my master, is that we should do
nothing.”

“
Nothing!”

Verescens nodded gravely, then bowed
deeply in spite of slightly-arthritic knees and an aching lower
back.

“
We can’t do that.” His
lord and master smiled his most charming smile. “Can
we?”

“
Certainly we can. We can
simply ignore it, in fact that is our wisest course.”

“
And why do you say
that?”

“
Because I fear this
Lowren—and I think I fear this Queen even more, oh, Great
One.”

Jumalak thought about it. Why give them
any more credit than they had before?

Don’t give them the satisfaction, in
other words.

“
We might observe them
closely, oh, Khan.”

“
Because she’s giving her
own cousin to this
henchman
of Lowren’s?”

His face went hard, as if suddenly
petrified by the dry desert wind. A pleasing picture entered his
mind. A captive Theodelinda was a tempting bargaining chip. He had
a few henchmen of his own, and some of them would truly appreciate
such an honorable gift.

“
Something like that. The
problem is that I don’t understand their thinking, oh, Great One.
More than anything I don’t like surprises from our enemies, and
just when we are so close to being finally ready.”

Jumalak fell silent. He
could reinforce Sinopus, and probably would in spite of Verescens’
insistence that it wasn’t
decisively
important. It wasn’t the general’s city, or his
empire for that matter, to lose.

But to just sit there and do nothing,
in the face of what might be a carefully-calculated insult, was
intolerable to one of his disposition.

As to what other moves they might make,
Jumalak really couldn’t see anything on the board that hadn’t
already been foreseen, taken into account, and ultimately
provided-for.

The waiting was always going to be the
worst.

And, as Verescens had put
it in his own humble, forcible eloquence—
I
do not like surprise
s.

“
Verescens.”

“
Yes, oh, Khan?”

“
When does the northern
part of the Great Sea freeze, anyways?”

Chapter
Fourteen

Jumalak was pleased to be able to
reinforce Sinopus before the big freeze-up made further movements
by sea impossible.

His spies were everywhere. Their
reports were interesting if not entirely unexpected as to
contents.

Kings and princes and
lesser khans, queens and the meanest tribes with any vestige of
pride or liberty remaining to them were in ferment. Couriers, post
riders, diplomats and ambassadors went back and forth. Spies were
said to be everywhere, and more than one man or woman had already
lost their lives on mere accusation. Fears and feelings were
running all too high. The truth was that nothing
much
had happened since
Sinopus fell under the sway of the Great One.

The Heloi had signed a defensive pact
with Windermere, and stated their neutrality in any conflict in the
region that did not directly affect their long-established and
equally well-known interests.

The Sicurri were encamped on the
northeastern borders of Lowren’s Lemnian kingdom. They moved about
every ten or fifteen years, and this was about the southern end of
their range. The vassal tribes and related bodies of barbarians
were surprisingly peaceful. Their normal pattern of raiding back
and forth amongst themselves, especially in winter, was somehow
held in abeyance.

The enemy had their spies as well. The
problem with barbarians was their propensity for selling their
swords to the highest bidder. There had been cases of defections,
where a band of light, mounted auxiliaries had taken their pay, and
ridden off. This was the unfortunate result of minor corruption
among some of his officials, who had been rather summarily punished
for the indiscretion.

It was too late, of course, but it sent
a certain message to other officials.

To let their pay get too far into
arrears was their first mistake, Jumalak considered. But to pay it
all off in one go was another—they were all up to date and they had
an end date in their articles of service. If they chose not to
re-up, there was little he could do about it without it being
noticed. Simply to make up the numbers, they would be relying
heavily on native troops, and tributary bands sent by minor kings,
and then there were the professional mercenaries. Not all of them
were illiterate barbarians, either. They could and did send letters
home.

At this point in time, any sort of
notice was unfavorable. All the Khan’s officers could do was to
smile, wave goodbye, and chalk it up to experience. It was always
unwise to send barbarian troops into battle against their brothers
and cousins. The usual remedy was to put them up against some other
foe, a blood enemy if possible or merely a foreign race they had
never heard of.