The Folding Knife (56 page)

"It shouldn't be a problem," Basso said briskly. "Salt and healthy young men are your country's only exports. You've never had a shortage of either."

The salt brother smiled. "With respect," he said, "there's never been such a level of demand; for both," he added, "but particularly the latter. And the difference between salt and men is that increasing production takes longer."

Basso nodded. "When a commodity's in short supply," he said, "the price goes up. I understand that. So I'm raising the recruitment bounty to one nomisma."

The salt brother frowned at his hands; they appeared to be more than usually irksome. "That will help, for sure," he said. "But six thousand; I can promise you four. The other two may not be forthcoming."

Not forthcoming
. Wonderful phrase. "Why not?"

"Partly, it's the time of year," the salt brother said. "There's a lot going on. The sheep have to be rounded up and moved to the lower pastures, and shorn. It's also the time for building salmon-weirs and hunting buffalo, deer and seals."

Basso looked at him. "That's important?"

"Vital." The salt brother looked surprised. "The buffalo herds migrate into the high valleys at this time of year. We drive them into ambuscades and slaughter them; we rely on their meat to see us through the winter. If there aren't enough men to drive the herd..." He shrugged. "Perhaps you might try recruiting among the Cazars who are already here, in the city," he said. "There must be several thousand."

Basso chose to ignore that suggestion. "You can get me four thousand."

"I believe so, yes. Provided you offer the increased bounty." The salt brother frowned, then went on, "Forgive my asking, but why do you need more men? Is the war going badly? Have casualties been very high?"

"Practically nil," Basso replied. "And the war's going very well. But it turns out we need more men than we originally thought."

"Ah." The salt brother nodded. "I'm delighted to hear it. My people enjoy victory, but are easily disheartened by defeat. It's why we don't have wars, only battles. One battle lost and we give up and go home. Of course," he added, "my people in Mavortis don't have that option. They can't leave, unless they swim."

Basso smiled. "If they enjoy victory, they'll be having the time of their lives," he said.

Next, he sent for the High Commissioner of the Hus. He'd been startled to discover that such a person existed; it was, he said, a bit like having accredited diplomatic relations with fire or the plague. But there was a High Commissioner; and he looked so much like a Vesani would imagine a Hus to appear that to begin with, Basso was convinced he must be an impostor; an out-of-work actor in a false beard and stage costume.

"My people have a rich and ancient culture," the Hus told him, in flawless Vesani, with a comic-opera accent that in no way impeded his mastery of syntax. "It's just different from your own. We are nomads. We move across the earth like the tide moves up the beach; but the tide obeys the moon, and we obey our own laws and traditions. We have ambassadors in every major capital city, and a substantial body of treaties and agreements. I'm surprised you don't know this."

"Forgive me," Basso said, without the slightest trace of an apology in his voice. "I need soldiers. Two thousand, infantry, for garrison duty."

The Hus frowned. "My people are horsemen," he said. "We are practically born in the saddle. We say, why should any sane man walk when he can ride? And we do not do well when confined inside buildings. If we spend more than half an hour in a building, we tend to burn it down."

"Fine," Basso said. "So you can't help me."

The Hus looked at him. "Replace some of the Cazars in your field army with our horsemen," he said, "and send the Cazars to man your castles. We are the finest assault troops in the world. Where we have been, the grass does not grow again for a hundred years."

"Yes," Basso said, "that's rather the point. Please don't take this the wrong way, but we were hoping to take over Mavortis and develop it after the war's over."

The Hus grinned. "In that case," he said, "I don't think I can help you. Why not try the Jazyges? They are simple people, not intelligent, but they can be trained to perform simple tasks. Or the Blemmyans. The Auxentines hire Blemmyans for siege operations and domestic law enforcement."

There was no Jazygite representative of any kind, but the Moral & Ethical Bank (the Caelius brothers, in partnership with the Trustees of the Studium) acted as gangmasters for recruiting Blemmyan labour for civil engineering projects. Saloninus Caelius was sure he'd be able to deliver two thousand Blemmyans within a fortnight.

"Soldiers?" Basso asked.

Caelius made a vague gesture of demurral. "It might be a good idea not to tell them exactly what they're being hired for," he said, "at least, not till they're actually on the boat, at sea. By that point, I don't suppose they'll make any difficulties. They're a very biddable people."

Basso spent several hours holed up in his study with the army lists and personnel returns. By replacing all the Cazar non-combatants--drivers, porters, artisans, cooks, low-grade clerks--with Blemmyans, he could free fourteen hundred Cazars for the field army. That still left six hundred to find.

The next day, a rather surprising announcement was posted up all over the City, and read out by official heralds for the benefit of the non-literate. Volunteers were needed for the army in Mavortis. Any resident alien who joined up would be guaranteed full citizenship on his return, together with a one-nomisma bounty and full military pay.

In a way, Basso said later, it couldn't have come at a better time. The Opposition were still exhausted after the gruelling battle over the Finance Bill to pay for the reinforcements; they simply didn't have the energy to make more than a token protest at the further extension of the franchise. Basso's assurance that it was a unique measure designed to deal with a specific situation that was highly unlikely to recur and therefore set no precedent was more or less accepted by default, and the Enfranchisement Bill passed comfortably. The Opposition were, of course, the least of his problems.

"Sentio reckons I've lost my sense of proportion," Basso said wearily, stretching his legs out to the end of the bath. "Furio reckons it's pointless, because nobody in their right mind would leave a safe job in the City to go fight a war, just to be a citizen. At least Cinio isn't speaking to me, so I'm spared his input." He sighed. "I'm not used to this," he said. "My father had it all the time when he was First Citizen, but that's because he wasn't very bright and didn't know how to handle his allies. My mother used to say the fact that he was his own worst enemy was a tribute to his single-mindedness, since there were so many of his friends competing for the honour."

"I think I'd have liked your mother," Melsuntha said.

"I doubt it. She'd have hated you. She was a snob and she thought foreigners weren't proper humans."

"She was Vesani." Melsuntha shrugged; wasted gesture, since Basso had his back to her. "I like a lot of people who don't like me. If I didn't, I'd hate everybody in the City."

"My mother was a clever woman in lots of ways," Basso said, "but she had a fundamental core of stupidity that cancelled them all out. I worry sometimes that I take after her. Still," he went on, "about the only person in the world she really got on well with was her maid, and she was Blemmyan."

"Perhaps she was one of those women who can only really talk to servants," Melsuntha suggested. "There seem to be a lot of them here."

"Maybe," Basso said. "She certainly didn't talk to my father. At him, yes, all the time. He was very good at not listening. There were times when I wondered if my deafness was hereditary, rather than because of getting bashed on the head."

"You listen," Melsuntha said, "but more the way a spy listens, to gather useful information that you can hold against the speaker. You eavesdrop on your own conversations."

Basso laughed at that. "I'm more interested in what the things people say say about them, I'll grant you," he said. "Which makes me think I'm like my mother. She did that. Like I said, fundamentally not very bright." He reached for a towel. "Bassano listens because he's interested," he said. "He's interested in everything. I've never been able to understand that."

"You admire him for it."

"Definitely," Basso replied. "It fascinates me, like watching someone play the flute. Don't want to be able to do it myself, but I admire the man who can."

She laughed. He looked at her. "Sorry," she said. "You playing the flute. It doesn't really bear thinking about."

He frowned, mock-irritable. "I could play the flute if I wanted to."

"I don't think so," she said. "It takes time and practice. Unless you can do something perfectly first go..."

"That's a gross slander," Basso said. "I can be really patient if I have to. When I was a kid..."

He stopped, his face suddenly dead. It was only for a moment, but she saw and was keenly interested. Then he went on, "When I was a kid, my sister got given one of those wooden puzzles; you know, where you've got to slide one part across and turn it up and round until suddenly it magically fits. She played with it for an hour and then gave up. It took me a week, but I did it."

She nodded. "Because she'd given up?"

"What made you ask that?"

Shrug. "I don't suppose it was the sheer joy of applied geometry," she said. "Cussedness, maybe. But I'd have thought you'd have solved it straight away."

"Well, I didn't. But I stuck at it."

"Why?"

His turn to shrug. "I can't remember."

From Bassano:

...
We got there as soon as we could, but by then it was all over. The embers were still hot, though. I trod on a piece of burned rafter, and it scorched my foot through the sole of my boot.

We don't yet know if any of our people made it out alive. Hard to see how they could've. The likeliest sequence of events is, they crept up round the fort on all sides during the night, and at first light they attacked on three sides at once. We found no dead bodies on the south wall, and dead men, ours and theirs, on the other three. Seems as though the only equipment they used was scaling ladders; we found four, busted up on the ground, presumably pushed down by our people. They didn't stop to loot the corpses or collect their own dead; just set fire to the place and left. Casualty ratio something in the order of six of theirs to one of ours, which Aelius says is astonishing. Usually, when an assault takes that sort of punishment, they give up pretty quickly. None of their dead had any sort of armour, just shields, and a lot didn't even have them. Most of their dead were shot. It would seem that once they got up onto the rampart, they had it mostly their own way; our people didn't put up much of a fight, hand-to-hand. Aelius says he's not surprised. They were second-line troops, after all. They'd been taught basic archery, but not hand-to-hand stuff. So far we've found a hundred and sixteen of ours, out of a garrison of a hundred and forty (only we're not quite sure of that--inconsistencies in personnel assignment lists and duty rosters). Twenty Blemmyans, the rest Cazars, plus one Vesani (pay corps liaison) of course, some bodies have been so badly burned we can't tell which side they were, and some would've burnt away completely.

So: from what we can gather they came from the forest, got past all our scouts and observation posts, stormed the fort with no gear except ladders, kept at it in spite of appalling losses, torched the place and withdrew. Conclusion: they knew what they were doing, they did it well and they were absolutely determined to do it, even if they got killed. I would suggest that this makes them a nuisance, possibly even a genuine threat, and the war isn't over after all.

Advance warning. Aelius is going to ask you for even more men. He's badly shaken. The thing he was determined wasn't going to happen has just happened, and for the first time since we got here, he doesn't know what to do
.

No, that's not true. He knows, but he really, really doesn't want to do it
...

From Aelius:

...
Therefore I feel that, having weighed up the available options and their likely chances of success, the only way to crush the insurgency before it has a chance to grow to unmanageable proportions is to seek out the enemy and destroy him.

This would entail advancing into the forest, which I am exceedingly reluctant to do. Our main advantages are in numbers and superior tactical ability. Both these advantages would be negated, quite possibly turned against us, in the forest. A large army is easier to harass in such conditions than a small one. Our techniques are tailored to fighting in the open. It is easy to imagine how a large column, necessarily strung out over a considerable distance, could be ambushed, pressurised by means of constant hit-and-run attacks, trapped, dispersed and slaughtered by a relatively primitive but fanatical enem
y.

The alternative, however, is even less attractive. I had hoped, by building so many forts, so close together, that an attack such as the one we have suffered would not be possible; that assistance would arrive from neighbouring forts before an assault could be pressed home. This would appear not to be the case. We therefore face a long war of slow attrition, each victory inspiring the enemy and demoralising our troops. My belief that the enemy lacks the supplies necessary to survive in the forest would appear to be incorrect; presumably they are able to survive by hunting and gathering. The food reserves at the fort were burnt, not looted. I conclude that the enemy are not going hungry.