Kingslayer (49 page)

He read it through twice before finally putting it away. So, she hadn’t been able to find it, eh? Twisting about, he grabbed his letter writing kit from behind him, pulled out a fresh sheet and the bottle of ink, dipped in the quill, and started writing a response.

“Bresalier!” a hearty voice greeted cheerfully.

Darius stopped in mid-word and twisted about. “Tunheim!”

“I came up to see how things were going,” the Baijian clan leader said as he walked toward him. “The men say you tried to parley with Behnam. Didn’t work.”

He didn’t sound surprised. Darius wasn’t either, really, as Behnam had always been stubborn. “I had to try,” he confessed with a shrug and wry smile.

“Every good general does.” Tunheim, without any hesitation, plopped down beside him, a bag of sweet wine in one hand and a joint of some sort of meat in the other. He situated himself comfortably with both legs crossed, sighing in satisfaction as he settled. Happy, he pointed to the letter Darius was writing with his leg of meat. “Writing your new Queen?”

“No, actually,” Darius admitted absently. “I’m writing my wife.”

“Hoooo? You finally got caught by a woman, eh?”

Darius shot him a quick smile. “I had to catch her, actually. She was betrothed to another when I met her.”

The Baijian’s eyes lit up. The only thing they liked better than a good bottle of wine was a good story. “How did you steal her away?”

Putting the quill aside, he stopped the bottle of ink before launching into the story. It didn’t escape his notice, either, that several men nearby all paused in what they were doing and were listening intently. But then, no doubt there were all sorts of variations of this tale going about. They were lucky to hear the true story from the man himself.

Tunheim listened intently, absently pulling at his flask as he listened. When the story wound down to a close, he let out a loud cheer of approval. “Good man! A wife is nothing to trifle with. She’s always worth the battle. But this must be a pretty woman, to be fought over by two men.”

“She’s quite lovely,” he admitted with frank prejudice.

The other man nodded smugly, as if he had already met the woman himself. “I thought as much. You are a good husband to write to her. I write to my wife daily, and bundle the letters before sending them off whenever I can.” He leaned forward as if imparting some grand secret. “The trick to keeping a wife happy is letters and gifts, my friend. Do not believe otherwise.”

Darius chuckled. “I have to agree. It’s funny you say that, though. This letter is about a gift I forgot to give her.”

“Forgot?” Tunheim demanded in surprise. “How can you forget a gift?!”

“Well,” Darius scratched at his cheek and wondered how to explain. “I bought it for her before we were betrothed, you see, while she still belonged to that goat’s son. I planned to give it to her later, when I found the right moment. But then I got tangled up in the duel to win her, and fought the Izeh Battle, and then we were married and moved into a new house, and…,” he trailed off sheepishly, shrugging. “It got lost somewhere in the shuffle. I told her that if she can find it, she can have it.”

“A treasure hunt.” Tunheim’s eyes lit up like a child’s. “Has she?”

“Not yet. Actually, her last letter to me demanded a description of what she’s looking for and an idea of where I saw it last.” He thought about it for a moment before offering, “I have no idea where I put it, actually.”

Tunheim threw back his head and laughed. “That poor woman. For your sake, I hope she finds it before you return home.”

Yes, he hoped so too. “Your men are doing well at the estate?” He’d put them at Surat, the Quetel’s estate, as it was very close to the Dakan Pass.

“They’re fine,” Tunheim assured him with a careless wave. “Good food, good wine, and kind women. You are a good host.”

Phew. He hated to think of what would have happened if Quetel hadn’t met the Baijian standards. “Glad to hear it.”

“I had a good look at your forts as we rode to Surat.” Tunheim gave him an admiring look. “Formidable, those. The way you staggered them, no man can get through the pass without being in danger of catching an arrow.”

Darius shrugged. “That was the idea. I’ve been up against forts like these before. It took a month just to get through and I lost a good portion of my troops managing it.”

“Ahh. That’s how you know he’ll lose half.”

“Hard-won experience,” Darius agreed with a grimace. “The harshest teacher.”

“True, my friend. But you never forget the lesson!”

“Also true,” Darius sighed. “The pass here isn’t as long as the one I went through, so I expect it won’t take a month. Two weeks, maybe, before he’ll bull through.” If Behnam only had ten thousand, Darius’s archers could hold them off longer. In this particular instance, numbers truly played in Behnam’s favor. Darius’s archers, after all, only had so many arrows and could only shoot so many times in a day before they ran out of light. Behnam would be able to force his way through eventually.

“We’ll be ready in two weeks,” Tunheim promised him. “Send word if you need us before then.” Standing, he chucked the stripped bone over his shoulder. “But until then, I shall be with my men.”

“It’s late,” Darius protested. “Why don’t you stay here tonight before going down?”

“Ah, you’re a true friend, Bresalier. But I shall return. For one,” Tunheim leaned forward in a confidential manner and winked, “the food is
much
better down there, yes? And there’s softer beds to be had. My stallion is the wind itself. He shall get me back before it’s truly dark.”

Well, he’d offered. Standing, he extended a hand. “Then safe return, my friend.”

Tunheim clasped his forearm with a grip that could crush boulders, grinned at him, and then sauntered off with a bow-legged stride.

Shaking his head, Darius went back to his letter.

“He’s not coming.” Darius growled, half-confused and half-irritated.

Behnam hadn’t moved his army at all in the past three days. He had, in fact, sat there like a stone lizard. At first Darius thought he was just letting his troops rest a little before tackling the very dangerous road ahead. But the forested area wasn’t any safer than the pass. In fact, it could arguably be more dangerous in a way. The Brindisi soldiers had to do everything with a shield covering them, even eat and sleep—no one would consider the area “safe to rest in.”

Granted, Darius had pulled all of his men from the forest and up to the mountains two days ago in preparation for Behnam’s troops coming through the pass. He didn’t have enough men to leave them in both places. But the Brindisi troops were completely paranoid now and weren’t willing to drop their guard, so they were still milling about camp with shields in one hand. They certainly weren’t getting any rest.

So what was Behnam
doing
?

And why did he insist on delaying the inevitable?! Didn’t the man realize that Darius had a schedule to keep?

Alright, he was being ridiculous. Even Amalah knew that enemies wouldn’t be accommodating for an expecting father’s nerves. But
still
.

Darius stood on the edge of the cliff, absently sliding his spy glass open and closed as he thought. Behnam was a seasoned general who had seen just as many campaigns as Darius had. He had any number of victories and losses under his belt. Darius couldn’t see the other general making any careless mistakes. So what could possibly motivate him to stay within this treacherous stretch of forested highway?

Unless….

Suspicious, he opened the spy glass fully and raised it to his eye again. With the morning sun setting up a glare, it took several adjustments of his stance and the angle of the glass before he could see far enough. When he did, it took even more time to really figure out what the soldiers at the very back were doing.

When he did understand it, he started swearing viciously. “KAVEH!”

His commander scrambled from behind him, trying to run on uneven ground and loose rock. “Sir? What happened?”

Wordlessly, he handed him the glance. “The very back of the camp.”

Kaveh shot him a worried look before lifting the glass and obediently looking in that direction. For several long moments he looked before he too started swearing. “He’s re-building his siege engines!”

“Yes,” Darius confirmed darkly. “Great sands! I think it’s my fault, too. I was trying to scare him into surrendering the other day by hinting that I had this whole pass fortified. I think I gave him too much information. He knows my habits as well as I know his. If I really
do
have fortifications built through here, then the only prayer he has of defeating them are—”

“Siege engines,” Kaveh finished with a pained expression. He lowered the glass and handed it back to Darius.

Even as he took it, Darius felt like swearing some more. In his effort to hasten this battle along, he had in fact made things worse. In essence, he’d stabbed himself in the foot.
Both
feet, really. “Does he have the tools with him to re-build them?”

Kaveh rubbed at the back of his neck with an open palm, thinking hard. “Yes and no, sir. Yes, he can rebuild them. Any good team of engineers would be able to, really. But with the materials he has on hand and the limitations of the time they have to work with? They’re not going to be very high quality constructs. It takes a good month, with a full team, to build one catapult. He doesn’t have the supplies necessary to camp out here for a month while they build something full scale. But if they cut it down to a smaller size, it’s possible. Actually, it’s almost preferable. They’d fit better in the narrower sections of the pass.”

Not the answer he wanted. “So we have to come up with a way to stop him. Truly stop him, so that he doesn’t just fight us off and try it again.”

“Yes sir,” Kaveh acknowledged with a long sigh. “Any brilliant ideas?”

Darius slammed the spyglass all the way closed with a sharp
shing
. “Not one.”

~~~

Darius called an emergency meeting with his staff right there on the rocks, within sight of the Brindisi encampment below. Field meetings didn’t have any rank or order to them, especially on this rugged landscape, so they all found a flat section of rock to sit on and made do.

With everyone settled, he summarized the situation and ended with, “We absolutely can
not
afford to let him build those siege engines. If we do, it’ll wreak havoc on our forts and it will give them a higher survival rate. I need ideas, and I need them now.”

Ramin rubbed at his forehead as if already getting a headache. “The only thing that I can think of is somehow sneaking our men through the forest and then forming up into ranks at the back of the Brindisi ranks and forcing them forward.”

Darius shook his head before Ramin could even finish. “Won’t work. They outnumber us and there are no natural fortifications on the road that will help us. They’ll just mow us down with sheer numbers and we’d be back to where we started.”

“Set fire to the woods so they don’t have anything to build with?” Mihr suggested.

He grimaced. “Not the best option. It would cut down on the wood they can use, but it also costs us considerable cover. It will also give them more room to spread out and make a more lasting camp, if they wanted to stay and develop a better plan against us. But I’ll keep the idea in reserve. It might come down to that.” He prayed not, though. In this dry weather, the trees would go up like a torch and it might well burn the whole forest down before something came along to stop it. “Any other ideas?”

Silence descended as the men thought hard, their faces drawn into frowns as they tried to think of some way around this.  

“Cats,” Navid said suddenly.

In this glum silence, the word seemed not only loud but absurd.

Darius drew on the little patience he had left before saying, “Navid. I know that you like to talk cryptically, but this is
not
the time for it. Cats?”

Navid grinned at him in a flash of white teeth. “You fought barbarians here,” he tapped his forehead with a finger, “by using cats. We need to fight here too. Brindisi already jumpy and nervous. It would be easy to scare them.”

The idea took root in Darius’s mind. Navid had a good point. Of course, the Brindisi engineers had more education than a barbarian did, so they weren’t as nearly as superstitious. No. Wait. It didn’t take superstitions to do mental warfare. “You’re right. We’re going about this the wrong way. Navid, get back down there with your best archers. These are your orders: fire at anyone that picks up a tool.
Only
people that handle tools.”

Kaveh let out a low whistle. “You’re going to make them terrified to build anything.”

“Would
you
pick up an axe if you knew that doing so would get you killed?” Darius pointed out reasonably. “I certainly wouldn’t, no matter what orders my superior officer gave me. I’d rather take whatever punishment he heaped on my head than be dead.”

“Fear is very contagious,” Mihr acknowledged slowly. “Especially in that camp. I’d wager that within a day, no man could be forced into building those siege engines.”