On the Oceans of Eternity (88 page)

“Lord Miskelefol,” he said. “You will assume command here. We will withdraw the army to cover this area.”

“Lord King—” one of his war-captains said, a grizzled man who’d been helmsman on the
Foam Treader
before the Eagle People came. “That means opening the valley of the
Tasweldan Errigu-abiden
to raids at least, and perhaps to invasion.”

Isketerol nodded. “True enough, Derentersal,” he said.

And perhaps even the wild highlanders will raise their heads again,
he thought. To free the rich river country of the age-old terror of mountaineer raids had been the first and hardest of his works, and the means by which he had won the loyalty of the valley folk. Laying the mountains under law and tapping their treasures had been nigh as hard.

“Better to lose ground than to lose the army; that would mean the loss of the kingdom,” he said.

Derentersal shook his head. “I don’t see how they did it, lord,” he said, looking at the ruins. “Oh, I can see how they did every
bit
of it. But to put them all together,
at the right time,
in a way so that they wouldn’t be wrecked if anything went wrong ...”

“They can talk across the air,” Isketerol said.
But that isn’t the whole story. To move everything as if it were the fingers of a man’s hand, how?

“Let us to our work,” he said at last. “This will not be a quick war, or an easy one. But we will win it.”

Miskelefol spoke, his eyes on the ruins of the commander’s residence: “The new things have brought us much grief.”

“And much power, and wealth,” Isketerol said. “More than that, we have no choice. Now that the New Learning has come into the world, those who don’t learn it will quickly become as helpless savages—then victims and slaves—to those who do. And now, we work.”

The war-captains nodded; they’d seen the truth of those words themselves, in the lands Tartessos had overrun, and in the fate of those conquered by Great Achaea. They also moved briskly to their tasks. The King had never punished a man for bringing bad news, or for arguing a point within reason. The fate he brought on cowards or the lazy, though ...

“But my Lord King ... they flee! We have the victory; they run from the terror of our arms!”

William Walker looked around the command tent; his face was flatly impassive, which the more experienced among them knew was a danger signal. Outside the wind was battering at the canvas with increasing force, making the kerosene lamp over the map table sway. The men here were brigade commanders, the heads of the allied forces, his own staff ... and his son Harold, sitting quietly in a comer and taking it all in.

First bad blizzard of the winter,
he thought, as the fabric flapped.
All right.
He took control of himself with an enormous effort of will.

“No, Lord Guouwaxeus,” he said with a softness that grated. “They are not
fleeing.
If they were fleeing, if they were breaking up and scattering, I would pursue them with at least part of our force. But they are not. They are making a fighting retreat, with is a very different thing.”

The Achaean lord was a spare man with long black hair that was thinning on top. It brought out the starved wolfish look of his face.

“Are we not to follow up our victory?” he said.

Walker felt his will clench on his mind, like the flexing of a muscle that keeps hands clamped on a ladder over an abyss.

“Lord Guouwaxeus, has it ever occurred to you that there is a difference between
going forward
and
winning?”

By his looks, it hadn’t. About half the other men around the table looked similarly bewildered.

“Guouwaxeus, how many rounds a man does your brigade have? How many days’ rations here and at the forward base? How many days’ fodder for the horses?”

Guouwaxeus’s lean face showed uncertainty for the first time; he looked around for the military clerk assigned to him. Walker looked instead to his chief of staff, Jack Morton. Morton had his problems—mostly trying to crawl into a brandy bottle if he wasn’t watched, and a taste for humping veal—but before the Event he’d been a manager at Wal-Mart, something to do with inventory control, and a supply officer in the National Guard part-time. That made the weakness for little girls more than tolerable.

“Jack?” Walker said.

“Your Majesty, thirty-two rounds, four days’ rations, no fodder,” Morton said crisply, standing at parade rest.

There was a faint bruise around one eye; the best way Walker had found to keep him on the wagon in the field was to simply, personally, beat the living shit out of him every once in a while when he started to forget the previous lesson.

Walker swung around to face the others. “And that’s about typical,” he said. “Right now, we have just enough to get this army back to its sources of supply, if we’re careful and start now.”

He ran a hand over the map. “One-third of our forces are strung out guarding our lines of supply along these miserable mud-track roads. Every mile we go forward we get weaker and
they”
—he pointed to the east, where the dull rumble of artillery marked a rearguard action—“get stronger, falling back on their bases. And everything will get worse now that the weather’s consistently bad. This army is too big to live off the land in poor country even if it hadn’t been stripped, and it needs continuous resupply of ammunition and spare parts to fight at all.”

About half of the dozen officers grouped around the map table looked as if they were getting it. The other half, Guouwaxeus worst of all, were staring at him as if he was reciting “Jabberwocky.”

Someday,
he thought,
I will watch you die on a cross, Guouwaxeus, and every last one of your wellborn shit-for-brains relatives beside you. But not yet, unfortunately.
It was one thing to teach a man how to march and shoot and dig, or even how to handle a company of riflemen, and something else entirely to teach them a whole new way to
think
about conflict.
Damn, if only I’d had another five years before this war!

“Then . . .” one of the Ringapi chieftains said, with a speculative look. “You say we are defeated, Lord King?”

Oh, somebody give me strength.
“No, Lord Tautorun,” Walker said. “‘Moving back’ is also not the same thing as ‘losing.’ In fact, it’s perfectly possible to move forward and win all the battles, and lose the war.”

Now he got a few glances of the sort you’d expect to see on a man who’d just turned a corner and come across a hyena eating a baby. Or the way a Baptist might look if he found he’d stumbled into a Wiccan orgy.

“If we pulled back to here,” he said, sketching a line on the map, “we could bring up supplies as fast as we consumed them. So we’ll go a little further west, to here.”

He drew a line that included most of the passes up onto the plateau from the coastal lowlands along the Aegean and Sea of Marmora.

“That means we’ll be able to build up stockpiles over the winter. We’ll also use the time to thoroughly pacify the areas we occupy, train new recruits, build roads and bridges, and to bring forward enough transport. Then, when we move east in the spring we can deny the enemy his harvests”—since grain ripened in late spring and early summer there—“and be well supplied right up to the Halys and past it. Once we’ve taken Hattusas, the enemy will have to fall back on Kar-Duniash. That will take another year, maybe two.”

He looked around. “We’ll need a rear guard, of course. Lord Guouwaxeus, I think that’ll be your job.”

The others drew a little aside, as if the Achaean had contracted some deadly, infectious disease.

He sat brooding over the map after the rest had left; they’d pull out tomorrow.
I hope we don’t have too many frostbite cases,
he thought. Transport and shelter were very short.

Harold came up beside him. “They should not dare to oppose you, Father,” he said hotly. “They are little men, without understanding.”

Walker chuckled and ruffled the boy’s blond mop. “Yeah,” he said. “Most of the time. There are reasons to listen to them, though. First one is it makes them feel better if they think I take them seriously.”

Harold scowled and clenched a small fist. “They should fear you!”

“Oh, they do. But an actively terrified man doesn’t make much of a general—for that matter, if he’s easy to terrify, he won’t make much of a general either. Capisce?”

The boy nodded slowly. “I see, Father. They must be brave men to serve you in war?”

“Yeah, more or less. And self-confident. I can’t be there to look over their shoulders all the time. Plus ... would you like to hear a story?”

Harold perched on a chair, eyes bright; he was dressed in a smaller version of his father’s black fur-and-leathers and looked comfortable in them despite the bitter cold outside the thin canvas.

“Yes!” he said.

“Okay, this happened in a land far, far to the east—China.” Harold nodded; his geography lessons had taken that in. “Well, in this empire of China there was a mighty emperor, who’d put down all his neighbors and made himself ruler of all the civilized kingdoms.”

“Like you, Father?”

“Sort of, but I’m smarter. Anyway, this emperor—his name was Lu Pu-Wei—”

He could see the boy silently mouthing the alien syllables.

“—had a minister named Li Ssu. Now, Li Ssu was big into punishment. He had a saying:
If light offenses carry heavy punishments, one can imagine what will be done against a serious offense. Thus the people will not dare to break the laws.
So he had pretty well only one punishment for anything—death.”

“Okay,” Harold said. “Yeah, I see ... but where’s the catch, Father?”

Walker laughed. “When this emperor’s dynasty was overthrown, it started like this. One day, some farmers who’d been called up for military service were sitting in the mud. Rainy season, you see.”

His hands sculpted the air, and Harold was bobbing up and down and grinning as his father went on:

“So one farmer says to the others:
‘What’s the punishment for being late?’
and the others all answer:
‘Death.’

“Then he says,
‘What’s the punishment for rebellion?’
and the others all answer ‘
Death
.’

“Then he stands up and says:
‘Well, brothers, I got news for you
—
we’re
late.’ ”

“Oh,” Harold said. Then he laughed himself: “You mean, if they think you’re going to kill them anyway, or might over some small thing, then they might as well rebel—they don’t lose anything by it.”

“Exactly, kid. The
other
reason for listening to the generals is that sometimes, they’re
right.”
He gripped the boy by the back of the neck and shook him a little. “I’m not always right. Neither will you be. If nobody tells you when they think you’re wrong, you’ll make more mistakes—it’s like blinding yourself. Now run along; you’ve got some studying to do.”

He leaned back and laced his hands behind his head, scowling himself, looking at the map. The temptation to try to smash them just one more time, and then they’d truly run ... No. He might have been able to take Hattusas, but that would have been one bridge too far. Napoleon had taken Moscow, and look how much good it had done
him.

After a moment the flap opened, and Hong came in. “You sent for me, Will?”

“Yeah,” he said.

He stood and swung his arm. The open palm caught her across the face and knocked her down with a flat heavy
smack
sound and a thump as she hit the ground without any of her usual grace.

For a moment her face was fluid with surprise; then she smiled as her tongue came out and touched the blood at the corner of her mouth, then slowly wet her lips.

“Oh, you have some
frustrations
to work off, do you, Will? I
like
that. It’s been too long.”

“Maybe you
won’t
like it this time,” he said, kneeling.

His left hand picked up a pillow and pushed it over her face with relentless strength, while his right tore her clothing open. Not until she stopped arching her body into the smothering weight and panicked, tearing at his hand and thrashing to escape, did he release the grip ... and thrust into her in the same instant. The slight woman gasped and bucked under two hundred pounds of weight, unable to draw a complete breath into air-starved lungs.

“Bet I can make you scream,” he said, drawing back a little.

Hong laughed and wrapped her legs around him. “Bet you can’t,” she gasped, deliberately hyperventilating; the dark flush of her face faded a little.

“And maybe I’ll forget and really kill you one of these days,” he said, grabbing her legs and pushing them roughly back until her knees were by her ears, rising and slamming down on her while only her shoulders and neck touched the ground.

“Oh, yeah, I know, and I
like
knowing that, too.”