The Proof House (53 page)

Nevertheless, he kept to standard operating procedures, just in case. Each morning he sent out scouts, in all directions except one, and every evening they came back with nothing to report. Every night he stationed sentries around the camp and pickets out in the open, so that he’d have plenty of warning if the enemy did somehow materialise and try a night attack.

The only direction he didn’t probe with scouts was, of course, the one he’d just come from, and so the first he knew about the raiding party that had been following him all the way from the coast, riding at night and laying up during the day with sacks over their armour and weapons to stop them flashing in the sun, was a sudden explosion of activity at the one time of day when an Imperial army on the march was ever truly vulnerable: dinner-time.

It was, of course, the perfect time to attack. It was dark; the men were out of their armour, standing in line at the cookhouses; the pickets weren’t in place yet and by the time the enemy rode down the sentries it was too late to raise the alarm. Quite suddenly there were armed horsemen inside the circle of firelight, galloping down the food lines slashing at hands and faces with their scimitars, spearing anybody who broke line and ran. The men who’d already got their food dropped their plates and cups and tried to get to the weapons stacks, but the horsemen kept pouring in, one unit crashing through the tents, another running off the cavalry horses, another rounding up the men in the queues like wild ponies in the autumn and driving them towards yet another unit, which surged forward to meet them. Ispel himself blundered out of his tent with his napkin still tucked in his collar, his sword-hilt tied to the mounts of the scabbard (to stop it falling out); by the time he’d picked out the knots there were horsemen in his street of tents, cutting guy-ropes and prodding the fallen heaps of canvas with long, narrow-bladed lances. He looked round and saw a gap in the line of tents which would let him through to the light-infantry camp, where the archers were quartered; archers and skirmishers, men who didn’t fight in armour, were more likely to be able to cope with a sudden disaster like this. He plunged through and came out in the main thoroughfare of the light quarter, only to find it empty except for horsemen; the skirmishers, archers and mobile auxiliaries had used their mobility and quick reaction time to get out of the danger area and away from the camp and the sharp edges of the scimitars, and it was a sure thing that they weren’t going to be coming back until it was safe.

Three horsemen saw him simultaneously; obviously they’d recognised him, which spoke highly of their intelligence work. Two of them dragged their horses round, making them turn almost on the spot, but it was the third man, who calmly put an arrow on his bowstring, aimed and loosed, who got the most coveted prize of the evening; the small three-bladed bodkinhead nuzzled between his ribs, through his lung and would have made it out the other side if it hadn’t jarred against his spine. When they saw where he’d been hit, the other two horsemen let him lie; he’d keep, and there was plenty for everybody.

Ispel died in a sort of dream, slowly, as his lungs filled with blood. It was maddening to have to lie there and die - he couldn’t move at all, even to turn his head - without knowing what was going on, exactly how much damage the raiders were doing to his army. When he could no longer see, he tried to keep track of what was happening by the noises; there was a lot of shouting and yelling, but whether it was his officers calling out words of command as they rallied the men, or just the inarticulate noises of the terrified and dying, he simply couldn’t tell. Just as he was certain he could make out at least one coherent voice giving orders, a plainsman jumped out of the saddle and cut off his head; it took him five blows before he was through the bone, and Ispel felt them all.

In fact, he’d been mistaken; the voice he’d heard calling out commands was that of the leader of the raiding party, a distant cousin of Temrai’s by the name of Sildocai, and he was trying to call off the attack before they pushed their luck too far. Nobody appeared to be taking any notice, however, and it didn’t seem to matter; as soon as the enemy made any attempt at rallying or forming a coherent group, a party of horsemen was on top of them, cutting and prodding where the bodies were most closely packed together, until the blockage in the flow was cleared. It was, the raiders said later, like Perimadeia all over again; the few who tried to fight were killed quite early, and after that it was like chopping through brambles, hard work, heavy on the shoulders, arms and back. But they stuck at their work and cleared a lot of ground, and as the job wore on they got better at it, worked out the most efficient cuts and angles - waste of effort to slash away wildly at arms and legs; one carefully aimed blow to the head or neck gets it done, and don’t hit harder than you have to, no point in wearing yourself out; try to get a rhythm going, it’s easier that way.

In the end, the attack was only broken off because of a silly misunderstanding. The cavalry horses, driven off at the beginning of the engagement, stampeded off into the couch-grass and stayed there for a while; but couch-grass didn’t make good eating, being coarse and bitter, and they were getting hungry. Being used to moving together they headed back towards the camp in a herd, and when they were quite close a plains horse that had lost its rider blundered into them at the gallop and spooked them, sending them stampeding towards the light. A couple of raiders at the edge of the camp heard the thudding of hooves and assumed that it meant enemy cavalry; they raised the alarm and got out of the way, and within a few minutes the attack was over, although the Imperial army didn’t realise until a while after they’d all gone.

It was one of the heaviest defeats ever inflicted on the Imperial army; fewer than four thousand killed outright in the raid (two thousand of them officers and sergeants), but over twenty thousand wounded, most of them slashed about the head and shoulders, losing too much blood from scalp and neck wounds. It was a long time before the NCOs could find an officer fit enough to take command, since the officers dined in separate messes in grander tents, and the raiders had found them quite easily. They’d also run off or killed most of the draught horses that pulled the supply wagons, and that was what caused most of the deaths.

Given a choice between carrying supplies or carrying their friends who were too badly cut up to walk, the soldiers decided to dump most of the provisions, on the grounds that they weren’t too far from the ships and they’d have to make do until they reached them. With so many officers and NCOs dead, there was nobody to tell them otherwise; so, when the raiders came back the next day and attacked the column as it crawled back along its tracks, they met with only marginally more resistance than they had during the night. But what they did encounter was enough to persuade them against closing with the sword and the spear; instead, they held off at medium range and shot from the saddle, not the most efficient method in the short term, but extremely cost-effective as regards the casualty ratio. What was left of the imperial cavalry tried to shoo them away, but they didn’t last long; there were only a few hundred horses among nearly four thousand men, and a horse is a large target. As for the light infantry and archers, whose job it ought to have been to swat flies in these circumstances, they’d made a serious error of judgement when they assumed that leaving the camp and plunging into the darkness was a safer option than staying put. It was the tussocks of couch-grass that did for them; they stumbled and fell, with twisted ankles and sprained knees, so that by the time Sildocai found them and put a cordon of archers round them, they’d more or less ground to a halt, sprawled on the grass and unwilling or unable to go any further. Most of them died where they lay, and the rest were pruned back later the next day.

Of the fifty thousand who disembarked from the ships, fifteen thousand made it back, with Sildocai’s men coming down to the coast to see them on their way; of the other thirty-five thousand, at least half were left behind in the empty plains; Sildocai went home, the fleet sailed back to the Island, and there was, as Ispel had so acutely observed, very little to eat on the plains, if you had the misfortune not to be a goat.

Sildocai attributed his victory to a souvenir he’d picked up in the sack of Perimadeia; it was a small book, entitled
The Use Of Cavalry In Extended Campaigns In Open Country
, by Suidas Bessemin; one of the few City military historians ever to study in detail the campaigns of the illustrious Perimadeian cavalry commander, Bardas Maxen.

The prefect of Ap’ Escatoy heard the news from the fastest, most experienced courier in the Imperial messenger corps, who left the island twenty minutes after the first ship landed. The prefect took the news calmly; having personally seen to it that the messenger was given the fastest horse in the cavalry stables for his journey to the provincial office in Rhoezen, he called for jasmin tea and honey-cakes, sent for his advisers, and sat down for a long day and night of sensible, hard-headed planning.

Bardas Loredan heard the news from the army courier sent out by the sub-prefect of the Island three hours after the news broke there. He had to be told the story three times; then he sent everybody away and sat in the dark all night. When he finally came out, he didn’t seem unduly worried or upset; he gave orders to step up the pace of the advance and post extra scouts and pickets.

Gorgas Loredan heard the news from his man in the Shastel proctors’ office, who made sure the official courier took a detour on his way south with the commercial dispatches. After he’d seen the courier, Gorgas took the big axe, which he’d had to put a new handle on himself, and spent the morning in the woodshed, splitting logs. Then he sent out three messengers of his own; one to the Island, with lugubrious condolences and offers of assistance; a second also to the Island, accompanied by a party of fifty or so ferocious-looking men whose letters of transit identified them as trade negotiators; and a third, the best man he had left, towards Temrai’s camp at the far end of the plains.

Temrai himself heard the news from Sildocai, as the raiding party returned home at record speed, even faster than the Imperial post-coach. He said ‘
How
many?’ and shook his head when the figures were repeated. Then he went back to supervising the reinforcement of the inner gates, and was in a foul mood for the rest of the day.

The provincial governor heard the news on the morning of his eldest daughter’s fourteenth birthday. He immediately cancelled all the scheduled celebrations, as was only fitting in the circumstances, and wrote a long letter to the prefect of Ap’ Escatoy expressing his sympathy, his support, his unwavering confidence and his profound disgust, promising a new army of a hundred and fifty thousand infantry, sixty thousand cavalry and genuine artillery support, to be despatched within two months, and enquiring politely after a silk painting by Marjent which the prefect had promised to send him a month ago, but which didn’t seem to have arrived yet. He then wrote another letter to the office of central administration, eight weeks’ ride away in Kozin province, asking whether the prefect should be put on trial, merely replaced, or left where he was. Finally, being a kind-hearted man, he rescheduled his daughter’s birthday by having the provincial astronomer-general insert into the calendar a special non-recurring intercalary month, to be named Loss-and-Reaffirmation, starting at midnight on the day the news reached him. It was generally agreed to be a particularly elegant and thoughtful gesture, and there was some talk of making it permanent.

Gannadius heard the news at dinner the day before the ships reached the Island; a survivor of the Imperial light infantry, striking out on his own for the coast, had lost his way and strayed north, where he ran into a party of Shastel commercial messengers returning home with important news about likely developments in the spot-market price of Bustrofidon copper. Because their message was so urgent, they’d taken the risk of riding overland through the war zone, and their first instinct on seeing an Imperial soldier running up the road towards them was either to shoot him or run away. When they realised what they’d stumbled across, however, they speeded up even more (they had to leave the soldier behind, not having any spare horses) and were thus able to bring the news to the Citadel before the close of that day’s trading; an act of heroism on their part that paid dividends for the Order’s commercial arm. Gannadius himself didn’t seem unduly surprised by the news; it was almost, his colleagues at High Table whispered after he’d gone to bed, as if he’d already heard about it from somewhere else. This greatly increased their respect for and resentment of the Perimadeian scholar and suspected wizard, who carried on with his daily routine as if nothing had happened.

When the news reached Voesin province, it sparked off a minor revolt in that already unsettled and unreliable corner of the Empire. A man appeared out of nowhere in the town square in Rezlain on market day, announcing that he was God’s chosen envoy, sent to lead the people out of slavery, and dragging along with him a startled and apparently half-witted young man who turned out to be the last descendant of the former royal house of Voesin. About six thousand people straggled into the rebel camp before the cavalry arrived; although a third of them were women, old men or boys, they managed to hold out for six days, until a full company of artillery was brought up from Ap’ Betnagur and the camp was buried under a mountain of seventy-pound trebuchet shot.