Warlord (17 page)

Raj nodded abstractedly. Behind him he could hear the Master Sergeant talking, agreeing, by the sound of it. Then a Company noncom bellowed:

"Sound off, 5th Descotters!"

The Captain grinned; they all knew that one, and it was a good sign after a hard day's work in this heat. Five hundred strong young male voices roared it out:

Oh, we Descoteers have hairy ears— 
We goes without our britches 
And pops our cocks with jagged rocks, 
We're hardy sons of bitches! 
 

Raj laughed aloud, drawing a deep breath of the hot dry air.
I
like this country
,
he thought. They were angling east of south, now, and the dust column of the 2nd and the transport was visible in the far distance; they rounded a mountain spur, and the valley on the other side was inhabited. The villages were high up along the sides, wherever there was a spring.
Like home
,
he thought,
but different
.
Patches of cultivation around the houses, growing olives and figs to supplement the grain, mostly, rather than the apples and plums and cherries of his homeland. The architecture had a functional similarity, walls and defensive towers, but these lacked the grimly foursquare build of the County's black-basalt farmhouses and keeps. Descott County's prime exports were plum brandy, fighting men, dog trainers and skilled masons; here they seemed to be content with fieldstone cemented by mud, like giant dactosauroid nests.

We fuck the whores right through their drawers
We do not care for trifles—
We hangs our balls upon the walls
And shoots at 'em with rifles.
 

I like the people, too
,
he decided, as they passed a shallow depression in the plain; it had collected enough water to grow a catch-crop of barley, five hectares or so. Women were throwing the stooked grain onto two-wheel oxcarts. They wore vests over their striped robes, sewn with coins and brass bangles and bits of shell, and wide hats to shelter their faces from the sun. He had noticed no woman covered her face in the border country, although many men veiled for comfort; it was for the same reason the borderers made a point of eating pork and drinking wine, and spitting at the name of Mohammed, he supposed. The wars in this strip of land had been long and bitter.

Much joy we reap by diddlin' sheep
In divers nooks and ditches
Nor give we a damn if they be rams
We're hardy sons of bitches!
 

Not much chance of giving offense
,
Raj thought. The Descott dialect of the common Sponglish tongue was archaic to outside ears, and the local country folk talked a sing-song version larded with Arabic loanwords. The column slowed as the women ran to the edge of the field, holding up leather bottles of water or pieces of dried fruit, giving an ululating cheer to the passing soldiers. Raj swung his hand out, and the order passed down:

"March . . . 
walk
!"

The women trotted along beside the dogs, holding up their gifts and refusing offers of payment; the soldiers passed the jugs among themselves, blasphemously happy when they found the water had been cut one-quarter with the strong local wine. A trooper swept a girl up before him one-armed, trying to steal a kiss; she returned it with enthusiasm, then reared back and punched him neatly in the face, hard enough to bloody his nose. He shouted with pain and clapped his hands to it as the girl dropped nimbly down and ran to rejoin her friends; his comrades howled laughter, nearly falling from their saddles.

So did the male kinsfolk of the women who were riding guard for the harvesters. They were men much like those who had been trickling in to volunteer by ones and twos for the past hundred kilometers, drawn by a hatred older than the hills and the smell of loot.
Glad they're taking it in good humor
,
Raj decided, saluting as the riders waved. Slight, lean men, whipcord next to the bull muscle of his Descotters; about the same shade of skin, where they were not burned black, which made them rather darker than most in the Civil Government, and they dressed for rough use, in sand-colored doghair robes and headcloths. Some carried buckets of light javelins, a few lances; more had short horn-backed bows or long-barreled flintlock rifles, and nobody seemed to feel dressed without half a dozen knives up to a foot long.

Raj looked upslope to the rock-built villages, and imagined fighting his way into the foothills. Long guns and hairy hawk-faces behind every rock, screaming rushes out of the side gulleys, ambush, rockslide, guerrillas . . . and these people were fanatics, they didn't just hate the Muslim enemy. Apart from Muzzaf he had heard scarcely a person south of the Oxheads who didn't invoke the Star Spirit every second sentence, and every hamlet had a church, usually large, no matter how squalid a flyblown slum the town was.

Raj's hand chopped forward once more, and the 5th rocked into the steady wolf-lope again. The riders who had been guarding the women spurred alongside for a moment, shouting and waving their weapons in the air:

"Aur! Aur!
Despert Staahl
!"
Awake the Iron, the local warcry.

"Star Spirit of Man with you, brothers! Kill many! Kill!"

"I'm surprised the Colony finds it pays to raid," he said, as they peeled off back to their charges.

"Hmmm, you might be surprised what a Bedouin will do for a sheep, Messer," Muzzaf said. "Also, there are mines of precious metals and silver in the mountains . . . and," he added with a smile that seemed less assumed than most of his expressions, "you have not yet seen the Vale of Komar."

"Tomorrow," Raj said, glancing up at the moons.
There's something odd about this Muzzaf
,
he thought. He gave an impression of always being about to sell you a rug, and that was normal enough, yes. But there was also . . . 
as if he can't decide whether to be glad to see us or to run for the hills
,
Raj mused.

"Oh, Raj," Suzette whispered. "It's . . . 
beautiful
."

They were sitting their dogs on the crest of the ridge, while the long creaking stream of baggage flowed down the slanting cutbacks of the road into the valley. It was . . . 
green
,
Raj decided.
Spirit of Man of the Stars, I hadn't realized how much you could
miss
green
.
In form much like any other foothill outwash cone, but bigger. Canals threaded it, and where they passed there was life. Plots of dark-green sugar cane, waving in ripples like the sea; grain stubble already showing verdant with the next crop; orchards of bushy glossy oranges and lemons
 . . . 
And in the center of the valley, rising on a hill, the city: glowing with a white that blazed in the noonday sun, like a heap of cubes of pure sugar, like a set of blocks carved out of snow, the White City of Komar.

"Well," he said to Suzette, "let's go down."
I really shouldn't be snatching time like this
,
he reminded himself. Then, savagely:
At least she's not in the carriage with bloody Stanson
.
That was a
little
unfair, the 2nd had been in the saddle and doing some field drill these past four or five days . . . 

" . . . and here," Muzzaf droned on, "you see the canal extension: wonderful are the works of the Spirit! The new concrete dam, another ten thousand hectares under cultivation, financed by the city and our most benevolent and well-loved Vice-Governor, may the Spirit . . ."

Raj tuned him out for a moment. The civil administration seemed to be moderately efficient, here: not much traffic to be pushed aside, at least. The road was arrow straight, up to East Residence standards. The long-settled part of the Vale was to their right, small holdings intricately cultivated. Tall date palms, with fruit trees beneath; beneath
that
were grain or vegetables, cotton or sugar or grass, with even the goats tethered and hand-fed. The farmers' dwellings were white cubes, sometimes surrounded by flowers; he could see that almost every one had a craft/workshop of some sort attached, men and women weaving cloth or baskets, tanning leather, embroidering, hammering at brass-ware or tinware, turning pots. Everyone waved, and many ran out to cheer. Dainties were handed up; split pomegranates, huge golden-skinned sweet oranges, joints of sugar cane and clay cups of fruit juices.

A girl ran along at his stirrup for a moment, holding up her laden hands. Raj bent to take the grass plate she offered, and the strong brown fingers threw a flower wreath around his neck.

"Dammit," he muttered, watching the grins on the faces of his command group. The plate held fresh dates; dried dates were a one-a-year luxury for gentlefolk back home, expensive even in New Residence. "Dates," he muttered. "We've been eating the bloody things for two weeks, and
I
get dates." Gerrin Staenbridge was peeling an orange, feeding segments to a laughing Foley. M'lewis had a banana, bit into it and made a grimace; da Cruz showed him how to peel it, looking as near to smiling as Raj had ever seen him.

The left side of the road was less festive; the new lands had been laid out in large fields of sugar cane and cotton and indigo, slave-worked. Mounted guards watched field gangs, many in chain hobbles, Colonists by the look of them. He peered closer: one or two were actually
black
,
with the wooly hair and flattened features he had heard of. Zanj, or even Azanians, from southwest of the Colonial Gulf.
They don't look glad to see us at all
,
Raj thought sardonically.

Muzzaf spoke, responding to his last words. "Yes, Messer; if you have eaten dates in the North, you have eaten our dates
 . . . 
See, many of the sugar-mills are run by steam; marvelous is Progress and the works of the Spirit of Man of the Stars. This year, our first steam-powered cotton mill! And there—" he pointed to the northeast of the city, visible now through the thick vegetation "—our railroad!"

Raj looked up with genuine interest, dropping his mental calculation of billeting ratios. Railroads were important, the only means of moving bulk goods cheaply overland, although the need for that was limited. Most people were peasants, after all, and lived from what they grew or made; cities fed from their immediate hinterlands. But a railroad could be very convenient from a military point of view, it was a pity they were so few.

"North from tahe city to the mines," Muzzaf was saying. "Our Vice-Governor, the Exalted Barholm Clerett, upon whom the Spirit of Man shall surely shed Its light, loaned us half the cost. No less than sixty kilometers, finished this year!"

He nodded, impressed; that made it the third-longest in the Civil Government, and the only one south of the Oxheads. Muzzaf bowed low in the saddle.

"It has been an honor to assist you, noble Messer," he said. "But . . ."

They turned the corner into the cleared space any city kept before its walls, here used for low-growing crops, tomatoes and beans and garden truck. Komar's defenses were formidable, even if you could see the buildings on their hill behind—a twenty-meter ditch, and steep turf earthworks before the stone curtain-wall. A hexagonal shape overall, quite modern, with outlying bastions, not one of those high flimsy affairs that rifled guns could batter down in an afternoon. All familiar, there were layout plans and perspective drawings of the fortifications of every city in the Civil Government stored in East Residence, and Raj had gone over them thoroughly. The main gates were open between their fortress-bastions, and a procession was filing out. Litters with the County Legate, officers in dress uniforms, choirs of children in white tunics. A Grand Hierarch ArchSysup of the Church, with acolytes in goldcloth jumpsuits swinging incense censors, bearing a circular computer-core set in gold and silver and lapis lazuli . . . 

"Shit," Raj muttered.

"URRA! URRA!"

The line of men and dogs moved with glacial slowness through the narrow twisting streets. Sprays of flowers flew toward the troopers from the crowds that blackened the rooftops and crowded up against the walls, leaned from wrought iron balconies and windows . . . 
And pushed in where they bloody don't belong
,
Raj thought savagely; they were handing bottles up to the soldiers, as well, and not fruit juice this time, either. Crowd noise was deafening, though not quite loud enough to drown out the sound of an NCO screaming:

"Next sumbitch takes a bottle I will personal gouge out his eyes and skullfuck 'im to death!"

There were priests on every corner, spraying holy water and scented smoke with abandon; voices were calling the blessings of the spirit on the Governor, on the Vice-Governor . . .
and I'll be dipped in shit if somebody wasn't calling a blessing on
Tzetzas,
there's a first
.
Somebody else ran out with a pork-roast and tried to feed it to one of the dogs, nearly losing an arm in the process. Renunciate Nuns would be handing out blowjobs, at this rate.

Da Cruz came up on his left. "What do they think this is, a bunch of groomsmen on their way to a wedding?" Raj screamed.

"Wait 'till the 2nd settles in, they'll think we're an outing from a girl's school!" the noncom shrieked back.

They passed what looked like a fancy cathouse, with the whores leaning out of
their
balcony, squeezing their breasts together and shaking them at the troops, with a sign unrolled below: "One Free Trip to Paradise For All Members of the 5th Descott and 2nd Gendarmerie."

Even the Master Sergeant grinned at that. "
It's a first
."
Then he paused. "
Ser, we need to talk
."

"Companion's briefing after we dismiss," Raj returned. "Two hours past sunset."

" . . . and
anyone
,"
Raj was saying, from the steps of the Tribunate building; it fronted the only square in the city big enough to address the Battalion, "who abuses billeting privileges will be up on charges. And if I get any complaints from husbands, brothers or fathers, the malefactor will be looking for work as a harem guard south of here." A rolling cheer at that; he looked down on the sea of grinning faces and felt a twist at the base of his stomach.
How many of them will be alive in a month
?
he thought. The weight of responsibility descended on his shoulders, heavier than the world.