Two generations of Marhanen kings, however, had not considered as urgent the possibility they would be the besieged inside Henas’amef and not the besiegers outside.
All of which argued to him that Efanor might be right, and that perhaps he should retreat to the capital immediately. But his leaving Amefel would virtually cede a rich and generally willing province to Elwynor:
Amefel had no loyal lord, the earls were divided, and its fall was certain in the absence of a strong royal hand on the reins. If it did fall, in the stead of a deep and treacherous river, Elwynor’s southern frontier with Ylesuin would be a wide land boundary defined by nothing more than a meandering brook—a vast, open approach with well-maintained roads leading right to the heart of Ylesuin and Guelessar itself.
Ceding Amefel, whether by policy or by defeat in war, was not a viable option: Amefel one summer, and an Elwynim army coming right down those well-maintained highroads by the next spring. The Elwynim need not spend any time consolidating their hold on a province the commons of which were of the same customs and religion as themselves, and considering they had both been the heart of the Sihhé holdings only eighty years ago.
He had never conducted a war. Skirmishes, yes; the wide-scale movement of fair-sized forces against bandit chiefs on the edges of Ylesuin ... but no outright war between Ylesuin and another kingdom.
He had the dicta of his grandfather, helpful advice such as: Make the first strike and make the last one; Taking prisoners encourages surrender
(this from the man who had butchered the Sihhé at Althalen); and, lastly, Never outmarch your baggage.
The latter seemed sensible advice. Tents and supper were a reasonable requisite for men who had to keep all Elwynor from pouring across the bridges—who might already, if the silence out of Emwy was an indication, have established themselves in fortified positions across the river.
He had read about fortifications such as the Sihhé of the middle reigns, notably Tashfinen, had built. One could see remnants of them in the ditches all about Amefel.
The earthworks Tashfinen’s Art of War described had been his despair in Emuin’s hard tutelage. Even the copied Guelen version, in the modern alphabet, had not been easy going for a nine-year-old. But it had stayed with him. It was part of him. When he was twelve he and Efanor had dug a miniature of such earthworks in the middle of the herb garden, which had won them severe reprimand: cook’s wife had turned an ankle and fallen very painfully in their siege of the thyme and the goldenseal.
He did not forget the old lessons. There had been no place to use them. Earthworks and rapidly advanced entrenchments ill-suited a bandit war in the stony terrain of the foothills eastward. But defending a valley of villages and farms and a prosperous towns was another matter.
Tashfinen had dug in along the Lenfialim’s lower course in his war, combining mobility behind the fortifications with clever design, reshaping the land itself to make it more convenient for his enemy to do what he wanted his enemies to do. More, Tashfinen, relying, as Sihhé would, only seldom on war engines, and far more on mobility, had still set outlying defenses to make their use against him impossible. He had had no hesitation to attack in winter, at planting or harvest, or any other time inconvenient for the enemy—possible, since the Sihhé of those days had had a large standing army that did not go home on the annual schedule of farmers: it had been hellish famine in the lands where that war was fought, but Tashfinen had kept it out of his own territory, another lesson.
The warfare of the Marhanens had never been so elaborate or so deliberate: Grandfather had been one of Elfwyn’s generals, but, again, King Tashfinen had subdued the whole south when, consequent of a rift in the Sihhé royal house, a claimant to the throne had broken away and fortified himself, as he had thought, invincibly in what was now Imor Lenfialim. Grandfather in his day had faced no such advanced threat or tactical necessity: Grandfather in the wars he had undertaken for the Sihhé had faced nothing but what existed today, a matter of subduing isolated rebels and pacifying the perpetually troublesome Chomaggari border—skirmishes that required mobility over strength, and on which various lords of Men had gained fair reputations of generalship.
Entrenchments had not been the style, not for hundreds of years, not since Tashfinen’s dynasty had dwindled away in foolish grandsons, enabled by Tashfinen’s brilliance to be foolish and to base their court in luxurious, unwalled Althalen. The Art of War bad existed in one known copy, which his grandfather had taken and had copied for his own use along with various other Sihhé works—fortunately not burned by the Quinalt like so much else. It was one of his grandfather’s best acts, the saving of such Sihhé wisdom—granted Grandfather had burned the library at Althalen, not intending the fire, so he claimed.
And if a general taught by some other surviving copy of Tashfinen’s Art of Warwere ordering things on the Elwynim side, it was possible he could look not only for bridge-building across the river at several points, not one, and on the land border a series of incursions to establish fortifications at various points along the frontier, where the enemy would dig in behind steep wall-and-trench formations designed to funnel cavalry into brutal traps; that situation could last for several seasons, the enemy seeming to claim no more than a few hundred paces of territory.
But from those initial castellations, the enemy would extend wall-and-trench-works to the left and right until they formed a formidable earthwork, increasingly difficult to take, and a screen behind which the enemy might shift forces about and arrange surprise excursions into the countryside: then try to dislodge them, or prevent their taking one set of villages, and the next, and the next.
Considering the Sihhé wars, which had been fought on this very land, before, there was indeed a way to attack and hold a territory the size of a kingdom. Barrakkêth had done it first, through wars rarely involving siege; and the halfling Tashfinen, whether by his own genius or by relying on some other work now lost, had repeated Barrakkêth’s feat and written down his tactics.
But Barrakkêth, one of the five true Sihhé, had relied on magic, wizardry, whatever Sihhé truly used, as well as arms, and come down from the Hafsandyr, where Men were, if anything, a distant rumor and where, one supposed, wizards’ towers were common as haystacks—more common, granted there was, by other account, nothing but barren ice to live on, as far as the eye could see, and gods knew what sustained a people there besides magic.
What then, did one do, if one’s opponents could work magic? He had seen in the last two days the efficacy of wizardry at getting messages passed—while his own couriers could not. The whole question was a matter Tashfinen’s book had scanted, though supposedly there had been Sihhé and magic on both sides. And Tashfinen, mortally disappointing for the boy of nine who had expected magic as his reward for pressing on in a very demanding text, had not so much as mentioned it except in reference to Barrakkêth. He wondered why now. He wondered was it forbidden, or simply buried between the lines so matter of factly his eyes could not see it. Did the Sihhi5 put some sort of magical barriers about them? Did they curse their enemies? Was there simply some point of honor about war and wizardry?
There was Tristen. If they could find him, there was Tristen for advantage-if Tristen had any sense of what to do. He could lose abundant sleep on that score.
Worse, he was not in Tashfinen’s position, able to snap his fingers and move an army without destroying his own source of supply: he sat, instead, at the edge of harvest, with winter approaching, in a town vulnerable to siege, with no earthworks to defend it—although that was at least one thing he could change at Henas’amef, if he was willing to sacrifice the three-hundred-year-old orchards and pasture hedges.