It reminded Gannadius of something. He thought for a while and then remembered the wire factories of Perimadeia, where they’d used something similar but much larger to form the links of chains. Once he’d found that mental image, he knew what they were doing: they were making armourers’ rings, for chain-mail. For some reason, Gannadius found the idea disturbing. No question but that the stuff was for export; he didn’t know a single Islander who owned a mailshirt (he knew several who owned thousands of mailshirts, carefully packed in oil-soaked straw and ready for shipping; but such ownership was intended to be as temporary as possible) or a sword that wasn’t a fashion accessory, or a bow or a spear or a halberd. As a nation the Islanders acknowledged the existence of war only as something that happened far away between two rival groups of potential customers. A unique mind-set, simultaneously endearing and reprehensible, like so much about these people… He shook his head, as if making himself wake up. There was no real likelihood of the Islanders taking up arms and going off to war, even if the rest of the world seemed determined to do so. Far more than mere water separated the Island from everywhere else, and for that Gannadius was extremely grateful. Nevertheless, he didn’t feel like wandering about any more. It was high time he went home, even if (like every other place he’d thought of as home for as long as he could remember) it was somebody else’s.
The armies of the Sons of Heaven sang as they marched; and generally speaking, they did it well. In addition to the signallers who blew their bugles for the charge and the retreat, there were any number of soldiers who carried flutes, rebecs, mandolins, fiddles and small drums along with their blanket rolls and three days’ rations; when the mood took them, they would hand their pikes to their neighbours in the column and accompany the singing, so that from a distance the approach of the army sounded more like a wedding than the onslaught of the Empire.
Bardas Loredan, who had no ear for music, had been rather taken with this apparently uncharacteristic frivolity; and besides, even he liked the tunes, which were either fast and lively or fast and sad, but never droopy like the refined fugues and motets they were so fond of in Perimadeia, or tuneless and interminable like Mesoge folk-songs. He couldn’t sing and could barely whistle, but he hadn’t been with the column long before he found himself humming, bumble-bee fashion, when the soldiers struck up one of his favourites.
But he couldn’t understand the words. They were in a language that was entirely unlike anything he’d ever come across; not the highly inflected sing-song Perimadeian that was the standard in most places, from the Mesoge to the plains; or the attractively rounded-and-crisp language of the trading nations, Colleon and the Island (and, by default, Shastel and Scona), which nobody had ever set out to learn deliberately but which everybody acquired, like a sun-tan, after any sort of regular contact with the people who spoke it; or the hammered-flat Perimadeian dialect that was the second language of all the western provinces of the Empire. When he finally got around to asking someone, he was told that the soldiers’ songs were in the language of the Sons of Heaven, and that nobody had a clue what any of them meant.
To Bardas’ mind, this spoiled the effect of the marching minstrel show, to the point where it started to get on his nerves. The idea that twenty thousand men could march along singing a song they didn’t understand struck him as rather distasteful; for all they knew, they could be singing graphic accounts of the defeat and subjugation of their own native cities, with detailed descriptions of what the victorious Sons of Heaven had already done to the men and were intending to do to the women and children. He asked the man he’d been talking to if it bothered him, and the man replied, no; the songs and singing them were an ancient tradition of the service, and traditions are what hold a professional army together. A man should be proud to be allowed to learn the words and join in singing them; they were a secret, a mystery that came with being accepted, becoming part of something great and invincible. The ordinary soldier didn’t need to understand the words of the song, the plan of campaign or the reason for the war; he was there to put into effect what the Sons of Heaven, in their absolute wisdom, decided should be so. And that was all there was to it.
In spite of the disillusionment, Bardas couldn’t help humming one tune that had burrowed deep into his mind. It was one of the fast, lively ones, generally accompanied with drums and flutes – the words, of course, were just a blur of noise but it had to be a marching song, if only because it was so difficult not to hum it when marching… Its shape was an endless loop, so that unless you made a conscious decision to abandon it there was no reason why you’d ever stop.
As easily as he’d taken to humming the tune, Bardas got into the habit of commanding the army. As much as anything, it was a matter of convenience and habit. He’d learned a long time ago that the easiest way to do anything is properly; it was less effort to tell the officers and sergeants the right way than have to sort out the mess they made if they tried to work it out for themselves. Every morning, just before daybreak and reveille, he held a staff meeting, told the heads of department what he expected them to do and questioned them about the things they’d done wrong or hadn’t got around to doing the previous day. He interrogated the quartermaster and the colonel of foragers about supplies and materiel, the colonel of scouts about the terrain they’d be crossing in that day’s march, the captains of each division about the state of their commands, the captain of engineers about how he proposed to deal with any natural obstacles or obstructions; if they gave the wrong answers he told them the right ones, the first time patiently. It was so much less effort than discussion, canvassing opinions, arguing merits; and since he’d been here before and done very much the same things, there wasn’t really any point in pretending to listen to the views of men who knew less about the subject than he did. Anything else would be like discussing the letters of the alphabet with a bunch of children who couldn’t read yet, rather than simply chalking them on a slate and saying, Learn this.
And he had been here before; it was strange how easily it came back to him, across over twenty years of deliberate forgetting. They passed the place where Maxen had won an incredible victory, five hundred heavy cavalry against four thousand plainsmen; he’d almost expected to see the bodies still lying where they’d left them, but there was nothing to mark the spot apart from a cairn of stones he’d ordered built himself to cover their own trivial losses. They crossed the Blue Sky River by the ford where Maxen had finally caught up with Prince Yeoscai, King Temrai’s uncle – the river had been in spate and when they found him, Yeoscai was sitting on his horse staring at it, as if he couldn’t believe in such gratuitous spite from something that wasn’t even human. They camped one night in the little valley where Maxen died; his cairn was still there, but Bardas was content to look at it from a distance. And from that point on, it was simply a matter of remembering; no more thought needed.
Two days on from Maxen’s cairn (if I’d been Temrai I’d have pulled it open and flung his bones to the wild dogs years ago) they were held up by another river; the Friendly Water, which had dammed up in the hills and flooded the Longstone Combe. The easiest solution was to build a bridge at the head of the combe, but the nearest timber was a day’s cart-ride behind them. He emptied the supply wagons and sent them back with the pioneers and the foragers, armed with detailed specifications of the amount and dimensions of timber they’d need, and settled down to wait. There was no reason why the army should be idle while it was waiting; there was kit to overhaul and inspect, armour to repair, boots to patch up and renail; archery practice and weapons drill and parade drill, an opportunity to train the soldiers in specific techniques they’d need against the plains cavalry and archers, tactical seminars for the captains and lieutenants, a few disciplinary tribunals that had been too complex to decide in an evening session on the march, a chance to update and correct the provincial office’s rather vague maps. By the time he returned to his tent, well into the second night of the delay, he was rather more weary than he’d have felt if they’d been on the road. He took off his armour – it was a second skin to him now, and he felt strange and uncertain on his feet without the weight of it on his shoulders; first, unbuckle the chausses, followed by the gorget, then the pauldrons, followed by the cops and vambraces, followed by the cuirass, finally the mailshirt and habergeon, and he was a little white worm again, a snail out of its shell – then kicked off his boots and lay down on the late Colonel Estar’s foldaway rosewood camp bed.