‘That’s very thoughtful of him,’ Gannadius said. ‘I’d like that very much. What’s the ship called?’
‘The Poverty and Forbearance; the master’s name is Hido Elan, and it’s down on the Drutz. They’ve agreed to take you home for free, as a gesture of goodwill.’
‘Goodwill,’ Gannadius repeated. ‘Well, isn’t everybody being kind to me today.’
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Colonel Ispel, in command of the provincial office’s expeditionary force against Perimadeia, made an undisputed landfall and sent out his scouts. When they returned, they reported no sign of the enemy in any direction. Ispel pitched camp on the site of Temrai’s recently abandoned settlement, spread out the maps on the floor of his tent and did his homework.
Because the enemy had abandoned their position and moved off inland, the reason for launching the offensive this way had become obsolete before he’d even embarked. Nevertherless, his situation was strong; he had just over fifty thousand men in arms, made up of twenty thousand heavy infantry, four thousand cavalry, sixteen thousand light infantry and ten-thousand-and-something archers, artillerymen, pioneers and irregular skirmishers. He left two thousand of the least useful irregulars to keep the crews of his ships from slipping away – they were, after all, Islanders, no threat but entirely untrustworthy – and set out with the main army to follow in Temrai’s footsteps. In addition to the fighting men, he had a large but not unwieldy baggage and supply train, with enough supplies to see the army clear across the plains and back into Imperial territory – one thing he knew for sure about this country was that living off it was out of the question. Such a large encumbrance would obviously slow down the progress of his main force, but he resisted the temptation to send his cavalry too far ahead. The clans were extremely competent light cavalry and horse-archers, and what he’d read about them suggested that they would enjoy nothing more than an opportunity to harass a slow-moving column unprotected by cavalry, to the point where momentum broke down and the advance ground to a halt. Besides, he was in no great hurry; intelligence reports from Captain Loredan’s army suggested that Temrai had dug in on top of some hill and was waiting for the end. If that was true, the only way this war could be lost was by making a stupid mistake, and he’d be far more likely to do that if he rushed blindly ahead into barren and largely unknown territory.
The plains turned out to be unlike any other country he’d served in. He’d fought in swamps and deserts and mountains, in hell and in paradise, in bleaching sun and driving snow, but this was the first time he’d had to march across a landscape that was utterly, painfully boring. It wasn’t called the plains for nothing; once he’d left behind the little fringe of mountains that overlooked Perimadeia itself, there was nothing on either side but flat land covered in coarse, fat blue-green couch-grass for as far as the eye could see. Not that boring was necessarily a bad thing; in country this open an ambush was effectively impossible, and provided they kept to the road, they would be able to make extremely good progress. Off the road, of course, it was a different matter; the ubiquitous couch tended to grow in little tussocks about the size of a man’s head, and trying to march an army across country would be courting disaster. Apart from the substantial monetary cost of keeping an army in the field (twenty thousand gold quarters a week), he wasn’t facing any problems that called for forced marches and flying columns. The only niggling fear in the back of his mind was that Captain Loredan might have finished the job before he arrived, leaving him and his men with nothing to look forward to except a long, dull march home.
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.