Acacia,War with the Mein

CHAPTER

Maeander had thought it before, but he knew now that it was true beyond a doubt: nothing stirred his blood as much as the promise of warfare. Carnal conquests, games of physical prowess, acquisition of riches, hunts of animal and/or human quarry, and skirmishes: all of these paled to insignificance compared to the promise of carnage on a massive scale. He had thrived on the bloodshed of the first war and had largely been bored since. On several occasions he had tried to convince Hanish to let him make war on one people or another, but his brother always dismissed him as a joker. Now, finally, after nine years of peace, he felt his heart quicken again. Aliver Akaran had returned, and he had brought enough friends with him to make it interesting.

As Maeander disembarked his troops at points along the central Talayan coast and marched them a short distance inland, he thought of the coming conflict as a grand diversion. He could not spot within himself any tendril of fear or concern or worry that fate might have some unpleasant outcome in store for him. He could not lose. He knew that much. He had never met another person with a mind as suited to slaughter as his. Perhaps the fabled Tinhadin might have rivaled him, but few others could. His troops were honed and ready. Hanish had made sure they did not luxuriate in their military victory too much and grow soft, like the Acacians had. It had not been easy to manage this, as most of them had become wealthy men overnight. But Hanish had sworn them to a strict level of discipline. With a few exceptions, they’d lived up to it.

They were a more formidable force than they had been in the first war: fitter, better provisioned, broader of outlook and training, and just as proud. They were not hungry the way they’d been in that earlier conflict, but they were determined to preserve what they had won. The younger men craved glory similar to their father’s, uncle’s, and older brother’s. They had obtained weapons that Aliver would be entirely unprepared for, surprises that might prove more dramatic than even the Numrek had been.

In addition to the faith he had in himself and his troops, the Tunishnevre had promised him that he would triumph over the Akaran. Aliver’s blood would spill at his hand; they had assured him of this. They had given him permission to kill the young man himself, if need be. Corinn would suffice in the ceremony to free them of their curse, but Aliver could not be allowed to live on as a danger to them.

Watching the upstart prince’s thronging army from atop a ridgeline overlooking what would be the battlefield, Maeander was as excited as a boy who imagines such scenes inside his head. He spent a few days arranging his troops into camps from which they could be deployed. If Aliver believed the revolts throughout the empire would leave the Meins with scant allies, he would be disappointed. Hanish had called upon the entrenched leadership in each province, those who had grown rich by supporting Meinish causes, those who so enjoyed being elevated above their peers that they would fight to preserve their status. These groups had worked to put down the rebellions at home and answered Maeander’s call for troops. The Numrek had yet to arrive. Word was that they were but a couple of days away. They would miss out only on a little of the action. He wasn’t sure he would need them anyway.

Talay might be largely out of his hands, but he did hold Bocoum and most of the coastline, with infinite resources for seaborne resupply. League vessels dotted the sea in the thousands, waiting to fulfill whatever need might arise. His forces numbered a solid thirty thousand. Each of this number was a fighting man, trained and selected for this battle. His army, he believed, was a steel blade that would cut through Aliver’s bloated forces. It would have been nice to still have Larken as his right hand, but that was not possible thanks to Mena, a strange, deceitful creature.

Because of this, he hoped that Aliver would accept his invitation to parlay. He would like to look Mena in the face again and search for signs of her martial skills that he had missed during their first meeting. He wondered what Aliver might look like in person. He worried that his appearance would be disappointing-it was better to imagine a gallant, skilled foe-but still he was curious and knew that Aliver would likely be deceased before another opportunity presented itself.

The Akarans, however, declined. They sent a message to remind him that during the last war the Meins had used the honored tradition of parlay only to unleash a foul weapon. This would not, Aliver said, be allowed to happen again. If Maeander wished to surrender himself, his brother, and every Mein who had fought against or profited from the fall of the Akaran Empire, then they might have something to talk about. Otherwise, they should decide the matter on the field.

Maeander answered that this was fine with him. He had nothing much to say to the prince either. This was not exactly true, as became clear from the further message he sent back. At this point, he said, he would not even have accepted Aliver’s unconditional surrender. Maeander believed the prince had cast his lot on the day he chose to come out of hiding. From that day to this, his life was ticking down toward its conclusion. Considering this, there was no possibility that talking would do either of them any good, and this simple exchange of messages served the purposes of parlay reasonably well. He would never have sent such a wordy message before the first war, but it felt natural enough now. Perhaps the cultured life available on Acacia was having an effect on him, making him more verbose.

Before dawn the next morning he sent conscripted laborers far out onto the plains to clear the field of debris. He had the catapults wheeled into place. The sun rose on the assembling troops. Between the two armies stretched a wide, flat expanse of open ground, dotted here and there by shrubs and a few acacia trees. Aliver’s troops outnumbered his nearly two to one. They formed up into ordered rows, divided into units that must have had autonomous leaders, but this did not hide the polyglot diversity of them. Maeander called them Acacians, but in truth they were mostly Talayans, with all manner of other peoples mixed in among them. A great many of them wore Akaran orange. Some had shirts or trousers in the color; others tied strips of cloth around their foreheads or on their arms or made belts from material of that hue. The Balbara troops-who went about nearly naked-marked their chests with ochre paint. All in all, they made for a most colorful display. Maeander had particular reason to be pleased by this. They would be crippled, he believed, by language barriers, by differing customs, by such a range of skill and bravery and battle preparedness that all he needed to do was stir chaos into their midst and slaughter them as they imploded.

He opened with two simultaneous maneuvers intended to deny Aliver any opportunity to grasp the initiative. He set his troops marching, and he had the catapults begin to lob boulders of flaming pitch at either wing of Aliver’s forces. His army was tightly formed, disciplined. They progressed forward with a steady pace that could not be ignored. The front lines of the Acacians would have heard their chants and the rhythmic tromping of their feet and the bursts of sound as different clans shouted in answer to prompts of their family names. All frightening enough.

Add to it the tremendous snapping motions of the catapults as they shot searing paths into the sky, arcing, arcing, falling before a tail of black smoke. They had modified the weapons from the ones the Numrek had first brought into the Known World. These were larger, improved versions of the originals, with massive gear works and the capacity to hurl missiles twice as far as before. With help from league engineers, they had managed to make the pitch into stable spheres that they could roll onto the cocked catapult arm before lighting them. Once airborne, they held their shape and burned undiminished until they smashed back to earth. Embedded within them were small, pronged iron tripods. On impact they dispersed across the ground, their sharpened, barbed points almost always ended sticking straight up. They were small weapons, but he was sure they would lame men and horses by the hundreds. Aliver had no weapon like this, nor would he be prepared for its devastating power. In response, his troops offered up timed barrages of arrows that-though they inflicted some damage-seemed of little more consequence than a swarm of gnats.

The first orbs exploded before the armies ever met. The blasts fanned out in all directions, incinerating everything within a fifty-yard radius and throwing globs of molten matter even farther. The soldiers ran away from the impacts in a frenzy, clambering over one another, pressing bodies in toward the center. Confusion already sown. Maeander had several of the catapults repositioned and recalibrated. Within a few minutes the first of them dropped an orb on the rear of Aliver’s forces. It took out a unit that might have expected to see no action the entire day.

Let them feel surrounded, Maeander thought, hemmed in by fire and destruction on three sides, facing their executioners on the other. Watching the billowing smoke and the waves of confused motion within the enemy ranks, he turned to offer a grin and jest to the man beside him. That man was not Larken, however. The thought of this soured his mood. Only for a moment, though.

The two armies met as the rain of fire from the sky continued. Watching what happened next, Maeander could not have been happier with how he had planned this action. He’d placed a wedge of cavalry in the center of his line. Aliver could not match them even if he wanted to; he had no cavalry unit at all, just a splattering of mounted men here and there. Hanish’s horsemen were heavily armored, bearing lances with which they darted foot soldiers, puncturing breasts and necks and faces before yanking the weapons out. They were top-heavy, muscled men who had trained and trained and trained for a moment like this. They could repeat their overhand thrusts hundreds of times without fatigue. Their horses were the largest in the empire, unshakable, belligerent mounts trained to smash men beneath their hooves.

Within a half hour they had carved a gash right toward the center of the Acacian troops. This might have seemed a risky maneuver, as they were soon deep within the enemy, hemmed in on three sides. But behind the horsemen poured a river of infantrymen, swinging swords and axes. The weapons were of such quality and honed to such sharpness that they cut through flesh and muscle and bone, leather and light mail. Aliver’s lightly armored troops fell in bloody pieces before them. Maeander’s foot soldiers ate into the center, leaving the bulk of the enemy army as largely immobile targets for the catapults.

In many ways Maeander felt that he controlled the ensuing slaughter with his own hands. It went on for hours, through the morning and into the afternoon. It was fatiguing just watching this bloody work. By the time he signaled for his troops to pull back he was drenched in sweat, muscles sore as if he had been in the thick of it all day himself. Nothing had transpired the entire day that he had not planned and pulled the strings of. He had lost few men and slaughtered a great many, it seemed. It was only because of the sheer numbers of Aliver’s troops that any of them were left.

His generals, when they debriefed later that evening, were not as sanguine. They’d killed many, yes, but not as many as Maeander seemed to think. The battle that they described bore a resemblance to what Maeander had witnessed, but it differed in some particulars as well. Numbers, for one. The Acacians had been trampled, hacked, battered. Some of them had fallen to grave wounds. Many, however, managed to back away despite injuries that should have lamed them. Others, whom the infantrymen believed they had dispatched and stepped over, rose sometime later and attacked them from behind. To their eyes the catapults had not been as destructive as Maeander thought. They had hit, yes, but only the immediately incinerated died. The others were blown from their feet, sent hurtling. They were aflame one moment and then out, steaming and largely unharmed the next.

“They’re hard to kill,” one officer said. “That’s the disconcerting thing. They are just hard to kill.”

All the generals who had viewed it up close agreed. None of them could make much sense of it. Again, Maeander wished he had Larken to consult with or his brother or uncle…but he doubted any of them would have advised him in any way he could not manage himself. Regardless of the details, the day had been theirs. If the Acacians came out to meet him on the morrow, it would be the end of them. His generals did not dispute this much, at least.

The next morning Maeander joined the front ranks of his soldiers. He wanted to see the enemy up close, to take his bloody part in the victory he anticipated. But from the first moment the two armies met, nothing transpired with the inevitability he had imagined. The enemy did prove hard to kill. Wounded, they fell back when they should rightfully have fallen dead. Those he thought killed often crawled away or rolled back up to their feet, not so badly hurt as he imagined. It almost seemed like he had to separate a head from its body to be sure of a kill.

And they fought improbably well also, despite their inferior weapons and training, regardless of their thin or partial or nonexistent armor. In one instance, clashing hand to hand with a boy in his early teens, Maeander found himself having a hell of a time killing him. It should have been easy. The boy was a slender-shouldered Bethuni, fighting with only a spear, his legs and arms and chest all bare, easy targets. He was terrified, Maeander could see. He was trembling, eyes wide and frantic. He managed to move just fast enough, blocking, defending, occasionally lashing out. Maeander could not help but laugh at him, at the strange combination of the boy’s fear with Maeander’s inability to strike him. It was comical, until the whelp nicked his shoulder. Angry at this, Maeander dove to press his attack. But, pushed by a sudden surge of motion from one side, he lost sight of the boy. He was left fuming and spitting, watching him slip away, something like mirth in the lad’s brown eyes. This incident was just one of many of the morning’s frustrations.

Back on the ridge that served as his command center later that afternoon, Maeander concluded that Aliver’s separate units were functioning with a rapidity he had not noticed at first. Communications passed quickly from one part of the mass of troops to the next. Too quickly, really, to be explained. Maeander had the catapults focus on destroying the handful of moving viewing towers interspersed throughout the Acacian army. He could not know for sure, but presumably these towers housed generals, tacticians, perhaps even the Akarans themselves. It struck him as foolish to draw attention to oneself that way, but the towers were there. They were being used for something. Twice he saw projectiles explode directly atop the mobile towers. That was satisfying. Whether an Akaran was in one or not, each explosion had certainly taken officers with it.

By the close of the day he was feeling better again. He would open the next day by destroying the rest of the towers. He’d switch tactics, sending the cavalry around to flank the Acacians while concentrating the catapults in the center. The orbs of pitch were running low, but he would use them anyway. That was what they were for. He would finish them and finish Aliver off in a massive hail of fire. Two days of slaughter and injury would have left them crippled, depleted. His men were still strong, still numerous. The third day would end the entire thing.

But overnight it seemed Aliver’s army replenished its numbers. New recruits must have poured in to replace the fallen. The army the Acacians fielded the third day looked little diminished from what it had been on the first. It didn’t make sense that they could so swiftly incorporate the new additions, but they placed them on the battlefield the very day of their arrival. Somehow, they fought with the discipline and grace of veterans.

And his downpour of fire? It poured down, rightly enough, but it had even less impact than in the days before. One tower, directly hit, buckled beneath the impact, flared into flame, and then…well, then the blaze went out, as if a breath of wind had extinguished it. Even as Maeander stared, the structure seemed to regain its footing, to rise back into shape. It smoldered, blackened, but it survived. By the time he called the day closed he felt he was fighting at a standstill. Instead of reveling in victory he felt himself floundering. He was not winning at all. And if the trend continued, the following day would see his troops driven backward.

The first day had confused him slightly. The second confounded him. The third worried him. He entertained the thought for the first time that perhaps Aliver had been blessed by some form of sorcery. He had thought all such things long dead, but what other explanation could there be? Nothing else made any more sense. With this realization came the first tingling of doubt. It appeared like an itch at his elbow, a nagging sensation that he just could not get rid of. If he scratched it with reason, it vanished, but only until he pulled his fingernails away. Then the itch crept across his skin again. He didn’t like it at all.

The Numrek had not arrived. Where were they? What game were they playing? The league was still readily available, but it would be four days before they could resupply the pitch orbs. His men were starting to look worried around the eyes. A messenger from Hanish arrived, demanding news. He had the man sequestered in a tent, guarded.

That evening he came to a decision. He was going to try something Hanish had cautioned should be used only as a last resort. They had a weapon they had not yet revealed to anybody. It had been a gift from their allies across the Gray Slopes. Not a disease this time but another thing unheard-of in the Known World. He did not like revealing their secrets if it was at all possible not to. But the situation they faced, Maeander’s gut told him, was just that sort of dire circumstance.

He sent a messenger to Aliver, proposing a two-day break in the fighting. Let the morrow be a day spent clearing the field, tending the wounded, and let another follow to honor the dead. Aliver agreed. With the delay in place, Maeander next contacted the vessels that carried the secret cargo, docked, as they were, in the harbor of Bocoum. He needed the antoks, he said. Bring them to shore and ready them.