The Chronocide Mission

14. ARNE (2)

Beyond the southern border of the Ten Peerdoms, chains of steeply sloping, wooded hills marched southward on either side of long, narrow valleys. The trees often spilled down the hillsides to crowd the banks of the small streams that ran below.

“The Lantiff are on horseback,” Inskor’s message to Arne said. “They will follow the low ground. We need cover, so we will keep to the hills. Our object is to set trap after trap, lose battle after battle—and make each of the Lantiff’s victories so expensive it will seem like a defeat. They will keep trying to encircle us. We must make them think our army is much larger than it is.”

The Lantiff’s formula for victory was a simple one. Their charging vanguard bristled with multi-pronged lances and flashed with gleaming, slashing, curved swords. Every thirtieth Lantiff was an officer, apparently unarmed, and it was these officers who wielded the deadliest weapon, the tube of lens that some unsung Lantian len grinder had invented. Its beam knocked the defenders senseless, after which the Lantiff surged forward to overwhelm an unconscious enemy.

It was an ideal tactic for troops with minimal intelligence. The Lantiff never had to think at all. They never sent out scouts; never varied their scheme of attack an iota. They had no need to; they were invincible. They tasted victory after victory, and no one bothered to tell them about the occasional defeats Lant suffered. They attacked with deliberation; they conquered even before they made contact with the enemy; and then they occupied themselves with more important matters such as pillaging undefended towns and villages. What the opposing army did or tried to do was no concern of theirs.

These were the invading hordes that came riding up the narrow valleys that pointed toward the Ten Peerdoms. The terrain forced them into awkward formations—long, narrow columns of mounted warriors with patches of woods to contend with—and Inskor, delighted that he could attack fingers rather than a clenched fist, was spreading his own army as thin as he dared in an effort to convert each of those valleys into a death trap.

The partly trained army of the Ten Peerdoms now numbered almost five thousand lashers with another two thousand no-namers organized into labor platoons. It was by far the largest army the Ten Peerdoms had ever assembled. Arne’s personal force of one-namers, the one that had defeated the wild lashers, had been expanded to more than five hundred men and women, and one-namers who had been hurriedly trained as scouts added five hundred more. There were another five hundred regular scouts from Weslon. The total seemed astonishing to Arne, who had to find a way to feed this swollen force, but it paled to insignificance beside the massed armies of Lant.

Arne’s original plan had had been to garrison these troops at strategic points along the southern frontiers. Now he would march them to war instead. He summoned his scattered one-namers, telling them to overtake him as quickly as possible; took a poignant leave of the prince; and set out. He left Deline to make arrangements with all of the Ten Peerdoms for the supplies that must be kept moving after them.

The army of Lant was moving north at its own deliberate pace. Surprise had never been a Lantian tactic—the peer had long-since learned that the more warning a victim had, the longer it had to wait, the more frightened it became. Many of Lant’s victories were no more than triumphant marches in the wake of a fleeing enemy.

Arne’s fear was that the Lantiff would arrive before he joined his force with Inskor’s. He left a squad of scouts, a small company of lashers, and a platoon of no-namers in each valley with instructions to build a series of barriers of upright logs, using them to link wooded areas or natural obstacles. When the Lantiff came, the lashers would feign a defense of each barrier, fleeing in pretended terror from one to another to entice the Lantiff to follow them. When the Lantiff were deeply committed to this trap, one-namers hidden on the wooded hillsides would cut them to pieces with Egarn’s weapon.

They moved east, and Arne’s army shrank dramatically as he left behind one defense force after another. He was becoming extremely worried that he would run out of troops when finally he made contact with Inskor and his Easlon defenders, who were extending westward.

Inskor greeted him warmly, listened with delight to what Arne had accomplished, and then told him to take the remainder of his force west again, along with a reserve of Easlon lashers and one-namers that had not yet been committed, and extend the defenses as far as possible.

“The Lantiff will keep moving west,” he said. “When we defeat them in one place, we will have to withdraw as much strength as we can and hurry it westward to meet their next attack.”

Arne obediently turned back with the Ten Peerdoms’ uncommitted strength. The next day he met a lone rider. He had heard nothing from Midlow Court since he left, and he had been waiting for a peer’s messenger.

But this rider brought no messages. It was Deline.

“I have come to fight,” she said.

Arne said sternly, “Your job is to keep food moving south. That is more important than any fighting you could do.”

“I have already arranged for that,” she said. “There will be plenty of food. Hutter will look after it.” She added smugly, “I have the peer’s consent. I told her I wanted my horse so I could fight for Midlow. I am not going to sit in a safe place and rot while my one-name friends are dying for the peerdom. Anyway, you need an assistant here more than you did at Midd Village, and that is what I am—your assistant. The peer herself appointed me.”

“When you asked the peer, what did she say?”

“She didn’t say anything. It is painful for her to talk. She nodded, and the land warden gave me my horse.”

Arne extended his army as far west as possible, sent scouts far into the wilds to detect any encircling movement, and turned east again. Along the way he conducted training sessions with each valley’s defense unit, and this introduced Deline to something she had never seen before or even imagined: Egarn’s weapon.

She was astonished. Then, as she began to understand the destructive power of the small tubes, she was elated. “I thought we here helpless against the might of Lant,” she said wonderingly. “It is the Lantiff who will be helpless. Does the peer know about this?”

“No peerager knows,” Arne said shortly. “Peeragers would use the weapon on each other.”

Deline was silent for a time. “You are right,” she said finally. “No peerager should know. I’m glad I didn’t know. I would have been worse than the others.”

When they passed south of the Peerdom of Chang, Deline volunteered to persuade peer and prince—former friends of hers—to furnish more lashers and no-namers so Arne and Inskor could hold a few units in reserve. Chang gave her everything that could be spared, and she trained this force on the march. It arrived in fine fettle and eager to fight the Lantiff.

So was she. The Prince of Chang had presented her with a uniform designed for the prince’s private guard—the same she had modeled her own guard’s uniforms on—and she arrived resplendent in black and white. She looked magnificent. Unfortunately, this was the wrong war for the heroics that went with her costume, and Arne quietly pointed out to her how a conspicuous dress could give away a battle plan.

“I didn’t come here to hide,” she said. “I’m going to fight.”

The long, narrow columns of Lantiff continued to seep northward. Finally one of them encountered the defenses Arne had planned so carefully and erected with so much labor. A barricade of upright logs completely spanned the valley. At intervals there were other barricades where Arne’s lashers waited.

The Lantiff paused while their officers rode forward a few yards to study these obstacles. Then they aimed their weapons, the weapons of Lant. The logs of each barricade were sent flying. Huge gaps opened up, Arne’s lashers fled, and the Lantiff pressed forward, still moving in leisurely fashion.

A defense that Inskor had devised proved more effective. A wide stripe of burnooze, a black substance found in the mountains where severe land upheaval had taken place, had been laid down across the valley. When ignited, it burned furiously, and it could be touched off from a distance with Egarn’s weapon. When the Lantiff’s vanguard was almost upon one of these strips, the ground at their horses’ feet erupted in flame. The head of column halted; the Lantiff behind continued to press forward until the valley was crammed with them. Then a scout on the hillside touched off another wall of flame behind them, and Egarn’s weapon systematically cut the Lantiff to pieces. The valley was piled thickly with corpses and with pathetically screaming wounded men and horses, but still the Lantiff tried to surge forward.

It was Arne’s first close view of the Lantiff. Squat, muscular, with dark faces and misshapen eyes, their appearance was completely different from that of the Ten Peerdoms lashers. They had no conception of defeat, and their attacks ceased only when there were no more of them to be killed. Fire might stop them momentarily, but when the leaders shouted their shrill commands, they charged through the wall of flames. The crashing lightning of Egarn’s weapon gave them pause, but the next command sent them blindly forward, crushing their own dead under foot, and they kept charging until they were annihilated. Inskor had expected them to flee in panic the moment the crashing beams of Egarn’s weapon stabbed among them, but they were superbly disciplined—or too stupid to understand what was happening.

Day after day Arne’s forces decimated the Lantiff in battle after battle in westward succeeding valleys. Finally the Lantiff happened onto a valley that was broader than the others, and their commanders mounted a massive attack. This time they kept charging until Egarn’s weapons exhausted their stored energy. The weapons recharged automatically, but they had to be rested for a short time, and while they were silent, the Lantiff suddenly spurred their horses forward and burst through the last of the defenses into gently rolling terrain where there was little cover for Inskor’s scouts.

Suddenly a lone rider appeared in their path, a rider clothed in black and white who galloped directly toward the menacing line of lances and swords. The Lantiff reined in their horses and watched this apparent suicide attempt with puzzlement. As the rider drew nearer, it proved to be a woman with blonde hair flying, which magnified their confusion.

Grooming was difficult in an army fighting one battle after another. All of Arne’s one-name women had been letting their hair grow, and the men were becoming shaggy. Now Deline’s blond hair streamed behind her as she rode recklessly toward the waiting Lantiff.

Arne, too far away to come to her assistance, could only watch with horror. She seemed intent on a suicidal collision with the leveled lances, but suddenly, at the last moment, she swerved and rode down the long line of Lantiff, turning one of Egarn’s weapons on them.

They were too astonished to retaliate. The awesome power sliced their front ranks to pieces and terrified and mutilated those behind. The lantiff that survived wheeled and fled without firing back. Deline’s magnificent audacity had saved both herself and the battle.

“Don’t do that again,” Arne said severely when he had overtaken her.

“Why not? It worked!”

“It worked once. Next time they won’t hold their fire—and I need you.”

That night Deline came to his bed—as audacious in love as she had been in battle. She was still caught up in the exuberance of her wild ride, and her passion seemed unquenchable. Their love affair resumed as though there had been no interruption. Each night they lay together on Arne’s narrow sleeping pad—on hard ground or a bed of leaves, sheltered or in the open, wherever the vagaries of war took them.

Deline felt no compunction at all about sleeping with her sister’s consort. For a time Arne’s conscience bothered him, and that amused her. She pointed out that the other one-namers who had come to war with Arne, both men and women, also had mates at home, but they hadn’t hesitated to take lovers.

“What do the stay-at-homes matter?” she asked derisively. “We are all going to die—we will fall in battle and they will be slaughtered in their beds when the Lantiff break through, so why worry about them? We can’t possibly win. I thought the weapon would make a difference, but now I can see that it doesn’t. The Lantiff are being sacrificed in hundreds and thousands to keep us occupied. When their generals find a weak place, they will pour more thousands through it. Let’s enjoy what life remains to us. We haven’t lived until we have lived dangerously. I never realized that.”

Arne was stubbornly committed to fighting cautious battles that killed as many Lantiff as possible. As soon as one was finished, he left a token force to guard that valley and rushed everyone else westward in an attempt keep ahead of the encircling enemy. He still hoped to win, hoped that eventually the attacks would become too costly to be pursued, but it gradually became evident that Deline understood war far better than he did.

She exulted in combat; Arne quickly came to hate it. He loathed performing meaningless butchery on brain-damaged lashers who probably had only a dim awareness of where they were and what they did. Deline laughed at his scrupples. “Maybe they don’t know what they are doing,” she said, “but if we don’t kill them, they will kill us just as thoroughly as if they knew.”

With Inskor’s approval, Arne devoted more and more of his time to feeding the army and moving reinforcements where they were needed. This quickly became as important as winning battles. Without it, there soon would have been no battles.

Deline assumed more and more of Arne’s command responsibilities. She continued to revel in battle, but when the Lantiff began knocking horses from under her, she learned to restrain her most rampagant urges. She would halt a charge just beyond the range of their weapon—but well within the range of Egarn’s—and decimate them. They came to fear her. Their front ranks would have fled when she approached if the ranks behind them had permitted it.

Inskor overtook Arne’s westward push with a small army of his own. The old scout agreed with Deline on the nature of the war, and he had decided to rush west with all the troops that could be spared.

“My scouts have lost touch with Lant’s main army,” he said. “It is circling more widely than I had thought possible. Gather as large a force as you can and follow me.”

His insight came too late. While the Lantiff were making their trivial feints, their main army remained far to the south, wheeling to attack the Weslon frontier from the west. Hutter arrived in a panic to report disaster. Everyone had been caught by surprise, and both the Weslon and the Midlow courts had been overrun as Lantiff poured into the middle peerdoms.

Chang was making a defense and needed all the help available. Arne numbly sent out orders to withdraw his forces from the various valleys they were guarding, assemble them, start them north. Then he placed Deline in charge and rode westward as fast as his horse could take him. He had to see for himself what had happened to Midlow Court and who might have survived.

He found a burned-out ruin encircling the once picturesque hill, and on the parade was the strangest scene he could have imagined: orderly rows of corpses covered by clouds of insects. He tried to ride up the spiraling road to the hilltop on the forlorn chance that survivors might have found refuge in the castle ruins, but the way was blocked by fallen and charred walls and roofs. The intense heat of the conflagration had even brought down the castle’s old stone walls. Anyone who sought shelter there would have been crushed or burned, but apparently no one had.

He returned to the parade and tried to imagine what had impelled the entire population of the court, peeragers, servers, and guards, to arrange itself in orderly ranks as though awaiting execution.

He dismounted and picked his way through the dead. A platform stood in the center of the parade, and the prince, the land warden, and several of the peer’s advisors had been standing before it when they were struck down. On the platform was a coffin containing the peer’s body.

So the peer had died, and her funeral had been in progress at the moment the Lantiff arrived. No other event would have left the court so totally helpless. The abrupt appearance of fierce horsemen had frozen everyone in terror. At least the peer had not lived long enough to see her world collapse.

The prince’s body had been hacked cruelly, but her face was untouched. Arne smoothed back her hair and straightened her clothing. She had the same serious look in death that she’d had in life. He stood for a long time, looking down at her. Finally he turned away. There was nothing left for him to do but rejoin the war and kill Lantiff, and kill, and kill while his own life lasted.

Suddenly he noticed an oddity, probably because his thoughts were on his own unborn child. There were no bodies of young children among the dead. The peeragers certainly would have brought them to the peer’s funeral. Contrary to all expectations, perhaps the Lantiff did have a streak of mercy in their brutal natures—but what had been done with them?

A chilling premonition about Midd Village seized him, and he hurried back to his horse. He had taken everyone to war who had been trained to fight, leaving Midlow virtually defenseless, but probably it didn’t matter. Even if he had kept his little army at home, the hordes of Lantiff would have quickly overwhelmed it in spite of Egarn’s weapon. In military matters, everyone in the Ten Peerdoms, even Inskor, was a fumbling beginner. The Peer of Lant had taught them a severe lesson. Unfortunately, those defeated by Lant had no opportunity to learn from the experience.

A short distance from the court, he met several lashers leading a full company of no-namers carrying picks and shovels. He sought out the leader. “Where are you going?” he demanded.

“To the court,” the lasher said. “To bury the dead.” He recognized Arne, and he added defiantly, “The Lantiff ordered it.”

“Do that,” Arne said. “Bury all of the dead.”

He rode on. At Midd Village, nothing but smouldering debris remained. Houses and mills lay in ruins. The no-namers had been at work there, and the garden common was marked with freshly turned dirt where trenches had been dug to dispose of the bodies. Arne was about to turn away when he saw a man approaching on foot.

It was old Marof. Arne dismounted; the old man threw his arms around him and wept unashamedly.

“What has happened to Egarn?” Arne demanded.

“The Lantiff never went near the ruins,” Marof said. “No reason why they should. No one except us knows what is there. So everyone is safe.”

“Wiltzon?”

“Dead. He was at home. Everyone in the village died. A few may have been away on chores, but I don’t know who or what’s happened to them.”

“Does Egarn know what happened?”

“Aya. I took word to him myself.”

“What happened to the children?”

“Lantiff took them to the no-name compounds,” Marof said. “I got close enough to hear them talking. Their orders were to kill all adult peeragers and one-namers—peeragers in revenge for the Peer of Lant’s children, one-namers because the Ten Peerdoms never taught its one-namers to be properly submissive and obedient. Also, the peer already has all the one-namers she needs except med servers. Med servers at the no-name compounds were spared. Peerager and one-namer children were taken to them for len treatments. Now all of them are no-namers. The peer always has a need for more no-namers, they said.”

“I want you to take a message to Egarn,” Arne said tonelessly. “You are to deliver it to him in person and make certain he understands it, and when you have done that, come back here and tell me. First, there will be no more support for him. He should send a few men immediately, before the Lantiff return, to pick through the village’s debris and maybe the court’s, too, in case there is anything left worth salvaging. That will be the end of it. There are concealed storage bins in all of the villages and at the court, but I haven’t time now to see whether they were damaged. Whatever food Egarn has may have to last until his mission is completed unless his sentries can scrounge something or do a little hunting. Second, Roszt and Kaynor must start immediately so he can give them as much help as possible before his supplies run out—or before the Lantiff return and find him. They represent our last chance for any kind of victory over Lant. Do you understand? They must leave at once.”

“Why don’t you tell him yourself?”

“I am not finished here. Take the message now—hurry!”

“Aya. What are you going to do next?”

“I’m going to Chang. There will be a battle there. Maybe a whole series of battles that will keep the Lantiff’s attention away from here for a time. That is the only way left to help Egarn.”

“It won’t do any good,” Marof said. “You will get yourself killed.”

“That hardly matters now. A devastated peerdom has no further need for a first server. If the Peer of Lant can revenge her dead children, I can—in a small way—revenge my dead prince and unborn child. Now take the message. Come back as soon as you have delivered it.”

He prowled through the ruins, smoothing the village’s dead embers over a lifetime of memories and the ashes of friends he had known from childhood. Finally Marof returned to tell him Roszt and Kaynor were ready and eager to leave and would be on their way by nightfall.

Arne embraced the old man again and took his leave of him. Then he rode east to a raging war already lost.