Trumpets of War

I

Uttering a deep, deep groan of pleasure, Sunshine gathered her thick legs under her, sat up and then stood up, streaming water back into the wide, shallow brook. Next, she lowered herself back down onto her now-scrubbed right side, that Gil might scrub the left as well. All the while that the short, wiry Horseclansman worked on the vast expanses of skin, pausing now and again to remove ticks and deposits of insects’ eggs from folds and nooks and crannies in that skin, he and the elephant “conversed,” mind to mind, in the silent, telepathic way that his people called “mindspeak.”

“You are the best, most caring brother that Sunshine ever has had,” the pachyderm had assured him over and over. “Not even Kalizos, who was my brother for as long as I can remember, understood me and cared for me as well and as tenderly as do you, Gil-my-brother. Yohnutos, who tried to become my brother after Kalizos ceased to live, meant well and was a good man, but by then he had his real sister and me as well to care for and very little to feed us, ever, so that we were always hungry. Sunshine believes that it was because he fed so much of his own food—little as it was—to us that he sickened and then he too ceased to live.

“When the life had left him, my sister and I were so very hungry that we ... we ate his husk, all of it, even the tiniest morsel. After that, we were cared for by the men who also cared for horses, but those always stank of fear when they were around us. You do not fear Sunshine, do you, Gil-my-brother?”

Folding one of her ears forward, Gil began to carefully remove a line of fat white ticks from the crease thus exposed, popping them between his nails, then swishing off the blood in the flowing water.

“Of course I don’t fear Sunshine, my sister,” he assured her. “If life should leave me, for whatever reason, Sunshine has my permission to eat my husk, too; better her than a horde of little sharp-toothed beasts or a bushel of slimy, shiny worms. Furthermore, I am certain that this late Yohnutos must have felt just that same way, too.”

After a while, he tossed the brushes onto the pile of gear on the bank, then slid from off the elephant and waded a few yards upstream to where the water formed another pool as deep as that in which she lay.

“I am done with you, Sunshine. Stay there and enjoy the water while I wash myself, then we will go back to camp. Perhaps the stores train arrived while we were away.”

Sunshine did not answerhim, she just rumbled another groan of pure pleasure from the cooling, soothing water gurgling around her. Idly, she filled her trunk and then sprayed the fluid onto those expanses of her body not submerged.

Once he had bathed and dressed, his clothes still damp from their washing, the pachyderm grudgingly quitted her pool and assisted him in resaddling her and hanging the equipment back in place. Then he guided her back to the upstream pool, on a bank of which he had discovered a dense growth of the plant called fen cabbage, much relished by the elephant. It was while she was using her trunk to tear out the plants, roots and all, and stuff them into her mouth that she once more mindspoke him.

“Gil-my-brother, there is a man lying in the tall grass just above the other bank. He has one of the long, hollow things thatthrows tiny arrows and it is pointed at your face. When I hear him take his deeper breath and propel that arrow, I will spray him with a trunkful of water and you must then attack him before he can set himself to take another breath. Sunshine has heard of these tiny arrows; the brother of one of her sisters ceased to live after being only scratched by one.”

Across the stream, motionless in the thick grass, his deadly blowpipe extended before him, Benee moved his left arm ever so slowly, gradually raising the pipe, meticulously adjusting the aim of the tricky weapon. Although hardly more than a child by the standards of most inland folk, among his own people—the fen dwellers of the coasts, called swampers by Merikan speakers andbaltohtheesee by Ehleenoee when not being called by cruder, more obscene names—Benee was both a hunter of long standing and a well-proven warrior, having taken the spears from off no less than three inlander warriors and the head off one of those men. This latest victim did not have a spear, but he did have a head to add to Benee’s collection that hung in the rafters of a certain stilt-supported hut deep in the salt fens.

True, he and all of the others had received word from the Men of the Sea Islands that the great inland war was now done and that they now were no longer to slay alien warriors along the edges of the fens. But Benee and all of the others of his kind had silently, grimly laughed at the words, for war or no war there never had been a time in living memory or legend when his folk had ceased to slay any who chose to encroach too closely to the peripheries of the salt swamps. All inlander folk were the enemies of the fen folk, this had always been so and would ever be so, and it was the duty, the right, the privilege and the joy of Benee and every other man of the fens to kill every inlander that happened to stray within range of his blowpipe.

The long tube aligned to his utter satisfaction now, Benee drew in a deep, deep breath, for the range was a few yards farther than he would have preferred, but the best he had been able to accomplish in the particular circumstances. He drew the air in through his nostrils, for his lips already were pressed to the mouthpiece of the pipe, the fluffy down of the deadly dart only a couple of centimeters beyond his mouth.

But a split second before he released the powerful puff that would send the envenomed dart sailing at the unprotected flesh of Benee’s chosen victim, a vast quantity of icy-cold brook water inundated him with some force, spoiling his careful aim so thoroughly that the dart buried itself deep in the muddy mire from which the huge singular beast had been tearing up and eating plants. And even as he dashed the water from his eyes, Benee knew that despite his caution in the stalk, he must have been observed, for his intended victim had waded or swum the width of the pool and was now clambering up the near bank, a long, wide-bladed dirk shining like silver in his right fist.

The swamp killer was wrong. Even at a distance of less than thirty feet, Gil Djohnz did not see the small, slight man—his body, limbs and head all streaks and daubs of mud, with dead leaves, clumps of grass and other vegetable trash stuck to it here and there—until he stood up from his place of ambush and drew a brace of single-edged knives from sheaths fastened to his skinny shanks.

Benee figured that his death would be quick in the coming, now, for not only was the inlander bigger and stronger-looking than was he, with a two-edged weapon that was obviously made and balanced for fighting, but surely the inlander must often have actually fought breast to breast, man against man, something that Benee never had done—fenfolk fought thus only as a last resort, as in this instance, when cornered, otherwise doing all of their man-killing from a distance with fiendish traps or with the poisoned darts from their blowpipes, the knives they carried being tools rather than weapons.

Gil knew fen-men of old, numerous families of the unsavory breed having inhabited the fens to the north and east and south of Ehlai before the cooperative efforts of the Ehleenoee and the Kindred had rooted them out, killed them or driven them farther south and north to pose an ever-present threat to other peoples. He knew that deadly as they all assuredly were at short distances with their pipes and poisoned darts, at ranges beyond the reach of their pipes they were craven, and without those pipes they posed about as much real danger to any determined fighter as so many swamp rabbits.

Nonetheless, he was a normally cautious man, so he stopped before having come within actual striking distance of the stripling-sized, mud-daubed would-be ambusher, took a renewed grip on the wire-wound hilt of his Horseclans dirk and began a slow, crouching, bent-kneed advance on the balls of his feet. He held the dirk firmly and low, with the point higher than the pommel, ready to either slash or thrust or stab as an opportunity presented itself; a hurried glance had not shown him a fallen branch or anything else that might serve him as an auxiliary weapon, so he held the empty hand out, a little below the level of his eyes, wrist, elbow and fingers all slightly flexed.

Benee slashed at the flat belly of the inlander with his pointless skinning knife. His razor-edged steel missed its mark, but the equally sharp blade of the inlander’s big dirk did not; it opened the skinny left forearm to the bone in a slash that curved from wrist to elbow. Bright red blood gushed up all along the terrible wound and began to wash the clots of drying mud from off the skin, and in his agony Benee did not even feel the worn hilt of the skinning knife slip from his weakening, now-nerveless grasp.

“Little snake’s only got one fang left now.” Gil grunted to himself in satisfaction. “Wonder why this breed never learned to fight face to face, like normal men?”

His mud-caked features distorted, the swamper screamed once and threw himself at Gil, the big hunting knife extended before him like a spear. It was absurdly simple for an experienced warrior: the Horseclansman swiveled his body obliquely to the left, took his opponent’s right wrist in a crushing grip and allowed a portion of the skinny man’s own momentum to drive his near-fleshless body onto the leaf-shaped blade of the dripping dirk.

The blade entered deep into Benee’s bowels well below his navel. He gasped, and his eyes looked to burst from out their sockets. Then, as the inlander twisted his blade and removed it by way of a vicious, upward-slanting drawcut that literally gutted Benee, the boy-warrior shrieked in a nameless degree of agony. Such a noise so close to him hurt Gil’s ears, so he stepped back and swung his gory weapon like a sword, allbut decapitating Benee.

Back in camp, he hastened to show the blowpipe, holder of darts, two knives and a horn tube of poison paste to Tomos Gonsalos and Mahvros of Lohfospolis, with whose infantry unit—long accustomed to the proximity of pachyderms—he and Sunshine had been marching, and recount the tale of the brief, bloody encounter.

At the conclusion, Gonsalos nodded. “You were right and I was wrong, Mahvros, this clinches the fact. We’re just too close to those damned salt fens and that race of murderous lunatics who inhabit them, so inbred that they don’t know which end to wipe.”

To Gil, he said, “Keep closer to camp from now on; find somewhere else to wash your elephant. And get rid of that pipe and those darts and that container of venom—just the sight of them makes my skin crawl. Throw them in the watchfire there.”

Then, back to Mahvros, he ordered, “Best get back to your command and prepare to break camp. We’re going to move our location a mile or so upstream. Those baltohtheesee stick at coming very far inland, even to avenge the execution of one of their sneak-thief murderers. But even so, we’ll be having double pickets, overlapping perimeters and so on until we’ve put a goodly amount of distance between us and this area.”

The camp was duly moved, the soldiers and noncoms grumbling, as soldiers always have and always will. Directional markings in the code of the army of Kehnooryos Ehlahs were left to indicate to those who could understand them where the units had gone. In the new encampment, Tomos Gonsalos ordered a ditched perimeter, but this was incomplete by nightfall, so Gonsalos settled for extra watchfires and an enlarged guard force and perimeter patrol, with the prairiecats prowling to the east and along the watercourses leading down into the fens.

On seeing the security precautions, Mahvros doubted aloud and in a joking manner that even a muskrat would be able to invade their new camp without raising an alarm that night.

But the next morning, when Gil awoke and rolled out of his blankets, there were ’wo elephants lying where only Sunshine had been when he had composed himself in sleep the night just past. Staring in silent wonderment, a bit stunned and a bit more disbelieving of the witness of his own eyes, he still noticed details about the newcomer—she was a cow, also, but a little bigger and seemingly fatter than his sister.

Rather than approach Sunshine and the strange elephant, he mindspoke her. Not until he had had the entire story, and been formally introduced to the other elephant and allowed her to give him a head-to-foot trunk-tip examination (as, too, had Sunshine, he recalled, on first meeting), did he saddle his sister and, side by side with the larger cow, cross the camp to the central headquarters area.

Tomos Gonsalos stood up from his breakfast to gape for a moment at the approaching pair of behemoths. Turning to Mahvros, who was stillseated and chewing, his back to the sight that so astounded Tomos, Gonsalos demanded, “Why did you not tell me that elephants reproduce like ahmoeebahs—splitting into two identical parts, overnight?”

Mahvros swallowed hurriedly and looked up, grinning. “Is that wine you’re drinking, or neat brandy? Man, elephants breed just like any other beast, but it takes about a year and a half from coupling to birthing, they say.” He turned fully to look in the same direction as his friend, and it then was Mahvros’ turn to gape and stare.

“Her Ehleenoee name is Ohxathees, or something like that,” said Gil Djohnz, after he had dismounted and accepted an offered mug of watered breakfast wine. “But she wants to be called Tulip. It seems that she was the other half of the team that drew old King Zastros’ pavilion wain, and she it was that turned about and ran back off the Lumbuh Riverbridge after it was fired and Sunshine had jumped into the river. She says that she just kept running until the camp was far behind her. After she had rested, she searched out food and water, then began to try to get off the elephant armor they had hung and strapped and tied on her. It took her several days of off-and-on tries, but she finally shucked it all. Since then, she has been wandering about the countryside, avoiding men. Then, yesterday, she cut the trail of Sunshine, followed it first back to the old camp, then here. She came into camp sometime last night, chatted with Sunshine for a while, then lay down and went to sleep beside her, and there they both were when I awakened, Chief Tomos.”

“But how the hell did a full-grown elephant get into this camp without being seen?” demanded Mahvros. “Man, Tomos had guards tripping over guards last night, a ditch halfway around the camp, and those trained cats out beyond the perimeter, too.”

Gil answered, “Chief Mahvros, Tulip says that she did not want to be seen and that so she was not seen but once. On that one occasion, however, she says she thinks that they who saw her in the dark there thought that she was Sunshine.”

“So, you can telepath with her, too?” said Mahvros. “Man, down south, you and your ilk will soon put the damned, arrogant, overweening Epithiseesos family out of the elephant business in short order, I vow, and none too soon, either.

“But that still doesn’t make my mind any easier for the here and now. Just how safe are any of us by night if a beast that stands at least threemehtrahee at the withers and weighs as much as a dozen big horses can just stroll into a supposedly tightly guarded camp? Man, the mere thought of it sets my mind aboggle and my nape hairs all aprickle. What if she’d had a dozen swampscum on her back and had ridden them in here? What if . . . ?”

Tomos sighed. “Oh, come on, friend Mahvros, we could sit here and play ‘what if?’ until hell freezes over solid. Look, the elephant is here, with us, this morning, and she was not here last night. As there was no alarm last night, one would assume that any who did see her thought she was the elephant they knew about—after all, recall that the beasts are not native to this countryside hereabouts, so who would have or could have suspected that a stray one was running loose around here?—and just dismissed her as a wakeful but benevolent beast, which is just what she appears to me to be. As 1 recall, you were almighty pleased that you would have the one elephant to take south to this Thoheeks Grahvos, so you should be twice as pleased to be able to take him two, right?”

“Yes, yes, of course,” answered Mahvros. “Nonetheless, such laxity on the parts of the sentries and guards should be, must be, severely dealt with, punished, flogged, at least.”

Tomos frowned and shook his head. “What you mete out to your troops, your retainers, is your business, of course, but please bear in mind that a thorough flogging often leaves a man unable to march as fast or as far as his fellows. As regards Hehluh’s unit, you can bet that he’ll flay yards of skin from off them with that acid-dripping tongue of his before all is said and done in this elephant matter. Nor do I think that Portos or Chief Pawl of Vawn will be pleased at all when they are apprised that their vaunted troopers failed to interdict or even see a titan like our Tulip wandering through our guardlines last night.”

Captain Mahvros seemed a bit mollified. After another draft of the wine, he advised Gil, “Taking care of one of those beasts is a full-time job, as I’m certain you know by now. Therefore, I’d advise you to find one of your people who, if possible, can also telepath to an elephant. Let him take over the new one. Saddles aren’t really needed for them, you know—feelahkseeride them even into battle without any saddle, down south.”

Not only was the ancient royal palace of Thrahkohnpolis ghost-ridden with the shades of all the rulers who had died by violence within its walls, and a bit charred from the fire set by Zastros’ immediate predecessor just before he fell on his sword, but Thoheeks Grahvos found to his chagrin that a fair bit of it had been at least partially looted since he and the rest had followed the. Green Dragon Banner up into Karaleenos with Zastros. Moreover, a goodly proportion of the career bureaucrats had left the capital city, and those few that he could have dug out and brought back indicated precious little desire to resume their previous functions under his or anyone else’s aegis.

Nor could he even blame them, not really, for in the chaos of the last couple of decades in the Kingdom of the Southern Ehleenoee, such positions had become exceedingly high-risk jobs. But lacking them and

withoutmore than a bare handful of experienced slaves remaining, he quickly realized that there was just no way possible to set the palace complex back into motion and keep it running for long. So very depopulated was Thrahkohnpolis itself become that there was not even a pool from which he could impress workers to possibly labor as they trained for jobs in the palace.

That was when he decided to move his erstwhile capital to his own principal seat, the city and duchy of Mehseepolis, lying somewhat south and west of Thrahkohnpolis.

“I know, I know,” he told the Council of Thoheeksee upon his announcement of his decision, “there will be those who are sure to say that I mean to make myself king . . . but, gentlemen, there are those who are already saying that and many more that are thinking it, and only time and the actions of our Council will prove to these ones just how wrong are their present suppositions and slanders of me, the Council and our laudable aims.”

“But, dammit, Grahvos,” rumbled Thoheeks Bahos, “granted, your Mehseepolis is a strong city—it’s never fallen in all of memory that I’ve ever heard of—and so, rich, but as I recall from visits, it’s not all that large. Where could you put a capital complex?”

Grahvos shrugged. “Simple. I’ll turn over the thoheeks’ palace to the Council and government and move my personal seat to Eepseelospolis, my second city.”

At this, young Thoheeks Vikos asked wonderingly, “Your pardon, Grahvos, but do you mean to cede all of Mehseepolis and its rich lands to Council? That’s what it sounds like you’re doing.”

“If that were what it required to set things right in the lands we all call home, I’d not stick at giving half of all I own, Vikos,” Grahvos declared sincerely, feelingly. “But in practice, here, no. Let us say that I am granting Council a long-term lease of as much of the city of Mehseepolis as they need to fulfill the functions of our new government, but the lands thereabout will remain mine.

“I had assumed Council approval of this decision—for it is clear that we cannot remain in this sprawling, damaged place, not with the ceilings falling down about our ears, vermin scuttling across rooms from every nook and cranny, the kitchen hearths drawing so poorly that all our food must be cooked outside over open fires, all of the complex wells polluted and so little furnishings remaining that we might as well be camping out in some hoary ruin. Because of my assumption, I have already put such few royal slaves and a detachment of my warband to loading the pitiful remnants of records and files as survived the looting and vandalisms, the fire and the violent turnovers this place has been seeing regularly onto some wagons and wains. If you are all amenable, we’ll plan to quit this place and take the road down to Mehseepolis in two days.

“But it will not be a short trip, gentlemen. No, I think that we must use this opportunity to pause at every city and town and seat of power along the way in order to explain what happened up north and tell as many people as possible just what is now intended, make it clear to all of them that there will never be another king, despite the fact that our land will become more powerful than ever it was under any of the kings.”

The noblemen who rode through the outer gate, up the passage that led through the thick walls to the inner gate and so up the ascending grade into the hilltop fortress-city of Mehseepolis were, after six weeks of riding through lands that had been bountiful, rich and very populous within very recent times, shaken, tight-lipped and silent, each buried in his own thoughts, his own impressions of the near-wasteland they had traversed since leaving the wrecked palace at what had been the royai capital, seat of the kings of the Southern Ehleenoee.

The first shock to them had been the deplorable condition of the very roads themselves, all weedy and overgrown with brush, the paving stones beginning to cant, here and there, the wooden boles of the corduroyed sections become so soft with rot that they were now a danger to horses or mules, not to mention riders. Cuts, for long untended, had eroded down to cover many stretches of roadway with red mud and rocks of all sizes. Overgrown shoulders now offered ready-made ambush points for brigands, and even though the size of Thoheeks Grahvos’ party and the presence of so many armed and armored men saw them pass along the road unmolested, there were many grisly evidences of others not so strong or fortunate who had unwisely made to use the road before them.

As for the once-numerous unwalled villages and small towns along the Royal Road, not even one remained inhabited, all were become only charred, tumbled, well-looted and much-overgrown ruins, lairs for vermin and those beasts and birds for which vermin was prey—owl, skunk, weasel, wildcat and serpent. And right many of the walled towns, most of the smaller, weaker ones, were in little better shape.

The larger and stronger places that had weathered the chaos and endured were become distrustful, unfriendly or downright hostile to armed strangers of any description. Some of these places loosed arrows and stones and engine-spears at any attempted approach to their walls and gates of even small parties, most heard out what was shouted up to them and then ordered the parties away on pain of death, a very few allowed Grahvos and two or three of the other noblemen into their gates, treated them at least civilly, heard what they had to say and then ushered them out, bidding them welcome to return if they ever really did put the land back to peace and order.

The once-rich lands and pastures were mostly become ill-tended or completely unworked wildernesses of weeds and brush and encroaching woodlands; such few kine as they chanced across or sighted from afar were become as lean and chary as game beasts. Masterless dogs ran in large, dangerous packs, all of them bony, on the verge of starvation and willing to attack anything or anyone . . . except for the mean, muscular, long-tushed sounders of feral swine.

But hardest for the travelers to take were the onetime seats of the minor nobility—komeesee, vahrohnohsee, opokomeesee. Some few had been just abandoned and now were tenanted by commoners who probably were also bandits, but most had obviously fallen by storm, and some of these were occupied by folk who claimed to be retainers and servants of the extirpated or scattered and absent lords. A handful of the larger or more cunningly placed and built holds had never fallen, for all that they showed the prominent traces of assaults and sieges, but not even in these was the present lord he who had been such a decade before—sons, grandsons, cousins, nephews and more distant kin now held the holds and the lands (such as most of those lands were become), and a few were illegally styling themselves with the vacated titles, as well.

It had not been until the party was within the bounds of Grahvos’ double duchy that they found a hold still occupied by the man who had been confirmed to that inheritance by his overlord. Opokomees Eeahnos Ehreetheeos had lost two sons and been himself crippled while fighting for his overlord and then-Thoheeks Zastros during the first rebellion, years agone, and when High King Zastros made to commence his march of conquest northward and into the Kingdom of Karaleenos, theopokomees had been too infirm and aged to join and his two grandsons too young.

But they had not been incapable of fighting to retain their own from the hosts of would-be plunderers that had plagued the land in the absence of the monarch and so many men of fighting age. Not only had the crippled dotard and the two barely pubescent boys and their scratch-force warband repeatedly held their seat against hordes of bandits and escaped slaves, they had early on had the men of the hold-village erect a strong timber-and-earth ditched palisade around their hilltop homes, had shown them how to fashion weapons and then taught them how to use them; and the peasants had used those homemade weapons very well, too, for the village still stood, most of the folk still lived and worked their fields and watched from the top of their gradually strengthened palisade.

Opokomees Eeahnos wept, openly and unashamedly, when he set eyes to Thoheeks Grahvos astride his tall horse. Even after the thoheeks had dismounted and warmly embraced the old man, kissing him on both his scarred cheeks, the tears continued to flow down those furrowed cheeks and the still-powerful body shook with sobs.

But when a brace of log drums began to boom insistently from the palisaded village, the oldster gasped, “Pahteeos, send a galloper to Komos and tell him that our dear lord, Thoheeks Grahvos, has at last returned to his lands and us, his people. He must have seen the warband below, and thought the hold to be under attack again.”

“At once, my lord Grandfather.” The boy spun on his heel and raced away, the crossguard of the sword slung across his back clanking rhythmically against the nape-piece of his helmet. Both dismay and pride of race sprang up in Grahvos when he saw that the twelve-year-old child already bore the scars and exuded the bearing of a veteran warrior. This boy’s youth was yet another thing that greedy, grasping, selfish thoheeksee had robbed and stolen from the land and the people, and it must not ever happen again, he and the others must do all within their power to see that the land never again became ripe for such, nor was Grahvos the only one of the thoheeksee in that party to make similar vows to himself during that terrible journey from Thrahkohnpolis to Mehseepolis.

The detachment of lancers that Grahvos had sent out ahead had delivered his messages, and the way was prepared for the Council before its arrival in the new capital. The Mehseepolis ducal palace was roomy enough for most functions and lodgings, and more room was provided by the adjoining citadel. Grahvos’ family and household were already on the way to his alternate seat, well guarded by their retainers and the lancers.

Inside the thick, high walls, the councilors found the steep ways of the city in a riotous tumult of celebration of the return of their thoheeks. If any of the noblemen had before doubted that Gahvos’ people loved as well as respected him, such doubts could not have survived all that they saw and heard that afternoon.

By the time that Captain Thoheeks Mahvros and his warband arrived at Mehseepolis in company with the loaned Confederation troops, work had already been begun, on marginal land below the city, on permanent installations to house and otherwise provide for an army of modest proportions. Mahvros made the thirteenth affirmed thoheeks for the new council, but the welcome addition of the trained, well-armed men he had brought with him assured that he would not be the last nobleman to appear at Mehseepolis for affirmation of his titles.

As the months rolled along, a succession of thoheeksee, komeesee, vahrohnohsee, mahrkeeseeohsee and evenopokomeesee came from near and from far—from very far, in some cases—all of them with sizable and well-armed retinues in these unsettled times, all of them seeking to ingratiate themselves with this new government and to be granted confirmation or reconfirmation of titles and lands and cities they had inherited or assumed or conquered.

In some cases, there was more than just a single claimant to a few of the richer holdings, and the disputations over these gave more than a few sleepless nights to the Council until, finally, they came up with a formula for most decisions of this nature:

Sons, grandsons, brothers and nephews, in that order, were to have precedence over adopted sons, the husbands of daughters, granddaughters, sisters or nieces, but in any case, no claimant would be confirmed or reconfirmed to any title or holding unless he was willing to accept and to serve the new order (in the case of thoheeksee, swearing most formally to never seek to make himself or any other thoheeks king) so long as he should live. Immediately upon returning to his lands, a confirmed noble must assemble those men whose overlord he was and take from them written, witnessed oaths to the Council and the Confederation, it being made abundantly clear to each that his own confirmation would not be considered as final until Council was in receipt of said oaths.

The wealthier magnates were persuaded by fair means and foul to make “loans” to the new government—in gold, silver, grain, wine or whatever they just then had the most of—the value of which was to be deducted from their future taxes along with the sizable interest.

Thoheekseewere all urged to set their home affairs in order, then return to sit on Council with their peers, that they might be certain that their particular interests and desires were served. They and all of the others, save only those presently threatened severely or themahrkeesee-ohsee, were urged to send any surplus troops to Mehseepolis to fill out the ranks of the army that Council was building to safeguard them all.

But it was pointed out that the lands were not to be stripped to provide spearmen, for it was considered imperative by Council that an orderly agricultural cycle be reestablished as soon as possible and that all arable land be put back into production, orchards and vineyards be replanted, herds be built back up, towns and villages be rebuilt and made safe for repopulation, outlaws and bandits be exterminated, roads be laid again and maintained.

And slowly, fitfully, it began to come together, after a fashion. Sitheeros, Thoheeks of the triple duchy of Iron Mountain, returned to Mehseepolis with enough troops to scour the countryside along his route for bandits, arriving with sack on sack of decomposing heads and two wainloads of weapons, armor and other assorted loot taken from those bandits so unlucky as to be swept up by him. He also contributed to the army a third elephant cow which had had a modicum of war training, but which had proved difficult to manage since herfeelahks had died of a summer fever.

Nor was this service and the elephant the last or even the least of Sitheeros’ generosity. He brought for the army a full and fully equipped regiment of pikemen, a half-squadron of lancers, some three thousand keelohee of cornmeal, several wainloads of the famous and fiery Iron Mountain brandy, additional wainloads of cured pork, barrels of pickled vegetables and not a few pipes of a middling wine. To the Council, he presented some twelve pounds of gold and two hundred of minted silverthrahkmehee.

“Ten pounds of the gold, the soldiers and the elephant are my personal contribution, gentlemen,” he told the council. “The silver—well, the most of it—the bulk of the corn, the pork and the wine and vegetables are fromvarious of my vassals. The brandy is from my brother-in-law, Ahrkeekomees Kohnyos. All of the folk of Iron Mountain are most pleased that there never will be another kingship to breed squabblings and usurpations and ruinous civil wars. Now, true, save for creating endless and rich market for our manufactories, our farms and the like, the chaos that has so torn this land has had little effect on us, for all of the other combatants rightly considered us too tough a nut to crack, but we would all as lief see and live with a slower, steadier market and a land in peace than with all that has gone before of recent years.”

In his retinue, Thoheeks Sitheeros had brought along skilled master weaponsmiths, along with their specialized tools and a goodly amount of semi-worked metal, and these were quickly put to work to properly outfit the army, allowing the long-overworked local smiths to get some sleep and then return to more mundane tasks for the nonmilitary populace of the duchy.

A year after the capitulation of what was by then left of Zastros’ host in Karaleenos saw a council of twenty thoheeksee ruling a bit over two thirds of the onetime Kingdom of the southern Ehleenoee, all but the very largest of the bandit and outlaw bands extirpated within the lands under Council’s sway, roads being re-laid, towns and villages here and there being rebuilt by their new occupants, crops ripening in reclaimed fields, the ferocious packs of wild dogs mostly eradicated and the cattle rounded up and fattening in reclaimed pasture-lands.

There had been much work for the army, often bloody work—fights, real battles, interdictions and sieges, forcible evictions of squatters and unconfirmed claimants to disputed holdings. But as the army of the Council was now the largest and best equipped still extant in all the land, they had as yet to see a defeat. The most distressing lack was that of a real, first-rate strahteegos or overall commander for this army.

Aside from that troubling matter, however, it was beginning to appear that the efforts of Grahvos and the rest would see their desperate gamble actually succeed.