"Ah, Shulamit?" Karl said.
"Yes?" she replied, reining in her horse.
Barak moved on ahead, his horse breaking into an easy trot as he pressed a leg to its side and shifted balance. The horde had halted, most of it—the rear was still breaking camp when the vanguard was pitching tents—and they were on the fringes, in open space between widely scattered yurts. A dozen warriors from a far-northern tribe were killing a land gator that had gotten too close; the beasts were very bold after months of following and eating everything from foundered horses to the stray child. This one was big, nearly ten meters long. It looked like a stout oblong oval on four columnar legs, the same sandy-reddish color as steppe of native grass, the front of the oval split back for a third of its length, edged with teeth like gems. The warty skin was studded with organic sapphire too, under the crusted, lumpy surface; when the Chukchi riders loosed the arrows from their heavy recurved bows the armor-piercing shafts sank only a few handspans deep with a sound like iron splitting rock. Thick red blood flowed in sluggish trickles down from the puncture points.
The land gator gave a hissing bellow of distress, something like a steam engine with a bellyache, but the arrows bristling from it like spines had not slowed it down much. Not by the speed of the sideways snap that almost caught one rider as his mount skittered aside, or the lashing strike of the tail. That was edged with knife-sharp scutes, and the horse it struck at jumped back with a squeal of fear. The other Chukchi swept around, firing again. The big animal halted, swinging its notional head—there was no neck—and the independently pivoting eyes, round and the size of plums in their high sockets of bone. Land gators had virtually nothing in the way of brain; they were an evolutionary relic, far more primitive than drillbits or muskylopes. They were too stupid to be afraid. They did understand pain, though. This one had had enough; it turned its head toward the distant mountains and began to lumber clumsily away.
The Chukchi closed in, firing again and again. One arrow went chunk into the elbow joint of a foreleg. The land gator bellowed again as it collapsed at one corner and began walking in a circle around the pivot of its ruined leg.
"Shulamit?" Karl said again.
She looked over at him, raising an eyebrow. They were both in full kit; Hammer-of-God had insisted on War Zone regulations, but he had his helmet off, and the dimday light cast ruddy tones across his brass-colored hair. Shulamit felt a complex of emotions she could not name; they seemed to be located just under her breastbone, and made her armor too tight.
"Um, I want to apologize." he said, meeting her eyes with a visible effort. "I did something stupid. I'm sorry." He smiled, like Byers' star coming up on truenight morning. "Will you forgive me?"
For sniffing after the Sauron bitch because she was in heat? Shulamit thought. For not believing me? For not believing me for five months while she swelled up with her repulsive spawn, which will be the first Sauron named fan Reenan, Piet forgive us?
"Yes, I'll forgive you," she said.
He reached out a hand to her. The smile crumbled when she slapped it aside.
"I didn't say I'd forgive you yet," she snapped.
"Yeweh give me strength—why not?" he shouted. "I said I was sorry!"
"Because you haven't suffered enough yet!" Shulamit screamed back, shaking a fist under his nose. Then she wheeled her horse around and spurred away.
Karl bar Yigal sat in the saddle watching her, the dust and grit of her departure stinging his eyes and making them water. He sat that way until her mount vanished behind a herd of muskylope, and until he heard a sound behind him. Laughter.
He turned. A couple of the Chukchi were laughing at him, resting their bows across their thighs and hooting with mirth, their broad flat faces creasing. Karl nudged a heel into the side of his horse and rode up to one of the warriors; the man's face had just enough time to change as the Bandari gripped him by the belt and hoisted him out of the saddle. The others shouted at him in their incomprehensible Siberiak dialect, going for their sabers or knocking arrows. He hoisted the man above his head one-handed, bringing a wheeze of protest from his horse, and then pitched him at two others ten feet away. All three went to the ground thrashing, and one of the horses staggered off a few paces and collapsed itself. Karl dismounted, ignoring the shouts of anger from the other Chukchi. Instead he unlimbered a weapon slung at his saddlebow, a forged-steel mace as long as his thigh with a serrated steel knob the size of a small child's head.
The warriors milled, hooting and yipping and calling to each other as he marched toward the land gator. When it paused in its obsessive circling to snap at him he jumped straight up over the lunge, landing with his legs braced on either side of its mouth and both hands gripping the warhammer. The mace came down and landed on the low-domed surface of its skull, rebounding with a ringing scream of protest. The metal could rebound, but flesh and bone could not; grayish tissue spurted out through cracks in the jewel-armored hide. Karl struck twice more; the last time he withdrew the macehead, it came out with a wet shluk sound.
"Keep the bloody thing," he snarled over his shoulder, as he marched back to his horse.
The big tent's sides were pegged out; it was a calm trueday in late summer, a good ten degrees above freezing. There was still a dense crowd around the clay model on the five-meter by five-meter table; as each new khan or noyon and his aides got a good look there was more spitting and invocations of Allah, Buddha, and the spirits at the perfection of it. A scale model, of the Citadel and the mountains about it, of the Karakul Pass through the Atlas and the beginning of the lowlands beyond, with Nûrnen sitting right at the edge. More detailed maps were strung from stick frames around the tent, showing the approaches and every facet of the Sauron defenses in immense detail, all of it the fruit of centuries of painstaking espionage and record keeping. Caravans from the Pale had come this way; even more individuals of the People had, often in disguise, and every second or third one had secret training and instruments.
Hammer nodded well done at Sapper and his aides. More of them now, people and goods had been streaming in from the Pale. It wasn't particularly difficult to overtake the horde, not if you were moving fast without grazing herds and families to slow you down.
"Khans, ghazis, enemies of the Saurons and their Dark Lord," Hammer said.
Silence fell, a deep hush of respect. The commanders bowed with helmets under their arms, or saluted in the manner of their various tribes and nations. Even Chaya inclined her head. It was like the glow of a glass of good brandy by a warm fire; Hammer could feel the pain in his leg fade, and the gnawing anxiety. Even the weird not-quite-real feeling he'd had since Chaya spoke to the tribes last truenight faded a little. It had been eerie, the tall figure in white lifting her arms on a high rock above a sea of faces that stretched to infinity.
First things first, he thought. "Khan Oyuk Tepe of the Mongur Kipchaks, come forth," he snapped.
That khan did; there was another murmur at the bandaged wounds he bore, and more still at the two guards who held him by arm and shoulder. Another Kipchak prince of high rank walked beside him, weaponless as well and with a nervous sweat on his flat brown face.
"Some of you have heard, and the rest should: Khan Oyuk, to whom is assigned the vanguard, took his men forward without orders."
"I could not restrain their—" the prisoner began. His voice sank under Hammer-of-God's glare, until the loudest sound was the snapping of guy ropes against the canvas roof.
"Bullshit," Hammer snarled in the homely Americ of his youth. Then he shifted back to plains Turkic:
"Silence, dog! You couldn't restrain yourself at the thought of paddling your paws in the loot of Nûrnen! So much for your oaths to the seven."
He turned to the other commanders. "What is the penalty for those who break ranks to plunder before the battle is done?"
The growl that followed might have come from a pack of Stobor closing around a wounded camel. There was a rattle of expensive steel-splint armor as hard callused hands closed on saber hilts, and a collective half-step toward the luckless Kipchak noble. Any steppe warrior knew the answer to that question.
"And more than that, this fool had no better idea of how to get to Nûrnen than to ride past the outworks of the Citadel; he lost a thousand men. A thousand men!" Hammer half-turned on his heel and bent slightly to glare into the nomad's face. "How many Saurons did you kill, thief and son of a thief? How many?"
Oyuk was no coward. "None, as you know," he snapped back. "The Gatlings caught us in the open—the sons of Shaitan can see in the dark!" The guards forced the nomad down on his knees, and stepped back. Hammer kicked him with calculated viciousness; it hurt, but Oyuk collapsed, wheezing.
"Thus giving them their first victory of this war," Hammer snarled. "Giving heart to all their followers. Giving them a thousand heads—the heads of brave men who deserved to die better than at the orders of a greedy thief and fool."
"Could you do better?" Oyuk snarled.
"I will do better," Hammer replied; in the same instant, he drew the Citadel-made revolver from his belt and shot the smaller man through the chest. "I will not charge fifty-meter concrete walls and Gatling guns with sabers and bows. I will not tolerate disobedience."
The body dropped, kicked twice, voided its bowels, and went limp. The smell of blood and shit rose on the summer-warm air. The smoking muzzle of Hammer's weapon turned on the younger nomad.
"You are now khan of the Mongur Kipchaks, Suleiman Tepe," he said. "Can you do better than this dead dog?"
Suleiman was a man of thirty T-years or so, hard-faced even by nomad standards, and evidently quick on the uptake.
"Command me, lord!" he said, bowing low.
"Good," Hammer replied. "Take your place." Casually, he tucked the weapon back and rested one foot on the dead body.
"Now," he went on, "even this Stobor food beneath my boot could get something half-right. We're not going to take the Citadel by storm, and if we sit down to make a siege on the steppe outside the Karakul Pass, we'll start starving to death in about three days." Haven days, almost two T-weeks. "While the enemy draws on the wealth of the Shangri-La. By the end of the sixth day, we'll be eating our horses."
Hammer drew his saber and used the point to trace a circle around the Citadel. It stood proudly in the mountains on the west side of the center of the Karakul Pass. To its east the narrow Pass wound over a high saddle between the Atlas Mountains and the Girdle of God Range. The Pass wound south from the steppes down to the city of Nûrnen at the northeastern edge of the Shangri-La Valley.
"We need to circumvallate—" He stopped, groping for a Turkic word. "—We need to establish a complete ring around the Citadel, and for ourselves, win access to Nûrnen. With Nûrnen in our hands, we can eat. And the enemy cannot."
"Much loot in Nûrnen," a Cossack leader said. "By Mary and the saints, I passed through with our tribe's women, and the Sauron-loving arselickers charged us ten ounces of gold for four months camping in an open field. Merchants so fat that grease ran from their mouths when they looked up at Cat's Eye made us pay a dozen sheep for a man's-weight of flour—ten times what they paid the farmers for it."
There was a chorus of similar complaints. Nûrnen had a monopoly of half a dozen necessities for nomads taking flocks or pregnant women or trade-goods into the great lowlands, and its merchants and traders used that power ruthlessly. The Saurons approved; the more wealth that was concentrated in the Citadel's dependent city, the more resources they had quick access to.
"Gold, yes." Hammer nodded, stabbing the air above the tiny streets on the clay model. "And silver, jewels, spices, drugs, fine rugs, blooded horses." He could see eyes narrowing and hear lips smacking. Life on the steppes of Haven was very hard, and wholehearted greed was a survival characteristic. "More than that. The harvest"—his sword took in the area west of Nûrnen—"of the richest lands on Haven, and it's just past harvest-time. The tribute will be streaming into Nûrnen for sorting and forwarding to the Citadel. Steel and copper and brass, grain and cheese and meat, livestock and cloth. Herds of fat stock fed on planted grasses. Grazing for all our beasts . . ."
And the souls of men, he thought ironically. Some of the nomad khans were practically mooing with lust at the catalog of wealth. Hammer judged his moment, then nodded to one of the Bandari regimental commanders; there were nearly three thousand fighters of the People here by now. "How do we get past the Citadel?" the man said, tugging absently at the long black braid of his hair. "Their Gatlings command all the open ground in that pass."
Hammer grinned like a Stobor and shifted his sword-point south on the relief map.
"There are trails passable on foot, a few on horseback, through the northern foothills of the Atlas range." He indicated an area at the northern approach to the Karakul Pass. "The Saurons control them by patrols—but thanks to our little diversion off in the western Shangri-La, they have not even enough men here to man all the gun-bunkers in the Citadel itself. We'll push through, making a road for wagons as we go. Then"—his saber cut through the hills, then southwest—"we bring up the siege weapons and hit the ruins of the old Gates with wave attacks from here and here." He pointed to northeast and northwest of the old Gates of Paradise, ruined generations before by earthquakes.
"We move past the Citadel—fast—to Nûrnen. With the materials in Nûrnen, we can throw a C-shaped ring of field fortifications around the Citadel; if the old men and boys there come out and fight us, we'll swamp them with sheer numbers."
The young Bandari raised his hand again. "Aluf, two points. First, what about Saurons in there, the blockhouses in the hills? We can't count on them all being gone. Second, what about those field Regiments? They're going to come back mighty damn fast, once we sit down around their homes and women."
Hammer nodded. Those were good points. Actually, the Saurons would have done well to spend more time on fieldworks in those hills, but that was soldati strategy for you. Aggressive to a fault, move forward, strike fast, crush. With the Citadel as an invulnerable base of maneuver and its normal garrison to send out strong patrols, the hills would be a worse deathtrap than the open ground under the fortress walls. The Citadel didn't think in terms of being stripped of all its maneuver forces and thrown back on a static defense. "If we can take Nûrnen and establish our ring, the field brigades will break their teeth on it; between the rebellion, and the way we'll strip the areas near the pass of supplies, it'll be a month or better before the field brigades can get back here. To make sure we get through the hills, I'm sending in our finest leaders," he said, with a slight smile.
The Pale commander reached back and gripped a shoulder in either hand. Barak bar Heber and Kemal of the clan that had been Juchi's came forward on either side. "With picked assault troops. And Sapper—"
"Djinni," a chief distant from the table muttered.
"—has something new from Clan Gimbutas. A secret weapon." That brought grins and more spitting and oaths. "Have no worries. Nûrnen shall fall before the next truenight!"
"Woe."
Chaya's voice, the thin reedy whisper that was so unlike the matter-of-fact tones of the Judge he had known. Hammer felt the hairs try to stand erect along his spine, and he was sure that every other man in the tent besides the corpse beneath his foot felt the same sensation.
The Judge stood, her eyes focused on something beyond the tentpole.
"Woe unto Nûrnen, the bloody city; earth is full of her iniquities. Woe unto Nûrnen, the bloody city, for she shall fall—and who shall weep for her?"
The tall figure in the white robes swept out of the tent, and a vast rustling sigh went through those of the horde near enough to see. Her voice rose to an astonishing shout:
"Woe unto Nûrnen! She is fallen, and her children shall be scattered like the dust!"
Hammer shivered, turning back to the commanders. "Prepare your men for battle within thirty-six hours," he said quietly, as a long swelling roar of exultation rose from those who were listening to Chaya's impassioned speech. "This isn't going to be easy—but we're going to win."
Temujin was pacing in the little foothills' hollow. He looked much better now, with the bruises given a month to fade; you could believe he had been born a prince of his tribe, a slim narrow-waisted young man with the broad shoulders of an archer. Kinsmen with the horde had outfitted him, from curl-toed boots to embroidered chamois coat and astrakhan-wool cap, with a good plain saber at his side. His face was the color of old amber and handsome in a blunt-featured way, and he walked gracefully, without the bowlegged waddle many steppe-dwellers had on foot. There was wary respect in his glance when Shulamit reined in and swung down from the saddle in a jingle of iron.
She-tamerlane, he thought. Deadly and unpredictable, for all she was so young. All haBandari women would as soon hand you your testicles on a knifepoint as look at you, but this one was worse than most.
"What results?" he asked.
She spat something in a guttural, choppy language he could now recognize as Bandarit, if not understand. From the expression, it was something obscene.
"Barak believes us, but won't do anything until after this battle; doesn't want to bother the commanders, I suppose. He says the bitch isn't going anywhere, not with that belly. Karl believes it too, for what that's worth. Which is nothing. She'll get away, I know it! Yeweh and the spirits of the Founders curse her with boils and hemorrhoids."
Temujin sighed and nodded. He had complete faith that Sigrid would get away, pregnant or no. He was also uncertain whether that angered or reassured him. When he looked up again, Shulamit was staring at him thoughtfully; the back of his neck prickled a little as he saw she had the grip of the assault rifle in her hand. The muzzle was pointing straight at him, ready to tear him in half with a twitch of her finger.
"And it's a time for paying debts," she said grimly, baring her teeth.
Oh, no, not again! he wailed inwardly, as his hand made a minuscule movement toward his sword. He had killed three men in duels, who called him "Sauron's dog," including the one who struck him while he was bound. It had been very good to be a free man, not knocked about and threatened with torture—perhaps too good to be true. All the tngri—I must have been a monster in my last life to deserve this! The haBandari wildcat must hold him responsible for setting Sigrid out on the steppe to begin with. Unfair!
"Drop the swordbelt," Shulamit said flatly. "Not a word—just drop it. Throw it aside. The boot-knife too."
Temujin obeyed. The air felt cold on his sweating face, despite the late summer warmth of the trueday and the still air of the little hollow where they had arranged to meet. He was suddenly acutely conscious of the spicy smell of the bracken beneath his feet.
"Down. Down, I said!"
He went down on his belly, hands behind his neck. "If you're going to kill me, at least let me die standing, you mad bitch," he said.
"Shut up. Roll over; keep your eyes closed."
For a moment there was nothing but a muted clanking and rustling. With a sinking feeling he thought of someone preparing knotted cords and sharp little sticks. What did I do to deserve this?
"You can look now."
He opened his eyelids, blinked them shut again, and stared, bug-eyed. Shulamit was standing over him, entirely naked, a silhouette against Cat's Eye, tying back her hair with a thong. Then she sank to her knees, straddling him, and grinned.
"I figure what I owe you is about twenty minutes of extreme happiness," she said, unfastening his belt. "That's what I got when you came up with her name . . . you can move now."