The attack came; forty days after he had arrived on Murssay, the Imperial Army crashed into the foothill forests. The priests began to panic. He had the Air Force attack the supply lines the majority of the time, not the front. The defensive lines gradually gave way; units retreated, bridges were blown. Gradually, as the foothills led into the mountains, the Imperial Army was concentrated, funnelled into the valleys. The trick with the dam didn’t work this time; the charges placed under it just didn’t go off. He had to move fast to shift two elite units to cover the pass above that valley.
‘But if we leave the city?’ The priests looked stunned. Their eyes looked as empty as the painted blue circle on their foreheads. The Imperial Army was slowly moving up the valleys, forcing their soldiers back. He kept telling them things would be all right, but things just got worse and worse. There was nothing else for them to do; it all seemed too hopeless, and too late to take things back into their own hands. Last night, with
the wind blowing down from the mountains to the city, the sound of distant artillery had been audible.
‘They’ll try to take Balzeit City if they think they can,’ he said. ‘It’s a symbol. Well fine, but it doesn’t actually have much military importance. They’ll grab at it. We let just so many through, then we close the passes; here,’ he said, tapping the map. The priests shook their heads.
‘Gents, we are not in disarray! We are falling back. But they are in much worse shape than we are, taking far heavier casualties; each metre is costing them blood. And, all the time, their supply lines get longer. We must take them to the point where they start to think about pulling back, then present them with the possibility – the seeming possibility – of a knock-out blow. But it won’t knock us out; it knocks them out.’ He looked round them. ‘Believe me; it’ll work. You may have to leave the citadel for a while, but when you return, I guarantee it will be in triumph.’
They did not look convinced, but – possibly because they were just too stunned to fight – they let him have his way.
It took a few days, while the Imperial Army struggled up the valleys, and the Hegemonarchy’s forces resisted, retreated, resisted, retreated, but eventually – watching for signs that the Imperial soldiers were tiring, and the tanks and trucks not always moving when they might have wanted to, starved of fuel – he decided that were he on the other side, he’d be thinking about halting the advance. That night, in the pass which led down to the city, most of the Hegemonarchy troops left their positions. In the morning the battle resumed, and the Hegemonarchy’s men suddenly retreated, shortly before they would have been over-run. A puzzled, excited but still exhausted and worried General in the Imperial High Command watched through field glasses as a distant convoy of trucks crawled away down the pass towards the city, occasionally strafed by Imperial aircraft. Reconnaissance suggested the infidel priests were making preparations to leave their citadel. Spies indicated that their spacecraft was being readied for some special mission.
The General radioed the Court High Command. The order to advance on the city was given the following day.
He watched the terminally worried-looking priests leave from the train station under the citadel. In the end he had to dissuade them from ordering the decapitation attack. Let me try this first, he’d told them.
They could not understand each other.
The priests looked at the territory they had lost, and the fraction they had left, and thought it was all over for them. He looked at his relatively unscathed divisions, his fresh units, his crack squads, all positioned just where they should be, knives laid against and inside the body of an over-extended, worn-out enemy, just ready to cut… and thought it was all over for the Empire.
The train pulled out, and – unable to resist – he waved cheerily. The high priests would be better out of the way, in one of their great monasteries in the next mountain range. He ran back upstairs to the map room, to see how things were going.
He waited until a couple of divisions had made it through the pass, then had the units that had held it – and mostly retreated into the forests around the pass, not gone down the pass at all – take it again. The city and the citadel were bombed, though not well; the Hegemonarchy’s fighters shot most of the bombers down. The counter-attack finally began. He started with the elite troops, then brought in the rest. The Air Force still concentrated on the supply lines for the first couple of days, then switched to the front line. The Imperial Army wavered, line crinkling; it seemed to hesitate like some wash of water almost but not quite capable of overspilling the damming line of mountains save in one place (and that trickle was drying, still pushing for the city, leaving the pass, fighting through the forests and fields for the shining goal they still hoped might win the war…), then the line fell back; the soldiers too exhausted, their supplies of ammunition and fuel too sporadic.
The passes stayed with the Hegemonarchy, and slowly they pushed down from them again, so that it must have seemed to the Imperial soldiers that they were forever shooting up-hill, and that while advancing had been a heavy, dangerous slog, retreating was only too easy.
The retreat became a rout in valley after valley. He insisted on keeping the counter-attack going; the priests cabled that more forces ought to be deployed to stop the advance of the two Imperial divisions on the capital. He ignored them. There was barely enough left of the two tattered divisions to make one whole one, and they were being gradually eroded further all the time. It was possible they might make it to the city, but after that they would have nowhere to go. He thought it might be satisfying to accept their eventual surrender personally.
The rains came on the far side of the mountains, and as the bedraggled Imperial forces made their way through the dripping forests, their Air Force was all too often grounded by bad weather, while the Hegemonarchy’s planes bombed and strafed then with impunity.
People fled to the city; artillery duels thundered nearby. The remnants of the two divisions that had broken through the mountains fought desperately on towards their goal. On the distant plains on the far side of the mountains, the rest of the Imperial Army was retreating as fast as it could. The divisions trapped in Shenastri Province, unable to retreat through the quagmire behind them, surrendered en masse.
The Imperial Court signalled its desire for peace the day what was left of its two divisions entered Balzeit City. They had a dozen tanks and a thousand men, but they left their artillery in the fields, bereft of ammunition. The few thousand people left in the city sought refuge in the wide parade grounds of the citadel. He watched them stream in through the gates in the high walls, far in the distance.
He’d been going to quit the citadel that day – the priests had been screaming at him to do so for days, and most of the general staff had already left – but now he held the transcript of the message they’d just received from the Imperial Court.
Two Hegemonarchy divisions were, anyway, on their way out of the mountains, coming to the aid of the city.
He radioed the priests. They decided to accept a truce; fighting would stop immediately, if the Imperial Army withdrew to the positions it had held before the war. There were a few more radio exchanges; he left the priests and the Imperial Court to sort it all out. He took off his uniform and for the first time since he’d arrived, dressed as a civilian. He went to a high tower with some field glasses, and watched the tiny specks that were enemy tanks as they rolled down a street, far away. The citadel gates were closed.
A truce was declared at midday. The weary Imperial soldiers outside the citadel gates billeted themselves in the bars and hotels nearby.
He stood in the long gallery and faced into the light. The tall white curtains billowed softly around him, quiet in the warm breeze. His long black hair was lifted only slightly by the gentle wind. His hands were clasped behind his back. He looked pensive. The silent, lightly clouded skies over the mountains, beyond the fortress and the city, threw a blank, pervasive light across his face, and standing there like that, in plain dark clothes, he looked insubstantial, like some statue, or a dead man propped against the battlements to fool the foe.