‘Fine, seriously,’ he said to the scout missile. ‘But I’ve already had a quick look at their maps, and these guys are in deep shit. If they’re going to win this war they’re going to need a real miracle.’
‘Just try, Cheradenine. Please.’
‘Do I get any help?’
‘Um… how do you mean?’
‘Intelligence, Sma; if you could keep an eye on what the enemy’s -‘
‘Ah, no, Cheradenine, I’m sorry we can’t.’
‘What?’ he said loudly, sitting up in the bed.
‘I’m sorry, Zakalwe; really I am, but we’ve had to agree to that. This is a really delicate deal here, and we’re having to keep strictly out of it. This missile shouldn’t even be here; and it’ll have to leave soon.’
‘So I’m on my own?’
‘I’m sorry,’ Sma said.
‘You’re sorry!’ he said, collapsing back dramatically on the bed.
No soldiering, he recalled Sma saying, some time ago now. ‘No fucking soldiering,’ he muttered to himself as he gathered his hair at the nape of his neck and pulled the little hide band over it. It was dawn; he patted the pony-tail and looked out through thick, distorting glass to the mist-shrouded city, just starting to wake to the dawn-rouged mountain peaks and the blue-glowing skies above. He looked with distaste at the over-ornamented long robes the priests expected him to wear, then reluctantly put them on.
The Hegemonarchy and its opponents, the Glaseen Empire, had been fighting, on and off, for control of their modestly-sized sub-continent for six hundred years before the rest of the Cluster came calling in its strange floating sky-ships, a century ago. They’d been backward even then, compared to the other societies on Murssay, which were decades ahead in technology, and – arguably – several centuries ahead morally and politically. Before they’d been contacted, the natives had the crossbow and the muzzle-loading cannon. Now, a century later, they had tanks. Lots of tanks. Tanks and artillery and trucks and a few very inefficient aircraft. Each side also had one prestige system, partially bought from but mostly just donated by some of the Cluster’s more advanced societies. The Hegemonarchy had its single sixth- or seventh-hand spacecraft; the Empire had a clutch of missiles which were generally reckoned to be inoperable, and probably were politically unusable anyway because they were supposed to be nuclear-tipped. Public opinion in the Cluster could tolerate the technologically enhanced continuation of a pointless war so long as men, women and children died in relatively small, regular batches, but the thought of a million or so being incinerated at once, nuked in a city, was not to be tolerated.
The Empire was winning a conventional war, then, being waged across two impoverished countries which left to themselves would probably just be harnessing steam power. Instead refugee peasants filled the roads, carts loaded with whole households swayed between hedgerows, while the tanks ploughed the crop fields and the droning planes dropping bombs took care of slum-clearance.
The Hegemonarchy was retreating across the plains and into the mountains as its beleaguered forces fell back before the Empire’s motorised cavalry.
He went straight to the map room after dressing; a few dozy general staff officers jumped to attention and rubbed sleep from their eyes. The maps didn’t look any better in the morning than they had the previous evening, but he stood looking at them for a long time, sizing up the positions of their forces and the Empire’s, asking the officers questions and trying to gauge how accurate their intelligence was and what level their own troops’ morale was at.
The officers seemed to know more about the disposition of their enemy’s forces than they did about the feelings of their own men.
He nodded to himself, scanned all the maps, then left for breakfast with Napoerea and the rest of the priests. He dragged them all back down into the map room afterwards – they would normally have returned to their own apartments for contemplation – and asked even more questions.
‘And I want a uniform like these guys,’ he said, pointing at one of the junior regular army officers in the map room.
‘But, Sir Zakalwe,’ Napoerea said, looking worried. ‘Those would demean you!’
‘And these will slow me down,’ he said, indicating the long, heavy robes he was wearing. ‘I want to take a look at the front myself.’
‘But, sir, this is the holy citadel; all our intelligence comes here, all our people’s prayers are directed here.’
‘Napoerea,’ he said, putting his hand on the other man’s shoulder. ‘I know; but I need to see things for myself. I only just got here, remember?’ He looked round the unhappy faces of the other high priests. ‘I’m sure your ways work when circumstances are as they have been in the past,’ he told them, straight-faced. ‘But I’m new, and so I have to use new ways to discover what you probably already know.’ He turned back to Napoerea. ‘I want my own plane; a modified reconnaissance aircraft should do. Two fighters as an escort.’
The priests had thought it the height of daring unorthodoxy to venture out to the space port, thirty kilometres away, by train and truck; they thought he was mad to want to start flying all over the sub-continent.
It was what he did for the next few days, however. There was a lull of sorts in the fighting just at that point – as the Hegemonarchy’s forces fled and the Empire’s consolidated – which made his task a little easier. He wore a plain uniform, without even the half-dozen or so medal ribbons that even the most junior officer seemed to warrant just for existing. He spoke to the mostly dull, demoralised and thoroughly hidebound field generals and colonels, to their staff, and to the foot soldiers and tank crews, as well as to the cooks and the supply teams and the orderlies and doctors. Most of the time he needed an interpreter; only the top brass spoke the Cluster’s common tongue, but even so he suspected the troops felt closer to somebody who spoke a different language but asked them questions than they did to somebody who shared their language and only ever used it to give orders.
He toured every major air field in the course of that first week, sounding out the Air Force staff for their feelings and opinions. About the only person he tended to ignore on such occasions was the always watchful priest every squadron, regiment and fort had as its titular head. The first few of these priests he’d encountered had had nothing useful to say, and none of those he saw subsequently ever seemed to have anything interesting to add beyond the ritualised initial greetings. He had decided within the first couple of days that the main problem the priests had was themselves.
‘Shenastri Province!’ Napoerea exclaimed. ‘But there are a dozen important religious sites there! More! And you propose to surrender without a fight?’
‘You’ll get the temples back once we’ve won the war, and probably lots of new treasure to put inside them. They’re going to fall whether we try to hold there or not, and they’ll probably be damaged if not destroyed in the fighting. This way, they’ll survive intact. And it stretches their supply lines like crazy. Look; the rains start in, what? A month? By the time we’re ready to counter-attack, they’ll have even worse supply problems; the wet lands behind them mean they can’t bring stuff that way, and they can’t retreat there once we do attack. Nappy; old son; this is beautiful, believe me. If I was a commander on the other side and I saw this area being offered, I wouldn’t go within a million klicks of it, but the Imperial Army boys are going to have to because the Court won’t let them do anything else. But they’ll know it’s a trap. Terrible for the morale.’
‘I don’t know, I don’t know…’ Napoerea shook his head, both his hands at his mouth, massaging his lower lip while he looked worriedly at the map.
(No, you don’t know, he thought to himself, watching the man’s nervous body-language. You lot haven’t known anything very useful for generations, chum.) ‘It must be done,’ he said. ‘The withdrawal should start today.’ He turned to another map. ‘Aircraft; stop the bombing and strafing of the roads. Give the pilots two days’ rest, then raid the oil refineries, here.’ He pointed. ‘A mass raid; use everything with the range that’ll fly.’
‘But if we stop attacking the roads…’
‘They’ll fill with even more refugees,’ he told the man. ‘That’ll slow the Imperial Army down more than our planes. I do want some of these bridges taken out.’ He tapped a couple of river crossings. He looked mystified at Napoerea. ‘You guys sign some sort of agreement not to bomb bridges or something?’
‘It has always been felt that destroying bridges would hinder a counter-attack, as well as being… wasteful,’ the priest said, unhappily.