T H E • P H I L O S O P H E R • I N • A R M S: 214

That night as we celebrated I would gaze now and then at each person, and they would each gaze now and then at me, assessing the changes. “They hurt you so,” they kept saying. I am alive, I kept thinking, remembering Jinai’s reading. At least some of the changes were good, such as Shaina’s breasts now having the shape of a mother’s. She was nursing not only Kima Imaye, but Etana’s new baby, Kilalere.

Kima’s face was more Shaina’s, but her hair was mine, as were her tiny hands and feet. She was very shy at first, turning away from me; my face had become a more harsh sight for a child, with the old scar, and the new ones I’d taken today, still fiery red. But I fed her and changed her diaper and played faces with her and carried her around on my arm the whole evening, when she let me, and she began saying “Daddy” with meaning. So soon, I would be gone again, for who knew how long.

The next morning I kissed them all goodbye and set off the courier’s way back to Ossotyeya.

To speak to the army, I wore just my wristlets and Chirel over my formal political clothes, in part because the good set of armour I should have I didn’t yet, having just been measured before I’d gone to Kefara. As the sun was setting, I found a place in the river that was deep enough. The firedish would have to be makeshift, but spears and torches were, of course, in good supply. I called the army to assembly around that spot.

It was a beautiful evening, the purpling sky shot through with long clouds like flame in the setting sun, everything clearer and brighter than usual, as if All-Spirit were more visible than usual in everything.

As with the command council, I recounted all I had done on the way home. From the battle of Haiu Menshir, they were in my hands; it was a crescendo as I told them how many warriors were coming from each place. “It is your names that will be graven in history,” I told them, “since all the world remembers those who refused to give ground, who were present at the turning-point of defeat into victory.” The singing wind was in my ears throughout, and my tongue didn’t come even near to locking up. At the end, as they let out a steady deafening roar, I tapped Esora-e to be my ritual monk, and did the Kiss of the Lake. Here, it was relatively easy. It was a year and some before I was actually due to do it, but now was a good time to show them I could still die for them if I must, whatever Kurkas had done to me, and Renewal was a good thought to have in their minds, too. We feasted and celebrated that night. Next morning, I started work, calling together the command council. There was an Ikal person waiting with a sickeningly-familiar-looking box under her arm; of course, they wanted to do the full debriefing. I told her to wait.

“First priority,” I said to the council. “Triadas Teleken, personally. It’s the best single thing we can do to raise our morale, and lay waste to theirs. Here, he stands for Arkan victory in both their minds and ours; if I’m going to stand for Yeoli victory, I have to kill him. Not only that, but he’s almost certain to be replaced by someone inferior, by the way they promote in Arko.”

I had not forgotten his kindness to me, but nor had I forgotten his loyalty to Kurkas, despite having enough sense to see the futility of it, and that remaining loyal would destroy him. I expect to die there, he’d said, meaning Yeola-e. Yes, you will, I thought. I wondered if he’d been expecting to die by my hand but hadn’t wanted to reassure me quite that much. With Triadas, you couldn’t know.

They smacked hands to foreheads. I was hardly the first to think of this, and all sorts of attempts had been made, so that Triadas had himself extremely well-guarded at night, and no one had been able to solve it. “You’re not going to do another lone assassination of an enemy general, are you, Chevenga?” Hurai asked me, worriedly. “You’ve become more important since then, and their spies will know from last night that you’re back, and he must know you have weapon-sense.”

“No,” I said. “That was by night. I want to do this in broad daylight, and in such a way that his whole army is watching. That would have the best effect.” Of course they all looked at me as if I should be shipped back to the House of Integrity. “I will try to think of a way, and I ask all of you to as well.” In the meantime I asked them to brief me on everything, and took the best look I could at the Arkan camp. What leapt out at me, when they gave me accounts of the times the Arkans had tried to take the pass, was that Triadas had placed his command post in the same place each time, well back from the pass, where the valley lies between two cliffs.

“I can tell you why!” I said, laughing. “He thinks the cliffs are unclimbable. He is a city Arkan; it’s in their bones to think of cliffs as unclimbable, because they are there. But this is Yeola-e! You just know the hotheads among the local kids make a game of climbing them, and know them like the backs of their hands.”

“They do,” said Emao-e. “We don’t. You can hardly take enough local kids on such a raid; he leaves a good thirty or forty guards in their camp.” But it was too late; the whole plan had flashed into my mind.

I sent out word in Ossotyeya and the other villages around, asking for twenty hotheads, and picked out the fifteen of my elite and fifty regulars who were the best on cliffs. I stood on rank to go myself. Jinai was unable to foresee the result, but my own feeling was very good. I first held council with the raid unit and the hotheads that night, a good cure to spending half the day on truth-drug being debriefed, and told them we’d be back together the next night, to start the mission. The Arkan camp had a clear view of the cliff, during the day. With our armour well soot-darkened, we climbed down about the time they’d be bedding down, and slept ourselves in the trees at the cliff’s foot, a long arrow’s flight from where Triadas’s command-post had been last time.

At dawn, Emao-e did as I commanded, began a charge down from the pass, seven thousand on fifteen. Triadas must know how my speech had fired up my people; let him think I, and they, were being rash. I’d said enough times how the wasp can sting the bear to death if it has enough spirit, and how every battle would be all or nothing.

The Arkans set ranks and charged in themselves, letting me see something that gave me a turn: he had stiffened the camp guard to what looked like eighty or ninety for some reason. Sachara, who I had here as my second, hissed through his teeth. “Cheng, what do you think?”

They were in the insignia of regulars, but I thought, he’s caught wind of my plan somehow, and they are elite disguised as regulars. Getting away safe depended entirely on running back to the edge of the valley far enough in advance of any chase to stay ahead despite the talus at the foot of the cliff, and the cliff itself, slowing us down. But with more they might be able to hold us long enough for enough of the main force to join them, we were done for, myself included.

My warriors all saw what I saw. Keeping fear hidden behind an impassive face as they waited for my decision, I considered calling it off, or sending them without me and perhaps sacrificing them, a worthwhile exchange for Triadas if it did not include me; but, even as one or two of them suggested it, my heart rebelled. I should follow my mind, not my heart, but knowing I could never be entirely detached about myself, I felt the doubt eat at me. I’m counting my own importance too great, to hide from myself my own cowardice, I thought. It’s a hazard of fighting command.

Meanwhile, up in the pass, the army was doing perfectly what I had ordered, and Triadas doing perfectly what I’d planned. When Emao-e called a fall-back, as if I had lost my nerve—we had a pretend Chevenga, built like me and with a cobbled-together shoulder scabbard, fighting under the national banner—Triadas saw it as a chance to crush us entirely and ordered up his full army after, trying to flank. Even the greatest general will sometimes forget the things he learned first; habit or complacency or stiff-minded or over-confidence creep in unseen like ghosts. He was doing what he had not planned, at a time chosen not by him but by us, and he’d set his command-post in the same place.

My body tingled all over with the imperative, Now! I drove away my doubts and called back logic by will. If Triadas had learned my strike force number, he would have more than seventy here, for, elite or not, you never want to be outnumbered. Nor could he be concealing strength, because in that case he’d keep their apparent number the same as before, fifty, hiding the others. If he really knew my plan, this was half-action, and Triadas wasn’t prone to that. So he must not be. “We do as planned,” I ordered. “Wedge-form, to me, charge!”

All-Spirit, I thought as I ran out like the tip of an arrow aimed at the canopy under which he sat, at a desk with a number of red-tunic-wearing aides, this is the moment I have been waiting for for two years, the time I could take the fight to them on my own soil with a good chance of a devastating victory. Drawing Chirel, feeling my footfalls, bellowing out the war-cry, feeling the wind in my face; I can’t begin to describe how good it felt; if I hadn’t been too busy I might have wept.

Of course the guards rallied to form a line to hold us, yelling and leveling spears. I picked a man, faked him one way and cut back the other with a half-leap to get past his spear, and took him down without much slowing down. The rest of the wedge followed until the ten of us who would go after Triadas were all through; I’d assigned the rest to finish the guards so as to cover our retreat.

No fool to pride, he didn’t try to play hero, but ran for the nearest safety, his army’s rear, in the hopeless hope that his guard could hold us off long enough. His mantle, which was the brilliant red of the most expensive Arkan dye, flowed out behind him; two aides ran flanking him and the rest scattered, arms full of rolled-up maps. “Triadas, my old friend!” I hailed him in Arkan as I dashed after him. “Bit different circumstances, we meet this time, eh?”

So, as in the old story, he was the rabbit fleeing for his life while I was the fox chasing merely for my dinner, but he was middle-aged, out of training, breathing thin mountain air, and running uphill. As well the fox knew he could become dinner if he were too slow; already some in the Arkan host ahead were seeing, and peeling away to come to their general’s rescue. Clever to the end, he pulled his mantle in around him so I couldn’t grab it as I drew close. I caught him by his long streaming Aitzas hair.

Give him credit: he turned and drew a dagger, and almost gave me a wound; I twisted to make my breastplate deflect it. There was that square stern face again, but now flushed with exertion, and angry: with himself, I realized. I would love to have taken him alive, and have another conversation with him in bonds and me free, this time, but it was impossible. I struck off his head.

Such sweetness, to taunt the Arkans running towards me, far too late, by holding up his head to them, and smacking his cheek with the flat of Chirel. I hoped Kallijas Itrean was getting a good look. “You are having too much kyashin fun!” Sach hissed at me, as they came closer, and yanked me half off my feet to make me flee as appropriate. The hotheads performed their assignment perfectly, just climbing the cliff fast so we could follow, placing our hands and feet exactly as they placed theirs, and from the top we heaved rocks and dead trees and whatever else we could find down on the Arkans until they gave up and turned back, dispirited. They soon fell back from the pass as well.

This incident from the point of Kalalao Shae-Fara, one of the hotheads, at Gabriel Gadfly's site here.