The armoured guard waved him past with his spear butt. Kevin stooped, ducked through an inner door of fringes that filtered out most of the dirt, and blinked at the abrupt change in lighting. The main chamber of the command tent was lit by torches of oiled rags, supported in crockery sconces on poles jabbed upright into the earth. Hanging from the roof peaks were cho-ja globes, an eerie blue-violet that mixed uneasily with the warmer glow of flame light. The colours of woven rugs, cushions, and hangings sparkled strangely, spiked by starred shadows that formed a mosaic of geometric patterns of their own, as though the belongings and their assorted shadow shapes formed some alien game board upon which people were the players.
Try as he might, Kevin had never been able to liken the Game of the Council to chess; the Tsurani system of honour was far too convoluted a custom for a foreigner to break down into moves. The desert men’s strategies, on the other hand, were less opaque. He had studied them exhaustively through the seasons that had passed since their arrival. The nomads sent raiders against the fortified passes, mostly at night, and always in stealth. They sought to wear away at the armies of Xacatecas and Acoma, here through attrition, and there through the nerve-sawing, actionless boredom.
Day after day dawned with no battle, beyond the wasp stings of raiding at night. The forays were just frequent enough, and just well enough engineered, to keep the armies on the hair-trigger edge of vigilance.
The Xacatecas forces had been stretched thin to keep all the minor trails through the mountains adequately guarded. With the support of the Acoma companies, Lord Chipino had hoped the raiders would acknowledge superior numbers and abandon incursions across the borders. Yet the desert men had done no such thing; rather, they stepped up the frequency of their strikes, goading like insects flying at needra bulls.
As the months dragged by with no change, Kevin had been hesitant to venture his full opinion, that the attacks held purpose behind them. He’d had the experience on the field to justify his hunches; but Tsurani killed Midkemian officers taken captive, and in preservation of his life he had never dared to admit his birth was noble to anyone this side of the rift save a handful of Midkemian slaves. Shedding his headcloth and sandals and leaving them for servants to beat clean, he now walked across beautifully woven carpets to where his Lady sat on cushions, a sand table depicting the mountains and the desert border of the Empire spread before her and Lujan.
‘There you are,’ Mara said, looking up. A river of raven hair spilled loose over one shoulder; she caught it back with a hand like fine porcelain and smiled her welcome. ‘We were discussing a change in strategy,’ and she nodded to indicate Lujan.
Interested, Kevin quickened his step. He knelt on the cushions opposite the sand table and studied the small clusters of green and yellow markers that represented Acoma and Xacatecas companies. The positions were clustered like chains of beads along river courses, passes, and rocky, steep-sided valleys through which the winds keened after dark. Unless a sentry happened to catch the movement of the enemy silhouetted against stars or sky, he would not hear footsteps; only a chance rattle of gravel, which often as not was set off by wind, and an attack that happened in a flurried, surprise ambush. The knives of the desert men were not metal, but they cut throats readily enough.
‘We want to eradicate their supply caches,’ Mara said. ‘Burn them out. Your opinion is of interest, since you have as much knowledge of the terrain here as any of us.’
Kevin licked his lips, a chill chasing his skin under the sleeves of his shirt and the broad-banded desert robe he wore like a cloak overtop. He looked at the sand map and wondered silently whether this was precisely what the enemy hoped to do: lure their warriors out of the defensible passes and harry them into ambush in the open. ‘I suggest again, Lady, that we not sally forth against these desert men. They hold all the advantage in their own country. I say, as I have before, that we let them come to us, and die on our spears with little cost to your companies.’
‘There is no honour in hanging back from attack,’ Lujan pointed out. ‘The longer the Lady is absent from her estates, the greater the danger to Ayaki. To wait through another turn of seasons wins her no gain in the Game of the Council, nor any stature in the eyes of the gods. It is not the fate of warriors to wait idly by while desert men treat their presence like that of querdidra herders, staging small raids at their pleasure.’
‘Then you have no use for my opinion,’ said Kevin, biting back exasperation. ‘I believe there is strategy in the movements of these nomads. You insist there is not -‘