Heirs of the Blade_ Shadows of the Apt_ Book Seven - Adiran Tchaikovsky [134]
Then there had been the attack on a convoy of pack-crickets led by a Dragonfly functionary bringing in some taxes. He had a quartet of Grasshopper guards escorting him, but Dal’s people had caught them utterly by surprise, leaping or flying from all around with bows drawn back. The tax-gatherer had sat glumly by and watched the bandits whoop and cheer as they salvaged this unexpected haul. When they were done, Dal had considered letting his people shoot the witnesses, as many had wished to, but had ruled against it. Word was going to spread in any event, and if he got a reputation that suggested surrender was useless, then a great many such fights might get a good deal harder to win.
He had taken his men to ground after that, let them enjoy the meagre spoils in the heart of a small wood while he planned his next move.
It reminded him of the way it had been after the war. The Wasps had changed his life, but he could not say whether that was for the better or not. Before the war he had been a woodsman, hunting and tracking game to keep his village fed, spending his days out of doors and his nights in a variety of beds – a loner, but not an outsider, and with more than a few admirers. It was a better living than many enjoyed, surely. The village headman had not bothered him, and the nearest noble had barely troubled the headman. It was a way of life that had been turning its slow circles for ever, and could have done so for ever more – or so it seemed to all concerned.
Then the Wasp Empire had mounted its grand invasion – a people and a nation that nobody in Dal Arche’s village had ever heard of, and originating so many miles away it might have been something out of a folk tale – until, that is, the prince’s recruiters came. There was to be a levy, and the headman had been given a quota: young men and women to be sent off to the war.
Some had volunteered, most had been put forward by others or decided by the headman’s fiat. The old man had even sent his own son, acting from faith or guilt. They had been supplied with spears and padded cuirasses, and Dal had brought along his little woodsman’s bow. And so they had gone to war.
Of those young men and women conscripted into the Commonweal’s grand army from Dal’s village, only Dal himself survived. The others had died, almost all together, charging the Wasp lines: scorched by stings, lanced by crossbow bolts, butchered by the sword. Only Dal, the archer, had lived, to be taken up by the princes and put into another force. He had been one of several such archers, but he had been a swifter flier and a better shot, and more than that, he had come to understand that few of the nobles directing the battles had the slightest idea of what they were doing. The Wasps had come against them with their flying machines and their automotives, their ordered formations, their ballistae and their stings. In return, the Commonweal had brought its massed ranks of spears, its vast, untrained and frightened peasant levy, within which, studded like gems, were the glittering retinues of individual nobles and princes.
Dal never went home again. He did not want to look into the faces of villagers he had grown up with, and see their eyes accuse him of the crime of being the only man to return. Nor could he go back to being a simple woodsman.
He had sworn that he would never be the subject of princes again.
After the war the Commonweal was a different place. The Monarch’s lands had already possessed their share of vacant provinces, gone to seed without a noble’s ruling hand and becoming a haunt for the lawless and the wild. The war had killed off many of the old families, and at the same time released onto the land far too many men who had known war, and would not take up the plough again.
Dal had thus become a