• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Thirty

There was precious little cover out here, and Dal and his followers were lying low in a copse of twisted trees, an old orchard gone wild decades ago. Had the Mercers been scouring the sky above them, then this mob of brigands would have been discovered almost at once even under cover of night, for there were more than fifty of them, filling the space between the trees to bursting. The Salmae’s hunters were not here, however. They were further south, which could mean one of two things, depending on who was in control.

Either they’ve cut us off from our retreat into Rhael, Dal considered, or we’ve stolen a march on them. So far, the skirmishing between Dal’s people and the Salmae had lasted over three ten-days, with a dozen vicious hit-and-run engagements, ambushes and surprise attacks from the bandits punctuating a history in which the Salmae’s Mercers chased all over the Rhael–Elas Mar border, trying to pin them down. Their conflict to date had been so mobile that Dal reckoned neither side could be sure who had the advantage in numbers. Dal’s people were split into smaller groups, because it would have been impossible to feed them otherwise, and so, of necessity, the hunters had split up as well, to try and contain them. The only numbers that mattered at any given time were those who were in evidence here and now.

The Mercers were better equipped, Dal knew, even if their luckless levy of peasants was not. If Dal had met them toe to toe, fighting them with honour and dignity, then those iridescent suits of armour, their masterworked swords and man-length recurved bows would carry the day swiftly. Not only were his own followers just a rabble under arms, but they had no stomach for a hard fight either. They had not signed on to die for him, just to get rich and fill their bellies. The Mercers, on the other hand, were relentless, and their peasant troops were just as scared of Salmae retribution as they were of Dal’s arrows.

And yet we’re not losing. It was hard to claim whether they were actually winning, in this chaotic shifting battlefield, but the simple fact that the Salmae had been unable to tie them down or force them into a serious battle seemed a victory in itself. Dal had lived the last few years in and around Siriell’s Town, jostling for power with the other bandit chiefs and sporadically wooing Siriell herself, playing his part in the chaotic running of that renegade province, which had depended wholly on the relative strengths of the major players there. Throughout this time, he had known that the people north of Rhael considered him their enemy.

A fair proportion of the population of seven villages had now turned out to swell the ranks of his followers. Several had burned their own homes. The mere appearance of Dal’s people seemed to spark off a madness of new horizons, people who had known nothing but gruelling work and taxation suddenly seeing for the first time another way. For Dal, the experience was like being carried away by a river current, but carried towards a destination that had never been within reach before. He knew, from personal experience, that a peasant’s life was hard, and that the privations of the war had only made it harder, but the people of Elas Mar had been living on the wrong side of poverty for years now as the Salmae settled their war debts through tithe and appropriation, without deigning to suffer privation themselves.

It would not be true to say that the people here wanted revenge, but they did want freedom. It took a desperate kind of squinting to mistake rule by brigands for that, but these were desperate times.

The thought kept occurring to Dal Arche now: What if we win? Would he set himself up as a local prince, put on the tyrant’s shoes and simply continue the way of the world, armed with everything noble but a bloodline? And what would the Prince-Major do about that? Reports suggested he had refused to come to the Salmae’s aid, and certainly none of