Helliconia Summer - Brian W. Aldiss [492]
She lay tense; then, sensing his inertia, spoke. When not crying out, Toress Lahl had a voice with a low liquid quality, as if there were a small brook at the back of her throat. She said, ‘That elder who came to you this afternoon. He saw himself going into slavery, as I see myself. What did you mean when you said to him that your Archpriest gave the only judgement possible?’
Shokerandit lay silent, struggling with his drunken self, struggling with the question, struggling with his impulse to strike the girl for so blatantly trying to turn the channel of his desires. In that silence, up from his consciousness rose an awareness darker than his wish to violate her, the awareness of an immutable fate. He threw down more liquor and the awareness rose closer.
He rolled over, the better to force his words on her.
‘Judgement, you say, woman? Judgement is delivered by the Azoiaxic, or else by the Oligarch – not by some biwacking holy man who would see his own troops bleed to serve his ends.’ He pointed to his friends carousing by the camp fire. ‘See those buffoons there? Like me, they come from Shivenink, a good part of the round globe away. It’s two hundred miles just to the frontiers of Uskutoshk. Lumbered with all our equipment, with the necessity for foraging for food, we cannot cover more than ten miles a day. How do you think we feed our stomachs in this season, madam?’
He shook her till her teeth rattled and she clung to him, saying in terror, ‘You feed, don’t you? I see your wagons carry supplies and your animals can graze, can’t they?’
He laughed. ‘Oh, we just feed, do we? On what, exactly? How many people do you think we have spread across the face of this land? The answer is something like ten thousand humans and ahumans, together with seven thousand yelk and whatever, including cavalry mounts. Each of those men needs two pounds of bread a day, with an extra one pound of other provisions, including a ration of yadahl. That adds up to thirteen and a half tons every day.
‘You can starve men. Our stomachs are hollow. But you must feed animals or they sicken. A yelk needs twenty pounds of fodder every day; which for seven thousand head comes to sixty-two odd tons a day. That makes some seventy-five tons to be carried or procured, but we can only transport nine tons …’
He lay silent, as if trying to convert the whole prospect in his mind into figures.
‘How do we make up the shortfall? We have to make it up on the move. We can requisition it from villages on our route – only there aren’t any villages in Chalce. We have to live off the land. The bread problem alone … You need twenty-four ounces of flour to bake a two-pound loaf. That means six and a half tons of flour to be found every day.
‘But that’s nothing to what the animals eat. You need an acre of green fodder to feed fifty yelk and hoxneys—’
Toress Lahl began to weep. Shokerandit propped himself on an elbow and gazed across the encampment as he spoke. Little sparks glowed in the dark here and there over a wide area, constantly obscured as bodies moved unseen between him and them. Some men sang; others abased themselves and communicated with the dead.
‘Suppose we take twenty days to reach Koriantura at the frontier, then our mounts will need to consume two thousand eight hundred acres of fodder. Your dead husband must have had to do similar sums, didn’t he?
‘Every day an army marches, it spends more time in quest of food than it does in moving forward. We have to mill our own grain – and there’s precious little of anything but wild grasses and shoatapraxi in these regions. We have to make expeditions to fell trees and gather wood for the bakeries. We have to set up field bakeries. We have to graze and water the yelk … Perhaps you begin to see why Isturiacha had to be left? History is against it.’
‘Well, I just don’t care,’ she said. ‘Am I an animal that you tell me how much these animals eat? You can all starve, the lot of you, for all I care. You got drunk on