As he arrived, they were still training. He stopped to watch the prodigy of it, though feeling his heart sink. Neither men nor beasts were much taking to the idea of discipline.
He had sent to Sarn, to his man Sfayot there: Give me all the horses they can spare, all the riding beetles, every beast broken for riding and not too weary to gallop. He had been obliged to send twice, because the Sarnesh had not taken him seriously the first time. Then the animals had started to arrive, trains of five, ten – twenty even. Two-thirds were horses, which he preferred for riding, being better for stamina and speed than most insects. Beyond that, they had been gifted as motley a nest of creatures as he had ever seen: a racing beetle long past its prime; a dozen plodding draught animals with high, rounded shells; a brace of nimble coach-horse beetles, fiery of temperament, their tails arching like scorpion stings. There were even a couple of exotic creatures that might have come from a menagerie: a black-and-white-striped riding spider that had the alarming tendency to jump ten feet when it became unsettled, and a low-slung, scuttling cricket that could give a horse a decent race over any short distance.The animals’ overall quality was variable, their temperament uncertain, since cavalry had little place in the Lowlander or imperial view of war. A combination of airborne troops, accurate crossbows and the Ant-kinden’s reluctance to rely on any minds not linked to their own had seen no development here of the noble art of horsemanship. Riding, after all, was for scouts and messengers, not real soldiers, so when Salma had told them what he planned, they had looked at him as though he were mad.
Except, that is, for men like Phalmes, who had served in the Twelve-Year War against Salma’s own people. They had seen how the Commonwealers fought.
Of course, the Commonwealers had better mounts, and longer to train. Still, the circling mounted rabble that Salma was now watching was at least managing to remain in the saddle. Phalmes, in the lead, kicked his mount on to a gallop, and most of the rest followed, the horses changing pace from a canter with rather more will than he had witnessed before, the insects scuttling after them, their legs speeding into a frantic blur.
Phalmes spotted him and slowed his mount, letting the column of riders behind disintegrate into a rabble. The Mynan rode over, looking as though he had been playing teacher to them far longer than he was happy with.
‘How goes your cavalry?’ Salma asked him.
Phalmes spat. ‘Three more broken legs since you went off,’ he said. ‘Still, the Sarnesh finally made good on those new saddles you designed for them, and riders are staying on more often than not, now we’ve got them. I haven’t yet explained why we need them, because I didn’t think they’d like it.’
Of course the Commonwealers had better saddles, too, and Salma had sketched his recollection of them, and sent the resulting drawing to Sarn for their leatherworkers to puzzle over. It seemed that something had actually come of that, although he had not been hopeful. The high front and rear were not to keep the rider seated so much as to prevent a charging lancer from being flung from the saddle on impact.
But Phalmes was right: it was not the time to explain about that.
‘Are they ready, then?’ he asked.
‘Not by a long ways,’ Phalmes told him. ‘Keep training them, they’ll get there eventually, but if you’ve got something happening soon, we can’t rely on them.’
Salma bared his teeth, but nodded. ‘I trust your judgment,’ he said, ‘but we need to make a stand sooner rather than later. Malkan’s reinforcements are with him already: the Sixth is joining the Seventh, and that means they’ll stop dragging their feet and start marching properly at last. If we’re to make good our promises to Sarn, then the time is upon us.’
General Malkan had ordered an automotive driven out to oversee the arrival himself, standing on its roof with some guards and his intelligence officer, eyes narrowed as he watched 15,000 soldiers marching towards his temporary camp.
‘Tell me about the Sixth, then,’ he directed, having observed they were in good order. Despite the long march, the troops on the ground were keeping ranks, forming columns between the snub-nosed wood and metal of the war automotives embellished with their turret-mounted artillery, and amid the huge plated transporters that plodded along patiently like enormous beetles. The scouts that had flown ahead and those on the flanks of the army were pulling in now as they neared the Seventh’s fortifications, filtering down to land ahead of the column in order to make their reports.
‘Well,’ the intelligence officer said, ‘you must have heard that the Sixth took the brunt of several engagements against the Commonwealers in the Twelve-Year War.’
‘Battle of Masaki, wasn’t it?’ Malkan asked.
‘Well… “battle” is probably overstating the case, General,’ the intelligence officer confessed. ‘Their then commander made the mistake of pushing too far into Dragonfly lands, ahead of the rest of the advance. My guess is that he mistook a lack of technical sophistication for mere weakness. In any event, the bulk of the Sixth was ambushed near Masaki by a Dragonfly army that outnumbered them at least ten to one. It was perhaps the largest single force the Commonweal ever put together.’
‘You sound impressed, Captain,’ Malkan noted.
‘Organization on that scale for an Inapt kinden is indeed impressive, General,’ the man said blandly. ‘Certainly it must have represented the high point of Commonweal strength, because the balance of the war was just a staggered holding action.’
‘So what about the Sixth? I thought it was a great triumph.’
‘Oh, well,’ the officer said, ‘a small detachment of Auxillian engineers had been split off to fortify a nearby camp, and thus escaped the massacre. Then they came under attack themselves from what should have been an overwhelming Commonwealer force. However they managed to hold out for seven days from behind their fortifications, and killed so many of the enemy that the relieving force was able to put the Dragonflies to flight and save the honour of the Empire.’
‘And those Auxillians were Bee-kinden?’
‘Yes, sir. And so the new Sixth, when it re-formed, became known as the Hive.’
Malkan watched as the gates to his camp opened, and the newcomers began to file in. At the very head of the army, the vanguard itself was composed of a rigid block of heavily armoured soldiers, too short and stocky to be Wasp-kinden, and dressed in black and gold uniforms halved down the front, rather than sporting the usual horizontal stripes. It seemed the Bee-kinden at Masaki had won themselves some privileges in their mindless defence of another race’s Empire.
‘So tell me about General Praeter,’ he said. ‘He wasn’t the original general, of course.’
‘No, sir. General Haken died at Masaki, which most think was the best thing that could have happened to him. Praeter was merely a lieutenant at the time, but he had already been given command of the engineers. Rumour suggests that he was not popular with his superiors, and it was a punishment duty.’
‘Engineers and glory seldom go hand in hand,’ Malkan admitted. Praeter had been the man the Empire chose to make a hero, though. He had been the only Wasp-kinden officer available for the post, hence the man’s sudden rise through the ranks.
‘They say he is a little… too comfortable with the Auxillians,’ the intelligence officer said carefully, ‘and he likes things done his way. Traditional ways.’
‘We shall have to see about that,’ Malkan decided. ‘Send a message to him. Give him two hours to settle his men, and then I request his presence.’