No, even worse was the loss of trained men. At least they were not the tool and die makers-those are more than worth their weight in gold.
"We can sift the ashes for metal," Isketerol said. "See to it-particularly the lead. We'll need storage for fresh supplies brought up from the city, or downriver. Get the less damaged buildings repaired…"
The man hesitated again, closed his eyes for a second, then went on: "Lord King, there is also the matter of your youngest brother Prince Gergenzol…"
Isketerol swallowed past a thick grief, his face a mask of cold determination. I knew he must have been struck down, or he would have been here to meet me. Just come to a man's full years, and the command of this town had been the first great task the King had entrusted to him.
"Lord King, we have not found the body. The commander's fort was utterly destroyed; with blasting charges, I think, as well as fire. There were many bodies, but few could be identified and many were… fragments. No trace of his wife or son was found."
The Iberian monarch took a long deep breath, fist clenching on the pommel of his saddle. His aides and war-captains looked on anxiously; there were few ties stronger than that between uncle and nephew, for their people.
"My brother Gergenzol fell in battle," Isketerol said harshly.
"That is a fitting end for a man. And the Crone comes for us all, soon or late."
He looked about. His cousin Miskelefol waited; a sound man, if not one whose wit flashed like a sword blade.
"Lord Miskelefol," he said. "You will assume command here. We will withdraw the army to cover this area."
"Lord King-" one of his war-captains said, a grizzled man who'd been helmsman on the Foam Treader before the Eagle People came. "That means opening the valley of the Tasweldan Errigu-abiden to raids at least, and perhaps to invasion."
Isketerol nodded. "True enough, Derentersal," he said.
And perhaps even the wild Highlanders will raise their heads again, he thought. To free the rich river country of the age-old terror of mountaineer raids had been the first and hardest of his works, and the means by which he had won the loyalty of the valley folk. Laying the mountains under law and tapping their treasures had been nigh as hard.
"Better to lose ground than to lose the army; that would mean the loss of the kingdom," he said.
Derentersal shook his head. "I don't see how they did it, lord," he said, looking at the ruins. "Oh, I can see how they did every bit of it. But to put them all together, at the right time, in a way so that they wouldn't be wrecked if anything went wrong…"
"They can talk across the air," Isketerol said. But that isn't the whole story. To move everything as if it were the fingers of a man's hand, how?
"Let us to our work," he said at last. "This will not be a quick war, or an easy one. But we will win it."
Miskelefol spoke, his eyes on the ruins of the commander's residence: "The new things have brought us much grief."
"And much power, and wealth," Isketerol said. "More than that, we have no choice. Now that the New Learning has come into the world, those who don't learn it will quickly become as helpless savages-then victims and slaves-to those who do. And now, we work."
The war-captains nodded; they'd seen the truth of those words themselves, in the lands Tartessos had overrun, and in the fate of those conquered by Great Achaea. They also moved briskly to their tasks. The King had never punished a man for bringing bad news, or for arguing a point within reason. The fate he brought on cowards or the lazy, though…
"But my Lord King… they flee! We have the victory; they run from the terror of our arms!"
William Walker looked around the command tent; his face was flatly impassive, which the more experienced among them knew was a danger signal. Outside the wind was battering at the canvas with increasing force, making the kerosene lamp over the map table sway. The men here were brigade commanders, the heads of the allied forces, his own staff… and his son Harold, sitting quietly in a corner and taking it all in.
First bad blizzard of the winter, he thought, as the fabric flapped. All right. He took control of himself with an enormous effort of will.
"No, Lord Guouwaxeus," he said with a softness that grated. "They are not fleeing. If they were fleeing, if they were breaking up and scattering, I would pursue them with at least part of our force. But they are not. They are making a fighting retreat, with is a very different thing."
The Achaean lord was a spare man with long black hair that was thinning on top. It brought out the starved wolfish look of his face.
"Are we not to follow up our victory?" he said.
Walker felt his will clench on his mind, like the flexing of a muscle that keeps hands clamped on a ladder over an abyss.
"Lord Guouwaxeus, has it ever occurred to you that there is a difference between going forward and winning!"
By his looks, it hadn't. About half the other men around the table looked similarly bewildered.
"Guouwaxeus, how many rounds a man does your brigade have? How many days' rations here and at the forward base? How many days' fodder for the horses?"
Guouwaxeus's lean face showed uncertainty for the first time; he looked around for the military clerk assigned to him. Walker looked instead to his chief of staff, Jack Morton. Morton had his problems-mostly trying to crawl into a brandy bottle if he wasn't watched, and a taste for humping veal-but before the Event he'd been a manager at Wal-Mart, something to do with inventory control, and a supply officer in the National Guard part-time. That made the weakness for little girls more than tolerable.
"Jack?" Walker said.
"Your Majesty, thirty-two rounds, four days' rations, no fodder," Morton said crisply, standing at parade rest.
There was a faint bruise around one eye; the best way Walker had found to keep him on the wagon in the field was to simply, personally, beat the living shit out of him every once in a while when he started to forget the previous lesson.
Walker swung around to face the others. "And that's about typical," he said. "Right now, we have just enough to get this army back to its sources of supply, If we're careful and start now."
He ran a hand over the map. "One-third of our forces are strung out guarding our lines of supply along these miserable mud-track roads. Every mile we go forward we get weaker and they"-he pointed to the east, where the dull rumble of artillery marked a rearguard action-"get stronger, falling back on their bases. And everything will get worse now that the weather's consistently bad. This army is too big to live off the land in poor country even if it hadn't been stripped, and it needs continuous resupply of ammunition and spare parts to fight at all."
About half of the dozen officers grouped around the map table looked as if they were getting it. The other half, Guouwaxeus worst of all, were staring at him as if he was reciting "Jabberwocky."
Someday, he thought, I will watch you die on a cross, Guouwaxeus, and every last one of your wellborn shit-for-brains relatives beside you. But not yet, unfortunately. It was one thing to teach a man how to march and shoot and dig, or even how to handle a company of riflemen, and something else entirely to teach them a whole new way to think about conflict. Damn, if only I'd had another five years before this war!