Bitter Spring

Fifteen kilometers from Bitter Spring, Zaid arranged his army in full battle array. Blocks of spearmen, cavalry, and skirmishers, all with battle banners flying and signal drummers keeping time, spread out across the basin and marched together to the battleground. They could smell the oasis, the green and wet, and they wanted nothing more than to kill their rebel enemies and take the luscious garden for themselves.

But, there was nobody in or near Bitter Spring. They marched through the field of mischus and surrounded the city without resistance. Zaid forbade anyone from going inside until the immediate area could be scouted.

For generations, there had always been a battle at Bitter Spring. Zaid's father fought there, as did his father before him. The residents always fought for their home with assistance from nearby allies. It was the most contested site in the desert. For Kashmar, it was the first stepping stone to conquest, a base from which to attack the next garden on their way to Sand Castle. For the rebel tribes, it was the best chance to extract blood from the invaders. Defeating the tribes this way was how Kashmar had punished or weakened them in the past.

But now, the outer wall was unmanned. Zaid's army, tired and thirsty as they were, wanted to rush into the oasis heedless of any dangers, but their commanders were successful in holding them back. Scouts were sent ahead. It said something about their newfound caution that they avoided the gates entirely. The scout teams entered Bitter Spring by climbing the wall at different points, using rope ladders.

The initial reports were strange, but encouraging. There were no buildings inside. Other than the outer wall, there weren't two bricks left standing on top of each other. The houses were torn down to their foundations and left as piles of rubble, so as not to shelter the enemy. Yet, the oasis itself was untouched, lush and fruitful. The first returning scouts came bearing sacks of sticky palm fruit and cool melons. The oasis could feed thousands if they picked it clean, and it could water the entire army.

It was obvious the Pasha would face Zaid's army elsewhere. If he had convinced all his tribes to fight together, then he had to avoid any open engagements involving smaller numbers of men. That was a sound strategy, but letting Zaid have the food and water at Bitter Spring for nothing would be a hard price for him to pay. A more ruthless man would have burned the oasis, no matter how sacred these places were to the people who lived there. For some reason, Zaid thought of Zorda with two arrows in his back. He was getting soft if he was mourning dead allies while in the middle of a war. If the old man needed grieving, Zaid would do it after he had his victory.

Zaid had his trains form a circle around the town and posted guards on the wall. Nobody was to enter the town until scouts returned with buckets of water, and the water could be tested for poison. Before the deployments were even properly underway, he could hear screams and the sounds of, not fighting exactly, but chopping wood.

"Not for nothing then," he said to himself. Then to Bassel, "form up the Eighth at the north gate, and the Third at the west. Sweep and destroy." Runners soon sprinted for the correct formations of soldiers to find their commanders and relay the order. Drums were sounded and men marched into the gates. Zaid would have deployed more fighters if he could, but the town and oasis were too small to hold his entire army all at once. Four thousand men should easily overrun whoever was hiding there. They looked eager to fight, to do something other than march and take hits from the enemy.

As soon as it was deemed safe, Zaid took a position on the wall where he could watch the engagement, standing next to Eight's commander. Third regiment's commander and his staff were far to their right, near the west gate.

In the grove of palms, men were hacking at thorny vines with swords and knives. The weapons couldn't bite deep enough and it took several strikes to cut even a small vine. Wherever a man lost his footing, he was soon dragged away toward the garden's center, shouting for help. More men would gather and try to rescue him, only to be dragged along and overcome with even more vines. As the commanders watched, the plants grew larger, the vines thicker. The wounded who escaped were white and shaking, covered in deep punctures.

Eighth commander looked shocked. "It's a monster."

"Bloodvine," said Zaid's lead scout. "The thorns are its fangs. It snares live prey and sucks their blood. But I've never seen it like this."

Zaid let the battle continue. Four thousand men weren't going to lose against a plant. But as the soldiers labored, the vines kept spreading. There were a hundred hectares of garden before him, and he could spot signs of movement everywhere he looked. At the nearest battlefront, tall green buds were rising, their tightly closed petals just peaking over the top canopy of palms.

"Sound retreat," the Princeps ordered, "burn it all."

"Yes, Princeps." Eighth commander ordered his drummer, and the first booming notes sounded for attention. "But what about the food?"

"We are the food, Eight. Let's not offer up any more of ourselves."

The drumming stopped before the retreat was fully sounded, because the drummer fell off the wall, instruments and all, and landed in the ruins with a clatter of breaking wood and bone. When Zaid looked for the third's commander, his drummer was also gone. Then, the commander himself collapsed. Zaid fell to the ground and shouted for everyone near him to take cover. He heard an arrow fly above his head, passing him too fast to see. He looked behind him to see who else was hit, and Bassel's fingers groped weakly toward his bleeding chest. Zaid crawled to him to press useless hands against the wound.

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"My Prince," Bassel wheezed, "my destiny … departs … from yours."

"Runners!" Zaid shoved his anger aside. Bassel had been with him for decades. They had trained together as recruits in the Chargers. He was supposed to support Zaid when he became Tyrant, but the life bled out of him through Zaid's fingers. Men died in wars. Except himself, apparently. That was twice he had escaped the deadly snipers. He leaned his head over the outside edge of the wall. "Send messengers to third and eighth. Tell them to get out of there!" Men acknowledged his orders and ran at speed, gifted by their beast traits with long swift strides.

He didn't need to order the perimeter swept: other commanders had noticed the latest volleys and were reacting appropriately. Two battalions of Zaid's own First Regiment were quick-marching over the ground behind a piercing phalanx of bronze. They weren't likely to hit anything, but the maneuver would force their invisible enemy to move out of range.

"More buds," pointed the scout. In a dozen locations widely spread throughout the garden, bright buds were stretching towards the sky. The first ones were changing colors now, and less tightly wound. "The pollen is poisonous. If they bloom …"

Zaid understood. "Everyone off the wall." He was the first to clamber down the rope ladder, and immediately ordered all units to retreat from the town's walls to a distance of a hundred meters. The exact distance wasn't based on anything concrete, he just needed a number that might be far enough away to avoid the worst damage. All of Kashmar's army put space between itself and the walls of Bitter Spring, pulling what survivors they could from the garden's deadly grip.

From a distance and standing atop a train car, Zaid had a good view of the bloodvine's flowers. He'd never seen a monster like it. The buds turned shades of yellow and orange and unfurled into glorious, impossibly massive blooms that dominated the tiny palms beneath them. It had drunk deep from the well of Kashmari manhood, and there was the result.

"They look like squash blossoms," observed Zaid.

"Bloodvine is a gourd," the scout informed him. "Meaty flesh, a lot like young futobel. Fantastic roasted. But don't plant the seeds unless you know what you're getting into."

What was left of Third Regiment came stumbling out the west gate and shut it behind them. Moments later, the gargantuan blossoms sighed and slumped while exhaling a yellow cloud over Bitter Spring. Much of it floated down in a slow-moving wave, drenching the trees in yellow powder. Then, like too much water poured into a cup, the cloud billowed up over the walls and spilled down into the mischus. The prevailing breeze pushed the yellow mist eastward, but Second Regiment was ready for it. They moved out of the way in double time and never panicked.

"Burn it all," Zaid ordered. His enemy had bled him without giving up anything in return. Well, that wasn't quite true, was it? It cost the Pasha an entire garden, one that would take a generation to restore properly. Some among the tribes would count it too high a price for only a fraction of Zaid's army.

Flaming oil pots arced over the wall, and firelight soon glowed over the oasis while men watched their hopes for fresh food go up in smoke. The impressive petals looming over everything began to blacken.

Zaid knew the reports' contents before they arrived. He lost two regimental commanders and over three thousand men. There was water in the wells, but he could assume they were capped like Satoma's. They could harvest the mischus and scrape moisture out of the hardy plants (rebels did that kind of thing all the time), but some of it was covered in poisonous spores. Any man who inhaled or ate the spores would be sick for longer than it took to finish the campaign.

As the scattered flames joined into a proper inferno, unbidden words came to Zaid. Leave the invader with nothing. Let him fight the desert.

"I know what he's doing," he realized. "This is Talal."

"He's using Talal against us." That statement from the Princeps meant something to only some of his commanders. They gathered in a tent around a big map of the desert, with a lot of empty space between points of interest. There were occasional oases and, far to the interior, Sand Castle. A scattering of black dots indicated watering holes, wells without any plant growth around them.

Zaid explained, "Talal was a powerful Pasha, pre-Alignment. His preferred strategy was to destroy his outer oases and lure his enemy to the deep desert. After the invaders, that's us by the way, were weakened by thirst and heat, he would attack with fresh troops from secret watering holes."

It was obvious to everyone that the army was in trouble. They had to cut water rations. Their progress had slowed thanks to sabotaged roads and a complete lack of disciples to fix them. The army could move faster if it left the supply train behind, but that meant troops would arrive in Sand Castle exhausted and starving while the supplies were likely to be captured or destroyed. The army was still in fighting condition, but that wouldn't last for more than a few days.

Tenth commander asked the obvious question. "How do we counter Talal?"

"Normally, with Sanuye," said Zaid. "If you know where those watering holes are and you have good coordination, you can swarm them with reconnaissance in force. Wherever you find the enemy, you mass and attack. They won't all be at the same place, which makes them easy to overwhelm if you have superior numbers."

"You said 'normally'," observed Ten.

"This new pasha is young, but he's smart. Inventive. And he has disciples. If Phillip has read Talal, then he has also read Sanuye. We have to assume he's sealed up all the wells between here and Sand Castle. It's no secret that we've scoured the desert for decades, mapping out watering holes. There have been skirmishes over it. But, he has a new watering hole near here, one he's kept very secret."

Zaid put his finger on the map, about twenty kilometers east of Bitter Spring. "It's a mine carved into the banks of the Great River. He doesn't know we know about it. At worst, we'll find water there. At best, that's where he's hiding the bulk of his forces right now."

"How do we know about it?" Ninth's commander sounded doubtful. "It could be a trap."

"Sapphires," added Zaid's lead scout. "Quantities of rough-cut gems started showing up in Ullidia and Gallia. The first families tried to buy up the excess supply and went looking for the source. They spent massive amounts of money before they realized the sapphires weren't passing through the desert trade route; they were coming from the desert. They spent a lot of lives trying to find the source and failed. Our scouts are better than theirs. They found several mines here." The scout placed markers on half a dozen sites along the Great River. "We thought the mines were long dead, but apparently Nexus found ways to get more gems from them. Our scouts were discovered and driven away from every site, except this one. Old records call it Laggard's Shaft. None of the regiments were briefed because the information was so secret."

"Circumstances change," added the Princeps, "and now it's our primary target. We'll take all the cavalry, mounted skirmishers, and battalions capable of a quick march. The rest of the army will stay in Bitter Spring. Pull whatever water is left from the wells, and dig new ones. We know there's water near the surface here. We just have to dig for it."

Soon, orders were streaming out of the command tent as the commanders refined their plans and mobilized their men.