The Battles of Talal

Though it was already dark outside, Taylor's next stop was the reading room, a rock-hewn fourth-floor chamber in the doyennes' arc. It was the public face of Sand Castle's library, and it was the only part of the library Taylor was allowed to enter. Much of the city was dug into the surrounding bluff, but the most important resources were deep inside the stone, in hidden chambers. The seed vault and library both fell into this category and, as a man, he was not allowed to visit either. Doyennes and tablas guarded their work jealously, and the only way Taylor could get inside the most sacred places was to dress convincingly as a woman, learn the abacus, and spend at least a year rattling beads in the Circle. As interesting as all that sounded, Taylor didn't have a year to spare. The reading room was as far as he was ever likely to get.

Since he was making people work past daylight hours, the long tables were lit with spirit lamps. Nexus students made copies of several texts he wanted, while two adults scanned through a small mountain of boards to winnow them down to relevant articles for his research. Taylor spent his evening hours being closely watched by Keeper Rigieta, or the Woman of Poison Spines as he liked to think of her. She was the tabla in charge of the library. She also complained, in subtle ways, about every request he made and hovered over him endlessly. She hovered, and she complained, but she also got him everything he needed. As working relationships went, it was both functional and uncomfortable.

This evening brought a surprise: Rigieta was sitting at a table with Anisca and Vizana, far from where the work was going on, having tea and chatting amiably. Vizana was the Nexus librarian, but Taylor hadn't asked her to come; he only needed to borrow some of her people for a couple of weeks. Anisca was the equivalent of Taylor's doyenne and was, semi-secretly, Second Princess Francisca Odemira of Lavradio. Her long stripe of hair ran from her crown to the nape of her neck, its silver-blue shine tied back in rows of complicated knots and ornaments: an Odemira family style.

Anisca was working, he saw, smoothing over whatever friction he'd accidentally caused between himself and Rigieta. She was wearing one of her "let's get to know each other" faces and was pointedly focused on what Rigieta was saying instead of meeting his eyes. Taylor left her to her work and went to his accustomed table, where he found everything he needed for the night already in place.

It was a far cry from how he'd started.

At their first meeting, things did not go smoothly between Taylor and the library's Keeper. She hovered over him as he browsed the catalog, flipping through boards at random.

"If Pasha Phillip would inform his Keeper of his needs, they would be seen to in good order." She was a senior tabla, and the circle's hand in Sand Castle's library. She had half a dozen tablas who worked under her, any of whom could have helped him, but she instead chose to stand close enough for the vibrissae on her arms to brush against him when he turned unexpectedly. Taylor didn't know how other mauls behaved in her library — the scant visitors to the reading room all seemed to be women — but she behaved like he might deface or destroy her precious boards. Or, worse, put them out of order.

"What your Pasha needs right now is a good sense of what's here, before he prioritizes his reading." She continued to hover while he finished his random crawl through the catalog, scanning descriptions of the library's contents. Most of it was records of circle deliberations and gardener records, all organized by date and bundled into volumes of three weeks each. There was a vast quantity of those records, going back almost three hundred years. If they had truly kept all of it, then there were kilometers of tunnels full of preserved records, somewhere inside the mesa. Maybe the Keeper worried he'd send her off into the deepest, most forgotten reaches of the archives to search for boards that had become unreadable or, worse, disorganized.

Aside from the logs, there were texts on forest agriculture, herb lore, husbandry, old weaver patterns, maps of the desert as surveyed by past hunters, battle records, and old fables that even the Calique might have forgotten. Like so many collections, the Keeper's domain only extended to a time a few decades after people emerged from the underground cities to live on the surface. Taylor would bet almost anything they had older records, and he would not be allowed to see them unless he forced his way in. The doyennes tabooed a great many topics, but what most of them had in common was Enclave's past hostility toward them. The taboos silenced to protect, usually from the excesses of Enclave zeal.

"Let's start with the summaries of every Kashmar campaign, working backward."

"All of them? That's a lot of reading." For a man, is what she meant.

"They're relatively short, and there's only twenty-five of them. Can I bring people in to make copies?"

Her surprise was palpable. "For what purpose?"

"Whenever I find something good, I try to add it to the Nexus library."

"Any garden is allowed to make copies, using their own materials."

"Wonderful." He let his smile speak for him, hoping it would warm up the keeper a little. When he had temporarily occupied Pashtuk's garden, Taylor made free use of their library and noticed they had copied volumes from Sand Castle. It was a tantalizing peek into what might be available.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

The stacks of boards started coming to him, borne by tablas, three battles at a time. Each report came in three parts, written by mauls, doyennes, and the Pasha respectively. It didn't take long to notice the first trend: victories produced reports that mainly agreed with each other, while defeats did the exact opposite.

The cause of the long-running conflict was simple and oft-recounted in the records. Sand Castle was, to Taylor's surprise, Old Kashmar. The two peoples used to be one, back when they emerged onto the surface and first settled into the conveniently sheltered oasis. Life in the desert grew increasingly hard, and the majority followed a strongman named Hadith into the north, past Morufu's Teeth, into a more hospitable climate to brutalize total strangers and take their land. The remainder stayed in the south and adapted. The city-state of Kashmar soon held land amounting to a fifth of the desert's size but supported twice its population.

After the split, the divisions grew more distinct as the two groups defined themselves as much in opposition to each other as by their native values. They now had nothing in common except for an affinity for men's make-up, which was superficial: what Calique men wore to brand themselves with a garden's identity, Kashmari men wore for fashion.

Every Tyrant of Kashmar claimed dominion over all of Kravikas. The campaigns to reunite the divided people started less than a century after the emergence, by Taylor's estimation. Each Tyrant would send their putative heirs to reclaim the desert south and prove their worth to be the next Tyrant. Many of these excursions were more form than substance. A few people would die, some Calique would get captured, goods would be stolen from a garden (usually whichever one was farthest north at the time), and the Tyrant would hold a victory parade for the returning heir. Other campaigns were more determined, and the most successful of these happened just after the Calique had suffered some other blow.

When he finished all the official summaries, Taylor selected six battles that were of special interest. Three of them were led by Talal, a famous and oft-quoted figure. "I need more information about these six campaigns. Can I get circle deliberations and harvest summaries for these periods? And if the Pasha or the mauls left anything, I'd like those too."

"Some of these campaigns were failures," Rigieta said doubtfully.

"True," he agreed, "but each one looks like a different kind of failure. I need more information."

"Pasha Phillip," admonished the keeper, "you have singlehandedly made more work for me than all other mauls put together."

"That's a shame. I'm sorry the mauls don't see your value." He watched her emotions get buffeted from disgruntled to proud at being recognized to open suspicion of a young man's flattery. Taylor's rule in every world was to love one's librarian. If knowledge was power, then a good librarian was a most potent lever. However, they weren't always accustomed to open appreciation.

He pushed onward before she could ponder what he might be up to. "Are there any biographies of Talal?"

"We are not Kashmari. We don't glorify a person, except in the stories hunters tell each other around their fires at night. Why would you want such a thing?"

"I was hoping to get a sense of him, and his thoughts."

"If you want Talal's thoughts, why not read them directly? He left a volume, The Battles of Talal."

Taylor nearly leaped out of his seat. Talal was a name he'd heard from Calique lips more than a few times in passing, and he knew young hunters got a dose of his battle lore as part of their early training. Talal was Pasha on three occasions and promptly gave up the title after each campaign. The little Taylor had heard seemed too mythologized to be useful, which prompted him to look for the true record of Talal's times as Pasha. If the three-time Pasha bothered to leave a book behind, then it was likely worth reading.

"Yes, please. Put that at the top of the list."

By the time he'd spent an hour on Battles, Taylor knew he'd found a superb addition to the Nexus library and a useful text for his students. At his first opportunity, he called Vizana and asked her to send him scribes.

With Keeper Rigieta at a comfortable distance and a stack of boards waiting for him, Taylor dug into a campaign where Sand Castle fell, the first of only two instances. Talal was popularly remembered as the Pasha who recovered Sand Castle from the occupying Kashmari. What most people didn't know, or chose not to talk about, was that he was the Pasha who lost Sand Castle. More accurately, he gave it up to invaders. The mauls' summary excoriated Talal for his failures, while the doyennes' report lamented the perfidy of mauls in general. Talal's summary was brief:

Kashmar has assembled a great host. The winning course is to burn the gardens in their path, but none are willing to sacrifice themselves for a neighbor. So, Kashmar will finally pluck the fruit it has so longed for. May it burn the Tyrant's tongue and run through him.

Less than a year after occupying Sand Castle, Kashmar abandoned it. They were chased out of the city, their leader dead, with fewer than a third of their forces remaining. The record offered little explanation on how it happened, only that Talal had commanded the Calique and drove them out. There wasn't even a summary report on the city's recapture.

Obviously, the doyennes tabooed the event and then buried or destroyed the records. Taylor tried to think of what would justify such a notable deletion. Talal could have used secret ways in and out of the city, passages that shouldn't be in the records. Or, he might have used ancient weapons that Enclave couldn't learn about. The reason could even be shame, if Talal ran an armed resistance and committed acts people didn't want to remember. Resistance movements were vicious and often killed fellow countrymen deemed too helpful to the enemy. Doynnes might try to bury the memory of internecine violence in the name of peace. A quick check confirmed the rosters of mauls and doyennes before and after the occupation were almost entirely different.

Meanwhile, The Battles of Talal offered bloody and considerable advice on insurrectionist warfare. Taylor doubted they were just theoretical musings.

He mulled over what he had learned as women at the other end of the room talked and drank tea. A lot of valuable information got passed around as casual small talk. Relationships were made or broken. This group's body language clearly showed a friendly deference toward Anisca. She was so good at this that even Woman of Poison Spines was warming up to her.

Talal had written, The battles you most need to win are the first you must fight: to earn the trust of your Circle. Despite their rocky beginning, Taylor was glad to have Anisca fighting on his side.