This is the thirty-seventh chapter of Wealthgiver, an alternate history serial romance about nationalism and cave-Thracians. For the back-of-the-book description and an index of chapters, click here. For the beginning, click here. For the previous chapter, click here.
Night came quickly in the valley south of Peshtera. Shadows rose up the cliffs like floodwater, squeezing the light on the mountainside into an ever thinner, ever more golden line.
"Why did you offer them food?" Zülfü demanded. "There won't be anything in Peshtera for a bunch of refugees to eat!"
The burly captain stood closer to Andrei than he'd ever come before, very nearly shouting, but careful not to step on the map. "There's barely enough stored grain in Pazardjik to keep the other half of our army supplied. Now, instead of marching with reinforcements, we're bringing them more mouths to feed. Babies and camp followers and loud old women." He tossed his head in the direction of Batak's sole surviving Good, who sat next to a cooking fire, cloth heaped around her legs, gesturing at Kori with both canes.
Andrei, seated on his camp stool, resisted the urge to smile. Zülfü was relieved because he hadn't had to massacre a whole bunch of civilians. In fact, he had fed them. Now the grocer's bill was due, though, and it was shockingly high.
Spring was not the best time to field an army. Winter food stores were at their lowest, and few people had any spare resources to send to the front. The young men were needed for hoeing, planting, and taking the cattle up the mountain. Instead, Andrei was planning how to plow their bodies into the soil.
He looked north and west, where the sky burned orange over the humped darkness of the Holy Mountain. "Does Nikolai have the same problem? General?"
Cenk straightened from the miniature sacrificial pit he'd been digging next to Andrei's map. "Not as acutely as our armies, My Master. They will have pulled supplies in from Peshtera."
"Plundered the town, in other words," said Andrei. "Making its citizens both less willing and less able to resist us."
"And less able to supply us as well." Zülfü's teeth ground audibly. "If we win the first battle."
A battle they would have to fight tomorrow. Fight, or starve where they camped. The resources of the Bessian Army were, in decreasing order and starting from zero: artillery, horses, ammunition, food, guns, men, and daggers.
"Battle." Cenk spat the word out with thick contempt. "Lining up soldiers in their gaudy uniforms and marching them across a field."
"Ah," said Zülfü. "Storming the Depths."
Andrei blinked away from the sunset behind the Mountain. "Doing what to the Depths? What have you two been planning without thinking to inform me?"
Cenk squared his shoulders and raised his chin. "My Master, we are the Good. Our wars are not fought with vast armies and interminable supply chains, but with the dagger and the rifle, the poisoned wine, the silent step in the shadows."
"We storm the Depths," said Zülfü. "We can take them."
"With how many men?" Andrei realized as he asked the question that it was rhetorical. "None. We have nobody to spare." He beckoned. "Come, go over the map with me one more time before the light fails completely."
Cenk stepped up out of his pit. "My Master, if we can only assassinate Nikolai, the rest of his forces will crumble."
"Why would they do that? They're the Good; they're in this for their own self-interest. No. Before we take the mountain, we take the town."
He gestured at the map at his feet. It was not stretched on cloth, nor did it cover the whole of the Balkans and Anatolia. It consisted of lines scratched into the dirt, and focused closely on Peshtera.
The town lay east and downhill of the western Rhodope Mountain and its Sacred Depths. The Stara river approached from the south before cutting Peshtera in two and slanting off to the northeast. There, the valley that led to Pazardjik was currently occupied by the Bessian Army's Eastern Division. Andrei and his Western Division were camped at the bend in the river, with the Stara to their east and at their backs.
"The western flanks of the Eastern Division march fist," Andrei recited. "They lead the rest, which come straight at Peshtera."
Silence from the two officers while Andrei pressed his hands to his iliac crests and arched his spine. His lower back still ached from the day's riding.
"Ow. Uf. At that time, our division will march north into the city." Andrei pointed. "We'll have to sneak messengers past Peshtera to get the status—"
Cenk cleared his throat. "My Master, we have already done so."
Andrei looked up. "Done what? When?"
"Our spies have been in contact with each other since we entered the mountains."
"Since this morning? Something else nobody told me. Why?"
Cenk smiled and shook his head. "The corporal who said he'd informed you must have been a counter-spy."
"And my lieutenant." Zülfü chuckled, as if at the naughty trick of a clever boy.
Andrei drew his hand down his face. "Of course. What were these traitors supposed to tell me?"
"The bridges across the Stara have been burned," said Zülfü, "and our men hold the Peristera fortress."
"Someone's men do."
Andrei hoped the captain would tell him he was wrong to be so cynical, but the Bessian only shrugged. "At any rate, there are no large guns there."
"And why not?" Andrei tapped the fortress on his map, on the west side of the road that led north out of Peshtera. "It took a day for the Pazardjik army to arrive here. Nikolai surely knew they were coming, and he had enough time to emplace the Krupp guns there. Why didn't he?"
"He only has four," said Cenk. "He emplaced them on the hillside, behind palisades and lines of rifle pits dug."
Four guns. That matched what Kori had told him, and she would know. "Where, exactly?"
Andrei well knew the range of a Krupp artillery piece. Depending on how far down the hill Nikolai was willing to place them, the mountain guns could threaten the entire town.
Cenk knelt to point at a circle on the map. "Right here around the entrance to the Sacred Depths, My Master. On the meadow where we met."
Looking down at his map, Andrei almost smiled. It could be a trick, but Andrei didn't see how. Nikolai hadn't had time to buy new weapons or ship them in. He was acting as if Peshtera were already lost, or as if it didn't matter.
"This makes today easier," he said. "Or at least, not impossible. Tomorrow, though, when we besiege the Mountain…"
"My Master," said Cenk. "We can disable those Krupp guns. We will have to."
"All right," said Andrei. "Not you, though, unless you plan to ride your horse silently up the mountain at midnight. Captain Zülfü, pick your men, as many as you think fitting. Sneak past Nikolai's defenses. Stop those guns from firing. General Cenk, now tell me about his cavalry."
Cenk raised his chin and clicked his heels, hiding whatever disappointment he might feel. "Nikolai's best strategy is to send his horsemen north and south to hammer at us. We have…" he sighed. "…five horses, which we will use to carry messages only. The enemy cavalry will have to be slowly worn down. We'll try to break up their formations and lure or drive them into alleys. It will be bad work, killing those horsemen."
"Yes," said Andrei. "It will. Is the Eastern Division ready to attack?" Those were his men from Pazardjik. Or men, at any rate. Whether they were his, Andrei could not guess.
"My Master, both your armies stand ready to attack at dawn."
"I would be glad to hear that," said Andrei, "if it happened to be true."
"The lie is the deepest truth, My Master. Just as Nikolai's spies seek to frustrate us, we stand ready to strike against him. Our Bessians have also infiltrated the Hadeans on the hillside of the Holy Mountain and in Peshtera, itself." Cenk laced his fingers together. "Even now, in tents and rifle pits, every Good is trying to secretly convince every other Good to switch sides. The side that gives the better opportunity will be welcomed. A whisper campaign."
Which Andrei was not confident he would win. He had seen enough men in total confidence of their own powers of ratiocination, even as they fell into step behind a fire-breathing demagogue. He'd been one.
"The population of the town is mostly Bessian, but only just," said Cenk, following his own thoughts. "Of this population, I expect half are already on our side. The rest must be convinced."
Andrei chuckled. "Convinced? There's a time for telling the patient to rest and take his tea, and then there's a time when you strap him down and grab the bone saw."
It was hard to tell in the gathering dark, but Andrei thought Cenk's face grew pale. "Some households will have to be destroyed, yes, but my point, My Lord, is that our army only has to take these households, not the entire town."
"It will be easier to attract the non-Bessians to our cause if we haven't besieged them," said Zülfü, and Andrei understood. The storming of the Depths, the whisper campaign. These men were afraid.
Andrei knew why. He'd spent five months besieging Pleven.
It had been the worst part of the war. Not marching forward, not even able to fight. Just waiting and dying.
"This won't be a siege," he reassured himself and his officers. "Our armies are only on three sides of the town. We burn the bridges across the Stara—oh, yes, we did that already—and we advance at first light. The hungry refugees are already in town ahead of us. When we squeeze, they and most of the town's population will have nowhere to go but west, uphill, toward the entrance to the Sacred Depths."
He caught the dubious look his officers shared with each other.
"Nikolai has had no rifle pits dug around the Peshtera," Andrei reminded them. "Why, when it would be so much easier down here in the valley? Because he's hording all of his resources on the hillside. The Sacred Depths are all that's important to him. The town is just his first line of defense."
All three men turned their faces toward the heights west of Peshtera, squinting. "That's where Nikolai will pull back," said Zülfü.
Andrei's eyes caught the light on the mountain ridge as it winked out, and his scowl became a grin. "So let's help him."
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