Every oasis is precious; a small, delicate world within a vast wasteland.


    <ul>


    <li style="font-weight: 400">The Commentaries of Aram ibn Bashear</li>


    </ul>


    ?


    16th Day of High Summer’s Moon, AC 297


    Suq Alnakhil, or Palm Market, was an oasis nearly as blessed with water as that beneath the Rock of Eayn Zarqa’. Rather than a series of interconnected ponds and springs, the settlement clung to the banks of a single long lake, surrounded by groves of date palms. Irrigation canals extended perhaps a quarter of a mile from the lake in every direction, and beyond the greenery fed by the waterworks, high dunes of sand piled, visible from every corner of the town and a constant reminder of the encroaching wastes.


    Ismet rode Sarkha, a battle-trained desert mare she’d left in her father’s stables when she went away to the University of Ma?īn so many years ago. Sarkha had foaled a strong colt while she was away, and under normal circumstances would not have been sent to war, but she’d held up admirably on the ride west through the Maghreb. Around her, the host broke into smaller units, each captain leading their men to make camp. Fazil rode back out of one of the streets that radiated from the lake at the center of the village, drawing rein within easy distance to speak, and both Captain Arkan and her father brought their own steeds in.


    “How many here?” Ismet asked.


    “Another hundred infantry,” Fazil answered, “and sixty-lancers.”


    Ismet added the number to the tally in her head. “With the men we picked up at Rabie Altimsah,” she said, “that gives us seven hundred and fifty.”


    “More will join us along the way,” Arkan said confidently. “There are many villages who have not yet sent men, but they will know our route.”


    “Less than you might think,” Salah ibn Yassar said with a frown. “We should have expected this. Many do not wish to risk taking a side. They will wait until it is clear who has the advantage before committing. And those who do support us must hold men back to deal with the raiders. If any more men do trickle in, they will not be enough to matter.”


    “There is more,” Fazil reported. “A merchant caravan coming east arrived yesterday. Both the merchants and the guards speak of reinforcements marched from the Capital to reinforce Eish Alsaqr Pass.”


    “Does Rizqullah ibn Zayyan still hold the command?” her father asked.


    “When they left, yes,” Fazil answered. “But if there are enough men from Ma?īn, it may not matter. The caliph’s own soldiers will not follow what they see as a rebellion.”


    “So what, we must rescue Commander Rizqullah from his own troops?” Arkan scowled. Ismet had come to appreciate her cousin’s husband as a reliable and loyal man, but it was painfully obvious to her that he lacked experience in actual battle.


    “See that the men are settled,” Ismet ordered, and even her father nodded at her words. It was an odd feeling, but more and more these men saw her as the Exarch who had fought daemons, and not the girl they had once known. There was a certain distance, she had found, that came with command. “We will plan over a meal in my tent, after.” With that, she turned Sarkha’s head toward the horse line.


    Her men had already raised the tent by the time she’d tied the mare up and left her to be brushed down. It had appeared out of nowhere, after they’d left Eayn Zarqa’: a traditional bayt al-shar of camel hair, standing up in a tall peak from the desert, with rugs spread for a floor and cloth hanging to divide it into rooms so that she would have privacy. Ismet had assumed she would sleep in the women’s section of her father’s tent, as she had when he took her on a journey when she was a child, but it seemed a truth of both the north and the south that a general must require their own tent. Fazil followed her in, by the light of small, portable oil lamps, but remained in the outer area, taking a seat on one of the cushions.


    Past the cloth flap that gave her privacy, Ismet unwound her red hijab. A pail of water from the oasis spring awaited her inside, with a second, smaller pail of shnan soap, for washing her hair. Made from the ashes of a shrub native to the wastes, the mixture had a tendency to gradually bleach blonde into one’s hair, but she still appreciated the luxury.


    “See to the map, please,” Ismet called out to Fazil as she unbound her hair and shed her armor, piece by piece. It was a relief to get the weight off, and her lower back ached from the day’s riding. Not so long ago, she would have died before undressing while speaking to a man, even with cloth between them to shield her modesty. But the urgency of the march made such feelings seem trivial, and perhaps her time in Narvonne had already begun to affect the way she thought.


    “There are less men than you had hoped,” Fazil replied. “Will there be enough?”


    “Do you remember the Hawk’s Nest well?” Ismet asked. Once she was nude, she set about washing her hair. “You must have travelled through the pass, when you first went to Ma?īn.”


    “I passed through it, yes,” Fazil replied. Whatever awkwardness had once existed between them had passed somewhere along the long journey. He was perhaps the only person she could trust all of her thoughts to. “It was a quick passage, however, and I did not see much. It is very narrow, from what I recall.”


    Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.


    “It is,” Ismet said, wringing the soapy water out of her hair and back into the pail. “There is a wall of stone that stretches between the rock faces on either side, cutting the road off entirely, with only a single gate. The top of the wall is held by a hundred archers at all times, and Commander Rizqullah has enough men to keep four full shifts.”


    “Four hundred archers, then,” Fazil tallied the sum. She could hear the clink of stones as he counted out troop markers.


    “And another four hundred guards,” Ismet continued, “to take shifts inspecting merchant caravans and travellers. Eight hundred, in total, is his normal complement.” She pulled her hair back, reaching for a comb to work out the tangles and knots.


    “That already outnumbers our men, even without reinforcements,” Fazil pointed out.


    “Yes,” Ismet agreed. “But there is something more important.”


    “That we have two Exarchs?” her aide asked.


    “No, though that is an advantage,” she replied. “My father and Commander Rizqullah are old friends.”


    “So you have said,” Fazil admitted. “But I do not believe we can rely on him to simply hand the pass over to us.”


    “They are old friends,” Ismet continued, “which is why, when Father took me to the university, we did not simply ride through the pass and continue on. Instead, we stayed with Rizqullah ibn Zayyan for a week as guests, during which time he gave us a tour of the fortifications.”


    There was a clacking sound, and Ismet smiled at the thought of Fazil dropping the stone markers. “You toured the fortifications?” he asked.


    “I was very interested,” Ismet recalled. “On my way to the capital, and determined to become an Exarch. It seemed like the sort of thing I should know. And, of course, I was the daughter of a powerful man, a leader in the tribe. It did not hurt that I was rumored to be quite beautiful. There were many guides eager to show me around. To explain how everything worked, and the reasons behind it all.”


    Fazil laughed. “I would have thought, by now, that you would cease to surprise me, General,” he said, once he was done. “It would seem that I was wrong.”


    ?


    Ismet held the corner of her veil aside to take a small bite of khubz, the traditional flatbread of the wastes, and could not help but smile again. It had been years since she’d had real khubz, cooked on hot stones.


    The remains of a meal lay scattered and defeated around her, with only the last few bites to be finished. Her father, Fazil, Arkan, and Samara ibnah Arif, the Exarch of Saint Nāshi?āt, sat around in a loose circle, having made themselves comfortable on the rugs and cushions of her command tent. Now that they had all finished eating, eyes naturally turned to the map and the stones, where Fazil had carefully marked out Ismet’s best estimates at the enemy troop numbers.


    “I have said before that I am no expert at such things,” Samara began, “but if I count those stones correctly, we are outnumbered.”


    “We are,” Ismet agreed. “They would have a hair more even if the pass had not been reinforced, and I think we must assume they have at least twelve hundred men, if not more. I do not see much of a point in sending less than four hundred to reinforce the pass, and the more men from Ma?īn, the less Nasir would worry about them turning on him.”


    “Traditional wisdom is that assaulting a fortified position, one would wish not merely a numerical superiority, but to have several times the number of troops defending,” Arkan pointed out.


    “This is so,” Ismet said. “But we have several advantages. First, division within the ranks of the men guarding the pass. Commander Rizqullah will not wish to betray his old friend, and his men will have no small amount of loyalty to him. They will have spent days cramped by new arrivals, men they do not know from the capital, who disrupt their routines. There will be resentment. When we reveal the presence of not one, but two Exarchs, that will divide them further.”


    “You wish to make a show of things, then,” her father guessed.


    “Indeed. We will ride forward to the wall and call up to speak with the commander. I will make our case in front of every man on the wall,” Ismet said. “The presence of Nasir’s men will mean they cannot openly turn against Ma?īn, but I think by the time we are done there will be very little desire to fight us. We will give them three days to make a decision.”


    “Can we truly afford to wait three days?” Arkan asked. “They could receive more reinforcements. They could send Ashar the Guardian.”


    “I am not certain he would come, even if ordered,” Samara mused.


    “You are both assuming he still lives,” Ismet pointed out. “With Valeria and Agrat in the capital, I would not count on it. In any case, we will not give them three days. Instead, we will send a small team here.”


    She pointed a finger at a very particular point on the lower slopes of the mountains, far beneath the pass, two switchbacks down along the road.


    “What is that?” Samara asked.


    “That,” Ismet said, “is a drainage.” Her father slapped his thighs and laughed.


    “Little Ismet, crawling around until you were filthy every day,” he recalled. “It seems your time was not wasted.”


    “The pass is very narrow,” Ismet explained. “There is no room to build barracks for eight hundred men. Instead, they dug into the rock face on either side. The armories, cisterns, cellars, all of it is mined out of the rock. However, when you mine down, you eventually reach water.”


    “Which requires drainage,” Fazil pointed out. He had the advantage that she had already explained it to him once.


    “It is small,” Ismet admitted. “Not even three feet high. We will have to crawl through the water. And there are metal grates along the way, to prevent exactly what we are going to do. I believe the strength of an Exarch, however, will be enough to knock the grates loose.”


    “I hope you are not asking me to do this,” Samara said.


    “No,” Ismet assured her. “Once we are through, there will be fighting. I will go myself, with a small group of men. We will crawl through the drainage shaft, then I will lead them up through the fort and out into the pass. We will open the gates, and then, Father, you will lead our army through.” She waited, holding her father’s gaze for a long moment.


    “Were you waiting for me to protest?” Salah ibn Yassar asked her with a grin. “You will be disappointed. Go ahead of us, daughter, and open the way. I will be waiting to follow you. Show all of the Caliphate what I have known since you were knee high: once your mind is set, it is useless to stand in your way.”