Page 31 of The Gathering Storm (The Wheel of Time 12)

Rodel Ituralde had seen a lot of battlefields. Some things were always the same. Dead men like piles of rags, lying in heaps. Ravens eager to dine. Groans, cries, whimpers and mumbles from those unlucky enough to need a long time to die.

Each battlefield also had its own individual print. You could read a battle like the trail of passing game. Corpses lying in rows that were disturbingly straight indicated a charge of footmen who had been pressed against volleys of arrows. Scattered and trampled bodies were the result of infantry breaking before heavy cavalry. This battle had seen large numbers of Seanchan crushed up against the walls of Darluna, where they had fought with desperation. Hammered against the stone. One section of wall was completely torn away where some damane had tried to escape into the city. Fighting in streets and among homes would have favored the Seanchan. They hadn’t made it in time.

Ituralde rode his roan gelding through the mess. Battle was always a mess. The only neat battles were the ones in stories or history books. Those had been cleansed and scoured by the abrasive hands of scholars looking for conciseness. “Aggressor won, fifty-three thousand killed” or “Defender stood, twenty thousand fallen.”

What would be written of this battle? It would depend on who was writing. They would neglect to include the blood, pounded into the earth to make mud. The bodies, broken, pierced and mangled. The ground torn in swaths by enraged damane. Perhaps they would remember the numbers; those often seemed important to scribes. Half of Ituralde’s hundred thousand, dead. On any other battlefield, fifty thousand casualties would have shamed and angered him. But he’d faced down a force three times his size, and one with damane at that.

He followed the young messenger who had fetched him, a boy of perhaps twelve, wearing a Seanchan uniform of red and green. They passed a fallen standard, hanging from a broken pole with the tip driven into mud. It bore the sign of a sun being crossed by six gulls. Ituralde hated not knowing the houses and names of the men he was fighting, but there was no way to tell with the foreign Seanchan.

The shadows cast by a dying evening sun striped the field. Soon a blanket of darkness would cradle the bodies, and the survivors could pretend for a time that the grassland was a grave for their friends. And for the people their friends had killed. He rounded a small hillock, coming to a scattered pattern of fallen Seanchan elite. Most of these dead wore those insectlike helms. Bent, cracked, or dented. Dead eyes stared blankly from openings behind twisted mandibles.

The Seanchan general was alive, if just barely. His helmet was off, and there was blood on his lips. He leaned against a large, moss-covered boulder, back supported by a bundled cloak, as if he were waiting for a meal to be delivered. Of course, that image was marred by his twisted leg and the broken haft of a spear punching through the front of his stomach.

Ituralde dismounted. Like most of his men, Ituralde wore worker’s clothing—simple brown trousers and coat, borrowed off of the man who had taken Ituralde’s uniform as part of the trap.

It felt odd to be out of uniform. A man like this General Turan did not deserve a soldier

in drab. Ituralde waved the messenger boy to stand back, out of earshot, then approached the Seanchan alone.

“You’re him, then,” Turan said, looking up at Ituralde, speaking with that slow Seanchan drawl. He was a stout man, far from tall, with a peaked nose. His close-cropped black hair was shaved two finger widths up each side of his head, and his helm lay beside him on the ground, bearing three white plumes. He reached up with an unsteady black-gloved hand and wiped the blood from the corner of his mouth.

“I am,” Ituralde said.

“They call you a ‘Great Captain’ in Tarabon.”

“They do.”

“It’s deserved,” Turan said, coughing. “How did you do it? Our scouts. . . .” His cough consumed him.

“Raken,” Ituralde said once the cough subsided. He squatted down beside his foe. The sun was still a sliver in the west, lighting the battlefield with a glimmer of golden red light. “Your scouts see from the air, and truth is easy to hide from a distance.”

“The army behind us?”

“Women and youths, mostly,” Ituralde said. “A fair number of farmers as well. Wearing uniforms taken from my troops here.”

“And if we’d turned and attacked?”

“You wouldn’t have. Your raken told you that you were outnumbered. Better to chase after the smaller force ahead of you. Better than that to head for the city your scouts say is barely defended, even if it means marching your men near to exhaustion.”

Turan coughed again, nodding. “Yes. Yes, but the city was empty. How did you get troops into it?”

“Scouts in the air,” Ituralde said, “can’t see inside buildings.”

“You ordered your troops to hide inside for that long?”

“Yes,” Ituralde said. “With a rotation allowing a small number out each day to work the fields.”

Turan shook his head in disbelief. “You realize what you have done,” he said. There was no threat in his voice. In fact, there was a fair amount of admiration. “High Lady Suroth will never accept this failure. She will have to break you now, if only to save face.”

“I know,” Ituralde said, standing. “But I can’t drive you back by attacking you in your fortresses. I need you to come to me.”

“You don’t understand the numbers we have . . .” Turan said. “What you destroyed today is but a breeze compared to the storm you’ve raised. Enough of my people escaped today to tell of your tricks. They will not work again.”

He was right. The Seanchan learned quickly. Ituralde had been forced to cut short his raids in Tarabon because of the swift Seanchan reaction.

“You know you can’t beat us,” Turan said softly. “I see it in your eyes, Great Captain.”

Ituralde nodded.