The Yellow Rose of Texas

She's the sweetest little rosebud that Texas ever knew,

Her eyes are bright as diamonds, they sparkle like the dew.

You may talk about your Megara and sing of Jalabi,

But the Yellow Rose of Texas is the only girl for me.

Translating song lyrics from English to Low Noddish was a diversion that probably didn't hone any useful knowledge or skills, except in the off-chance a philologist got a chance to interview Grant when he returned to Earth. He spoke the local language instinctively, not really noticing the differences between it and English until he tried to conform a certain meaning to a certain scheme of rhyme and meter. The Yellow Rose of Texas, he had figured out how to sing in Noddish without significantly compromising the meaning, but after hearing a variety of local marching songs, he had localized it a bit, replacing references to Clementine and Rosa Lee with names he had heard in Jalabartan and Vetani love ballads. References to Texas, however, he had decided to keep.

That was why he was trying to put this new, unique marching song out among his troops: culturally, this army was a mess. His warriors were the et cetera of Cain’s horde: descendants of those first few brigands he had ridden out with to begin uniting the steppe tribes; exiles from all said tribes, even from the Bekhites they moved now to destroy; Lugomen, Jalabartans, and Vetani; and ethnicities he hadn't had much interaction with thus far, rebels from half a dozen other peoples under the suzerainty or direct subjugation of Lugo, adventurers from island merchant republics allied to Vetania, even beast-eyed men from the savage forest tribes northwest of the steppe. And each culture wanted to sing its own songs.

An upside of this difficult-to-manage cultural diversity was diversity of fighting units. A slight majority of the force was equipped in the traditional fashion of the northern steppes: mounted archers, interspersed with a few lancers, on hardy little horses, in light to medium armor. Grant’s battalion, and both the Bayut ones crossing into the desert with them, had requisitioned a great number of mules, donkeys and horses untrained for war in order to speed their advance, but any man under Abutai’s or his father’s command who could not afford his own warhorse would have been held in contempt for it, treated as fodder for arrows while fighting as a foot spearman or archer, hoping for nothing more than to take an enemy mount as plunder. But in Grant’s force, there were many well-practiced in doing battle on their own two feet.

Most of these veteran infantrymen were of two types, with fighting styles that seemed present in all the armies of Nod: spearmen drilled to fight in a tight shieldwall, forming a single mass that could hold ground in the face of charges from infantry or cavalry; and skirmishers that hurled javelins or axes or slingstones, then sank away over terrain horses or heavy infantry could not expediently cross. In addition to light, basic formations of spearmen, he had some heavy infantry trained and equipped in the royal army of Jalabarta or the household retinues of Lugo nobles. Fighting with similar professionalism was a large company of Vetani longbowmen, that country’s yeomanry who had abandoned their farms and come to Cain when times became troubled. Beyond spear and shield, he had men equipped for the melee with two-handed pikes, a massive style of two-handed curved sword used in Lugo and its southern tributaries to cut the legs out from under warhorses, and the distinctive long-hafted axes of the forest tribes that could tear a formation of tightly-packed infantry apart.

He had mounted troops of types distinctly alien to the steppes, as well, though precious few. For heavy shock cavalry, he had a small handful of Vetani knights, sworn to a heretical offshoot of the Church of the Giver of Chastity that shared many beliefs with the White Circle of Cainite shamanism. His White and Green shamans were perhaps his most valuable single asset, and he protected the best of them– including Yuya’s mentor Sauhur– by mounting them on the single, four-tusked, impossibly huge elephant he had, a beast from the jungles west of Jalabarta whose mahout had fallen into sycophantic obsession with Cain.

This army, he surveyed as they crossed the border into Jalabarta, then turned to his unit commanders riding behind him. Piran was among them, and though he was a Bayut in good standing, Daguk, the man he had rescued from a Bekhite ambush the day he arrived on Nod, accompanied them also. He was overseeing logistics for all three battalions, which was something of a new concept to the Cainites. Normally, their warbands were supported largely by hunting or raiding done as they rode, but the grander campaigns the Cainite horde was now undertaking demanded a greater measure of planning.

“Daguk, do you think we'll be able to recover any usable provisions from the Bekhite camp, or should we already be thinking about the supply lines needed to hold that position or advance on Ak-a-Kartam?”

“In their state? They escaped Cain in the north with the horses they were riding, perhaps a few slaves in what wagons could be shuffled out ahead of the attack, and not many more moveable goods besides. Their smaller bands in the south would not have the livestock to support the whole tribe. Unless the Jalabartans have been feeding them– and reports suggest they can hardly feed themselves– I suspect they are beginning to eat their mounts around now, or perhaps their slaves.”

Grant spat. “Did they become cannibals by order of this goddess of theirs? If so, I'm going to enjoy killing her.”

“She… found them in a desperate time. Centuries ago, well before Cain returned to the steppes from the cities of the south, the Bekhites were under constant raids by the Bayut and the now-extinct Abarites. It came to the point that they had lost so many flocks and herds, they would send warbands out to their enemies without any provisions at all. No food would be wasted on the ones who were killed in battle, and those who were not could eat from their enemies’ captured supplies. This got most of their warriors killed, but the few who survived became hardy and vicious beyond ordinary men, pursuing first their enemies' meat and milk, then their horses, then, as they waged longer and bloodier punitive attacks, they came to need their enemies' flesh to sustain them. Only then did Yog appear to them, and elevate the bloodthirsty, half-crazed cannibal warriors they had created from a grim necessity of survival to a spiritual ideal for all Bekhites to imitate. The spirit of the practice changed from pragmatism to hatred. It has had… ill effects on their health, been seen as a dangerous but necessary sacrifice to gain power, but being able to strike farther and farther into enemy grazing lands with each victory is quite the power indeed.”

“A grim tale, but it only fills me with the sort of sympathy one feels for a rabid dog, before putting it down. I do respect that you know your enemy well.”

“My mother was a war-prize my father took from a Bekhite camp. It… was not a particularly sharp turn for the worse, as far as such abductions go.”