Part IV:
The Dance of the Seven Cities
Prelude to Part IV:
Excerpt from Wise Man Tellorin’s
The Updated Histories of House Dorsa
So much has been written about the Battle of the Empress’s Last Stand that it seems either an act of vanity or an act of futility, or both, to attempt to explore it here. Entire volumes have been dedicated to the subject, and far be it from this simple-minded Wise Man to attempt to write an analysis more complete or insightful than what has already been written elsewhere.
Yet write it I must, because no history of Empress Natasia I could possibly be considered complete while ignoring the event that defined — and ended — her short reign.
So let us begin to approach this complex subject, but we will approach not from the starting point of the string of ill-fated decisions the Empress made leading up to the battle (as Wise Man Follarin does in The Great Failure of Empress Natasia the I), nor from exploring the Coup of the Cult of Culo, which is where most modern historians locate the turning point of Natasia’s failed Eastern campaign. Instead, I would like us to begin at a point seemingly far more banal, and perhaps because of its very banality, far too often overlooked: the weather.
As I have argued elsewhere, the most pivotal villain in Empress Natasia’s Eastern campaign was not the Kingdom of Persopos, not the fickle Cult or Brotherhood of Culo, and not even the Quanca Carin who, since the Treaty of the Regent, occupied well over a third of the East. There is still one enemy that is left off that list of malefactors, and that is the winter of Year of the Chariot, 1752 to 1753.
Winter struck so early and so hard that year that even if the occupation of the Empire’s most fertile lands by the mountain tribes had not ground agricultural production to a near stand-still, the famine that seized the Empire that year, a famine which radiated from the foot of the Sunrise Mountains to the shores of the Western Sea, probably would have occurred anyway.
Wise Man Follarin excoriates the Empress for stepping directly into the trap laid for her when the Quanca Carin apparently abandoned the city of Pellon. What fool would take such obvious bait? Follarin demands. My answer is this: A fool whose camp just suffered a devastating raid, a fool whose army is falling increasingly ill as it sleeps each night in canvas tents that offer little protection from the cold, a fool who knows that at least some food was left behind in Pellon when the mountain men abandoned it.
Furthermore, the Empress did not take the “obvious bait” easily, without proper investigation first. She sent her most trusted commander, Joslyn of Terinto, to scout Pellon and the lands around it before she moved the Imperial Army into the sanctuary of Pellon and the impressive fortress of Castle Pellon. Yes, Pellon was in ruins after months of occupation by the Quanca Carin, but the safety offered by thick stone walls and the protection from the elements provided by actual buildings with fireplaces was too much for the suffering Imperial Army to turn down.
The Empress had no way of knowing that the Cult of Culo had already betrayed her, its illusionists managing to hide thousands of mountain men while its House of Wisdom-trained engineers began construction on the siege weapons that would destroy what remained of the city.