“This is the Wild,” Ser Hartmut said. “Best get used to it. Here, one is either predator, or food.”

Sixty miles east of Dorling, the Emperor mounted his horse, took his helmet from the junior spatharios, Derkensun, and his sword from the senior, Guntar Grossbeak, and rode to his officers, gathered to review his magnificent army. Derkensun was still unsure of his rank, cautious in ceremonial. Grossbeak—tall and with fading copper hair and the biggest nose of any man Derkensun had ever met, was a lord, a Jarl. From home. He had no experience in the guard—but a great name as a killer.

Derkensun liked him, but he was a symptom of the imperial army’s greatest problem—too many new men.

The Emperor’s army broke camp and marched in a damp dawn. The Meander flowed on their right and to the south, the outposts of the Green Hills rolled away into long downs, some crowned with ancient hill forts, complex rings of earth, and some with standing cairns so ancient that no man remembered who had built them.

The Emperor watched the head of his army, guarded today by his Nordikaans, each carrying a great axe or a long-bladed two-handed sword, and wearing hauberks to their knees or below—some of steel, some of dull iron, some of bronze. Many of the Nordikaans now sported Etruscan or Alban breastplates over their maille, and some wore the new-style bascinets with maille aventails to pad the axed hafts on their shoulders. Almost every man had acquired full plate leg armour since last year’s bloody victory in Thrake. But the magnificent cloaks on their shoulders were the same, and many helmets glinted gold in the rising sun.

Behind the Emperor’s person, today, rode the Scholae, the elite cavalry of Morea, with horn bows scabbarded by their sides and coats of plates or steel scale over light maille, with gold brocade surcoats and billed helmets, new made in distant Venezia from hardened steel. Each troop of the Scholae rode matched horses; black in the first troop, bay in the second, and grey in the third. The scarlet-clad Vardariotes were already far ahead, moving across the hills in a nearly invisible skirmish line that covered the front and both flanks of the column.

Behind the Scholae rode two regiments of the Emperor’s stradiotes—his semi-feudal cavalry; the men of southern Morea and the men of the city. The northern Morea and Thrake would need a generation to recover from treason, stasis, and battle. But already since last year the stradiotes had changed in armament, and more of them rode larger horses and had heavier armour—made available at very favourable prices by the Etruscan factors.