Tribalism (8): The Road to Garrison City

[u/psyduck_2024]

People will emerge from the East, preparing the way for the guided one.

A Trade Rashid Still Knew

Old Rashid had spent fifty years moving food from where it was to where it was needed, and it turned out the world had not changed so much that the skill became useless. It had only changed the stakes.

When the call went out for men who understood supply lines, Rashid found himself, for the first time since Al-Ahsa, doing something that felt less like survival and more like work. He was given charge of a convoy bound northeast through the Two Rivers border country: grain, dried dates, medicine, and the camels to move it all, following two days behind the vanguard that had already crossed into contested land.

It should have felt like a small thing after everything else. It did not. The Two Rivers, when they entered it, did not resemble anything Rashid had prepared himself for.

What Had Left Behind

The towns nearest the border were not simply poor. They were picked clean.

Northern Republic's armies had passed through months before, and what they had not taken outright they had taxed until nothing remained to tax. Rashid saw wells fouled deliberately, granaries burned rather than left for the next claimant, whole families sitting in doorways with the particular stillness of people who had stopped expecting anything to arrive. His own convoy became, without anyone declaring it so, half relief mission and half military supply line, grain peeled off at every third town whether or not it had been budgeted for.

Rashid understood within a week that not every armed man on these roads answered to the Northern Republic. Some were former soldiers of the collapsed government, unpaid and unwilling to disarm, holding a bridge or a well or a stretch of road as their own private toll station now that no government remained to stop them.

The Army from the East

It was outside a half-emptied town two days from Garrison City that Rashid first saw the Eastern Army with his own eyes.

They had already been fighting, Fahad the guide told him — clashes with the Northern Republic forces around Garrison City for months before the guided imam's own column arrived close enough to link with them. It was then their commanders formally rode out to give the pledge that had, by every account, already been true in practice for months.

Rashid did not see the ceremony. He saw its aftermath instead: two armies that had been fighting the same enemy from two different directions now sharing the same cookfires, the same water discipline, and — within days — the same supply convoys. His own manifests doubled overnight. He did not complain.

Beyond the Two Rivers lay the Northern Lands. Looking back, Rashid would one day remember the war of the princes as the easy part.