PREVIOUSLY.
[—But there's another way.
He took a piece of chalk from the bowl. He walked up to the blackboard and wrote, with a steady, broad stroke, the letters of his name: A-C-A.
The chalk scraped faintly against the stone, and the letters stood out white against the black, crisp, perfect. He returned to the center of the stage. He carefully undid the knots of the cloth around the bundle, let it fall at his feet, and drew out from inside a flat, thin board, dark on one side, matte, without any shine.
He held it up high so that everyone could see it.
Then, without another word, he took the same chalk and wrote his name on it as well.7
The three white letters appeared on the dark surface, as clear as those on the stone, as clean, with the same trail of fine dust falling toward the edge.]
----
Year 15 of the SuaChie Calendar, Fourth Month (June 1497).
Dawn City (Santiago de Cuba, Cuba), Caribá Region (FRFI).
The side hall had lost the solemn air of the stage.
Someone had flung wide the doors that opened onto the courtyard, and the afternoon light, already slanting and copper-colored, reached halfway across the long tables, leaving the other half in cool shadow.
It smelled of fried dough, roasted cacao, golden onion, and beneath it all, sweet and heavy, of warm honey. The noise was different now: no longer the attentive murmur of those who weigh and judge, but the loose din of people who can finally eat with both hands.
A couple of hours had been enough to change the faces.
The members of the Chamber had unbuttoned the collars of their robes and were chatting in groups, glasses in hand, merchants again and no longer judge. The organizers came and went, restocking trays. But the ones I was watching, without hiding it too well from my corner by the window, were the participants.
They truly were eating. A girl with tight braids, who hours earlier had seemed on the verge of breaking, was laughing with her mouth full of something while a young man told her a story with big gestures.
An older man with weathered hands ate with his eyes closed, very slowly, as if the taste of the food were the first good thing to happen to him all week. They had left their bundles and tablets piled in a corner, and no one was watching them anymore.
The table had no order that I had given, and yet every dish carried something of mine.
Potato pastries the size of a fist, with a golden crust and a filling of mutton. Baked empanadas, sealed with a crimped edge that I had once sketched, half-distracted, in the corner of a report, and that the cooks had turned into a school of craft.
Cassava croquettes with cheese. Round breads stuffed with a paste of peanut and chili. Honey-soaked fritters, piled in a precarious tower on a clay tray, and beside them bowls of candied fruit that had come from three different seas.
The cooks had begun to include everywhere what they called, with that slightly ridiculous reverence, "the Leader's knowledge." They had no idea that sometimes it was only old hunger, the memory of things I had eaten in another century and that I insisted on rebuilding piece by piece.
I took a fritter. It was warm, and the honey ran down my fingers.
The taste carried me abruptly back to the middle of the afternoon.
It had been the fifth project, or the sixth.
A man from the lowlands, broad in the back, with a voice that did not obey him, had climbed onto the stage carrying a wooden crate two spans high. He had set it on the floor, lifted the lid, and from inside drawn a frame of thin slats, sticky, covered in hexagonal cells of yellow wax.
"Bees," he had said, and a couple of members of the Chamber had shifted in their seats.
What he was showing was a crate, and on top of it another, and another. Frames that slid out without breaking anything. Modular, stackable wooden hives, where beekeeping stopped being a hunt for combs in hollow logs and became a trade. Wax for candles, for seals, for waterproofing. Honey all year round.
"And the stings?" the merchant from Coquivacoa had asked, with his usual broad smile.
"Those you pay for, sir," the man had answered, and the whole room had laughed, myself included.
That, however, had not made me laugh inside. I had stayed looking at the frames, those slats, the exact space they left between one and another so the bees would not glue them together, and I had felt something like vertigo.
Someone, here, without me, had arrived at an idea that in my other life had taken centuries to refine. It was not the first time it had happened. Every time it did, I struggled to decide whether what I felt was pride or fear.
I was searching with my tongue for the trace of wax at the bottom of the honey when I felt a light touch on my forearm.
"Leader," murmured my assistant, leaning in just enough. "Aca is coming this way."
I looked up.
He was crossing the hall with short steps, dodging tables and groups, holding against his chest the cloth bundle he had brought to the stage earlier. He had given up the pressed robe of the morning; either he had taken it off, or it had wrinkled so much that the difference no longer showed.
On his face he wore two things at once, and the two fought for the same spot: the nervousness of someone approaching a person he shouldn't be so close to, and a gratitude so open it almost hurt to look at.
He stopped three paces away and came no closer. I waved him over with my hand, unhurried, and it was like cutting a rope.
"Come. What do you need?"
I said it calmly, without the voice of the main hall. Aca came closer, opened his mouth, closed it, and at last the words came out in a single breath.
"First, forgive me, Leader. I shouldn't have interrupted you; I know it's your time to rest, and that you surely have a lot on your mind, and that..."
"Aca."
"Yes, Leader."
"Speak."
He swallowed.
"I wanted to thank you. Truly. For earlier, when everyone started murmuring and you told me to continue. I... I don't know what would have happened if you hadn't said it. And also," he hurried on, as if afraid his turn would run out, "I want to thank you for becoming my sole sponsor."
I already knew. But hearing it said aloud, with that clumsy solemnity, gave it a different weight.
The contest was not a prize; it was more of a push.
Every project that climbed onto the stage sought one or several investors, people who would put up money, yes, but also contacts, open doors, letters of introduction, everything needed for the idea to get going.
That was how almost the entire Suaza Chamber of Commerce, now eating croquettes in my hall, had been born.
Some of them were already merchants or caciques with something in their hands: salt, emeralds, gold, furs, mountain routes. I had invested in them, and not with money alone. I had made myself a partner by bringing them new knowledge, techniques, tools that did not exist. The same thing they were now repeating with these young people.
And the funniest part of all, the part I struggled not to smile at, was the unwritten rule.
The members of the Chamber did not interfere in my investments. If I gave no signal, if I did not open the door, not one of them lifted a finger. Aca had been one of those closed doors. When he said "arts" and the room murmured, there was not a single pocket in all that company willing to open. He would have gone up and down from the stage without a sponsor, had it not been for me.
I laughed. I couldn't help it. It was a short laugh, without mockery.
"There's nothing to thank me for," I told him. "I'm the one thanking you. Almost no one thinks of education when they think of wealth, and you did. That is worth more than any sum."
Aca blinked, disarmed. He pressed the bundle against his chest, and for a moment he did not know what to do with his hands.
"And now that you're here," I continued, "tell me something that has been nagging at me. How did you come up with a porous paint on wood to replace stone?"
The blush rose from his neck. He lowered his gaze and scratched the back of his head with his free hand.
"It wasn't my idea alone, Leader. It's a joint project. With some friends from the Academy. And I wanted to ask you..." He broke off, took a breath, went on. "If it's possible, I'd like them to take part in the venture with you too... as partners."
"Of course," I said, without hesitation. "They're authors, aren't they? Then it's their due as well."
His shoulders gave way all at once. He let out a long breath and his smile trembled.
"Thank you. Thank you, Leader." And he began to talk, and did not stop. "One of them studies ways of protecting ships. With paints. The problem is that the ones we have don't last, seawater eats them in a few months, and copper plates work, but they're ruinously expensive. One day he was testing a base, a thick coat that stuck very well to wood, and he said, half joking, that you could paint something else on top of that base. Something decorative, even the ship's name, written on the hull."
"The ship's name," I repeated.
"Yes. And that's when I lit up. I thought: if a name can be written on that base, then anything can be written on it. So, we sat down with other friends to examine the stone of the blackboards; its properties, why it takes the chalk and why it lets it go. We discovered it was all in the porosity, in how the surface holds the dust. And to imitate it we added fine sand to the mixture... After a lot of trial and a lot of error, it finally worked."
I fell silent. I had not thought of it. Not once.
I, who had walked through dozens of classrooms in this kingdom and in my other life, who had seen blackboards of stone, of wood, of glass, of other materials that did not even have a name here, had never had the idea of a paint cross my mind.
And it was so simple. So obvious, once said, that it almost shamed me.
A cheap coating, spread over any board, would turn every small classroom, every village school, into a place where one could write and erase without hauling a single stone from the quarries.
The costs of teaching would drop at once. And beyond the classrooms, in industries, in workshops, on ship hulls, that mixture could serve a thousand purposes that neither he nor I yet knew how to name.
I nodded slowly; my gaze fixed on the dark board that Aca carried wrapped in the cloth.
Then I looked around. At the participants by the tables, laughing with their mouths full. At the members of the Chamber, standing in their circles, glasses in hand. At Chewa, who was talking with a woman wearing amber beads without ceasing to watch the room out of the corner of her eye.
I looked back at Aca.
"I have an idea," I told him. "A much bigger one than a few blackboards."
The boy went still. Something in his face opened and something closed, all at once: the surprise, the curiosity, and beneath them, quieter, the doubt of someone who has come to a room full of powerful people to show a small black board and suddenly learns that someone wants to make it grow to a size he doesn't know how to hold.
"Bigger?" he asked, in a low voice.
One week later.
Forty paces separated the guardhouse at the entrance from the first parade ground, and in that short stretch the barracks of the army's first division entered me through all the senses at once.
The air arrived heavy with red dust kicked up by hundreds of boots, with greased leather and sour sweat, and above it all floated the smoke of the field kitchens, which at that hour were boiling something with maize.
Pressed against the living-stone walls, the November humidity lingered on the nape of my neck like a warm hand. Somewhere to my left, someone was striking an anvil with a rhythm that was not a blacksmith's.
The officer guiding me, a captain with cropped hair and short strides, had decided not to speak.
I walked slowly; hands clasped behind my back.
The city's barracks was not a single compound but a succession of open fields, spread among the buildings like plots in a vegetable garden, and in each one something different was being trained.
In the first, a running track marked out in lime, and on it a line of young recruits, of the lowest rank, running while a broad-backed instructor shouted out the time of each lap.
In the second, an obstacle course made of logs, nets, and mud pits, where a boy had gotten stuck halfway up a wall and his comrades, instead of helping, cheered him on with an affectionate cruelty.
Farther on, behind a cane fence, they had built a piece of a false city: narrow adobe streets, blind corners, flat roofs. A platoon advanced through it hugging the walls, two by two, covering each other's backs.
And at the far end, where the eastern wall ended, someone had planted a real little grove of transplanted trees, and among the foliage figures moved with branches tied to their armor.
Shouts. Orders. Stifled laughter.
Conversations that dropped in volume as I passed and resumed behind my back.
And beneath it all, something I could not name well until I had it before me. A cadence. A way of moving as a group, of obeying without looking, of splitting apart and joining together again, that I had not seen in this kingdom five years ago and that I recognized from somewhere else.
From screens, from manuals, from documentaries I had watched with a cup of something hot in my hand. It was a force beginning to resemble those of the future, without losing the style of the present: the braids, the leather breastplates with Tairona designs, or the whistles made of bone.
I stood for a moment watching a group cross a ditch with their spears raised, and the image struck me in a way I did not expect. It was not pride, or not only.
It was guilt, of a lesser and duller kind than that of the food reserves.
Over these years the army had gone through reforms, many of them, but almost all structural: who commanded whom, how the zones were divided, which schools trained the officers.
I had concerned myself with the frameworks and left the content to those who knew more than I did. And what had happened the week before had forced me to look squarely at something I had avoided for far too long: I had not given the army the attention it deserved.
And it was not for lack of equipment, nor of weapons.
We had cannons; Juracán, culverins; Colibrí, and arquebuses; Gataza, bronze and iron cuirasses, and in some corps, steel. What it lacked could not be bought at a forge... It was the foundation.
The common training, the groundwork on which everything else rested. And the response to a mass deployment, that capacity to move thousands of men without their breaking apart along the way... That was where the gap lay.
It showed on the Mexica front.
A front that had been open for years, with slow results, almost clumsy. There were officers there who had never commanded more than a hundred men, and soldiers who had never seen a real war, learning every lesson with their own blood.
Experience is a good teacher and a bad friend. Every error corrected in the field was paid for with names that someone would later have to write on a list.
Perhaps I could have shortened that list. Perhaps, had I insisted more on the infantry and less on the navy, I would have saved lives. The ships were my weakness, I knew it. I had pampered them like children, given them all the attention of my memory, and meanwhile the land forces had grown wild on their own.
"This way, Leader," said the captain, steering me down a covered corridor.
We entered the main building. The shade fell over me like cool water.
The walls were whitewashed stone, with high windows that let in a yellow, dusty light, and the tiled floor echoed with the footsteps of those coming and going with messages.
Taking mental note of these differences in the support I had given; I could clearly make out the differences that were also visible at a glance. The uniforms, the equipment, even the weapons of the army's first division were less standardized than those of their counterparts in the navy's Blue division; though they followed the minimum rules, the visual difference made them look somewhat more "peasant" in my eyes.
There was only one force that overshadowed them in everything, apart from the more "advanced" Blue division: the Explorers.
And the Explorers were commanded by me directly, with the help of the few who had surrounded me from the beginning. They had been the first to try the artillery, the first to receive the Gataza, the first to wear bronze, then iron, then steel.
The first to mount horses and learn to fight from the saddle. A jewel I had polished with my own hands, and which for that very reason was useless as a measure of anything. It was like judging a city by its ruler's palace.
It was while thinking of the horses that the memory caught me.
A dirt road in the light of dawn. An eyepatch. A name that was not mine; Lion. Myself, on the back of an animal carrying me toward a village that was already burning, and the smell, which one never forgets: burned flesh, wet adobe, a sickening sweetness. A baby in the arms of someone who should not have been holding it. The eyes of a man at the instant he stopped being a man.
A shiver ran down my spine, from nape to waist, and the sweat went cold beneath my tunic.
"Leader."
A dry, measured cough. The captain had stopped and was watching me with a vigilant courtesy, the kind offered by someone who has seen a shadow cross another's face and does not want to ask.
"We're in front of the meeting office now," he said.
I nodded. I breathed deeply once, slowly, and let the air cleanse from within whatever remained of that morning on the plateau. Then I squared my shoulders and put my hand on the handle.
"Thank you, Captain."
I opened the door.
The office was a rectangular room with a long table of dark wood. Four men sat around it. Seeing me enter, they rose all at once, with that dull knock of chairs dragging their legs across the floor.
Michuá stood at the far-left end.
General of the entire army, the pillar on which the kingdom had leaned for years, and the one who best understood what was happening on the Mexica front because he lived it with his fingers buried in the map.
Beside him, the City Colonel, a thin, upright man with large hands clasped behind his back. Across from him, the Rear Admiral of Dawn City, who had brought with him the salt air of the port and the faint distrust of a sailor on land.
And at the back, by the map, the Major of Friendly Sea City: Tlala, his skin darkened by the coastal sun and his boots still stained with the mud of the road. He had arrived that very day, and had not had time to change.
"Leader Chuta," they said almost in unison.
I answered with no formula. I crossed the room, pulled out the chair at the head of the table, and sat, and they waited for me to do so before sitting again. I was not in the mood for pleasantries. What I brought did not allow for preambles.
"I'll be direct," I said. "As you know, one of the last changes we made in the kingdom's political sphere was to establish a management book. A record of errors, of solutions, of what we learned the hard way so as not to repeat it... I want to do the same with the army."
The Colonel nodded cautiously, waiting for the rest. The Rear Admiral furrowed his brows slightly.
"But it won't be the same," I continued. "The government's book collects what we have already done. This one will also gather your strategies, your deployment methods, and the maneuvers you yourselves have learned over these years, and in addition the information we are collecting from other parts of the world: how the Europeans fight, the Africans, those from across the other ocean... And there is one more difference."
I paused and looked at them, one by one.
"I am going to intervene. I am going to help with the subject."
No one moved.
It was a strange silence; of a kind I had rarely seen at that table.
The Rear Admiral opened his mouth and closed it. The Colonel blinked twice. Tlala tilted his head like someone who has misheard. And I understood at once: I did not usually contribute much in matters of war.
I gave directions here and there, approved plans, asked for changes. The most important thing I had done in that field, directly or indirectly, were the weapons, the materials, the ships... I had never sat down to tell them how they should move their men.
Michuá, on the other hand, had stayed looking at me with an expression I had never seen on him. His eyes shone; he knew how much I knew about strategy. It had been he, years ago, who had received from my mouth the first deployment formations that did not exist in this world, and he remembered every one. He rose on impulse, hands braced on the table.
"Leader," he said, and his voice caught for an instant, rough. "Thank you. Truly. I have been waiting for this for a long time and did not dare to ask."
The others glanced at one another, caught it, and stood one after another. The Colonel bowed his head solemnly. The Rear Admiral, somewhat stiffer, murmured "it is an honor." Tlala simply nodded hard, biting his lip.
"Sit down," I told them, raising a hand. "Please. It's not that much."
They sat. I kept silent a moment, looking at my hands on the table.
"There is something I must tell you," I said at last, more carefully. "I have neglected the army. Above all, the Mexica front. It has been open for years and the results have been slow, and I believe part of that slowness has been my lack of attention. I feel guilty about it. Men have died who perhaps would not have died if I had been more present."
"Leader," the Colonel began, leaning forward, "with all due respect, that burden is not yours alone..."
"Colonel."
I raised my hand. There was no harshness, only firmness. The man stopped. The Rear Admiral, beside him, had opened his mouth as well, and I stopped him with a look.
"Later," I said. "If you want to debate it, we will debate it, but not today. I did not come to be comforted; I came to tell you what is coming."
They settled in their chairs. Michuá was looking at me with a hard, stony attention.
"We are also going to gather the best combat techniques in the world," I said. "Not only ours, everyone's. And with them we will create a unified, improved version, to be taught throughout the army. Something that can adapt to the use of different weapons, the spear, the sword, the axe, whatever they have in hand."
This time the silence was different. Longer. Denser.
I watched them hang suspended, stunned, their gazes lost at some point above the table, like men who had just been asked to lift a mountain with their hands. Tlala scratched his beard. The Rear Admiral interlaced his fingers. The Colonel looked at the map, as if searching it for the answer.
It did not surprise me. I understood their bewilderment. But I saw something else.
I saw the warriors who would face them on the plateau, with fighting styles born of centuries of ritual war, fast, ferocious, unafraid of wounds.
I saw our soldiers, brave and poorly taught, learning every blow from their own bodies.
And I knew, with a certainty that needed no proof, that against such an enemy weapon were not enough.
A foundation was needed.
A common groundwork of self-defense and martial arts, standardized and complete, that every recruit could carry with him from his first day.
.
..
...
..
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[A/N: CHAPTER COMPLETED
Hello everyone.
I owe you a huge apology for not posting anything or giving any notice about my absence.
To be honest, things have been hectic: work, progress on building my house, moving furniture that we've recently been gifted, and even my birthday, which just passed.
I wasn't able to manage my time well, and—worst of all—I lost the thread of the story. The silver lining is that I've managed to combine two chapters into one (this one), so I can now get back on track with what I had originally planned.
I think I left out some business presentations and innovative ideas. I also had a training sequence planned for Chuta himself, but I think we can skip that.
BY THE WAY...
BIG NEWS!
I've started writing another novel.
As if I didn't already have enough going on in my head, I've decided to add even more!
The first chapter should already be up on my account.
It's about...
The Mongols.
Unlike this novel, this one will be much grittier and more realistic in terms of technology. It will also be easier to follow the plot, as it will, to a certain extent, follow the actual course of history.
Just like with this story, there's a lot of research behind it.
Details:
Title: *Golden Horde: Race Against Time* (Yes, it's the same base title—haha! That doesn't mean it's the same universe, though.)
Main character: Batu Khan (one of Genghis Khan's grandsons).
The tags are essentially the same, but in this case, the protagonist doesn't have a "perfect memory" like Chuta; it's more like Turey's ability. I should also mention that this story will feature adult-oriented scenes right from the start, as it won't go into as much detail regarding Batu's childhood.
I hope you'll take a look and let me know what you think!
Although I think it's not showing up because it's very new and doesn't exceed the word limit.
As always, I'll be posting for both stories—neither one takes priority over the other.]