2006 alternate-history war story, last of six books. The Malwa have
been pushed back but still hold their home territory; Belisarius and
allies must finish the job.
This is really something of a revelation, after a series of books
that increasingly descended into minor variations on "the bad guys
lose a battle in spite of superior numbers because the good guys are
smart". There is battle here, but there's much less emphasis on it:
here at the end, what matters more is the people and their
individual actions, and it's splendid to find authors who don't treat
the end of a series as an excuse to escalate the scale even further.
The foreshadowed rebellion happens. The bad guys fail basically
because they are bad guys, because they don't realise that trying to
rule their underlings with fear has its limits when they want those
underlings to be competent thinking people.
And Belisarius, who began the series as something of a superman, is
tied up at the end holding down an army that's not a significant piece
on the board (though it could be if it could move elsewhere); he's
not in at the kill of the Malwa emperor and the empire's
time-travelling master. I think one could reasonably infer from this
series a suggestion that no matter how amazing one person may be, one
person with reliable subordinates and allies will be able to beat
them.
There's a section looking into the future, as the conflict between the
two time-travelling factions also gets resolved – but it feels a bit
superfluous. These aren't the people we've been following for six
books, they're just the excuse for the alternate history, and while it
provides some closure to Belisarius himself it doesn't feel of a piece
with the rest of the book.
Yes, all right, all arranged and political marriages turn out to be
happy ones, and all competent soldiers are also good people (though
not necessarily the other way round, a step up from some mil-fic), but
if you objected to those things you wouldn't have got this far in the
series anyway.
Obviously this is not a place to start (there's a crib to the
characters at the back, and maps of important places at the front, but
there are still quite a lot of them to keep track of, and there are
plenty of mid-chapter shifts in viewpoint), but it's a strong finish
to the series after books 3-5 were rather less to my taste.
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