Pattern

by K. J. Parker

In which case, he thought, clawing briars away from in front of his face as he ran, the enemy must be taking a right pounding, the poor buggers. A dry branch snapped under his foot, startling him and throwing him off balance for a split second. Slow down, he urged himself; haste breeds delay. Another of those wonderful precepts.

  Behind him, he could hear them, a confused noise, like a huge blind animal crashing through the brittle dead trees. Not a good place for a battle; not a good place for anything much, but certainly not for a battle, where you need to be able to see what’s happening. Only the idiot son of a congenital idiot would pick a fight in a wood – can’t see, can’t move, can’t hold the line, can’t communicate, can’t swing, can’t do any bloody thing. Slow down, before you fall over and do yourself an injury.

  Precepts of religion, he thought. Every strength is a weakness; well, quite, and by the same token every bloody stupid idea is a stroke of genius. Such as attacking a larger, better armed, better led enemy in the heart of a dark, boggy, overgrown forest – dumbest idea in the history of mankind; stroke of genius.

  Twenty-five yards; that far he could see, at best, and no further (all these goddamned trees in the way), so he didn’t have a clue what was going on, other than that he and what was left of his command were doing their best to run away from the enemy, last seen over there somewhere, unless (as he secretly suspected) they’d mislaid their sense of direction along with their courage and their brains, and were going round in circles – in which case, any moment now, they were due to crash into the back end of the enemy line. Fat lot of good it’d do them, heavy infantry in dense scrub. The finest spearmen in the Empire, trained to the utmost pitch of perfection to fight shoulder to shoulder (each man sheltered by his neighbour’s shield, each man’s shield sheltering his neighbour; what more perfect metaphor could there be?) – only that was precisely what they couldn’t do, not with all this fucking lumber in the way. So instead they were puffing and stumbling from briar-tangle to sog-pit, either chasing or being chased, and a thousand years hence historians would pinpoint this moment as the decisive battle that changed the world for ever, and it’d all be his fault—

  He saw them in the shadows, the debatable shades of grey between the black and green stripes, and for an agonised moment he couldn’t make up his mind: our men or theirs? Then a little logical voice chimed in somewhere at the back of his mind: axes, they’ve got axes, none of our lot have got axes, they’ve got to be the enemy. He swung round, to see how many of his men were still at least vaguely with him, then wheeled back, waved with his sword and yelled, ‘Charge!’ Probably not a good thing to do, since they were already running as fast as they could go (under the misapprehension that they were running away; easy mistake to make); but they were broad-minded, they forgave him and carried on running, and a few seconds later he could hear shouts and the clatter of ironmongery as battle was joined. Great, he thought, I love it when things work out; and then he noticed that he was right up where the fighting was, and the man in front of him wasn’t on his side. The last thought that crossed his mind before he diverted all his attention to not being killed was, Hang on, though, what about the Seventh Light Infantry? They’re on our side and they’ve got axes. Every careless mistake is in fact the right answer. Precepts of fucking religion.

  The man in front of him was just a man. A big, long, skinny bastard with a turkey neck, huge nose and knuckles, slashing at his head double-handed with an axe; he sidestepped, only to find there was a tree standing where a lifetime of diligent study and training dictated he ought to be, and he couldn’t go there. So he ducked behind the tree instead. It did just as well as the low backhand parry in the fourth degree; in fact considerably better, since the skinny bastard’s axe lodged itself in the soft, rotten wood and stayed there, defying the skinny bastard’s best efforts to get it free. Nothing simpler, meanwhile, than to nip out round the other side of the tree and stick him under the armpit – not a true lunge from the middle ward, nothing like it at all, but it got the job done, and the poor dead bastard slid obligingly off the sword blade and flopped in a heap on the soft ground.

  If that was supposed to prove a point or something, he thought, I’m far from convinced. He looked round, both ways and then behind, but for the moment at least he was mercifully alone. Remarkably so, in fact. Last time he’d looked there had been people everywhere, but now there wasn’t a living soul (important distinction) to be seen. The battle, presumably, had got tired of waiting for him and gone on without him. Annoying, to say the least, since he had no way of knowing whether it was a winning battle going away in front of him, or a losing one that had swept past him while his attention was engaged elsewhere. I hate forests, he thought.

  Precepts of religion, he muttered to himself; but just for once, there wasn’t one that seemed even remotely relevant, so he pressed on forward to see what would happen. Silly, to be chasing after the war – his war – panting and yelling ‘Wait for me!’ like a fat man after the carrier’s cart. Luckily, it hadn’t got far. The battle was still there, just over a little stony hump and through a clump of holly bushes; it had contrived to get itself caught up in a tangle of brambles, like an old unshorn ewe.

  Which wasn’t how the historians would describe it, a thousand years hence. They would feel obliged to mention the wide, black, boggy rhine lurking under the mess of waist-high brambles (like it was somehow intentional, a clever idea on somebody’s part) into which the enemy, retreating, had obligingly stumbled and got hopelessly stuck. And there they were, poor unfortunate bastards, mired in the smelly, wet black shit up to their thighs; it’d take a lot of clever men a long time and probably a couple of miles of rope to get them out of there, but that wasn’t the job that needed doing. If only. But no, instead of that comparatively simple task, he had to do something really clever. He had to kill them.

  By some miracle, his men hadn’t charged down on them screaming battle-cries and got hopelessly stuck as well. They’d held back on the top of the rise – not common sense, he’d never accuse them of that, it was probably just that they were too pernickety to push through the briars and risk a scratch or two – and were waiting for someone to tell them what to do. Someone; anyone; him.

  On the other side of the rhine (it was an old drain, he observed; dug a hundred years ago in a vain attempt to draw off the surface water from the hillside, but all it had done was silt up and make things infinitely worse) he could see a dozen or so of the enemy, also standing about listlessly, also trying to figure out what they were supposed to be doing. Best guess was, they’d somehow managed to scramble through the mud, maybe treading on their comrades’ shoulders to get across, and now they were thinking that maybe it was their duty to go back and try and help get them out, except that then they’d get stuck too, and everybody would end up dead. Safe to ignore them, he thought, they’ll get scared and bugger off as soon as I’ve thought up a way of slaughtering their friends. Meanwhile the main part of the enemy forces (as the historians will describe them) were still floundering in the stinking mud, every frantic effort to get loose pulling them in deeper.

  It crossed his mind that if only he waited a little longer, they’d all go in over their heads and be swallowed up, and he wouldn’t have to do anything at all. But apparently not; the slough was waist-deep but no more, and there they all were, hundreds of them, enemy soldiers from the waist up, conscientiously clutching their axes and spears and halberds as though there was still a battle, as opposed to a horrendous disaster resulting from a confluence of bad luck and stupidity. Problem, he thought. Going in after them was clearly out of the question. Standing here watching wasn’t going to help, either. The obvious thing would be to call up three companies of archers and shoot the bastards down where they stood, but he didn’t have any archers with him, only the finest spearmen in the Empire.

  Then he started to grin. Precepts of religion, he thought: the best course of action is no action. They weren’t going anywhere in a hurry. There was, of course,
the problem of the others, the dozen or so on the other side, but he couldn’t help that. If he was lucky, really lucky, the poor fools would go down into the bog to try and fish out their mates, and get stuck too. There was, after all, nothing they could do without rope (which they hadn’t got), or at least if there was, then the finest military mind in the Empire was buggered if he could figure out what it was. At least some of them would try it, however; and eventually there would come a point when there weren’t enough of them left unmired to get out those who were helplessly stuck, and then it’d all be over.

  He frowned, doing mental arithmetic. Suppose the survivors went for help; nearest place would be the village on the far western edge of the forest, and the very earliest they could get there and get back (assuming the villagers downed tools, left their dinners on the table and ran straight out to help as soon as they arrived) was five days, more likely six. But it wasn’t as straightforward as that; in order to do any good they’d need to bring tools and ropes and poles and planks, that’d mean carts or packhorses at the very least. Six days or more likely seven.

  Fine, thought Feron Amathy. No further action required. Time to go home.

  ‘Battle Slough, it’s called,’ said the old man, ‘on account of there was a battle here once.’

  Poldarn nodded. The logic was impeccable.

  ‘Hell of a battle too, it was,’ the old man said. ‘One lot, they chased the other lot into the slough, they got stuck – midwinter it was, slough’s mortal sticky in winter, and that’s nowadays, with all the drains they dug over Winterhay taking off the worse of it – and the first lot, they just walked away and left ’em there. You can still find bones, if you look.’

  Poldarn looked at him. ‘What happened?’ he said.

  The old man shrugged. ‘Oh, they all died,’ he said. ‘Stuck in the mud, couldn’t get out. Nothing their mates could do for ’em. Oh, they went for help, but by the time they came back, they’d all died. Just stood there – well, not standing, they were all slumped over like stooks of reed, strangest thing you ever saw in your life. Makes you wonder, though, what it must’ve been like.’

  Poldarn decided he’d like to change the subject. ‘It’s mostly oak here, then.’

  The old man nodded. ‘Some oak,’ he said, ‘some chestnut, but mostly oak. Damn good charcoal wood, oak. There’s some as prefers beech, but it’s too hot for our line of work. Oak holds the fire longer, see.’

  ‘Seems a waste, though,’ Poldarn said, without thinking. Back home (of course, he’d never once thought of it as that while he’d been there) he’d seen maybe half a dozen oak trees, no more; and even the spruces and firs were precious, as he’d found out to his cost. Curious; he’d had to leave the islands because he’d accidentally burned down a small stand of immature firs, and now here he was on his way to a charcoal camp, where on average they burned a dozen fully grown oaks a day.

  The old man was looking at him. ‘Why?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, nothing,’ Poldarn answered awkwardly. ‘But aren’t you worried you’ll run out, the rate you’re felling at?’

  This time the old man stared at him for a moment before laughing. ‘I keep forgetting,’ he said, ‘you’re not from round here. Odd, though, you sound like you’re a local boy. Leastways, most of the time you do – and I can tell an off-comer soon as he opens his mouth,’ he added, with pride. Poldarn had worked out that ‘offcomer’ (which was probably the most offensive term in the old man’s vocabulary) meant someone born out of earshot of where they were standing. ‘Plenty more where these came from,’ the old man went on, ‘plenty more. I been felling in these woods since I was a kid, and we ain’t hardly started yet.’

  He made it sound like he was a man with a mission, to rid the world of the lurking threat of deciduous timber once and for all. Good luck to him, Poldarn thought, though he couldn’t really bring himself to share the old fool’s passion. Chopping down very big trees was too much like hard work, in his opinion. ‘Well, that’s all right, then,’ he said. ‘Is it much further? Only—’

  ‘Nearly there,’ said the old man. ‘Just up over the steep and down along through.’

  Poldarn nodded, wishing he hadn’t asked; the old man had given him exactly the same answer a good hour ago, and his left heel was beginning to blister. ‘Are there many of you up at the camp?’ he asked, by way of making conversation.

  ‘Dozen,’ the old man said vaguely, ‘couple of dozen. Folks come and go, see. Some of ’em stay a couple weeks or a month, some of ’em’s been there twenty years, and nothing to say they won’t be up and gone come the morning. Always work in the burning for them as wants it, but some folks can’t settle to it, and then they move on.’ The old man shook his head sadly, as if to say that humankind was a sadly unsatisfactory breed. That at least was something Poldarn could agree with, though he’d probably arrived at that conclusion by a different route.

  No way in a forest of knowing how long they stumbled on for; no way of seeing the sun, to gauge the passage of time. It felt like hours and hours and hours, probably because they were mostly going uphill, and where it wasn’t boggy and wet, the way ahead was blocked with curtains of brambles and low branches. Poldarn had already learned to walk bent over like an elderly cripple, his left hand pushed out in front to ward off flailing twigs and briars. He had, of course, not the faintest idea of where he was or which direction he’d come from. If there was a path, he couldn’t see it, and all the trees looked identical.

  Then, without warning, he shouldered through a screen of holly leaves and found himself on top of a steep rise, looking down into a clearing. For maybe five hundred yards in front, there were no trees, only stumps. In roughly the middle of the cleared space stood four huge round domes. How they’d been made and what they’d been made from he couldn’t tell at this distance; in fact, they hardly looked artificial at all, and if the old man had told him they were some kind of massive woodland fungus he’d probably have believed him.

  ‘Here we are,’ the old man said.

  As they climbed down the slope, Poldarn got a better look at the domes; in particular, the furthest dome away on his left, which was only half-built. Fifteen yards across and five yards high; inside, it was composed of stacks of neatly split logs about four feet long, stood on end like books on a shelf; these, the old man told him, were the shanklings, whatever that signified. Covering the wood was a six-inch layer of bracken, straw and dry leaves, which in turn was covered with a skin of fine soil. (‘We call that the sammel’, the old man told Poldarn, who nodded seriously, as though he could care less.) Here and there, men were fooling about with rakes, hooks and odd-looking arched ladders. They were moving slowly, as though they’d been doing this job for a hundred years and had another hundred still to go.

  ‘Got to be careful, see,’ the old man was saying. ‘Hearth’s got to be dead flat, and you’ve got to be careful there’s no stones or anything. Leave a stone and like as not it’ll shatter in the burn and poke a bloody hole out the sammel, and then you’d be buggered.’

  Poldarn learned a great deal more about the art and science of burning charcoal before they reached the bottom of the slope. He learned that the slabs of turf that the slow little men were fitting carefully round the apex of the dome made up the cope; that the thick log stuck in the very centre was called the mote peg; that the gap between the bottom skirt of the sammel and the ground was the flipe. He heard about how the rate at which the fire burned was governed by the amount of air it drew in through the flipe, and how the burn was controlled by packing sand round the base, and how the sand had to be dug out and moved each time the wind changed direction, to make sure the burn was even all the way through. There was something about the old man’s voice, probably its pitch, that made it impossible to ignore, no matter how hard Poldarn tried.

  ‘To start the burn off,’ the old fool was saying, ‘you pull out the mote peg and drop in a bucket of hot coals, then fill up flush with clean charcoal – lumps, mind, not fine
s or dust; then you cap off with fresh turf and there you go. To start with you get a lot of white smoke and steam, that’s the roast drawing the wet out, see. Then it goes blue, and you know it’s time to shut down the burn. That’s when it gets tricky, mind.’

  ‘I see,’ Poldarn lied. ‘It’s obviously a very skilled trade. I never knew there was so much to it.’

  The old man grinned. ‘Oh, that’s not the half of it,’ he said. Poldarn was sure he was right, at that; fortunately, before the old man could educate him further, Poldarn caught sight of a familiar face – Basano, the man they’d done the deal with, back in the relative sophistication of the stable yard of the Virtue Triumphant in Scieza.

  He waved hard, and Basano waved back, slowly. Poldarn frowned. Back in Scieza, Basano had come across as almost normal, apart from the length of his beard and the powerful stench of smoke that clung to everything he wore. At any rate, Poldarn hadn’t noticed any particular sloth about the way the man moved. Here in the woods, though, he seemed to have slowed down like everyone else; he was trudging up the rise to meet them as though he was one of the unfortunate soldiers trapped in the mud of Battle Slough, all those years ago. Maybe it was something to do with prolonged exposure to extreme heat roasting the nerve endings; or perhaps it was what happened to you if you breathed in too much smoke.

  ‘You got here all right, then,’ Basano said. Poldarn nodded, figuring a little white lie was permissible in the circumstances. ‘Olvo’s been looking after you, I hope.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Poldarn said, with a nice smile. ‘He’s been telling me all about how you do things.’

  ‘Splendid,’ Basano replied. ‘Actually, you couldn’t have come at a better time. We’ll be lighting up number four later on this evening, so you’ll be able to watch.’

  ‘Wonderful,’ Poldarn muttered. ‘I’ll look forward to that.’