The Undesired Princess

by L. Sprague DeCamp

  “No, no, Sham! You said you want fight fair war. All right. When you fight fair war, you send herald to challenge enemy, arrange battle place. Simple, yes?”

  “Too damn simple,” groaned Hobart. “Guess we’ll have to change the plans, to provide for an unfair war.”

  “Cannot do that,” said Sanyesh calmly.

  “Why the devil not?” snapped Hobart.

  “Orders already given out, to get ready for fair war, battle in five days in Uzgend Valley. Now you want to change. So must countermand orders. Will take days to get everything back like was, and six days more get ready for unfair war. So we could not get to Uzgend Valley in time for battle. If we do not come, Marathai will be insulted, say we betray them. Then they invade us before we are ready. Impossible, Sham.”

  Hobart argued, but the elder was adamant. As he explained it, you prepared either for a fair or an unfair war. The preparations were different in each case, and therefore it was out of the question to prepare for one kind and then wage the other. You simply had to go back to the beginning and start over.

  Hobart gave in for the time being, but during the night he had an idea for a daring coup to circumvent Sanyesh’s quibbles. The next day he determined the fact that over two thousand men had been mobilized, and armed. He ordered Sanyesh: “Tell ’em to get their blankets and enough food for twenty-four hours. I want to take ’em on an overnight practice march.”

  “Good,” said Sanyesh, and carried out the order. The party got under way by noon. There were 841 infantrymen, sturdy phalangites with twenty-foot pikes, and the rest horsemen.

  Hobart endured a desperately dull afternoon, occasionally thanking his stars that he was not a professional soldier and hence did not have to submit to such boredom often. About an hour before sunset they reached a place where the yellow sand they were crossing gave place sharply to white. Along the line of demarcation was a long row of little obelisks, stretching out to the horizon on either side. The army halted, unordered, at the line.

  “What’s the matter, Sanyesh?” inquired Hobart.

  “Border of Marathaia,” said Sanyesh.

  “I guessed that. But why are they stopping?”

  “You say this practice march, not invasion, Sham.”

  “Okay, I know I did. But here’s my idea: if we keep on going we’ll reach the Marathaian capital late tonight. We can surprise them—”

  “Impossible, Sham. Cannot start training for fair war and change to unfair one in middle.”

  “Damn it!” cried Hobart. “You tell ’em we’re going ahead! That’s an order!”

  Sanyesh looked surly, but translated the message to the subcommanders. These looked even more displeased, and passed it on to their men. Instead of resuming its march, the army stayed where it was, buzzing with angry talk. Then little groups of men detached themselves and began to trail off toward home.

  “Hey!” yelled Hobart. “What’s this? Mutiny?”

  Sanyesh replied nonchalantly: “They desert. They say you deceived them. Not like deceitful sham. Pretty soon I desert, too, by damn.”

  “Tell ’em I just changed my mind—”

  “Make no difference. Not like changeable sham either.”

  Hobart swore himself blue in the face before he capitulated. “Okay,” he groaned. “Tell ’em I was just having a little joke. I’m a humorist, see?”

  Sanyesh looked surprised. “You funny man? Good! Fine! Parathai like jokes.” He raised himself in his stirrups and shouted: “Gish!”

  The men wandered back slowly; there was more palaver, and the soldiers began to grin and laugh in a reassuring fashion. A couple of them sidled up to Hobart, laughing and clapping him on the back and spouting Parathaian.

  Then they suddenly seized his arms, twisted them behind his back, and tied his wrists. Another produced a rope whose end was doubled in an efficient-looking hangman’s knot. The loop was slipped over Hobart’s head, and the other end tossed over a branch of a convenient thorn tree.

  “Hey!” screamed Rollin Hobart. “What’s the idea?” But nobody answered him. The soldiers, grinning, tightened the rope; several hefty phalangites anchored themselves to the free end. Hobart saw with horrid clarity what they were going to do: slap his horse into motion, so that it would bound out from under and leave him dangling. His yells of protest made no impression.

  Smack! A horny hand came down on the animal’s rump. It leaped forward. Hobart braced himself for the shock of the noose. The rope tightened, jerked—and whipped over the branch to trail loosely behind.

  A calvary-man cantered up alongside and gathered Hobart’s reins; another untied his wrists. When he turned around he saw that the entire army was helpless with laughter, rocking in saddles and rolling on the ground.

  “Sanyesh!” gasped the engineer. “What’s the idea?”

  “Haw-haw-haw!” bellowed the elder, his kalpak tilted over one eye with the force of his mirth. “You like joke, yes? Ha-ha-ha-ho-ho-hoo!”

  Hobart kept silent lest a worse thing befall him. It did anyway. As soon as he dismounted, strong arms seized him and dropped him into an outstretched blanket. Those holding the blanket heaved, and Hobart bounced into the air. When he came down they heaved again, and up he went, higher. He churned the air with his limbs, trying not to come down head first and remembering that people had received broken necks that way. Up—down—up—down—he was dizzy and breathless when they finally spilled him out on the yellow sand. He reeled over to Sanyesh and clutched the elder’s arm for support.

  “Haw-haw-haw,” chortled Sanyesh. “More fun. You like more jokes, yes?”

  Hobart croaked: “Heh, heh, very funny. But tell ’em that’s about all the humor I can stand for one day. We’ll march back a couple of miles from the border and set up our tents, and after that I’ll follow your advice on the campaign.”

  The thing that griped Hobart most was the thought that if he had simply let the whole crew desert without interference, he would have been free of this gang of logical lunatics. Damn obligations!

  He was not quite through with the Parathaian sense of humor yet. His jangled nerves relaxed, after a frugal soldier’s supper, over the thought that at least others would do the sham’s camp chores for him. As sham, he had a real bed, or at least a mattress. He entered his tent with the hope of forgetting his plight by intimate contact therewith.

  Some jokester had carefully piled, in the center of his bed, a bushel of horse manure.

  ###

  It was past noon, days later, when Hobart’s scouts brought word to him, the nominal commander of the army of the Parathai, that the Marathai were drawn up in battle array a short distance up the valley. That was not news to Rollin Hobart, who had already noted the twinkle of sunlight on military equipment. Sanyesh had begun to deploy their own army.

  Hobart did not have too much confidence in the elder, but the only alternative would have been to try to run the war himself, an entirely impractical scheme. Even if he had known something about strategy and tactics, he could not in a few days have trained the barbarians to use any other than their traditional methods of fighting. At that, the terrain was such that the traditional methods were likely to prove as effective as any. They marched between vertical walls of black rock forty feet high, just far enough apart to allow the armies to deploy comfortably, but too close together to permit any wide flanking movements in the style of Subotai or Sherman.

  Sanyesh gave all the orders, though he usually unbent far enough to inform Hobart of what he was doing after he had done it. His conferences with Hobart gave the troops the impression that their sham was really running things as a sham should. Since they could not understand how a man could be the commander and not be the commander at the same time, they were satisfied for the nonce. Oddly enough they showed no sign of resenting the fact that Hobart was most decidedly not one of them. That, he told himself gloomily, was no doubt due to the fact that they were all keyed up with the excitement of the invasion. How they would act afte
r a defeat was something else; Hobart had his own ideas, and they were not nice.

  Meanwhile he had nothing to do but to watch the bloody drama unfold with a certain degree of detachment. These people’s actions were so devastatingly consistent, and their motives so childishly simple, that they never seemed quite real. If this attempt failed, he supposed he would have to let his whiskers grow and penetrate Marathaia single-handed, disguised as a repairer of old clichés or something. He might of course have tried that in the first place, but such a piece of romantic knight-errantry was for him the last resort, not the first.

  And not a soul among the Parathai had been able to help him in his quest for Hoimon. The late Khurav had, at the beginning of his reign, let it be known that any ascetic who wanted immediate promotion to the rank of martyr had merely to set foot inside his principality. A few had availed themselves of the offer, but after the supply of would-be martyrs had been exhausted there had been no more contact between the brotherhood of ascetics and the Parathai.

  He turned to Sanyesh. “Better set up the stepladder.”

  “That so,” said Sanyesh, and gave the order. The stepladder was Hobart’s one contribution to the military art, and was just what its name implied, except that it was larger than most stepladders. From its top he could see over the heads of men mounted and men afoot, and thus keep a better tab on the progress of the battle than if he had remained on the flat valley floor.

  He climbed the rungs. “Theiax!” he called, but the lion had slipped out of sight among the soldiers, who, once they had gotten used to him, had become inordinately proud of such a formidable ally.

  Directly in front of Hobart was the phalanx, six thousand men strong, holding their twenty-foot pikes upright like the bristles of a gigantic brush. On each side of them, small bodies of light infantry were getting into formation; beyond the light infantry, the heavy cavalry. The light cavalry—horse-archers—were strung out in a thin line across the entire front of the army. If the idea was to fool the enemy as to their dispositions, Hobart doubted whether it would work, since the Parathai always fought in one invariable formation.

  The enemy were now close enough for individuals to be distinguished but not recognized. They appeared to have come to a halt, too, in a somewhat different formation. There was a heavy block of cavalry on each wing, and between the wings stretched a chain of infantry—squares of pikemen alternating with oblongs of musketeers.

  A couple of gaudy persons were now out in front of the respective armies, shouting at each other. Hobart leaned down toward where Sanyesh sat his placid black horse, and asked what that signified.

  “Challenges,” said Sanyesh. “You see.”

  The gaudy men blew on trumpets and returned to their own lines. Presently a horseman rode out from the Marathai army and cantered up and down the yellow sand between the two armies. The Marathai cheered. Another man spurred out from among the Parathai; now the Marathai were politely silent while their foes cheered. The two horsemen drew up at opposite ends of the space between the armies, which were sitting and slouching in the attitudes of relaxed spectators.

  The soldiers quieted down, so that the muffled hoofbeats of the duelists came clearly as the challenger and the challengee galloped at each other. They passed each other too quickly for Hobart to see just what had happened, except that one man stayed in his saddle and continued on, reining up, while the other flopped out of his with the first man’s lance sticking through his body.

  From the cheers Hobart inferred that the Marathaian was the winner. This man now rode closer to the Parathai lines, calling out his challenge. Sure enough, another went out to meet him. This time they met with a splintering crack; pieces of broken lance soared into the air. The riders circled back, dropping the butts of their broken lances and drawing their swords.

  There was a brief confusion of swinging arms and whirling blades, and a metallic clatter; then one of them pitched out onto the sand: again, it transpired, the Parathaian.

  Sanyesh turned a leathery, worried face up to his lord. “Bad,” he growled. “If we lose all challenges, we lose battle.”

  “Why?”

  “Always happens. Ah, look!”

  The low yellow shape of Theiax was scudding over the sand toward the hostile cavalryman, tail stiffly erect and swaying like a mast as the lion galloped. There were shouts of warning from the Marathai side, but even as the champion made vague movements to prepare for this sudden assault, Theiax left the ground in a tremendous leap, struck the champion fair and square, and carried him out of the saddle on the far side. The riderless horse snorted and bounded off, circling the rectangle defined by the armies and the valley walls in a frantic effort to escape. Meanwhile the lion stood over the Marathaian and shook him so that his arms and legs flopped limply like those of a doll. Eventually, Theiax tired of this amusement and trotted back to his own army.

  But now the heralds were at it again. “What’s up?” asked Hobart as the Parathaian herald pushed his way through the ranks to Sanyesh and spoke.

  Sanyesh explained: “Protest. General Baramyash say his men not challenge lion; no fair. And unless we—”

  “So what?” interrupted Hobart.

  “If we cannot get through challenges, we cannot get around to battle!” cried Sanyesh.

  “Bunk. It’s driving me nuts, sitting around and waiting to get it over with.” Hobart reached up and grasped the rodent skull, and called: “Kai!” No result! Hobart raised his voice, “KAI!”

  “You need not break my ears,” said a shrill voice beside him, and there was the medicine-man, grinning like some depraved yellow idol. “What you want, Sham?”

  Hobart pointed at the hostile army. “Can you break ’em up?”

  “I do not know. Maybe. What you want, rain spell?”

  “No! Something with punch in it; a monster, for instance.”

  At that instant Sanyesh called up: “Watch out, Sham; enemy coming!”

  The hostile commander, Sham Khovind’s son, Baramyash—or Valangas, had evidently lost patience, for sharp commands were ringing up and down his array. The Marathaians cheered and began to move.

  Kai frowned. “I can conjure serpent. Look.” He made passes and incanted:

  “Borabora tahaa,

  “Totoya manua;

  “Gorontalo morea,

  “Niihau korea,

  “Kealakekua!”

  And a spotted viper a yard long appeared at the base of the stepladder. The immediate effect was to cause a nearby horse to rear and throw its rider.

  “Take it away!” cried Hobart. “Not here; can’t you plant a few thousand among the Marathai?”

  Kai spread his hands. “One is all I can do at one time. What you think, I am great magician? I am just poor starving fish-eater—”

  “Shut up!” yelled Hobart in exasperation. Sanyesh had departed to line up his men. The only familiar faces nearby were those of Kai, Hobart’s horse standing near the stepladder, and the groom holding the horse. Hobart hated to think of what would happen if his army started to run away before he had a chance to climb down and mount. “What else can you do? Open the earth?”

  “A little,” whimpered Kai, “like this:

  “Aia aia alala,

  “Walla walla potala

  “Nuuanu nukuhiva

  “Tokelau kapaaa:

  “Rota, haleakala!”

  The earth trembled and groaned; the stepladder swayed perilously, hung on the edge of an overset, then settled back. A crack six inches across had appeared in the sand near it. All the soldiers nearby looked at the crack with horror and aversion.

  Hobart, whose fingers had gripped the stepladder with the violence of reflex, drew breath. He shouted at Kai: “You damn fool, one more like that and you’ll panic my whole army! Can’t you do anything to the other side?”

  Kai waved his hands. “I never said I was a great magician! Just poor starving . . .”

  He was drowned out by a gathering thunder of hooves as the Marat
haian cavalry got under way, straight for their opposite numbers on the Parathaian wings. From his eminence Hobart could clearly see that his own cavalry was badly outnumbered. Perhaps his own cavalry saw it, too, for as the Baramyash’s lancers poured down on them, their formation lost its sharp corners; horses wheeled this way and that, and the Parathaian wings dissolved into amorphous crowds of men riding hell-for-leather to the rear. The Marathaians shrieked their triumph and tried to catch up with them. Friend and foe vanished down the valley in a great cloud of dust. Hobart remembered Sanyesh’s explanation that the barbarians considered the slightest disorganization an excuse for flight, on grounds of irrefutable Aristotelian logic.

  Flight and pursuit had occurred so suddenly that the infantry on both sides had not even gotten into motion. Hobart called down to Sanyesh: “Think we can smash those guys before the cavalry comes back?”

  “How your magician?” parried Sanyesh.

  “Lousy.”

  “I know he that, but does he know any magic?”

  “Not enough. Kai, what else do you know?” said Hobart, shaking the medicine-man’s shoulders.

  “I can make wildflowers spring up. I stopped a pestilence among my poor people last year. I can call fish into the nets . . .”

  “All too pacific. You savages are too damn civilized for your own good, Sanyesh. Tell ’em to go ahead.” He had been mistaken, he saw, in not expending one of his three calls via the rodent skull for a staff talk with Kai in advance. He had wanted to save the calls as long as possible—false economy . . .

  The phalanx was getting under way. The men of the leading ranks lowered their pikes and tramped forward to the beat of drums; the rest followed with their pikes upright. They would gradually pick up speed until they hit the enemy at a run—if they hit the enemy at all. Something might happen—

  Crash! The Marathaian line spilled flame and smoke. Cries of pain and alarm . . . Kai half-climbed, half-fell down the ladder as a couple of musket balls whizzed close. Rollin Hobart followed at a more dignified pace. Crash! The muskets of the second rank went off; a few pikes toppled. Hobart climbed aboard his horse as the animal began to jitter. Crash! The phalanx slowed up and came to a dead stop. Crash! They began to retreat. Sanyesh galloped around them, yelling, but they kept on backing until they were out of effective range.