The Belly of the Bow f-2

by K. J. Parker

An hour later, the enemy arrived; a great surge of armoured men squeezed so tight into the narrow gallery between two sheer sandstone walls that Baiss could hear shields and arm-guards scraping against rock. That was good, but not as good as he’d hoped. He’d been relying on being able to deploy his archers so that they’d all get a shot, but with the best will in the world he couldn’t accommodate a firing line more than sixty strong, and the pass curved about so much that the longest distance the enemy would have to cross in full view of the defending force was less than a hundred yards.

  ‘Five volleys if we’re lucky,’ the ensign said gloomily, ‘and then they’ll be on us like a dog on a rat. Of course, hand-to-hand in this sort of terrain will suit them down to the ground.’

  Baiss frowned, trying to concentrate. Six fives are thirty, so three hundred; but of course, not every shot will count, so reduce that by, what, half? He had no idea. Say by a third. A hundred of the enemy shot down before they made contact. Was that enough to break an army’s morale? Or would it just make them so mad they’d fight like demons?

  (An idiotic war; a bank, led by a baker, is fighting a university in a place where of necessity both sides will cut each other to ribbons.)

  ‘Here they come, anyhow,’ the young ensign said, and his voice was weak with fear. To his surprise, Baiss realised that the terror he’d been trying to cope with ever since Mogre’s army had been traced had somehow slipped away. Rationalising, he came to the conclusion that it was because there was nothing he could do now, no options remaining except to stick by what he’d decided and see it through. The prospect of his own death didn’t worry him, and the men under his command were proper soldiers, they’d know how to deal with the matter in hand.

  ‘Does everybody know what to do?’ he asked. The young ensign nodded. Except me, of course. Not for the first time, he wondered what in the gods’ names had possessed Gorgas Loredan to drop a civilian into a position in the chain of command where he might just possibly be called upon to lead an army into a major battle. When he’d asked Gorgas that question, though not in so many words, he’d been told that there were only ten regular sergeants in the army and four of those weren’t fit to lead a goat on a short string. ‘It’s all right,’ Gorgas had told him with a wide smile, ‘none of us have done anything like this before. I know I haven’t. You’ve got what it takes, you’ll manage.’

  ‘On my mark,’ the young ensign shouted, his voice high and shrill but clear nevertheless. ‘Draw. Aim. Loose.’

  Baiss had never seen anything like it in all his life. The nearest he could come to it was a clump of tall thistles, the sort that grow head-high in overgrown pasture, toppling and falling together as one scythe-stroke slices through them. The front rank of the halberdiers had simply gone down, and the men behind had walked right over them; not because they were callous or exceptionally well disciplined, but because there wasn’t time to slow down or swerve to avoid them. Someone in the advancing mass shouted an order, and the formation changed from a brisk walk to a trot, the pace at which a middle-aged clerk runs after a hat blown off in a wind. The second volley took down two full ranks and made a mess of the third; this time there was stumbling and falling over, jogging men trying to jump clear over the fallen and either barely succeeding or spectacularly failing; the ranks behind running into the scrambling men in front and shoving them forward, so that more still went down and joined the jerking, twitching tangle; men wading through a sprawl of arms and legs like foresters picking a way over ten years’ growth of brambles in an abandoned ride; the young ensign, his eyes tight shut, calling Loose a third time.

  They’re still coming, Baiss thought in astonishment; but of course, it was the safe thing to do, much safer to go forward than try and fall back through that unspeakable hedge of dead bodies and trampled men. They were running now; no more formation trotting, these were men running for their lives away from the shambles, ducking under the inslanting arrows, following the line of least danger. The third volley hit them at no more than thirty yards; it was like watching water flung hard from a bucket splashing against a wall as they went down in a flop, gone from all movement to dead still in a bare moment. Maybe five men, all told, were still on their feet; the line parted to let them through (standard drill manoeuvre, so he’d learnt a whole eight days ago) and as soon as they skidded to a halt they were grabbed by the reserve lines like fighting drunks scooped up by their friends and made harmless. That was all that was left of that charge; the detachment behind stayed where they were, for some reason, and didn’t join in.

  Victory, Baiss thought. Well, bugger me.

  ‘Stand to,’ the ensign yelled – Baiss still hadn’t a clue what that actually meant, and he remained none the wiser since nobody in his army appeared to react to it at all. ‘Casualties, report.’

  ‘All present and correct,’ someone shouted back, and a few enthusiastic souls cheered.

  Baiss tried hard not to look at the bodies of the enemy who were still alive out in the heaps and drifts of corpses. It was another hot day; if he was lucky enough to live through it, he’d have the privilege of watching them slowly dying.

  Nothing happened for a long time after that. Where was Gorgas Loredan? Shouldn’t he be here now, with his professional army, to take over and make this slaughter worthwhile? Baiss had done his bit, he’d won his victory. Surely he ought to be allowed to go home now?

  ‘The scouts just got back.’ It was the young ensign again, looking slightly crazy and grinning like a skull. ‘Guess what.’

  ‘You’ll have to tell me,’ Baiss said.

  ‘There’s not two thousand men out there,’ he said. ‘More like four hundred. The rest of Sten’s army must have gone the other way. We’ve been had.’

  ‘I think they came this way,’ someone said.

  Gorgas walked to the head of the column and examined the scene. A few halberdier bodies were scattered among the rocks, like hastily discarded clothes on a bedroom floor. A little further on he found a mat of dead archers. They’d been backed into a dead end and cut to pieces. In this confined space, with bodies tightly packed together, there hadn’t been room to use the six-inch spike of the issue Shastel halberd; it had been an awkward affair of carving and slicing with the long curved blade, held overhead and brought down on throats, faces and shoulders. Afterwards, the halberdiers had tracked bloody footprints over the rocks.

  ‘These things happen,’ Gorgas said, stooping down and dipping a finger in a sticky brown pool. ‘This wasn’t long ago,’ he added. ‘We’ll catch up with them.’

  ‘What happened to the rest of the army?’ someone asked. ‘There’s only about, what, fifty of ours here?’

  ‘They ran, I suppose,’ someone else said.

  Gorgas shook his head. ‘No, I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘My guess is this lot was a token force just to show willing; the main army must be guarding the other pass. In which case,’ he went on with a sigh, ‘we’ll have to deal with Sten Mogre on our own. Let’s go.’

  For men who hadn’t eaten or rested properly since the night before the battle in the river bed, they kept up a respectable pace in their disintegrating shoes. They seemed to have mastered the quick trudge, the characteristic tempo of men who won’t have time to be exhausted until the job’s done. In many respects, they reminded Gorgas of what he’d heard about his Uncle Maxen’s legendary army, which had reputedly lived like this from battle to battle for something like seven years. The thought of that made him wince.

  Even so, it was nearly dark by the time they came down out of the mountains onto the more gentle downlands that lay between them and Scona Town. From this point the road ran straight, with nothing to hold Mogre up except a shallow river and a small wood. Gorgas sent out a few scouts, but he was fairly sure he could guess what the enemy were doing. If he was Sten Mogre, he’d hide his army in Lox Wood for the night and make his attack on Scona first thing in the morning, planning to arrive there just after first light. In which case, he had two choic
es: to try and get to Scona before Mogre did, shut the gates and stand him off in a formal siege – not a bad plan, on the assumption that Scona still controlled the sea, but effectively giving up on the rest of the island – or to make a stand between Lox and Scona and take his chances in a pitched battle in the open. In either case, it meant marching all night, again. It would be asking a lot of his men to expect them to be able to stand up straight in the morning, let alone fight. There was also the small matter of arrows, shortage of.

  Two valid points against risking a pitched battle; and Scona, as far as his sister was concerned, meant the Town, or to be exact, the Bank. The rest of the island was just the view from an office window. No doubt at all about what Niessa would want him to do. She’d been resigned to a siege since this escalation of the war began; he’d virtually had to plead with her for permission to engage the enemy in the field. And that, in Gorgas’ opinion, was wrong. The islanders were their people, they owed them a defence; he’d seen the mess the halberdiers had made at Briora. The thought of that sort of thing happening in every village on Scona was more than he could live with. If he retreated back into the Town now, he’d feel like a father shutting his door on his own children. No; the Loredan name stood for something in these parts, it had led these people to stand up against the Foundation and try for something better than the life of serfs and slaves. It was a matter of obligation.

  The scouts confirmed his guess: Sten Mogre was making camp just inside the wood. There was a substantial clearing where a generation of straight-growing pines had been felled recently, and the army was there. Mogre wasn’t taking any chances. He’d placed pickets on the edges of the wood and a ring of sentries fifty yards or so out from the perimeter of the clearing, so there was precious little chance of sneaking up in the night to attack the camp. A battle inside the wood would suit Mogre well, since the archers would have no substantial advantage of distance in the thick undergrowth; at best, it would be another confused mess. His original idea of looping round the wood and barring Mogre’s way on the downs was still his best option, in spite of the disastrous odds. He gave the necessary orders, which were accepted with resignation, as if sleep and rest were politicians’ promises, often mentioned and never realised.

  Sten Mogre was usually the sort of man who could sleep anywhere, but for once he found he couldn’t quite let go. After a couple of hours of lying in the dark in his tent with his eyes wide open, he gave up the struggle, lit the lamp and called a council of war. There wasn’t really anything left to discuss, but if he was going to be awake all night, he might as well have company.

  ‘We haven’t seen anything of Hain Eir’s relief party,’ someone reported. ‘Looks like we’re going to have to do without them.’

  Mogre shrugged. If Eir had lost all four hundred of his men, it was worth it to keep the rebel home army occupied while he made his assault; besides, Eir was a Separatist, not to mention Avid Soef’s brother-in-law, which was why he’d been chosen for the job in the first place. Sixteen hundred men were more than enough for the task in hand. His only real worry was that Gorgas might not get there in time. It would be galling to have to kick his heels outside Scona Town waiting for him to catch up.

  ‘That’s enough shop for one night,’ he said. ‘Let’s talk about something else, for pity’s sake. I know – has anyone hear read that thing Elard Doce wrote last month?’

  Someone laughed; two or three others murmured. ‘Actually, ’ someone said, ‘I liked it. Especially that bit about the forked roots of consequence. The man should have been a poet, not a philosopher.’

  Mogre smiled. ‘I remember that bit,’ he said. ‘And to give him credit, there’s just a trace of a valid point in there somewhere, tucked away in a dark corner.’

  Various people made sceptical noises. ‘You reckon?’ someone said. ‘I thought it was just the old Obscurist line in a new hat.’

  ‘Oh, it was, no question,’ Mogre replied. ‘But the Obscurists had a point – no, don’t laugh, they were all as mad as a barrel of rats, but that doesn’t alter the fact they’d come up with the Law of Conservation of Alternatives when Dormand was still learning two-and-two-is-four.’

  ‘From entirely false premises,’ someone else pointed out. ‘And arse-about-face and back-to-front. If Dormand hadn’t taken it and turned it on its head, nobody would ever have given it a second thought.’

  ‘Actually,’ a thin man sitting near the tent-flap interrupted. ‘I heard that City man, Gannadius, say something interesting about that no so long ago. He was basically agreeing with Dormand-’

  ‘Big of him,’ someone broke in.

  ‘But he made the point that Dormand didn’t take it to its logical conclusion. Think about it,’ the thin man went on. ‘Let’s say you’ve got a number of alternatives contingent on one moment of choice; all right, for the sake of argument, let’s say you’re Gorgas, right now, sitting in your tent trying to figure out what to do. You can scuttle into Town and lock the gates, you can take your chances in the field, you can slink off into the hills. Three alternatives. Now, Dormand says that the consequences resultant on those choices are not truly infinite. For a start, he says, all three options could result in Scona falling.’

  ‘The word could,’ someone interrupted, ‘in this context…’

  ‘Quiet, Marin,’ Mogre said. ‘This is interesting.’

  ‘Likewise,’ the thin man went on, ‘the pitched battle and siege options share a large number of possible outcomes; in other words, the lines of possibility diverge at the point of choice, but then try and join up again as if the choice had never existed. The Obscurists – all right, we know about them, but let’s give them their say – the Obscurists would have us believe in the Obscure Design that overrides the choice; Destiny, all that crap. Dormand says there’s no destiny, just a natural law that keeps the number of real alternatives to a minimum. What Gannadius was saying, and coming from him it’s worth considering, is that there’s also a human element – human interference with the natural development of alternatives through the medium of interference with the Principle.’

  ‘In other words,’ someone said, ‘magic. Sure thing. And then Doctor Gannadius pulls a toad out of his ear and vanishes up his own pointy hat. Somehow I’m not convinced.’

  ‘It’s a leap of faith, I agree,’ Mogre intervened, ‘but not an insurmountable one.’

  ‘A hop of faith, you mean.’

  ‘Yes, I like that, a hop of faith. Let’s just suppose for argument’s sake that there is this thing called magic, and the likes of Gannadius and his toad-abusing cronies can sometimes bend the Principle at will. Dormand would say it’s still random, it’s just individuals making choices, only carrying them out through a different medium – doesn’t matter whether I exercise the choice by walking through the door myself or influencing you to walk through it, the door still gets walked through, the choice happens.’

  ‘Ah,’ said the thin man, ‘but Gannadius would say that the sort of event that attracts magical interference follows a pattern. Battles, the fate of cities, blood curses and family feuds, that’s when magic gets used; and that in itself creates a trend, which in turn corrupts the purely random development of choice. In other words, there is an obscure design. It may not be Destiny, Obscurist-style; it’s purely artificial. But it’s a trend nonetheless, and unlike Dormand’s law, it’s not natural. Then consider the knock-on effect, and you can see where it’s leading.’

  ‘Obscurist crap,’ someone replied. ‘All this talk about something being corrupted implies there’s something to corrupt, an Obscure Design. If there’s a trend, it’s just part of the ordinary trend of human nature, just like Sten said a moment ago.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ someone else objected, ‘but a supervening trend, a trend that’s bigger and stronger than just ordinary motivation, because it pushes people around, makes them do what they otherwise wouldn’t have done.’

  ‘In other words,’ Mogre said, ‘further economising on the number of
possible alternatives. Pure Dormand. The State rests.’

  ‘Talking of which,’ said one of the council, standing up and stifling a yawn, ‘what’s good enough for the State’s good enough for me. You lot may be able to stay up all night and fight a battle next day, but I need my eight hours. Oh, and a word of advice: make sure Sten wins the argument, unless you want to find yourself posted in the front rank tomorrow.’

  ‘Funny you should mention that,’ Mogre said.

  The departing councillor stared at him; there was a little twinkle of pure fear in his eyes. ‘You’re joking, aren’t you?’ said he. ‘Sten, that’s not funny.’

  There was a long moment of silence; then Mogre smiled and said, ‘Of course I’m joking, Hain. This time, at any rate. See you in the morning.’ The circle around the small brass brazier had gone rather quiet, but Mogre didn’t appear to have noticed any change in mood. ‘Right,’ he said, ‘where he’d got to? Ah, yes-’

  Revision. Ack.

  Machaera looked up at the guttering candle, then back at the page in front of her. Sometimes a momentary break in eye contact with the book helped jolt her out of drowsiness. This time it didn’t look like it had worked. She’d read the same twenty lines at least five times now, and still it didn’t mean anything to her.

  She tried again.

  Although, in refuting the foolish and frivolous claims of Maddianus and his fellow adherents to the so-called Doctrine of the Obscure Design, I have in part sought to disallow the notion that the number of such possible alternatives is restricted through the agency and at the whim of an unknown and imperceptible supervening external agency-

  Machaera’s head nodded forward onto her chest. She snored-

  – And was sitting in darkness, looking down into a circle of light. To be more precise, she was balanced on a rickety folding stool that wobbled as she shifted her weight slightly. The canvas top sagged at one corner, and as she tried to get away from the sag she felt the material tear a little more. She sat perfectly still, and tried to make out her surroundings.