The Belly of the Bow f-2

by K. J. Parker

  The first volley thinned them a little, but the gaps soon filled, so that was all right. The staggered ranks of the square worked just as he’d hoped; as one rank loosed, the other drew, so that there was never a moment when there wasn’t a cloud of arrows in the air. The enemy were stumbling now, as if they’d been tripped by a rope across their path. Forty yards out from the square they became so tangled that they couldn’t move forward fast enough to live long enough to get past the banked-up dead and wounded and go in closer. The bank grew; it was like watching the sand forming high drifts in the bottom of an hourglass, or the moment when the incoming wave dissipates on the sand just before it’s pulled back into the sea. At forty yards out, the crucial moment was tangible, although as a problem in applied philosophy it was hardly worthy of attention. It would be decided by nothing more obscure or profound than elementary arithmetic – which was going to run out first, Gorgas’ supply of arrows, or the enemy’s supply of men? It would be very close, close enough for a recount. It might yet come down to the last arrow or the last man, the accuracy of one archer’s aim, the care with which one halberdier put on his breastplate, the true tiller of one bow, the straightness of one arrow, the turning of a head to left or right at one particular moment, to decide whether the attack broke off and fell back or surged over the bank and pressed home.

  Gorgas reached down without looking and felt the fletchings of another arrow, one more than he thought he had left. The skin between the first and second joints of his draw fingers was rubbed away into a mush of raw flesh, and the muscles of his back screamed as he took up the weight of the draw, pushing against the handle of the bow with his left hand, drawing back the string with his right. As he drove his left arm forward, straightening the elbow, he heard a sharp crack and felt the top limb of his broken bow smash into his mouth, as hard as a punch from a skilful boxer, while the lower limb welted across the side of his knee. He stood for a moment with the ruins of his bow hanging comically around him – damn the thing, the useless, cheapskate heap of crap, lousy unbacked ash that couldn’t take the racking stretch across the back and crushing in the belly, it had left him defenceless in the very moment when everything was to be decided; suddenly there was nothing more he could do except drop two pieces of firewood, stand still and wait.

  ‘The hell with this,’ someone shouted (Huic Bovert, who’d tripped over a guy-rope on his way back from the council of war last night, the pain from his twisted ankle was draining his strength like a hole in a bucket). ‘Pull back; dress your ranks and for gods’ sakes pull back.’ Slowly at first, simply because there was so much mess on the ground to pick their way through, the halberdiers edged back; the arrows carried on hitting them, of course, and they continued to fall in roughly the same numbers as before. At seventy-five yards they checked and rallied, and saw for the first time how few of them there were. ‘The hell with this,’ Huic Bovert repeated, and they withdrew, walking reluctantly away, guiltily, like a man walking away from a woman he no longer loves. Limping slowly behind the main body, his broad back a distinct target, Huic Bovert was the last man to fall, although it was hours before he died.

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ Gorgas said.

  ‘Don’t knock it,’ someone beside him replied. ‘Close, yes, but it beats losing.’

  Someone else had assumed command of the remnants of the army; they had fallen in and formed a column, they were marching away. ‘No more than seven hundred,’ someone said. ‘If that. Probably closer to six.’

  Gorgas snapped himself out of it. ‘What about us?’ he said. ‘casualties?’

  ‘They never got that close,’ someone else replied. ‘Another three arrows fewer each and they’d have made soup with us, but we got away with it. All present and correct, it looks like.’

  ‘We’re getting good at this,’ Gorgas said.

  Late in the afternoon, while Gorgas was organising men from the Town into parties to collect arrows, parties to strip the dead, parties to bury them, a messenger came in from Sergeant Baiss’ detachment; he was pleased to be able to report that Baiss had ambushed the retreating column as they climbed up into the mountains. Out of an estimated seven hundred halberdiers, he was confident that no more than ninety had escaped and were still at large. Was he to pursue the fugitives or return to Scona Town?

  Gorgas felt sick. He told the messenger to bring Baiss back and leave the poor devils alone; then he set off up the hill to see his sister.

  The Bank was nearly deserted; no clerks scuttling down corridors or peering up at him from their desks. Nobody waiting on the stone bench outside Niessa’s office. He pushed the door open and went in. Nobody home.

  Eventually he caught up with a clerk in the exchequer; the man was scooping up the silver counters from the counting boards and putting them into a large, clinking sack.

  ‘You,’ he said, ‘where’s the Director?’

  The clerk stared at him as if he had two heads. Gorgas glanced down at his bloodstained clothes and shredded hands. ‘It’s all right,’ he said, ‘we won. Have you seen my sister?’

  The clerk looked as if he didn’t know whether to giggle or run. ‘Don’t you know?’ he said. ‘She’s cleared out. Left Scona. Taken all the ready money and the best ship and gone.’

  Avid Soef? thought Avid Soef. Yeah, I remember him, wasn’t he the clown who showed up in Scona Town three days after the other two armies, soaked to the skin and covered from head to foot in mud and pine needles? What a joke!

  According to the locals, the bog-carpeted forest that covered the southern tip of Scona was far drier than usual; the recent heavy rains had all run away into the sea, and the scouring heat of the past few days was drying out patches of marsh and bog that had been submerged for as long as anybody could remember. Mires that usually swallowed you up to the waist now only engulfed you as far as the knee.

  Wretched, dismal, every step laboured and difficult; tracks that might just have been passable for five men and a mule becoming lime-traps with two thousand men squelching through them; mud-encrusted boots, almost too heavy to lift, so saturated that their wearers would almost have been drier walking barefoot; tussocks of couch grass, tripping men up and turning over ankles; all under a dark, nasty-smelling canopy of spindly firs and wind-twisted beeches, through waist-high clumps of briar and bramble, in and out of the branches and roots of fallen trees that blocked the way. How utterly superfluous, in all this natural torment, was any trace of the enemy.

  The enemy wouldn’t come in here. More sense.

  Nevertheless, Soef knew, if he didn’t send out scouts and advance parties, then undoubtedly there would be ambushes, roadblocks, landslides, pickets, snipers. The whole army could be cut down in their tracks, all because of carelessness, a general thinking he knew better than Regulations. At any moment he expected to bump into the remnants of the rebel army in flight from the sack of the Town – presumably it had fallen by now, it was hard to imagine anything that could stop an army of four thousand men. When he met them, would they keep running or turn and fight? A battle in this mud and filth among these dark and gloomy trees would be unspeakably awful, for both sides. Surely they’d have more sense. (Ah, but if they had any sense they’d have stayed out of the marshes.)

  ‘They reckon there’s a clearing up ahead,’ said the colour-sergeant.

  ‘Let’s hope they’re right this time,’ Soef answered. ‘For a while back there I thought they were deliberately misleading us – reasonable enough, since we’re the enemy. But I don’t think so now. I think they’re as lost as we are. After all, why in hell should anybody ever come here?’

  The colour-sergeant nodded. ‘Apparently some of them do,’ he said. ‘Hunters – there’s supposed to be deer and wild pigs in here somewhere, I guess we must be making too much noise. And a few old men bring their yard-pigs to look for truffles.’

  ‘Never could understand what people see in those things. With honey, I suppose, or diced in a-Good gods, they were right. There is a clearing.
’

  ‘That’s not all. Look.’

  In the clearing there were men putting up tents, men trying vainly to make fires with wet timber and sodden kindling, men stacking bows in stands, hanging clothes from branches to dry. In the five or so seconds it took for Soef to realise what he was looking at, a few of them made an effort to get to their weapons. Most of them simply stood and stared, as if they were sitting at home and mythical beasts had just battered their way in through the wall.

  ‘Front three ranks,’ Soef shouted, but he was too late; the army was already surging forward all around him, not waiting for orders in their eagerness to take out their feelings after a week in the forest on someone else. The action didn’t last long. Half of the two hundred and fifty rebels made it into the forest, unarmed, some barefoot and in their undershirts. The rest were chopped down as if they were the brambles, briars, bracken, saplings and undergrowth of the forest that had caused the army so much suffering and aggravation. It was a swift, efficient, slashing clearance, a lopping of exposed limbs, all blade-work, very little stabbing. Soef didn’t try to intervene; he might as well have asked his men to consider the feelings of the couch grass and the bog-cotton and besides, he didn’t want to. A week in the forest had got to him too.

  By the time the army lost interest, there were about fifty of them left. Most of them had at least a cut or a slice, some were missing fingers or a hand or an ear; it had been like watching spiteful children aimlessly bashing at the trunks of trees, smashing off branches, crushing and scarring the bark till the sap flows. Scarcely any of them had tried to fight.

  ‘That’ll do,’ Soef called out. ‘We’re just wasting energy now. Secure the prisoners, we’ll move on in an hour. Somebody see if there’s any clean water nearby, and find out if there’s anything fit to eat in the rebel tents. No point letting good stuff go to waste, when we don’t know when we’ll next have a chance to stock up.’

  Quite. We might just as well eat what we kill.

  The prisoners’ story cheered him up. They’d got lost as well, trying to find the halberdiers and ambush them. After three days of crashing through bush and sliding in mud, they’d resolved to give it up, pull back to the edge of the forest and either pick the Shastel men off as they came out or harass them all the way back to Scona, the way Gorgas had done with the first army -

  ‘What do you mean?’ Soef interrupted.

  The prisoner looked worried. ‘You don’t know?’ he said. ‘We heard just before we left: General Loredan defeated your first army. He’s got hundreds of prisoners.’

  Soef frowned. ‘General Mogre’s army?’ he queried. ‘Or General Affem’s?’

  ‘No idea,’ the prisoner said. ‘Gorgas hadn’t reached Scona, all we heard was dispatches and the order to guard the forest. We only heard about you when we ran into the foresters.’

  ‘You’re seriously telling me Gorgas defeated one of the other two armies?’ Soef said. The prisoner dipped his head nervously. ‘And then he was going to fall back on Scona Town, presumably.’

  ‘I suppose so.’ The prisoner wiped blood from a slash across his scalp out of his eyes; blood was running down his hair, dripping off his sheepdog fringe, like rainwater running off leaves. ‘The message we got didn’t say; all we were told was we’d won a big victory, and we’d been ordered to keep this end tidy.’

  ‘And you’re sure you don’t know which army it was? If you’re lying I’ll have you strung up.’

  ‘I’m sure,’ the prisoner said wearily. ‘I don’t even know where the battle was, or where Gorgas was when he sent the message, come to that. I suppose the sergeant might know, if he’s still alive.’

  Avid Soef looked up at the colour-sergeant, who shook his head. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Sergeant, fall the prisoners in, we’ll have to take them with us. There’s a thought; they can show us the way they came. They don’t look like they’ve been wading up to their chins in mud.’

  The prisoner shook his head. ‘It’s really very dry the other side of the clearing, where the side of this combe slopes upward. But I can’t show you exactly which way we came; we were lost, remember. I’m sure we spent about half a day just drifting round in circles.’

  The thought that it might be Sten Mogre’s army that had been beaten and captured or put to flight troubled Avid Soef more than he’d imagined such news ever could. He thoroughly disliked the man and knew Mogre felt the same about him, with contempt added in on top. But ever since they’d landed Mogre had been running the show, and Soef hadn’t really given much thought himself to any overall strategy, only various small ways to embarrass Mogre and his constituents back in Shastel Chapter. If Mogre had truly suffered a serious defeat, it could be days, even a whole week, before he’d be able to rally his men and play any further useful part in the war. That meant Soef would effectively be in charge of the whole expedition. Whatever happened next could be his fault.

  Bloody war, he thought bitterly. Even when things go right, it’s a hiding to nothing.

  ‘What do you mean, gone?’ Gorgas said.

  ‘Gone,’ the clerk repeated helplessly. ‘And she’s resigned as Director. She took all the silver plate and most of the valuable furniture and stuff. But she’s left all the books and the accounts.’

  Gorgas took a deep breath and let it out slowly. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Did her daughter go with her?’

  The clerk looked puzzled. ‘Sorry?’ he said.

  ‘Her daughter. The Lady Iseutz.’

  ‘Oh. No, I don’t think so. I don’t think she took anyone with her, just some bodyguards and the crew of the ship.’

  Gorgas leant against the wall and rubbed his cheeks with his fingertips. ‘All right,’ he said again. ‘There just isn’t time for this now. Who are the headquarters staff reporting to?’

  The clerk shrugged. ‘I don’t think anybody’s bothering with any of that,’ he said. ‘I think most of the clerks are, well, getting ready to leave too.’

  Gorgas scowled and snatched the sack of counters out of the clerk’s hand, spilling them all over the floor. ‘I bet,’ he said. ‘Well, that’d better stop. Anybody caught trying to leave his post will have to explain himself to me; you make sure that reaches all your colleagues, or I’ll hold you responsible. What did you say your name was?’

  The clerk sighed. ‘Riert Varil,’ he said. ‘Chief deputy, copying pool.’

  ‘Right. Pass the message round, then get back to your desk. No, forget that. Find out if there’s been any messages, and where in hell the southern guard units have got to. I need to know if there’s any more of the enemy left.’

  ‘Oh, I shouldn’t have thought so,’ the clerk replied. ‘I thought you said you’d just wiped them out.’

  ‘Find me as soon as you know. I’ll be in the Director’s office.’

  It was true, Gorgas said to himself, lifting his feet and planting them in the middle of her desk, she must have gone, or where’s that little applewood cup of hers, the one Bardas made for her out of the stump of the kitchen tree? It isn’t here, so she must have gone. And so, he observed, has everything else, except for the few bits and pieces that weren’t worth anything or were too firmly fastened to the walls to be easily removed. He’d known she was gone when he’d put his feet up on her desk without being worried in case she suddenly came in through the door. He couldn’t feel her in any part of the building. She’d gone because she couldn’t trust him to defend her against her enemies. Again.

  The clerk reappeared, looking distinctly nervous. ‘No messages, Director,’ he said. ‘And I’ve spoken to the heads of department-’

  ‘Director,’ Gorgas repeated. ‘All right, carry on.’

  ‘I’ve spoken to the heads of department, and the staff are being put back to work. Sergeant Graiz and the southern guard left for the marshes as you ordered, but nothing’s been heard of any enemy units.’ The clerk hesitated. ‘The war would appear to be over for now,’ he said. ‘Will there be anything else?’

 
Gorgas looked at him for a moment. ‘Does anybody know why she left?’ he asked. ‘Did she say anything?’

  The clerk nodded. ‘I gather she decided the war had become too expensive to pursue any further,’ he said.

  ‘Too expensive.’

  ‘So I gather. She formed the view that it was time to cut her losses by closing down her operation here and concentrate on her other business interests.’

  Gorgas stared. ‘What other business interests?’ he demanded.

  ‘You mean you don’t know?’

  ‘Oh, for gods’ sakes,’ said Gorgas angrily. ‘No, I don’t. What other business interests?’

  So the clerk told him: the half-share in a Colleon merchant venturers’ company, the tannery on Gasail; the lumber mill at Visuntha; the vineyards at Byshest; the stake in the Dakas copper-mining syndicate; the ropewalk on the Island-

  ‘Go away,’ Gorgas said.

  Bardas picked up the bow.

  Ideally, he would have liked to have left the glue to cure for at least a week, preferably longer than that; but time was a luxury and besides, the glue he’d made from this batch of exotic, expensive rawhide dried remarkably quickly in the fierce sunlight. He picked up the string and dropped one loop over the bottom nock, then hesitated. There was every chance that, when he flexed the bow for the first time to string it, the thing would snap in two and all his work and hard-to-come-by materials would be wasted.

  The first stage had been shaping and fitting the butt-spliced sections of bone to the belly of the wooden core; a slow, frustrating business for a man aware that he was working to a tight deadline. But it had to be right; unless the sections fitted together exactly, the belly would be weak, the terrifying forces of compression would find the vulnerable points where the sections met and tear the work to pieces. So he had filed and scraped and polished, smearing soot onto one face of each join with the tip of his finger, assembling them, taking them apart, until the soot marked both faces evenly and they came together so tightly that he couldn’t pull a hair into the fissure of the joint. Having located, sized and numbered each section, he smeared on the glue, pressed each one into place against the core and wrapped it round tightly with stout cord, one turn every eighth of an inch. To make sure, he added clamps packed with slivers shaved from the spare bone to distribute the force of the clamps evenly. To help pass the time while the glue set, he carded and sorted the sinew for the backing once again, and wove and served the string.