Snakewood

by Adrian Selby

  I hauled myself to my feet and headed east, making a way through the cool moonlight to the woods ahead and leaving behind the whistling and crackling of the burning vineyard.

  I cried like a dut. The fall was more vicious than in many winters. I was curled up most of the next day under an overhang of rock as I paid the colour. I was shitting fierce and sicking up what strips and biscuits I ate. Belly was agony and I was burning up as a fever set through. Shale was somewhere off and in the same state. If we were found now it would be over.

  Kailen and the Spike

  This is a Rhosidian lord’s account of the Battle of Ubetzwan, 641 OE, against a Tetswanan army that had been wreaking havoc along the Rhosidian border. Incidentally, it wasn’t until the following battle of that campaign that Kailen came across Harlain and recruited him.

  Goran

  The Tetswanans had a marvellous general, Orko Trisi, Orko being their own term for a general. Made a virtue of their lack of horse and excellent counters to our plant. He’d mastered us in two engagements, having bolstered his southern flank with Seeyaltans. Bloody awful savages, but fierce soldiers.

  I was a captain at the time, newborn to it. Ubetzwan was my first where I had command of some soldiers. Coming from the coast, the interior of southern Rhosidia was murderously hot. The Tetswanans were looking to push back our border to the oasis of Outpost Forty, which you will have heard of if you know anything of Rhosidian history.

  We were confident, given they had little more than some light horse. We had near a thousand, good horses from the Alagar, who were concerned about their own border with Tetswana and its aggression.

  They were drilled exquisitely well, advancing quickly on our forces as we were organising our flanks. Our general sent our own infantry after some softening up with our archers, but as the line approached, at some command they changed formation, forming a spike, a wedge with, counter-intuitively, some of their best men and women at the front. We learned to our great cost that they had a counter for our dust, for the volleys did not slow them.

  They rather easily broke the line of our own infantry and split them. I commanded a unit near the rear of our advancing forces and saw that we had little answer to the formation.

  Our General called for the flanking cavalry, but their wedge proved to be an effective counter even to that. As our horse hit their middle, aiming to disrupt their formation, their rear troops, being the wide end of the wedge, fanned out quickly to provide a counterflank to our horse.

  These rear soldiers immediately started hurling their javelins at the horses held up by disciplined spear and shield formations at the sides of the wedge. Soon enough our cavalry had to regroup and they had at this time broken through our infantry lines and were running at the archers and reserves. Panic set in. I bid my men hold but was mocked and left to either face them and die with courage or flee myself. I chose the latter I’m glad to say.

  The next engagement went similarly, an outcome I and a number of other captains were appalled at, for we received no orders that suggested a counter to the spike employed by the Tetswanan infantry. We must have lost near ten thousand men in both battles, six standards lost as well, which our generals were bent on getting back, for the four they’d captured in the first battle were paraded during the second.

  Ubetzwan was a settlement built near the strategically important lake on the opposite side of which was Outpost Forty. The rains were due and taking the settlement and holding it would offer us a significant advantage once the rains had replenished the basin.

  At this time we were desperate for soldiers of any sort, and the queen, the formidable Queen Vaurn, borrowed from various guilds and brokers to fund the war and the recruitment of mercenaries and more horse from the Maiols of Alagar.

  A mercenary, my age, name of Kailen and apparently a Purple Rose winner of noble lineage at the Harudan War Academy, had requested he be present at the council preparing an assault on Ubetzwan.

  At first he came across as ill mannered, for with the presentation the generals made of the ground for battle and how we would try to engage their forces using a river as a means of breaking their formation by trying to draw them over it he rolled his eyes and sucked in his cheeks and made a great noise of sighing and shaking his head. The impression of him wasn’t helped by his curious appearance, some accident with brews I was told, had skin that looked and felt like wood, most curious. It lent him an air of savagery that didn’t sit well with the generals.

  “Someone take that pup outside and give him a kicking while we try to win this war!” said our Lord of Kailen.

  “You’ve explained what has happened twice to your army but you present no solution, Warlord,” Kailen replied. “Let me present you a solution.”

  We thought he’d get his throat cut for that; it’s happened for less and to men of greater standing.

  “I am in sore need of entertainment and a refill of this cup, young Kailen, so please, take the floor; the map and our pieces are yours.”

  He laid out the first battle much as I have here, and described, as I have here, what the flaws were with our tactics.

  He assumed, correctly, that the Tetswanan general had too limited a set of options to engage with our army except as he had done so, for we had cavalry, horse archers and foot soldiers. He explained as well the composition of our arrowbags and the counter that the Tetswanans had. Our own drudhas concurred that his assessment would be broadly correct, for he, and his famous drudha Ibsey, had learned well the plant available in the region, what could be farmed or harvested in sufficient quantity.

  Contrary to even my own thought regarding how to engage them, he took the cavalry from the map and replaced each centa, that is, a hundred horse, with foot soldiers, equipped with bows, behind a front line of infantry. He then placed the horse archers at the flanks.

  He had the stallion’s balls to tell us that we would lose a lot of infantry but in return would utterly defeat the Tetswanans if we followed his plan. He proposed also that his drudhas prepare a different recipe for our arrowbags.

  Of course, the other flaw he pointed out in the generals’ planning was that in holding Ubetzwan, the Tetswanans had no need to cross the river, nor indeed would it present much of a barrier, being dry just before the rains, for all that its banks would make a marching re-formation a challenge if we were on the slopes less than a thousand yards off.

  So we lined up as we had previously, at least to the eyes of the Tetswanans, who saw the cavalry they needed to see, for the archers were equipped with axes and shields, but each shouldered a bow and their saddles were packed with quivers under blankets.

  The Tetswanans marched forward, singing and shouting, and in their midst were our banners. Again we marvelled, as they approached us, at how well drilled they were as they changed to their spike.

  Our infantry marched out to meet them, my unit and those of my fellow captains that commanded the cavalrymen now on foot were ordered to stay where we were, not follow behind. Our hail of arrows did little to break them, at first, as had happened previously, and they charged at us. Kailen’s drudhas had helped our army concoct a mix that would not work immediately, to better support our subterfuge.

  Our infantry did their best and I could not have been the only one that suffered for watching my countrymen die as these brave hearts did, for we could not have told them how this would be won if we had wanted to avoid a mass desertion after two morale-sapping defeats.

  Kailen was with the generals and through the horns and flags our flanking horse archers were signalled.

  He had timed it brilliantly. No sooner had their vanguard broken to the rear infantry ranks the horse archers charged the flanks. We were then commanded to defend our own archers, forming smaller wedges before the offset formations of archers. As their spike slowed to meet the impending assault the horse archers stopped some hundred yards off, out of the range of most of their javelins. They started peppering them with arrows. While their men were somewhat pr
epared for this on the flanks of the wedge, the arrowbags we shot at them contained powders that even on the breeze of that day required only a small amount carry to be sufficient to reduce our men to weeping and putting on hoods. Their soldiers suffered exquisitely as the powders rose around them.

  Their reaction was to push forward of course, where our archers launched more of these bags at their vanguard, once what remained of our infantry fled past us. Trapped between breaking formation to take on the horse archers on both flanks or progressing into those of us who had stayed back to have the space to launch volleys, they broke up. For all that the powders weren’t fatal, their men could hardly see, and their captains struggled to control their ranks as they spread out to attack the horse archers, who, as I’m sure you’ve rightly deduced, were fast enough to evade them and harry them to their deaths.

  We lost seven hundred men that day, they lost seven thousand. The standards were recovered, their general captured and their drudhas captured and tortured for whatever they knew.

  It is no accident that we would turn to him a few years later, when General Urutz led a column towards Tharos Falls, our whole kingdom under threat.

  Chapter 9

  Sand

  I am leaving the jungle to take my revenge.

  I have spent many years here, living a life of research and experiment, in the garden of a magist, ten or more perhaps since I landed on that beach.

  While I still recollect so little of my life as a boy, the family I may have had, I have gained the recollection of what happened to me, how it was I became a slave. I will keep this journal while there are still things I do not recall.

  I still do not remember my name.

  The story of my slavery up to the point I was shipwrecked I had put in a chest in the garden of the magist and forgotten about it. It had been written in the village of the fishers, the fishers that found me washed up on their beach, but the ink was of poor quality and somewhat faded, so I have rewritten it and continue it here.

  One morning, already punishingly hot, there was a gathering as four men on horseback arrived in that small community that had rescued me from the sea.

  Their command of these people’s language was halting. I caught the eye of one as he noticed me emerging from the doorway of the chief’s large thatched house. We had both paid the colour, his colourings a mottled gold and brown, which against such dark skin made him and those of these riders that had paid the colour enough look like leopards, though from what place I recall this I do not know. Blacks that paid the colour in the Old Kingdoms looked the more diseased or bruised due to the red and green those fightbrews caused.

  We stayed at the fringes while the trade was conducted, waiting to talk to each other. He wore a fieldbelt, so must have been a drudha to these visitors. A skin full of the seeds I’d seen the villagers thread into their children was swapped for some coins and what looked like tea leaves.

  The drudha approached me, shortly after tea was passed around the traders, drinking to health.

  “I am… Sand. I was shipwrecked, a storm,” I said, anticipating his question.

  “King’s Common? Are you from the Old Kingdoms, thamir? Sorry, drudha?”

  I nodded. He showed me a fieldbelt of sorts sewn in the folds of his cotton robe.

  “Drudha is thamir here. My Common not good. I am Loza.”

  “I need to get back to the Old Kingdoms,” I said.

  He laughed. “You are far side of the world, drudha.”

  He held up a hand for me to wait and spoke to the negotiator in the group, a man who scowled for the entire time, a head like the end of a club. His appraisal of me was swift; a sharp exchange of words with Loza followed. Then he gestured to me as he addressed the village leader.

  Shortly I found myself embraced by most of the village, a flask of the milk brew my parting gift.

  The thamir helped me up onto his horse. None but he spoke King’s Common.

  “Are you selling me back into slavery, Thamir?” I asked as we left the village and rode a trail inland.

  “No. But drudha without his book is not valuable drudha. I want the recipe you know. You will be fed and free. These people tell me you speak much in your sleep. I will listen to your dreaming, drudha. You dream plant I am told.”

  “I would be grateful if you would share what you hear with me. It may help me to remember more.”

  I had not yet seen his recipe book, but as with most of us it would be hidden away on him, coded in a cyca I would have little or no chance of deciphering, particularly without a deep familiarity with their language.

  Over the following three days we rode across lands rising slowly from the coast, trails cutting through bleached brown grasses and patches of fig trees and a sort of oak I’d not seen before; bright orange bark that the thamir and one of the other travellers stripped away and stored some of while we rested, presumably to treat stings and cuts.

  None of these men had seen hard service, at least none had been paying the colour deeply. The swagger of the men with Loza suggested they had not seen anything like a war. Blooded soldiers lose their swagger quickly.

  The milk and rum brew I had been given was quite restorative. I hadn’t felt as strong since before the Droop. The brew had a breed of gilead leaf, the tell-tale bitter resin thickening the drink. The rest I did not recognise.

  Despite this return of my strength I did not consider killing these men and escaping. I knew too little of the lands around us and the clan to whom they belonged. I saw that Loza had been writing, for he sat over me as I woke, marking his book with the characters of his cyca.

  On the evening of the fourth day we approached their camp, a fierce sun casting the hundreds of tents in silhouette at the top of a plateau overlooking a dried-out river basin.

  Ten guards walked this approach. Scouts moving in at least three groups flanked the basin and more in the hills about, to judge from the unwise campfires. Escape would not be on foot.

  Past a tannery, pens of chickens and the tangy smoke of the settlement preparing food I was led through a wall of stakes to one of the grander pavilions of the inner camp.

  Seated at the entrance to this pavilion was a man wearing the first iron breastplate I had seen since leaving the Old Kingdoms. He stood up from a platter of rice and strips of lamb to shake hands with Loza and the trader who led our group back from the coast.

  I understood only “drudha” in the conversation that followed. He was not the chief or lord, for a grander pavilion stood fifty yards to my right, but from his bearing he must have been a captain.

  He stepped past them to me, pulled back my sleeves, scrutinised my arms and hands, then my eyes, fully yellow with my paying the Drudha’s Share. More talking followed and Loza appeared to protest to something. Two guards came for me and I was marched out to the perimeter of the main camp, edged by a sheer drop some twenty yards to the river basin below.

  We were followed and watched by boys and girls, most in tobs as was usual in such lands near the midden, some naked.

  They stopped short of the dogs that flanked the gate to the compound, the ten of which leaped to the ends of their ropes barking and straining for me. I noticed the faintest scent of a treatment on the gates, poison for the unwary escapee no doubt.

  A student of Loza’s worked at the wounded hands of some quivering wretch at a bench in front of the shelters. Under these shelters, tied to stakes, were prisoners huddled to shelter from the sun. I submitted to the gestures and prods of swords as I entered one of the tents. Inside were stakes with lengths of rope attached, allowing some movement. Each stake was walled off with a panel of woven hair sewn into a frame hanging from the roof.

  My hands were bound and I was left listening to a man in the next partition, the only other man in this tent I could sense, whispering in their language.

  I dreaded being put on the Droop again, being submerged, suffocated in its coils. I couldn’t walk that road back a second time. Feeling the knotted rope worki
ng into my wrists I pulled at them with a fury, wishing my hands severed. I swore and stamped, and muttered and stamped again, in a frenzy at how quickly I was back in chains again. The whole camp could burn if it meant my freedom, I said to myself. I felt betrayed by this thamir and it compounded the air of betrayal that I carried like a head cold.

  The man nearby fell silent. The wind blew the stink of festering wounds through from the tortured in their heaps around the posts outside.

  My rage then subsided, the surety of this older me worming its way back in more strongly, decades of soldiering working despite me, the advice of a man whose name escaped me, a leader I knew, drawing me out of this agitated reverie. It is better sometimes not to act, he said, the world will act and it is just a matter of being ready for it.

  Loza, the thamir, came for me at dawn.

  “I am sorry. I could not change the captain’s mind. Your colour is strong; you have been warrior he thinks. Dangerous.”

  “No. This is the colour the drudhas of the Old Kingdoms pay for their experiments. I cannot wield a sword.”

  He nodded and led me to a tent the same as the drudha tents in warcamps everywhere. Here were men injured in familiar ways, wounds from battle, the cuts and bruises of drunken disputes or rivalries, but the poisons were unfamiliar, as were some of the stings and bites from the creatures in these parts.

  The tools for presses were primitive, as was the influence of Loza’s faith in what must have been a magist, Lorom Haluim, said to reside in the vast jungle to the east and who had in centuries past supposedly walked among his people. I did not, however, disillusion him on that score. How could anyone believe there were people with the power to change the world when it was as awful as it is?

  I was to assist him, earn their trust, share my knowledge of plant. These things I did, all the recipes I could divulge were recorded in his journal, the ones I’d learned on the ship that I had not forgotten. Others he took from my dreaming, as he had hoped, and as he told them to me, hoping I could make sense of the rambling that characterises sleep-talking, they came back to me. I embellished them, only partly correctly depending on the recipe he gave. I put him right on some of his errors as well to further bolster my standing with him.