by K. J. Parker
(Monach, in his dream, on the other side of the room, talking to Rethman, knows what will happen, because Monach, awake, will remember what happened. Three weeks later: Ciartan, angry about something, very drunk, hammered on the door of Rethman's house, demanding to see Xipho. Rethman, half asleep, trying to calm him down, believing he's good at handling drunks and excitable people, telling Ciartan to come back in the morning; something in his voice, or maybe an inadvertent gesture misinterpreted as a threat, breaching Ciartan's circle. The draw happens in a moment so brief that it exists only in religion; but after the draw, when the sword had completed its perfect movement and was back in the scabbard, Rethman dead on the floor, sliced from ear to collarbone. Xipho came down to see what all the shouting was about; having no sword, she attacked with a candlestick, which isn't a proper weapon in the eyes of religion, and therefore not covered anywhere in the syllabus. Ciartan, just managing not to draw, defending himself as best he could: a kick in the stomach, no big deal under normal circumstances-Monach, asleep, has all this locked down in his memory, as he dreams of being Ciartan, on the day that caused the act that finally eliminated all remaining options.)
'Wake up, for crying out loud.' Someone shouting in his sleep: is that Ciartan at the door, drunk, violent, wanting to see Xipho? 'For God's sake, wake up-they're attacking. You're supposed to be in charge!'
Monach sat up, swung his legs off the bed, opened his eyes. 'Was I asleep?'
'They've got battering rams.' Runting, wide-eyed, shaking. 'Bloody great big trees from the forest. They're-'
Monach yawned and stood up. 'How's Spenno getting on? Finished yet?'
Runting shook his head. 'Technical problems-the crane keeps breaking or something. Look, are you coming, or what?'
'Sorry,' Monach said, 'I was miles away. Right, let's get to it, shall we?'
When the world closes down around you and forms a clamp that seems to be squeezing your brain out past your eyes, there's nothing quite as effective as a temporary palliative than taking it out on strangers with a sharp tool. It was their fault; they'd smashed open the gate and come bursting in before everything was ready for them. For a short while, under the gatehouse arch, Monach's life suddenly became pleasantly, wonderfully simple. It was all disgracefully self-indulgent, but at least, for the most part, they wouldn't have felt anything, and they were the enemy. Presumably.
He'd already sliced a dozen necks to the bone before he realised: this was all very well, and his performance of the eight approved cuts would've wrung a nod of approval out of Father Tutor himself, but it wasn't the job he was supposed to be doing. True, he was forging ahead like a scythe through dry grass, but all around him the enemy were streaming past, pushing their way into the yard as if he was somehow irrelevant, while his men were either falling back or being killed. All his perfectly executed strokes were doing was putting him in a position where he'd be cut off, surrounded and hacked to death, leaving the garrison without anyone to tell them what to do. He stopped in his tracks, trying to figure out how to retreat-not covered in the syllabus, because sword-monks don't-and wondering what in hell's name he could do to rally his people and push the enemy back. No idea, not a clue. Then, while he stood still and helpless over the body of the last man he'd chopped down, something slammed into the back of his head and he found himself sprawling on the ground.
Beautiful irony; because it was Monach's getting knocked silly by a stone that saved the moment, not his supreme skill and grace. Someone in the retreating line of defenders saw him go down, and yelled, The chief's been hit, they got the chief; whereupon half a dozen of them pulled up short, faced about and rushed towards him. At least one of them ran straight up an enemy spear; at which, more defenders waded in to try and rescue them, and the general falling-back turned into a reckless but effective counter-attack. By the time they reached Monach he was on his feet again, sword in hand and looking round for the bastard who'd hit him. They surged round and past him, as soon as they realised he was all right; just as the enemy had done, they ignored him, as though he belonged to some other battle that happened to be going on next door. The hell with this, Monach thought; but the sheer ignorant energy of his followers stove in the advancing line and rolled them back under the gatehouse arch. There were plenty of other sword-monks in the garrison besides Monach, and they seemed keen to make the most of their chance to indulge themselves, too.
Right, he thought, and glanced up at the gatehouse tower, hoping to see if Spenno had managed to dismantle the Poldarn's Flutes yet. But the angle was too steep-all he could see were palisades. Not to worry; the job in hand was obvious enough. He needed to rally his men, make sure they didn't pursue the retreating attackers too far, then organise work details to patch up the smashed gates.
Monach tried shouting, but he couldn't make himself heard. His voice had always been soft and quiet, and he'd never had occasion to learn how to project it. As he stood in the yard, feeling unpleasantly foolish, he caught sight of Galand Dev. The short, wide engineer was engaged in a faintly ludicrous duel with two enemy soldiers, both of them a head and a hand taller than him; but he was using their height against them, warding off their blows with a captured shield as they cut down at him, and making them skip backwards as he slashed at their knees with a short-handled adze. A few strides brought him up close enough to join in; one soldier didn't see him coming until it was far too late; the other swung round to face him and forgot about Galand Dev, an omission that cost him his life.
'Thanks,' Galand Dev panted, wiping sweat out of his eyes, 'but I was doing just fine-'
'Listen,' Monach interrupted. 'You can shout louder than me. I want you to call them back before they go chasing off through the gate and get themselves cut off. Then I'll need you back here.'
One thing Galand Dev excelled at was giving orders. Soon the last of the enemy had scuttled away under the gate, and the defenders had regrouped in the yard, with Galand Dev barking out assignments by platoon.
Fixing up the gates didn't take nearly as long as Monach had expected it to. One platoon lifted them up and walked them back into position-they'd been ripped off their hinges, and the locking bar had snapped in two, but the panels themselves were hardly damaged at all. Another platoon fetched heavy poles and bricks; they weren't master masons or joiners, but they knew how to prop and wedge. Besides, Monach reflected, he didn't want the gates to keep the enemy out permanently. Just long enough.
He shuddered, not really understanding why. There was, after all, no difference. He could feel the damp warmth in the cuffs of his shirt, other people's blood, an occupational hazard for those who favour the lateral cut off the front foot. Severed veins spurt; there's a knack to blinking the blood out of your eyes quickly, so you don't lose the plot in the middle of a complex sequence of moves. No difference, not even in religion, between a subtle feint that deceives one swordsman, and the setting up of a fire-spitting monster behind a wicker screen…
Inappropriate thoughts: you could maybe just about get away with them as a foot soldier, a follower of orders, but not when you're in charge. Instead, he should be playing chess in his mind, figuring out the move after the move after next. (But Monach hadn't got a clue what he was going to do, let alone what the enemy were planning; he couldn't play chess worth spit, either.)
Still.
'We'll need to reinforce the east wall,' he heard himself telling someone. 'Who's in charge up there, anyhow?'
The man Monach was talking to mentioned a name he didn't recognise; it was as though his memory had been wiped away, like moisture off glass. 'Fine,' he replied. 'Take one man in five off the south wall, they won't try anything there.'
Whoever it was he was talking to didn't seem to agree with that. 'You sure? It's high ground on that side, if I was figuring where to put ladders-'
Monach grinned. 'You've forgotten your precepts,' he said. 'Strength is weakness. East wall's the strongest point, so they'll reckon we won't bother so much with defending it. Sam
e principle as with the gates,' he added, for his own benefit mostly. 'Weakness is strength.'
The man (a sword-monk, Monach remembered) grinned suddenly. 'I remember that one from classes,' he said. 'I thought it was a load of shit back then, too.'
Colonel Muno, or whoever was commanding the enemy, couldn't have read the precepts of religion; or else he shared the sword-monk's low opinion of them. He attacked the east wall, just as Monach had anticipated; he brought up siege ladders-the trunks of fifty-year-old ash trees, taller by a yard than the walls and cut with slots up one side to serve as rungs-and sent his men clambering up them like terrified spiders. Monach had his men push down the first three or four; but the wall was too low for the drop to be fatal or even debilitating, and most of the ladder-climbers picked themselves up after they'd hit the ground and immediately set about righting the ladders for another attempt. So Monach told his people to let the bastards come, and placed sword-monks on the walkway at regular intervals. He denied himself the indulgence of joining them.
The essence of religion is, of course, simplicity; it aims to pare away distractions, on the assumption that the divine is an indivisible perfection. There was something wonderfully simple about sword-monks setting about religion, if you could put out of your mind the (distracting) fact that they were cutting human tissue and bone. A purist-Father Tutor, say-might have quibbled, pointing out that their choice of cuts was too diverse for perfection; some of them favoured the downwards diagonal into the junction of neck and shoulders, others the rising diagonal across the throat, while others opted for a flamboyant, almost blasphemous celebration of variety, ranging from the minimal thrust to the full sweep of the arms, laterally off the back foot, shearing the head off the neck in a shocking waste of energy. Monach (who had specialised all his adult life in just the one cut, a swift drawn slice across the windpipe) didn't really mind, which in a sense was a failure on his part. His only real concern was to keep the enemy out of the enclosure, and so far his approach seemed to be working.
So efficient were the sword-monks, in spite of their lack of true focus, that the enemy commander abandoned the direct assault with ladders after a few minutes-long enough for the dead bodies to become a nuisance and a hindrance to movement on the narrow walkway, but not nearly as long as Monach would have liked. Since there was no danger of losing at this game, he'd have preferred it to continue for an hour or more, with less mayhem but more time-wasting, so as to give Spenno a chance to get the Flutes down from the tower and into the yard. Instead, the enemy withdrew their ladders and almost immediately resumed their attack on the already mangled gates. It wasn't hard to follow the reasoning behind the switch. Monach could only have so many of these bloodthirsty maniacs at his disposal, and the rest of his sad little army was made up of day-labourers, farm boys, runaway apprentices, thieves and outlaws. It would take minutes to get the sword-monks down off the wall and into the yard. It ought only to take half a minute to bash through the botched-up gates and match regular Imperial troops against the rabble. By the time the sword-monks rejoined the action, there should no longer be any scope for a series of single combats. It'd be back to proper grown-up soldiering, in which the trained unit invariably stamped flat the undisciplined individuals. Good plan.
So good, it was the strength that Monach, devout believer in precepts, was planning to attack. His idea had been to lure the bulk of the enemy force into the gateway in just this fashion, and then open up with the Flutes, charged with leather sacks full of gravel. It was annoying that the sword-monks had thwarted his unimpeachably orthodox planning by doing their job far too well.
Never mind. Yelling at Galand Dev to keep the men on the wall at their posts, Monach led the rest of his forces (even he caught himself thinking of them as 'the rabble') across the yard at a run. Mathematics, he thought, as he threw his weight against the planks of the left-hand gate. Factor: the gateway is wider on the inside than on the outside. Accordingly, it ought to be possible to get more bodies, therefore more weight, against the gates on our side than they can on theirs. A straightforward shoving match, mere muscle and body mass, and we have the numerical advantage. Simplicity.
He was right, of course, though it was a closer thing than he'd assumed it would be. But they were cheating, using the battering rams (mechanical advantage), which not only increased the force they were able to apply, but also smashed the woodwork up still further, making it harder to push against. As he shoved, his mind elsewhere (clearly they hadn't got archers with them, which was a blessing, but why? Because, stupid, they were expecting to fight light infantry in a forest with visibility restricted to thirty yards, terrain that would turn archers into casualties-in-waiting) Monach felt a slight twinge in his shoulder, which he recognised as minor damage to a tendon. Big deal, except…
Cutting it too fine. It was only a minute or so before the battering-ram assault suddenly broke off that Monach managed to figure out what their next move ought to be. The enemy commander, he guessed, either kept cats or had played with one as a boy. He knew about flicking the piece of wool backwards and forwards, making the frantic cat lunge left, then right, wearing itself out. So: the master strategist had timed how long it'd take to get the sword-monks down from the wall into the yard, and then he relaunched the attack on the wall. That much Monach had had the wit to anticipate, hence his orders to Galand Dev; what he hadn't considered until it was very nearly too late was that his opponent was a man whose mind wasn't saturated with the precepts of religion, and who therefore didn't know the importance of attacking strength rather than weakness. Accordingly, entirely at odds with religion, he would see nothing wrong in launching a simultaneous attack on the hitherto unmolested south wall Monach peeled himself off the door and tried to push his way through the scrum, but no chance; it was like a nail trying to walk through a hammer. When the rams suddenly didn't slam home, and the gate-side mob promptly lurched forward against the impact of a blow that didn't arrive, he was knocked to the ground. Staring up through a forest of legs, he could just see the tops of scaling ladders poking above the south rampart.
Shit, he thought; but apparently there were smarter men than him inside the compound, for which he felt unreservedly, unselfishly grateful. Someone with a brain had sent the two platoons of mobile reserves to the south wall, in good time to push down the ladders before the enemy could come surging up them. Meanwhile, the butcher noises from the east wall told him all he needed to know about what was going on there. In that respect at least, he was ahead on points. What mattered, of course, was the progress or lack thereof up in the guard tower, and he couldn't see that since he was directly underneath it.
By the time he'd contrived to excavate himself out from under the gatehouse mob, the enemy had once again given up on the scaling-ladder approach. In fact, they didn't seem to be doing anything. That was bad; because, according to the scenario in Monach's mind, they ought now to be pressing home an attack on the gate and the south wall. If they weren't, it had to be because they'd thought of a better idea.
It was a good better idea, too. The master of strategy had been fooling with him. The direct assaults had been nothing more than playing for time (him and me both, Monach thought unhappily), while his pioneers were busy in the woods nearby, felling the tallest, straightest trees they could find and lashing them together with the ropes and chains they'd fortuitously decided to bring with them. They were as quick and efficient about it as you'd expect trained soldiers to be. The result of their efforts was a single massive ram, consisting of a dozen substantial tree trunks bundled up together like the twigs of a broom and hoisted onto the two biggest carts in the baggage train. While one section of their comrades-in-arms had been thumping on the gates, and others had been providing Monach's brothers-in-religion with live cutting practice, the pioneers and the reserve had dragged the super-cart round to the hitherto undisturbed north side, which happened to face a long, gentle slope.
The 'walls' of Dui Chirra were, of course, no suc
h thing. The compound was defended by a stockade-as tall and well-built as a stockade can be, but still nothing more than a row of posts driven into the ground. When the cart-mounted ram rolled down the northern slope and crashed into it, there was an alarming splintering of timber, like a violent gale blowing down tall, spindly trees in a crowded wood. Before Monach could do anything, the enemy started to pour in though the breach.
Impossible, Monach thought; where's the religion in that? The whole purpose of this dismal affair (he reasoned as he sprinted across the yard, narrowly missing the corner of the charcoal store) was to provide a pivotal moment in history, a day when the world would change; this would be the day when the full devastating force of the Poldarn's Flutes was unleashed on unsuspecting flesh and muscle, or else why were any of them there, why had Cordo, his friend, stranded him here in an impossible situation that he otherwise simply wasn't equipped to handle? If Dui Chirra fell to a breached stockade, with the Flutes dangling in the air on ropes, not a solitary charge loosed from a single one of them, where in Poldarn's name was there any religion in it at all?
The first man he happened to run into was some kind of officer; brave, conscientious man, leading by example. He was wearing a thick waxed-leather breastplate, and Monach had to tug hard to free his sword blade from it, where he'd cut into it far too deeply, because he'd been angry and afraid and had slashed down far too deep. In doing so, he wrenched that abused tendon a little more. Very bad; nothing, of course, to an ordinary man, but the slightest imperfection in religion undermines everything else. If his shoulder hurt him a little bit as he moved into the cut, his timing would be very slightly off. If his timing was off, the cut wouldn't be exactly as it should be and there would be no perfection. Any deviation from perfection would render him mortal; like the hawk, masterpiece of economy of design, condemned to death by the loss of three feathers. The realisation hit Monach hard: he was no longer in absolute control of his actions in the one tiny area of existence where he should have been able to rely on a predictable outcome to anything he did. It was as though he'd just watched a god being killed in front of his eyes.