by Steven Brust
“Good,” I said, meaning it.
She said, “Smart, too. I wouldn’t send horses against ditches and earthworks.”
“What would you send against us?”
“Well, certainly not a spear phalanx—they don’t like ditches and they hate earthworks. I’d say either mounted infantry or heavy infantry, like last time.”
“Mounted infantry?”
“Ride like bastards up to the ditch, dismount, and come right over. They could get here awful fast, and the horses will shield them from javelins once they’ve dismounted. Why do you ask? We’ll know for certain in a few minutes.”
“Just killing time.”
“Best to be killing something,” put in Napper. His eyes were shining and he kept baring his teeth.
I shook my head. “You really like this, don’t you?”
“Yes,” he said. “And so do you, you just don’t want to admit it.”
“Mounted infantry,” said Rascha.
“Good call,” I said. “So, what do we do? Think the Captain will pull something clever?”
“Nothing clever to be done, really. We just have to hold this spot. Maybe Sethra will send someone in on their flanks, maybe not. Depends on how much of their forces they’ve committed and, well, on a lot of things we don’t have any way of knowing.”
I grunted.
Crown, from far down the line, called, “Make ready.”
I drew my sword, transferred it to my left hand, and picked up a javelin.
“You really ought to borrow a heavier blade,” Aelburr told me. I grunted again.
Virt said, “We’ll be lucky to have time for two throws before they’re on us.”
“Yes,” said Aelburr.
That meant one for me.
Rascha said, “Aim for the horses.” That was funny; how was I supposed to aim for anything else? We could now see the line clearly—it stretched out to more than cover us; we were flanked on both sides, then. But that, of course, was not my concern. Whoever was guiding the battle was supposed to make sure our line didn’t get rolled up, and if whoever that was blew his job, it wasn’t my concern.
It was, of course, my life. I remembered what my grandfather had said about trusting your officers even though you know they aren’t worthy of trust. My hand was cramping from gripping the javelin tightly and I made an effort to relax it.
I wasn’t used to this. Analogous situations in the Jhereg just weren’t analogous.
“You know, Loiosh, I don’t think I’d care to make this a career.”
Whatever answer he was going to give was masked by an intrusion into my head. It took a minute for me to figure out what it was, then I realized that it was Kragar, choosing just then to get in touch with me.
“What is it, Kragar?”
“Nothing important, Vlad, but—”
“Then forget it, for the love of Verra. I’m just a little busy right now.”
“Okay. Later.”
I looked up again, and there were many horses riding down on us, and Rascha said, “Javelins ready!” We all prepared to throw; I prepared to ignore the order to throw until I had at least some chance of hitting something. I wondered abstractedly if this time I’d be able to follow the flight of the javelin as it left my hand. I wondered if—
“Loose javelins!” called Rascha, and the sky darkened again. I waited a moment, then threw, instantly forgot that I wanted to see where my javelin ended up, and transferred my sword once more to my right hand.
Someone screamed, and someone yelled, “’Ware sorcery!” so I let Spellbreaker fall into my hand, and I noticed that there were an awful lot of horses writhing about on the ground. At first I thought someone had strung a trip-wire, then I realized that they were the result of the javelins, and then I wondered why I hadn’t thought of stringing trip-wire myself, or, at any rate, why someone hadn’t thought of it, and then some guy came bounding up out of the ditch in front of me so I stuck my sword through his neck and he went down.
There was shouting, screaming, and the clashing of blades, but it all became a sort of noiseless noise, and I remember having the illusion that I was in my own universe, with no directions except forward; anything to the sides was someone else’s problem. It was odd, and it was also odd how much time I had to think, to observe, to plan, and to act. Someone else bounded up, off balance and sword flailing as if he’d been propelled by something behind him, and I remember being able to pick my target, wait for it to line up, and to hit it. Then a hand appeared, and I cut it, and then I intercepted some sort of spell with Spellbreaker without being aware of how I spotted it. Then two came over at once, and I gave one a good cut across the legs while the other struck at me. I slipped to the side while holding my rapier up at a sharp angle—I even remember calculating the angle to keep the blade from breaking—and when I’d deflected it I stuck him one in the stomach. He fell forward, so I let a dagger fall into my hand from my left sleeve, stuck it into his throat as he lay on his back, and recovered Spellbreaker from his chest, where I’d dropped it.
I wiped my brow, dragging Spellbreaker in front of my eyes; its gold links were small now; no doubt that meant something. I waited for the next man to try to get past me, but there wasn’t one; the assault was over.
I stood there and looked myself over, until Loiosh said, “Relax, Boss; not a scratch.”
“Okay.”
Then I looked for my tent-mates. Virt was on her knees breathing heavily, but didn’t seem to be bleeding. Napper had one hand on the earthworks, the other holding his sword, as he watched our retreating enemies, and I had the impression he was willing them to return. Aelburr was sitting on the ground, grinning, shaking his head, and cradling his left arm with his right. He caught me looking at him. “Son of a bitch,” he said, but not angrily, more as if he were commenting on the weather. “Dislocated my fucking shoulder.”
“Next time,” said Virt, looking up suddenly. “Try cutting them instead of throwing them around. For one thing, that way they aren’t in such a hurry to crawl back over.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” he said.
I looked an inquiry at Virt, but she didn’t provide any details. She opened up her water flask and helped Aelburr drink some, and presently the surgeon arrived. I walked away a little, because I don’t like watching surgeons, physickers, healers, or anyone else whose job it is to undo the sort of thing I’m so good at doing.
Rascha came by about then and directed those of us who didn’t need treatment to pick up javelins and make sure they were unbroken, which was sufficiently mind-numbing to be relaxing after the battle.
We had not, it seemed, been in the worst part of the engagement; there were places where the carnage was much worse, and Jhereg—normal-sized ones—were circling overhead. Sometimes one would come a little too close and someone would hurl a stone or a javelin at it.
“Why is it, Loiosh, that they hate Jhereg so much but like you?”
“My winning personality, Boss?”
“Yeah, that must be it.”
By the time I got back, the bodies were neatly stacked, and the seriously wounded were gone, and the walking wounded had, for the most part, been tended to. Napper had gotten over his battle-fury and was himself once more. “We should attack,” he said disgustedly.
“Good thinking,” said Virt. “They only outnumber us about three to two.”
“Don’t matter,” said Napper.
“And we’d be leaving our protection, which is the only way we survived the attack.”
“Don’t matter.”
“And they could probably bring a spear phalanx against us.”
“Hmmm. Matters,” said Napper.
“What,” I asked, “is a spear phalanx?”
“A unit specially designed to wipe out units like us.”
“Oh.”
“Think of a solid wall of very big shields with ranks of spears sticking out of them, and those in back, who aren’t even in danger, pushing the ones in front a
t you.”
“I see. Well, no I don’t, but I’m convinced I don’t want to.”
“I’ve been through one of those,” said Virt. “I didn’t much care for it. I probably wouldn’t be here if we hadn’t had help.”
“What sort of help?”
“They don’t like getting hit from the flank while they’re engaged in front. The especially don’t like it when it’s heavy cavalry.”
“Do we have heavy cavalry?”
“Probably. I’d still rather skip that fight.”
“Okay,” I agreed. “I won’t order it.”
“Thanks,” she said. “Which reminds me. That business last night.”
“What about it?”
“Are you—”
I was saved from having to evade another question by the juice-drum, which told us to form our line again.
“Here they come again,” said Rascha.
“Bugger,” I said.
Napper stood and bounded back to the earthworks, his eyes shining.
“More mounted infantry,” said Rascha. “Ready javelins.”
You don’t need to hear about the second assault, or the third. We survived, and more died. Virt picked up a gouge on her left leg that didn’t amount to much, and I got a bruise on my forehead that knocked me down and would probably have been fatal if I hadn’t been rushing my opponent; she caught me perfectly, but it was the flat of the blade. Things got hazy for a bit, and I don’t know what became of her, but then it was over, and, while we were awaiting the fourth assault we got word to retreat. Napper didn’t like it, but I was delighted.
Rascha came by and gave me a new cap, since I’d lost mine in the last assault, and Virt, limping along next to me, said that the bandage around my forehead made me look like a real warrior. I made scatological culinary recommendations.
“Loiosh, I just want you to know, for the sake of my familiar having complete information, that my feet hurt.”
“I think you’re cheating, Boss. Everyone else has to either carry on without complaint or be known as a complainer. You get to complain without anyone knowing it.”
“Because I had the foresight to show up with a ready-made listener to complaints.”
“That’s a new job for me. Do I get a raise?”
“Sure, Loiosh. Your salary just doubled.”
“Heh.”
We didn’t start the march until fairly late in the day, so we stopped blessedly early, posted the extra pickets, and settled in to a hasty but well-organized camp. I suppose the art of setting up camp has a whole lot of theory behind it, too. Maybe that was what Crown was so good at; I don’t know.
I had the second picket duty, which gave me the dubious pleasure of sleeping a little less than four hours, standing guard for four, and then sleeping another hour and a half before having to get up. We weren’t attacked during the night, which I wondered at. In fact, I wondered why we never launched attacks during the night. I wondered if it was some sort of agreement among Dragons, the way the Jhereg won’t have you assassinated in your own home or in front of your family.
Turned out I was wrong, it was all a matter of generalship and the art of war, about which I know nothing now and at the time knew even less. You see, I somewhere got the idea that good generalship would have a lot in common with running the organization and that there would be a great deal of similarity between battle tactics and, say, planning an assassination. I found out later that I was wrong. Oh, in very general terms, sure there are some similarities, but not in any useful way. I was speaking with Sethra Lavode about the Wall of Baritt’s Tomb and the campaign leading up to it. I said, “You have this reputation, you know. I mean, as being a great general. You were Warlord I don’t know how many times, and—”
“What about it?”
I had to cast about for words. It’s hard to tell the most powerful sorcerer and perhaps greatest general in history that you weren’t impressed with how she did her job. She might take it wrong. After mumbling a bit, I finally said, “I don’t know. It’s just that the whole time I was marching and waiting and sneaking around and fighting and marching again I kept waiting for you to make some brilliant maneuver, or some great stroke, or pull some trick, or something.”
“How many tricks do you use in your work?”
“Huh? I’ll use a trick any time I think I can get away with it.”
“So will I,” said Sethra Lavode.
“But you usually don’t?”
“Tricks, feints, sneak attacks, night attacks, they all work better if they’re on a smaller scale. A unit, maybe a company, that’s about it. Once you have anything larger, the chances for miscommunication and mistake become too great. And there’s always more of a chance for error on attack than defending even in the most simple operations, so if you add something tricky it gets much worse. That’s one reason I prefer to defend whenever possible.”
“So that’s why we kept holding positions and then retreating after we’d won?”
“Those skirmishes you’re talking about—”
“Skirmishes?”
“All right, Vlad. Those battles, then, that you won, you couldn’t have actually won if you had remained. Fornia wouldn’t have attacked if he hadn’t been pretty sure he could overrun those positions eventually. We had to keep drawing him after us.”
“Well, I suppose that counts as a trick, then.”
“Maybe. Except, of course, that he knew very well what I was doing.”
“Then why did he do what we wanted?”
“Because it was what he wanted, too. He wanted to try to get past our advance positions so he could divide our forces, which would have put me in a very uncomfortable position. It was a race, if you like. I needed to hold him off long enough for all of our forces to be in position; he needed to break through and separate us so we couldn’t combine. And then, of course, the big, decisive engagement. However much planning you do, you don’t really know until the armies meet and have it out. Even if your position looks perfect on paper, or even if it looks utterly untenable, you don’t know until someone calls for an attack and the fight happens.”
“Okay,” I said. I tried to phrase my next question, then gave up just as she figured it out.
“The reason,” she said, “that I have been successful is that I pay attention to details. The fewer details you miss, the greater your chances of winning.”
“Well,” I said. “That much is rather like assassination. Or so I’ve heard.”
“I don’t doubt it. It means keeping open lines of retreat and communications, and always knowing how you’re going to feed and water the troops, and where they’ll be camping, and what sort of ground they’ll be crossing at every point, and the nature of your officers and where their strengths and weaknesses are, and how much dependence to place on which intelligence reports, and how far to push a particular victory, and how to salvage as much as possible from a given defeat, and so on and on and on. The details—the little things that lead to your peace, instead of the enemy’s.”
“Lead to peace?”
“Peace is the goal of war. Didn’t you know that?”
“Uh …”
“Come, Vlad. Until there is peace, you haven’t won. That is, you haven’t accomplished your goals. On the other hand, it is worth remembering that, until there is peace, you also haven’t lost.”
“I guess I hadn’t looked at it that way.”
“You have never had to.”
“Yeah, I suppose.”
“The other reason I’ve been successful, I think, is that I’m very aggressive. And of course, my reputation helps. They think of me as being a great general, which makes the enemy afraid to be aggressive, which makes me a great general.” She laughed a little. “But my usual approach is to give the enemy every chance to make a mistake, and then I punish him when he does, and the biggest mistake may be not to be aggressive enough, which is one mistake I never make.”
“Aggressive on defense?”
&n
bsp; “Certainly, Vlad. After all, it’s always the defender who starts the war.”
“Excuse me? Then it was Fornia who started the war with Morrolan?”
“Yes, indeed. That made him the defender, and that was why so much of my effort was involved in bringing him over to the attack.”
I shook my head. “I don’t see how it is that the defender starts the war.”
“It isn’t that complicated. The attacker doesn’t want war. The attacker wants to conquer. If the defender would simply allow him to do so there would be no war.”
“Uh … Sethra, I think there’s something wrong with your logic.”
“No,” she said. “There isn’t. It’s counterintuitive, but it isn’t wrong.”
I thought all that over, remembering the battles and the retreats and the marches, and I said, “Assassination is easier. Or so I’ve heard.”
She smiled and made no answer.
But that, as I said, was months later. At the time I just sat in camp along with everyone else, stood picket duty, marched, and griped. I think of that period as “the long march,” although it was made clear to me that it wasn’t long by anyone’s standards except mine. I don’t know exactly where we marched—I keep meaning to find a map and trace the route—but we usually had the Eastern River on our left, and we always had the Eastern Mountains on our right, and we kept going north; and then one day we turned around for no apparent reason and headed back south, almost exactly retracing our steps. No one except me, it seemed, found that infuriating, but I was annoyed enough to make up for the rest of them. My comments on the subject met with shrugs and puzzled looks until I stopped talking about it.
The weather for the most part stayed dry and cold. The cold wasn’t too bad, because marching kept me warm, but I learned that dry wasn’t all that much better than raining, because we were now passing through an area that hadn’t seen any rain in some time, and so whenever we were on a road, which was most of the time, the troops in front kicked up dust that we had to eat all day—even worse than before. Dust so thick you walked with your cap down and tried to keep your mouth closed, but you couldn’t because your nose was plugged up. A few of my comrades had handkerchiefs over their mouths and noses; I tried that, but breathing became difficult so I stopped. Periodically someone would conjure up a cross breeze just to give us some relief, and even I took my turn at it, but we couldn’t keep it going all day without a major weather-working, which was expressly forbidden by the Captain—something about interfering with “stated objectives of the Brigade.”