by K. J. Parker
They brought him his horse. The wretched thing was in a mood. It got like that from time to time, mostly when it hadn’t had enough exercise; it stamped its feet, backed up, tossed its head, pulling him sharply forward by the reins. He tried soothing words, but knew he was wasting his time. It was going to be one of those days. He watched the men form up, according to the order of battle he’d finally decided on in the early hours of the morning, not because he’d thought of something but simply so that he could go to bed and try and sleep. It was pathetically simple; offcomers in the centre, regulars in two blocks to cover the ends of their line, archers on the wings; cavalry, what little there was of it, held back as a last-chance mobile reserve. He’d drawn it out on a piece of paper, then looked at it and written 4/10, must try harder at the bottom. It was what Apsimar would’ve come up with if he’d been in command. Time to think of something was starting to run out.
He realised, with a terrible jolt in the pit of his stomach, that he hadn’t yet found a vantage point from which to watch and control the battle; he hadn’t done it yet because there wasn’t one. The small hill where they’d pitched camp was the only high ground in sight, and the enemy were a mile away. For the hundredth time he considered calling the whole thing off; pulling out, going away, starting again from scratch somewhere else. For the hundredth time, he reminded himself that that was impossible; he was at the very end of his supply chain and there simply wasn’t enough food, the reasons for which he intended to discuss forcefully with Supply as and when he got back to the City. The mistake had already been made and was past fixing. It had to be here and now—in which case, the only place he’d be able to see from would be right up close, far closer to the actual fighting than he’d been for about ten years. He realised that he was sweating and shivering, and his knees were freezing cold. Ah, he thought, I’m a coward, that’s interesting. Hell of a time to find out, but useful to know nevertheless.
Well, he thought, I may be a coward but the horse isn’t. He gave it a harder kick than strictly necessary, and it jolted forward, with a buck and a half-hearted rear. Heroes’ horses do that sort of thing. Maybe it’s because heroes kick them too hard, because they’re terrified.
He was halfway across the plain towards the enemy before he remembered he hadn’t got his armour on.
Hunza, according to the reliable sources, positioned himself in the exact centre of his front line. He arrived in a silver-plated chariot, complete with purple canopy and scythed wheels, that had belonged to Casharo the Great, conqueror of the Known East; he was flanked by nine hundred veterans of the old Invincible Guard, who’d travelled from all four corners of the former Sashan empire to be at his side. The centre of his formation was Sashan regular heavy infantry—the Ninth Army, which hadn’t seen action in the last stages of the war and was practically at full strength; they’d been on garrison duty in Agpatana, nine hundred miles away, when the Great King was overthrown. On the wings were twenty squadrons of Matapaean dragoons. The reserve was five thousand Zeugite heavy infantry; time-discharged twenty-year men recalled to the colours from their smallholdings in the Mesoge. It was only scraps and leftovers of the might of the Sashan, but Hunza had twenty-six thousand men—fifteen hundred tons of steel armour—against Calojan’s twelve, and the imperials had seen fit to attack.
The imperial line advanced, with a cloud of staff officers buzzing around the ranks like flies, trying to keep the front straight and level. The trouble was, the offcomers walked faster than the regulars—later, Calojan figured out it was simply because they were taller, so had longer legs—and they didn’t seem inclined to listen to the riders who kept telling them to slow down. By the time they were within a long bowshot of the enemy, they were seventy yards clear of the regulars, puffing along in their wake.
A Sashan captain who was with Hunza at this point later recalled that all his senior advisers told him to send the dragoons out to hook and outflank this advance unit, but Hunza refused; he knew Calojan, he said, and clearly this was a deadly trap, into which he was not disposed to fall. The dragoons, therefore, stayed exactly where they were as the five thousand men of the imperial advance guard crashed into Hunza’s centre.
I can’t see. Calojan realised he was shouting it out loud, but the noise was so great he couldn’t hear himself. It was like being suddenly struck blind. In front of him, on the far side of the backs of his infantry reserve, one hell of a battle was going on. He could hear it, but that was all. Everything was going wrong, and he had no idea what to do.
This is hopeless, he told himself. He gave the horse a brutal kick and yanked its head over, swerving round the side of the reserves and out into the open, where he could see—
He’d forgotten. It had been a long time. It all looks so different from a long way away.
The offcomers were tearing a hole in Hunza’s front line. Confronted with a rock-steady hedge of spearpoints, the front rank had dropped their shields, ducked under the spears, grabbed the shafts and pushed them apart, wide enough for two or three from the second rank to wedge themselves into the gap. The Sashan, gripping shield and spear as though they were frozen to their hands, had no way to defend themselves or get out of the way; the offcomers pulled their helmets off with one hand and crushed their skulls with the other. They were fighting like animals, the way Calojan had seen deer and pigs and dogs fight each other, a scrambling, violent mess which bore no resemblance to the drill manuals or the skill-at-arms displays. The Sashan, as far as he could tell, weren’t even trying to fight back. They were shocked, terrified, as if the enemy were werewolves or trolls, unnatural and inhuman. The attack was eating into the formation like acid on metal, and deep inside there shone a gleam of flickering gold; Apsimar, in his ridiculous armour, cutting a path straight at a shining silver chariot gridlocked in the dead centre of the line.
This is insane, Calojan thought. He stood up in his stirrups, thinking, what about the dragoons, for crying out loud? They should be pouring in on the flanks by now but he could see no sign of them. He tried to think, though he’d never felt more stupid in his life. They’re not moving, because they haven’t had orders; orders can’t reach them, because Hunza’s in that ludicrous shiny chariot, and my savages are in the way. He looked round for a rider—there were always at least a dozen riders with him when he was running a battle, close enough that they could hear him dictate orders without having to lean forward; no, not this time, he’d left them behind. He panicked, as though he’d unexpectedly lost his voice; then he kicked the horse forward, right up close to the horrible, wet, red fighting, until he saw what he was looking for; a man in reject-stock lamellar armour, picking himself up off the ground.
“You,” he shouted.
The man looked at him. He must’ve been knocked out and only just come round. There was blood running down his face, but scalp wounds bleed like hell. Calojan reined in the horse and slid off it. “You,” he repeated. “Can you ride?”
“Who the hell are you?”
“I’m Calojan.” He grabbed the man’s hand and pressed the reins into it, closing the fingers around them. “Ride to the regular infantry division on the left, give them this message. Quarter wheel towards the dragoons and fucking stay there. Those exact words. Then you ride over to the other division on the right, tell them the exact same thing. You got that?”
The man wiped blood out of his eyes. “You’re the general?”
“Yes.”
“But I thought—” He pointed vaguely in the direction of the centre. “In the gold armour. We were following—”
“Not him,” Calojan shouted; for some reason, he felt mortally offended. “Me. Now move.”
The man dragged himself onto the horse with a handful of mane, gave it a ferocious kick. His feet weren’t in the stirrups; probably he’d never used them, since they’d be made of iron and therefore too expensive. Calojan watched him out of sight, then remembered where he was; ten yards from the fighting and completely unarmed.
Fortunately, a sword wasn’t hard to come by, though he had to prise it out of the previous owner’s hand, finger by finger; Sashan, some sort of officer, his head split open like a log, dust on his open eyes. He’d forgotten about all that, and for a moment he stood staring at the weapon he was holding, wondering what on earth he was supposed to do with it. Answer; as little as possible. Now he could really do with a horse, but there wasn’t one anywhere.
Something was happening. It took him ten seconds, a very long time in context, to figure it out. The Sashan line was starting to crumple, but there wasn’t anywhere for it to crumple into; the back six ranks couldn’t see what was happening at the front, probably had no idea that the front five ranks had ceased to exist, and were standing their ground; the middle five was trying to push through them, walking backwards because there was no room to turn; nobody could ask or answer, because you couldn’t hear yourself think over the blacksmithing noises. Now, if his messenger had got through and been taken seriously by the divisional commanders, he had two regular divisions facing off against the dragoons on the Sashan wings; if they called his bluff and charged, that would be the end of the matter, but they wouldn’t, because they weren’t getting orders from Hunza and they’d be too scared of invincible, infinitely cunning General Calojan to use their initiative and attack anyway. Meanwhile, the offcomer division was continuing to consume the Sashan centre like fire burning a bundle of dry sticks.
Luck, he thought bitterly; it was practically obscene. Still, it was doing a better job than he was capable of, in the circumstances. As for his part in all this—the only way they could lose now would be if invincible Calojan the Miracle-Worker contrived to get himself killed, in which case the regulars would simply drop their weapons and run. His duty, therefore, was to get the hell out of it, as quickly and discreetly as possible.
Running was out of the question, so he turned and walked briskly, away from the fighting, towards the camp. He felt ridiculous, but he couldn’t help that. Behind his back, men were dying, for or because of him. He tried to think about something else.
That evening, he walked back again, this time to view the bodies. The offcomers, who took that sort of thing rather seriously, had laid out their dead in rows, each man lying under his shield, feet crossed (he wanted to ask about that, but decided another time would do just as well); at the end of each row was a huge pile of manufactured goods, the proceeds of enthusiastic scavenging. Calojan didn’t have the heart to tell them that half of the stuff—worn-out boots, bloodsoaked trousers—wouldn’t repay the cost of carting it to the City. The rest of it, mostly armour and weapons, would make a little money on a saturated market. It would probably constitute unimaginable wealth to the offcomers.
The fifteen thousand dead Sashan, by contrast, were piled up in long, low heaps, slumped where they’d been pitched off the tailgates of carts, like road-makers’ chippings. All the bodies were naked except the one he’d been brought to see. He looked down, then knelt and made a show of examining it closely, though there was no need. He’d seen from ten yards away that the corpse in the shiny silver-plated scale armour wasn’t Hunza, who had presumably exchanged outfits with a gullible subordinate, then made his way quietly off the field, like someone else he could mention. Of course, it was worth bearing in mind that Hunza wasn’t Hunza, just someone pretending to be him; now, presumably, pretending not to be the man he’d pretended he was.
He stood up. “That’s him,” he said. “I’d know him anywhere. Strip the body and burn it with the others.”
The other body he’d come to see was lying on its own, on a stretcher made from broken spears and one of Hunza’s more flamboyant banners. Apsimar had died from one of about twelve deep, slicing cuts, most likely from a Sashan cavalryman’s sabre. Someone had been to a lot of trouble to try and squash his arm and shoulder back onto the torso, but it wouldn’t line up right. His face had a diagonal red-and-black line across it, as though someone had crossed him out. Apparently he’d got within five yards of Hunza (or the fake Hunza, more likely) before his frenzied attempt to end the battle with one glorious stroke had run out of energy and luck. Forty-seven men, nearly a third of the offcomer dead, had been killed retrieving his body. Next to him, the offcomers had made a heap of the finest weapons taken from the dead; they’d snapped the bows, crushed and smashed the shields, heated the swords to soften them and twisted them into semicircles. The idea was that the killed weapons would accompany the dead man to some place where slaughtered heroes go. The offcomers had repeatedly insisted that they didn’t expect to be paid for these weapons; they were a present, to their fallen lord.
It rained in the night, so that next morning there was no dry wood available for burning the Sashan bodies. The regulars objected that the picks and shovels were with the reserve supply train, which hadn’t arrived yet. They could wait for the wagons, of course, but there was no way of knowing how long they’d take to arrive, and the quartermaster wanted it put on the record that they only had food for another two days. The northern savages, they added, had their own picks and shovels, not military issue but perfectly serviceable. The offcomers explained politely that they didn’t bury their enemies, it was disrespectful to their own dead. The Chief Augur helpfully reminded him that leaving the bodies of the enemy to rot on the battlefield was anathema and would incur divine wrath; Calojan might be inclined to take a relaxed view of such issues, but he ventured to suggest that the emperor would not. So Calojan went back to the offcomers and offered to pay them five hundred solidi if they’d lend their privately-owned digging tools to the regulars. That, apparently, was entirely acceptable. Then the regulars objected that because of the heavy overnight rain the ground was too wet for excavating the usual deep-cut mass graves; the sides of the trenches might fall in, which posed an unacceptable risk to the men doing the digging. By this point, Calojan’s head was hurting so much he could hardly see straight; then he remembered that in the wagons containing Hunza’s personal belongings were twelve forty-gallon casks of rose-scented sacramental oil, of the sort that Sashan noblemen used as a cologne after bathing. A quick test confirmed that it was extremely inflammable, even when sprinkled on something wet.
The smell—roses, and something rather like burnt pork fat—followed them on a south-westerly breeze almost as far as Chastel Rosc. A cloth dipped in water and tied over the nose and mouth helped a bit, but it was a week before any of them managed to get it out of their hair.
Although the festivities themselves were of almost unparalleled ingenuity and splendour, the prevailing mood among the crowds who watched Sechimer walk the half mile from the Newgate to the Golden Spire was confusion. They were there, so they’d been told, to celebrate two things; the deliverance of the empire from the Sashan threat, and the marriage of the emperor to Gesel de Peguilhan. Fine; but hadn’t the Sashan already been wiped off the face of the earth six months or so ago; and why was their tall, handsome young emperor, now the undisputed master of the entire world, marrying a mousy, horse-faced little commoner two years older than himself, who nobody had ever heard of before?
Good questions, both of them; and the Council dealt with them by having the fountains in the Perfect Square run with wine instead of water from noon until dusk, and handing out fifty million trachy from huge hampers on the Temple steps. This response proved to be popular but not satisfactory. Why, people persisted in asking, had the bride and groom gone to their wedding on foot, in sackcloth, to the accompaniment of monks singing the Intercession for the Dead? Why wasn’t Calojan at the wedding? And, given that they’d just been told that the purchase tax, the wine tax, the property tax and salt duty were all about to go up because of financial stringency, who exactly was paying for all this, and what with?
“Actually,” the archdeacon said, as he piled smoked-fish rolls on his plate at the reception, “that’s a very good question. Officially, it’s coming out of the vast treasure captured after the battle. The truth is, we got barely enough out of it to cover
the cost of the campaign, particularly since Calojan was so very generous to these new savages of his.”
Aimeric had tried one of the fish rolls; too salty. “So who did pay for it?”
“We did,” the archdeacon replied grimly. “Mostly the Golden Spire, though the New and the White Star promised to cover a third, though we’ve yet to see the colour of their money. No, the last of the offertory plate had to go, and the clerestory screens, and all four of the Mezentine officiary chalices. We’re now in the unhappy position of genuinely being as poor as we’ve been telling people we are for the last ten years. The only bright side to it is that we don’t have to pay for feeding all those wretched savages at that ghastly camp any more. They’re on the army payroll now, heaven help them. If you ask me, the savages and the paymasters’ office are ideally matched, the utterly insatiable versus the sublimely unsatisfactory. Still, you never know.”
Aimeric nodded. “So why the funeral service? And where’s Calojan?”
“The Intercession was for that fool Apsimar.” The archdeacon sniffed a fish roll and put it back on the far side of his plate. “And Calojan’s not here because he can’t face being forgiven by Sechimer for getting his last living relative killed. You can see his point. I mean, I have no objection to religion,” the archdeacon went on, “in moderation, but lately Sechimer’s become little short of insufferable. The sackcloth is a case in point.”