The Folding Knife

by Parker, K. J.

  Stopping for a crap is absolutely terrifying. You fall out of line and wander a very few steps away from the road--the road is the way, the truth and the light in a forest; three yards off it and you're in Hell--and you watch the army marching past you while you fumble with your tasset straps and unbuckle your breastplate and take off your cuisses, till you're basically a peeled shrimp; and you squat in the bracken knowing that you'd never see the hand that comes up to cover your mouth while the other hand slides a knife across your jugular vein.

  I'm drivelling. Apologies. These are military dispatches, which will be filed in the permanent record. Posterity doesn't need to know about me shitting in the woods.

  I have no idea how long we marched for. After the first few days, time just seemed to stop. No way of knowing anything; can't see the position of the sun in the sky, can't see where you are, wouldn't mean anything to you if you could see. Just a load of fairly identical trees, and the road. Sometimes it went up hills, for hour after fucking hour--if ever I do become First Citizen, I shall have all gradients lined up against a wall and shot--sometimes it went down again. Aelius knew where we were, because he had the map. I've got it here in front of me. It's really helpful. There's this enormous splodge with thousands of little drawings of trees, and a straight line up the middle to represent the road. Only the road wasn't straight, and it didn't go through the middle. Otherwise, you couldn't fault it.

  We knew what was going to happen. We all knew. There'd be a place where the road gets constricted by some natural feature, probably in a valley or combe with high, thickly wooded sides. They'd have blocked the road, probably by felling trees across it. We'd come up against this barrier and be forced to stop, at which point the air would fill with savage cries and javelins, the enemy would pour down on us from three sides, they'd slaughter us like sheep and then pull out again before we could get ourselves organised. Repeat the procedure until we're all dead. We all knew it would be like that sooner or later. Naturally, we'd planned for it; been over the drills time and time again. First sign of trouble, the three outer files of the column (heavy infantry) form a shield wall (kneeling, standing, innermost file hold shields over heads of other two), the archers marching in the innermost files shoot over the wall to create a no-survivors zone; pioneers at front of column get the obstruction cleared away as soon as possible; under no circumstances is anybody to leave formation or go off the road. The Cazars have huge forests of their own. They do this sort of thing to each other all the time, for politics or fun. Which isn't to say they weren't brown-trouser scared all the time, but at least they had a procedure to believe in; do exactly what we've practised, and we should be all right.

  It wasn't like that.

  It started very gradually. First, it was just one man--a lunatic, presumably. We came round a corner, and there he was: stark naked, standing in the middle of the road, waving a single javelin. He yelled something at us--probably something offensive--threw his javelin at the front rank (hit a shield), then ran like buggery back into the trees. How we laughed.

  Next day there were more of them--groups of two or three. They came out of the trees, stood in the road, yelled at us, threw javelins, missed, ran away. Day after that, it happened twenty-six times. Aelius had given an order not to waste arrows on these clowns. Next day, they chucked their javelins from cover, not the open road. One man wounded, several others minor grazes and bruises. That night, more javelins chucked into the camp, at extreme range. Next day, same, but more and more. We told ourselves we didn't give a shit; they chuck spears, the spears bounce off, is that really the best they can do?

  Asked Aelius: what's this in aid of? He was taking it very seriously. The enemy, he said, was far more patient and intelligent than he'd at first assumed. All this pantomime was just a series of gradual extended experiments, to gauge our discipline and nerve. He'd been counting; the number and duration of attacks was increasing steadily. We were supposed to notice this. Observe, the enemy was saying, how we can annoy you, round the clock, and you can't do anything at all about it. True, we're only irritating you; but you're the ones who have to win. All we have to do is not lose. And the deeper you go into our woods, the worse it'll be for you.

  Days four and five, it was pretty much continuous: a constant drizzle of javelins, rocks, logs rolled down hillsides, trees felled across the road, holes dug in the road; they'd got a river from somewhere and diverted it, presumably quite some time previously, because it turned a quarter of a mile into knee-deep ooze, which we had to squelch through, and there's nothing on earth more physically exhausting than wading through really deep mud. All to the accompaniment of sharp things being thrown at your head by bastards you can't see.

  Aelius said it was to wear us down. Well, yes.

  Day six, early hours of the morning; we'd all been awake the last two nights, so were past caring, fast asleep. They came out of nowhere. First I heard was the screaming of bloody great trees falling, all around. Clever buggers, they must've sawn them half through a day or so before, so all they had to do was chop the back-cut, and down the trees came. It was like being in a room and the walls cave in on you. So much for our shield wall. As the trees fell, so they came out of the woods, straight at us. Now we've got God only knows how many casualties dead or pinned down screaming under the fallen trees, we can't move up or down the fucking road, they're coming in from the sides; they've got us penned in like sheep between the tree trunks, hardly any room to move; they throw in two volleys of javelins at point-blank to mess us up real good, then follow up with the sword.

  The Cazars have been fighting in forests for a thousand years, but they never thought of that.

  The javelins didn't kill anybody much; weren't meant to. They were just to deprive us of our shields. Stick a javelin in a shield, you nearly double its weight. They didn't bother with shields, or armour. They came in with long, stiff swords and bloody great big felling axes; stick you through the joints of your armour or bash your head in. Our archers never got off a shot.

  It was at some point during this stage of the engagement that Aelius was killed. I didn't see it, haven't found anybody who did. I like to think he died sword in hand, making himself a mat of dead Mavortines to lie down on. Or maybe a tree fell on his head, I don't know.

  It says in the Book that military command is transmitted instantaneously: soon as one officer dies, his next-in-line is automatically in charge. I guess it was like a line of beacons. Aelius dies; Brigader General Phaselis is in command; Phaselis dies; General Euthyphron is in command; Euthyphron dies; and so on. Might not have happened in score-card order; maybe Phrontis died before Acanthides, God only knows. Fact is, there came a point, probably about ten minutes into the proceedings, where there was nobody left. Thinking about it, they knew exactly where in the column the senior officers were likely to be, and they made a point of getting them killed straight away. Cut off the head and the body dies. You know it makes sense.

  There was this colonel--dead now, poor bastard, so I won't say his name. He was running up and down, scrambling over tree trunks, dodging spears and savages, desperately trying to find an officer more senior than he was, so he wouldn't have to be in command. You can understand that. Anyway, the stupid bastard found me.

  What had I been doing all this time? Not a great deal. Stood there, looking at the tree trunk that had come this close to squashing me to mulch. Savages all around me; Cazars fighting them, getting killed. It was only some time later I stopped to wonder why those Cazars hung around there and fought, rather than scrambling over the tree trunk and getting away. They were fighting to save me. Aelius' orders: safety of Bassianus Licinius top priority. They were letting themselves get killed, being my human shield, and I was too preoccupied to even bloody notice.

  When the colonel found me, there was a bit of a lull. I'd even pulled myself together sufficiently to get my sword out of its scabbard and look round for someone to hit, only by then the Cazars had killed them all. Colonel asks me if
I've seen so-and-so; no, I haven't, and incidentally, what the fuck is going on? Aelius is dead, he tells me, and so's everybody else, the entire chain of command. Then he looks at me, and I can practically hear little tumblers click into place in his brick-thick skull.

  No way, I tell him. I'm not even a soldier, I'm a civilian.

  You're the First Citizen's nephew, he says (and if I give him any lip, he's going to smash my face in); that practically makes you royalty. Anyway, someone's got to do it, and it's fucking well not going to be me, he says.

  (And I thought: well, can't do any harm, we'll all be dead in the next twenty minutes anyway. Why not? Seriously, that's exactly my train of reasoning. Why not?)

  Of course, my mind immediately went blank. Really blank, blanker than blankness itself. All I could think was: well, so far we've done exactly what they've expected us to do. Therefore, if we do what they aren't expecting, no matter how stupid, it's got to be better, hasn't it?

  All right, I told the colonel, get me a horn-blower. A trumpeter. Why? he asks. Don't fucking argue, I say, get me a fucking trumpeter.

  He stares at me like I'm mad, then he hauls himself over the tree trunk and he's gone. Well, I thought, probably won't see him again, and I sort of froze--waiting for a savage to come and kill me, I guess. But a few moments later, back he comes, dragging this poor bloody trumpeter.

  How loud can you get that thing to blow? I ask. He doesn't answer. Make as much noise as you possibly can, I tell him. So he does. Then I tell the colonel: get up on that tree trunk, yell as loud as you can: at the next horn-blow, everybody go left up the hill, double quick, pass it on.

  That's crazy, he says, we can't leave the road.

  I bent down, picked up a bit of broken-off spear-shaft, and smacked him round the head with it. Do as I say, I told him.

  So he did--up on the tree trunk, yelled; some bastard savage hit him with a javelin and he came tumbling down, stone dead. Never mind that now. I told the trumpeter, Blow, and he made this noise like the Invincible Sun farting into a bucket, and I turned round and started to run up the hill.

  For a moment, it wasn't going to work; they were just standing there, too scared to leave the road. I was jumping up and down yelling, Come on, for fuck's sake. They started to move; a few, then a lot, and then the whole army, what was left of it, was running up the hill.

  We met savages, sure. But suddenly it was all different. It wasn't what they were expecting; and you know what? There weren't nearly as many of them as we'd led ourselves to believe. Really there was just a thin cordon--they'd spread themselves thin the whole length of the column, and we couldn't see them so we never knew how thin. We ran into them, messed them up a bit and punched through. We had armour, they didn't. It really does make a difference.

  I say we. Overstatement of case. I was running, looking over my shoulder, yelling Come on, follow me, stuff like that, and suddenly there's this horrible man bang in front of me--the enemy, face to face, so close I can smell his sweat.

  I am a graduate of the Republic's finest fencing school. I have a bit of paper that certifies that I'm invincible. I froze. He didn't. If some Cazar hadn't barged into him and knocked him off his feet, he'd have cut my head off and I wouldn't have done a damn thing to stop him. It was only some time later I realised I'd dropped my sword, at which point I picked up a big thick bit of stick. Some time later, I bashed a Mavortine over the head with it, so that was all right.

  How long we ran I don't know. Quite some time. Then I remember hearing someone in the distance yelling, Hey, they aren't chasing us any more; and I thought, can that be right? So I called a halt. Amazingly, people stopped running, like I was in charge or something.

  Then I tried thinking. Well, of course, I thought. They've stopped chasing us, sure. They don't want to get too far off the road. Get away from the road in a forest, you get lost.

  But we were so definitively, so absolutely and perfectly lost, it really didn't matter a toss. Also, having accidentally done one thing right, that one thing had suddenly become the cornerstone of my new religion. Whatever we do, we don't go back to the road. Any fucking road. We're alive precisely because we're lost; because we've wandered into the depths of the forest, and no bugger knows where to find us.

  There's probably a deep philosophical truth in there somewhere.

  So we stopped, and pulled ourselves together, figuratively and literally. Found there were a hell of a lot of us, even though a hell of a lot of us were missing, if you see what I mean. Of course, we had no map, but that was hardly a death blow. We'd gone left off the road so we were heading sort-of-north. My plan, my master strategy, was to keep on going till there weren't any more trees; and if the savages came after us, run away.

  I put a bit more effort into it than that. I went round looking for officers--mostly hoping to find someone who'd relieve me of command, but no such fucking luck--and I told them I was in charge now and this is what we're going to do, and any suggestions very gratefully received. Of course, half of them couldn't speak Vesani.

  It was the officers, not me, who got the men back into some semblance of order and looking like a bunch of soldiers rather than refugees from a costume party. Well, some of us had shields, most of us had weapons; those that didn't went in the middle, with the shields on the outside. Then we advanced. Well, you honestly couldn't call it an advance. More of a sort of heavily armed stroll.

  Now, the next bit is extremely important. I want you to make sure that whatever else they cut out, they leave the next bit in. Please.

  I did not, repeat not, know where we were at this point. I had no idea. I was a little boat cast adrift on an ocean of leaf mould under a dappled green-and-brown sky. I thought I was heading due north; in fact, I was proud of the way I was managing to steer us by the very occasional glimpses of the sun I could snatch through the canopy, and the direction of the shadows of the trees, when there were any shadows, which was hardly ever. The one thing I had no intention of doing was returning to the scene of the ambush and sneaking up on the enemy while they looted the baggage and the dead. Though the idea might have some transitory, meretricious appeal to an over-imaginative armchair tactician, in real life it'd be the dumbest thing I could possibly have chosen to do.

  The enemy thought so, for sure. Which is why, when I contrived to lead us right round in a fucking circle, they weren't expecting us.

  It's hard to reconstruct in the absence of witnesses, and we killed every Mavortine who didn't manage to get away, but my guess is: they blundered on after us until they were too scared to go off the road any further, then they headed back to the ambush site to make a really thorough job of sending us a message. I do know they kept two (2) survivors alive--to send back to tell the nearest garrison commander what they'd seen, because we were just in time to save one of them. All the other survivors, five, six hundred, they nailed alive to trees, ripped open, wound out their guts on sticks. Apparently there's a religious reason. Leaving aside the moral issues, it's not a good thing to do in the circumstances because it's so very labour-intensive. What with that, and mashing up and destroying every single artefact we'd brought with us, not to mention getting the felled lumber off the road (their road, their lifeline), they were fully occupied--no men to spare for sentry duty.

  The hero of this story is some Hus whose name I'll never know, who probably shouldn't even have been on the expedition (Aelius specified: no Hus, too undisciplined), who was scouting ahead of the main rabble. Apparently the Hus can no more not-scout-ahead in unfamiliar territory than breathe underwater; and we felt, if these people want to tire themselves out creeping from bush to bush and hooting like owls, let 'em. Anyway, this Hus saw the enemy just in time, figured out what had happened, came back, told us. By some miracle, I believed him.

  What happened after that was pretty straightforward. After all, the men are Cazars. They had a pretty good idea of what needed to be done. All I had to do was say, Right, I want them completely surrounded and sealed in t
ight before anybody so much as thinks about moving in, and they did all the rest. Very well, too. I stayed right back. My burning thirst for martial glory well and truly quenched some time earlier.

  They came and found me when it was over, though I'd more or less guessed by the noise level. No idea of our casualties in the encirclement/butchering phase; the impression I got was single figures (including the poor bastard Hus who made it all possible, of course). Their side: well, nobody would admit to having let through a single man, but we reckon a couple of dozen oozed through the cracks. Nothing is ever perfect, not even wholesale slaughter.

  We all felt pretty good about it; even though, as always in these circumstances, it was an incredible amount of hard, gruelling physical slog. Some Cazar told me: you don't actually feel tired when you're smashing heads; it's the next day when everything aches like hell and you wish you were dead. Took his word for it. But anyway: dog-tired, but quietly, ferociously pleased.

  We counted the bodies, then just left them to lie; too much work putting our own dead back together and dumping them in a pit. Our losses: four thousand, six hundred and fifty-seven. Theirs: twenty-seven thousand and some.

  Since intelligence assured Aelius before we left that the absolute maximum number of insurgents there could possibly be in the whole forest, including support and non-combatants, was twenty-four thousand, I think it's probably safe to assume we got most of them.

  Well, we had a good night's rest after that (apart from the poor devils who drew sentry duty, of course); and in the morning we faced up to the fact that we'd permitted ourselves to overlook the previous evening: namely, that the Mavortines had (in pursuit of their religious and cultural agenda) destroyed all the food we'd brought with us.