by K. J. Parker
(It had been in his mind to tell him about the fraud, too, but he decided to reserve judgement on that. Almost certainly it’d be different once they got to Sphoe, and Kudei could see for himself.)
He noticed that one of the crates was open; it had been thrown against a beam by the movement of the ship, and the lid had sprung its nails. He bent it up and peered inside, trying to remember what was in there. At first he couldn’t make it out, a shape swathed in hay; too small for a shield, too big for a mirror. He pulled it out, teased off the hay, and grinned. It was a frying pan. Well, he thought, I’ve got twenty-four of them. Any man who can stand up and truthfully assert that he owns two dozen serviceable new frying pans has something to show for his time on earth.
He went back on deck. Aidi and his wife (he was going to have to make a very special effort and learn their names) had set up a chess board on top of the water barrel. Cautiously, so they wouldn’t notice him, he craned his neck to see the board over Aidi’s shoulder. He was startled to see that Aidi appeared to be losing; he was white, and there were only four white pieces left on the board. No, revise that: three.
“Check,” she said.
He couldn’t see Aidi’s face, but the silence and the stillness were unmistakable. Aidi was thinking, very hard. She, on the other hand, looked bored. After two minutes, she yawned and said, “It’s your move.”
“I know,” Aidi grunted. “I’m thinking.”
He had a lot to think about. Teuche had never been a top-flight chess player like Nuctos Di’Ambrosies (or, come to that, Aidi Proiapsen), but he could read a board well enough. Mate in four, was his forecast.
“If you concede, we can start a new game,” she coaxed.
“I never concede,” Aidi growled.
“Then make a move.”
He scratched his head. She sighed. He moved his knight, kept his finger on the piece, made a strange, baffled noise and put it back where it had been.
“Tell you what,” she said briskly. “I concede. Now can we start a new game?”
“Don’t be stupid,” Aidi snapped. “You can’t concede, you’re winning.”
“Matter of opinion,” she replied. “You can still make checkmate with one knight and a king.”
“Will you please be quiet and let me think?”
It was more than flesh and blood could stand, and Kunessin decided to stop it. He took a long, heavy stride forward and said loudly, “Aidi, there you are. I need you to—”
“Not now, Teuche, I’m busy,” Aidi said, his eyes still fixed on the board. “Can it wait just for a minute or so?” he added, his voice less abrasive but just as resolute.
“General Kunessin,” she said (which startled him). “Could you please take my husband away somewhere before I strangle him? I’ve offered him a draw, I’ve offered to concede, it’s painfully obvious he’s lost, but will he give in?”
Kunessin pursed his lips. “Looks like a draw to me,” he said.
“I just need time to think,” Aidi moaned.
“It’s a draw, for God’s sake,” she shrieked at him. “You heard him. General, can you make that a direct order?”
Aidi made another strange noise and moved his king. “At last,” she said, and her hand was on the piece; then she hesitated, and a bewildered frown spread across her face like the smoke from burning stubble.
“Now it’s a draw,” Aidi said, and he sounded very, very tired. “My knight takes your rook, my pawn makes queen, immediately gets killed by your bishop, which gets killed by my king, your knight takes mine, stalemate. Do you agree?”
She opened her mouth, closed it again and nodded; and he was right, there was no other way it could go. But where the hell had that last move come from? Kunessin traced it back in his mind. It was a perfectly legal move, there for anybody to see, but he hadn’t seen it and clearly neither had she. “Right then,” Aidi said briskly, scooping all the pieces together and shovelling them into a wooden box on the deck. “What was it you wanted me to do?”
Kunessin’s mind went blank, but only for a moment. “You were saying something about our being off course two degrees,” he said. “Can you do the sums and tell me what that’s going to mean in terms of supplies? If we’re going to run short of water—”
Aidi shook his head. “That’s not a problem,” he said. “Even if we overshoot by two degrees, we still reach the mainland long before the water runs dry. We can go ashore and refill.” He frowned. “Was that it?”
“Thanks,” Kunessin said. “Sorry if I disturbed your game.”
Aidi gave him a poisonous look. Behind him, his wife was setting out the pieces on the board. Kunessin knew he shouldn’t ask, but he couldn’t resist. “What’s the score?” he said.
Aidi looked at him. “Today?” he said. “Or since we left home?”
“Both.”
“Today, six draws. Overall, she leads me two games to nothing, with fourteen draws. But there’s still time,” he added defiantly, “especially if we’re two degrees off, and we get stuck on the mainland for a month waiting for the wind. I’m gradually learning her game,” he said. “It’s just that—”
“I thought you were good at chess,” Kunessin said pleasantly.
“I am,” Aidi replied, in torment. “In fact, I’m loads better than I ever thought I was. That’s what’s so terrible.”
Chapter Seven
The second time that A Company, Sixth Battalion, the Ninth Regiment, engaged the enemy was shortly after the catastrophic defeat at Maxa, when General Euteuchida realised too late that he’d allowed himself to be caught in a simple crab’s-claw trap by the enemy light dragoons. Maxa left the Ninth and Sixteenth cut off from what was left of Euteuchida’s battered army, at the mercy of the enemy lancers and their crack Twenty-Sixth of pikes. Purely by chance, A Company hadn’t fought at Maxa: Brigadier General Calodaemon had assigned them to cover an attack that proved to be a feint, and by the time they were recalled, the general retreat had already begun. Calodaemon, now in sole command of the two regiments, did the only sensible thing in the circumstances and fell back on the Mysartis river valley, allowing himself the option of escaping upstream to Shandra Bakt. Or so he thought: the escape route was, in fact, a fundamental part of the enemy strategy, although in all fairness there was no way that Calodaemon could have realised that from the information available to him. Once the ruse had become apparent, he resolved to make his stand on the eastern bank of the river, with his back to a small village called Pasen Far.
“You don’t want to bother with anything the officer tells you,” Nuctos said with a grin. “Just do as I say and we’ll be fine.”
The enemy were a grey rectangle, impossible, on the opposite side of the valley. As the wind fluctuated, they could hear snatches of the sounds they made: the thump of eight thousand pairs of boots on the dry chalk, the clatter of armour plates jostling against each other, from time to time the shrill, nervous voices of officers. Impossible, because they’d never seen anything like it before. Eight thousand, they’d been told, but they could only see one huge, solid grey object, sliding towards them down the gentle slope. It was inconceivable that anybody could expect them to fight that thing. They all knew stories about the heroes who’d fought giants and dragons; as far as Thouridos Alces was concerned, the whole point of the stories was the overwhelming size of the opponent - one lonely hero squaring up to a fifteen-foot man or a twenty-foot lizard. But this thing was a mile long. How could anybody fight that?
“You reckon,” he heard Aidi say behind him.
“Trust me,” Nuctos said; and his voice was different today, soft and slightly hoarse, almost as though he was looking forward to the appalling thing that was about to happen to them. “Come on, Aidi, we’ve been through all this. If we do it the orthodox way, we’re packed lunches for the crows. Do it my way, they won’t know what hit them.”
Just for a moment, the sun came out from under the thick wad of cloud. It caught steel on the edges of the slowly approachi
ng thing; like a silent roar, a predator showing its teeth. Alces tried to estimate the distance, just as an exercise in applied mental trigonometry (Muri and the right-angle-triangle law; couldn’t help but smile at the thought of that), and decided they were still between six and eight hundred yards away. Now, if a marching man covers two yards a second, a hundred and twenty yards a minute, seven hundred divided by a hundred and twenty is five minutes forty-eight seconds—
“Where in hell,” Aidi was muttering, “is our field artillery?”
“Basco,” Nuctos replied promptly.
“Where’s that?”
“No idea.” Nuctos smiled. “Not near here, anyway. I heard the colonel swearing at a messenger. But the way I see it, who needs them? Sure, you throw a few rocks, you squash maybe three dozen of them, it really makes no odds in the long run. The only way we win is if we break them and they run for it. It’s not about killing, it’s about winning the battle. And that,” he added, widening his smile to an enormous beam, “is why, right now, we’re the most important men on this field. If we break them, we win. If not, it’s goodbye Ninth Regiment, so long General Euteuchida, once this lot catch up and outflank him, and most likely pop goes the entire war. So,” he added chirpily, “no pressure, gentlemen. Just go out there and do your best.”
Behind them, they could hear their own pikes forming. According to the best authorities, if the enemy didn’t get you, your own side would; when the line broke and the men surged forward to exploit the breach, there was virtually no time to get out of the way, nowhere to go, nothing at all you could do except keep cutting a path deep into the enemy formation, just to stay six inches ahead of the oncoming pike-heads. Keeping up with the enemy as they ran away was no good at all, since you’d be hampered by all the men in the middle and back rows. You had to chop and scramble. The best way was supposed to be to jump up and run on their shoulders, crushing heads as you went - the more you killed, the more dead bodies there’d be to get under the feet of your own oncoming line, slow them up, buy you time. That was, of course, too much to ask of any man, which was probably why most linebreakers didn’t last more than one engagement.
“A bit closer,” Nuctos was saying. He was nearly having to shout, because of the noise, the tramp and clatter and jingle. It really was true, the ground did shake. Alces could feel it through the soles of his boots. No more than two hundred yards now . . . “Not yet,” Nuctos growled, “not yet, not quite yet.” Well, Alces thought, I’m bound to have forgotten something, but it’s probably too late now. “Draw and go,” Nuctos yelled; and for a split second Alces thought: draw? And then he realised, draw the sword, and then he remembered he’d already done that; and next to him, Muri started to move, and it was as though they were tied together with rope, because he couldn’t have stayed put if he’d tried.
Even so, he thought, this is stupid, we’re running towards that thing, it should be the other way. Then the pike-heads were stupidly, dangerously close, you could do yourself an injury, and at the very last moment he remembered what to do . . .
(The trick, Nuctos had instructed them, was to jump, but just before your feet leave the ground, trip yourself up; so you go forward headlong, roll as you hit the deck, three rolls should do it to get well under the pikes; there’s a knack to kicking away from the ground to get upright again all in the same movement, and use that surge to come up through the pikestaffs - like breaking ice from underneath (strange image, but they knew what he meant) - and bash straight into them, don’t worry about trying to get your balance; there’s nothing they can do about you, they’re stuck in a bloody great hedge, both hands on the pike, helpless as kittens; and then, if you’re quick . . .
Oh, and one other thing. Don’t look at their faces, just at what you want to cut.)
He hit the soft grass with outstretched knees and elbows, but there wasn’t time to hurt. The roll came out because they’d practised it so often, and the recovery came from the roll, and then he was crashing into a man’s face and chest, remembering to turn his shoulder to crush the man’s face out of his way while raising his arms for the first cut; not a big slash, not enough room for that, but instead a long, light-as-a-feather draw cut, pulling the cutting edge across nose and lips, to cause damage and pain, which disconcerts the enemy, putting him out of action for the fraction of a second it takes to get your balance, sway back and make the big cut. Mistimed: the face didn’t go back far enough, so instead of the strong top third of the blade coming down sweet on the weak middle seam of the helmet, he jabbed the crossguard into an eye. Which worked just as well, even though it was a mistake and a mess, proving there’s no justice.
The man obligingly dropped, showing the next target, and he redeemed himself with a perfect from-the-roof cut, on the neck just above the collar bone, missing the steel pauldron (try not to hit armour, it takes the edge off the blade); smart pull back to free the sword from the suction of the wound, and onwards (and remember, try and pace yourself. Don’t waste your strength over-hitting. If possible, get a rhythm going).
It occurred to him, quite suddenly, that he was seven feet deep inside the enemy formation and still alive; in which case, they’d probably done it, broken the line, in which case the countercharge should be coming up any second now. But there was no time to turn and look (he swung; too much weight behind it, because he split the helmet right down the braze line, through the bone, deep into the notoriously soft and clingy brain. He managed to get clear, but only just in time) and for a moment he had no idea where he was, lost, like a child strayed from its parents, because he couldn’t see the others. Then he caught a glimpse of Muri - lunatic, he was taking the stuff about jumping up on their shoulders seriously, and it was working - and on the other side, the officer, Lieutenant D’Eteleieto, both hands on the hilt as he drew-cut a throat, then a perfect little shuffle to get into position for the next—
And then he didn’t understand, because instead of a quarter-turn into the next target, D’Eteleieto lurched forward, bashing his nose and chin against the target’s breastplate, and sort of slid down him to the ground; which could only mean he’d slipped, lost his footing on the blood-greasy turf, in which case . . .
There was no time to think, of course. If he’d thought about it, he’d have realised it was impossible, and that would mean leaving D’Eteleieto to die. So he turned his back on the man he had to get through and pushed with his legs, the way he’d learned how to get through a too-small gap in a thorn hedge. He felt something sharp brush across his face, a blade or the jagged edge of cut armour; it couldn’t matter less. He was holding the sword high above his head, to keep it from getting caught in anything, and he turned round again, to see an enemy pikeman letting go of his splintered pike-shaft. He swung at him; no skill, just effort, and the sword-point skidded off the peak of his helmet and flew wide, though he’d hit hard enough to knock the man off his feet. But the enemy was now the least of his problems. The front rank of the Ninth was pressing a wedge into the breach; D’Eteleieto was on his hands and knees, about to stand up, just as the pike-hedge surged forward. Alces swung again, trying to bash the pikes down, but all he managed to do was smash one pike just below the socket.
It helped not to think. He knew what to do: dive, deliberate trip, roll, and come up under the pikes, burst upwards; just in time, he kept himself from swinging the sword and killing one of his own people. Instead, the man he’d just been at such pains not to kill barged into him. He felt his left knee give way, and a numbing, splitting pain in his head as the man stumbled over his bent back and landed on him with his full weight. He tried to move, but a boot slammed into his cheekbone, then another stood on his neck; they were trampling him as they jammed themselves into the hole in the line - they couldn’t help it, almost certainly didn’t know he was there until they felt him through their boot soles, but if he didn’t contrive to get out of the way he’d be dead in a few seconds. So he reached up and grabbed, catching hold of a knee and hauling on it with all hi
s strength; the man went down as he came up, he felt his shoulder ram the man’s jaw, and something broke. His legs weren’t working, but it didn’t matter. He was being shunted forward by the men behind him, straight towards the levelled point of a pike. His outstretched hand caught and deflected it at the last moment - it went wide and in under the armpit of some soldier off to his left, and Alces was jammed up against the shaft, until the surge behind him snapped it and he lurched forward. Someone tried to jab him in the chest with a short sword, but he was either tired or not very strong. The sword-point skittered off Alces’ breastplate and took a small nick out of the inside of his left forearm, and then the man went down, and Alces trod on his face as he was shoved forward.
Lieutenant D’Eteleieto, he remembered; where the hell was he? Pointless question; he couldn’t go back. But he had to, so he twisted round, raised his arms, somehow got his elbows on the shoulders of two men, and hoisted himself off the ground. Then it was like climbing a horizontal, violent tree. He used his hands to grab handholds and hauled himself up; the support gave way and his feet touched down, so he did it all over again, swinging his head from side to side to butt obstacles out of the way. He could feel his strength starting to drain, like water out of a leaking bucket. Oh well, he thought, I’ll get as far as I can and see if it’ll be enough.