by K. J. Parker
Kunessin felt oddly light-headed, as though he’d been hit by something. “Something’s actually gone right,” he said. “Well, that’s a pleasant change.”
“It could still sink,” Kudei said soothingly. “Or the men might run off with the girls in it and not come back.”
Aidi pulled a face. “We should be so lucky,” he said.
The third day of the march, and the road was gradually climbing. White dust nestled in the folds of their clothes and the ridges of their boots like frost, and their pack straps were starting to fray against the steel rings of their mail shirts. Something had gone wrong with the supply train, though nobody knew exactly what; there should have been thirty wagons loaded with bacon, flour and apples waiting for them at the last crossroads. They’d waited for four hours (two hours either side of noon, no shade) before the general gave up and ordered them to resume the march. Now they were late, behind the clock, liable to miss the next rendezvous and be caught out in the open at nightfall. And if Supply hadn’t made the last drop, was there any reason to believe they’d make the next one? What if something bad had happened?
“Muri, for crying out loud, put it away,” Nuctos said, harsh and soft. “Unless you want to share with the whole army.”
Muri froze, his mouth full, then shoved the rest of the cheese back in his coat pocket. A Company tended to make its own arrangements where essential supplies were concerned; nobody’s business but their own, but it was sensible not to flaunt their superior foresight in front of the pikemen. Aidi, surreptitiously chewing a slice of dried apple, swallowed quickly.
“What do you reckon happened to the wagons?” Fly asked. He was trying to sound casual. “Just basic inefficiency, do you think?”
“Probably,” Nuctos replied, shifting his pack a little.
“Probably,” Kudei repeated.
“It’s always the most likely explanation,” Nuctos said. “You know Supply, couldn’t drown in water.”
“But . . .” Teuche prompted.
Nuctos shrugged, an uncharacteristically agitated gesture. “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s probably just me, but I can’t help wondering.” He paused, frowning, a study for a monumental statue of Man In Thought. “Heading from the main depot to meet us here, the wagons’d have to come up the main east-west road, right?”
Muri looked blank. Aidi nodded. Teuche frowned, already half-way there. “Sure,” said Fly. “I remember the map. So?”
Overhead, three crows were circling, doing complex geometry on blue paper. “Well.” Nuctos turned his head. “If they’re supposed to meet us at the foot of the mountain at dusk, we ought to have been seeing their dust for the last hour.” He pointed at the horizon. “That’s where the west road’s got to be, all right? That green line in the distance must be the river, and we know the road follows the river bank the first third of the way. So, I’m thinking, thirty-odd wagons bumbling along the road should be kicking up a cloud of dust we could easily see from here.”
Nobody said anything for a while. Then Teuche broke the silence. “That’s not so good,” he said.
Nuctos nodded. “It also begs the question of what happened to the wagons,” he said. “Three possibilities. One, they’re horrendously late leaving the depot; entirely possible. Two, they got lost - not so likely; even Supply’d be hard put to it to get lost in a desert with only one road. Three, someone cut them off.” His frown deepened. “Not all that likely, because as far as we know there’s no army, just a bunch of no-hope militia. But if there is an army . . .” He shook his head. “Not a happy thought, gentlemen.”
Aidi said: “There can’t be an army, we’d have seen their dust.”
“Not necessarily,” Nuctos replied gravely. “Not if they’re drawn up on or just behind the mountain. Cavalry could take a long loop on the far side of the river, hit the wagons and go back the way they came, and we’d be too far away to see the dust. Of course,” he went on, “that’d presuppose they knew our plans in some detail, if they know we’re taking this route, and are going out of their way - literally - to make sure we don’t see them.” He scowled, then grinned. “Assuming there really is an army, for which we have no hard evidence. I think it’s rather more likely that I’ve dreamed all this up to occupy my mind on this extremely boring march. You know me, morbidly active imagination.”
Kudei shifted his pack straps on his shoulders and sighed. “Well,” he said, “even if you’re right, there’s not a hell of a lot we can do about it, unless you fancy trying to make out a case to the general . . ”
“That famously open-minded individual,” Nuctos said. “And even if we did, what’s he supposed to do about it? We can’t turn back, we’re too far along.”
“We could,” Aidi said quietly.
“I don’t think the general staff would be too impressed,” Nuctos said.
“Screw the general staff,” Fly said. “Starving to death in the desert’s got to be the stupidest way to die.”
“Bar being hung for desertion,” Muri said.
“I don’t think we’d make it back,” Teuche said quietly. “Even with what we’ve got left.”
Nuctos pulled a deep, comic frown. “Serves me right for raising the subject in the first place,” he said. “Look, nobody’s going to desert, all right? We’ve got no proof, just a load of idle speculation on my part. For all we know, the wagons got to the mountain early this morning, which is why we haven’t seen any dust. Maybe they forgot about the drop at the crossroads and came straight on, or one of the wagons ran over a rock and busted an axle, and they’ve sent back to the depot for a smith. Could be a dozen other reasons, and they’d all be more plausible than an imaginary army suddenly rising up out of the dust like dragon’s teeth.”
That killed the subject, and left no real scope for a replacement, so they marched in silence for a while, only glancing at the horizon, with its blatant lack of dust clouds, when they thought the others weren’t looking. Behind them, the main line was slowing down - lack of food starting to have an effect - but they were reluctant to slacken their own pace and so allowed the gap to widen, from the customary twenty-five yards to more like fifty. It didn’t seem to matter; their place was, after all, at the front, on the march as in battle. Muri complained about his boots for the sixth time that day, but as usual nobody replied.
Nuctos noticed the dust cloud before anybody else; then Teuche, then Aidi, who pointed it out to the others. “Finally,” Fly said cheerfully, but Aidi was frowning. Nuctos explained.
“Wrong direction,” he said quietly. “Coming down the road.”
Kudei squinted, then asked, “How can you tell?”
“Been watching it for some time,” Nuctos replied. “It’s headed away from the mountain. Hard to tell at this distance, but I could swear it’s coming straight at us.”
Muri looked worried. Aidi said, “Could be the wagons arrived early, realised they’d missed the first drop, and now they’re coming looking for us.”
Nuctos stopped for a moment, gazing at the white wisp, like a shred of wool caught on a briar. “Could be,” he said.
“You don’t think so.”
“If that’s wagons,” Nuctos said, “they’re moving at a hell of a lick.”
They’d all stopped now. “We should tell someone,” Muri said.
Nuctos laughed. “No point,” he said. “If that’s a squadron of enemy cavalry, the general’ll see them for himself soon enough. Besides, what exactly do you think we can do about it? In the open, not so much as a pebble or a thorn bush. But,” he went on, speaking a little louder, “there’s a lot of us, and if they want to charge a square of pikes with cavalry, they’ve got my permission.”
The dust cloud grew, from a wisp to a smear to an eyesore, and the general eventually noticed. He ordered a halt, and for two hours the army stood in the white eye of the sun watching the cloud grow. It sprouted men and horses, and the general wondered who they might be; he had no cavalry closer than Tenevris, and there was no
enemy. The men and horses began to sparkle, and the general speculated as to who (apart from soldiers) rides with polished steel. Although there was no threat, he nevertheless ordered the pikemen to form a square, purely as a precaution.
The cloud became a wave. Nuctos counted them, or formed a reliable estimate: no more than five hundred, six at the very most. They weren’t the cavalry from Tenevris.
“Which means,” he said, “they’re the enemy, or an enemy. Like it matters. There’s too few of them to be any threat to us.”
Even so (purely as a precaution), he led A Company inside the pike square. Once inside, they couldn’t see what was going on. The first arrow, therefore, came as a complete surprise.
It floated, on a high, decaying trajectory, just over the heads of the back row of pikemen; then, like a wounded bird, it lost its momentum and pitched in the dust, a yard or so from a colour sergeant, who had his back to it and didn’t see. Someone must’ve told him; he turned round and stared at it, then took a long stride and picked it up. As he straightened his back, another (it flew tired, as though it had just crossed an ocean) dropped in two feet to his right; he looked round at it, frowning, as though someone was playing a joke on him, and so didn’t notice the third arrow until it pecked him in the chest. His mail shirt stopped it, of course, but he jumped a foot in the air; someone laughed, but not for very long. Then it started to rain.
They came in on a steep angle, like those short, frantic showers that arrive out of a blue sky. Instinctively, the men in the middle of the square looked round for cover, but there wasn’t any. Someone gave the order to kneel; it was standard procedure for pikemen under fire in the open, designed to reduce the size of the target, but against arrows dropping in practically from overhead it had no real effect. They were weary arrows, with no real spite left in them; they pattered off helmets and armoured backs and shoulders, stinging as they pecked but making no more than an irritating dent in sixteen-gauge plate. The pikemen crouched forward as they knelt, tucking their chins down on their chests, hiding their hands under their armpits, just like men caught out in the rain. From time to time an arrow might skip or skid as it bounced, and fly off unpredictably, grazing a knee or slapping a face with its shaft, but there was no genuine chill of danger; just the misery of getting drenched and having to huddle. Nobody spoke, so the only sound was the tapping, pinging, pecking, like a workshop full of silversmiths. It couldn’t last long, at any rate.
It didn’t. The shower stopped as suddenly as it began, and men stood up, wincing at cramps, pins and needles from crouching awkwardly, and all started talking at once. The officers were yelling to make themselves heard; men were scooping up arrows, to look at them, maybe secure one as a souvenir.
“Archers,” Fly said. “But they haven’t got an army.”
“Horse archers,” Nuctos replied. “Which is impossible. Nobody’s used them in civilised warfare for two hundred years.”
Aidi stood up; his legs were white with dust, and he looked like a clown. “If that’s the worst they can do,” he said, “I don’t see there’s anything to worry about. They’ll have to come a lot closer than that to do us any harm.”
And they did. An hour later they were back, and the arrows came in on a steeper line, and with a livelier bite. They still weren’t hitting hard enough to penetrate helmets or mail, but this time they punched and slapped instead of pecking and kissing; enough to force the air out of a man’s lungs or slap his brain against the inside of his skull. They huddled and made themselves small, like someone being beaten up by a mob; men were screaming, or in tears. The noise was far louder this time - blacksmiths, not tinkers - and it drowned out the orders the officers were still insisting on calling out, though nobody showed any inclination to move. Aidi was hit seven times, Muri five, Fly and Kudei four each, Teuche and Nuctos twice. About a dozen yards away, a pikeman in the back row suddenly jumped to his feet and started to run, in no particular direction. An arrow hit his kneecap and he stumbled and fell, rolled on the ground, hugging his knee and bawling like a calf penned away from its mother.
The second shower lasted two minutes, more or less, and when it stopped and it was safe to unclench and look up, the ground was stuck full of arrows, like a stubble field. Later, once the order had been given to move out and they’d left the site of the square (a strange plantation of red-and-yellow-flowered canes in an otherwise empty wilderness of dry dust; it reminded Teuche of something, but he didn’t share with the others), Aidi did the multiplication: six hundred archers, shooting for two minutes, nearly five thousand arrows.
“Which means,” Nuctos pointed out, “they can’t keep it up indefinitely. Say they each started out with fifty rounds. They’ve each used twelve, so—”
He broke off. Not as comforting as he’d intended it to be.
They marched quickly, as if there was some safe place to go; but they hadn’t gone more than five hundred yards when the dust cloud appeared again, and the general ordered halt and form square. This time it was no more than a minute and a half, and instead of lobbing their arrows high, the horsemen closed the range and concentrated on the front ranks. It was an experiment, suggesting an enemy with a methodical approach. He learned from it that too many arrows weren’t making it through the forest of levelled pikes, and when he attacked again, half an hour later, the archers went back to shooting high. By now, they’d found the optimum range for pitching down into the inside of the square, where the canopy of pikes offered no shelter. This time the arrows got through, hitting hard enough to puncture a helmet or split the links of mail and just about draw blood. The punch was harder, enough to knock a man down; the point of the arrow sticking through a helmet, or the sharp edges of the cut metal, gouged a furrow with every movement, and the hooked barbs of the arrowheads made it impossible to get them out. Even so, nobody who’d been hit took his helmet off, though some snapped off the shafts; most didn’t, and quite comical they looked, as though they had twigs growing out of their heads (but each time an arrow shaft snagged on something - a neighbour’s back, the victim’s own shoulder - it moved the head, which cut another furrow). It wasn’t long before somebody noticed how rusty the heads of the arrows lying on the ground were; just one more thing to be depressed about.
The attack seemed to go on for a very long time. When eventually it stopped, the general, who’d noticed that the enemy was concentrating his efforts on one section of the square, tried to move his men about, so the same ones wouldn’t come under fire the next time. This manoeuvre didn’t go as smoothly as it might have done, and the men were still bustling and shuffling around when the arrows started falling again. There was a general rush for places, which meant a dozen or so men were still standing, their arms and legs exposed. Three of them were hit, right in the middle of the square where everyone could see. Meanwhile, news had filtered through from the front ranks that four more dust clouds were on their way.
That must have prompted the general to do something. He ordered the square to advance, a complicated business at the best of times, requiring a quarter of the men to turn their backs on the enemy. The invitation was gratefully accepted. With no hedge of pikes to obstruct them, the horsemen crowded in, shooting from as close as ten yards. The back rank melted like ice, leaving a mess of bodies behind. Immediately the general ordered a halt. The archers kept on shooting as the pikemen struggled to turn; as soon as the pike-hedge came down, they drew back and resumed their patient, practised lobbing. The square crouched, aware that it had been outsmarted.
This time, the arrows didn’t stop; the five cavalry units were taking turns to advance, loose six shots and retire, and they didn’t seem to be running short of arrows. Aidi did his sums once again: at most, they’d lost twenty to thirty-five men, no big deal, nearly all of them the victims of the general’s error of judgement in trying to march the square. While they were crouched under the shelter of the pikes, they were mostly safe . . .
“Which is the beauty of it,” Nuctos mutter
ed, in the tiny reprieve as two units changed shift. “We daren’t move, we stay here, sooner or later we’ll parch, starve or cook to death.” He had an arrowhead lodged in his mail shirt just below his left collar bone. The barbs on one side had got under the links, and he was gingerly trying to work it free. “Or we rush them, and they shoot us dead. Either way . . .” He shrugged, then winced as the arrowhead cut him. “I’m not usually in favour of running away in the middle of an engagement, but in this case I’m prepared to keep an open mind.”
“Fine,” Aidi said. “And how exactly do you propose—?” But then the arrows started pitching again, and the noise drowned him out.
This time, they must have managed the shift change rather more smoothly, since there was no break to speak of between the two-minute barrages. The next change wasn’t so smooth. The arrows stopped coming, and that was enough for one wall of the square. They jumped up, knocking over and trampling the men who weren’t quick enough getting off the ground, and streamed out in a ragged wave, while the officers yelled at them.
“Now,” Nuctos said. “Come on.”
As they stood up, the horsemen wheeled in, and for the first time A Company saw the enemy. They were nothing much, by any standard: small men on ponies, many of them old men or boys, very few of them armoured, most just wearing their one tired, everyday coat over a homespun shirt and trousers. They looked like farmers riding to market, except that they were drawing their short curved bows and loosing, horribly fluent, letting the weight of the bow snatch the string off their fingers as soon as the nock touched the lobes of their ears; if they were aiming, it was just a glance, casual and expert, the way country people do any familiar task. The front rank of fugitives collapsed like an undermined wall, the second rank swept over them and fell on top of them; and Nuctos, judging the moment, shouted, “Go!”
He’d chosen well: a gap between two enemy surges. Six men running off to one side weren’t worth bothering with, when there was a gaping hole in the square to be mined and exploited. They put their heads down and sprinted, glimpsing the legs of the horses sweeping past them, going the other way; and then nothing, just the flat plain and the white dust. They ran until the hammering and the yells had faded into an indistinct jumble of noise; then they stopped and fell over, and after some time, turned back to see what was happening.