by K. J. Parker
‘Now what?’ he said, as a man appeared behind his shoulder, just as he was about to eat something for the first time in twenty-four hours. ‘Look, if it’s something you can possibly deal with yourselves…’
‘Message from the scouting party.’ The man turned out to be Hedasai, until recently ex-officio commander of the duck-hunters. Now that there were no gullible ducks left anywhere within a week’s ride, he’d been reassigned to lookout duties. It occurred to Temrai that Hedasai shouldn’t be there.
‘Well?’
Hedasai paused for a moment before answering. ‘We think you should come and take a look for yourself. It could be trouble.’
Temrai looked up at him, a wedge of salted duck forgotten between his fingers. ‘What kind of trouble?’ he demanded. ‘More observers from downriver?’
‘We think it’s more than that. It looks like it might be an army.’
What a ridiculous thing to say, Temrai thought. Either it’s an army or it isn’t; it’s not exactly something you can mistake for anything else. And then he thought, Oh, gods.
‘Well, I suppose I’d better see for myself,’ he said. ‘Jurrai, Modenai, I need you for something. Could you get my horse and my bow and meet me by the saw-pits?’
Nobody said anything much as they forded the river and rode up the winding road into the hills. From the highest point, where they’d built a signal beacon, it was possible to convince yourself that you could just see the tallest tower of the upper city; it was a splendid vantage point, and Temrai had had it in mind when he chose this place for the construction camp.
‘Well?’ he said, catching his breath. They’d had to dismount and lead the horses for the last half-mile, and he’d spent too long sitting and standing around over the last few months. ‘Where’s this army of yours?’
Hedasai pointed. A good way off in the distance, maybe fifteen miles, something flashed in the light. Temrai looked hard; was that his morbid imagination or a cloud of dust? ‘Jurrai,’ he said, ‘you’re the one with the eyesight. What do you make of it?’
‘Not good.’ Jurrai cupped his hands round his eyes and concentrated. ‘I’d say that’s a large body of men, cavalry by the dust they’re putting up and the speed they’re going at. Assuming they know where we are, they could be here in three hours or so.’
‘Damnation.’ Temrai scowled. To his surprise, there wasn’t much fear, very little compared to the anger. Of all the things he didn’t need, a pitched battle against heavy cavalry in front of the construction camp, where he had two hundred dismantled catapults and fifty trebuchets in the process of being fitted together and taken apart again – as if he didn’t have enough to worry about. ‘Oh, well, we’d better get ready for them. Modenai, get back to the camp, have the men saddled up and ready. Hedasai, take your scouts and go with him; I don’t want stray riders wandering about where they can be seen, I want these people to think we’re careless and stupid. Jurrai, you’re with me.’ Suddenly he grinned. ‘Do you know how to plan a battle? I don’t.’
‘You didn’t know how to build catapults, either.’
The two of them rode down a little way under the skyline and sat in silence for a full quarter of an hour, learning the landscape by heart and considering the implications of what they saw. Then Temrai’s face softened into a smile.
‘It’s perfect,’ he said. ‘Jurrai, we can do this if we keep calm and don’t try to be too clever.’
Jurrai nodded. ‘I know what I’d be doing if I was their man. What had you in mind?’
‘Well.’ Temrai collected his thoughts; it would help him clarify matters in his mind if he explained to someone else, and there was always the chance he’d missed something obvious that Jurrai had noticed. ‘He’s over there, with nothing much except open country between him and us except these hills. Now, our camp is on the other side of the river, on the flat between the river and the high ground over there; which means he’s got to cross the river to get to us, and there’s only two places he can do that.’ He stopped, rubbed his chin. ‘There’s the main ford down below us, opposite the eastern ends of both ridges, with our saw-pits and the jetty right beside it. Then there’s the bend in the river, with those two little copses, and the other place you can just about ford the river, which is maybe a mile and a half from the camp. What he’ll want to do is creep up on the other side of this ridge here, hoping that we don’t see him behind the ridge until he’s actually on the ford. Agreed?’
Jurrai nodded. ‘Mind you,’ he said, ‘if I was him and wanting to do things properly, I’d be trying to make some use of that higher crossing. It’d be a crying shame to let all that natural cover go to waste.’
Temrai thought about that for a moment, trying to make believe he was the other man, whoever the other man was. ‘I think you’re right,’ he said, ‘which makes it even better for us. What if he splits his army in two when he reaches the eastern point of the ridge? He sends the best part of his forces up to the higher ford, to sneak round between the two copses and behind the head of the ridge on the camp side of the river – he’d reckon there was a better than even chance of getting into position there without being seen since we wouldn’t be expecting an attack from our side of the river. Then he sends the rest of his people over the main ford; we charge off to meet him there, and his main force pops out from behind the ridge on our side and hits us from behind. Next thing we know, we’re surrounded, the only way to run is back downstream, and he’s got control of the camp and can destroy the engines at his leisure. Good plan.’
Jurrai nodded. ‘Assuming he’s counting on us not having seen him coming,’ he said. ‘Although we’ll know soon enough by the direction he takes. He can’t cross the river downstream of the camp for about ten miles, to the best of my knowledge.’
‘I didn’t know that,’ Temrai nodded. ‘But let’s assume he does, it forces his hand even more. Now then, here’s what we do. You take, say, two-thirds of the men and split them into two, one lot behind each of the two copses. You ambush him, one in front and one behind so he’ll have nowhere to go except to run due east, which’ll take the best part of his forces out of the reckoning entirely.’ Temrai stood up in his stirrups, staring at the ground beyond the river bend, trying to imagine it swarming with shouting men and panic-stricken horses. ‘He’ll see all that, and it’ll make him think that all our men are up that end of the field and the camp’s unguarded. He’ll then make a dash for the camp, which’ll be a big mistake from his point of view, because I’ll have one detachment over the river actually in the camp ready to meet him, and my main force on this side, just below where we are now, all ready to jump out and cut him off from behind. If we’re really lucky we might even be able to catch him while he’s crossing the ford and squeeze him into the river from both ends.’ Temrai stopped, and stared at Jurrai, his eyes wide. ‘Gods, Jurrai, what if it doesn’t go like that? We’d have our people split up into four groups. I don’t like it.’
Jurrai shook his head. ‘Better than being all bunched up in the camp,’ he replied. ‘And your contingent’s got a back door if things don’t work out; you can just run for it downstream and hope you’re faster than he is. If I were in his position I don’t think I’d risk an extended pursuit. The same goes for my lot,’ he added. ‘We can always split and run east, then double back behind the ridge and join up with you downriver.’ He bit his lip, and added, ‘It does all seem a bit too perfect, doesn’t it? Or maybe we’re just brilliant tacticians and never knew it.’
Temrai sat back into his saddle, his eyes fixed on what was now quite definitely a cloud of dust far away on the flat plains. ‘You’ve been in battles,’ he said. ‘What’s it like?’
‘Messy,’ Jurrai replied. ‘Mostly, you get frightened because you don’t know what’s going on. Usually – at least, all the fighting I’ve ever been in – you start off with a long, boring wait, which is when the nerves get to you and you end up convincing yourself that you’re going to get killed and it’s going to hu
rt, and you tell yourself you can’t possibly keep your nerve, you’ll run away at the first sight of the enemy and everybody’ll despise you for ever.
‘Well, you’re just about ready to kill yourself there and then and save the other side the bother when the action starts, and in my experience you don’t have the time or energy to be scared after that; either you’re in the line and you’re desperately trying to hear the orders over the shouting and keep up with the others and do what you’re supposed to be doing, or else you’re in command yourself, and you’re so busy trying to make yourself heard, trying to keep your men together and doing what they’re told, you probably wouldn’t notice if you had arrows sticking out of you like prickles on a hedgehog.
‘And the actual fighting; well, that’s even more of a mess. You can forget all your sword training and archery practice; you’re loosing off arrows as fast as you can draw, you don’t think about aiming, or if you do, that’ll be the moment you drop the arrow or the string breaks or the enemy suddenly change direction and ride off out of range.
‘As for the hand-to-hand stuff, you’re riding forward, usually too fast to be in any sort of control, and suddenly there’s people all round you, yours and theirs; if you really want to, you can usually ride straight through a melee and nobody’ll try and stop you, because the chances are the other side are just as scared and confused as you are, and nobody really wants to fight if they can help it. If you do fight, it won’t be a five-minute fencing match. You hit and he hits, and perhaps one of you’ll make contact, and then you’ll be past him and either dead or onto the next one. If you’re hit, you may well not know it. If you get killed, it’ll probably be by someone you hadn’t even seen. It’s a bloody dangerous hobby, sure enough, but don’t imagine it’ll any of it be deliberate. It’s ninety-five parts luck, and the other five depends on the generals. That’s what fighting’s like. Is that any help?’
‘Not really,’ Temrai replied. ‘It sounds like what I remember of when the camp got attacked when I was a kid, except we weren’t even trying to fight back. The crazy thing is,’ he added hopelessly, ‘I started all this. I must be out of my mind.’
‘As Your Majesty pleases,’ Jurrai replied politely. ‘Let’s get back to the camp.’
When the enemy reserve suddenly appeared out of nowhere and came crashing into the rear of the column, trapping them half in and half out of the river and throwing the whole party into utter confusion, all Loredan felt was a vague sense of relief; the worst had happened, there were unlikely to be any more unpleasant surprises; all he had to do now was fight it out and it’d all be over for the day. Even as the men behind him dropped off their horses into the water, dead before they fell, he knew that he wasn’t going to be killed; not here, not this way. It was strange, this calm, this sensation of not being involved except as a spectator; perhaps it was because he’d been expecting something like this ever since they left the city. Now things were going the way he thought they’d go, at least he knew where matters stood. It was starting to make some sort of sense. Just as the old man always said; the enemy you can see is the least of your problems.
His greatest and most insoluble problem, namely his five so-called co-commanders had been solved for him. Two of them were dead already, to his certain knowledge. As for the other three, well, if they were still alive, there wasn’t much damage left for them to do. He tugged hard on his left rein, lifted his sword and selected one of the enemy to take out his anger on.
It had been, of course, all his fault. If he hadn’t whined and complained solidly about being put in charge of this ludicrous venture, in the hope of being replaced by someone else, he wouldn’t have had five deadheads foisted on him the day before the expedition was due to set out, each one of them apparently convinced he was the commander-in-chief and the other five were only there for decoration.
Six generals, for crying out loud. Sheer lunacy under any circumstances. Six generals in charge of five thousand untrained volunteers meant they’d never stood a chance.
The plainsman rode straight at him, spear levelled. Loredan pulled up, watched him come, dragged his horse round at the last minute and severed the other man’s spine just above his shoulders with a short-arm cut as he flashed past. Something hit him six inches or so above the left knee; it felt like a sword or an axe, wasting its force on the heavy-duty mail and the thick padding underneath. Damn fool of an amateur; never hit unless the blow achieves something, you should kill ’em or leave ’em alone. He’d estimated where the other man would be before he’d finished turning round; the enemy horseman was almost past him, his back turned, but not so far past that he was safe from a long-arm thrust under his armpit, where there was a gap in the boiled-leather armour just nicely convenient for a sword to go in and reach the heart. The dead man’s own forward momentum pulled him off the sword; Loredan watched just long enough to see him topple forwards, then spurred his horse on and rode for a gap in the melee. He wasn’t achieving anything by just sitting there killing people, and he needed time to think.
He couldn’t see very well for all the people in the way, but it seemed fairly certain that they were hemmed in back and front, with the deep water of the river on either side. That meant there was nothing for it but to force a way through either front or back. Chances were the main force of the enemy were behind them, since that was his logical line of retreat. In which case, he’d have to go forwards, try and break through to the camp and perhaps throw them off balance by getting between the camp and the ridge. If only he could keep things mobile, there was even a chance of outrunning the force behind them, coming up on the enemy detachment who’d ambushed the flanking party, spooking them, rescuing what was left of his people upriver and getting out of this shambles with some vestige of order.
First things first. He pulled his horse round and forced a way through the mass of terrified men that formed the centre of his column. A more useless congregation of human beings would be hard to find, but enough of them followed him to give him a little impetus, just enough to give him a chance of reversing the flow of the melee on the east bank of the ford. Luckily the enemy were slackening off, starting to think they’d done enough and that it was now just a matter of finishing the job. He killed seven men and carved up another four before he finally made it through to the other side; his right arm ached so badly he could hardly breathe, and his head was splitting after a bash on the side of his helmet from something he hadn’t seen.
The wedge of men behind him forced a breach in the enemy line – not so much a line as a mob, jammed tight by weight of their own numbers, certainly no longer in the mood to fight after they’d decided in their minds that they’d already won. If you’ve won, why risk getting killed? More amateur thinking. At long last, something resembling a survival instinct led his column to push through the gap. The enemy let them go, too busy with their own sudden and unexpected panic to initiate any further hostilities. They wanted to be left alone now, and Loredan was happy to oblige them. When he looked back over his shoulder at the ragged stream of horsemen emerging from the slaughter of the ford, he was pleasantly surprised to see that he’d managed to get nearly four-fifths of his people out. The rest were as good as dead; the hell with them.
Still in business, he congratulated himself. Now then.
His assumptions held good. The last thing the enemy were expecting him to do was attack, and so when he rode up between the head of the ridge and the southernmost of the two little copses, he had a clear run straight into the rear of the happy throng of slaughtermen who were surrounding what was left of his flanking party. Once they realised what was happening, they cleared off without even making a pretence of a fight, heading upriver to cut him off from the high-river ford across which they were expecting him to go. Reasonable guess, but amateur thinking nonetheless. What he needed most at this point in the proceedings was time, space, peace and quiet; they were going to let him have some, and that ought to be enough grace to save all their lives. As soon
as he was sure he’d got as much of his flanking party with him as he was likely to get, he signalled a right wheel and led the column off east at the double.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Having realised he was still alive, Temrai opened his eyes and yelled. After a minute or so, his dead horse was pulled off him and he was lifted up out of the water. It occurred to him that he was shaking like a man having a fit, but there was nothing he could do about it.
‘What happened?’ he gasped. ‘I thought we’d won.’
‘We have,’ replied the man who was holding his right arm. ‘They’ve got away from us, and they’re running for it. Are you all right?’
Temrai nodded. ‘What happened?’ he repeated. ‘Everything went like we wanted it to, and then the next minute they were all over us.’ He shuddered, remembering the sudden terror that had paralysed him as the other man, the one who’d started it all, burst out through a solid wall of Temrai’s guard and came straight at him, his face so completely calm, almost serene, that for a moment Temrai had taken him for Death itself.
He remembered how there had been no time at all – the man was on him, his sword-arm through with the thrust before Temrai could even make up his mind what to do, but it had all gone so slowly, so that he’d had time to think all sorts of things before the other man’s sword-tip came out through the other side of his horse’s neck, and he’d felt both of them gradually toppling over into the water. He remembered the extraordinary feeling of calm and resignation after that – oh, well, here goes, that was that – as he waited to hit the stony bed of the ford, feel the hooves of the oncoming enemy landing on his face and chest-And here he was, apparently alive and not hurting, nothing broken, no blood he could definitely say was his own. Just like Jurrai had said: a mess…
‘Where’s Jurrai?’ he asked, already knowing the answer.