by K. J. Parker
Bardas frowned. ‘What with?’ he said. ‘I’ve bust the hammer and the axe is useless.’
Alexius scowled at him. ‘Don’t be so pathetic,’ he said. ‘When I was your age we proved everything with our bare hands, we didn’t faff about with hammers. Stop mucking about and get on with it.’
So Bardas hammered on the piece with his clenched fists, which were of course harder than any axe and heavier than any hammer; but try as he might, once he’d battered away the skin and the flesh, he couldn’t make so much as a little dent in the skull. ‘Quality,’ Anax muttered. ‘Don’t think you’ll ever crease that, not even with a drop-hammer.’
‘Rubbish,’ Bardas replied irritably. ‘I can break anything. Bloody fine assistant deputy viceproofmaster I’d be if I couldn’t. Here, give me that.’ He pointed to an arm which Anax had picked out of the pile; it was Colonel Bardas Loredan’s sword-arm, neatly sawn off at the elbow. He cut off the hand with his thin-bladed kitchen knife, the one he used for jointing and skinning the carcasses, and swung the massive bone round his head with all the strength he could muster. Steel on steel, the noise was; because Colonel Loredan’s head was a helmet and his sword-arm a vambrace, cop and lames. ‘You can always tell the quality by the sound it makes,’ Anax reminded him. ‘Listen to that, best Mesoge steel. When you’ve done with that skull, I’ll have what’s left for a planishing stake.’
‘There won’t be anything left,’ Bardas grunted; and he attacked the piece as if it was an enemy and his life depended on the outcome. In the end, honours were roughly even between the arm and the skull; both were dented and twisted, but nothing a good armourer couldn’t mend by beating out over an anvil. Quality like this can always be mended by hard, skilful bashing between hammer and anvil; no reason why it shouldn’t go on for ever.
‘Give up?’ Alexius asked, and the skull’s eyes opened –
- ‘What?’ Bardas asked. There was a man standing over him. ‘Gods, is it morning already?’
‘Staff meeting,’ the soldier replied. ‘Then weapons training; it says on your schedule you’re doing wounds and death with the ninth, tenth and twelfth platoons.’
Bardas yawned. ‘I’d completely forgotten. All right, tell ’em I’ll be out in a minute or two.’
Another agreeable thing about the Imperial army was its eagerness to learn. Two centuries ago, the Sons of Heaven had hit on the happy notion of performance-related bonuses for field armies. These awards were calculated at platoon level (to take it further down the command structure would be to risk encouraging soldiers to place individual opportunity above corporate goals) and were based on the number of confirmed kills attributable to each platoon during a battle. Naturally, any kills achieved in the face of or to the prejudice of explicit orders from an officer were discounted; only the platoons that saw action were eligible, which had the beneficial effect of making each unit eager to take its turn in the front rank. In consequence, combat tutorials from an expert like Colonel Loredan were regarded as a genuine opportunity to increase a platoon’s earning power, and were very well attended.
‘Today,’ Bardas said, looking over the top of the mass of attentive faces, ‘we’re going to look at the mechanics of killing; this is all about making your blows count, doing as much damage as you can with as little exposure and risk as you can get away with.’
You could have heard a coin drop. Bardas suppressed a grin. If you could see me now, Alexius; a college lecturer.
‘Quite simply,’ he went on, ‘there’s two ways of doing damage with the sword and the halberd, namely thrusting and cutting. Now then, hands up anybody who’s studied fencing or something similar outside the service.’ A couple of hands appeared; Bardas nodded. ‘Well, first thing you’ll be doing is forgetting everything you were taught in fencing school about thrusts being better than cuts. Sure, thrusts kill better than cuts, but they kill slowly. You’re in a battle and the other man’s trying to kill you: you don’t just want him dead, you want him dead now. Most of all, you want to stop him being able to hurt you; which is why a cut that does relatively little damage – snips off a thumb, say – is quite likely going to be more use to you than a neat thrust through the lung that’ll drop him dead as a stone in ninety seconds’ time.’
The audience shifted a little in their seats. Bardas knew why; they weren’t sure which they were more interested in, staying alive or racking up a healthy body-count. Very good; let them keep that division of priorities firmly in mind.
‘If you’re going to kill a man or take him out of play, you’ll need to damage either the works or the pipes; works are things like muscle, sinew and bone, pipes are veins and arteries. But damage isn’t everything; you can do fatal damage and still not do the job. Just as important as damage is shock. Always remember that, if you can.’
Bardas paused and took a sip of water.
‘For a good military kill with a thrust, don’t bother with the head too much. Skulls are thick; unless you’re lucky enough to get a fluke shot in through the eye, the ear or the mouth, chances are that all you’ll do is make your enemy even more bad-tempered than he was before. Necks are good, especially if you twist the blade once you’re in, but the neck’s a damn fiddly small target; so’s the heart, come to that. If you go for the heart, ten to one you’ll get tangled up in the ribs, which are springy and a right pain. You can make a real mess of someone’s chest and still not stop him; it’s a low-return shot, not something you want to muck around with in a serious battle.
‘If you’re fighting cavalry, of course, you’ve got the option of a thrust up under the ribs – also if you’re kneeling to receive an infantry charge. As well as the heart, you’ve also got a clear shot at the liver and a big fat artery. Gut-shots are probably the easiest kind of thrust; but you’ll be amazed at the amount of junk there is inside there that you’ve got to get through before you reach anything worthwhile. Also bear in mind that the stomach muscles convulse when they’re cut, enough to move your shot off line. By the way; when you prick a stomach, it goes pop as all the air comes rushing out; it’ll startle the life out of you the first time you hear it, so be prepared for that.
‘Actually, if you’re thrusting you can do a lot worse than go for the arteries in the groin, the small of the back, upper arm, armpit, knee and so forth. Lay one of those open and you’ll almost certainly have a kill; but please, always bear in mind the fact that bleeding to death takes its own sweet time, during which he’s still armed and dangerous. Even if you’ve got him fair and square in a good place, always follow up, preferably with a big cut, just to make sure he ends up on the deck. Same goes for kidneys, lungs, all that stuff. If all you’re interested in is killing, get a job in a slaughterhouse. If you want to be a soldier, concentrate on killing quickly.’
He paused for breath. Still got their attention? Good.
‘Cutting, on the other hand,’ he went on, ‘is as much about shock as damage. Cut a man’s hand off and suddenly he’s not a threat any more, even if he lives to be a hundred. Remember, pain is your friend, it’ll stop him trying to get you; a perfectly lethal thrust might not hurt enough to notice, and if a man doesn’t know he’s dead, he might not stop attacking you until it’s too late. Now, the choicest cuts are to the head and neck; but don’t fool about trying to chop the other man’s head off when a nice crunching slash across the neck artery will do just as nicely. For one thing, while you’re swinging your sword up for the really big hit, you’re the next best thing to an open target yourself. Short, meaty cuts across bones are what bring home the bacon; so long as you stop him cold, you can always finish him off with the next one.
‘Finally, people will tell you the thrust’s quicker than the cut; maybe so, but that sounds to me like you’re taking too big a swing. Get close first, then take your shot; use your feet to close up the gap, move your body and your arm at the same time, and you won’t need to worry too much about slow cutting. Do it right and they’ll never know what hit them. All right, any questions?
’
There were questions, plenty of them and for the most part intelligent and informed. Once again Bardas reflected on what a pleasure it was to work with people who really cared about technique and craft. If only he’d had a few students of this calibre (instead of only one) when he was running his fencing school, perhaps it might have worked out a whole lot better.
Later that day, the first timber wagons rolled back into camp, and the tempo changed noticeably. In no time at all the lumber was unshipped and hauled to where it was needed, giving the engineers barely enough time to finish their designs. As he watched the teams of men dragging the heavy logs into position, he couldn’t help remembering the spectacle of Temrai’s men as they shifted lumber and built their trebuchets and catapults under the walls of the City. No matter which side you’re on, there are few sights more inspiring than a large number of men working well together on a big, ambitious project; watching them lever and winch huge bulks of timber about as if they weighed nothing at all, even hoist them into the air on cranes and pulleys, is enough to make a man feel proud to be human. Is this how Temrai felt? he wondered. He’d have been entitled to, no question about that. It was odd; being back here, doing this sort of thing, was almost enough to make him feel young again.
Young and in charge, like Temrai against Perimadeia. Young and supremely confident, like Bollo starting to swing his hammer. Young and with a lifetime of opportunity ahead of him, like Bardas Loredan leading Maxen’s army home from the wars. He thought for a moment about the young lad who’d briefly been his apprentice on Scona, when he’d been trying to make his living as a bowyer. He remembered what it had felt like, on the night of the Sack, twisting Temrai’s arm behind his back with one hand, holding the cutting edge to his throat with the other. That had been one of the most intimate moments of his life.
As they worked, the soldiers of the Sons of Heaven sang the appropriate working songs, taking them on trust, as always. It must be wonderful, Bardas thought, to have that kind of faith; so comforting, so much easier, like a log running on rollers instead of being dragged along the ground. Trust, believe, and it’ll make you young again – that’s what a sense of purpose can do for you. If only there wasn’t always some older, wiser man to hold a sharp edge to your throat and take the faith away, like Bardas Loredan during the Sack.
‘Asking for trouble, I reckon,’ Venart protested, yet again. He’d said it so many times that it was rapidly turning into a joke.
‘We’ll see,’ someone replied. ‘We’ve got them over the proverbial barrel. They need us; it’s business, pure and simple.’
‘They’re late,’ someone else commented. ‘They’ve never been late before.’
In the Long Room of the Island’s Chamber of Commerce, fifty or so representatives of the Island’s Ship-Owners’ Association (founded a week previously) were waiting to meet with a delegation from the provincial office, on a matter (as the invitation to the meeting had phrased it) of some urgency and delicacy.
‘It’s hustling, that’s what it is,’ Venart persevered, ‘and you know it as well as I do. You can call it what you like, but that’s what it is.’
Runo Lavador, owner of seven ships, sat on the edge of the President’s desk, swinging his legs like a small boy. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘it’s hustling. Perfectly legitimate business practice. We’ve got what they need – ships. They’ve got what we want – money. It’s for the parties to the deal to make their own bargain.’
‘We made a deal, though,’ said one of the few people in the room who agreed with Venart. ‘Going back on it – well, it doesn’t seem too clever to me. We’ve got a pretty good deal already, if you ask me.’
Runo Lavador shrugged. ‘If you don’t want to be here,’ he said, ‘then by all means bugger off. Nobody’s forcing you to do anything. Besides, you simply don’t understand the nature of the charter business. All along, they’ve been entirely at liberty to call it a day and walk away if they found a better deal somewhere else. They chose not to. Now we’re making a choice; we want more money. They can still walk away, any time they want. To listen to you, anybody’d think we were holding a knife to their throats.’
The tall, heavy doors at the other end of the hall swung open, and the Sons of Heaven made their entrance. Hard not to think in terms of pageantry and theatre when a party of them entered a room; first, an honour guard of halberdiers in half-armour, then a secretary or two and a couple of lesser clerks carrying desks and chairs and ink-horns; then the delegates themselves, both of them a head taller than anybody else in their party, and scurrying behind them, three or four unspecified attandants, cooks or valets or personal librarians. Look out, Venart thought, here come the grown-ups. He hoped they weren’t going to mind too much. They wouldn’t, would they? After all, it was only money that was at stake here, and so far the Sons of Heaven had given the impression of valuing money the way sailors value seawater.
Cens Lauzeta, the fish-oil baron, was sitting in the President’s chair. Nobody could remember electing him chairman, but nobody minded very much if he wanted the job. He stood up and nodded politely as the delegates processed (no other word for it) down the hall and sat down at the far end of the long table.
‘Good of you to spare the time to see us,’ said Cens Lauzeta, sounding even more cocky than usual (what was it about the fish-oil trade that brought out the boisterousness in people?). ‘We represent the Island Ship-Owners’ Association‚’
‘Excuse me,’ interrupted one of the delegates. ‘I don’t seem to recall having heard of your organisation before.’
‘I don’t suppose you have,’ Lauzeta replied cheerfully. ‘We haven’t been in existence for terribly long. Up till now, there hasn’t been a need. But here we are; so, if it’s all right with you, we might as well get on with the negotiations.’
‘By all means,’ replied the Son of Heaven. ‘Perhaps you’d care to tell me what we’re here to negotiate.’
Lauzeta smiled indulgently. ‘Money,’ he replied. ‘So far, you’ve chartered ships belonging to our members – no complaints on that score, by the way, you’ve been perfectly straight with us and we’ve been straight with you. But now,’ he went on, sitting on the arm of the President’s chair, ‘things are about to change. You’re going to take our ships off to a war; we don’t know how long this war’s going to last – well, how could anybody know that? – we don’t know when we’re likely to get our ships back, or whether we’ll get them back at all. No offence, my friend, but we’re businessmen, and we’ve been hearing reports about the way this war’s going that put a whole new perspective on the deal.’
‘Is that so?’ replied the delegate coolly. ‘Please enlighten me.’
‘If you like,’ Lauzeta said. ‘One column effectively wiped out; the colonel in command of another column killed in action; the enemy have mobilised and are on the move, taking the offensive – this isn’t what we all had in mind when the deal was struck. Those invincible armies don’t seem quite so invincible any more, and we think that changes things quite a bit.’
‘I see,’ said the Son of Heaven. ‘But you’re not disputing the fact that we have binding agreements with the members of your Association?’
Lauzeta shook his head. ‘Not the way we see it,’ he said. ‘What we’re saying is, one of the assumptions on which the contracts were based has changed. I’ve spoken to some of our leading commercial lawyers and they all tell me the same thing. A contract’s like a house; if the foundations collapse, the whole thing falls to the ground. As we see it, the contracts are null and void.’
The delegate raised an eyebrow. ‘Really,’ he said. ‘As far as my layman’s understanding of Imperial law goes—’
‘Imperial law, maybe,’ Lauzeta interrupted. ‘But the charters were all signed here on the Island, so they’re under the jurisdiction of Island law and Island courts; and I’m telling you, as of now the contracts are dead and buried. Fact.’
‘An interesting line of argument,’ said t
he delegate. ‘In which case, assuming your interpretation is valid, I suppose you want us to withdraw our men and return the ships.’
Lauzeta shook his head. ‘By no means,’ he said. ‘That’d put a serious crimp in your plans, and none of us want that. No, we’re quite happy to carry on with the agreement just so long as the agreed levels of payment are revised to take into account the likely additional time and risk. After all,’ he went on in a rather more conciliatory tone, ‘the last thing we want to do is fall out over this; the Island and the Empire have always been close—’
(‘No they haven’t,’ Eseutz Mesatges whispered in Venart’s ear. ‘Even with a following wind, it’s a two-day journey.’>
‘Shh,’ Venart replied.)
The delegate frowned and smiled at the same time. ‘You want to proceed with the existing agreement, but you want more money. Is that what you’re saying?’
Lauzeta nodded. ‘Bluntly, yes,’ he said. ‘I think it’s entirely reasonable to factor in an allowance for depreciation of goodwill and loss of business opportunities. For one thing, what do you think is happening to our regular business while our ships have been standing idle? We do have competitors, you know.’
The delegate conferred briefly with his colleague. ‘How much more money do you want?’ he asked.
Apparently, Cens Lauzeta hadn’t been expecting that particular question; he opened his mouth and closed it again, and said nothing. The delegate raised an eyebrow.
‘What we need to do,’ Lauzeta said at last, ‘is agree some sort of formula that’ll allow us to work this out scientifically. I mean, I wouldn’t want you to think we’re just pulling a figure out of the air.’
‘You mean,’ the delegate replied, ‘you want more money, but you don’t know how much more money.’ He stood up, and the rest of his entourage immediately did the same. ‘Perhaps when you’ve thought of a figure you’d be kind enough to let me know. In the meantime, I’d be grateful if you could tell me whether we should continue loading our ships, or whether you want them unloaded again.’