by K. J. Parker
The squad leader smiled and picked a lantern off a wall-sconce outside a tavern. ‘Easy,’ he said. ‘Watch and learn.’
The crowd surrounding the Merchant Venturers’ was large and noisy, but standing back a respectful distance after the Imperial archers had given them a demonstration of the effective range of an issue crossbow –
(‘Lucky for us,’ the squad leader pointed out. ‘They sent all the longbowmen with the army, and they didn’t come back; all they’ve got here are crossbows, and they can only shoot once every three minutes.’)
- But the sheer number of them was what impressed Venart the most. He hadn’t imagined that his fellow countrymen would be so quick and so eager to risk their lives for their liberty. On the other hand, it wasn’t as if they had anything to lose.
‘They’re in there all right,’ someone reported to the squad leader; another of Gorgas’ men, presumably, since Venart had never seen him before, and he looked too fierce to be an Islander. ‘Did you find any oil?’
The squad leader shook his head. ‘Don’t need any,’ he replied. ‘All right, sort out a cordon; I want halberds and poleaxes in the front two ranks, axes and hammers behind. Keep ’em well back; for one thing, this is going to burn hot.’
He was right; oil or pitch or sulphur would have been redundant. As soon as the first few torches pitched in the thatch, the Merchant Venturers’ burst into flames like a beacon, lighting up a circle as bright as noon as far as the buildings on the other side of the square. The Islanders were shocked to see it go up; for a hundred years it had been a source of civic concern to make sure the thatch didn’t catch fire, and setting it alight on purpose would never have occurred to them.
For what seemed like an impossibly long time nothing happened, and Venart found himself wondering if the Imperials were in there, standing to attention as they burned to death at their posts – from what he’d seen of them, he wouldn’t put it past them. Then the front and side doors seemed to explode outwards and the soldiers came pouring into the light, their armour and helmets dazzling; it was like watching molten metal glowing white as it runs from the crucible into the mould, and Venart couldn’t see any way it might be stopped, not by his fellow citizens and a few spikes on long sticks. He didn’t want to watch, he could feel his skin crawling at the thought of cutting edges on bare skin, but it happened too quickly for him to look away in time. At first, the fiery bright ram crashed into the line of points and rode it down; but the mass of bodies behind soaked up the momentum, as the soft padding inside the armour absorbs the blow; the charge slowed and came to a stop, cooling, solidifying into individual men; at which point Venart saw that the outcome was inevitable. Herded together, without room to swing their weapons, the soldiers were crushed down, like an egg in a man’s fist – the brittle shell, the armour, not standing up to the soft pressure all around it, not coming up to this level of proof. They were pulled down, their helmets ripped off; they were bashed down with hammers and axes and spades, mattocks and bidels, until all the shining steel shapes were crumpled into a heap of scrap lying on the ground, under the feet of the people. When it was over, there was a long silence.
So that’s that, Venart thought; and as the crowd surged away from the circle of light and down the hill towards the Drutz, he wondered how this strange creature, this soft and flexible anvil, had been subdued so easily in the first place, when the soldiers first came out on to the streets and the notice of annexation was pinned to the door. It was still there, or at least strips of it were, burning fast and turning into soft ash, but everything else seemed to have changed, and he couldn’t quite work out what had made all the difference. But then he looked sideways at the squad leader, Gorgas’ carefully selected emissary, signalling to his men at the edges of the crowd, effortlessly directing the mob; the Loredan touch, he said to himself; of course, it makes all the difference.
Lieutenant Menas Onasin, in command of the army because everybody else was dead, looked back over his shoulder at the sea. Here we are, then, he thought. We can die on our feet, or we can drown. Spoiled for choice, really.
They were throwing stones; big, jagged stones, chunks of pavement, arms and heads smashed off the statues that lined Drutz Promenade. The man standing next to him in the line had been killed by a marble head, a bizarre way to die, with undesirable overtones of comedy. Having no archers to return fire, he had no option but to stand and take it; he’d tried charging the mob five times, and each time he’d led out a company and brought back a platoon. It was like fighting the sea, or a sandstorm.
His principal mistake had been leaving the cover of the ships in the first place. At the time it had seemed like the sensible thing to do; ships, like thatched buildings, are inflammable, and he hadn’t relished the prospect of fighting on two fronts (the mob on land, the mutinous crews below decks) while trapped between fire above his head and water under his feet. Face them on dry land, he’d told himself, where we can at least stand up straight and use our weapons.
Someone had set up one of the light trebuchets they’d mounted on the forecastles of the ships and was loosing off ranging shots; the first stone fell short, nearly creaming the front row of the mob, the second, third and fourth had gone splash in the water. If the man behind the arm was being at all methodical in his approach, number five was due to pitch into the exact centre of the army, and there was nothing that Lieutenant Onasin could do about it. It was like old times, standing still while quick learners lobbed rocks at his head; he was a Perimadeian, a refugee from the Fall, and he’d learned everything he knew about motionless cowering during Temrai’s bombardment of the City.
For shot number five they used a torso, all that was left of Renvaut Razo’s masterpiece Triumph of the Human Spirit, which had stood in the courtyard of the Copper Exchange ever since Onasin had first visited here as a boy of nine, brought along by his father as a special treat. He could remember the statue vividly; it was huge and dramatic, and the head was far too small for the colossal, mountain-breasted body; but when he’d pointed that out, his father had told him to be quiet, and he’d kept the secret to himself ever since. Now there were bits of the Triumph of the Human Spirit all around him – not just the torso, which had squashed seven armoured men like beetles, but arms and hands and drapery shrapnel too, not to mention the too-small head (which had flattened one man and wrenched the leg off another). He remembered eavesdropping on two earnest-looking women who’d stood for ages just staring at the statue; according to them, what made it so special was the ease and power of its movement. He’d waited twenty years to find out what they’d meant by that. They were right, too; hurled from the sling of a trebuchet, Razo’s gift to the ages moved like shit off a shovel and packed a devastating punch.
They were setting up more trebuchets. It was a pity that the soldiers of the Empire were universally known not to surrender, not under any circumstances, because a few more direct hits were going to panic the men, and that would open gaps in the line; and when that happened, the sea in front of him would come rushing in and sweep him off the dock into the sea behind him, and he was too well armoured to swim. Surrender would be an excellent option right now; but he’d already tried it twice and they simply hadn’t believed him.
Another charge would also break up the line; but on balance Lieutenant Onasin preferred the thought of dying fighting to either drowning or being squashed, so he yelled out the appropriate orders and the front three ranks dressed to the front. A stair, ripped out of the steps that led up to the customs house, enfiladed the front rank, knocking off heads. Onasin raised his arm and stepped forward, straight into the path of a brick. It bounced off his gorget, crimping the metal so that he couldn’t turn his head. Damn, he thought, and dropped his arm to signal the advance.
After that, there wasn’t any point in deluding himself that he had any control whatsoever. The momentum of the ranks behind him boosted him forward like driftwood on a wave, and all he could do was keep his legs moving, so that he wou
ldn’t get shoved over and trampled. As he was propelled forward, he saw the spike on the head of the halberd dead ahead, but of course he couldn’t slow down, or even move sideways. The man behind him rammed him on to the spike like a cook driving a skewer into a cut of meat; he felt himself being jolted forward as the spike finally burst through the belly of his breastplate, then the shock of coming to a sudden stop as the crossbar at the end of the spike held him back. The pressure on his backplate wasn’t getting any less, which meant that his body was being crushed between the man behind him and the crossbar, the main effect being to drive the spike deeper into his compressed belly.
And there he stuck, because the momentum of the mob easily matched the momentum of the charge. He found that he was looking directly into the face of the man who was holding the halberd; he was wearing an expression of panic and what could only be described as acute embarrassment (which was quite understandable; after all, what do you say to a perfect stranger who’s impaled himself on the spike you happen to be clinging on to?) and if he’d had any control over the muscles of his face, he’d have been tempted to smile, or even wink.
It was the trebuchets that saved him. There were ten of them in action now, and they all loosed in unison, suddenly flattening the men in the ranks directly behind him. With no more pressure from them he found himself being thrust back; then his feet caught on something, he stumbled and went down on his backside, wrenching the halberd out of the other man’s hands. Now it was the other man’s turn to be shot forward; Onasin felt the sole of the man’s boot on the side of his jaw as he stumbled forward, then a savage pain in his shoulder as somebody else stood on that. Then he lost count, and fell asleep.
When he opened his eyes, he found that he was staring into another man’s eyes; but this man was quite definitely dead. In fact there were dead men everywhere. Mass grave. He opened his mouth to scream, but only a little squeak came out, so he tried waving his arms and legs instead. They were scarcely more co-operative than his throat and lungs, but apparently he’d done enough, because he heard someone shout, ‘Hold on, we’ve got another live one.’
He wasn’t sure how they got him out again; the grave was pretty deep and sheer-sided, so he guessed someone had had to jump down in there, on top of all the really dead people. That didn’t strike him as a pleasant thing to have to do – well, he wouldn’t have fancied it himself – so he tried to say thank you as he swung face-down through the air; but if anybody heard him, they didn’t acknowledge it.
‘Will you look at that?’ someone he couldn’t see said as he was flipped over on to his back. ‘He’s never going to make it with a hole that size.’
‘You’d be surprised,’ someone else replied. ‘I knew a man once who was gored by a damn great bull – when they got the horn out you could literally see daylight through him, poor bugger. He made it, though.’
‘All right,’ said the first voice, ‘put him over there with the others. If there’s a medic with nothing better to do—’
‘You’ll be lucky.’
But there was a medic, eventually, a sad-faced man who cleaned and bandaged the wound. Whether his sorrow arose from the horrors he’d seen or the remoteness of his chances of getting paid for his work, there was no way of knowing. By then, of course, the battle was over, the enemy had been killed or captured, the fires put out; and the Islanders were moving wearily about the streets, clearing up wreckage, repairing damage, stumbling over bodies that had been overlooked by the corpse details. After they’d filled up two deep graves, they stopped bothering with such niceties, loaded the dead on to two enormous grain freighters and dumped them in the sea.
Onasin ended up on a similar grain-ship, which had been pressed into service as a prison hulk. It could have been worse; it would have been far worse if it had been an Imperial prisoner-of-war compound. From what he could overhear of the guards’ conversation, they explained away their humanity by claiming that the men in their charge were potentially valuable hostages, but by this time Onasin knew them better than that. This was, after all, their first war; they hadn’t learned yet.
‘A tragedy,’ sighed the prefect of Ap’ Escatoy. ‘A tragic, wretched waste. And so futile, too.’
The chief administrator nodded sadly. ‘It is rather heartbreaking,’ he said, wiping honey from his fingertips with a damp cloth. ‘And, as you say, they’ve achieved nothing by it. If anything, they’ve made matters worse for themselves.’
‘Undoubtedly,’ the prefect said. ‘But I’m afraid they’ve forfeited my sympathy, given what they’ve done. I know, vindictiveness is an ugly emotion, but on this occasion I’m going to allow myself that luxury. They will be made to pay for what they’ve done.’
‘Figuratively speaking, of course.’
The prefect smiled grimly. ‘Unfortunately,’ he said. ‘I wish it were otherwise, but it isn’t.’ He shook his head. ‘No, the fact must be faced, and we must come to terms with it: this confounded battle has cost me my refurbishment grant, and with it goes my best chance of rebuilding Perimadeia. All gone, and no actual benefit to anybody. And on reflection it isn’t tragic; tragedy has a certain nobility about it that this shambles lacks. It’s waste, plain and simple.’ He picked up a corner of the tablecloth and rubbed it between the palms of his hands, as if wiping away the unpleasantness of life. ‘But there, it’s done, and now it’s up to us to make the best we can of the circumstances we’re faced with. Practical, pragmatic and positive,’ he added with a little smile – it was obviously a quotation or a reference to something (the prefect was an inveterate slipper-in of apt but abstruse quotations, to the point where it wasn’t safe to assume that anything he said was necessarily his own words) but the administrator couldn’t place it; so he nodded and twitched his lip in token refined mirth. ‘And we should start,’ the prefect went on, ‘with the war. The main thing is to make sure there aren’t any more defeats. Send a letter to Captain Loredan telling him to stay put and do nothing, just make sure Temrai doesn’t slip past him and escape. I want the actual coup de grâce to come from the new army, the one the provincial office is sending. Just defeating them won’t be enough; they have to be completely outnumbered and crushed if we’re to put this mess into perspective.’
‘Agreed,’ said the administrator. ‘Now then, what about the Island? That’s going to be awkward, isn’t it? We’re going to have to get some ships from somewhere.’
The prefect shrugged. ‘We’ll need ships anyway, for the war. Potentially, of course, this Island business could be far worse for us than Temrai and losing an entire army.’ He turned his head and sat still for a moment or two, watching a kestrel in a lemon tree in the courtyard below; it had a small bird, still alive, gripped in one claw and was trying rather awkwardly to kill it without letting go of the branch with its other foot. ‘In a way,’ he went on, ‘a major setback like the one Temrai’s given us needn’t be an entirely negative thing. Once in a while, it can even be – well, almost desirable. The point is, there’s no prestige to be gained from overrunning a weak and negligible opponent. A serious defeat, provided it’s followed up in short order by a complete victory, serves to give the enemy a degree of stature. And, of course, it helps keep standards up in the army; nothing like getting your face slapped once in a while to stop you getting complacent. The Island business, though; as I said, there’s nothing to be gained from that. There’s all the difference in the world between a setback along the way to an inevitable triumph, and getting kicked out of a place we’re supposed to have subdued and added to the collection, so to speak. What makes matters worse is that everybody knows that the Islanders aren’t worthy opponents or formidable warriors, let alone noble savages whose primitive virtues we can admire, et cetera, et cetera; they’re fat, smug, slightly obnoxious little men who make a living by buying cheap and selling dear.’ The prefect was starting to get annoyed now; there was nothing to show it in his face or his voice, but he’d pulled the ring off his little finger and was twisting it round, as
if tightening a screw. When he did that, wise men who knew the score found excuses to go elsewhere for a while. ‘Still,’ he went on, ‘getting worked up about the situation won’t help it, and it might lead us to make more mistakes. For that reason, I feel we ought to leave them alone for a while; at the very least, until the war’s over.’
The administrator nodded. ‘I agree,’ he said. ‘In fact, I’ve been giving the matter some thought; what I’d suggest is that we give them some time to reflect on what they’ve done and then send them a letter offering them a chance to buy their lives. Of course,’ he added, as the prefect raised an eyebrow, ‘they’d have to send us the heads of the ringleaders first, as a token of good faith – I always feel that getting rebels to execute their own leaders is far better than doing it oneself; you simply can’t make a martyr of a man whose head you’ve cut off yourself.’
‘An interesting point,’ the prefect conceded.
‘Then,’ the administrator went on, ‘we set the terms; we’ll accept their abject surrender on condition that they put their fleet at our disposal, fully manned – after all, that’s the object of the exercise, and that’s what our betters in the provincial office will judge us by, at the end of the day. We need Islanders to crew the ships; if we slaughter them to a man, we’ll have ships but no crews. If we do it my way, we’ll have crews who are acutely aware that their families and countrymen are hostages for their good behaviour and satisfactory performance—’
‘Thereby,’ interrupted the prefect, stroking his chin, ‘turning this ghastly business to our advantage and making something good out of it after all. Thank you; I do believe you’ve restored my faith in the value of clarity of vision.’
‘My pleasure,’ the administrator replied. ‘One of the pleasures of life, as far as I’m concerned, is taking a disaster and turning it into an opportunity.’ He smiled. ‘Fortunately, it’s a pleasure I rarely have a chance to savour.’