by K. J. Parker
And so they did. It was easy enough to find; for the last hour of darkness, they had a bright orange glow to guide them. The fire was pretty much burnt out by dawn, when the archers attacked again. When Affem finally limped down what had been the village street, swinging between two men with his wounded leg dragging behind him, there was nothing but ash and charred timbers. The well was blocked with the bodies of dead halberdiers, men killed on the first day. There was no food, and no cover. Nothing for it, therefore, but to press on to the next village, which was only four miles away.
‘I don’t know about you,’ Gorgas said, his mouth full of cheese, ‘But I’m exhausted. This not fighting certainly takes it out of you.’
Behind him in the distance, a pillar of smoke rose in the still air. He made a point of not looking at it; that was the village of Lambye, burning, and he’d given the order to burn it. The thought that he’d set his men to burn down one of his own villages made him angry, for all that he knew it was the way to win the war. Nevertheless, the act disgusted him. And what Niessa was going to say when she found out, he shuddered to think.
‘How much further is it to the river?’ the sergeant asked. Gorgas glanced down at the map spread across his knees and brushed away a few crumbs that had fallen in the folds.
‘At the rate they’re going, four hours,’ he replied, ‘give or take an hour. I’ll say this for them, they’ve got a hell of a lot more staying power than I’d have given them credit for.’
‘Training,’ the sergeant said. ‘Discipline. It’s what sets your professional soldiers aside from your bandits and hooligans.’
‘I think you’re right,’ Gorgas said, cutting himself another slice of cheese. ‘For a start, it gets them killed.’
They saw the smoke rising from the second village almost as soon as they left the first.
‘That’s it, then,’ said the colour-sergeant, stopping and shading his eyes. ‘It’s going to be like this all the way. No food and no cover. We don’t stand a chance.’
‘Then why don’t we charge them?’ growled the young soldier to his left. ‘Go out there and get the bastards? Got nothing to lose by it, have we? If we all charged, the whole lot of us—’
Nobody was listening, and he gave it up. For the last eighteen hours, he’d found it progressively harder not to think about water. Up till then, the other desperate issues of the march had been enough to distract his attention - hunger, exhaustion, the incessant nibbling inroads of the archers. Now he could hardly spare them a thought. Which is good, he tried to re-assure himself. Nothing like being thirsty for taking your mind off your troubles. He wriggled his shoulders against the hard straps of his pack, which were crushing the rings of his mailshirt through the buckskin jerkin underneath and into his skin. He had a blister on each heel where the backs of his boots nipped against the tendon. He tried not to think about water.
‘There’s one thing he haven’t tried,’ somebody muttered in the row behind.
‘Uh? What’s that?’
‘We could always surrender.’
Several men took it as a joke and laughed. ‘He’s got a point there,’ the young soldier said. ‘Why don’t we do that?’
‘Ah, go to hell,’ someone jeered. ‘We can do without that kind of talk.’
The young soldier frowned. ‘What’s your problem?’ he said. ‘Face it. Either we give in or we’re going to die.’
‘Make him shut up, Sarge,’ someone sighed. ‘Put him on a charge or something.’
The colour-sergeant shook his head. ‘We won’t surrender,’ he said. ‘Not while we still outnumber them five to one, or whatever it is now. It’s still overwhelming odds. We can’t surrender, we can’t get near enough to fight, we’re getting slower all the time and in a few hours we’re going to start keeling over without the bastards having to raise a finger. Craziest thing you ever heard of, but they’ve done us. It’ll be the biggest, most spectacular victory in history; they’ll be teaching it in their damned faculties for the next thousand years. Pity we got to be on the wrong side, really.’
Bol Affem was thinking along broadly similar lines, as he stumbled and dragged along between his two supporters. Amazing innovation, he thought, just when you thought every possible tactic had been tried and there couldn’t be anything new. After this, they’ll have to rewrite every textbook and treatise in the library - unless we win the war, of course, in which case we can forget this ever happened and go back to the proper ways of making war, the ones in the syllabus. He could feel his eyes closing all the time now; such an effort to keep them open, to stay awake, to be bothered. Now that he was being dragged along rather than having to make the effort of walking, he was beginning to feel removed, outside, not involved; it was like being a child again, carried on his father’s shoulders, too small to be any use or any trouble. He didn’t really feel hungry or thirsty; the pain in his leg was still there but even pain didn’t seem to work properly any more. Most of all, he could no longer make the effort to be afraid of Death. Foolish, pointless. It was like the fear he’d felt when he was a little boy, just before he went to a children’s party. It’ll be all right, his mother used to say, you’ll enjoy it once you get there.
‘Here they come again,’ someone nearby observed in a matter-of-fact voice. Nobody seemed very interested. Affem lifted his head and saw in the middle distance the line of archers walking towards them, not hurrying, moving up like a party of merchants on a long journey. He saw his soldiers wearily closing ranks, like very old monks performing a ritual they’ve long since lost all belief in. He let his head droop.
There had been a point, presumably, where they’d stopped believing in survival, but he couldn’t remember it coming and going. It had been gradual, gentle, the death of hope; the slow realisation and acceptance, made easier by the fact that none of them really cared any more. Water, shade, shelter, food - give them any of those and they’d stop and stay stopped. A future after water or shade or shelter or food wasn’t a realistic aspiration, and besides, where would be the point in it? It had become obvious that this march would never end, that somehow this rocky scrub and moorland stretched away into infinity. Given time, a man might eventually climb the stairs to the moon; but no one could ever reach the edge of this country.
We could surrender.
Bol Affem laughed. Yes, why not? In another life, perhaps, the next time round, the next army to be caught like this, in a siege without a city, a prison without walls, surrender might be an option. But not while there are still a thousand of us to a couple of hundred of them; because any minute now, we’ll reach the water or the shade or the shelter or the food, and there’ll be fighting, and when there’s fighting we’ll win. Or we could surrender, right now, we could refuse to go on. In theory.
Something was happening.
Affem looked up again, and saw that the men at the head of the column were quickening their pace, walking instead of slouching, breaking into a run. He tried to see what all the fuss was about; not the enemy, surely, they’d given up trying to engage them hours ago. Besides, he could see the archers on either side coming in close, shooting, taking men down in dozens and being ignored.
‘What’s the matter?’ he asked.
‘Don’t know,’ said one of the soldiers. ‘Here,’ he called out, ‘what’s the rush?’
‘Water’, someone shouted back. ‘There’s a bloody river.’
To begin with, Gorgas had worried. It would be just like life, he reckoned, if at the very last moment, when all the hard work had been done and everything had worked out so perfectly, one little mistake cost them everything and turned this victory into a ghastly defeat. It would only take a little carelessness, allowing the enemy to get close enough to engage, getting between them and the water, with the odds still so desperately uneven, his army could be wiped out in a few minutes.
Then he stopped worrying, as soon as he saw the enemy scrambling and tumbling down the steep sides of the combe, dumping their packs and their weap
ons, hurling themselves into the water. Instead, he joined the line of archers steadily, methodically shooting them down as they drank and splashed.
They aren’t taking any notice. They don’t seem to know we’re here.
He nocked an arrow, drew, aimed, pushed with his left hand and let the load on the string pull it clear of his fingers, then watched the arrow lift and drop into the mark; a good one, seven hits on the trot now. There was another arrow on the string before he even knew it. He’d always done well, shooting from a distance.
Up till then, it had just been the front end of the column; now the main body had caught up and was pouring down the slope like a landslide, like a stampede, like sheep being driven down a narrow lane, like water splashing messily out of an over-filled bucket and slopping onto the floor. They were tripping over each other, shoving, falling and making others fall with them, sliding down the dry slope on their backsides like children toboganning on rush mats; but all they were aware of was the presence of water. Gorgas shot a man and watched him still gulping down water as he died.
‘Extraordinary,’ said the sergeant, disgusted. ‘Never seen anything like it in all my life.’
‘You’ll be feeling sorry for them next,’ someone commented. The sergeant shook his head.
‘I wouldn’t go that far,’ he said, as he drew his bow. ‘Nobody could feel sorry for them.’
It was true, Gorgas reflected. The sight was so obscene, that scrambling, crawling, inhuman mass - it was like watching ants or wasps, or a nest of woodlice revealed by the lifting of a rock. The only emotion he felt was revulsion, the urge to stamp on them and make them stop moving, put a stop to the indecent spectacle. That’s a point, he reflected. How long’s it going to take us? And are we going to have enough arrows? I really don’t want to have to come back tomorrow to finish off.
There was a raft of bodies on the surface of the water now, like the clogged mess that collects in a stream after a rainstorm, when hedge-clippings and dead leaves get washed into the watercourse and drift up against a rock or a tree root, forming an impromptu dam. ‘How many do you reckon we’ve done so far?’ someone speculated. ‘Three hundred?’
‘Not so many as that,’ someone else replied. ‘Say two hundred.’
‘Two-fifty, surely. At least two-fifty.’
‘Cease fire,’ Gorgas said.
They did as they were told; but they were staring at him as if he’d gone crazy. He took no notice. This had gone far enough. Any more would just be a waste.
‘You two,’ he said, ‘go and tell them to throw down their weapons and put their hands on their heads and they won’t be harmed. Find me their commanding officer.’
Had they noticed that the shooting had stopped? He could see no sign of it. Most of the men who’d made it into the water looked like they were dead, but that couldn’t be right, they couldn’t have shot that many. He looked again and saw that there were men just lying in the river, floating, full to bursting with water and waiting for something to happen, or just floating. The rest, the ones still scrabbling for a way in, seemed totally preoccupied with getting to the water. Calling for them to throw away their weapons was a waste of time: they’d all done that already. ‘All right, the rest of you,’ Gorgas said. ‘Make sure your quivers are full, we may not be done shooting yet. Where’s those carts with the arrows? Come on, just because we’re winning there’s no call for everything to grind to a halt.’
Some time later the two men came back. With them were three of the enemy; two men carrying a third, all three of them soaked to the skin, their clothes, arms and legs dipped a sort of rosy pink. Down there in the river they were drinking the stuff. Gorgas felt sick.
‘This is Master Bol Affem,’ said one of the two halberdiers. ‘He’s in charge, but I don’t know if he can hear you.’
‘Unlikely,’ Gorgas replied. ‘He’s dead.’
‘Oh.’ The halberdiers let go, and the dead body flopped to the ground like a sack of flour. ‘So now what?’
Gorgas put his toe against Affem’s jaw and flipped it over so that he could see the man’s face. He smiled bleakly. ‘Consider yourselves promoted to the rank of acting generals. Surrender or I’ll kill the lot of you.’
‘We surrender,’ one of the halberdiers replied promptly. ‘Now what?’
It was a very good question. There was no force on earth short of death that was going to persuade the halberdiers to stop and get out of the water before they’d finished guzzling it. All he could think of was to make it look like there had been a proper official surrender, and trust that they’d all accept that that was what had happened. His knowledge of human nature suggested that they would. ‘Down the slope,’ he ordered. ‘Form a ring around them, forty yards out, and slowly close it up till they’re all herded together into a mass; then we’ll start pulling them out in groups of thirty and marching them out. And we’re going to need food for the buggers, and somebody’d better go ahead and make a start on a stockade; and you three, start assigning men to prisoner-guarding squads. The gods know, I never expected anything like this, so I haven’t a clue how you’ll go about it.’
‘Hang on,’ said a sergeant, ‘isn’t there an old slate-pit a mile or so up the road? We could put ’em in that for the time being.’
Gorgas shrugged. ‘If you say so,’ he said. ‘If it’ll work, let’s do it. This is embarrassing.’ Suddenly he grinned.
‘What’s the joke?’ the sergeant asked.
‘Oh, nothing,’ Gorgas replied, smiling. ‘I’m just imagining that my sister’s going to say when I tell her I’ve brought some people home for dinner.’
‘We don’t need to wait for Affem’s column,’ said Sten Mogre. ‘Gorgas and the army simply aren’t here. We can press on and be in Scona Town by the end of the week.’
Avid Soef glowered at him over the wine jug. ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Then what was the point of sending him?’
‘The point,’ Mogre replied smugly, ‘was a half-hearted attempt to lure Gorgas away on a wild-goose chase while we made a dash for the Town. I never for one moment imagined he’d be stupid enough to fall for it, but I thought what the hell, we don’t need Affem’s army anyway, the extra numbers’d just get under our feet and complicate logistics, and it’d be nice to have a third army loose behind their backs while we’re bashing them up in front of Scona. The fact that he went for the bait surprises me, but I’m damned if I’m going to let the opportunity slip.’
Soef thought for a moment. If there was a hidden agenda behind the manoeuvre he couldn’t see it. ‘Fair enough,’ he said. ‘But we should still divide our forces, come at the Town from two sides. I don’t like the thought of four thousand men all marching up the same road.’
‘That’s a good point,’ said someone from the far end of the table. ‘It’s the same principle you referred to a moment ago. Too many men in the army’s often worse than too few.’
Sten Mogre frowned, and tilted the jug over his cup. It was empty, and he licked his fingers. ‘Obviously I’ve considered that,’ he said. ‘But the fact is, there’s only one realistic approach to the Town by land: along the heights and down the north road. Which direction do you suggest our other army should come from? In from the west, threading their way through all those rocks and rubbish? Or do you envisage them squelching their way through the south marshes?’
Avid Soef hadn’t thought of that. ‘You’re being a bit glib, aren’t you?’ he said to buy himself time to think. ‘Just how much do we know about the southern approach?’
Mogre smiled. ‘I’ve been there,’ he said. ‘I won’t say I know it like the back of my hand, but I remember having to pay a couple of peasants to pull my chaise out of the bog. Unless you know your way in that stuff, you’re asking for trouble.’
Soef nodded. ‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘And I’ll bet you money they’ll think so too, and they won’t bother setting up proper defences. Which is why we should send a force that way - picking up a few locals as guides, of course. Surely
you haven’t forgotten your Guerenz?’
‘Remind me,’ Mogre said patiently.
‘Guerenz, chapter seven, section four or five, can’t remember which offhand. Avoid the enemy’s weaknesses, which he will fortify into strengths, and address instead his strengths, which complacency will render weak. Always been a favourite of mine, that.’
Mogre sighed. ‘Far be it from me to argue with Guerenz,’ he said. ‘But do we actually need to bother? What’s that other passage in Guerenz? To strike unexpectedly with overwhelming force is the only strategy; everything else is compromise forced by circumstance. And that’s not scripture,’ he went on, leaning back and clasping his hands behind his head, ‘that’s just ordinary common sense.’
‘Not so fast,’ someone else said. ‘I’ve been with you every step of the way up till now, but I think Avid’s making sense on this one. Suppose Gorgas comes back and engages us in front of the Town, somewhere in the high passes where a handful of men can easily hold up an army. Unless we’re prepared to bash through and take heavy losses, we could be held up for days, and remember, we’re on a knife-edge with logistics as it is, this far from home. I hear they’re already burning villages between here and Polmies. But if we had a second attack going home, we could afford to waste time playing games with Gorgas, because while we’re doing that, our second army’ll be in Scona Town ending the war. And if Gorgas just falls back on Scona and shuts the door, it won’t make any odds.’
One of the big candles in the middle of the table guttered and went out. A batman quickly replaced it with a fresh one. ‘All right, I’ll go along with that,’ said Sten Mogre. ‘Actually, it’s a good idea, though nobody’s mentioned the real reason; which is, the purpose of this exercise isn’t just burning Scona Town, it’s wiping out the rebel army and capturing or killing the Loredans. I like the idea of our second army coming up from Scona once we’ve taken it and catching Gorgas in the rear while he’s defending this notional pass we’re all assuming he’ll lay us up in. Now that’s neat.’