by K. J. Parker
Sergeant Cerl Baiss had been a sergeant for precisely three weeks. Before that, he’d been the superintendent of the second-largest flour mill on Scona, managing a staff of sixty men, doing a job he liked and doing it exceptionally well. Gorgas Loredan had decided he had leadership and administrative abilities that were badly needed for the war effort, and had drafted him into the reserves a fortnight ago. He’d just had time to master the basic elements of archery, such as how to string the bow and fit an arrow on the string so that it didn’t fall off again as soon as he took his hand away, when the reserves became the Town garrison, making Cerl Baiss the man responsible for the defence of Scona Town in Gorgas’ absence.
The news that Sten Mogre was fifteen miles from the Town gate with two thousand halberdiers hit Sergeant Baiss like a falling wall.
‘If Gorgas got our message,’ the young, brash ensign was saying, ‘he’ll most likely take this road here.’ He pointed to a squiggle on the map that Baiss had been assuming was a river, or a village boundary. ‘If he really gets a move on, he could be here -’ (another prod with the finger) ‘- by midday tomorrow, by which time Sten will be here, right on our doorstep, where he’d dearly love to be. Which really only leaves us with one course of action.’
One vice Baiss had never indulged in was false pride. ‘You’d better explain,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to get this wrong.’
The young ensign nodded. ‘These mountains here—’
‘Oh. Those are mountains. Right. Sorry.’
‘These mountains here,’ the ensign repeated, ‘are our only chance. Sten’ll have to come through them here,’ (prod) ‘or here,’ (prod) ‘and my guess is he’ll take this fork here, even though it’s three miles out of his way, because he knows we could really string him up on the other pass. So we intercept him - he’ll be expecting it, mind, but that doesn’t alter the fact that we can make life pretty bloody for him - and just hope and pray Gorgas catches up in time to give him a boot up the bum. If everything holds together - if Gorgas comes - we might do ourselves a bit of good. If not, well.’
Sergeant Baiss stared at the map - he’d never understood maps - and tried to think like a soldier, something which came as naturally to him as swimming under the surface in mercury. Why was it, he wondered, that everybody in the army referred to the enemy generals by their first names, as if they were old friends?’
‘I think we should defend the other pass,’ he said.
The young ensign looked at him. ‘But that’d be asking for trouble,’ he said. ‘Sten’s too bright for that.’
Baiss shook his head. ‘Forgive me,’ he said, ‘this is probably all first-grade stuff to professional soldiers, but if the obvious thing to do is go this way, wouldn’t he be better off going that way and missing us altogether? Especially as that’s the shorter way.’
The ensign shrugged. ‘You could go mad playing that game. I could say, “He’ll expect us to expect him to do that, so he’ll do that unexpected.” No way of knowing how many double-crosses to allow for, is there?’
Baiss felt his patience getting thin. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘we’ll toss a coin for it.’
‘Might just as well,’ the ensign said with a grin. ‘You’re the boss, it’s your decision, thank the gods.’
That wasn’t what Baiss wanted to hear, but if he’d been a soldier rather than a naturally gifted mill superintendent, he’d have chosen the shorter road. ‘We’ll defend this one,’ he said. ‘How soon do you think we can get there?’
The young ensign walked his fingers across the map. ‘Four hours,’ he said. ‘If you’re right, my guess is that Sten’ll be there in eight.’
In the event, it took Baiss and his three hundred archers two and a half hours to reach the pass, which was just as well since they’d been two hours behind schedule setting off. As a token gesture, he’d sent fifty men to the other pass, trusting the young ensign’s assurance that any more than two hundred and fifty men would be a hindrance rather than a help in the sort of battle he was anticipating. Fifty men wouldn’t be enough to do more than make Sten Mogre angry if he chose the other way, but that was really beside the point.
An hour later, the enemy arrived; a great surge of armoured men squeezed so tight into the narrow gallery between two sheer sandstone walls that Baiss could hear shields and arm-guards scraping against rock. That was good, but not as good as he’d hoped. He’d been relying on being able to deploy his archers so that they’d all get a shot, but with the best will in the world he couldn’t accommodate a firing line more than sixty strong, and the pass curved about so much that the longest distance the enemy would have to cross in full view of the defending force was less than a hundred yards.
‘Five volleys if we’re lucky,’ the ensign said gloomily, ‘and then they’ll be on us like a dog on a rat. Of course, hand-to-hand in this sort of terrain will suit them down to the ground.’
Baiss frowned, trying to concentrate. Six fives are thirty, so three hundred; but of course, not every shot will count, so reduce that by, what, half? He had no idea. Say by a third. A hundred of the enemy shot down before they made contact. Was that enough to break an army’s morale? Or would it just make them so mad they’d fight like demons?
(An idiotic war; a bank, led by a baker, is fighting a university in a place where of necessity both sides will cut each other to ribbons.)
‘Here they come, anyhow,’ the young ensign said, and his voice was weak with fear. To his surprise, Baiss realised that the terror he’d been trying to cope with ever since Mogre’s army had been traced had somehow slipped away. Rationalising, he came to the conclusion that it was because there was nothing he could do now, no options remaining except to stick by what he’d decided and see it through. The prospect of his own death didn’t worry him, and the men under his command were proper soldiers, they’d know how to deal with the matter in hand.
‘Does everybody know what to do?’ he asked. The young ensign nodded. Except me, of course. Not for the first time, he wondered what in the gods’ names had possessed Gorgas Loredan to drop a civilian into a position in the chain of command where he might just possibly be called upon to lead an army into a major battle. When he’d asked Gorgas that question, though not in so many words, he’d been told that there were only ten regular sergeants in the army and four of those weren’t fit to lead a goat on a short string. ‘It’s all right,’ Gorgas had told him with a wide smile, ‘none of us have done anything like this before. I know I haven’t. You’ve got what it takes, you’ll manage.’
‘On my mark,’ the young ensign shouted, his voice high and shrill but clear nevertheless. ‘Draw. Aim. Loose.’
Baiss had never seen anything like it in all his life. The nearest he could come to it was a clump of tall thistles, the sort that grow head-high in overgrown pasture, toppling and falling together as one scythe-stroke slices through them. The front rank of the halberdiers had simply gone down, and the men behind had walked right over them; not because they were callous or exceptionally well disciplined, but because there wasn’t time to slow down or swerve to avoid them. Someone in the advancing mass shouted an order, and the formation changed from a brisk walk to a trot, the pace at which a middle-aged clerk runs after a hat blown off in a wind. The second volley took down two full ranks and made a mess of the third; this time there was stumbling and falling over, jogging men trying to jump clear over the fallen and either barely succeeding or spectacularly failing; the ranks behind running into the scrambling men in front and shoving them forward, so that more still went down and joined the jerking, twitching tangle; men wading through a sprawl of arms and legs like foresters picking a way over ten years’ growth of brambles in an abandoned ride; the young ensign, his eyes tight shut, calling Loose a third time.
They’re still coming, Baiss thought in astonishment; but of course, it was the safe thing to do, much safer to go forward than try and fall back through that unspeakable hedge of dead bodies and trampled men. They were running n
ow; no more formation trotting, these were men running for their lives away from the shambles, ducking under the inslanting arrows, following the line of least danger. The third volley hit them at no more than thirty yards; it was like watching water flung hard from a bucket splashing against a wall as they went down in a flop, gone from all movement to dead still in a bare moment. Maybe five men, all told, were still on their feet; the line parted to let them through (standard drill manoeuvre, so he’d learnt a whole eight days ago) and as soon as they skidded to a halt they were grabbed by the reserve lines like fighting drunks scooped up by their friends and made harmless. That was all that was left of that charge; the detachment behind stayed where they were, for some reason, and didn’t join in.
Victory, Baiss thought. Well, bugger me.
‘Stand to,’ the ensign yelled - Baiss still hadn’t a clue what that actually meant, and he remained none the wiser since nobody in his army appeared to react to it at all. ‘Casualties, report.’
‘All present and correct,’ someone shouted back, and a few enthusiastic souls cheered.
Baiss tried hard not to look at the bodies of the enemy who were still alive out in the heaps and drifts of corpses. It was another hot day; if he was lucky enough to live through it, he’d have the privilege of watching them slowly dying.
Nothing happened for a long time after that. Where was Gorgas Loredan? Shouldn’t he be here now, with his professional army, to take over and make this slaughter worthwhile? Baiss had done his bit, he’d won his victory. Surely he ought to be allowed to go home now?
‘The scouts just got back.’ It was the young ensign again, looking slightly crazy and grinning like a skull. ‘Guess what.’
‘You’ll have to tell me,’ Baiss said.
‘There’s not two thousand men out there,’ he said. ‘More like four hundred. The rest of Sten’s army must have gone the other way. We’ve been had.’
‘I think they came this way,’ someone said.
Gorgas walked to the head of the column and examined the scene. A few halberdier bodies were scattered among the rocks, like hastily discarded clothes on a bedroom floor. A little further on he found a mat of dead archers. They’d been backed into a dead end and cut to pieces. In this confined space, with bodies tightly packed together, there hadn’t been room to use the six-inch spike of the issue Shastel halberd; it had been an awkward affair of carving and slicing with the long curved blade, held overhead and brought down on throats, faces and shoulders. Afterwards, the halberdiers had tracked bloody footprints over the rocks.
‘These things happen,’ Gorgas said, stooping down and dipping a finger in a sticky brown pool. ‘This wasn’t long ago,’ he added. ‘We’ll catch up with them.’
‘What happened to the rest of the army?’ someone asked. ‘There’s only about, what, fifty of ours here?’
‘They ran, I suppose,’ someone else said.
Gorgas shook his head. ‘No, I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘My guess is this lot was a token force just to show willing; the main army must be guarding the other pass. In which case,’ he went on with a sigh, ‘we’ll have to deal with Sten Mogre on our own. Let’s go.’
For men who hadn’t eaten or rested properly since the night before the battle in the river bed, they kept up a respectable pace in their disintegrating shoes. They seemed to have mastered the quick trudge, the characteristic tempo of men who won’t have time to be exhausted until the job’s done. In many respects, they reminded Gorgas of what he’d heard about his Uncle Maxen’s legendary army, which had reputedly lived like this from battle to battle for something like seven years. The thought of that made him wince.
Even so, it was nearly dark by the time they came down out of the mountains onto the more gentle downlands that lay between them and Scona Town. From this point the road ran straight, with nothing to hold Mogre up except a shallow river and a small wood. Gorgas sent out a few scouts, but he was fairly sure he could guess what the enemy were doing. If he was Sten Mogre, he’d hide his army in Lox Wood for the night and make his attack on Scona first thing in the morning, planning to arrive there just after first light. In which case, he had two choices: to try and get to Scona before Mogre did, shut the gates and stand him off in a formal siege - not a bad plan, on the assumption that Scona still controlled the sea, but effectively giving up on the rest of the island - or to make a stand between Lox and Scona and take his chances in a pitched battle in the open. In either case, it meant marching all night, again. It would be asking a lot of his men to expect them to be able to stand up straight in the morning, let alone fight. There was also the small matter of arrows, shortage of.
Two valid points against risking a pitched battle; and Scona, as far as his sister was concerned, meant the Town, or to be exact, the Bank. The rest of the island was just the view from an office window. No doubt at all about what Niessa would want him to do. She’d been resigned to a siege since this escalation of the war began; he’d virtually had to plead with her for permission to engage the enemy in the field. And that, in Gorgas’ opinion, was wrong. The islanders were their people, they owed them a defence; he’d seen the mess the halberdiers had made at Briora. The thought of that sort of thing happening in every village on Scona was more than he could live with. If he retreated back into the Town now, he’d feel like a father shutting his door on his own children. No; the Loredan name stood for something in these parts, it had led these people to stand up against the Foundation and try for something better than the life of serfs and slaves. It was a matter of obligation.
The scouts confirmed his guess: Sten Mogre was making camp just inside the wood. There was a substantial clearing where a generation of straight-growing pines had been felled recently, and the army was there. Mogre wasn’t taking any chances. He’d placed pickets on the edges of the wood and a ring of sentries fifty yards or so out from the perimeter of the clearing, so there was precious little chance of sneaking up in the night to attack the camp. A battle inside the wood would suit Mogre well, since the archers would have no substantial advantage of distance in the thick undergrowth; at best, it would be another confused mess. His original idea of looping round the wood and barring Mogre’s way on the downs was still his best option, in spite of the disastrous odds. He gave the necessary orders, which were accepted with resignation, as if sleep and rest were politicians’ promises, often mentioned and never realised.
Sten Mogre was usually the sort of man who could sleep anywhere, but for once he found he couldn’t quite let go. After a couple of hours of lying in the dark in his tent with his eyes wide open, he gave up the struggle, lit the lamp and called a council of war. There wasn’t really anything left to discuss, but if he was going to be awake all night, he might as well have company.
‘We haven’t seen anything of Hain Eir’s relief party,’ someone reported. ‘Looks like we’re going to have to do without them.’
Mogre shrugged. If Eir had lost all four hundred of his men, it was worth it to keep the rebel home army occupied while he made his assault; besides, Eir was a Separatist, not to mention Avid Soef’s brother-in-law, which was why he’d been chosen for the job in the first place. Sixteen hundred men were more than enough for the task in hand. His only real worry was that Gorgas might not get there in time. It would be galling to have to kick his heels outside Scona Town waiting for him to catch up.
‘That’s enough shop for one night,’ he said. ‘Let’s talk about something else, for pity’s sake. I know - has anyone hear read that thing Elard Doce wrote last month?’
Someone laughed; two or three others murmured. ‘Actually, ’ someone said, ‘I liked it. Especially that bit about the forked roots of consequence. The man should have been a poet, not a philosopher.’
Mogre smiled. ‘I remember that bit,’ he said. ‘And to give him credit, there’s just a trace of a valid point in there somewhere, tucked away in a dark corner.’
Various people made sceptical noises. ‘You reckon?’ someone said.
‘I thought it was just the old Obscurist line in a new hat.’
‘Oh, it was, no question,’ Mogre replied. ‘But the Obscurists had a point - no, don’t laugh, they were all as mad as a barrel of rats, but that doesn’t alter the fact they’d come up with the Law of Conservation of Alternatives when Dormand was still learning two-and-two-is-four.’
‘From entirely false premises,’ someone else pointed out. ‘And arse-about-face and back-to-front. If Dormand hadn’t taken it and turned it on its head, nobody would ever have given it a second thought.’
‘Actually,’ a thin man sitting near the tent-flap interrupted. ‘I heard that City man, Gannadius, say something interesting about that no so long ago. He was basically agreeing with Dormand—’
‘Big of him,’ someone broke in.
‘But he made the point that Dormand didn’t take it to its logical conclusion. Think about it,’ the thin man went on. ‘Let’s say you’ve got a number of alternatives contingent on one moment of choice; all right, for the sake of argument, let’s say you’re Gorgas, right now, sitting in your tent trying to figure out what to do. You can scuttle into Town and lock the gates, you can take your chances in the field, you can slink off into the hills. Three alternatives. Now, Dormand says that the consequences resultant on those choices are not truly infinite. For a start, he says, all three options could result in Scona falling.’
‘The word could,’ someone interrupted, ‘in this context . . .’
‘Quiet, Marin,’ Mogre said. ‘This is interesting.’
‘Likewise,’ the thin man went on, ‘the pitched battle and siege options share a large number of possible outcomes; in other words, the lines of possibility diverge at the point of choice, but then try and join up again as if the choice had never existed. The Obscurists - all right, we know about them, but let’s give them their say - the Obscurists would have us believe in the Obscure Design that overrides the choice; Destiny, all that crap. Dormand says there’s no destiny, just a natural law that keeps the number of real alternatives to a minimum. What Gannadius was saying, and coming from him it’s worth considering, is that there’s also a human element - human interference with the natural development of alternatives through the medium of interference with the Principle.’