by K. J. Parker
He’d put three hundred men in two ranks in the centre, and thrown out the rest in equal numbers on the wings; six hundred and fifty men to each wing, in two long lines. The plan was to advance the wings wide, giving Gorgas the impression that they were sweeping round him to avoid him altogether and attack the Town. If he took the bait, he’d either divide his forces in an attempt to stop them and be encircled before he knew it, or else he’d lose his nerve and try and fall back on the Town, in which case the centre would charge and catch him in rear while the flanks joined ahead of him and formed a noose to cut him off. In any event, so long as he kept his men spread out and moving, he’d rob the archers of any chance of snatching a fluke victory; there simply wouldn’t be enough halberdiers in any one place at any time to give them anything worthwhile to shoot at. Fond though he’d become of Gorgas since the war started - hard not to become attached to someone you’ve studied so intensely - he couldn’t for the life of him see any way that two hundred and fifty archers stood a chance against sixteen hundred halberdiers in this terrain. Briefly he toyed with the idea of offering terms, but decided against it without much internal debate. Technically this was putting down a rebellion, not a legitimate war; accordingly, rebellion protocols applied.
‘All right,’ he said calmly. ‘Let’s go. Advance the wings, steady the centre. Let’s make this one neat and tidy.’
Gorgas watched the halberdiers coming towards him on either side, and realised that he hadn’t the faintest idea what he was going to do.
Stupid, stupid. For some reason he’d got it into his head that they’d form a strong, packed centre and charge from there - an absurd notion, since that was the only scenario in which he’d have a chance of winning. Now it looked like they were ignoring him altogether, stepping round him as if he was a drunk slumped in the street.
‘Well?’ someone asked. ‘What do we do now?’
Gorgas shrugged. ‘Engage the enemy, I suppose. I think that’s what we’re here for.’
‘Which ones?’
Gorgas thought for a moment. ‘Them,’ he said, pointing at the centre of the line, ‘the buggers standing still. They’ll be easier to hit. All right, form two ranks, loose and advance in turn.’
The first volley lifted and soared like a flock of rooks scared off newly cut stubble. The range was just over two hundred yards - clout-shooting distance, and wasn’t it just as well he’d had them all training at the clout for the past six months? Just over halfway towards the enemy, the arrows faltered, stopped climbing, hung in the air for a fraction of a second -
(one tiny fragment of time; the beam of the scale balanced on a razor-thin fulcrum.)
- and dropped, gathering speed and force as their trajectory decayed. They always fall short of where you think they’re going to fall; you think they’re almost directly overhead at the high point of their ascent, but the trajectory decays, they rise gradually and fall steeply, and their momentum is greater going down than going up. The volley pitched square on the first and second ranks of the centre; and by the time it pitched, the second volley was in the air, fired by Gorgas’ second rank after it had passed through the first, advanced five paces and shot. Now the first rank came on another five paces, drew and loosed; as the volley went up, the second rank advanced, drew, loosed. The first rank held their ground, since there was nothing left for them to shoot at.
(I never thought he’d do that, Sten Mogre said to himself as he died.)
Now the wings were coming in fast, wondering what in hell was going on. Gorgas took a deep breath and gave the order to form a tight square. If they’ve got the sense they were born with, they’ll make for the Town, he reflected, reaching for another arrow. If they come for us, it’ll all depend on whether the arrows hold out. In the end, it comes down to supplies, economics.
They were coming on, the lines on either side extending so as to join and complete the encirclement. That didn’t bother him in the slightest. He’d made his square as small as he could; if they wanted to fight him, they’d have to squeeze in close, turning their extended widely spaced line into a thick, jostling mob just right for shooting arrows into, like the mess he’d seen in the river bed. ‘Hold your fire,’ he called out in a loud, clear voice. ‘At eighty-five, no further. Front rank, draw.’
The first volley thinned them a little, but the gaps soon filled, so that was all right. The staggered ranks of the square worked just as he’d hoped; as one rank loosed, the other drew, so that there was never a moment when there wasn’t a cloud of arrows in the air. The enemy were stumbling now, as if they’d been tripped by a rope across their path. Forty yards out from the square they became so tangled that they couldn’t move forward fast enough to live long enough to get past the banked-up dead and wounded and go in closer. The bank grew; it was like watching the sand forming high drifts in the bottom of an hourglass, or the moment when the incoming wave dissipates on the sand just before it’s pulled back into the sea. At forty yards out, the crucial moment was tangible, although as a problem in applied philosophy it was hardly worthy of attention. It would be decided by nothing more obscure or profound than elementary arithmetic - which was going to run out first, Gorgas’ supply of arrows, or the enemy’s supply of men? It would be very close, close enough for a recount. It might yet come down to the last arrow or the last man, the accuracy of one archer’s aim, the care with which one halberdier put on his breastplate, the true tiller of one bow, the straightness of one arrow, the turning of a head to left or right at one particular moment, to decide whether the attack broke off and fell back or surged over the bank and pressed home.
Gorgas reached down without looking and felt the fletchings of another arrow, one more than he thought he had left. The skin between the first and second joints of his draw fingers was rubbed away into a mush of raw flesh, and the muscles of his back screamed as he took up the weight of the draw, pushing against the handle of the bow with his left hand, drawing back the string with his right. As he drove his left arm forward, straightening the elbow, he heard a sharp crack and felt the top limb of his broken bow smash into his mouth, as hard as a punch from a skilful boxer, while the lower limb welted across the side of his knee. He stood for a moment with the ruins of his bow hanging comically around him - damn the thing, the useless, cheapskate heap of crap, lousy unbacked ash that couldn’t take the racking stretch across the back and crushing in the belly, it had left him defenceless in the very moment when everything was to be decided; suddenly there was nothing more he could do except drop two pieces of firewood, stand still and wait.
‘The hell with this,’ someone shouted (Huic Bovert, who’d tripped over a guy-rope on his way back from the council of war last night, the pain from his twisted ankle was draining his strength like a hole in a bucket). ‘Pull back; dress your ranks and for gods’ sakes pull back.’ Slowly at first, simply because there was so much mess on the ground to pick their way through, the halberdiers edged back; the arrows carried on hitting them, of course, and they continued to fall in roughly the same numbers as before. At seventy-five yards they checked and rallied, and saw for the first time how few of them there were. ‘The hell with this,’ Huic Bovert repeated, and they withdrew, walking reluctantly away, guiltily, like a man walking away from a woman he no longer loves. Limping slowly behind the main body, his broad back a distinct target, Huic Bovert was the last man to fall, although it was hours before he died.
‘I don’t believe it,’ Gorgas said.
‘Don’t knock it,’ someone beside him replied. ‘Close, yes, but it beats losing.’
Someone else had assumed command of the remnants of the army; they had fallen in and formed a column, they were marching away. ‘No more than seven hundred,’ someone said. ‘If that. Probably closer to six.’
Gorgas snapped himself out of it. ‘What about us?’ he said. ‘casualties?’
‘They never got that close,’ someone else replied. ‘Another three arrows fewer each and they’d have made soup with us,
but we got away with it. All present and correct, it looks like.’
‘We’re getting good at this,’ Gorgas said.
Late in the afternoon, while Gorgas was organising men from the Town into parties to collect arrows, parties to strip the dead, parties to bury them, a messenger came in from Sergeant Baiss’ detachment; he was pleased to be able to report that Baiss had ambushed the retreating column as they climbed up into the mountains. Out of an estimated seven hundred halberdiers, he was confident that no more than ninety had escaped and were still at large. Was he to pursue the fugitives or return to Scona Town?
Gorgas felt sick. He told the messenger to bring Baiss back and leave the poor devils alone; then he set off up the hill to see his sister.
The Bank was nearly deserted; no clerks scuttling down corridors or peering up at him from their desks. Nobody waiting on the stone bench outside Niessa’s office. He pushed the door open and went in. Nobody home.
Eventually he caught up with a clerk in the exchequer; the man was scooping up the silver counters from the counting boards and putting them into a large, clinking sack.
‘You,’ he said, ‘where’s the Director?’
The clerk stared at him as if he had two heads. Gorgas glanced down at his bloodstained clothes and shredded hands. ‘It’s all right,’ he said, ‘we won. Have you seen my sister?’
The clerk looked as if he didn’t know whether to giggle or run. ‘Don’t you know?’ he said. ‘She’s cleared out. Left Scona. Taken all the ready money and the best ship and gone.’
Avid Soef? thought Avid Soef. Yeah, I remember him, wasn’t he the clown who showed up in Scona Town three days after the other two armies, soaked to the skin and covered from head to foot in mud and pine needles? What a joke!
According to the locals, the bog-carpeted forest that covered the southern tip of Scona was far drier than usual; the recent heavy rains had all run away into the sea, and the scouring heat of the past few days was drying out patches of marsh and bog that had been submerged for as long as anybody could remember. Mires that usually swallowed you up to the waist now only engulfed you as far as the knee.
Wretched, dismal, every step laboured and difficult; tracks that might just have been passable for five men and a mule becoming lime-traps with two thousand men squelching through them; mud-encrusted boots, almost too heavy to lift, so saturated that their wearers would almost have been drier walking barefoot; tussocks of couch grass, tripping men up and turning over ankles; all under a dark, nasty-smelling canopy of spindly firs and wind-twisted beeches, through waist-high clumps of briar and bramble, in and out of the branches and roots of fallen trees that blocked the way. How utterly superfluous, in all this natural torment, was any trace of the enemy.
The enemy wouldn’t come in here. More sense.
Nevertheless, Soef knew, if he didn’t send out scouts and advance parties, then undoubtedly there would be ambushes, roadblocks, landslides, pickets, snipers. The whole army could be cut down in their tracks, all because of carelessness, a general thinking he knew better than Regulations. At any moment he expected to bump into the remnants of the rebel army in flight from the sack of the Town - presumably it had fallen by now, it was hard to imagine anything that could stop an army of four thousand men. When he met them, would they keep running or turn and fight? A battle in this mud and filth among these dark and gloomy trees would be unspeakably awful, for both sides. Surely they’d have more sense. (Ah, but if they had any sense they’d have stayed out of the marshes.)
‘They reckon there’s a clearing up ahead,’ said the colour-sergeant.
‘Let’s hope they’re right this time,’ Soef answered. ‘For a while back there I thought they were deliberately misleading us - reasonable enough, since we’re the enemy. But I don’t think so now. I think they’re as lost as we are. After all, why in hell should anybody ever come here?’
The colour-sergeant nodded. ‘Apparently some of them do,’ he said. ‘Hunters - there’s supposed to be deer and wild pigs in here somewhere, I guess we must be making too much noise. And a few old men bring their yard-pigs to look for truffles.’
‘Never could understand what people see in those things. With honey, I suppose, or diced in a—Good gods, they were right. There is a clearing.’
‘That’s not all. Look.’
In the clearing there were men putting up tents, men trying vainly to make fires with wet timber and sodden kindling, men stacking bows in stands, hanging clothes from branches to dry. In the five or so seconds it took for Soef to realise what he was looking at, a few of them made an effort to get to their weapons. Most of them simply stood and stared, as if they were sitting at home and mythical beasts had just battered their way in through the wall.
‘Front three ranks,’ Soef shouted, but he was too late; the army was already surging forward all around him, not waiting for orders in their eagerness to take out their feelings after a week in the forest on someone else. The action didn’t last long. Half of the two hundred and fifty rebels made it into the forest, unarmed, some barefoot and in their undershirts. The rest were chopped down as if they were the brambles, briars, bracken, saplings and undergrowth of the forest that had caused the army so much suffering and aggravation. It was a swift, efficient, slashing clearance, a lopping of exposed limbs, all blade-work, very little stabbing. Soef didn’t try to intervene; he might as well have asked his men to consider the feelings of the couch grass and the bog-cotton and besides, he didn’t want to. A week in the forest had got to him too.
By the time the army lost interest, there were about fifty of them left. Most of them had at least a cut or a slice, some were missing fingers or a hand or an ear; it had been like watching spiteful children aimlessly bashing at the trunks of trees, smashing off branches, crushing and scarring the bark till the sap flows. Scarcely any of them had tried to fight.
‘That’ll do,’ Soef called out. ‘We’re just wasting energy now. Secure the prisoners, we’ll move on in an hour. Somebody see if there’s any clean water nearby, and find out if there’s anything fit to eat in the rebel tents. No point letting good stuff go to waste, when we don’t know when we’ll next have a chance to stock up.’
Quite. We might just as well eat what we kill.
The prisoners’ story cheered him up. They’d got lost as well, trying to find the halberdiers and ambush them. After three days of crashing through bush and sliding in mud, they’d resolved to give it up, pull back to the edge of the forest and either pick the Shastel men off as they came out or harass them all the way back to Scona, the way Gorgas had done with the first army -
‘What do you mean?’ Soef interrupted.
The prisoner looked worried. ‘You don’t know?’ he said. ‘We heard just before we left: General Loredan defeated your first army. He’s got hundreds of prisoners.’
Soef frowned. ‘General Mogre’s army?’ he queried. ‘Or General Affem’s?’
‘No idea,’ the prisoner said. ‘Gorgas hadn’t reached Scona, all we heard was dispatches and the order to guard the forest. We only heard about you when we ran into the foresters.’
‘You’re seriously telling me Gorgas defeated one of the other two armies?’ Soef said. The prisoner dipped his head nervously. ‘And then he was going to fall back on Scona Town, presumably.’
‘I suppose so.’ The prisoner wiped blood from a slash across his scalp out of his eyes; blood was running down his hair, dripping off his sheepdog fringe, like rainwater running off leaves. ‘The message we got didn’t say; all we were told was we’d won a big victory, and we’d been ordered to keep this end tidy.’
‘And you’re sure you don’t know which army it was? If you’re lying I’ll have you strung up.’
‘I’m sure,’ the prisoner said wearily. ‘I don’t even know where the battle was, or where Gorgas was when he sent the message, come to that. I suppose the sergeant might know, if he’s still alive.’
Avid Soef looked up at the colour-sergeant, who s
hook his head. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Sergeant, fall the prisoners in, we’ll have to take them with us. There’s a thought; they can show us the way they came. They don’t look like they’ve been wading up to their chins in mud.’
The prisoner shook his head. ‘It’s really very dry the other side of the clearing, where the side of this combe slopes upward. But I can’t show you exactly which way we came; we were lost, remember. I’m sure we spent about half a day just drifting round in circles.’
The thought that it might be Sten Mogre’s army that had been beaten and captured or put to flight troubled Avid Soef more than he’d imagined such news ever could. He thoroughly disliked the man and knew Mogre felt the same about him, with contempt added in on top. But ever since they’d landed Mogre had been running the show, and Soef hadn’t really given much thought himself to any overall strategy, only various small ways to embarrass Mogre and his constituents back in Shastel Chapter. If Mogre had truly suffered a serious defeat, it could be days, even a whole week, before he’d be able to rally his men and play any further useful part in the war. That meant Soef would effectively be in charge of the whole expedition. Whatever happened next could be his fault.
Bloody war, he thought bitterly. Even when things go right, it’s a hiding to nothing.
‘What do you mean, gone?’ Gorgas said.
‘Gone,’ the clerk repeated helplessly. ‘And she’s resigned as Director. She took all the silver plate and most of the valuable furniture and stuff. But she’s left all the books and the accounts.’
Gorgas took a deep breath and let it out slowly. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Did her daughter go with her?’