Writing Fantasy Heroes

by Jason M Waltz (ed)

  This horde of people must eat and excrete. Every day convoys of wheeled vehicles must be hauled into the camp, full of food, and in pre-modern times this food cannot be stockpiled as easily as in our refrigerated world; there are no tin cans in most fantasy, and no portaloos either. Beef will be on the hoof, slaughtered in camp and then salted down or dried. Bread will have to be baked in situ. Staples such as corn, or lentils (which formed the mainstay of a Roman legionary’s diet), will be consumed in stupefying quantities. Or perhaps the army will be more eastern in flavor, and will subsist on rice. In the Vietnam War the Vietcong lived on rice, a few vegetables, and dollops of fish sauce.

  In any case, the need to feed the troops will to a large extent govern the maneuvering of the army. Will the host be able to live off the land of an enemy, or will it be campaigning in friendly territory? If it is to pillage as it advances then it will have to be weakened by sending out substantial foraging parties, and these detachments will in turn be vulnerable to ambush.

  In camp another problem arises; sanitation. Ideally the army will encamp close to potable water, for the sake of the livestock as well as the troops. But think of the waste this great conglomeration of men and animals will produce. The camp will stink to high heaven. A disciplined, professional army will dig latrines, but most pre-technological armies simply squatted where they felt like it. In two or three days the army will be bivouacked in a cesspool, and if is summertime, disease will begin to nibble at the edges of the host’s manpower.

  This is something that is not covered by most fantasy writers, but I feel it to be key to the depiction of large-scale campaigning. After all, in almost every pre-modern war, more men died from disease than from enemy action. That was true right up to the end of the nineteenth century. It may be that the author does not wish to dwell on such prosaic details of military life; after all, we never see Aragorn popping out behind a bush before the uruks rush the Deeping Wall. It should at the back of his or her mind though. A large army encamped in one place for a long period will eventually succumb to sickness; that is reality.

  (Unless they’re elves, of course.)

  So, the army has been gathered. It has been fed, and has a baggage train of wagons or pack animals which will keep the supplies coming forward. The men have dug latrines and are in rude health. Everything is tickety-boo. The author rubs his hands, thinking of the glorious Technicolor™ carnage to come, the fields of glory which await. The army is ready, finally, to march.

  Have you ever been in a really, really long queue? Like you’re trying to buy a Harry Potter ticket or an Apple gizmo on its first day of sale. When things finally get moving, the snake of people shuffles forward, and it can be an age before those at the back of the queue even register that the line is moving at all.

  An army on the move is like that.

  Think about how much space four men marching abreast will take up on a single-track road. They’ll need six feet perhaps, so they don’t tread on the heels of those in front. Now if you had ten thousand men marching four abreast, they would take up 15,000 feet, or a shade under three miles. Even if this mighty crocodile of men were to stand still, it would take an hour for a man to stroll from one end of it to the other.

  Now imagine that the head of this column encounters the enemy. Even if it’s a piffling little force of just a few hundred, those thousands back down the road will take many precious minutes to arrive on the scene, and in that time the men at the front of the long column will have been cut to pieces.

  So the army cannot just march out in one big long line with our heroes resplendent at the head of it. It is at its most vulnerable in this formation, easily split up, and incredibly hard to concentrate against a threat. The sensible general will throw out flanking forces, preferably of faster moving light troops—perhaps even cavalry. He will have a forward guard of mounted men if he has them, and wide-ranging bodies of scouts scouring the land around. The army is a powerful instrument, but it cannot fight blind. Gathering intelligence on the surrounding region will enable the host’s leaders to make better decisions when the time comes for the balloon to go up. And the outlying detachments will prevent the marching men from being taken by surprise.

  Thus will the average soldier spend his day—trudging in a fog of sweat and dust with little to look at but the back of the man in front. Even if he is a horseman, he will be eating dust, (for nearly all campaigning must take place in the summer if the harvest or the spring planting are not to be interrupted), and he will have a big horse steaming under him.

  It has been estimated that even with all the advances in equipment and technology that our modern age has brought to warfare, the very minimum that a combat infantryman must carry on his back is some forty pounds. And that is moving light. Now think of what the crushing weight of an 80 pound mail shirt must have been like, or a bronze breastplate. And that’s not taking into account a helmet, a sword or spear or both, a shield, and all the other myriad of equipment a man needs to make sleeping under the stars bearable. Men routinely carried upwards of 100 pounds on their back, and marched mile after mile under that load in all times of the year. In World War II, German infantrymen in Russia routinely marched forty miles a day. Stonewall Jackson’s foot cavalry achieved something similar up and down the Shenandoah Valley. But by and large our army will be a lot slower. Depending on the size of it, and the cleverness of its commanders, it will be doing well to average half that. Xenophon thought that if an army made fifteen miles a day that was fairly adequate. Ancient armies were simply more unwieldy, and they were chained to a slow-moving baggage train of wagons that were more often than not pulled by plodding oxen. A column of cavalry might cut loose from its baggage for a time, and travel light, as Custer did on his way to the Bighorn, but it will suffer for it in broken down and played-out animals. And even Custer still had to take with him an ungainly and dilatory train of pack mules.

  Finally this straggling behemoth makes its way to a place where it intends to meet its enemy. The location of the battle may be prearranged, either by tradition or geography. In classical Greece armies met and fought on the same fields for year on year, and even century upon century. Rocky, mountainous Greece had few level patches of open country that were deemed suitable for ‘real’ warfare, as opposed to the unsightly and unimportant skirmishing of lightly armed troops. So many battles were fought on the plains of Boeotia that it was called the dancing floor of war. Even closer to our own time, multiple battles were fought at such widely disparate places as Bull Run, and the Belgian Ardennes forest.

  The ideal of pre-modern warfare is to meet the enemy in the field, and crush him decisively in one engagement. Anything else, and the war drags on, you have all those mouths to feed, and next year’s harvest begins to look doubtful. Rome’s professional standing army was unique in the Ancient world, in that it would fight year round, and would post its troops to any location regardless of their ethnicity. The men’s loyalty was given to the legion and its commander, not to a tribal homeland, and, eventually, not even to Rome itself. (Therein lies the intrinsic danger of a standing army.)

  Our author has brought his troops to the battlefield at last. Here we are at the tip of the spear, the consummation of all his scene-setting and plotting and conspiring. The grand spectacle of the battle itself awaits him. I find in writing battle scenes that to sit before an empty page on such occasions can be one of the most intimidating experiences in writing epic fantasy. This is the meat in the sandwich, and it has to be tasty.

  One can talk about atmosphere, language, characterization and every other facet of the narrative. This is still fiction; normal rules apply. But there are a few things that are different also.

  Seated on his quiet mare, Vorus watched the line of spearmen march up the hill with a wall of sound that was the Paean preceding them. He thought he had never seen a sight so fearsome in his life: that moving battlement of scarlet and bronze, that wave of death approaching. (from The Ten Thousand)

 
; Firstly, when the battle-lines clash, it’s as well for an author to have an accurate idea of where exactly everyone stands. I always do what I do upon starting a fantasy novel—I draw a map. Write down the positions of the various forces, and the characters which are in those units. Note for sneering purists; it’s not nerdy, and it doesn’t reduce your magnum opus to the level of a Dungeons & Dragons campaign.

  Keep the map beside you as you write, and as the narrative progresses and the lines move and break and reform, annotate your map. By the end of the battle it should be covered in scrawls, but you will still see the sense within it. It should also have a scale, so that if you want one character to see another across that deadly space, you can gauge whether it’s possible or not. Battlefields can be large places, miles wide. Our ten thousand men, standing in four ranks shoulder to shoulder, will form a line over a mile and a half long, and that’s close-packed heavy infantry such as Greek spearmen or Roman legionaries. If your troops are wild-eyed Celtic types who like a lot of space to swing their swords, it will be even longer.

  And you must know your troop types; what their purpose is and what they’re capable of. If your much-caressed body of heavy cavalry go charging into the sunset in a haze of glory and horn-calls, and then meet a formed up body of disciplined spearmen, then you can kiss your magnificent cavalry charge goodbye. Horses—even trained destriers—will not gallop into a line of steady infantry.

  However, if those spearmen flinch at the awe-inspiring sight of your hero and his mates bearing down on them, then there may be a chance. But by and large, cavalry want to be out on the flanks, feeling for the end of the enemy line. And your enemy, if he has any sense, will either meet your horsemen with his own, or anchor his flanks on unsuitable ground such as a wood or marsh where your hero’s destrier will lose its momentum.

  This is tactics, and it’s not rocket science—in fact there is a kind of rock-paper-scissors sense to it. Spearmen counter cavalry but are vulnerable to missiles; they cannot get into contact with lightly armed skirmishers, who just scamper out of their way and thumb their noses at them. But skirmishers can be easily ridden down by cavalry.

  If we delve deeper into the bloody contending lines of men on the battlefield, then we come to the very heart of the thing, what the Greeks called the othismos. Here is a massive scrum of flesh and metal and sharp pointy things.

  The crash of the battle lines meeting, a sound to make the hearer flinch. It carried clear down the valley, and close on that unholy clash there came the following roar of close-quarter battle. The ten thousand Macht slammed into forty thousand Kefren like some force out of nature. In the rear of the Kefren left the archers loosed another volley, twenty thousand arrows overshooting to pepper the ground behind the Macht army. Before them, the ranks of their spearmen were shoved bodily backwards, pressing in on each other. Vorus could see the glittering aichme of the Macht darting forward and back at their bloody work all along the line, like teeth in some great machine, whilst the men in the rear ranks set their shields in the back of the man in front, dug their heels into the soft ground, and pushed. The Kefren phalanx staggered under that pressure, as a man’s stomach will fold in on the strike of a fist. The battle line was simultaneously chopped to pieces and pushed in on itself. Vorus found the breath clicking in his throat. It had been a long time. He had forgotten what his people looked like in battle, and what savage efficiency they brought to war. (from The Ten Thousand)

  Lines will collide and come apart again. Crowds will coalesce and wither. Look at footage of riots on television. The riot police are the heavy troops, and the rioters are skirmishers. The riot police hold their line, but periodically charge forward when they’ve had enough things thrown at them. And to continue the analogy, the way mounted police make a crowd melt away in front of them as they charge must have something in common with the way pre-modern warriors once viewed bulky armored figures on big horses. The mere presence and bulk of all that meat and muscle counts for something, as much as the damage it deals out.

  The Merduks in the valley looked up, and the Torunnans and Fimbrians who were fighting their desperate battle for survival saw a long line of cavalry come raging down from the hilltop like a scarlet avalanche. One thousand two hundred heavy horses carrying men in red iron, their lances a limbless forest against the sky, and that terrible, barbaric battle-hymn roaring down with them.

  They sped into a gallop, their lines separating out, and the wicked lances came down from the vertical. The Merduk skirmishers took one look at that looming juggernaut, and began to run.

  The first rank of the Cathedrallers rode them down, spearing them through their spines and galloping on. Half a dozen of the horsemen went down, their mounts tripping on the broken ground, but they closed the gaps and kept coming. The main Merduk formations below frantically tried to change their facings to meet this new, unlocked-for enemy clad in their own armor but glowing red as fresh blood and singing in some barbaric tongue. A regiment of Hraibadar arquebusiers stood to fire a volley, but the approaching maelstrom was too much for some of them to bear, and they ran also. Their formation was scrambled, even as the first rank of the Cathedrallers smashed into them.

  The big horses rode down the Merduks as though they were a line of rabbits, and the terrible lances of the riders speared scores in the first clash. Horses went down, cartwheeling, screaming, crushing friend and foe alike, but the charge’s momentum was too powerful to stop. They rode on, and behind them came the second rank, and the third, and the fourth. More horses falling, brought down by the corpses underfoot, their riders flung through the air to be trampled by the ranks behind them. Corfe lost sixty men in the first thirty seconds, but the Merduks died by the shrieking hundred. (from The Iron Wars, Ace, 2002)

  The battlefield is a nasty place, and it would be rank dishonesty on the part of the author to suggest otherwise. I do not think that scenes of close combat should make for comfortable reading. I do believe that there can be moments of glory in warfare—too many soldiers have testified to the exhilaration of combat all through history for it not to be true. But I also believe that in the main, battle is an exhausting, horrific, terrifying experience, and no matter how many wands are waved or legions of flying monkeys descend, it should not be portrayed otherwise.

  And your book will be the better for it.

  Shit Happens

  in the Creation of Story, Including Unexpected Deaths, with Ample Digressions and Curious Asides

  Glen Cook

  My first college roommate taught me several invaluable lessons about mundane life and demonstrated its profound connection to the Sea of Stories—though at the time he just pissed me off. His name was Gary. He hailed from Sarcoxie, Missouri, in the southwestern quarter of the state, geographically, historically, and culturally redneck Confederacy country. Gary was the first epileptic I ever knew, and the only professional bowler.

  The boy was wicked good at rolling that ball. He had his own, too. Custom-drilled.

  The first lesson he taught had to do with making character assumptions based on someone's background. Gary ran counter to stereotype, deeply. Though not particularly sophisticated he owned few of the prejudices, habits, or attitudes generally considered to be built into a country boy from his social pool. He was, in the main, indifferent to the social excitements of the Sixties. The one strong opinion I recall was an abiding disdain for the Beatles, their hairstyling in particular.

  Gary favored a Marine Corps style cut. Too, he might have owned a certain level of jealousy based on the response of the female species to that posse of funny-talkers.

  Dorms were tight in those days. We had another roommate, call him Jones. We three were packed into a space engineered for one back in the day of Spartan expectation that went with World War II. Jones was from Bowling Green, in northeastern Missouri: hard core Union territory. Jones demonstrated the character assumption rule, as well. He was as racist as they came. The moment he could do so he went Greek, to a house proudly
flying the CSA battle standard instead of the US flag. He was no redneck. His people were local bankers, lawyers, and politicians, spanning generations.

  (Historical aside: the a) Civil War, b) War for Southern Independence, was contested more bitterly in Missouri, though in battles of smaller scale, than most anywhere else, and defeat did not emotionally come home, for Confederacy sympathizers, until Jesse James was a) brought to justice, or, b) till that dirty little coward, Robert Ford, shot Mr. Howard, and laid poor Jesse in his grave.

  On the other hand, our Confederates seem to have gotten over it more fully than have some in other locales.)

  More importantly than showing me that the people within are not necessarily determined by what their outside circumstances would suggest, Gary taught me the relevance and importance of the connection of life to the title of this piece. I took it to heart, especially as regarded my own communion with the Sea of Stories.

  Things happen outside causality. They do so in every life and, so, should in every plot. Unlikely shit happens every day, without warning, and has an impact on everything that comes afterward—often a lasting, history-determining impact.

  On a hot August afternoon in 216 B. C. the protracted scheming and maneuvering of the Roman Senate brought the armies of Rome and its federates to contact with Hannibal at Cannae, in southern Italy. The plan was tactically and strategically sound. But…In three hours of intense fighting more people died than in any single day until the Tokyo firebombings of World War II more than two thousand years later. Rome suffered a defeat of a scale that we cannot even imagine today. Ten percent of the adult male, war-capable population of the Italian peninsula died that afternoon, yet still the battle, though it echoes and is still studied minutely today, was not decisive. Rome sucked it up and kept on fighting. The nearest to a ‘Shit Happens’ on that day was that a teenager named Scipio was one of the lucky survivors. Years later he would stand before the Senate after the Battle of Zama and declare, "Carthago delende est (Carthage is no more)!”