by Dan Simmons
It was a wet and chilly late October morning in A.D. 1415. Kassad had been inserted as an archer into the army of Henry V of England. The English force had been on French soil since August 14 and had been retreating from superior French forces since October 8. Henry had convinced his War Council that the army could beat the French in a forced march to the safety of Calais. They had failed. Now, as October 25 dawned gray and drizzly, seven thousand Englishmen, mostly bowmen, faced a force of some twenty-eight thousand French men-at-arms across a kilometer of muddy field.
Kassad was cold, tired, sick, and scared. He and the other archers had been surviving on little more than scavenged berries for the past week of the march and almost every man on the line that morning was suffering from diarrhea. The air temperature was in the low fifties Fahrenheit and Kassad had spent a long night trying to sleep on damp ground. He was impressed with the unbelievable realism of the experience—the Olympus Command School Historical Tactical Network was as far beyond regular stimsims as full-form holos were beyond tintypes—but the physical sensations were so convincing, so real, that Kassad did not relish the thought of being wounded. There were tales of cadets receiving fatal wounds in the OCS:HTN sims and being pulled dead from their immersion creches.
Kassad and the other bowmen on Henry’s right flank had been staring at the larger French force for most of the morning when pennants waved, the fifteenth-century equivalent of sergeants brayed, and the archers obeyed the King’s command and began marching against the enemy. The ragged English line, stretching about seven hundred meters across the field from treeline to treeline, consisted of clusters of archers like Kassad’s troop interspersed with smaller groups of men-at-arms. The English had no formal cavalry and most of the horses Kassad could see on his end of the field were carrying men clustered near the King’s command group three hundred meters toward the center, or huddled around the Duke of York’s position much closer to where Kassad and the other archers stood near the right flank. These command groups reminded Kassad of a FORCE:ground mobile staff HQ, only instead of the inevitable forest of comm antennae giving away their position, bright banners and pennants hung limp on pikes. An obvious artillery target, thought Kassad, and then reminded himself that this particular military nuance did not yet exist.
Kassad noticed that the French had plenty of horses. He estimated six or seven hundred mounted men formed in ranks on each of the French flanks and a long line of cavalry behind the main battle line. Kassad did not like horses. He had seen holos and pictures, of course, but he had not encountered the animals themselves until this exercise, and the size, smell, and sound of them tended to be unnerving—especially so when the damn quadrupeds were armored chest and head, shod in steel, and trained to carry armored men wielding four meters of lance.
The English advance halted. Kassad estimated that his battle line was about two hundred and fifty meters from the French. He knew from the experience of the past week that this was within longbow range, but he also knew that he would have to pull his arm half out of its socket to hold the pull.
The French were shouting what Kassad assumed were insults. He ignored them as he and his silent comrades stepped forward from where they had planted their long arrows and found soft ground in which to drive their stakes. The stakes were long and heavy and Kassad had been carrying his for a week. Almost a meter and a half long, the clumsy thing had been sharpened at both ends. When the order first came down for all archers to find saplings and cut stakes, somewhere in the deep woods just after they had crossed the Somme, Kassad had wondered idly what the things were for. Now he knew.
Every third archer carried a heavy mallet and now they took turns driving their stakes in at a careful angle. Kassad pulled out his long knife, resharpened the end which, even leaning, rose almost to his chest, and stepped back through the hedgehog of sharpened stakes to await the French charge.
The French did not charge.
Kassad waited with the others. His bow was strung, forty-eight arrows were planted in two clusters at his feet, and his feet were set properly.
The French did not charge.
The rain had stopped but a cool breeze had come up and what little body heat Kassad had generated by the short march and the task of driving stakes had been lost quickly. The only sounds were the metallic shufflings of men and horses, occasional mutterings or nervous laughs, and the heavier thud of hooves as the French cavalry rearranged itself but still refused to charge.
“Fuck this,” said a grizzled yeoman a few feet from Kassad. “Those bastards’ve wasted our whole bleeding morning. They’d better piss or get off the pot.”
Kassad nodded. He was not sure if he was hearing and understanding Middle English or if the sentence had been in simple Standard. He had no idea if the grizzled archer was another Command School cadet, an instructor, or merely an artifact of the sim. He could not guess if the slang had been correct. He did not care. His heart was pounding and his palms were sweaty. He wiped his hands on his jerkin.
As if King Henry had taken his cue from the old man’s muttering, command flags suddenly bobbed and rose, sergeants screamed, and row upon row of English archers raised their longbows, pulled when commands were shouted, released on the next command.
Four waves of arrows comprised of more than six thousand meter-long, chisel-pointed, clothyard missiles rose, seemed to hang in a cloud thirty meters up, and fell on the French.
There came the sound of horses screaming and a thousand demented children pounding on ten thousand tin pots as the French men-at-arms leaned into the rain of arrows to let their steel helmets and their chest and shoulder armor take the brunt of the downpour. Kassad knew that in military terms little real damage had been done, but this was small solace to the occasional French soldier with ten inches of arrow through his eye, or to the scores of horses leaping, tumbling, and crashing into one another while their riders struggled to remove wooden shafts from the creatures’ backs and flanks.
The French did not charge.
More commands were shouted. Kassad raised, readied, loosed his arrow. Again. And again. The sky darkened every ten seconds. Kassad’s arm and back ached from the punishing rhythm. He found that he felt neither elation nor anger. He was doing his job. His forearm was raw. Again the arrows flew. And again. Fifteen of his first sheaf of twenty-four arrows were gone when a cry went up along the English line and Kassad paused and glanced down while holding full pull.
The French were charging.
A cavalry charge was something beyond Kassad’s experience. Watching twelve hundred armored horses charging directly at him created internal sensations which Kassad found a bit unnerving. The charge took less than forty seconds but Kassad discovered that this was ample time for his mouth to go absolutely dry, his breathing to begin to have problems, and for his testicles to retreat completely into his body. If the rest of Kassad could have found a comparable hiding place, he would have seriously considered crawling into it.
As it was, he was too busy to run.
Firing on command, his line of archers got off five flat volleys at the attacking horsemen, managed one more shot in independent fire, and then they fell back five paces.
Horses, it turned out, were too smart to willingly impale themselves upon stakes—no matter how hard their human riders implored them to do so—but the second and third waves of cavalry did not stop as abruptly as the first, and in a single mad moment horses were down and screaming, riders were thrown and screaming, and Kassad was out and screaming, rushing at every downed Frenchman he could see, wielding a mallet on the prostrate form when he could, slashing through gaps in armor with his long knife when it was too crowded to swing the mallet. Soon he and the grizzled archer and a younger man who had lost his cap became an efficient killing team, closing in on a downed rider from three sides, Kassad using the mallet to knock the pleading horseman off his knees, then all three moving in with their blades.
Only one knight gained his feet and raised a sword to co
nfront them. The Frenchman flipped up his visor and called out a clear request for honor and single combat. The old man and the youth circled like wolves. Kassad returned with his bow and put an arrow into the knight’s left eye from ten paces.
The battle continued in the deadly comic-opera vein common to all armed combat since the first rock and thighbone duels on Old Earth. The French cavalry managed to turn and flee just as the first wave of ten thousand men-at-arms charged the English center on foot. The melee broke up the rhythm of the attack and, by the time the French had regained their initiative, Henry’s own men-at-arms had braced to hold them at pike length while Kassad and several thousand other archers poured volley fire into the massed French infantry at close range.
That did not end the battle. It was not necessarily even the decisive moment. The turning point, when it came, was lost—as all such moments are—within the dust and turmoil of a thousand individual encounters where infantrymen faced infantrymen across the distance of their personal weapons. Before it was over some three hours later there would be minor variations on repeated themes, ineffective thrusts and clumsy counterthrusts, and a less than honorable moment when Henry would order prisoners killed rather than leave them in the rear when the English were confronted with a new threat. But the heralds and historians would later agree that the outcome had been sealed somewhere in the confusion during the first French infantry charge. The French died in the thousands. English dominion on that part of the Continent would continue for a while. The day of the armored man-at-arms, the knight, the embodiment of chivalry, was over—hammered into history’s coffin by a few thousand ragtag peasant archers carrying longbows. The ultimate insult to the noble-born French dead—if the dead indeed could be further insulted—lay in the fact that the English archers were not only common men, common in the lowest, most flea-infested sense of the word, but that they were draftees. Doughboys. GIs. Grunts. AIPs. Spezzes. K-techs. Jump Rats.
But all that was in the lesson Kassad was supposed to have learned during that OCS:HTN exercise. He learned none of it. He was too busy having an encounter which would change his life.
The French man-at-arms went over the head of his falling horse, rolled once, and was up and running for the woods before the mud quit flying. Kassad followed. He was halfway to the tree line before he realized that the youth and the grizzled archer had not come with him. It did not matter. Kassad’s adrenaline was flowing and the bloodlust had him in its grip.
The man-at-arms, who had just been thrown to the ground from a horse moving at full gallop and who was wearing sixty pounds of clumsy armor, should have been an easy prey to catch. He was not. The Frenchman glanced back once, saw Kassad coming on a full run with a mallet in his hand and his eye full of business, and then the man-at-arms shifted into a higher gear and reached the trees fifteen meters ahead of his pursuer.
Kassad was deep into the woods before he stopped, leaned on the mallet, gasped, and considered his position. Thuds, screams, and crashes from the battlefield behind him were muffled by distance and shrubbery. The trees were almost bare and still dripped from the rainstorm the night before; the floor of the forest was carpeted with a thick layer of old leaves and a snarl of shrubs and brambles. The man-at-arms had left a trail of broken branches and footsteps for the first twenty meters or so, but now deer trails and overgrown paths made it difficult to see where he had passed.
Kassad moved slowly, stepping deeper into the woods, trying to be alert for any noise above the sound of his own panting and the insane pounding of his heart. It occurred to Kassad that, tactically speaking, this was not a brilliant move; the man-at-arms had been wearing full armor and carrying his sword when he disappeared in the bushes. At any moment the Frenchman might forget his panic, regret his temporary loss of honor, and remember his years of combat training. Kassad also had been trained. He looked down at his cloth shirt and leather vest. The mallet was still in his hands, the knife in his broad belt. He had been trained to use high-energy weapons with a killing range of a few meters to thousands of kilometers. He had been rated in plasma grenades, hellwhips, fleschette rifles, Sonics, recoilless zero-gravity weapons, deathwands, kinetic assault guns, and beam gauntlets. He now had a working knowledge of an English longbow. None of these objects—including the longbow—was on his person at the moment.
“Ah, shit,” murmured Second Lieutenant Kassad.
The man-at-arms came out of the bushes like a charging bear, arms up, legs apart, the sword coming around in a flat arc meant to disembowel Kassad. The OCS cadet tried to leap back and raise his mallet at the same time. Neither effort was completely successful. The Frenchman’s sword knocked the heavy mallet out of Kassad’s grip while the dull point of the blade slashed through leather, shirt, and skin.
Kassad bellowed and stumbled backward again, tugging at the knife in his belt. His right heel caught the branch of a fallen tree and he went down backward, cursing and rolling deeper into the tangle of branches as the man-at-arms crashed forward, his heavy sword clearing limbs like an oversized machete. Kassad had his knife out by the time the man-at-arms had cleared a path through the deadfall, but the ten-inch blade was a pitiful thing against armor unless the knight was helpless. This knight was not helpless. Kassad knew that he would never get inside the arc of sword blade. His only hope was in running, but the tall trunk of the fallen tree behind him and the deadfall beyond eliminated that option. He did not wish to get cut down from behind as he turned. Nor from below as he climbed. Kassad did not wish to be cut down from any angle.
Kassad went into a knife fighter’s crouch which he hadn’t used since his street-fighting days in the Tharsis slums. He wondered how the simulation would deal with his death.
The figure appeared behind the man-at-arms like a sudden shadow. The noise of Kassad’s mallet striking the knight’s armored shoulder sounded precisely like someone bashing the hood of an EMV with a sledgehammer.
The Frenchman staggered, turned to meet the new threat, and took a second mallet blow in the chest. Kassad’s savior was small; the man-at-arms did not go down. The French knight was raising his sword above his head when Kassad hit him behind and below the knees with a shoulder tackle.
Tree limbs snapped as the Frenchman went down. The small attacker stood astride the knight, pinning the armored man’s sword arm with one foot while bringing the mallet down repeatedly onto helmet and visor. Kassad extricated himself from the tangle of legs and branches, sat on the downed man’s knees, and began slashing through gaps in armor at groin, sides, and underarms. Kassad’s rescuer jumped aside to plant both feet on the knight’s wrist and Kassad scrambled forward, stabbing through crevices where the helmet met chest armor, finally slamming the blade through slits in the visor itself.
The knight screamed as the mallet came down a final time, almost catching Kassad’s hand as the hammer drove the blade through the visor slit like a ten-inch tent peg. The man-at-arms arched, lifting Kassad and sixty pounds of armor clear of the ground in a final violent spasm and then fell back limply.
Kassad rolled onto his side. His rescuer collapsed beside him. Both were covered with sweat and the dead man’s blood. Kassad looked at his savior. The woman was tall and dressed in clothes not dissimilar to Kassad’s. For a moment they merely lay there and gasped for air.
“Are you … all right?” Kassad managed after a while. He was suddenly struck by her appearance. Her brown hair was short by current Worldweb fashion, short and straight and cut so that the longest strands fell from the part, just a few centimeters left of the center of her forehead, to just above her right ear. It was a boy’s haircut from some forgotten time, but she was no boy. Kassad thought that she was perhaps the most beautiful woman he had ever seen: bone structure so perfect that chin and cheekbones were shaped without being too sharp, large eyes glowing with life and intelligence, a gentle mouth with a soft underlip. Lying next to her, Kassad realized that she was tall—not so tall as he but obviously not a woman from the fifteenth century�
��and even under her loose tunic and baggy trousers he could see the soft swell of hips and breast. She appeared to be a few years older than Kassad, perhaps in her late twenties, but this fact barely registered as she continued staring into his face with those soft, beguiling, endlessly deep eyes.
“Are you all right?” he asked again. His voice sounded strange even to himself.
She did not answer. Or, rather, she answered by sliding long fingers across Kassad’s chest, ripping away the leather thongs which bound the rough vest. Her hands found his shirt. It was soaked with blood and ripped halfway down the front. The woman ripped it open the rest of the way. She moved against him now, her fingers and lips on his chest, hips already beginning to move. Her right hand found the cords to his trouser front, ripped them free.
Kassad helped her pull off the rest of his clothes, removed hers with three fluid movements. She wore nothing under her shirt and coarse-cloth trousers. Kassad’s hand slid between her thighs, behind her, cupped her moving buttocks, pulled her closer, and slid to the moist roughness in front. She opened to him, her mouth closing on his. Somehow, with all of their motion and disrobing, their skin never lost contact. Kassad felt his own excitement rubbing against the cusp of her belly.
She rolled above him then, her thighs astride his hips, her gaze still locked with his. Kassad had never been so excited. He gasped as her right hand went behind her, found him, guided him into her. When he opened his eyes again she was moving slowly, her head back, eyes closed. Kassad’s hands moved up her sides to cup her perfect breasts. Nipples hardened against his palms.
They made love then. Kassad, at twenty-three standard years, had been in love once and had enjoyed sex many times. He thought he knew the way and the why of it. There was nothing in his experience to that moment which he could not have described with a phrase and a laugh to his squadmates in the hold of a troop transport With the calm, sure cynicism of a twenty-three-year-old veteran he was sure that he would never experience anything that could not be so described, so dismissed. He was wrong. He could never adequately share the sense of the next few minutes with anyone else. He would never try.
