by K. J. Parker
‘All right,’ he said again. ‘First things first, weapons. How many of you have got any?’ He waited. Nobody moved. ‘Right. Well, get anything sharp or heavy or pointed. Hurry, you’ve got two minutes. Go.’
At least that dispersed them. Bar turned to his platoon. ‘Now listen to me,’ he said. ‘This lot’s worse than useless, so mostly it’ll be up to us. The odds are crap, but we’ve got surprise and a good position. Venin, you remember where you were just now? All right, take five men with you, wait for my signal before you start shooting. Bool, follow on behind but take the trees on this side of the road. You’ll get three, maybe four shots each, and that’ll be it, your only chance to end this and get out in one piece, so for gods’ sakes concentrate, we’ve got to take down at least half of them in those first three volleys. You can do it easy, it’s well within your capabilities. Right. Go.’
They moved out without a word, leaving him standing on his own in the middle of the village. Wonderful, he said angrily to himself, now we’re in a war. Should’ve been more careful what you wished for. Still, you’ll never get a better position, so why the hell not?
He reviewed his remaining forces. There were twenty-six of them, comprising seven felling axes, one genuine Shastel military halberd, twelve hayforks – there had been no more formidable weapon in the world when he was thirteen years old and running away from one with a dozen freshly stolen onions down the front of his shirt – six mattocks and a spade. Put ’em together and what d’you get? A massacre, most likely. But we’ll see. ‘The axes, the halberd and you, the big man with the fork. You know where I had my sentry? A hundred yards beyond that and further down the slope there’s a pile of rocks. Can you get yourselves there quick without being seen from the road?’
One of the axes nodded. ‘No problem,’ he said.
Bar nodded. ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘In that case, you’re in charge. Now, when I give the signal and only then, you get yourselves down the slope quick as you can and take the enemy in the rear. The signal will be three short blasts on this horn,’ he went on, patting the small copper bugle at his belt. ‘Stay awake and remember, don’t move a hair till you hear the signal and we ought to be all right.’
The assault party (my picked men. Oh, gods) set off briskly, leaving Bar with the eighteen remaining peasants. There were three boys no more than seventeen and four old men with grey hair or no hair at all (but he had the idea they were probably the pick of the bunch). The rest of them were that indeterminate age that only peasants ever attain, the stage in their life-cycle where childhood and courtship are over and there’s nothing left to do but work and die. They were tough, strong, determined men, and no match in a million years for trained armoured halberdiers. Oh, well. They were only there for decoration, bait to draw the halberdiers into enfilading fire from a dozen Scona archers shooting at between seventy-five yards and point-blank. With any luck, a canteen of hot soup taken off the fire just before the start of this action should still be palatably warm by the time his victorious forces came back again.
There wasn’t time to build a road-block or a barricade; a nuisance, that, because it meant his centre guard would be out in the open where the enemy could count them, maybe notice the absence of archers if they were bright enough. As he formed his line, pushing and shoving the plainly terrified farmers into some semblance of formation, he tried to figure out an escape route, but nothing obvious met the eye; just headlong down the road back to the village, or up the sides of the combe and hope nobody follows. Damn the cheapskates, they should have assigned an officer for this mission, not just sent out a sergeant.
In due course the halberdiers came into view; at first just a coloured smudge on the margin of the sky, then discernible human shapes, then identifiable people. Beside him, his makeshift platoon were standing still and quiet, staring at the oncoming enemy as if they were strange monsters walking up out of the sea onto the beach, something unnatural and inhuman. But to Bar they were just soldiers; after a while, all soldiers look the same, act the same. At this distance, you could be forgiven for mistaking them for people, but that would be foolish. When a man puts on a second skin of steel, hardened leather or padded cotton, he becomes something more and less than human, and the usual rules don’t apply. Slickly and competently, Bar braced his bow, checked the lie of the string between the nocks, drew an arrow from the quiver at his belt and fitted it carefully over the served point opposite the arrow-shelf. He took up a few pounds of pressure, checked the position of his feet, and scanned for a target. In the dead centre of the front rank there was a tall man, a whole head taller than the men on either side, an obvious choice for the first shot of the day. Bar squinted a little, trying to assess range, something he’d never found easy. The only way he’d ever made any sense of it was by practising at roving marks – walk through woods and fields, choose a mark, measure off fifty or a hundred paces, remember what a head or body-sized target looks like at that range, then experiment with elevation and windage (allowing for paradox) until you can hit the mark three shots out of four. If in doubt, shoot high, so that if you miss your target you stand some chance of hitting another further back in the column. All standard elementary stuff, the sort of thing he made his living teaching to other people. Shouldn’t be a problem.
When the tall man was about ninety yards distant, Bar raised the bow to an angle of forty-five degrees, pushed with his left hand, pulled with his right until the tip of his index finger brushed the corner of his lip while lowering the bow to what he estimated was just below the right elevation and looking down the arrow over the bodkinhead, directly at the target, then up with the aim an inch while pushing his left hand forward just a touch more until he could feel his shoulder blades pinch the skin over his spine, at which point his fingers knew to relax of their own accord, letting the arrow fly and the string come smartly forward to slap against the bracer on his left wrist. He held the loose position for half a second of follow-through, then reached for the next arrow as he looked to see what he’d done.
The tall man was still there, but there was a disturbance in the row behind as the column shifted a little to step round a fallen body; good enough for government work, as the engineers said. He had time for one more shot before giving the signal to the archers in the wood-
And down from the hillside in a flurry of mud and loosened stones came his assault squad, his sting in the tail, far too early. They slithered the last few yards, trying to slow down but only making things worse for themselves; the halberdiers saw them in plenty of time, halted and formed to receive them in flank and rear. Sheer impetus carried them into the line and sent them spilling out round the back of the column, so that they masked both sides of it, making it impossible for the archers in the wood to shoot without hitting them. Bar felt his mouth drop open – honest to gods, he simply hadn’t imagined such a thing could happen, not when he’d been at such pains to tell them to wait – and for a long time (in context) he couldn’t think of anything he could do. But it wasn’t long before the halberdiers had the better of it; the peasants fought for themselves, the way people do, but the halberdiers fought like soldiers, engaging the enemy facing the next man down the line on the right so as to get the best advantage from the design of their weapons, assuming as an article of faith that the next man in the line would do the same for them. Nothing is more disconcerting for the amateur fighter than being ignored by the man you think you’re fighting while being attacked by the man you thought was fighting your neighbour; and in a battle, few men live long enough to be disconcerted twice.
That cup of soup’s still warm, Bar said to himself. This would be a good time to go. It would be the logical thing to do, draw the attack onto his platoon of peasants, and the enemy would never even realise there were a dozen men in the wood. They could stay still and quiet and then discreetly withdraw, go back to the ship and away home in safety. Instead, he nocked, drew and loosed another arrow, this time reducing the elevation by a quarter of an inch. Sec
ond time lucky. He pulled the bugle round on its strap and blew once, the signal to the archers in the wood.
It turned out to have been a lucky mistake. The mistimed attack had had the effect of halting the column seventy-five yards or so from the archers, a comfortable range for three aimed shots. The first volley took the halberdiers completely by surprise, and by a lucky chance the officer was one of the eight men who went down. The rest of the company were just about to break up and run for cover when the second volley hit them – seven down this time, making a total of seventeen out of forty, leaving twenty-three standing. Quite possibly, the Shastel Faculty of Military Mathematics has a formula for the critical percentage, the point at which the survivors give it up and run. In Bar’s experience, it was somewhere around the one-third mark, which meant this lot ought to break now. But they didn’t. Instead they came on at the run.
Hell, Bar thought. There wasn’t a third volley – they’d have been shooting towards the standing line, with the risk of overshots hitting their own side, and they weren’t to know that as far as Bar was concerned it would have been a justifiable risk. He had time for a snatched shot (clean miss; pulled left) before the halberdiers were on top of his line, which broke and melted away, leaving him standing. But not for long.
After the halberdiers had burnt the village and rounded up the male survivors, they fished Bar’s body out of the mud – he was seven-eighths dead, with two puncture wounds in his stomach and a cracked skull – cut off his head and stuck it on a pole, and dropped the trunk down the well. Their bad grace was understandable; twenty-one dead out of forty, and only one dead Scona archer to show for it. The rest of Bar’s command had reached their ship and were well away before the halberdiers even came looking for them.
Apart from being the first real engagement of the war, the battle of Shantein was important as the first major victory of the Redemptionists over the opposing factions. It had long been a plank in the Redemptionist platform that the Scona archers were not invincible and that traditional halberdier tactics would always prevail if properly and faithfully applied. The timing was impeccable, since it coincided with elections to five crucial faculty appointments, all of which went to Redemptionists. This in turn altered the balance of power in three sub-committees, causing a snowball effect that brought the faction an extra seat on the Appropriations and Establishments Committee, seriously shifting the voting patterns in Chapter. By clever manipulation of the agenda, the faction leaders were able to reschedule a delicately poised research funding vote they were expected to lose so that it came after a Redemptionist motion to bring back the Scona archer’s head from Shantein and mount it on the main watchtower of the Citadel. The faction won both votes by a surprisingly comfortable margin, and the head of Sergeant Mohan Bar was duly and ceremoniously put in its appointed place, its empty eyes looking out over the straits towards home, where it stayed for some time until it was removed as an eyesore following complaints from the Dean of the Faculty of Military Geography, whose window looked out over the tower platform.
As for the surviving villagers, they were kept in an open-air stockade for a fortnight, during which time four men died of wounds or fever, then they were marched back home and turned loose, with a substantial figure for damages and indemnities being added to their total mortgage debt. No further rebellions among the hectemores of Shastel are recorded.
On Scona, where they used a somewhat different basis for their accounting, the Shantein incident was regarded as a qualified success. The mathematics, it was held, spoke for themselves – twenty-odd halberdiers killed for the loss of one archer, a respectable return on capital. Factor in the confusion caused by the botched attack and the desertion of the peasant line, and the net result was a substantial victory of bow over halberd, giving grounds for genuine optimism.
‘The fact remains,’ Gorgas argued in committee, ‘we were let down by lack of support for the archers, and that’s a problem that isn’t going to go away. They’re bound to learn something from their mistake, we can’t expect them to go on charging down the archers’ throats like that.’
‘So what do you suggest?’ someone asked. Gorgas took a sip of water and dried his lips with a linen handkerchief.
‘Mercenaries,’ he said. ‘A minimum one hundred heavy infantry. Professional soldiers, the type who know that when things go wrong, their best chance of survival is standing firm and staying cool, not running away. Half a dozen pikemen at Shantein would have turned the battle for us; the centre would have held, the hectemores wouldn’t have run, the halberdiers would have ended up withdrawing under fire, we’d have half of Shastel territory up in arms for us by now. Carry that through to a major battle here on Scona, and you can work out the implications for yourselves.’
There was a brief silence, as the committee waited for Niessa to speak.
‘I can see your point,’ she said, looking up from the tablets she was keeping notes on. ‘Now let’s work it through. Last point first: substantial hectemore uprisings. Well, the fact of the matter is, we simply couldn’t have afforded to arm and supply more than a token number of rebels, which is precisely why that mission was specified the way it was. I didn’t want a mass defection; I wanted a few pockets of rebellion, enough to be a nuisance and a worry, no more. Anything bigger than that would have looked like a mortal threat to the very survival of the Foundation, and any chance of a settlement would have gone out the window for ever. And that’s aside from the question of the cost and the drain on our resources that a big rebellion would’ve been, and that’d have done us more harm than a major defeat in the field. So,’ she continued acidly, ‘we came close to a disaster there, but luckily we just fell clear. We’ve learnt our lesson, no more troublemaking in Shastel territory. You’ve got to stop thinking like a soldier, Gorgas. We aren’t soldiers, we’re bankers; what we understand is profit and loss and return on investments. On that basis, we’re well out of it.’
There was a rumble of approval from round the table. Gorgas looked as if he wanted to say something, but didn’t.
‘Next point,’ Niessa went on briskly. ‘I’m afraid this mercenaries business is pure fantasy. Now, I’m not even going to discuss the practicalities – recruiting men we could actually trust, getting them here and so on – because none of it’s relevant. We can’t hire mercenaries for the simple reason that we can’t afford to; which brings me neatly on to the main point we’ve got to cover today, which is budgets. The plain fact of the matter is that unless we stop spending like farmers at a fair and cut a third off these projections, we’ll be bankrupt in a matter of months. And that,’ she added, ‘isn’t up for discussion, it’s plain truth, and we’ve got to deal with it.’
‘Go on,’ said a man at the end of the table.
‘I’ve cancelled the following projects,’ Niessa said. ‘Forca, I’m sorry but your grain depots are going to have to wait. Gorgas, the commerce raiders. Lehin, the curtain walls across Novice point. Thanis, we’ll have to postpone repayment on the unsecured loan stock; let’s just cross our fingers and pray it doesn’t start a run on the rest of our securities. If we cut those, and if we all make sure we’ve trimmed all waste right back to the bone in our respective departments, we’ve at least got a chance of seeing it through to the end of the quarter without bleeding ourselves dry. Obviously there’s not going to be a dividend for the foreseeable future, which means a lot of our securities are going to be sold off cheap on the foreign exchanges; I’ve got no option but to buy in at least a major percentage, just to keep confidence in the markets from caving in. With deferred payment options and using nominees I can put off settlement to next quarter, but it means we’ll be looking for a further ten per cent cutback then, so you’d better start planning ahead for that.’
‘Easy,’ Gorgas muttered. ‘To begin with, there’s the wages of all the men who’re going to get killed because of this quarter’s cuts. All it’d take is one massacre and we could be back in the black.’ He leant forward across the t
able, his weight braced on the palms of his hands. ‘Niessa, don’t you understand anything about this war? Or are you just ignoring it, hoping it’ll go away? I invite you to think of it in these terms. Each major defeat makes us weaker. The weaker we get, the harder it’ll be for us to keep trading; which means reduced revenues, further cuts, further weakness. We can’t run this war according to best counting-house practice, Niessa; those rules don’t work here.’
‘Nonsense,’ Niessa replied. ‘Everything we do is war in some form or another. We’re at war with every major bank in the world. It so happens that this war is in three dimensions rather than the usual two.’
Ironically, the first ship to reach Shastel from the Island was the privateer Reprisal. A few days later, she was joined by five others, the Butterfly, True Virtue, Meriz’ Chance, Return and Equal Measure. The crews were the usual mix of Islander underclass and foreign miscellany, and the first thing they did was take their melodramatic privateer thirst to the usually quiet and sombre inns of Shastel Quay.
One exception was the midshipman of the Return. He walked up the hill from the Quay as far as the middle gate, turned left, climbed the hundred and fifteen steps of the Cloister Stairs and stopped to ask the way to the Faculty of Applied Philosophy. The research fellow who pointed him in the right direction was puzzled by the unlikely combination of scruffy third-hand cuir-bouilli armour, neat short white hair and cultured Perimadeian accent, but really didn’t want to get involved, and so made no comment. The stranger, who had somehow made it up the steepest stairway on Shastel without getting out of breath, thanked her politely and walked briskly away, leaving the research fellow to her speculations.
At the faculty gate, the Perimadeian stopped again and asked the porter where he might find Doctor Gannadius.
‘Depends,’ the porter replied. Like most Shastel porters he was a retired sergeant-at-arms, fully capable of recognising a pirate when he saw one; and the halberd leaning against the corner of the front office of the lodge was definitely not just a war souvenir. ‘You tell me what you want with him first. Then we’ll see.’
