Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen

by H. Beam Piper

  “And by this time next year, Grefftscharr fireseed will be traded down the Great River to Xiphion,” Kalvan said. “Good. Now, how soon can this gang of yours start pouring cannon.”

  “Two moons; a special miracle for each day less.”

  He started to explain about the furnaces and moulding sand; Kalvan understood.

  “Then we’ll have to fight this war with what we have. We’ll be fighting in a moon-quarter, I think. We sent our Uncle Wolf off to Sask Town today with demands on Prince Sarrask. As soon as he hears them, they’ll have to chain Sarrask up to keep him from biting people.”

  “Among other things, we’re demanding that Archpriest Zothnes and the Sask Town high priest be sent here in chains, to be tried for plotting Kalvan’s death and mine,” Ptosphes said. “If Zothnes has the influence over Sarrask I think he has, that alone will do it.”

  “You’ll command the Mounted Rifles again, won’t you?” Kalvan asked. “It’s carried on the Army List as a regiment, so you’ll be a colonel. We have a hundred and twenty rifles, now.”

  Dalla wouldn’t approve. Well, that was too bad, but people who didn’t help their friends fight weren’t well thought of around here. Dalla would just have to adjust to it, the way she had to his beard.

  Ptosphes finished his wine. “Shall we go up to Rylla’s room?” he asked. “I’m glad you brought your wife with you, Verkan. Charming girl, and Rylla likes her. They made friends at once. She’ll be company for Rylla while we’re away.”

  “Rylla’s sore at us,” Kalvan said. “She thinks we’re keeping that bundle of splints on her leg to keep her from going to war with us.” He grinned. “She’s right; we are. Maybe Dalla'll help keep her amused.”

  Vall didn’t doubt that. Rylla and Dalla would get along together, all right; what he was worried about was what they’d get into together. Those two girls were just two cute little sticks of the same brand of dynamite; what one wouldn’t think of, the other would.

  THE common-room of the village inn was hot and stuffy in spite of the open door; it smelled of woolens drying, of oil and sheep-tallow smeared on armor against the rain, of wood smoke and tobacco and wine, unwashed humanity and ancient cooking-odors. The village outside was jammed with the Army of the Listra; the inn with officers, steaming and stinking and smoking, drinking mugs of mulled wine or strong sassafras tea, crowding around the fire at the long table where the map was unrolled, spooning stew from bowls or gnawing meat impaled on dagger-points. Harmakros was saying, again and again, “Dralm damn you, hold that dagger back; don’t drip grease on this!” And the priest of Galzar, who had carried the ultimatum to Sask Town and gotten this far on his return, and who had lately been out among the troops, sat in his shirt with his back to the fire, his wolfskin hood and cape spread to dry and a couple of village children wiping and oiling his mail. He had a mug in one hand, and with the other stroked the head of a dog that squatted beside him. He was laughing jovially.

  “So I read them your demands, and you should have heard them! When I came to the part about dismissing the newly hired mercenaries, the captain-general of free companies bawled like a branded calf. I took it on myself to tell him you’d hire all of them with no loss of pay. Did I do right, Prince?”

  “You did just right, Uncle Wolf,” Ptosphes told him. “When we come to battle, along with ‘Down Styphon’ we’ll shout, ‘Quarter for mercenaries.’ How about the demands touching on Styphon’s House?”

  “Ha! The Archpriest Zothnes was there, sitting next to Sarrask, with the Chancellor of Sask shoved down one place to make room for him, which shows you who rules in Sask now. He didn’t bawl like a calf; he screamed like a panther. Wanted Sarrask to have me seized and my head off right in the throne-room. Sarrask told him his own soldiers would shoot him dead on the throne if he ordered it, which they would have. The mercenary captain-general wanted Zothnes’s head off, and half drew his sword for it. There’s one with small stomach to fight for Styphon’s House. And this Zothnes was screaming that there was no god at all but Styphon; now what do you think of that?”

  Gasps of horror, and exclamations of shocked piety. One officer was charitable enough to say that the fellow must be mad.

  “No. He’s just a—” A monotheist, Kalvan wanted to say, but there was no word in the language for it. “One who respects no gods but his own. We had that in my own country.” He caught himself just before saying, “in my own time”; of those present, only Ptosphes was security-cleared for that version of his story. “They are people who believe in only one god, and then they believe that the god they worship is the only true one, and all others are false, and finally they believe that the only true god must be worshiped in only one way, and that those who worship otherwise are vile monsters who should be killed.” The Inquisition; the wicked and bloody Albigensian Crusade; Saint Bartholomew’s; Haarlem; Magdeburg. “We want none of that here.”

  “Lord Prince,” the priest of Galzar said, “you know how we who serve the war god stand. The war god is the Judge of Princes, his courtroom the battlefield. We take no sides. We minister to the wounded without looking at their colors; our temples are havens for the war-maimed. We preach only Galzar’s Way: be brave, be loyal, be comradely; obey your officers; respect yourselves and your weapons and all other good soldiers; be true to your company and to him who pays you.

  “But Lord Prince, this is no common war, of Hostigos against Sask and Ptosphes against Sarrask. This is a war for all the true gods against false Styphon and Styphon’s foul brood. Maybe there is some devil called Styphon, I don’t know, but if there is, may the true gods trample him under their holy feet as we must those who serve him.”

  A shout of “Down Styphon!” rose. So this was what he had said they must have none of, and an old man in a dirty shirt, a mug of wine in his hand and a black and brown mongrel thumping his tail on the floor beside him, had spelled it out. A religious war, the vilest form an essentially vile business can take. Priests of Dralm and Galzar preaching fire and sword against Styphon’s House. Priests of Styphon rousing mobs against the infidel devil-makers. Styphon wills it! Atrocities. Massacres. Holy Dralm and no quarter!

  And that was what he’d brought to here-and-now. Well, maybe for the best; give Styphon’s House another century or so in power and there’d be no gods, here-and-now, but Styphon.

  “And then?”

  “Well, Sarrask was in a fine rage, of course. By Styphon, he’d meet Prince Ptosphes’s demands where they should be met, on the battlefield, and the war’d start as soon as I took my back out of sight across the border. That was just before noon. I almost killed a horse, and myself, getting here. I haven’t done much hard riding, lately,” he parenthesized. “As soon as I got here, Harmakros sent riders out.”

  They’d reached Tarr-Hostigos at cocktail time, another alien rite introduced by Lord Kalvan, and found him and Ptosphes and Xentos and Rylla and Dalla in Rylla’s room. Hasty arming and saddling, hastier good-bys, and then a hard mud-splashing ride up Listra Valley, reaching this village after dark. The war had already started; from Esdreth Gap they could hear the distant dull thump of cannon.

  Outside, the Army of the Listra was still moving forward; an infantry company marched past with a song:

  Roll another barrel out, the party’s just begun.

  We beat Prince Gormoth’s soldiers; you oughta seen them run!

  And then we crossed the Athan, and didn’t we have fun,

  While we were marching through Nostor!

  Galloping hoofs; cries of “Way! Way! Courier!” The song ended in shouted imprecations from mud-splashed infantrymen. The galloping horse stopped outside. The march, and the song, was resumed:

  Hurrah! Hurrah! We burned the bastards out!

  Hurrah! Hurrah! We put them all to rout!

  We stole their pigs and cattle and we dumped their sauerkraut,

  While we were marching through Nostor!

  A muddy cavalryman stumbled through the door, looked around blin
king, and then made for the long table, saluting as he came.

  “From Colonel Verkan, Mounted Rifles. He and his men have Fyk; they beat off a counter-attack, and now the whole Saski army’s coming at him. I found some Mobiles and a four-pounder on the way back; they’ve gone to help him.

  “By Dralm, the whole Army of the Listra’s going to help him. Where is this Fyk place?”

  Harmakros pointed on the map—beyond Esdreth Gap, on the main road to Sask Town. There was a larger town, Gour, a little beyond. Kalvan pulled on his quilted coif and fastened the throat-guard; while he was settling his helmet on his head, somebody had gone to the door and was bawling into the dripping night for horses.

  THE rain had stopped, an hour later, when they reached Fyk. It was a small place, full of soldiers and lighted by bonfires. The civil population had completely vanished; all fled when the shooting had started. A four-pounder pointed up the road to the south, with the dim shape of an improvised barricade stretching away in the darkness on either side. Off ahead, an occasional shot banged, and he could distinguish the sharper reports of Hostigos-made powder from the slower-burning stuff put out by Styphon’s House. Maybe Uncle Wolf was right that this was a war between the true gods and false Styphon; it was also a war between two makes of gunpowder.

  He found Verkan and a Mobile Force major in one of the village cottages; Verkan wore a hooded smock of brown canvas, and a short chopping-sword on his belt and a powder-horn and bullet-pouch slung from his shoulder. The major’s cavalry armor was browned and smeared with tallow. They had one of the pyrographed deerskin field-maps spread on the table in front of them.

  Paper, invention of;

  he’d made that mental memo a thousand times already.

  “There were about fifty cavalry here when we arrived,” Verkan was saying. “We killed them or ran them out. In half an hour there were a couple of hundred back. We beat them off, and that was when I sent the riders back. Then Major Leukestros came up with his men and a gun, just in time to help beat off another attack. We have some cavalry and mounted arquebusiers out in front and on the flanks; that’s the shooting you’re hearing. There are some thousand cavalry at Gour, and probably all Sarrask’s army following.”

  “I’m afraid we’re going to have to make a wet night of it,” Kalvan said. “We’ll have to get our battle-line formed now; we can’t take chances on what they may do.”

  He shoved the map aside and began scribbling and diagramming an order of battle on the white-scrubbed table top. Guns to the rear, in column along a side road north of the village, four-pounders in front; horses to be unhitched, but fed and rested in harness, ready to move out at once. Infantry in a line to both sides of the road a thousand yards ahead of the village, Mobile Force infantry in the middle. Cavalry on the flank; mounted infantry horses to the rear. A battle-order that could be converted instantly into a march-order if they had to move on in the morning.

  The army came stumbling in for the next hour or so, in bits and scraps, got themselves sorted out, and took their positions astride of the road on the slope south of the village. The air had grown noticeably warmer. He didn’t like that; it presaged fog, and he wanted good visibility for the battle tomorrow. Cavalry skirmishers began drifting back, reporting pressure of large enemy forces in front.

  An hour after he had his line formed, the men lying in the wet grass on blankets, or whatever bedding they could snatch from the village, the Saski began coming up. There was a brief explosion of small-arms fire as they ran into his skirmishers, then they pulled back and began forming their own battle-line.

  Hell of a situation, he thought disgustedly, lying on a cornshuck tick he and Ptosphes and Harmakros had stolen from some peasant’s abandoned bed. Two blind armies, not a thousand yards apart, waiting for daylight, and when daylight came ...

  A cannon went off in front and on his left, with a loud, dull whump! A couple of heartbeats later, something whacked behind the line. He rose on his hands and knees, counting seconds as he peered into the darkness. Two minutes later, he glimpsed an orange glow on his left, and two seconds after that heard the report. Call it eight hundred yards, give or take a hundred. He hissed to a quartet of officers on a blanket next to him.

  “They’re overshooting us a little. Pass the word along the line, both ways, to move forward three hundred paces. And not a sound; dagger anybody who speaks above a whisper. Harmakros, get the cavalry and the mounted infantry horses back on the other side of the village. Make a lot of noise about five hundred yards behind us.”

  The officers moved off, two to a side. He and Ptosphes picked up the mattress and carried it forward, counting three hundred paces before dropping it. Men were moving up on both sides, with a gratifying minimum of noise.

  The Saski guns kept on firing. At first there were yells of simulated fright; Harmakros and his crowd. Finally, a gun fired almost in front of him; the cannonball passed overhead and landed behind with a swish and whack like a headsman’s sword coming down. The next shot was far on his left. Eight guns, at two minute intervals—call it fifteen minutes to load. That wasn’t bad, in the dark and with what the Saski had. He relaxed, lying prone with his chin rested on his elbows. After awhile Harmakros returned and joined him and Ptosphes on the shuck tick. The cannonade went on in slow procession from left to right and left to right again. Once there was a bright flash instead of a dim glow, and a much sharper crack. Fine! One of the guns had burst! After that, there were only seven rounds to the salvo. Once there was a rending crash behind, as though a round-shot had hit a tree. Every shot was a safe over.

  Finally, the firing stopped. The distant intermittent dueling between the two Castles Esdreth had ceased, too. He let go of wakefulness and dropped into sleep.

  PTOSPHES, stirring beside him, wakened him. His body ached and his mouth tasted foul, as every body and mouth on both battle-lines must. It was still dark, but the sky above was something less than black, and he made out his companions as dim shapes. Fog.

  By Dralm that was all they needed! Fog, and the whole Saski army not five hundred yards away, and all their advantages of mobility and artillery superiority lost. Nowhere to move, no room to maneuver, visibility down to less than pistol-shot, even the advantage of their hundred-odd rifled calivers nullified.

  This looked like the start of a bad day for Hostigos. They munched the hard bread and cold pork and cheese they had brought with them and drank some surprisingly good wine from a canteen and talked in whispers, other officers creeping in until a dozen and a half were huddled around the headquarters mattress.

  “Couldn’t we draw back a little?” That was Mnestros, the mercenary “captain”—approximately major-general—in command of the militia. “This is a horrible position. We’re halfway down their throats.”

  “They’d hear us,” Ptosphes said, “and start with their guns again, and this time they’d know where to shoot.”

  “Bring up our own guns and start shooting first,” somebody suggested.

  “Same objection; they’d hear us and open fire before we could. And for Dralm’s sake keep your voices down,” Kalvan snapped. “No, Mnestros said it. We’re halfway down their throats. Let’s jump the rest of the way and kick their guts out from the inside.”

  The mercenary was a book-soldier. He was briefly dubious, then admitted: “We are in line to attack, and we know where they are and they don’t know where we are. They must think we’re back at the village, from the way they were firing last night. Cavalry on the flanks?” He deprecated that. According to the here-and-now book, cavalry should be posted all along the line, between blocks of infantry.

  “Yes, half the mercenaries in each end, and a solid line of infantry, two ranks of pikes, and arquebuses and calivers to fire over the pikemen’s shoulders,” Kalvan said. “Verkan, have your men pass the word along the line. Everybody stay put and keep quiet till we can all go forward together. I want every pan reprimed and every flint tight; we’ll all move off together, and no shoutin
g till the enemy sees us. I’ll take the extreme right. Prince Ptosphes, you’d better take center; Mnestros, command the left. Harmakros, you take the regular and Mobile Force cavalry and five hundred Mobile Force infantry, and move back about five hundred yards. If they flank us or break through, attend to it.”

  By now, the men around him were individually recognizable, but everything beyond twenty yards was fog-swallowed. Their saddle-horses were brought up. He reprimed the pistols in the holsters, got a second pair from a saddlebag, renewed the priming, and slipped one down the top of each jackboot. The line was stirring with a noise that stood his hair on end under his helmet-coif, until he realized that the Saski were making too much noise to hear it. He slipped back the cuff under his mail sleeve and looked at his watch. Five forty-five; sunrise in half an hour. They all shook hands with one another, and he started right along the line.

  Soldiers were rising, rolling and slinging cloaks and blankets. There were quilts and ticks and things from the village lying on the ground; mustn’t be a piece of bedding left in Fyk. A few were praying, to Dralm or Galzar. Most of them seemed to take the attitude that the gods would do what they wanted to without impertinent human suggestions.

  He stopped at the extreme end of the line, on the right of five hundred regular infantry, like all the rest lined four deep, two ranks of pikes and two of calivers. Behind and on the right, the mercenary cavalry were coming up in a block of twenty ranks, fifty to the rank. The first few ranks were heavy-armed, plate rerebraces and vambraces on their arms instead of mail sleeves, heavy pauldrons protecting their shoulders, visored helmets, mounted on huge chargers, real old style brewery-wagon horses. They came to a halt just behind him. He passed the word of readiness left, then sat stroking his horse’s neck and talking softly to him.

  After awhile the word came back with a moving stir along the line through the fog. He lifted a long pistol from his right-hand holster, readied it to fire, and shook his reins. The line slid forward beside him, front rank pikes waist high, second rank pike-points a yard behind and breast high, calivers behind at high port. The cavalry followed him with a slow fluviatile clop-clatter-clop. Things emerged from the fog in front—seedling pines, clumps of tall weeds, a rotting cartwheel, a whitened cow’s skull—but the gray nothingness marched just twenty yards in front.