by K. J. Parker
Raffen sat up a little straighter in the chair. “That name you mentioned just now,” he said. “I don’t want to hear it ever again, is that clear?”
There was a brief, awkward silence. Then Cari said, “I believe it’s quite in order for the king to choose a new name on his accession; one of the lucky ones, Torcel, Egil, Erald, Hrafnkel—”
“Hrafnkel,” Raffen said. “Raffen for short.”
“Which would make you Hrafnkel the Eighth. Good choice.” Cari smiled. “Hrafnkel the Fourth reunited the kingdom after the Second Permian War. Hrafnkel the Sixth instituted the common land reforms. It’s always the even numbers that work out best, so you should be just fine.”
“I don’t know how to do this,” Calojan said.
The enemy were drawn up on the other side of the valley; a basic formation, centre and two wings. The centre looked like armoured infantry, there were horsemen on the left and what looked like archers on the right. They had appeared so quickly that nobody had had a chance to get close enough to take a good look. Calojan’s best scouts had gone out at dawn to make the usual observations. It was now midday and they hadn’t come back. The report had said unidentified savages from the north-east, origin unknown.
“You’re just saying that,” Apsimar said cheerfully.
“I don’t just say anything,” Calojan replied. “This one’s beyond me. I have no idea who they are or what they can do, and my mind’s a complete blank. If you’d like to take command, be my guest. You’d be doing me a favour.”
Apsimar looked even more magnificent than usual today. His armour was closely modelled on the suit worn by Fortitude in Ozaches’ Battle for the Soul of Man, except that the pauldrons were the right way round and the ventral plates were articulated, which made it possible for him to breathe. The colours and the gilding were, however, an exact copy. “Oh come on,” he said. “They’re savages. After what you did to the Sashan—”
“Would you mind shifting a bit to the left?” Calojan said sweetly. “You’re blocking my view.”
He walked forward half a dozen paces and shaded his eyes. He wouldn’t admit it to anyone, but he couldn’t make out fine detail at long range like he used to. He could feel Apsimar’s eyes on the back of his head.
“Are you serious?” Apsimar said. “About taking command? Because if you are—”
“Do me a favour,” Calojan said. “Nip back and get them to find captain Bessas. Quick as you can.”
“Of course.”
It was easier to concentrate without the heir to the throne breathing down his neck. He rubbed his eyes. It didn’t help. Somewhere between seven and nine thousand of the enemy, depending on whether the long grey blur in the far distance was a substantial mobile reserve or a hedge. If they’ve killed all my best scouts, he told himself, I shall be seriously annoyed.
Bessas came lumbering up, struggling to do up the side-straps of his breastplate. The idea was, you got a friend to do them up for you. Inevitably, Bessas had to manage on his own.
“There you are,” Calojan said. “Right, you see that grey blur over there, between the enemy centre and the skyline.”
“You mean the cavalry.”
God, Calojan thought. But Bessas had the best eyesight in the army. “You’re sure that’s what they are.”
“Quite sure. Four squadrons, about five hundred men each.”
A 2,000-strong cavalry reserve. It just gets better and better. “Just as I thought,” he said. “Right, Bessas, I’d like you to stick around, I need your eyes. Watch those cavalry like a hawk; the moment they move so much as an inch, you tell me.” He frowned, then said, “Oh, and one other thing.”
“Sir?”
“If anything happens to me in the battle,” Calojan said, “and I don’t make it, I want you to find prince Apsimar, go straight to him and kill him. You got that?”
Bessas looked at him, half-grinning. “You’re not serious.”
“Of course I’m serious,” Calojan replied. “If that clown takes command of this army, you’ll all be dead in half an hour. Do it, understood? Direct order.”
“They’re moving.”
Sure enough, the grey blur had shifted. On his own, he wouldn’t have noticed. “Where? Which way?”
“To our right, about fifty yards. Still going.”
Calojan nodded. “Tell me when they stop.”
Two thousand cavalry. Heavy or light? Even Bessas couldn’t see that clearly. He was fairly sure the two squadrons on the left wing were heavy-armoured. You wouldn’t stick your dragoons out on the wing and keep your light brigade in reserve—not unless you were Calojan at Trinaxa, and that was a special case. But perhaps these savages would; maybe their entire strategy was based around it, and in an hour or so their reasons for doing so would become painfully obvious. No more pathetic epitaph for a general than Why didn’t I think of that? He tried to focus his mind. In this situation, he asked himself, what would general Calojan do? Answer; he’d send his Aram Cosseilhatz round in a big loop and round the buggers up like sheep. If he had any Aram Cosseilhatz. But I haven’t.
Screw Calojan. Half his victories were sheer luck, anyway; and the other half were the Cosseilhatz, combined with painstaking attention to detail and really first-class intelligence about the enemy’s strength and leadership. Deprive him of his pet horse-archers and confront him with opponents about whom he knows nothing at all, you’ll soon find out just how smart he really is. And we’re outnumbered, and they’ve got water for their horses and we haven’t, and they’ve got that great big wood at their backs while we’re stuck out in the open like an archery target. Of course, Calojan would never have allowed himself to get in this position in the first place.
“They’ve stopped,” Bessas said. Calojan strained his eyes, then closed them, to impress the new position on his mind. “Stay there,” he said, “I’ll be back in a minute.”
It’s an unwritten law of arms that the men should never see their commander-in-chief taking a pee; it would be liable to lower him in their estimation, which would be disastrous for morale. On a bare hillside, with the army drawn up in long ranks behind him, that was a problem. He had to walk back through the front line until he found a supply cart, and the last hundred yards were decidedly uncomfortable. Would Bessas really do it, he wondered, if it came to it? On the one hand a direct order; on the other hand, the thought of having to explain to the authorities exactly why he’d stabbed the emperor’s nephew to death in cold blood in the middle of a battle. On the balance of probabilities, he reckoned the direct order would win out in the end, but it’d be a close-run thing. The best course of action, therefore, would not to let himself get killed. Right then, agreed. We’ll do that.
With the pressure off his bladder he was able to think a little straighter. Somewhere in his vast mental library there had to be a precept suitable for this occasion. When the enemy is strong, play to his strength. Yes, love to. How, exactly? Or what about do what they expect; it’ll confuse them to death? But he had no reason to assume they’d ever heard of him, so the Calojan mystique, which had destroyed the Great King of the Sashan, was probably going to be useless today. If you can’t win, don’t fight. He pulled up his trousers and adjusted his armour. You’ll think of something, he told himself.
Walking back through the lines, he saw two soldiers fighting. One was considerably bigger than the other, but he was hindered by the sack of flour he had clamped tight under his right arm, with his hand encircling it like a girl’s waist at a dance; all he could do was fend off the other man’s attacks, delivered with half a broken tent pole. When they saw him they froze, looking terrified, but the big man didn’t let go of the flour sack. Both of them, he noticed, were wearing Sashan boots, and a big rip in the smaller man’s far-too-big Sashan mailshirt was clumsily darned with wire.
Calojan fixed his eyes on the smaller man. “Soldier,” he said. “You’re out of uniform.”
“Sir.”
“When this lot’s over, report
to the quartermaster for new boots and armour. Tell him I sent you.”
They stared at him as though he was the Invincible Sun made flesh, then the bigger man carefully put down the flour. “Dismissed,” Calojan said, and they both bolted like rabbits.
Fine, he thought, as he quickened his pace, another story to add to the Calojan legend. Trouble was, the army was falling apart, to the point where even stories like that wouldn’t be able to hold it together. Ten years’ constant action had made the Imperial infantry hard as nails, what was left of it, but the men had no boots and hadn’t been paid for over a year; two thirds of them were conscripts, with farms going to ruin. They’d had to empty the City jails to make up the Seventeenth to full strength. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. It doesn’t matter, the Chancellor had told him, there’s no-one left to fight.
“There you are,” Apsimar yapped at him, as he took his place again. “I’ve sent men to find you. They’re on the move.”
Bessas was looking at the back of Apsimar’s head, like a butcher at a cattle market. If I do get killed today, Calojan thought; no, forget about that. Not today, I’ve got too much work to do. “Are those cavalry still at the back?” he asked, and Bessas nodded. He looked down into the valley and thought; if I were you, what would you most want me to do right now?
He didn’t look round. There would be a messenger there waiting, like an arrow on the bowstring. “Tell the Twenty-third to get out of there now,” he said.
Apsimar was looking at him. He pretended not to have noticed. He felt a hand on his shoulder.
“You can’t do that. They’ll have their backs to those cavalry on the left there.”
Without looking round he said, “Thank you so much, Apsimar. Now then, tell the Seventeenth to pull back, quartering right.”
“That’s crazy. You can’t do that. You’re opening a hole they can drive a wedge into.”
“We’ll see. Oh, and I want the Ninth to close up to the right. Not much, just twenty yards.”
Another eager young man swung into the saddle and thundered away, his horse’s hooves kicking up divots. There would be a long line of them, just behind his right shoulder.
“At the very least,” Apsimar yammered in his ear, “bring the dragoons in tight to cover the withdrawal. Otherwise, we might as well—”
“Bessas.” He spat the name out like catarrh. Bessas nodded, recognising the tone of voice; then he swung round and punched Apsimar in the mouth. There was an uneasy moment—Apsimar was six feet eight and massive as an ox. Then he sort of folded at the knees, waist and neck, and dropped to the ground as though his clothes had nobody inside them. “Thank you,” Calojan said. “Now then, as soon as their cavalry begins to move, I want the Ninth to go hard left and the Twenty-third to go inside out. Got that?”
So it was that when the enemy cavalry swooped down on the disordered and vulnerable Imperial centre, they were met with a dense shower of arrows from the five companies of archers embedded in the middle of the suddenly-shifting phalanx; reeling away, they collided with an infantry brigade that seemed to appear out of nowhere and stopped them dead, as though they’d run into a brick wall. Seeing his prize lancers trapped and on the point of being encircled, the enemy general had no option but to commit his main infantry. It was a sensible, businesslike move, and in the short time left to him the general simply couldn’t understand where the Imperial cavalry came from or how they’d managed to get there. He yelled for his own cavalry reserve, only to find that they weren’t available; Imperial auxiliary cavalry had materialised on their right flank, ripped a hole in them and darted away, so that they’d followed instinctively, like a dog chasing a cat, straight into a point-blank volley from six companies of archers. The general looked round for something, anything, to plug the gap with, and realised with a sort of dreamy amazement that he suddenly had nothing left; all his men were fighting, being savaged in flank and rear, or herded like sheep, or shot up by massed archers, and his superior numbers had melted away, and he was now outnumbered and about ten minutes from being completely surrounded, and there was absolutely nothing he could do, and how the hell had that happened? He had just about enough time to draw his short, sharp knife and, his eyes fixed on the rapidly approaching Imperial heavy lancers, slice the blade into the arteries of his wrist. Then his army sort of slumped all around him, the way a burning house subsides a little just before the roof falls in, and the Imperials closed up their ever-tightening circle, until they met in the middle and there was nothing left for them to do.
“I’m just so sorry I doubted you,” Apsimar said later; it was hard not to laugh, he sounded so funny talking with a lower lip three times its normal size. “I should’ve known you had it all figured out. You might have let me in on it, though.”
The soldiers were gathering the enemy dead and loading them on flat-bed carts. It was a loathsome job, reserved for defaulters and men the sergeants didn’t like, though there was a hard core of regulars who volunteered because it meant they got first pickings. From the disappointed slump of their shoulders, Calojan guessed that the enemy weren’t much given to jewellery and personal adornment. High-ranking Sashan officers wore gold earrings to indicate status; it was quicker and more efficient to slice off the lobe. Whoever these people were, they were too poor to merit more than the occasional nudge with the toe of a boot. Marvellous, Calojan thought. We managed to find an enemy even more threadbare than ourselves.
“Actually,” he said, “you were quite right. We were this close to disaster. I didn’t have the faintest idea what to do, so I repeated the last battle against the Sashan.” He stooped and picked something out of the grass; a gold filigree brooch in the shape of two dogs pulling down a stag. Three ounces of fine yellow gold, seven solidi but probably worth more to a collector. Some people, he decided, have more luck than they deserve. He slipped it into his pocket without showing it to anyone. “It would’ve been a stupid risk even if we’d had the Cosseilhatz; without them, relying on Imperials, it was practically suicidal. If they’d been a minute late, if a messenger’s horse had put its foot down a rabbit-hole, it’d be them looting us right now.” He shrugged. “But we got away with it, and please God we’ll never see these people again, so what the hell.”
Apsimar gave him a puzzled look. “Come off it,” he said. “General Calojan making it up as he went along? I find that hard to believe.”
“Of course you do,” Calojan replied. “I’m like the leper in the story.”
“What story?”
Calojan sighed. He wasn’t in the mood; but Apsimar was the heir apparent, and he was being frightfully decent about the punch in the mouth. “Once upon a time,” Calojan said, “there was a leper. He was horribly disfigured, and people who saw his face ran away screaming. So he made himself a mask, out of shoe leather. Before he got sick he’d been a sculptor, so the mask he made was sublimely handsome. Wherever he went, people used to come out of their houses just to look at him. He took up his old trade, and soon he was getting commissions from the best families. When people asked him why the mask, he politely changed the subject, so they assumed it was a clever way of advertising. One day a priest came to see him; they had an old statue in their temple, but they’d had a fire and the stone had cracked. It wasn’t a particularly good statue, not by anybody famous, and they were a poor parish, so they couldn’t pay much. The leper said that was all right, he’d do it for free. He made a new head for the statue, and it turned out to be his finest work. People came from all over the City to worship at the temple. Soon that district of Town became quite fashionable; the poor people moved out and they pulled down the slums and rebuilt, with wide streets and a fine square. The temple got a new façade and endowments for forty monks. Shortly after that, the leper woke up and found the mask had fallen off while he was asleep. Horrified, he scrambled to a mirror to put it back on, only to find that he wasn’t a leper any more; furthermore, his face had grown back and somehow been moulded by the mask, so that now he w
as just as handsome as the thing he’d created. I’m assuming he went on to live happily ever after, but the story doesn’t say so specifically.”
There was a puzzled silence; then Apsimar said, “That’s a nice story.”
“Yes,” Calojan replied. “I sort of grew up with it. I liked it so much, my dad painted it for me when I was nine years old; a triptych, on limewood.” He smiled. “I think it was the best thing he ever did, but we had to sell it when dad was in prison one time.”
“That’s sad,” Apsimar said. “Actually, I’m a great admirer of your father’s work. I believe he’s seriously undervalued as an artist.”
The casualty figures were not good; they’d killed nine thousand savages and taken four thousand able-bodied prisoners, but they’d lost nearly six hundred Imperial infantry and two hundred irrepleaceable cavalrymen. Apsimar suggested asking the prisoners if they wanted to enlist. “After all,” he said, “they fought pretty well, and it wasn’t their fault they were up against you.” Calojan changed the subject rather than insult a prince of the blood; later, though, when he interviewed a dozen high-ranking prisoners, he broached the subject as tactfully as he could.
“Yes,” said the spokesman, without hesitation. He was tall and ridiculously broad across the shoulders; he had a small head that reminded Calojan, for some reason, of an apple. He wore his hair long, in braids, but was going thin on top. “We would be honoured to serve in the Great King’s army. You must know that we are landless men, outcasts in our own country. We came here only because at home we were starving. We have so little, and you are so rich. We would serve you very well.”
