by K. J. Parker
Sechimer greeted that with a sort of glazed smile. Calojan said, “That’s rather neat, and it’s always helpful to have a way of keeping the score. But what if the king had an enemy who was so old that all his teeth had fallen out? You wouldn’t be able to count him, surely.”
“Oh, that’s all right.” The woman looked straight at him. “Our king’s enemies don’t live that long.”
The end of the world began with a goat; to be precise, a nanny goat and two kids. They belonged to Rutetz, a junior elder of the Blue Flower Cosseilhatz. The Blue Flower tended to leave shearing rather later than the other Families, claiming that their bloodline was thoroughbred northern stock and shed its wool in early summer rather than late spring. Accordingly, they delayed shearing until they reached the summer lowland pastures, and used shearing pens built on the north bank of the Rociander, a tributary of the Essa which marks the nominal boundary between the western Cosseilhatz marches and the imperial protectorate of Crebriand. At the beginning of summer, the Rociander is usually in mild spate, because of the spring rains in the mountains. That year, however, the rain had come early and been followed by a long dry spell; as a result, the ford at Crowsnest was passable two months earlier than usual.
Rutetz came last in the shearing lottery, which meant he had to wait until everyone else had finished with the pens before he could drive his flocks down off the foothills. To make matters worse, several large herds of deer, forced down into the valley by the dry weather and poor grazing, had eaten off much of the fat spring grass, which Rutetz had been relying on to bulk out his flock before the long drove south-east to the main summer pastures; having to leave them on the close-cropped foothills while he waited his turn at the pens meant that they were losing condition rather than gaining it, and hunger was tempting the more adventurous animals to stray.
Amportat, his eldest son, suggested compensating for their losses by taking a few days off and shooting as many of the deer as they could; this would give them salt meat in hand and hides which could later be traded for hay when they reached the autumn layover, which would help put some fat back on the animals before winter. It was a plausible enough suggestion, though Rutetz reckoned it had more to do with Amportat’s newly-acquired ninety-pounder bow than a hard-headed appraisal of the season’s prospects; he compromised and sent Amportat and two of the men to hunt deer while the rest of the household waited for the shearing pens to become free. As a result, he was three men short when his neighbours finished their shearing earlier than anticipated and he was finally able to drive his flock down to the river.
Even so, he would probably have been able to cope if the goats hadn’t been hungry, because of the depradations of the deer and the enforced delay. As it was, he had all sorts of trouble keeping the wretched creatures from wandering off or breaking out. The cold, dry spell made the fleeces heavier than usual; an excellent thing in itself, but it meant that the goats took longer to shear, which in turn meant that the flock spent rather longer than he’d have liked cooped up in the pens, with no grazing. Six weeks of continuous use had left their mark on the pens; the idea was that the households using them patched them up after they’d finished, but it never seemed to work like that, and by the time Rutetz’ turn came round they were in a rather sorry state, with broken rails hastily bound up with string and patched with half-sprung hurdles. The only pairs of hands Rutetz could spare from shearing to keep the goats in the pen were his younger son Partetz and his three sisters. They did their best, but it was like trying to hold water in a sieve; as soon as a goat broke out and trotted off in search of grass, three of them had to go and chase after it before it got too far, leaving one (usually Razos, the youngest girl) to keep the others from following the fugitive and mend the breach in the defences.
In the circumstances it was hardly surprising that disaster eventually struck. Partetz and his two elder sisters were off chasing a billy-goat with a remarkable turn of speed up the lower slopes of the mountain. Razos, eleven years old and profoundly unhappy with her role in the proceedings, was trying to tie together the two ends of a broken rail. She ran out of twine; she’d asked the others to bring her some more from the wagons, but they’d been busy and hadn’t got around to it. So she went to fetch it herself, and while she was away, a nanny-goat and two kids eased their way through the half-mended breach and set off for the river-bank, where the grass was greenest. By the time Razos got back, they had a hundred yard start. She dumped the ball of twine and chased after them, but all she achieved was to spook them and make them run faster. By the time she ran out of breath, the goats had reached the ford and were halfway across the river.
There was no sign of Partetz or her sisters. All she could think of to do was run to the shearing trap and tell her father. Predictably, Rutetz wasn’t amused. He said some rather unkind things about his family in general and his daughters in particular, then set off with two of the men and their wives to see if they could somehow catch up with the goats and turn them round before they went too far into forbidden imperial territory. On the way, he happened to encounter a man called Glaia, the senior stockman for one of the other households. Glaia had been sent to cut withies for hurdle-making, but quickly realised the seriousness of the situation and offered to help, which offer was gratefully accepted.
It was Glaia who pointed out that if they swam the river rather than running to the ford, they could get ahead of the errant goats and stand some chance of turning them round, instead of merely driving them deeper inland. The idea worked. By cutting across some sloping ground and coming up on the goats over the brow of a small hill, they were able to execute a flawless ambush and send them running back towards the river. It didn’t particularly matter which precise direction they took; once they reached the river, they’d have no option but to follow the bank until they came to the ford, and if Glaia and two others ran around in a wide loop and came up on the far side of the ford, they’d be able to turn the goats back if they tried to carry on downstream. They’d be left with nowhere to go except back across the ford, and that’d be the worst bit done.
It couldn’t have gone better. The goats, moving fast, reached the riverbank about a quarter of a mile upstream of the ford, which gave Glaia and his detachment plenty of time to get in position, while Rutetz drove the goats down along the bank. At just the right moment, Glaia jumped up out of the long grass waving his arms; the goats darted back across the ford, as if that was what they’d wanted to do all along.
Once they were back on the Cosseilhatz side of the river, Rutetz detailed a woman called Chanzos to hold the ford in case the stupid creatures tried to double back, then deployed his troops in a classic encircling manoeuvre. Regrettably, it was too successful. The goats, seeing they were completely surrounded, darted back the way they’d just come. Chanzos, confronted with a charging nanny-goat, swerved to block it; the two kids darted past her; she swung back to try and stop them, and the nanny slipped past her on the other side. By the time she realised what had happened, all three goats were back across the ford and deep inside the empire, running very fast.
Rutetz was all for going back to the wagon for his bow and shooting the miserable creatures, but Glaia, who’d learned true patience from thirty years’ incessant warfare with livestock, just grinned and said they’d just have to start over, was all; they’d managed it once, so they could do it again, and this time, he’d guard the ford and stop them getting through a second time. So, after a few minutes to catch their breath, the pursuers set off on the heading they’d last seen the goats following.
It took them a while to catch up. Rutetz was all for giving up and going back, arguing that the goats were younger and fitter than any of them and would be uncatchable in open country. Glaia pointed out that they’d just been running; as soon as they felt they were safe, they’d stop to catch their breath and graze. All that was needed was to come up on them steadily and quietly, so as not to spook them again. With luck, most of the mischief and pent-up energy fr
om being stuck in a pen for two days would have been run out of them by now. Provided everyone stayed calm, it ought to be possible to walk them peacefully back to the ford.
After an hour’s walk, they caught sight of the goats grazing on the brow of a hill, about a third of a mile away. To avoid being seen, they dropped down out of sight and skirted the hill, then plodded up the scarp face to bring themselves out on the far side. They looked down. There, sure enough, were the goats. Between them and where they stood, however, Auzida could make out four horsemen, riding fast in single file, apparently straight at the goats.
“That’s good,” he said. “They’re going to round them up for us.”
Glaia scowled. “I don’t think so,” he said.
He was quite right. The horsemen broke into a gallop. The goats lifted their heads, saw them, and fled. The horsemen closed in; they had bows, and started shooting. They weren’t very good shots, at least not by Cosseilhatz standards, but their horses were fast enough to get them in so close that they could barely miss.
Furiously angry, Rutetz broke into a run; Glaia hesitated for quite some time, then followed him, with the others at his heels. Rutetz was yelling as he ran. The horsemen heard him and looked round to see who was yelling at them.
“You bloody fools,” Rutetz shouted. “What’s the matter with you? Can’t you tell tame goats from wild?”
Probably not; unshorn, to southern imperials, the difference wouldn’t be immediately apparent. That thought occurred to Rutetz while he was still shouting; also, he noticed that the men were soldiers.
Their leader, the youngest of them, and the best dressed, looked at him and said, “Who the hell are you?” He spoke in Imperial, which Rutetz could understand; he’d been shouting in Aram, which presumably the soldier could not. Chances were, however, that an officer in the imperial forces would recognise Aram for what it was, even if he couldn’t understand it.
“The goats you just shot,” Rutetz said. “They’re mine.”
Another man, older, said, “This is imperial territory. You shouldn’t be here.”
It occurred to Rutetz that there might be more at stake here than straightforward property rights. “I was chasing the goats,” he said. “They got across the river.”
The officer seemed troubled by that. “Unlikely,” he said. “River’s in spate this time of year. Ford’s closed till midsummer.”
Rutetz opened his mouth to explain, but realised that anything he said wasn’t likely to be believed. At that moment, the older man turned his head, saw something that made him start, and pointed. All of them, Rutetz included, followed the line he was indicating; Glaia and the rest of the pursuers, suddenly emerging out of the long grass.
Rutetz could see how bad it looked. He knew Glaia had approached slowly and quietly simply because he was a stockman and always moved that way. The patrol captain, however, wasn’t to know that. Nor was he to know that Glaia had an axe in his hand simply because it was the axe he’d brought to cut withies with, it had fallen out of his belt a moment or so before, he’d picked it up but hadn’t yet put it back. All the captain saw was a Cosseilhatz on the wrong side of the Rociander, creeping up on him with an axe in his hand while his attention was being distracted by some man babbling at him about goats. He yelled, “Shoot him!”, and two of the troopers immediately drew and loosed. One of them shot high and missed. The other hit Glaia square in the middle of his forehead.
Later, Rutetz freely admitted that what happened next was all his fault. He wasn’t even sure what actually happened, or how. Presumably he must have stooped, picked up the fallen axe and either swung it or, more likely, thrown it at the nearest archer. When that man dropped from the saddle, he must have grabbed his bow and an arrow from his quiver and shot the officer. He remembered shooting the other two troopers, because they turned and fled; he could distinctly recall thinking that he daren’t let them get away, in case they came back with a squadron and slaughtered the entire Blue Flower. Later, of course, he saw the flaws in that line of reasoning; but not before he’d picked off both of the departing troopers, one at forty yards, the other at nearly seventy—not bad shooting, he said ruefully, with a bow he wasn’t used to, and piss-poor imperial arrows.
About two seconds after he’d killed the last of the troopers, he realised what a terrible mistake he’d made. Panic set in. Without stopping to see if Glaia was miraculously still alive, or sparing a thought for the other four, who’d stood rock-still throughout, he turned and ran as fast as he could back to the ford. It was only once he’d crossed the river that he realised he was still holding the soldier’s bow. He threw it in the river; it was sheer bad luck that, before the Blue Flower hastily broke camp and headed up the mountain, a boy from another household who hadn’t heard what had happened chanced to find it, trapped in some reeds, and took it back to his wagon.
It was further bad luck that that particular wagon was the first one stopped and searched by the imperial punitive expedition, immediately launched by the frontier garrison commander once the troopers’ bodies were discovered, in company with one dead Cosseilhatz and an axe of unmistakable Aram design. The troopers, on finding the bow, decided straight away that it constituted conclusive evidence, and started lashing out with their sabres at everyone they could reach. They’d killed a dozen or so, mostly women, by the time the men realised what was going on and dashed back to their wagons for their bows. This time, four imperial troopers managed to get away, though one of them died of his wounds shortly after he got back to camp. Their account of the engagement may have been influenced by their retrospective doubts about the legality of slaughtering the women without first referring the matter to their commanding officer; as they told it, they’d stopped and searched a wagon, found the incriminating bow, and been shot to pieces by a pre-arranged ambush.
The garrison commander was a regular, but had somehow avoided seeing any significant action during the war; he’d heard ever so many stories about the Cosseilhatz but never served with them or seen them fight. It took him about three seconds to form his own interpretation of the evidence; however, he decided that things had gone too far for a summary reaction, and sent an urgent report to the governor, with a request for instructions and substantial reinforcements.
Rutetz, meanwhile, was taken by the Blue Flower elders to explain himself to the Family council, who immediately despatched him to Joiauz. He told the story more or less straight. Describing the interview later, he said that Joiauz sort of froze for a while, his face completely blank, then thanked him politely and asked if he wouldn’t mind waiting around for a bit in case the Council had any questions. Two men he didn’t know then led him to a tent, where he was given white wheat bread and half a jug of exceptionally good wine, together with the strong impression that trying to leave the tent would be the last thing he ever did.
“Right,” Joiauz said, in a rather high voice. “Let’s start with the war, shall we?”
The others looked at him. Then one of them said, “Is it that bad?”
“Oh, I think so,” Joiauz replied furiously. “After all, it looks like we’ve already had a battle. Where there’s battles, there’s a war, right?”
“Let’s just slow down a little,” murmured Semplan of the Four Birds. “There’s been a misunderstanding. No, let me finish. Our man inadvertently trespasses. Their man mistakenly kills our man’s stockman. Our man unthinkingly fights back. Their cavalry raid—”
“Slaughters twelve women before they get what they deserve,” Autet of the South-East interrupted angrily. “Are you saying we should just forget about that?”
“I’m saying,” Semplan replied calmly, “that there’s facts, and there’s ways of looking at those facts. Some ways lead to more people getting killed. It’s not what actually happened that matters, it’s what happens next.”
Luzir of the Long Arrow made a sort of hissing noise. “I don’t agree with the principle,” he said. “But I don’t think it’s going to help anyone if
we stagger into a war with the empire. We’ve got enough on our plate with the no Vei, for crying out loud, and the Chantat, and the Goida are right behind them. If the empire wants to fight us, they’ll just have to wait their turn.”
Autet sighed. “Agreed,” he said, “we don’t want a war. But—”
“Don’t we, though?”
They all turned and stared at him. Joiauz, however, was smiling. It wasn’t a happy smile. “What did you just say?” Semplan asked.
Joiauz leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, his face in his hands. “Do we want a war?” he said. “I think we do. The right war, of course.”
“Joiauz, you’re making no sense,” Luzir said. “Do you really want to pick a fight with general Calojan? You, of all people?”
“I’ve been thinking about him,” Joiauz said. “I’ve been thinking about him a lot. And I spoke to a man who was at the battle, the recent one, where they beat the Sashan without us. And I think I know why Calojan always wins.”
There was a silence that seemed longer that it actually was. Then Semplan said, “Go on.”
“Calojan,” Joiauz said, “always wins because—” He stopped, and drew a deep breath. “He wins because he understands that the old nations have had their day—the Sashan, and the empire too. He’s figured out that their people just don’t want to fight any more, or else they can’t—don’t know how to, or there just aren’t enough of them. Think about that, will you? I’ve spent twenty years learning about the empire; not deliberately, but you can’t help picking things up as you go along. Five hundred years ago, a thousand years ago, all the countries in the empire were doing well, they were crowded with people; every bit of land was ploughed and manured and harrowed and planted, the countryside was crowded out with small farmers, there were too many people and not enough land. So the imperials raised big armies and went out and conquered half the world, and the Sashan conquered the other half; and then what happened? The best soldiers turned into great noblemen, with huge estates worked by hired men and slaves. That made them rich, and they wanted to get richer, to compete with each other, because how rich you are is their only way of keeping score. So what happened? The great nobles and their great estates started buying out the small farms, or simply taking them over, fencing off the shared land. The empire and the Sashan started fighting each other almost all the time, so they needed more and more soldiers; that meant more farmers getting called up to fight, which meant they weren’t home to work their land, so it got neglected and the great nobles came in and got hold of it—security for loans that could never be paid back, that sort of thing. Then the nobles started rearing huge herds of livestock, so they could sell meat and hides and wool for money; they grassed over the ploughed land, and that meant two or three stockmen were all that were needed where ten years before there’d been twenty families on the same ground. People who couldn’t make a living in the country any more went to the cities, to make things in factories to sell for even more money. Meanwhile, with all the endless wars against the Sashan, thousands of men got killed every year. That’s how it happened. It wasn’t planned, and I’m not even sure any of them have noticed, except possibly Calojan himself. But the fact is, the empire’s like an old dried-up walnut. It’s hard on the outside, but inside there’s a little shrivelled thing and a lot of empty space. I think Calojan knows this. What he’s done that’s so clever is, he’s gone out, outside the empire, and brought in people like us to do his fighting for him. He knows that we’re still prepared to fight, and there’s a lot of us. He turns us loose on the Sashan, who are just as weak and brittle as the empire, and we slaughter them. He knows we’ll win, because the Sashan are basically just like the empire, another walnut shell. Then, when we won’t fight any more, he finds these northerners; and guess what, he wins again. You want to know what Calojan’s secret weapon is? We are. We’re it. Which is why,” he said quietly, “we can beat him. If we want to.”
