Savages

by K. J. Parker

  “And?”

  “Oh, lots of wild stuff. Like, they have steel spearheads and bits and bridles, but otherwise they don’t use metal very much. Their soldiers wear helmets made out of boar-tusks, sliced lengthways and wired to a leather crown.”

  “That’s possible,” Calojan said. “I’ve heard of something similar.”

  “Have you? Well, maybe it’s true, then. Also, they have armour made of squares of horn, and they paint their faces with clay and white lead. They don’t give a damn for anything made by anybody else, they smash it up or just leave it lying. Oh, and they kill everybody they come across, women and kids as well as men. They take a toe from every dead body they’ve killed, and they believe that if you die in battle, you’re reborn as a swan. Apparently, that’s a good thing. I don’t suppose any of it’s true.”

  Calojan nodded. “Strictly a nomadic race, then.”

  “A what?”

  “Like the Aram,” Calojan explained. “They move about all the time and herd sheep and goats. Not a seafaring people.”

  Raffen grinned. “Not unless there’s a sea out that way nobody’s told us about. Why?”

  “Oh, just something I heard. But it was only a name. Probably someone got them mixed up with somebody else.”

  The Selbst weren’t great ones for resting on the march, so it was evening before Calojan could reread the despatches he’d received from the coast; raiders, exceptionally savage, many civilian casualties, four towns burnt to the ground, raiders arrived and withdrew by ship; identified by a Vesani merchant as the Goida; request you send at least two squadrons of lancers immediately to secure against further attacks. Well, no hope of that, obviously. With any luck, the local prefect would evacuate the other coastal towns. If not, God help them.

  Other despatches; the Cosseilhatz had occupied the Mier valley; they’d engaged a hastily-assembled rural militia at Ridishen and slaughtered the lot of them; they’d skirted round six towns without bothering them at all, but caught up with a retreating half-regiment of auxiliary infantry, pushed them into the ford at Seuno and killed them all; no prisoners. (I could have told them that, Calojan thought; you can’t contain and control prisoners when you’re as mobile as the Cosseilhatz, they’d get in the way and be a terrible security risk.) They were advancing, twenty miles some days, but the army always stayed close to the flocks and herds, so there was no chance of cutting off the non-combatants and using them as hostages. Besides, was there such a thing as a Cosseilhatz non-combatant? Hard to think in those terms when the fighting men rode right in among the wagons, chatting with their wives on the way to the next battlefield. They were at Dreunis; they were through the pass and out onto the moors above Caput Imperii; they’d bypassed Caput and its garrison and were on the West Road, headed straight for the City. They were sixty, forty, twenty miles away. They were here.

  If there was anything positive, it was the attitude of king Raffen. The closer the enemy came, the more cheerful he seemed to become, like a man looking forward to his birthday. On the day when the enemy were reported at Cerauna, a small party of riders joined him; they’d ridden non-stop from Selbst, and when they arrived he seemed almost absurdly happy, so presumably they were close friends or family. He held a feast for them in his tent, to which none of the imperials were invited.

  It was the first time Raffen had seen him since—

  He allowed the surge of energy that the memory gave him to flow into his smile of welcome, broadening his mouth until he felt he could have swallowed the world. “Sighvat,” he said. “Thank you so much for coming.”

  Sighvat looked at him warily. He looked exhausted, covered in mud and dust, his boots dull from being soaked in water. His two sons (what were their names?) hung back, like shy boys at a dance. “Your Majesty,” he said.

  “Oh, don’t call me that.” Raffen reached forward and took him by the elbow, led him into the tent. “I do have a name, you know. Anyway, how was the journey? Not too bad, I hope.”

  “It was fine,” Sighvat lied. “But we’d quite like to rest now, if that’s all right.”

  “Of course. You and your boys can have my tent, it’s practically the only one we’ve got that doesn’t leak. Sit down, get yourselves comfortable. I’ll send someone to tell you when dinner’s ready.”

  He could see the question in Sighvat’s face, the one he couldn’t bring himself to ask. He laughed. “It’s fine,” he said. “Really. Nobody’s going to hurt you. I need you here because you’re an experienced and capable soldier, that’s all. I trust you to lead men. After all, I know what you’re capable of.”

  He left the tent and went to persecute the cooks, who were sick of the sight of him already. Yes, they told him (politely the first four times, loudly the fifth), everything was just fine, it’d be ready on time, no, they hadn’t forgotten the apricot stuffing, please go away. Finding he had no place to go to, he went to Calojan’s tent and got under his feet for a while, until he was firmly but politely thrown out.

  At the banquet, which by all accounts was a great success, he proposed a toast; to Sighvat. I owe this man, he said, more than I can begin to tell him. I won’t bother you all with the details; suffice to say, Sighvat set me free. It was thanks to him that I started on a long journey, one which has brought us all here, to start what I trust will be a long and fruitful partnership with the empire. I can see from his face that he doesn’t think he deserves the credit, but let me assure you, he does. So I’d like you all to stand and drink the health of my good friend and our great benefactor, Sighvat.

  Afterwards, he’d called on him at the tent and, after a few awkward moments, they’d spent several hours talking strategy and tactics. Raffen explained exactly what he needed Sighvat to do in the battle; the biggest problem would, of course, be the Cosseilhatz horse-archers, and the imperials had demonstrated recently how you dealt with that. He needed a man he could absolutely rely on to command the shield-wall, make sure it held firm while the savages were riding up and down shooting arrows, then be ready to lead the counter-attack as soon as he saw the signal. Could he do that?

  Sighvat thought for a moment. “I believe so.”

  “Of course you can. One thing I know about you, Sighvat, you’ve got guts. Right now, that’s exactly what I need. Do this for me and—” He stopped. “Well,” he said. “You know what I’m getting at.”

  Sighvat looked at him. “Is it really that easy?” he said.

  “It should be.” Raffen sat down, poured himself a drink of milk. “I have a special gift,” he went on, “one that’s granted to very few people. I don’t think I’d ever have realised I had it, if it hadn’t been for you and—well, what happened. My gift is, if I set my mind to it, I can be anyone I want. It’s like a sort of magic; I can reshape the world, so things are how I want them, just by thinking, just by wanting it to be so.” He settled the horn cup on the ground at his feet; soft grass, no rug. “Like, when I went to the City to work, they said they needed carpenters, I chose to be a carpenter. Two minutes later, I was a carpenter. Then they came to me and said, Raffen, we want you to be the king. Now I am the king. So,” he went on, “if I choose to be the sort of man who can forgive you, that’s exactly who I am. I just have to imagine such a person, and suddenly, that’s me.” He paused and smiled. “I reckon it’s because whoever I really was died that day, and just by being alive I’m having to pretend, be someone else, every day of my life. I know this sounds stupid, but the first thing I did, after it happened; I swore an oath to myself that I wouldn’t even think about trying to take revenge. What good would it do, I asked myself; couldn’t think of one positive thing. So I made up my mind, from now on I’ll be whatever I need to be, to get by; a carpenter, a king, an animal eating tree-fungus in the woods, it really doesn’t matter. It’s not really me, you see. That’s all—” he paused to think of the words—“water under the bridge. And the result is—well, you can see for yourself.”

  Sighvat regarded him for a long time, then said, “Ca
n I ask you something?”

  “Sure. Go ahead.”

  “How did you get out of the well?”

  Raffen laughed until it hurt. “Ah well,” he said eventually, “I’m quite proud of that, though really it was just luck. And you were careless, you should’ve asked a few more questions.” Then he told the story, for the first time. “Mostly luck,” he said. “A certain amount of gumption, I’ll say that for myself, but basically just luck.”

  “I’m sorry,” Sighvat said.

  Raffen gave him a big mock scowl. “Don’t say that,” he said. “I’ve thought about it, rather a lot, as you can imagine, and I’ve come to the conclusion that you were probably in the right. I did treat you very badly over the years. There came a point when it simply couldn’t go on any longer; one of us was going to have to take out the other, and you acted first. That’s all. So don’t apologise, please. Apologising makes it sound like it was a mistake, and if it was a mistake, I shouldn’t be here. Anyway,” he said abruptly, standing up and straightening his coat, “that’s quite enough about that, and we won’t talk about it ever again. Agreed?”

  Sighvat nodded. “Agreed.”

  “Wonderful. Well, sleep well. We’ve all got to be up early in the morning.”

  Calojan couldn’t sleep, so he set out the chess-board. Knights for the Cosseilhatz, pawns and rooks for his own men. Something about the look of the board bothered him, no matter how he arranged the pieces. A shield-wall would have to be the key. Was it that he couldn’t trust the Selbst to stand still, shields raised over their comrades’ heads? He thought about it, and decided that wasn’t it. Aside from the Selbst, he had five battalions of imperial heavy infantry, the very last of the home-grown regulars; two brigades of lancers, four hundred armoured archers; also about a thousand auxiliary light infantry, the sort imperial generals were accustomed to describe as salad. He knew exactly what the Cosseilhatz were going to do. Now all he needed to decide was where the battle would take place.

  He spread out the big, good map, but the more he looked at it, the less it meant. Luckily, he didn’t need a map this close to the City. He could close his eyes and see it, as though he was a bird flying very high up. He saw the Cosseilhatz column, a blurry sprawl like a swarm of bees. The rivers, mountains, woods, roads, bridges stood out clearly, as though they were the chess pieces (but the pieces stayed fixed and the squares moved around them). He didn’t even have to think about how each feature could be used and how it could pose a threat. He could see the multiple alternate strategies, as clearly as pictures. Go along this road, and this is what will happen. Cut across toward that river, and this will be the sequence of events. Over-prepared, that was his problem; he was thinking about it as though each separate possibility had already happened and couldn’t be altered. He poured himself a drink and tried to clear his head.

  Back to the chess-board. He cleared it, and selected some pieces. To his mild surprise, he found himself picking up a king, a queen, the other king; he wanted at least one more, but there were only two. He tried a priest instead of one of the kings he needed, but that didn’t seem right. Maybe it was simply that he only had red and white pieces to choose from.

  Concentrate. Let these pawns be the shield-wall, and these rooks be the heavy regulars, to stop one end; the other end will need to butt up against something, rivers or a mountain. A wood would be nice, preferably a wooded hill; he glanced across at the map and found the place he was thinking of. A wooded hill, a river, flat ground, broken ground. He realised he’d made his choice. The battle would take place at Moisin, in two days time.

  He leaned back in his chair. I’ve just made history, he thought; the decisive battle of the war would be fought at Moisin, at dawn, in two days. Around that battle, the future of the world will pivot; my choice, my action. My fault. Let the record show—

  He asked himself whether the Cosseilhatz would fall for it. A simple process to arrive at an answer, straightforward and reliable as mathematics. He did the calculations and found that yes, they would. They would believe the wooded hill was hiding a substantial, decisive reserve. It’d be empty. They would believe four hundred archers wouldn’t be enough. They’d be wrong. He reached out and nudged the white king with his fingernail until it fell over. A thousand years of human history will flow from here, he thought, like water from a leak. He shivered.

  It still wasn’t right, as though a significant piece was hidden behind something. He stood up and walked round the board, then realised that was ridiculous. He sat down again and considered each piece in turn. Something was wrong.

  When I get back, he promised himself, I’ll have to do something about Aimeric de Peguilhan. Aimeric was a knight, and he didn’t like knights. It was somehow unfair that they could jump over the other pieces, and their angled attack was basically dishonest. He had, of course, left it too late, because Aimeric had been useful, a short-cut, an excuse for neglecting important details. It’d probably be enough just to scare the life out of him; he lacked ambition, he was being used by someone rather cleverer than himself. Who? Don’t know. He pulled away from the frustration of a gap in his knowledge, tried to think about something else.

  Two days. With a sigh, he pulled the map towards him and went over it carefully, closing his eyes every so often, then opening them again. It’d have been so much easier, he thought, and less bloody, and more productive generally, if Sechimer had agreed to let the Cosseilhatz have the empty land they’d asked for. But that had been the emperor’s decision, not his. Curious, he thought. Both of us make decisions that change the world, but I have to go second, like it’s some sort of game; like white always having the first move.

  Only two colours; it was something to do with that—his fault, for only bringing with him one chess set, on the assumption that every game is between two players. He tried to imagine a chessboard designed for a three-player game; the board would have to be triangular, and you’d need to have triangles instead of squares, or they wouldn’t fit; and in that case, how would the priests move?

  Too tired to think clearly. He swept the pieces back into their box, and lay down on his bed.

  When the philosopher Saloninus was asked to name the unluckiest town in the world, he laughed and immediately said, “Moisin.” It was generally agreed that it didn’t take the genius of a Saloninus to reach that conclusion.

  Moisin grew up on the river trade, as the loading point for lumber from the Blue Forest (in those days it was twenty times the size it is now) to be floated downstream to the City. At the height of its prosperity the river dried up, but the demand for building timber remained strong, so the people of Moisin built what was later to become a section of the eastbound Military Road. In its day it was the straightest, best-maintained road in the empire; which is why it was an obvious choice of route for the San Tan, those enigmatic destroyers of cities, when they launched their second great assault on the empire in the reign of Florian III. The people of Moisin saw them coming in good time and evacuated; when they came back, they had difficulty finding where their city had been, so thoroughly had the San Tan demolished it.

  Realising that it was the road that had been their undoing, they decided to rebuild five miles north of it, in a wedge-shaped canyon in the shadow of Cone Mountain. It had never occurred to anyone that the Cone could be a volcano, so the eruption and lava stream that buried Second Moisin in the fifth year of Gaiseric IV came as a complete surprise.

  Once again, the citizens had managed to get out in time, and they rebuilt four miles inland on the far side of the road, next to the dried-up river bed. Learned men say it was probably the eruption of the Cone that led to the subtle rearrangement of flow patterns that brought the river roaring back to life in the appallingly wet summer of the seventeenth year of Amalrich I. Third Moisin was swept away in a single night, though fortunately the townspeople were able to save themselves. They rebuilt on the top of the Hog’s Back, a long ridge running parallel to the road; and in doing so they stumbled acr
oss the rich seam of porcelain clay which was to be the foundation of the city’s prosperity for the next seventy years.

  That happy time in Moisin’s history came to an abrupt end during the First Collegiate War, when the Boule, heavily defeated by Florian V at Mauchart, retreated down the Military Road, forced entry into Moisin and were besieged there for nine months, until Florian’s sappers succeeded in undermining the southern wall. The combination of the undermining and the deep excavations of the porcelain diggers resulted in catastrophic subsidence, which ended when a quarter of the city literally disappeared into the ground. By a miracle, the disaster took place on Ascension Day, when the vast majority of the townsfolk who’d survived the occupation and siege were assembled in the water-meadows below the city to give thanks for their deliverance.

  Fifth Moisin was an altogether more modest affair than its predecessors. Built on a tongue of flat pastureland equidistant from the road, the river and what remained of the forest after four hundred years of systematic felling, it was principally engaged in the fullering trade; barges of nightsoil from the City arrived at the town docks, while drovers brought sheep for shearing at the great pens erected under the lea of the forest. Although the population had dwindled away by two-thirds since the heady days of the porcelain mine, the town was prosperous and comfortable, though regarded as something of a backwater. It’s hard to explain, therefore, how it came to produce a man like the firebrand Absolutist preacher Vorteric, or why his doctrine of violent nihilism should have appealed so strongly to his countrymen. Be that as it may; on Midsummer’s day in the eighth year of Lutimer II, the Vorterists rioted and burnt down the magistrate’s house. A brigade of dragoons was sent from the City to deal with the uprising, and the result was the worst massacre of civilians the empire had ever seen. Eight thousand men, women and children lost their lives before Vorteric was finally taken and killed and the dragoons withdrew. The town itself was engulfed in flames; by morning, virtually nothing remained.