by K. J. Parker
Cronan nodded, looking away. 'Sure,' he said. 'We simply withdraw, refuse to play. Sansory falls-but it'd have fallen anyway, in all probability; Feron Amathy doesn't get an opportunity to stab the raiders in the back, he doesn't get rid of Tazencius; the raiders get as much loot as they can carry and go home. Feron Amathy's campaign loses momentum, giving us time to pick off Tazencius, maybe patch up a pardon so he can go home, and then deal with the Amathy house once and for all. Apart from Sansory getting burned to the ground, it's a good result. And, as you say, our chances of saving the city even if we do press on and fight are next to nothing, so to all intents and purposes they're already dead, we can't save them.' He picked at a thread on the knee of his trousers. 'Also, true courage and service don't lie in making the heroic gesture; fighting and dying here would be the easy way out. The truly brave and loyal thing to do would be to walk away. Did I leave anything out?'
'I think that covers it,' someone murmured, 'more or less.'
'Splendid,' Cronan replied. 'Well, we'd better be getting along. If this pathetic excuse for a map's anything to go by, it's still nearly two hours to Vistock.'
Just over two hours later they came to a ford over a small, inoffensive river.
'North Hey?' Cronan asked the captain of pioneers, who claimed to know the area.
The captain shook his head. 'Vistock,' he replied.
The first thing they could make out was the shell of a mill-house, with a wrecked and moss-grown wheel sunk in the water. There was only one other structure still standing: half a barn (the other half had fallen in a long time ago, there were still signs of fire on the rounded ends of the rafters), surrounded on two sides by an overgrown wall. Outside the ramshackle doorway someone had driven a stake into the ground and stuck on it the head of an old woman with long, matted grey hair. The blood running down the stake was still wet. The body was nowhere to be seen.
'Raiders,' someone said.
'Or Feron Amathy,' someone else suggested, 'pretending to be the raiders. Not that it matters, I suppose.'
Cronan stopped the cart and climbed out to take a look. He didn't seem shocked or revolted, just curious. 'Actually,' he said, 'it doesn't look like either of them to me. I guess we may just have tripped over a good old-fashioned private murder, nothing to do with the destiny of nations and none of our business.' He knelt down and stared up at the base of the neck. 'It's a clean cut,' he said. 'Just one cut; which could mean a backsabre, I suppose. Or a sword-monk; they're supposed to be able to chop off heads with one mighty blow, in fact I think it's on the syllabus. Or it could just be some lunatic loose with a felling axe.' He stood up and looked round. 'This is Vistock? The map says it's a medium-sized town.'
'Raiders,' the pioneer captain told him. 'Forty-odd years ago.' Something caught his eye and he stooped to pick it up: a single bone button. 'Let me see that map of yours a minute.'
Cronan reached up into the cart for it and handed it over. 'And some of you bury that,' he said, pointing to the head, 'before the crows get at it. I don't know about you people, but I find this place depressing.'
He walked over to the barn and told a couple of his guards to help him on to the roof, where the rafters were bare and he could hold on and look around. From there he could see a fair way up and down the road. The obvious point was the ford, but he wasn't convinced, so he called down to some scouts and told them to look for crossing places a couple of miles in each direction. If not the ford, then what? He'd been assuming there would be a town: houses, walls, gates, a wide variety of obstacles to break up a charge, cover behind which he could hide reserves. Instead he'd committed himself to fighting on a level plain, with nothing to play with except a river that he suspected wasn't deep enough to slow down a determined advance, let alone block it. His suspicion proved to be correct.
'Wonderful,' he said. 'All right, if there's nothing here, we'll have to make something of our own. Somebody help me down, there's a lot to get done.'
They weren't finished by nightfall, so Cronan called for big fires and all the available lamps and torches. The men weren't in the mood, not after a long march, and it was fairly obvious they didn't have any faith in what Cronan was doing. He couldn't really blame them; he was being thorough and workmanlike but unimaginative; there was nothing in his plans that another general couldn't have thought of and carried out just as well. If he was going to be the first man in the history of the empire to beat the raiders in a pitched battle, he was going to have to come up with something better than that. Unfortunately he couldn't think of anything; and besides, they were running out of time.
'You look awful,' someone told him. 'You want to get your head down and sleep for a few hours, or you'll be no good to anybody when they do show up.'
'Yes, Mother,' Cronan grunted, but he couldn't think of anything else to do, and he was very tired. They offered to pitch his tent for him but he told them he couldn't be bothered; he'd just lie down in the cart for a while and go over the maps one last time, in case he'd missed something. When they came back with the lantern he'd asked for, he was fast asleep.
Monach woke up with a start, and wondered if he was dead. He was feeling much better, almost no pain-entirely consistent with death, from what he'd read about it, rather less likely if he was still alive, considering the gravity of his injuries.
But he was alive. He was also alone, in a cart, about four hundred yards away from a great deal of noise and movement. They'd started the battle while he was still asleep, and nobody had thought to wake him up. Bastards!
It hurt a lot when he raised himself on one elbow, to where he had a view of what was going on, but it was worth it. He could only see about a third of the action, because the units in the centre of the battle were blocking his view of both wings to some extent; however, not only was the imperial centre still there, it was moving forward at a calm, brisk walk, and the bodies being stepped over weren't all imperial soldiers, by any means.
Intriguing development. He resolved to make the effort, and dragged himself up on to the box of the cart. That really did hurt, and for a moment or so he thought it'd be the death of him, since breathing became almost more trouble than it was worth. But that passed, and he found that he was looking at a fairly straightforward three-sides-of-a-square envelopment procedure, with the raiders penned in the middle, a massive central block of infantry herding them back, and two hedges of cavalry on either side doing the killing and the wounding Cavalry. Far more cavalry than General Cronan had had at his disposal on the way here. Another, more careful look at the backs of the infantry in front of him confirmed it; at least a quarter of the centre weren't wearing Cronan's arms or livery. He squinted (the sun was inconveniently placed) until he recognised the flamboyant outfits of the Amathy house, and old-fashioned imperial patterns, which could only be the foot soldiers from Tazencius' garrisons.
Very strange indeed, he thought; Feron Amathy and Prince Tazencius were fighting with General Cronan against the raiders. How on earth had that happened?
There hadn't been one single factor that turned the tide, simply the cumulative effect of small, common-sense precautions and preparations, combined with a certain amount of flair in the leading and handling of troops.
It was, of course, pure Cronan, all of it. His basic idea was to fool the raiders into thinking that he was planning to defend the ford. They'd know perfectly well that the river could be crossed in at least two other places, and they'd split into two units and make a rush for them, with the aim of getting across the river and round behind Cronan's infantry before he could withdraw or react. They'd meet brief, futile resistance from the cavalry on the wings; they'd charge through them, scattering them, and rush down on the infantry-only to find that the cavalry had deliberately given up too easily and were coming back to take the raiders in flank and rear, while the heavy centre unfolded to receive them with prejudice. That was good tactical thinking; the part that might almost qualify as genius was the caltrops.
('Caltro
ps?' the colonel of engineers had said, when he got his orders. 'Oh, you mean those little three-legged wire things about the size of your fist, with spikes sticking out, the ones you hide in long grass or something, and when the enemy treads on them-yes, I suppose we could, if we had enough wire.' Cronan had, of course, seen to it that there was plenty of wire suitable for improvising caltrops out of in the field, using only basic tools.)
Genius, because Cronan had guessed that what gave the raiders the edge was their unstoppable charge, the impetus that carried them on, through and over any obstacle, no matter how dense or determined. Unstoppable, he'd said to himself, but supposing they wanted to stop. Could they?
In the event, it turned out that they couldn't. As the dozen or so men in the lead suddenly collapsed to the ground, screaming with pain, the main body of the raiders guessed something wasn't right. But they were committed to the charge and couldn't stop; they ploughed on into the caltrop field, driving the finger-long tines of the caltrops clean through bootsole and foot, and fell to the ground like ripe corn under the thin slice of a sharp scythe. When they fell, they landed on more caltrops, which stabbed them in the stomach and the chest and the face, and the boots of the men behind them landing on their backs and necks drove the tines in further still. As the charge continued to falter and pile up, still a dozen yards or so short of the enemy line, the cavalry crashed into the rear of the mob, stampeding them, and now the great wave of the raiders was smashing into the sea wall and disintegrating into fine spray, vaporised by its own impetus. Cronan saw that and muttered a quick prayer under his breath, to Poldarn the Destroyer; at the heart of all inspirational tactics lurks a small kernel of poetic justice, of the strong undone by their own strength. Then he looked up and saw the Amathy house, heading straight at him.
Oh well, he thought, it was a moral victory, I suppose. But the Amathy house cavalry swung further than he'd anticipated they would when he saw them line out; instead of charging his squadrons, they wheeled and crunched into the raiders' flanks, stoving them in like rocks crushing the side of a ship. Not far behind came Tazencius' infantry, with the Amathy foot soldiers bringing up the rear; they moved in to reinforce his own troops as if they'd been practising the move as a drill for a year. They'd figured out about the caltrops for themselves and stayed clear of the few patches where the spikes hadn't been clogged and rendered safe with a mat of dead raiders.
It was at this point that Cronan finally realised how few of the enemy there actually were. Spaced out in open order in the full flight of the charge (like a flock of birds flying) was one thing; crowded together in a narrow space (like the same flock roosting in a few tall trees) was quite another. And, of course, the best part was still to come Poldarn didn't get to fight in the battle. One moment he was running forward, the backsabre held over his head in both hands; the next he was lying on his side, his whole body ringing with some terrible shock that hadn't yet started to melt into pain, but that paralysed him nonetheless. He only just had time to locate the source of the trauma-the spike of a caltrop poking up through the top of his right foot like a crocus, the feel of something pricking his ribs through his upper arm-before heavy bodies thumped down on top of him, squashing his face down among the heather stems and blotting out the light. The last thing he saw was a huge flock of crows congealing in the sky directly overhead -And they were talking to him, one voice coming together out of the multitude, announcing itself as the god whose name he'd borrowed or stolen. He wished he could see, but that was apparently out of the question.
To be certain, he asked: Who are you?
The voice answered: Oh, you know us, you've known us ever since you were a boy. We've been enemies for years.
He didn't like the sound of that. Have I actually done you any harm? he asked.
The voice answered: It depends on how you define harm. You've killed hundreds of us, possibly thousands, but that's all right, you can't hurt me; not on your own, there's simply too many of us for you to make a perceptible difference. Don't worry about it; I forgave you years ago.
A window opened in his mind, and through it he could see a level field, muddy, with small pools of rain standing on the surface here and there. From a distance it was brown with a faint sheen; as he grew closer he saw that it was covered with ranks and files of tiny green spearheads, driven up through the mud like caltrop spikes. He saw a gate, and beyond that the stump of an old dead tree in the hedge, where someone had built a very fine hide out of green branches and briars. Fifteen yards out from the hide, four or five crows were hopping round in small, furious circles; looking closer he could see that each of them was tethered by one leg to a stick driven into the mud. From time to time each captive bird would open its wings and manage to rise a single wingbeat off the ground before flopping back down again and continuing its small, circular dance. Further out, scattered at random within a twenty-yard radius, he could see a couple of dozen more crows, but when he looked closer he saw they were dead and pegged out, a slender thorn twig stuck through their lower jaws and into the dirt to keep their heads up and make them look as if they were contentedly feeding.
He asked: Am I doing this?
The voice replied: This is who you are, it's the answer to your question. The boy in the hide is you. Now look up and to your left.
He did as he was told and saw a stand of seven tall, thin ash trees, leafless. In the branches sat a dozen fat black crows, and as he watched one of them got up and flew straight towards him, gradually getting lower in the sky as it battled against the stiff wind. It gained a little height as it flew over the decoys, turned a tight circle and came in against the wind, wings back. As it pitched, an arrow with a thick blunt tip shot out of the hide and knocked the bird over in a tangle of outstretched wings, then the bird scrambled up and hopped towards the trees, one wing trailing. Meanwhile the rest of the crows in the trees got up and sailed over; two of them pitched straight away, and an arrow flew out and knocked it down, while the others veered sharply and rode the wind back to their trees.
The voice said: That's how clever you are; you noticed how, when you put one of us down, the others didn't see the arrow, they only saw one of their own dropping in and staying down. I saw that and thought that must mean it was safe, which is why the others came over too. Because you're patient as well as clever, you were able to kill scores of me in a single day, until eventually I realised what you were doing and learned to avoid you.
He said: I'm sorry.
The voice said: I told you, don't worry about it. I admire intelligence. Consider this: you're the only human ever to defeat the great army of the crows, just as Cronan is the only general who's ever beaten the raiders. Consider this: if you hadn't won your famous victory against me, I'd have stripped this field bare-that's your grandfather's spring barley, which he can't afford to lose if he's to feed you and the rest of the farm. Compare General Cronan again: if he hadn't won his famous victory against the raiders, they'd have burned Sansory and killed everybody inside. Does the morality bother you, now that you've decided to become a crow?
He replied: I suppose not. There's a sort of poetic justice to it.
The voice replied: A great man once said that there's a kernel of poetic justice inside every famous victory. Consider this: you and Cronan are the only men in history to have defeated the divine Poldarn. Who do you think you are, the boy or the crows?
He said: Didn't you just say I'm the boy in the hide?
The voice replied: Consider this -And he was sitting in the hide watching the crows flying slow, cautious circuits around the trees. After a while, one crow peeled off from the mob and flew straight towards him, heavy and straight, like his own blunt-headed arrows (as if the crows were shooting at him, not the other way round). He watched the crow come within seventy-five yards, then suddenly shear off screaming and fly back the way it had just come.
The voice said: Consider-before I assemble to feed, I send out a scout (the scout is also me, of course) to see if it
's safe, to lead the way. Ask yourself this-when the divine Poldarn manifests himself as the god in the cart, leading the way, scouting ahead for the end of the world, are you the crow or the boy in the hide?
He thought before replying: Perhaps you could tell me, he said; does the crow that leads the way know it's a part of you, or when it leaves the trees and the rest of the mob does it think of itself as an individual?
The voice laughed, and said: Think about this -And he was standing on the top of a cliff watching a sail ship slip away into the interstice between sea and sky; when it had gone, he turned and walked across the downs towards the lights of a town in the distance; and he was repeating to himself his new name, his new history, the details of his new persona The voice said: There's your answer; you're the crow flying away from the trees, the spy sent out to find a good place to feed. When you leave the trees and the rest of the mob, do you think of yourself as an individual? And if so, which one?
He said: I don't know. The person I'm about to become is a stranger to me.
The voice said: When the divine Poldarn manifests himself as the god in the cart, leaving the mob and flying away from the trees, does he know he's me or does he think he's just an individual whose mind happens to be empty of memories because of some accident?
He thought hard before answering: Do you just send out one spy at a time, he asked, or are there many of us?
The voice became hard and cold, as if it was angry at having been tricked into giving away too much. Consider this, it said -And he saw his mother as a young girl, standing up with the knife in her hand, her skirt wet and filthy falling back down to her knees, as his father tried to breathe but couldn't, his throat having been cut; and he saw her as an old woman, coming out of the barn because she'd heard voices and assumed it was the bone cart from Sansory (she wasn't afraid of a man in a cart rolling up to her door) and hardly seeing the backsabre before it severed the veins and tendons of her neck and bit into and through the bone, and the last thing she heard was an old man talking about his dead son.
