‘I don’t know about you,’ Gorgas said, his mouth full of cheese, ‘But I’m exhausted. This not fighting certainly takes it out of you.’
Behind him in the distance, a pillar of smoke rose in the still air. He made a point of not looking at it; that was the village of Lambye, burning, and he’d given the order to burn it. The thought that he’d set his men to burn down one of his own villages made him angry, for all that he knew it was the way to win the war. Nevertheless, the act disgusted him. And what Niessa was going to say when she found out, he shuddered to think.
‘How much further is it to the river?’ the sergeant asked. Gorgas glanced down at the map spread across his knees and brushed away a few crumbs that had fallen in the folds.
‘At the rate they’re going, four hours,’ he replied, ‘give or take an hour. I’ll say this for them, they’ve got a hell of a lot more staying power than I’d have given them credit for.’
‘Training,’ the sergeant said. ‘Discipline. It’s what sets your professional soldiers aside from your bandits and hooligans.’
‘I think you’re right,’ Gorgas said, cutting himself another slice of cheese. ‘For a start, it gets them killed.’
They saw the smoke rising from the second village almost as soon as they left the first.
‘That’s it, then,’ said the colour-sergeant, stopping and shading his eyes. ‘It’s going to be like this all the way. No food and no cover. We don’t stand a chance.’
‘Then why don’t we charge them?’ growled the young soldier to his left. ‘Go out there and get the bastards? Got nothing to lose by it, have we? If we all charged, the whole lot of us-’
Nobody was listening, and he gave it up. For the last eighteen hours, he’d found it progressively harder not to think about water. Up till then, the other desperate issues of the march had been enough to distract his attention – hunger, exhaustion, the incessant nibbling inroads of the archers. Now he could hardly spare them a thought. Which is good, he tried to re-assure himself. Nothing like being thirsty for taking your mind off your troubles. He wriggled his shoulders against the hard straps of his pack, which were crushing the rings of his mailshirt through the buckskin jerkin underneath and into his skin. He had a blister on each heel where the backs of his boots nipped against the tendon. He tried not to think about water.
‘There’s one thing he haven’t tried,’ somebody muttered in the row behind.
‘Uh? What’s that?’
‘We could always surrender.’
Several men took it as a joke and laughed. ‘He’s got a point there,’ the young soldier said. ‘Why don’t we do that?’
‘Ah, go to hell,’ someone jeered. ‘We can do without that kind of talk.’
The young soldier frowned. ‘What’s your problem?’ he said. ‘Face it. Either we give in or we’re going to die.’
‘Make him shut up, Sarge,’ someone sighed. ‘Put him on a charge or something.’
The colour-sergeant shook his head. ‘We won’t surrender,’ he said. ‘Not while we still outnumber them five to one, or whatever it is now. It’s still overwhelming odds. We can’t surrender, we can’t get near enough to fight, we’re getting slower all the time and in a few hours we’re going to start keeling over without the bastards having to raise a finger. Craziest thing you ever heard of, but they’ve done us. It’ll be the biggest, most spectacular victory in history; they’ll be teaching it in their damned faculties for the next thousand years. Pity we got to be on the wrong side, really.’
Bol Affem was thinking along broadly similar lines, as he stumbled and dragged along between his two supporters. Amazing innovation, he thought, just when you thought every possible tactic had been tried and there couldn’t be anything new. After this, they’ll have to rewrite every textbook and treatise in the library – unless we win the war, of course, in which case we can forget this ever happened and go back to the proper ways of making war, the ones in the syllabus. He could feel his eyes closing all the time now; such an effort to keep them open, to stay awake, to be bothered. Now that he was being dragged along rather than having to make the effort of walking, he was beginning to feel removed, outside, not involved; it was like being a child again, carried on his father’s shoulders, too small to be any use or any trouble. He didn’t really feel hungry or thirsty; the pain in his leg was still there but even pain didn’t seem to work properly any more. Most of all, he could no longer make the effort to be afraid of Death. Foolish, pointless. It was like the fear he’d felt when he was a little boy, just before he went to a children’s party. It’ll be all right, his mother used to say, you’ll enjoy it once you get there.
‘Here they come again,’ someone nearby observed in a matter-of-fact voice. Nobody seemed very interested. Affem lifted his head and saw in the middle distance the line of archers walking towards them, not hurrying, moving up like a party of merchants on a long journey. He saw his soldiers wearily closing ranks, like very old monks performing a ritual they’ve long since lost all belief in. He let his head droop.
There had been a point, presumably, where they’d stopped believing in survival, but he couldn’t remember it coming and going. It had been gradual, gentle, the death of hope; the slow realisation and acceptance, made easier by the fact that none of them really cared any more. Water, shade, shelter, food – give them any of those and they’d stop and stay stopped. A future after water or shade or shelter or food wasn’t a realistic aspiration, and besides, where would be the point in it? It had become obvious that this march would never end, that somehow this rocky scrub and moorland stretched away into infinity. Given time, a man might eventually climb the stairs to the moon; but no one could ever reach the edge of this country.
We could surrender.
Bol Affem laughed. Yes, why not? In another life, perhaps, the next time round, the next army to be caught like this, in a siege without a city, a prison without walls, surrender might be an option. But not while there are still a thousand of us to a couple of hundred of them; because any minute now, we’ll reach the water or the shade or the shelter or the food, and there’ll be fighting, and when there’s fighting we’ll win. Or we could surrender, right now, we could refuse to go on. In theory.
Something was happening.
Affem looked up again, and saw that the men at the head of the column were quickening their pace, walking instead of slouching, breaking into a run. He tried to see what all the fuss was about; not the enemy, surely, they’d given up trying to engage them hours ago. Besides, he could see the archers on either side coming in close, shooting, taking men down in dozens and being ignored.
‘What’s the matter?’ he asked.
‘Don’t know,’ said one of the soldiers. ‘Here,’ he called out, ‘what’s the rush?’
‘Water’, someone shouted back. ‘There’s a bloody river.’
To begin with, Gorgas had worried. It would be just like life, he reckoned, if at the very last moment, when all the hard work had been done and everything had worked out so perfectly, one little mistake cost them everything and turned this victory into a ghastly defeat. It would only take a little carelessness, allowing the enemy to get close enough to engage, getting between them and the water, with the odds still so desperately uneven, his army could be wiped out in a few minutes.
Then he stopped worrying, as soon as he saw the enemy scrambling and tumbling down the steep sides of the combe, dumping their packs and their weapons, hurling themselves into the water. Instead, he joined the line of archers steadily, methodically shooting them down as they drank and splashed.