‘The hell with this,’ someone shouted (Huic Bovert, who’d tripped over a guy-rope on his way back from the council of war last night, the pain from his twisted ankle was draining his strength like a hole in a bucket). ‘Pull back; dress your ranks and for gods’ sakes pull back.’ Slowly at first, simply because there was so much mess on the ground to pick their way through, the halberdiers edged back; the arrows carried on hitting them, of course, and they continued to fall in roughly the same numbers as before. At seventy-five yards they checked and rallied, and saw for the first time how few of them there were. ‘The hell with this,’ Huic Bovert repeated, and they withdrew, walking reluctantly away, guiltily, like a man walking away from a woman he no longer loves. Limping slowly behind the main body, his broad back a distinct target, Huic Bovert was the last man to fall, although it was hours before he died.
‘I don’t believe it,’ Gorgas said.
‘Don’t knock it,’ someone beside him replied. ‘Close, yes, but it beats losing.’
Someone else had assumed command of the remnants of the army; they had fallen in and formed a column, they were marching away. ‘No more than seven hundred,’ someone said. ‘If that. Probably closer to six.’
Gorgas snapped himself out of it. ‘What about us?’ he said. ‘casualties?’
‘They never got that close,’ someone else replied. ‘Another three arrows fewer each and they’d have made soup with us, but we got away with it. All present and correct, it looks like.’
‘We’re getting good at this,’ Gorgas said.
Late in the afternoon, while Gorgas was organising men from the Town into parties to collect arrows, parties to strip the dead, parties to bury them, a messenger came in from Sergeant Baiss’ detachment; he was pleased to be able to report that Baiss had ambushed the retreating column as they climbed up into the mountains. Out of an estimated seven hundred halberdiers, he was confident that no more than ninety had escaped and were still at large. Was he to pursue the fugitives or return to Scona Town?
Gorgas felt sick. He told the messenger to bring Baiss back and leave the poor devils alone; then he set off up the hill to see his sister.
The Bank was nearly deserted; no clerks scuttling down corridors or peering up at him from their desks. Nobody waiting on the stone bench outside Niessa’s office. He pushed the door open and went in. Nobody home.
Eventually he caught up with a clerk in the exchequer; the man was scooping up the silver counters from the counting boards and putting them into a large, clinking sack.
‘You,’ he said, ‘where’s the Director?’
The clerk stared at him as if he had two heads. Gorgas glanced down at his bloodstained clothes and shredded hands. ‘It’s all right,’ he said, ‘we won. Have you seen my sister?’
The clerk looked as if he didn’t know whether to giggle or run. ‘Don’t you know?’ he said. ‘She’s cleared out. Left Scona. Taken all the ready money and the best ship and gone.’
Avid Soef? thought Avid Soef. Yeah, I remember him, wasn’t he the clown who showed up in Scona Town three days after the other two armies, soaked to the skin and covered from head to foot in mud and pine needles? What a joke!
According to the locals, the bog-carpeted forest that covered the southern tip of Scona was far drier than usual; the recent heavy rains had all run away into the sea, and the scouring heat of the past few days was drying out patches of marsh and bog that had been submerged for as long as anybody could remember. Mires that usually swallowed you up to the waist now only engulfed you as far as the knee.
Wretched, dismal, every step laboured and difficult; tracks that might just have been passable for five men and a mule becoming lime-traps with two thousand men squelching through them; mud-encrusted boots, almost too heavy to lift, so saturated that their wearers would almost have been drier walking barefoot; tussocks of couch grass, tripping men up and turning over ankles; all under a dark, nasty-smelling canopy of spindly firs and wind-twisted beeches, through waist-high clumps of briar and bramble, in and out of the branches and roots of fallen trees that blocked the way. How utterly superfluous, in all this natural torment, was any trace of the enemy.
The enemy wouldn’t come in here. More sense.
Nevertheless, Soef knew, if he didn’t send out scouts and advance parties, then undoubtedly there would be ambushes, roadblocks, landslides, pickets, snipers. The whole army could be cut down in their tracks, all because of carelessness, a general thinking he knew better than Regulations. At any moment he expected to bump into the remnants of the rebel army in flight from the sack of the Town – presumably it had fallen by now, it was hard to imagine anything that could stop an army of four thousand men. When he met them, would they keep running or turn and fight? A battle in this mud and filth among these dark and gloomy trees would be unspeakably awful, for both sides. Surely they’d have more sense. (Ah, but if they had any sense they’d have stayed out of the marshes.)
‘They reckon there’s a clearing up ahead,’ said the colour-sergeant.
‘Let’s hope they’re right this time,’ Soef answered. ‘For a while back there I thought they were deliberately misleading us – reasonable enough, since we’re the enemy. But I don’t think so now. I think they’re as lost as we are. After all, why in hell should anybody ever come here?’
The colour-sergeant nodded. ‘Apparently some of them do,’ he said. ‘Hunters – there’s supposed to be deer and wild pigs in here somewhere, I guess we must be making too much noise. And a few old men bring their yard-pigs to look for truffles.’
‘Never could understand what people see in those things. With honey, I suppose, or diced in a-Good gods, they were right. There is a clearing.’
‘That’s not all. Look.’
In the clearing there were men putting up tents, men trying vainly to make fires with wet timber and sodden kindling, men stacking bows in stands, hanging clothes from branches to dry. In the five or so seconds it took for Soef to realise what he was looking at, a few of them made an effort to get to their weapons. Most of them simply stood and stared, as if they were sitting at home and mythical beasts had just battered their way in through the wall.
‘Front three ranks,’ Soef shouted, but he was too late; the army was already surging forward all around him, not waiting for orders in their eagerness to take out their feelings after a week in the forest on someone else. The action didn’t last long. Half of the two hundred and fifty rebels made it into the forest, unarmed, some barefoot and in their undershirts. The rest were chopped down as if they were the brambles, briars, bracken, saplings and undergrowth of the forest that had caused the army so much suffering and aggravation. It was a swift, efficient, slashing clearance, a lopping of exposed limbs, all blade-work, very little stabbing. Soef didn’t try to intervene; he might as well have asked his men to consider the feelings of the couch grass and the bog-cotton and besides, he didn’t want to. A week in the forest had got to him too.
By the time the army lost interest, there were about fifty of them left. Most of them had at least a cut or a slice, some were missing fingers or a hand or an ear; it had been like watching spiteful children aimlessly bashing at the trunks of trees, smashing off branches, crushing and scarring the bark till the sap flows. Scarcely any of them had tried to fight.
‘That’ll do,’ Soef called out. ‘We’re just wasting energy now. Secure the prisoners, we’ll move on in an hour. Somebody see if there’s any clean water nearby, and find out if there’s anything fit to eat in the rebel tents. No point letting good stuff go to waste, when we don’t know when we’ll next have a chance to stock up.’
Quite. We might just as well eat what we kill.