He was quickly disappointed. The forest turned out to be a swamp with trees growing in it, and what little game there was saw or heard him coming. He came back empty-handed to find that nobody else had done much better; but one party reported that they’d stumbled on a lake about a mile due south that looked promising for duck.
Leuscai wasn’t enthusiastic. He’d had enough of duck a few years back, when he’d been one of the men Temrai had sent to hunt the wretched creatures for food and feathers during a hiatus in supplies just before the attack on Perimadeia. He’d been a victim of his own success; they’d found what seemed like an inexhaustible supply of ducks and proceeded to exhaust it, grimly and piecemeal, with nets, slings, throwing sticks, arrows – in some cases, where they’d found a strain of particularly trusting, stupid ducks, their bare hands. For weeks on end he’d done nothing but wring necks and pull out feathers, with nothing but duck to eat (fishy and stringy) and the creatures’ obnoxious smell always in his nose. He’d come to loathe the sensation of killing them, gripping the neck tight just below the head and swinging the body round and round in circles until the bird suffocated – but you kept getting ones that were the next best thing to immortal, that carried on living even after you’d broken their necks and crushed their heads into the ground with your heel; nothing on earth is harder to kill than a horribly injured duck, not even a bull buffalo or a man in full armour. And here he was again, about to kill and eat yet more ducks if he wanted to stay alive. Maybe, he speculated, he was really the Angel of Death for ducks, and killing them was what he’d been put into the world to do (he thought of Colonel Loredan and the plainspeople); if so, there wasn’t any point trying to avoid the inevitable. Yes, he said, by all means; let’s go and scrag some ducks. So they went.
Inevitably, it seemed, they got lost; the lake had moved, because it wasn’t where the scouts said it was. They spent most of the day hunting for it, dragging through the wet, dangerous swamp, losing boots and getting filthy, having to pull each other out when they suddenly went in up to their thighs. When at last they stumbled on the lake, Leuscai was pretty sure it wasn’t the one they’d been looking for – the scouts had mentioned a hill at the southern end that rose above the tree line, and there was no sign of anything like that. But it was a lake, and it was unquestionably covered with ducks. Thousands of them, floating in enormous black and brown rafts, like the garbage flotsam washed down into a lake by the first storm rains of summer. They showed absolutely no inclination to go away when Leuscai and his men poked through the trees on to the shore; they quacked and steered away a little, obviously not aware that Death himself was watching them. Foolish, objectionable ducks.
Leuscai convened a brief ways-and-means conference. They had no nets, no slings, no throwing sticks, no dogs and no boat, which ruled out most of the conventional ways of slaughtering waterfowl. They had their bows, but not enough arrows that they could afford to waste any, sinking into the still water spitted through a dead duck. ‘We’ll just have to throw stones,’ someone suggested; and since there were no better suggestions, the motion was carried.
Leuscai, of course, was a master of the art of stoning ducks. They found a handy supply of stones in the bed of one of the streams that ran into the lake, and agreed their strategy. There was a small spit of dry land sticking out into the lake, and a particularly dense mob of ducks bobbing up and down in the horseshoeshaped bay it created. They’d be able to bombard the ducks from three sides; they’d have about twenty seconds of extreme activity before the whole flock got up off the water in an explosion of wings and spray, leaving their dead and wounded behind. If they didn’t manage to get enough the first time, they’d undoubtedly get another chance next morning, and next evening too, if need be. It would be rather like the bombardment of Perimadeia, with Leuscai and his men being the trebuchets (ironic, given what they’d originally come for).
Since Leuscai had absolutely no wish to repeat the performance, he took special pains in deploying his artillery; spook one duck, and there was a faint but disturbing chance that the whole lot would get up before a single stone could be dispatched. So the hunting party set off from well inland and crept up slowly and painfully to the shore, taking great care not to make a noise or a sudden movement. The plan was tactically sound and would surely have succeeded if one of the party hadn’t slipped and gone down in a boggy patch, grabbing at his neighbour as he went and pulling him down as well. As luck would have it, there was a single adventurous duck nosing about in the bushes at the edge of the lake a few yards away fom where the men went in, and their sudden, pitiful yells of distress sent the duck rocketing into the air, like a stone from a torsion engine. At once the whole flock rose with it, blotting out the sun like a huge volley of arrows lobbed over a city wall at extreme range. Leuscai howled with rage and frustration and hurled the stone he’d been gripping in his hand; he was well out of range, of course, and the stone splashed noisily into the water. The ducks swung and lifted over the trees, then swung again and headed out towards the middle of the lake, putting up other flocks until the whole surface of the lake seemed to be standing up, like a man getting out of bed.
The Imperial patrol, which had taken the afternoon off to go wildfowling on the other side of the lake, were furious. They’d been looking forward to their evening’s sport all week; they’d smuggled nets and slings and gunny-sacks out under their armour, trudged all the way across the swamp to get here, and just as they were about to set up and take their positions, something had spooked the birds and ruined everything. The sergeant’s first guess was a fox; but it was just too early for foxes to be about, and what else would panic the best part of five thousand ducks? The only other creature fearsome enough was a man, and that couldn’t be right, since this was a restricted area. A thought occurred to him, and he snapped at his men to shut up and keep still.
Sure enough, his fears were justified. On the far shore he saw men moving about. He couldn’t make out much in the way of detail, but he didn’t really need to; there were too many of them for their purpose in being there to be legitimate. For a while he simply couldn’t decide what to do for the best. He was outnumbered (nearly two to one, if his estimate of their numbers was at all accurate), but he had the element of surprise, and of course his men were Imperial heavy infantry, which put rather a different complexion on the matter. Received wisdom had it that a force of Imperial regulars facing only twice as many opponents could quite reasonably be held to be outnumbering them… That was all very well, and it did wonders for morale if you could actually get the men to believe it; as their sergeant, it was his job to preach one doctrine and believe another. The only alternative was to go back to the camp, a day and a half away through the marshes, and hand the matter over to Captain Suria – three, maybe four days’ delay, by which time finding the enemy again certainly wouldn’t be a foregone conclusion. In the end, the deciding factor was the thought of explaining to Captain Suria how they’d come to be at the lake at all, since it was quite some way from their designated beat; it’d be much easier to handle the interview if he’d just driven off an enemy invasion of Imperial territory and become a hero. True, that wasn’t necessarily a good thing (the Empire approved of heroism but generally despised heroes); but so far, in its thousand-odd years of history, the Empire had never court-martialled a hero for netting a few ducks.
Once he’d made his mind up, he gave the order to advance. With every squelching, bogged-down step closer to the enemy, the sergeant questioned his decision; there were even more of them than he’d thought there were, and they were quite definitely plainsmen, and they were armed with bows (and what else would plainsmen be armed with?) – he’d stumbled across a major raiding party, possibly the skirmisher line of a whole invading army, and he was proposing to give them battle with one platoon of heavies. The only way to avoid being shot down like – well, ducks, say – was to get very close very quietly, and rush them before they even had a chance to get their bows out of their cases.