Fortunately (the sergeant couldn’t fathom why) the enemy seemed determined to make his job as easy as possible. There were no pickets, no sentries; they appeared to be arguing violently among themselves, with their backs to the likeliest vector of attack. For the first time since he’d embarked on this idiotic venture, the sergeant began to feel just a little hopeful. One statement of official doctrine about the plainsmen that wasn’t just good-for-morale was that they were warriors rather than soldiers, basically undisciplined and disorderly.
Most of the way he was fairly sure of staying out of sight as long as he kept his men just inside the tree-line. He’d chosen to follow the western shore of the lake, and the choice turned out to be a good one; the trees grew close enough together on the western side that it was possible to hop from tree-root to tree-root, avoiding the boggy leaf-mould pits. By the time they reached the southern side, where the trees were older and more openly spaced, they were no more than a couple of hundred yards from the enemy. Still, it might as well have been a mile for all the good it did him, because the going became horrendously wet and sticky and nobody, not even Captain Suria and the Sons of Heaven, can wade up to their knees in thick black liquid mud and be unobtrusive about it. He called a general halt and tried to hustle his brains into coming up with a better strategy – unfair and uncalled-for, since he was only a sergeant and neither trained nor expected to be a battlefield tactician.
When he gave the order to go back, he could tell the men weren’t happy about it, but it was an order, and that was all there was to it. They hopped back about fifty yards; then he led them at right angles deeper into the woods, striking in about a hundred and fifty yards. His reasoning was simple: if he was going to have to make a noise, it’d be sensible to make it as far away from the enemy as possible for as long as he could. He’d swing round behind them and then make the best job he could of charging, or at least squelching quickly, into the enemy’s rear. He had no idea whether it’d work or not, but he was wet, muddy, extremely weary and very frightened, and he couldn’t think of anything else.
In retrospect, it would probably have been a very good strategy in the circumstances, if only they hadn’t got lost in the wood. But both distance and direction are notoriously hard to keep track of in a wood unless you happen to be an experienced forester; when the sergeant launched his charge, he found out the hard way that he’d come too far, as his breathless and dishevelled command burst through the undergrowth at the edge of the lake to find that instead of being behind the enemy, they were alongside them, about forty yards to the east.
A mistake; but in the event not a wholly decisive one. When Leuscai first became aware of an Imperial patrol materialising beside him, his first instinct was to hide weapons rather than ready them. The way he saw it, he’d been caught trespassing and poaching; his mind was busy trying to find a plausible lie to explain why he and his men were there (we got lost in the forest; excuse me, but are we right for the Green River?) and it didn’t occur to him that he was going to have to fight anybody until two of his men, who’d been trying to hide their bows behind their backs, were speared like fish by a couple of legionaries.
Without any conscious effort on the part of either commander, they’d managed to hit on the optimum conditions for bloodshed. There was just enough time for the majority of Leuscai’s men to get their bows out, nock and draw, and just enough time for the Imperials to close with the plainsmen nearest to them. It was a short battle and extremely uncharacteristic; neither side could very well avoid killing the enemy, or being killed themselves. Leuscai’s archers were loosing at point-blank range, easily punching their bodkinhead arrows through plate and into muscle and bone. The patrol were thrusting and slashing at effectively unarmed men, without armour, shield or sword to ward off the blows. Interestingly enough from a theorist’s point of view, the casualty ratio more or less validated provincial-office doctrine (one Imperial footsoldier to three plainsmen) to the extent that if the fighting had carried on to the point of annihilation, there should have been four Imperials left standing, and no plainsmen. Unfortunately for military science, the experiment was abandoned early, with the survivors of both parties giving up as if by mutual agreement and pulling back; so the data, although persuasive, cannot be taken to constitute proof.
Leuscai died in the brief third phase of the engagement, when the Imperials closed for a second time after taking the plainsmen’s one devastating volley. He’d been rushing to get a second arrow on to the string; he fumbled the nock, dropped the arrow in the mud and was reaching over his shoulder for another one when a man he hadn’t even seen wedged a spearhead between his ribs. The blade was too broad to penetrate any further and too firmly stuck to be withdrawn, so its owner wisely abandoned it and tried to finish the job with his sword. But he was rushing things, too; instead of a clean, coaching-manual, skull-splitting blow, all he managed was a cack-handed slash that scived half the scalp off the left side of Leuscai’s head and toppled him into the oozing leaf-mould. As the mud covered his raw flesh like a poultice, he was aware of the man for the first time, putting one heavy boot on his chest as he tugged at the shaft of his spear, vainly trying to get it unstuck. After three goes he gave up and went away, leaving Leuscai to bleed peacefully to death. It turned out to be not nearly as traumatic as he’d imagined it would be. Ironically, the last sound he was aware of hearing was the distant quacking of ducks, cautiously drifting back to the middle of the lake.
‘Wonderful,’ said Eseutz Mesatges. ‘Now we can have the war, get it over with, get our money and have our ships back.’
She’d met Athli Zeuxis in the street outside a dress-maker’s shop, one of the best and most expensive on the Island – one of the few things left to spend money on was clothes, and for some unaccountable reason there had just been a wave of seismic activity in women’s fashions; the warrior-princess look was out, stale and dead as last night’s scraps, its place triumphantly usurped by the nomad-caravan look, all cloudy silks and bare midriffs. This suited Eseutz perfectly – warrior princess had placed what she felt was an unhealthy emphasis on cleavage, and the leather made her sweat.
‘We won’t have the details for a day or so,’ Athli said. ‘That’ll have to wait until I get the official despatch from head office in Shastel. But their reports are always pretty reliable.’
Eseutz thought for a moment. ‘Short term, it’s going to create havoc,’ she said. ‘It’ll be the same as it’s been since this started, only worse, too much money chasing too few opportunities, everybody desperate to buy before prices soar, but nothing to spend the money on.’
‘Except futures,’ Athli replied. ‘Which is an area I’ve always tried to keep out of, since I don’t happen to be a qualified fortune-teller. If I were you, I’d hang on to my money until things start getting back to normal; pretty soon, everybody who’s overbought in the first rush of excitement is going to want to sell, and that’ll be the time to buy. Sadly,’ she went on, ‘I haven’t got the luxury of following my own advice; everybody’s going to be wanting their money so they can start spending, which means that unless I can arrange cover from head office, I’m going to be in an awkward position for a week or so.’
Eseutz held a spangled slipper up to the light. ‘Give ’em paper,’ she said. ‘They’ll grumble, but they’ll take it. After all, everybody knows Shastel scrip is good; mind you,’ she added, with a grin, ‘that’s what they used to say about Niessa Loredan.’