K Parker: The Belly of the Bow

Trumpets were blowing. Do we use trumpets for signalling? I can’t remember. No, we don’t. Avid Soef is giving an order.

There was movement all round him, but there was a pattern to it; men were leaving the camp, steaming away towards the lights and the noise. Avid Soef is recalling his men . ‘Hold your ground!’ he heard himself yell – to his own side, presumably, not the enemy; hell, they wouldn’t obey him anyway. Why would Avid Soef be pulling out when he was winning the battle, the war? Maybe he doesn’t know he’s winning. Maybe he thinks his men are getting slaughtered, and this advance with lights and trumpet-calls is a desperate attempt to rescue them. The thought was so amusing that he laughed out loud.

‘Make for the centre of camp,’ he shouted. ‘Form ranks, and don’t move!’ It was worth a try, he supposed. He had no way of knowing how much of an army he had left, four hundred men or twenty – gods damn it, but what a difference the absence of light makes, it changes everything, turns us from demigods into buffoons, makes it possible for two opposing nations each to lose a war in the course of half an hour.

Mercifully, someone got a fire going in the middle of the camp, enough light to see a few yards by. He had the sergeants call the roll; thirty men unaccounted for, presumed dead, and another sixteen cut up to a greater or lesser extent. The lights in the distance weren’t going back the way they’d come. Avid Soef was doing something, moving men about. He could hear trumpets and shouts, orders (but he couldn’t make out what they were). Patterns of light shuffled about all round the camp, while Gorgas sat on the ground holding his captured halberd and saying nothing, almost unable to think.

It was a long night to sit through. In the first dimpsy half light, he sent men out to collect bows, arrows, weapons, helmets, whatever. The sergeants did most of the organising; for once, he didn’t want to be in charge. He had a theory – no more than that – about what Soef had been doing in the pitch dark; he’d been setting up an encirclement, moving his troops into position, setting up a trap that was almost as deadly and likely to result in victory as the unholy mess he’d pulled them out of the night before. Gorgas gave the order to form a square. Then someone brought him his bow.

He recognised it while the man was still quite a few yards away; its white limbs seemed to shine in the thick coagulated light. The relief he felt as soon as he had it in his hands again was foolish, utterly illogical; it was like having a brother or a father or a son come and stand beside him, a cheerful grin and a hand on the shoulder, saying, It’s all right, I’m here now. He realised with alarm that the poor thing had been lying strung all night, and in the dew as well. He checked it over with the utmost care; no harm done, as far as he could see. So that was all right.

Avid Soef attacked about half an hour after sunrise. His men walked up briskly, men going to work in the morning after sleep and breakfast. Gorgas’ army weren’t like that; they were still in the nightmare they’d dreamt last night, bewildered and scared, tense as a half-drawn bow.

Tactically speaking, the position wasn’t good. Somehow or other, Soef had left the eastern side of the camp uncovered, but his men were advancing evenly on the other three sides, which meant that each division of his two thousand, less the ten or so who’d been killed in the night, were facing just under a hundred archers, forming two ranks of fifty, with the eastern side of the square standing idle. Quickly, Gorgas did the mental arithmetic; to wipe out two thousand men, each archer would have to make seven successful shots before the enemy reached them. To halt the advance and turn it back, maybe four successful shots, more likely five. At between a hundred yards and fifteen yards, against an advancing target, the acceptable ratio for archery training in the butts was three hits out of five. Gorgas scowled, trying to do the maths – call it eight, nine volleys. In theory, there was time. Assuming, of course, that the enemy were content to lumber placidly forward into the arrow-storm.

Can’t be bothered to think. Draw the bow. You wouldn’t have the bow if you weren’t going to win.

He heard it creak as he drew the first arrow; but that wasn’t unusual with a new composite bow, just the sinew and the belly material getting used to taking up the strain. His arrows were all too long for it, given the way it stacked immovably at twenty-five inches, and the spine wasn’t right, because the first arrow fishtailed away to the left as well as overshooting; it was chance and the overcrowding in Avid Soef’s line of march that made the arrow pick out a man in the very back row of the column. Gorgas couldn’t see where he’d hit him, he only saw a break in the pattern, something slumping, a gap just discernible in the hedge of shouldered halberds. With a desperate effort, ignoring the pain in his fingers, he managed to draw the next arrow an extra inch, and allowed for paradox; at eighty yards he hit exactly what he’d been aiming at, a man on the end of a line. He could see the man drop to his knees, the man behind hopelessly trying to jump over him from a standing start, tripping on his shoulder and sprawling down, just avoided by the man behind him. He drew again, making the full twenty-five inches, dropping half an inch, aiming into the brown of the middle of the column. Before he was ready, the string scraped across his raw fingers and slipped away, sending the arrow up into the air and down like an osprey dipping for fish into some place in the army. Men were falling down in that part of the column, but he couldn’t be sure that any one of them was his, particularly. Only after the fourth shot did he steal a moment to look at the shape of the advance. They were still coming, but very slowly, picking their way through the dead and fallen like men in a bramble patch who have to keep stopping to unhook the thorns from their clothes and skin, rather than pressing onwards and feeling cloth and skin rip. By now they should have been running; but it’d have been like running in thick mud, to wade through the killed and the twitching. They were near enough to charge, to charge home and win the war, but their dead were like great dollops of mud clinging to their boots, slowing them up and draining their strength.

Some bow. Seven shots, six confirmed hits, one possible.

At that moment, Gorgas noticed Avid Soef.

That man . he thought. That man looks like Gorgas Loredan.

There was an old story in the Soef family, about one Mihan Soef who’d won a famous victory for the Foundation by charging the enemy at a crucial turning point, a fulcrum or pivot of the war, and killing the enemy general with his own hands. Up till then, so said Soef family history, it had been a hiding to nothing – the Foundation army was being led by some nullity from an opposing faction, so it was inevitable that they should be losing. According to the story, Mihan Soef saved the day and went on to become Dean of Military Geometry, the first of the family to head a sub-faculty. That part of the story was a lie – look at the great inscribed stone in Shastel Hall, see the dozen or so Soefs listed there above Mihan, up among the dust-clogged cobwebs – but nobody cared, because it was the Soef family version of history, relevant only to themselves, and they had every right to do what they liked in it.

Ridiculous notion, of course; and anybody who tried anything of the sort under his command would answer for it at a court martial, whether it won the battle or not.

I wish I knew how we were doing , Avid Soef said to himself as he stepped over a dead man. It’s only a few yards more, but we’re hardly moving. It feels like everything’s stopped, as if we’re waiting to see what’s going to happen.