It was as good a line as any other to end the conversation on, and besides I had a full enough day left ahead of me. I left Adolphus to consider the error of his ways, or more likely why he had chosen to go into business with a gibbering asshole, and threaded the narrow stairway up to my grim, dingy room. Once there I changed back into my regular get up, and took a spare moment to fill my skull with pixie’s breath before heading back out into the street.
3
There wasn’t any part of soldiering I had great affection for, but if you put steel to my throat I’d probably single out that period where we weren’t killing anyone as being the least horrible. It was brief, lasting only the few weeks it took to transport forty thousand men from Rigus to Nestria and shove weapons in our hands. And it was still an awful, awful way to spend time – lost days in the hot sun practicing movements with pike and blade, off hours listening to the chittering of the other idiots stupid enough to have enlisted. But still, it was a hell of a lot better than what came after.
We didn’t know it the morning of the Battle of Beneharnum, of course. We were all operating under the vague suspicion that having learned nothing more than to stand in a line and point our spears in the same direction, such would be all that was required. Our immediate superiors, no crack strategists themselves, encouraged this sort of thinking, indeed seemed to labor beneath it. A strange lethargy had spread through the ranks, from the officers, who drank and gambled and generally made asses of themselves, to our regimental drummer boy, who couldn’t keep a fucking one-two if our lives depended on it – which, as it turns out, they did.
I was a private back then, the lowest rung on a long fucking ladder. It wasn’t a position that much suited me. We’re all dancing on strings, but I prefer mine less visible. It’s impossible to maintain even the common pretense of free will when every drop of your energy is spent at the discretion of men you never see, who seem as far above you as the Firstborn and his siblings – albeit possessed of a good deal less wisdom.
We’d been drawn up in formation since morning, packed against each other while the artillery corps wasted small mountains of iron in a futile effort to annihilate the opposing forces. The Great War would see a dramatic expansion of the role of cannon in combat, recent industrial advances having allowed for their mass production. Of course, you could build all the culverin you wanted, didn’t mean much without anyone who knew how to aim them. It was one thing to show an illiterate peasant how to swing a piece of metal at his Dren equivalent, another to provide him with the training necessary to correctly sight ordnance. As the conflict progressed and the gunners had time to perfect their craft, cannon fire would come to be as deadly as the plague, and the whistling of shot would be enough to send a brigade of stout-hearted men diving for cover – but that day was far off. The soldiers manning our batteries seemed half-blind or fully retarded, and there was probably no safer place in Nestria than that occupied by the army some half-mile distant. For once the Dren were equally incompetent, and a solid hour passed while shot and metal shards buried themselves in the mud a few hundred yards in front of us.
If you’re hoping for a treatise on military history, you’re shit out of luck. I didn’t know then and I don’t know now what it was about Beneharnum that necessitated the death of ten thousand men, why this particular stretch of earth needed to be watered with blood. I suppose it was as good a place to die as any, and I never heard a man put six feet down complain about the spot.
Certainly the officer who gave us our orders did no great job of explaining the situation. He looked the part at least, seated atop a white destrier and gesturing dramatically with his cavalry saber, though with the artillery duel going on no one could hear a word he said. I assumed he’d been exhorting us to die for Queen and Country, and though I’d never met the old bitch and wasn’t mad for what I’d seen of her kingdom, a half-hour later I nevertheless found myself in the front rank of her army, leaning against the twenty-foot spear I’d wedged into the ground and waiting to march on to death.
Next to me Adolphus was doing the same, though the sapling seemed insufficient for his bulk. In light of future events it’s tempting to imbue our early relationship with more than casual importance, but the truth is back then he was just another face in the regiment, albeit one set substantially above the rest. I didn’t know much about him and didn’t want to – it didn’t make sense to get too close to anyone, given the reasonable likelihood of their demise. You could hear the hills in his argot, a country boy grown up slinging mud or diddling cows or doing whatever the fuck farmers do, I dunno. He’d told me the first time he’d left his village was when he’d joined up, as anxious to get out of the provinces as I’d been to leave the slums.
The artillery barrage finally ended. Adolphus let a spiral of saliva fall to the ground. ‘Hell of an overture.’
‘Gorgeous,’ I responded. Tough as scrap iron, the two of us. If we hadn’t been holding our weapons you’d have seen our hands palsy.
We had good reason for it. The front row was not an ideal spot as far as safety was concerned. The rest of the line had been drawn by lots, but the two of us had volunteered, meaning we drew double pay and more importantly, by my lights, had a shot at getting noticed by the brass. I hadn’t enlisted to spend my time at the bottom of the post – I wanted to make a name for myself, and that wouldn’t happen if I spent my service cowering in the back.
Of course, my hopes for future advancement were contingent on surviving our encounter with the enemy, and as the drummer boy began to beat out an uneven rhythm I realized that was pretty fucking far from a deadlock. There were five rows of men with too much wit to take our place in the vanguard, and they fell in behind us, pikes straight in the air. Scuttling in lockstep across the battlefield, our ungainly hedgehog joined a hundred-odd others stretching out along either side of us, surely as curious a migration of bipeds as ever graced the surface of the Thirteen Lands.
Battles are often conceived of as duels between generals, a chess game played out in real time, and we pawns no more than the instrument of their designs. ‘The Twentieth took the hill,’ read the histories, a minor escapade barely warranting its single sentence. But let me tell you, if you were a member of the Twentieth you’d feel a hell of a lot different about the whole thing. ‘What hill?’ you might well find yourself asking, ‘and where the hell am I taking it?’
In the front ranks of a vast agglomeration of men, the dust from their footfalls kicking up around your eyes and the hum of their breathing drowning out any other sound, you’d be lucky to recognize the approaching incline. And that’s before you even hit the enemy, and your focus sharpens down to a pinprick. I’ve been in a lot of battles, and rarely in any of them did I have the faintest idea of what was going on. It’s enough to know there’s a man watching your back, and to spend any leftover energy watching theirs.
As the distance narrowed between us I caught sight of my opposite, the man whose job it was to oppose my passage, to wound and kill me if he was able. Sitting in camp you spent half the day talking about them, passing out bits of folklore disguised as wisdom. In time it became difficult to think of the enemy as being composed of individual particles, as if we had declared war on one vast but singular organism. In the face of the man ahead of me I recognized my error. Apart from the dye of his armor he was largely indistinguishable from any of the men I was marching beside, or indeed from myself.
It was a curious discovery, and not one I had time to contemplate. The weight of expectation, which is not to say duty, kept us moving forward. Fifty-odd paces out, at one with the rest of the rank, I brought my spear level.
The pike is an odd weapon. Useless as tits on a bull one-on-one, it presents an impermeable barrier if you can get it in the hands of a few hundred men sharp enough to point it in the same direction and stupid enough not to throw it away and go home. But that’s pretty much all it’s good for – it doesn’t lend itself to intricate movements or much in the way of technique, you don’t really wield it so much as hold it in place. I think we all had it in our heads that, at the final moment, the Dren were going to sprint forward onto the points of our weapons. They seemed to be operating under the same delusion, because a few feet outside of effective range both lines stuttered to a stop, and for one ludicrous moment I found myself wondering if maybe we’d all give up and go home.
Then the men behind us plowed forward, unable to see anything and thus immune to the sudden twinge of fear or humanity that had briefly halted our movement. I managed to keep myself standing but the end of my pike skipped upward harmlessly. Luckily the Dren marching counter to me was similarly inept, and his did the same. My neighbor to the left was not so fortunate, the head of a spear plunging through his leather carapace, the forward press of the men slowly skewering it through his chest and out his back.
The other thing about the pike is that it’s about twenty feet long and only a few inches of it can actually hurt
