The Deadliest Game

and the cavalry beginning almost casually to engage the Talairn cavalry uphill — they had been taken completely by surprise as Shel and eight hundred of his picked horsemen came plunging down from the surrounding hills on both sides of the river and hit both Delmond’s horse and foot in their flanks.

Delmond’s cavalry, boxed in on the Minsar side of the river or still trying to flounder their way out of the water, was driven down into the mud and reeds and sedges to either side of the ford, and slaughtered there by Shel’s halberd-armed foot. Delmond’s infantry, predictably and sensibly, tried to run away, but there wasn’t much of anywhere for them to run to. The Talairn cavalry, with Shel leading one of the four forces that had come plunging down from the shelter of the pines, surrounded them and began chopping them down like some bloody harvest. Within a very short time, the battle was over.

Put like that, it sounded simple, but there had been nothing simple about it. Any true account of the battle would have to include the hours and hours, starting before dawn that morning, that Shel had spent getting his mounted troops in place up on the hills, every move being made in strictly enforced silence while he prayed that the early mist off the river would not lift until all his people were under cover. Mention would have to be made of the dead chill under the pines, early on, in which breath smoked and teeth chattered — followed in only a couple of hours by the stifling heat of an unseasonably warm, breathless spring day: the bug bites, the maddening itch of pine needles down Shel’s tunic and under his chain mail as he crept from position to position, making sure his people were where they needed to be, cheering them up with a well-placed word of encouragement here and there, when it was he who needed the encouragement, but dared not show it.

The description would have to include the lance of pure fear that struck straight through him as he heard the sassy brass challenge of Delmond’s trumpets coming down the road on the far side of the river, approaching the ford. Anticipation mixed with utter dread that even now Delmond might think to send some scouts up into the pines — but then came the flush of combined relief and absolute rage as Delmond did no such thing. Thank Rod for small favors, Shel thought, and a second later, furious; What the hell kind of general does he take me for? I’ll show the sonofa—

And then one last dreadful thrill of fear as Delmond’s forces forded the river, still playing their blasted trumpets—What do they think this is, a Memorial Day parade?…We’ll see who needs a memorial in a couple of hours! — and made their way up the far side of the ford, toward his troops, waiting there: his troops, under his eager young lieutenant Alla, who had no orders except, “Don’t let them past! Hang on!”

They hung on. It was very close. They’d had to stay there without relief and fight on their own, long enough to make sure that Delmond’s whole cavalry force took the bait and crossed the river to the unfavorable uphill ground. If any of them had lingered on the far bank of the river, all Shel’s carefully planned tactics would have gone straight to hell. But his enemy’s fighting psychology was all too plain at this point. A few victories against careless or unlucky adversaries had convinced Delmond of his skill as a strategist and tactician, though Shel knew Delmond had little real skill in either art. All it needed now was the obvious opening, for a seemingly easy win, to tempt Delmond into the obvious move. Delmond took it…and even then Shel had had to suffer through many minutes of torment and uncertainty yet while his little force on the far side of the river stood their ground and met Delmond’s first charge—

Then, along with his picked horsemen, then Shel had been able to vault into the saddle and blow his horn for the signal to charge, and had led his riders whooping down the hillsides in a crash of hooves and dislodged stones, taking Delmond’s infantry at open shields from left and right, and his split cavalry force from behind and both sides. The cry of “To Shel! To Shel!” had gone up from his forces on the Minsar side of the river, their desperation turned to rage and triumph in a moment, and they began cutting their way toward him as he and his horsemen cut toward them.

The worst of it had really been over about half an hour later, though the cleanup, as usual, took until sunset…not that anything was much cleaner at the end of it all. Survivors were herded together and disarmed, as many of them as could be found. Wounded fighters had to be picked up and brought in; the ransomable, those of them who could be located after attempting to make themselves unrecognizable, had to be separated out, their worth determined, sureties taken from them and parole given. Shel had had to supervise it all, getting tireder and tireder by the moment.

And now it was all finished, except for the most important part, the reason the whole battle had happened in the first place: dealing with Delmond. Shel had truly not thought this far ahead, and he was still surprised that Delmond had fallen for his tactics at all. But then the Swiss had been surprised, too, when the Austrians had fallen for a variation on this theme at Morgarten. Delmond had never been much of a reader, though, and was therefore condemned to repeat the great military mistakes of earlier centuries. Shel, for his own part, thought it served Delmond right.

Outside, the trumpets were blowing a tired version of the recheat, signaling that pickup had been made on all the wounded, and it was now safe for noncombatants, the husbands and wives of the fallen who might have been following either force, to reclaim the bodies of their relatives. Shel took one last look at the battlefield, which was becoming more and more deeply drowned in rose-tinged, foggy shadow as the mist rose off the River Artel and crept over the ground, mercifully hiding what still lay there. After a moment he let the tent- flap fall, and went to sit down in the camp chair by his map table, letting out a long weary breath.

When he had fought his first battle in Sarxos, a few years ago, Shel had come equipped with the usual images of how the aftermath of a mighty battle ought to look: his standard flying bravely over the stricken field, and the standard of his enemy thrown down in the dust. Now, with a little more experience behind him, numerous battles lost and won, he knew that there was precious little dust to be found on one of these battlefields. This morning, in the sunshine, the slight slope leading up from the fords had been a great sheep-cropped expanse of green grass, all speckled with white daisies and the small yellow blossoms of nevermind. Now, after the trampling of twenty thousand hooves and ten thousand feet, it was mud. Red mud — it stuck to your boots with horrible tenacity. His enemy’s standard, trampled well into it, would now be just one more sodden rag, indistinguishable from anybody’s collapsed tent, or from some petty noble’s surcoat flung off to keep its owner from being captured and held for a fat ransom.

As for the stricken field, it was Shel who always felt stricken, the next morning, at the smell. Nor was it any wonder that the husbands and wives and other relatives of the fallen always showed up as soon as the battle was over, or anytime well before dawn, to ask permission to search for the bodies of their loved ones. They knew, from too much painful experience, what the place would smell like once the sun was up and had had a chance to warm things.

Shel intended to be well away from here by then. His tent was already unable to keep out the battlefield stink of stamped-out guts — or of guts not lost, but just loose, the results of many a brave young warrior’s first encounter with the battlefield. War is hell, went the saying. But at the moment, Shel felt more inclined to substitute another four-letter word for “hell.” Certainly he would have preferred the smell of brimstone to the aroma most prevalent just now.

“It’s only a game,” he told himself…and then made a face. The game’s creator, a careful and thorough craftsman, had done his job too well for such bland assurances to make a difference. No action was permitted to evade its consequences. The air should have been sweet with the oncoming evening, and wasn’t. There would of course be a great celebration of Shel’s victory later, when he got back to Minsar, a mighty meeting to congratulate the heroes who had contributed to the win, and there the banners would fly and the trumpets would sing, and the bards would chant their praises…but not here. This place could be cleaned up by no lesser force than Nature, and even she would take some months about it. Even after the grass was green again and the daisies bloomed, the sheep that grazed these pastures would be working around swords and arrowheads and the stained bones of skulls for quite a few years.

At least the grass would be of high quality, and lush, come the later summer. Blood was an extraordinary fertilizer….

The tent-flap lifted. One of Shel’s guardsmen looked in, an old companion called Talch. Shel glanced up at him.

“When do you want to see him, sir?” said Talch. He was a big man, cavalry, still all spattered from today’s work, with mud and blood and Rod knows what else. He stank, but then so did Shel, and so did everyone else for a mile around.

“Twenty minutes or so,” said Shel, reaching across the map table for a pitcher of honeydraft. “Let me do something about my blood sugar first. Has he said anything?”