36 - Like a house-sized boulder rolling down a mountainside

Any warrior will tell you the same thing: once you’re fighting, the nervousness goes. It’s the waiting, as the enemy and you approach each other, that is gut-watering. If you are not fighting yet, you have to think: think about them, think about their weapons, think about how well you’re going to fight, think about how you feel, think about fear, think about whether your thought-out plan will actually prove to be madness, think about whether what you’re feeling proves you are in truth a coward, think about whether your face is showing anything.

This is unless you are singing the paian at the top of your lungs, which is why we Yeolis do it as we take the field; the worst tales of pre-battle nerves you hear from Arkans, who are forbidden. The gong sounded advance at a walk, and I changed the words a little, my thirty picking it up, laughing.

Full of strength and bravery
We’ll strike down the mamokal
You set foot on Yeoli lands
Mamok, die by Yeoli hands!

It occurred to me that with the mamokal as their van, the Lakans wouldn’t speed their general advance to faster than the beasts could walk. In that case, it’s usually best to charge at run yourself, and strike their lines with greater force; but turning the mamokal would take time, so the plan was to keep the main lines advancing at a walk or even halt them if we took long enough. (How could anyone know how long we would take?) The plan then was to follow the mamokal, once they were driven back on the Lakans, with Kadrini and heavy-armed charging through the breaches they would make. Our mission then was just to get out of the heavy-armed units’ way and stand by, watching for chances to capture mamokal. No doubt Emao-e was sending out fast orders to the milakraseyel right now, having seen where the beasts were placed. One thing about fighting mamokal, I though wryly: so long as the dust doesn’t get too thick, you always know where they are.

We already had our heavy-size shields raised. My archers were strung already; I unclipped and loosened Chirel in its scabbard and ordered “Nock.” When the moment seemed right I locked eyes on my mamoka’s driver, and called and signaled at once with my spear, “Charge!”

Life is all motion in a charge. Everything in you and everything around you is pure motion; the wind whistles past your face and pushes back on your helmet-plumes; your vision swims with the jolts of your running. Your mind and spirit is in motion, too, full of the intent of attacking and the joy of being set free. (I’d been thoroughly taught that a young commander in particular must guard against commanding a charge too fast out of yearning for this feeling.) One thing in the world only was still for me; the mamoka driver.

Since our plan was to shoot from close, and a mamoka can carry a good store of arrows, they started shooting long before we did, arrows thumping into our shields and whistling past our ears. One of mine went down before we got there, and I saw out of the corner of my eye Sachara was still running with an arrow in the top of his shoulder. The mamoka loomed more and more huge, towering over us; now we could see the embroidered black, red and gold headcloth he wore, fringed with tassels, and his eyes, black and oddly thoughtful, even wise, as he dutifully took his ponderous steps toward us. The driver crouched in his place in the saddle-box, only his cone-helmed head and arms showing, sword-hand holding the stick, which had a steel point like a spear. How close was too close? Less than fifteen paces, I guessed, called a halt, and ordered, “Shoot at will.”

My two front tens were my archers’ wall, the tops of our shields their crenels. Though I’d ordered shoot at will to give them all the time they wished to aim, and their target was moving with the beast’s enormously lumbering gait, their first shot was almost a volley, and a good three or four of them hit him right in the face. “Oh, beautiful shooting!” I couldn’t help but shout. He went down in the box too fast even to cry out, his hands snagging utterly lax on its edges, and the stick dropping beside the mamoka’s shield-side foreleg.

The beast stopped in his tracks, raised his head and made a whistling shriek that was ear-piercingly loud. They love their drivers; could he sense somehow that the man had been killed? Was this the distress-sound? It didn’t seem to last long enough. The Lakan archers were distressed, though, not knowing what to do without that stick, until one snatched an arrow from his quiver and gave the mamoka a poke with it. To do that he had to lean forward out of the box, though, which, with archers as good as mine, doomed him all but instantly.

The arrow-exchange went on until we saw no more of them; whether they were all shot or some just hiding in the box, I had no way of telling. They were as trapped as warriors could ever be on a field. The mamoka whistled again and stamped; it seemed more angry than afraid, in truth. “If it charges, we split either side five and five fast,” I said. “Archers, his nose-tentacle now! One shot each, then stand by in case one of the Lakans pops up again.”

I learned then what a mamoka’s cry of pain is; later, remembering, I’d feel the pity that is natural. Like horses, they had not chosen to be here. He took two or three huge steps backwards, raising his head and curling his nose-tentacle with the arrows standing in it doubly, like the windings of a huge snake. Then he began a long steady panicked whistling that I knew right away was the sound.

“Go sword-side, we’ll turn him to his! Ai, hairy beast, go, go, get, get, get!” I yelled at him as if he were a stray dog; all of us doing that might help turn him, too. We were close enough to smell him now, a deep grainy, earthy, woolly scent that was overpowering if you got a full whiff. The strands of hair were like brown twine, and matted underneath; the feet were nothing like feet or hooves but flat stubs at the ends of the legs, with black nails, each bigger than a spread hand and caked with dust.

I sprang in to his side, further back than I guessed he could swing those monstrous blades, and jabbed him hard with my spear, wondering if he’d even feel it. A shriek sharpened the whistling for a moment; he’d felt it. Kunarda, Kamina and Nyera sprang in right after me and did the same.

We did soon get the feel of it. He’d turn towards the side he was being hurt on, instead of away, trying to bring his head around so he could strike with those blades. You just had to move faster than he did. We split up and surrounded him; being many and acting in turn, we could confuse him, and get him moving, we learned, any way we wanted. Here and there his red-brown fur turned pure red. When we had him pointed back towards the Lakans, I decided it was time to throw, and did for all I was worth; a spear-point that stayed in his rear was more likely to keep him going that way. Three others did the same, and he set off at a fast walk, bearing down on the Lakan lines like a house-sized boulder rolling down a mountainside, his monstrous anus loosing the most enormous waterfall of kyash we’d ever seen in our lives.

“Chen, we’re done, to me, take up the wounded!” Of the thirty of us, three needed carrying. The war-cry of a block of Kadrini was coming roaring up behind us; I barely had time to glance to either side to see how my other thirties were faring before I had us running for a gap between charging Yeoli units.

Behind the lines, we took stock. One of us, a man I didn’t know, was dead of an arrow in the neck; another two had arrows in the lung and the jaw, so might live if we got them to the infirmary fast enough. I had Kamina see them carried properly there on litters, and the walking wounded helped there, and waited for my other commanders of thirty to report, staying about a hundred paces back from the battle as it raged, as planned; I found I was advancing to keep the distance, so we were winning. Having it so close and not being in it was something I’d never experienced, and bothered me; if we hadn’t had mamokal to chase, possibly, I think I would have rallied those of my force who were willing and able, and waded back in.

All but two of my commanders reported themselves or sent someone. We were indeed the conquerors of the mamokal. All but two had been driven back as planned; two had remained unmoving, one sitting down, and were being held at bay by us now.

“Look at this, Cheng!” Mana yelled over the battle-noise when I got to where his unit was holding one, which was indeed sitting on its haunches like a hundred-times oversized dog. “The rest of us all working our hearts out, and he’s just lazing!” The mamoka did indeed look fed up with his entire situation, perhaps disillusioned with war itself, in his inhuman wisdom.

The right-most mamoka, though, was still fighting, maddened with wounds, the thirty staying with him as the battle left them behind. He was defeating us; four were down around him, one with a patch of red pulp where his head should be, another with his guts torn out by some huge blunt weapon, which must be one of the mamoka’s blades. Not surprisingly, they’d decided to kill rather than capture him, and the commander was requesting reinforcements, as well as more arrows, since they’d run out. I’d been curious how hard it was to kill one; now it seemed we’d find out. “All get back!” I said. “Shoot and throw spears at him; if we have to bleed him to death, so it goes, but we need not be in danger.”

Breached in so many places, the main force of the Lakans broke and fled in masses shortly after that, and the battle was over but for the chasing. We captured Mana’s mamoka by roping him immobile and then chaining his legs and head—we found the huge tethering-chains in what was left of the Lakan camp—and two more. Eleven got away, most following the Lakans, some never accounted for. It took until evening to kill the wild one; he finally felling onto his side and went lax enough that we could pull back his head and slit his throat as the sun was going down. The commander offered me the honour of making the kill, but I gave it back to him. “It’s yours who’ve taken the losses that earned this,” I said.

All told, we were twenty-three dead and seventy-nine wounded. “A small price for the benefit,” Emao-e said, when I reported to her. “Make no mistake, Chevenga: what you and they did was the seed of the rout.” That night we were all decorated; I’d been planning to reward my archers in particular for how well they’d shot the driver, but by the reports most of the others had done no less well. I intended to give them all Steel Arrowheads, and everyone else the Crystal Dagger that is for pure bravery, but Emao-e did. I was heading off with the others to sit down when Emao-e said, “Fourth Chevenga, where are you going? Up here.”

While I stood beside her on the reviewing stand, she told them the whole story of my books, how I’d conceived the plan and how I’d been chosen to lead it. While I felt the points of red come up burning on my cheeks, she awarded me the Eye Argentine, the highest award a Yeoli can get for victory over an unfamiliar threat, and the Silver Plume, which is again the highest degree, for excellence in command, both. I wanted to melt through the planks.

“In three years or so, this lad will be semanakraseye,” she said to the army. “Always, as a warrior, you wonder whether a new semanakraseye will appoint someone else as chakrachaseye, or take it himself, and whether that would be wisdom or folly. I say, and I want all Yeola-e to mark this, that I fervently hope that Chevenga will appoint himself, that as a general I abjure him to, because, from what I’ve seen today and before, he’s potentially the greatest fighting-commander Yeola-e has had in a century, or even longer. In three years, whomever we are fighting, I want to fight under none but him.”

I couldn’t stand not to bury my face in my hands as I stood, foolish though it must have looked, in the face of the army’s roar. When I finally found it in myself to raise my arms and blow kisses as is appropriate, everything blurred with tears. I’d been planning, when they let me speak, to invite the army on behalf of my Conquerors of the Mamokal to eat mamoka-meat as at least part of dinner tonight; the book had mentioned that the meat was good, and such a huge carcass should produce at least a bite for everyone in the army. I almost couldn’t get out the words for embarrassment. Emao-e put her arm around my shoulder like a wise old aunt, and said in my ear, “Learn to take this with equanimity, lad. It’s going to be your life.”

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