42 - Someone had to give his life

A small Lakan army formed, from those who’d somehow gotten away, and those we’d ransomed, and we chased them at a regular-pace march down the valley over the next few days.

I drew Chirel for drilling one day, noticed a speck of dried blood where the guard and the blade met that I’d somehow missed when I’d last cleaned it, and flaked it off with my fingernail, my mind half-elsewhere. I suddenedly wondered, was there a time before I was doing this? Fighting was my life, the warp and the woof, the bones, the heart of it. One blessing in it: I felt twenty-five or thirty, and I was still only sixteen. How old might I feel at twenty-five?

More exactly, fighting on the winning side was my life. I had yet to find out what it was to be on the losing.

A runner came to command council mid-session with news: a cloud of dust had been sighted, so big it could mean no less than thirty thousand more Lakans were coming. It made us wonder whether Astyardk would send every male in Laka, and leach all the iron out of his nation equipping them; in the meantime, until we could get reinforcements, we were outnumbered by double.

The temptation is always there, to second-guess. Despite the devastation in my heart, my mind had been getting the itch to press our advantage faster, drive back the Lakan remnants at a force-march. And yet if we had, perhaps we’d met a relatively fresh army dog-tired, which is never good.

It was too late now; they were far enough back from us that if we tried to catch and charge them, the reinforcements would probably arrive while we were mid-battle in a wide valley, so that they could approach it any way they wished, something you never want.

This time Tyeraha sat in on the command council. “I’m going inland to muster more warriors,” she said. “Count on having another thirty-thousand in a moon.” That got her to relative safety, too. Hurai would go with her to command them, they decided. Then they turned their eyes to me. “We all know what you’re going to argue, Chevenga,” Tyeraha said, smiling, “so you needn’t.”

“You know that I’m going to argue that I should stay, of course,” I said. “Do you know that it’s not just my desire not to look like a coward making me argue it, but knowing first, that they probably have mamokal, and second, that if you pull me, it will seem to this army as if you’ve given them up for doomed?”

My aunt stared at me, her brows rising. “Oh? You’ve become that important?”

You can’t truly know the tide of feeling in an army, feel the heart of its spirit, unless you are in it, which she had not been. Reports don’t convey it. Suddenly dashed down to sixteen again, I stood stuck for words, and Hurai came to my rescue. “No exaggeration, semanakraseye. Warriors who have the gift of finding ways to bring victory single-handed are extremely rare, but they exist, and we are blessed in our lifetimes to have one right here. The army knows it and loves him accordingly.” There was assent all around the circle. My cheeks burned, and Hurai said laughing, “Enjoy seeing him blush now, everyone, before time hardens him to praise.” It never will, I swore internally.

She called a vote, and they chalked to keep me here all but unanimously; then we thrashed out a decision, to fall back to Kantila and hold it until our own reinforcements arrived.

The temptation is always there, to second-guess. I didn’t like the idea of being pinned down in a town; in the valley we’d have everywhere and anywhere to maneuver. There were examples I could name, and did, from the history of Yeola-e and other nations, of defeats over forces double the size through excellent plans, cohesiveness of units and spirited fighting. The strongest argument for retreating to Kantila was that the walls were the best defense against the Lakans’ main strengths, horse and mamokal; not entirely if they hooked mamokal to a battering ram, I argued, citing from a book of mine on Lakan siegecraft which explained how.

I guess at heart I never like having everything depend on one thing, which it does in a siege: the gate. We’d used that weakness ourselves, to the Lakans’ grief. But I was outvoted. Second-guessing is to no end anyway. For all I know, if we’d faced them in the valley we might have been thrashed and routed, and my gift of finding victory single-handed come to an end in the bloody dust, since I would never have fled myself.

And yet sometimes I wonder whether I felt as I did due to the whisperings of foreknowledge.

At any rate, this would be a new lesson for me, who’d seen things go so well: how to retreat, though it means giving up hard-won gains, when necessary.

I do not know whether the Lakans knew by their spies or guessed that aid would soon come to us; at any rate, they wasted no time. They were indeed thirty-thousand. After three days of rest from marching for the reinforcements, they surrounded the town, and attacked at dawn the fourth day, driving at the gate with a great shielded ram hitched to four mamokal. The strategem of shooting the driver was to no avail; they had no drivers, being guided from the ground by men behind the huge shield.

Kantila’s gate was built solid, of iron-bound oak half an arm’s length thick and bars whose stoutness I knew with my own arms. Still, the first impact of the ram so shook the whole wall that Emao-e commanded that the gate be reinforced. From buildings or lumberyards or wherever they could find them, the people of the town took beams and rafters and heaped them before the gate; then those skilled in hammering began nailing them to the gate.

Scenting blood, the men guiding the beasts put all their spirit into the heaves, which made the beasts do likewise. I could not see, but I remember the chorus of hammers desperately striking, then the thundering boom that shook the ground beneath us, sharpened with the creak of loosening nails and the cracking of boards, and the curses of the carpenters as they found their work undone. They did not give up even then, but worked on, for all our lives. In vain: in three more charges, the ram smashed through and the gates burst open, and Lakans flooded in.

Emao-e had set up a pike-hedge across the thoroughfare behind the gate, but whether because of failing courage, the pike-butts slipping on the cobbles or the sheer weight of the Lakan numbers, it broke soon. Fighting spread like a pool, and flowed ragged down the streets.

Before it reached our position, Mana seized my shoulders. “You should flee.” I saw agreement in the faces of the others. “We’re done for, Cheng, it’s just a matter of how many of them we take with us. Go, save yourself, become our semanakraseye.”

“If I should not be here,” I answered, “I should never have held the sword of Saint Mother.” They could not argue with that; faces turned grim. So I added, “If it’s any comfort, Jinai foresaw a lot more future for me than this day. Hey, they’ve won nothing yet, but entrance into the wolf’s jaws! Are we the dribbling spit, or the teeth?”

I split my hundred in half to hold the two nearest streets, hedging our spears. We were beset by footmen; I ordered a jagged line, ten across in the narrow street, taking the center myself, while the rest watched our backs and sides. On the roofs were our own archers. We held them, taking plenty, but more charged our flank across a backyard.

I ordered a fighting retreat; then someone in the rear yelled “Chen! Behind!” and I heard the banging of hooves on cobbles. Somehow Lakan horse had got behind us, a good score of them. Their leader called charge, and they were bearing down on us on their great black destriers, nostrils flaring, lance-points an arm long, whooping joyfully to find Yeoli foot trapped.

I backed out of the line and looked all around. We were beside a tall stone building, some large workfast’s home that had been barred on all windows by the Lakans to use as a jail, with an iron-clad door, when they’d first held Kantila. I dashed to the door. Would it open to my hand? Yes… “In! In!” I ordered.

A race, then, between our scrambling and their galloping. “In fast fast FAST!” Kyash… they were going to get to us before we were all in, someone had to turn and fight to cover the rest. I stood beside the door haranging them past me and assigning no one; how to choose who will do that? It would be me by default, it seemed.

Kyash why didn’t I think of this sooner “Leave your spears here!” They’d have no use for them in a building. I threw my own, aiming for a horse’s neck—it glanced off, curse it—grabbed another and this time got a nice thump and watched the destrier rear up screaming with the shaft in his throat and the man barely staying in the saddle, deranging the ones behind.

Time for one more throw “Cheng! Cheng! No! It can’t be you!” So close it was easy to hit and another horse screamed, but they could fit five abreast so three were still coming, roaring their deep-throated war-cry, aiming their lances at me. I grabbed up the last spear, lining up its point in my mind with the man’s chest and his point with my shield.

“Nooooo!” Kamina, one of the three last heading for the door, leapt between me and the Lakans and set himself into stance. An arm hooked around my spear arm, another around my neck, from behind; the other two of the three last, Kunarda and Mitao Feronin, barreled into me and grabbed on as well. We all crashed through the door and onto the floor. My ears heard Kamina scream; weapon-sense told me why. Krero slammed shut the door and threw the middle bolt; other hands threw the top and bottom ones, and others still started piling furniture against it.

“Aiiigghh! Kaminaaaaah!!” I fought as if my friends were the enemy; taking no chances, they kept a very firm grip on my spear.

Kamina Shae-Boraina had been let into the School of the Sword on his natural gift for fighting; his struggle had always been with fear, and with hating himself for cowardice. He was the only person I knew who’d been ordered to leap from the cliff of Akaturin—which can kill if you don’t take enough of a run or land in the water correctly—so as to defeat fear more than once. The first time he’d only been able to do it because I did it first, to show him it could be survived. I’d got a thorough combing, of course, because doing it without orders is absolutely forbidden; but I also still had the shirt he’d secretly given me in gratitude.

Now, outside, his spear and his sword were both on the ground, very still. “Kahara Kahara Kahara how could he ever have thought he was a coward?” Finally Mana sat full on my chest and drew his arm back. “Cheng, quit or I’ll hit you!”

I stopped fighting; I couldn’t stop the tears. “Someone had to give his life and it couldn’t be you, you know that!” they all started yelling at me. “Any of us would have done it, he was just in the best position!”

The thought I could not speak burned through me. Give maybe fifty years of his life for no more than thirteen and a bit of mine.