Tomorrow, the Killing

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 a motherfucker. If you miss with the point there’s still a long way to go, staring at your opposite, both of you scared shitless. But it only lasts a few seconds before the inexorable momentum pushes you together, the mad scrum of flesh allowing for little in the way of maneuver.

Everyone around me was holding on to their spears like they were some sort of charm against death, but I figured fuck that and dropped mine, going for the long dirk in my belt. It was an awkward movement, my forehead pushing up against the Dren in front of me, but I managed it, reversing my hold and slipping the weapon into his gut, just above the groin, beneath the protection afforded by his armor.

Unlike most of my comrades, I’d killed before I’d entered the service, knew what it felt like to watch a man stare up at you blankly as whatever force animates him slips out of the hole you’ve made. But I’d always felt something of it afterward, could tell you every man I’d sent to meet She Who Waits Behind All Things, could tell you why I’d thought I had to send them to meet her. Not justify it – I won’t pretend that – but explain it at least, beyond that he was wearing a different colored outfit than I was.

Of course in the thick of things the moment barely registered. The dagger rose a second time, falling into my counterpart as of its own volition. I watched him die with my head tucked against his, close as lovers. After the third blow he slid limply to the ground, and I wish I could say I felt something about it but the truth is at that point my blood was up so high all I saw was the next man in line, and I stepped over the corpse, on it really, and launched myself into the Dren behind him.

He was quick, and he caught the edge of my blade with the shaft of his spear, the weight of the men behind us locking our weapons together. I jerked the ridge of my brow against his nose, snapping the fragile bone and smearing blood against my skull, but he didn’t drop, red leaking down over a rigid sneer. It was my introduction to what would rapidly become, along with the stupidity and gutlessness of the brass, the bane of my existence for the next five years – the legendary Dren grit, a willingness to endure pain and discomfort that seemed almost an inability to feel either, which ensured that every redoubt would be held to the last man, and to the last man’s last breath.

But still, meat ain’t stone, and I managed to hook his eye with my off hand, and he screamed and dropped his pike so as to keep himself from being blinded, and I wiggled my steel into the underside of his throat and moved on to the next one.

Whether because of the hole I’d made or some other factor I could feel their line bending. Not see it, I couldn’t see anything except what was directly in front of me and a few blurred motions from out the corners of my eyes – but sense it somehow, like a change in the wind. ‘We’ve got them!’ someone screamed, and I realized that it was me. ‘One more fucking push!’

I might have been right about that, or I might have been wrong, I never had the chance to find out. Because in the scant second after I had spoken, as the long, snaking line of Dren began to buckle and turn, as victory seemed just at the limit of our grasp, the world ended.

So it seemed, at least. Practically speaking, the results of a well-formed battle hex are indistinguishable from a black-powder barrage. They both result in the destruction of wide sums of flesh, the scattering of bone and brain – but one peculiarity that accompanies the use of sorcery, or more accurately fails to accompany it, is sound of any kind. In contrast to the ear-shattering boom of cannon, a hex is utterly silent. From out of the corner of my eye I saw a light so bright it nearly blinded me. But there was no noise connected to it, nothing to alert one aurally to the holocaust that was taking place.

The vacuum was quickly filled with the shrieks of my dying countrymen, those lucky or unlucky enough to have found themselves on the outskirts of the explosion. Having avoided outright death they now found their limbs atomized away to nothing. Their cries were picked up a second later by the surrounding infantry, to whom the spell had done no direct damage but who were quick to realize that our ranks had been irreparably shattered, and our flanks were bare of support.

Prepared for this sudden attack, the Dren redoubled their efforts, straightening their formation against ours. The sudden disappearance of a substantial portion of our unit had opened up a little room in my peripherals, but I didn’t have time to take notice, not with an approaching infantryman keen to square accounts for his two comrades. The end of my knife had broken off against the spine of the last Dren, and I discarded the remainder and dove shoulder first at his back-up, hoping to get within grappling range before he planted something sharp in my chest.

I had him on the ground, my hands squeezing the blood into his face and the life out of his body, when it occurred to me that the back ranks had been awful slow to come to my aid. As a last gasp escaped past his lolling tongue I took a quick look up and discovered with a sinking horror that the lack of attention came by virtue of there being no one around to provide it. Our line had broken, utterly, and apart from Adolphus there were none of us left standing. It seemed that while I had been caught up in strangling a man to death the remainder of our division had assessed the situation and decided that the course of greatest wisdom lay in vacating the area with all possible speed.

Warfare is based on a sort of mass hysteria by which the individual mistakes his own well-being for that of the collective, but as solid as the mania may seem on march, it punctures mighty quick in the heat of battle. One moment you’re walking in lockstep, no more cognizant of your own particular existence than is a drop of blood filtering through the heart. Then some unfortunate setback occurs, entirely disabusing you of the absurd fiction that anything could possibly matter more than forestalling your own death, and you throw down your weapon and sprint for the back, willing to trample your fellow soldiers into the ground should they prove an impediment to your escape.

It’s then that the rock-bottom of a man’s character comes out, when you get to learn who it is you’ve been bunking and eating and shitting with. Though the battle was lost and our cause vanquished, you couldn’t have figured it from Adolphus, for whom the defeat of our army had been forgotten in the sheer joy of combat. He let out a roar that would have done credit to a lion, shoved back the Dren who opposed him and laid out left and right with his pole, snapping the neck of one man and notching the brain-pan of another, cowing the surrounding infantry and earning us a brief moment of respite.

He was continuing forward even then, but I got a hand on the back of his armor, not enough to check his progress but sufficient to focus his attention on me. ‘Adolphus!’ I screamed, trying to make myself heard over the fray. ‘We’re done! Let’s go!’

He gave a mournful look back at the enemy, a handful of whom had neglected to fall upon our fleeing comrades and were instead showing disturbing signs of renewed hostility.

‘Now, Adolphus!’ I said again, in what I would later come to think of as my ‘command voice.’ He gave a quick nod, and together we began to fall back.

The nature of a rout is that it sends the victors into nearly as much confusion as the vanquished, as if you threw yourself against a locked door only to find it giving way at your touch. Though our side had ceased even the semblance of being an organized body, the Dren seemed but little more ordered. Some were hot on the heels of our retreating fellows, hoping to down their quota. Some had already started on the grim but lucrative business of looting the corpses. And a great many, an astonishing percentage really, milled about in aimless confusion.

If you can maintain some sense of direction in such bedlam you’ve got an advantage, and between the two of us we managed a capable fighting withdrawal. I picked up a stray pike and held it parallel with Adolphus’s, edging it warily at anyone who came too close, falling backwards gradually and with purpose. Mostly those Dren pursuing our shattered rear didn’t bother with us, not when there were easier targets swarming all around.

The march in had only taken us ten minutes, but going back took us twice as long, three times, hell, five, I don’t know. It seemed an eternity, dead and dying everywhere you looked, the population of a fair-sized town made into mounds of rotting flesh. And the screaming, by the Firstborn, the screaming. It was like a strong wind, thousands of men hurling their misery at you, their terror and hatred.

At one point I tripped over a corpse and added to the song, certain that Adolphus would prioritize his own survival over our newly minted friendship. But he didn’t – he stood over me steady as a statue, and the enemy stayed clear.

Things eased off once we got back to the baggage train. The Dren quickly lost interest in murder, turned to scooping up anything that could be eaten, drunk, sold or fucked. By nightfall we were five miles back from the front, trying to find our unit amongst the mass of broken men, the wounded dying unattended, the officers no more capable of offering succor than they had been of saving us from the catastrophe of the day.

And that was that – twenty minutes on a bright autumn afternoon sounding the death knell on set-piece warfare, of fluttering pendants, of regimental musicians beating the score, of cavalry charges and men in tight formation. From then on it was all shovels and trenches, dugouts of mud and shit, scorching in summer and freezing in winter, and of course, always wet. Tactics switched to dead sprints across the barrens of no-man’s-land in the dark of night, armies of men as huge and profligate as locusts, suiciding themselves without order, purpose or reason.