The horses were the breed of western Moha, mostly black or roan, with a few palominos like sunlight become flesh, all bred for grace and glory, maybe the best-looking children of my native land. Bershar is famous for horses too, by the way — mountain type, homely but steady in a crisis as these slimlegged beauties were not.
The horsemen were sleek young aristocrats. Owning their horses and gear, they’d feel they were doing the army a favor. They made a grand military picture. They wouldn’t dream of riding any horses except the beautiful breed of western Moha — hell, I’d as soon send a green girl into battle. You can’t trust them to stand, and if the rider loses control for an instant they go wild as the wind.
For most of the cavalry — the boys were that young — this would be the first war. Not so for the infantry — old faces there, furrowed by sword-work; hard-case types used to stinking rations and the rule of the bull-whip. Some were clods, others looked repulsively crafty — ex-slaves some of them, and some were petty criminals given a choice between slavery and infantry service. Any discipline they possessed had been banged into them from outside; they were men for the ugly labors, the uncelebrated dying. Except for the murders and rapes of their profession they had no pleasures but gambling, drink, cheap marawan, stealing, and whatever enjoyment can be wrung out of a fifty-cent prostitute or a complaisant drummer-boy. In their inarticulate heavy way I suppose they welcomed war and thus were good patriots. I’d say that building the infantry out of such trash was another Moha mistake — one that Katskil didn’t make. An army of men able to think like human beings may be hard to handle, but it does win wars, so far as any army ever does.
A second mounted detachment appeared on the higher ground. That meant a second battalion — three companies, each of a hundred and fifty foot, plus the mounted unit of thirty-six. A Moha regiment consists of four such battalions. As it turned out, only two battalions were on the road — Emmia had heard it wrong, or some upholstered brass in Moha City decided that since Skoar was only a half-ass city with a twelve-foot stockade, why bother with more than half a regiment?
I watched the foot-sloggers down there. Some were marching with drooping heads — tired, hot, bored. Gnarled masks, two out of three pockmarked. From time to time I saw a dull mouth-gash turn sideways to shoot the juice of a ten-cent chaw. A twist of the wind brought me their reek, more disturbing than the sight of them. An army, however. On them, people said, depended our safety from the Katskil Terror. And, yes, there was a Katskil Terror. So far as any nation can be imagined to possess a personality, that presented by Katskil was iron-gutted, ambitious, stern. A political image of course, which means, largely a fantasy: the Katskil people themselves were and are of every sort, cruel, gentle, wise, sffly, mixed-up average like the people of any nation.
I suspect the mere fact that their territory encloses Nuber the Holy City on three sides has inclined the nation (as a political fantasy imitating reality) toward a certain pious arrogance which the Church may privately deplore but will not openly condemn. Church decisions have been consistently pro-Katskil (within respectable limits) for so long now that no one expects anything else.
They streamed by below my oak tree, the sodden, witless, beaten faces. On the hill, a trumpet screamed.
Flights of arrows from both sides of the road had cut into our troops like a pair of scissors. Riders were toppling off their mounts, the horses going mad at once and plunging everywhere. No sound reached me yet but the trumpet cry.
The Katskil battalion in ambush had let half our line go by, then stabbed at the center. Moha’s flank scouts must have merely skirted the edge of the woods; perhaps some idiot thought the forest too dense for an army to hide in it. Now that the trap was sprung, the Moha men doubling back to help — if they did — would have the hill to climb, and maybe the rush of a storm in their faces, for that fitful growing wind was a northeaster.
The trumpet blast echoed inside me — three short notes and a long. I knew it must be a recall of the first battalion that was passing below my tree. It halted them. I saw grotesque faces empty with shock. Someone started a yelping: “Skoar! To Skoar!” Noise swelled hideously on the name, and a furious young voice cut through it: “Get back up there! Move, you God damn pus-gutted slobs! You heard it. Move, move, you whoreson sumbitches, move!”
Up here — well, what was in it for them? Why, up there under blackening sky, men in dark green were pouring out of the woods and killing men in brown. I heard for the first time the shattering Katskil yell. And I saw our second battalion still marching over the rise — stifi in formation, poor yucks, stepping off a cliff in a dignified manner.
Yet there weren’t so many of the dark green uniforms. No more had followed the first flood; plenty were already fallen — for make them angry or scared or merely startled like a herd of spooked cattle, and that Moha rabble could fight. Except at the initial surprise blow there can’t have been much arrow work. Jammed there in the narrow gut of the road, both sides were forced to infighting, always a deadly business. I don’t know how many brown shapes lay mingled with the green-shirted Katskil dead. The brown and red-brown melted at that distance into gory mud.
The flag of Moha reappeared, hurrying up the rise. At least the soldiers of the color guard weren’t all of a whimper for the comfort of the city’s stockade. To this day I wonder why a b.s. yard-boy on the run, with scant reason to love his native land, should have gulped tears of pride and awe at seeing how the Moha color guard knew where to go. A glory of white and blue and gold, it climbed the rise, that rag with no meaning except the fantasies men had woven into the fabric. A wave of green surged to meet it, a wave of men who just as dearly loved a rag of black and scarlet.
I saw that flag too, wrathful in the wind. Moha cavalry charged it; their horses fell pierced or hamstrung. Black and scarlet are colors of night and fire. That flag was glorious as ours, if there is such a thing as glory.
But down in my neighborhood was disgrace, nastiness of panic. I saw one flash of contrary action — one horseman galloped by toward the battle and in passing whipped the flat of his sword against a mouth that was howling: “To Skoar!” Only three riders followed him. Maybe the rest were out of my sight trying to stem the disorder of the infantry, the men who had come to defend the city and were now running for shelter inside it — a slow run, like the motion of men caught in momentum who must keep their legs moving or fall on their faces.
I took out my golden horn. Forty feet above them I blew the call that trumpet had sounded, three times.
I looked down. No one had located me. The sound would have seemed to be coming from all around them. They were not running now. I blew the call a fourth time, more quietly, as though the men of their own kind up the road had said in reasonable voices: “We are in trouble.”
In the silence some cavalry boy dropped the words: “Kay, let’s go take them!” They ran — the other way.
Moha won a dazzling victory that day, if there is such a thing as victory. I’m sure history calls it a victory, for the priests who turn out the little simple books for the schools must have recorded the puffing Moha-Katskil war of 317 — it didn’t even last into the following year. Old woman history chewing her mishmash of truth and maybe-so beside the uncertain fire of today.
When I looked again at the distant rise I saw the color guard still cruelly pressed, no more than a dozen Moha men left around the standard-bearer. As the ring of defenders was cut even smaller it held shape in stubborn courage, a shine of steel within a dark green band. At the crest of the rise the demoralized cavalry was winning back some order. They might have been dangerous in a charge. Charging at what? — not at the nimble devils who slid in and out among them like green smoke. Here and there riderless horses broke for the woods leaving man to his own sickening inventions.