He'd already sliced a dozen necks to the bone before he realised: this was all very well, and his performance of the eight approved cuts would've wrung a nod of approval out of Father Tutor himself, but it wasn't the job he was supposed to be doing. True, he was forging ahead like a scythe through dry grass, but all around him the enemy were streaming past, pushing their way into the yard as if he was somehow irrelevant, while his men were either falling back or being killed. All his perfectly executed strokes were doing was putting him in a position where he'd be cut off, surrounded and hacked to death, leaving the garrison without anyone to tell them what to do. He stopped in his tracks, trying to figure out how to retreat-not covered in the syllabus, because sword-monks don't-and wondering what in hell's name he could do to rally his people and push the enemy back. No idea, not a clue. Then, while he stood still and helpless over the body of the last man he'd chopped down, something slammed into the back of his head and he found himself sprawling on the ground.
Beautiful irony; because it was Monach's getting knocked silly by a stone that saved the moment, not his supreme skill and grace. Someone in the retreating line of defenders saw him go down, and yelled, The chief's been hit, they got the chief; whereupon half a dozen of them pulled up short, faced about and rushed towards him. At least one of them ran straight up an enemy spear; at which, more defenders waded in to try and rescue them, and the general falling-back turned into a reckless but effective counter-attack. By the time they reached Monach he was on his feet again, sword in hand and looking round for the bastard who'd hit him. They surged round and past him, as soon as they realised he was all right; just as the enemy had done, they ignored him, as though he belonged to some other battle that happened to be going on next door. The hell with this, Monach thought; but the sheer ignorant energy of his followers stove in the advancing line and rolled them back under the gatehouse arch. There were plenty of other sword-monks in the garrison besides Monach, and they seemed keen to make the most of their chance to indulge themselves, too.
Right, he thought, and glanced up at the gatehouse tower, hoping to see if Spenno had managed to dismantle the Poldarn's Flutes yet. But the angle was too steep-all he could see were palisades. Not to worry; the job in hand was obvious enough. He needed to rally his men, make sure they didn't pursue the retreating attackers too far, then organise work details to patch up the smashed gates.
Monach tried shouting, but he couldn't make himself heard. His voice had always been soft and quiet, and he'd never had occasion to learn how to project it. As he stood in the yard, feeling unpleasantly foolish, he caught sight of Galand Dev. The short, wide engineer was engaged in a faintly ludicrous duel with two enemy soldiers, both of them a head and a hand taller than him; but he was using their height against them, warding off their blows with a captured shield as they cut down at him, and making them skip backwards as he slashed at their knees with a short-handled adze. A few strides brought him up close enough to join in; one soldier didn't see him coming until it was far too late; the other swung round to face him and forgot about Galand Dev, an omission that cost him his life.
'Thanks,' Galand Dev panted, wiping sweat out of his eyes, 'but I was doing just fine-'
'Listen,' Monach interrupted. 'You can shout louder than me. I want you to call them back before they go chasing off through the gate and get themselves cut off. Then I'll need you back here.'
One thing Galand Dev excelled at was giving orders. Soon the last of the enemy had scuttled away under the gate, and the defenders had regrouped in the yard, with Galand Dev barking out assignments by platoon.
Fixing up the gates didn't take nearly as long as Monach had expected it to. One platoon lifted them up and walked them back into position-they'd been ripped off their hinges, and the locking bar had snapped in two, but the panels themselves were hardly damaged at all. Another platoon fetched heavy poles and bricks; they weren't master masons or joiners, but they knew how to prop and wedge. Besides, Monach reflected, he didn't want the gates to keep the enemy out permanently. Just long enough.
He shuddered, not really understanding why. There was, after all, no difference. He could feel the damp warmth in the cuffs of his shirt, other people's blood, an occupational hazard for those who favour the lateral cut off the front foot. Severed veins spurt; there's a knack to blinking the blood out of your eyes quickly, so you don't lose the plot in the middle of a complex sequence of moves. No difference, not even in religion, between a subtle feint that deceives one swordsman, and the setting up of a fire-spitting monster behind a wicker screen…
Inappropriate thoughts: you could maybe just about get away with them as a foot soldier, a follower of orders, but not when you're in charge. Instead, he should be playing chess in his mind, figuring out the move after the move after next. (But Monach hadn't got a clue what he was going to do, let alone what the enemy were planning; he couldn't play chess worth spit, either.)
Still.
'We'll need to reinforce the east wall,' he heard himself telling someone. 'Who's in charge up there, anyhow?'
The man Monach was talking to mentioned a name he didn't recognise; it was as though his memory had been wiped away, like moisture off glass. 'Fine,' he replied. 'Take one man in five off the south wall, they won't try anything there.'
Whoever it was he was talking to didn't seem to agree with that. 'You sure? It's high ground on that side, if I was figuring where to put ladders-'
Monach grinned. 'You've forgotten your precepts,' he said. 'Strength is weakness. East wall's the strongest point, so they'll reckon we won't bother so much with defending it. Same principle as with the gates,' he added, for his own benefit mostly. 'Weakness is strength.'
The man (a sword-monk, Monach remembered) grinned suddenly. 'I remember that one from classes,' he said. 'I thought it was a load of shit back then, too.'
Colonel Muno, or whoever was commanding the enemy, couldn't have read the precepts of religion; or else he shared the sword-monk's low opinion of them. He attacked the east wall, just as Monach had anticipated; he brought up siege ladders-the trunks of fifty-year-old ash trees, taller by a yard than the walls and cut with slots up one side to serve as rungs-and sent his men clambering up them like terrified spiders. Monach had his men push down the first three or four; but the wall was too low for the drop to be fatal or even debilitating, and most of the ladder-climbers picked themselves up after they'd hit the ground and immediately set about righting the ladders for another attempt. So Monach told his people to let the bastards come, and placed sword-monks on the walkway at regular intervals. He denied himself the indulgence of joining them.
The essence of religion is, of course, simplicity; it aims to pare away distractions, on the assumption that the divine is an indivisible perfection. There was something wonderfully simple about sword-monks setting about religion, if you could put out of your mind the (distracting) fact that they were cutting human tissue and bone. A purist-Father Tutor, say-might have quibbled, pointing out that their choice of cuts was too diverse for perfection; some of them favoured the downwards diagonal into the junction of neck and shoulders, others the rising diagonal across the throat, while others opted for a flamboyant, almost blasphemous celebration of variety, ranging from the minimal thrust to the full sweep of the arms, laterally off the back foot, shearing the head off the neck in a shocking waste of energy. Monach (who had specialised all his adult life in just the one cut, a swift drawn slice across the windpipe) didn't really mind, which in a sense was a failure on his part. His only real concern was to keep the enemy out of the enclosure, and so far his approach seemed to be working.