Poldarn shrugged. Looked at objectively, it was ridiculous to feel a sense of anticlimax. If he hadn't taken charge, the one practicable opportunity would've been missed, and the fire-stream would be headed straight for Haldersness and his new house. Sure, he thought, but would that really have been so bad, compared with so many men dying? Barn and his hammerman, Swessy and the others (he couldn't remember them all offhand, his mind was too ragged, but he promised to remember them later, when he was himself again). So; supposing the fire-stream had ploughed down into Haldersness, forcing the river out of its bed and obliterating his house-both his houses? So what? They were just timber arranged in a pattern, nothing that couldn't be built again, and even the farm, the river, the land weren't all that important; it was a huge island that they lived on-all they'd have had to do was pack up and move on, no big deal compared with what the first settlers here had faced, no big deal compared with the terrible malevolence of the fire-stream against human skin, the heat annealing all the memories out of their bodies, evaporating them, losing them for ever. It occurred to Poldarn that he'd made a very big, serious mistake, and that everything would have been better if only he'd left well alone.
Chapter Twenty-One
At first he assumed he was back in the peafield, and that the bodies lying out on the dry earth were the crows he'd killed. He could feel the pain in his knees-a pity I can't change the past, he thought, I'd get up and stretch my legs at this point, maybe save myself five days of misery-and the weary ache in his right shoulder. But then he realised that he wasn't alone in the ditch. It was full of men, in armour, clutching weapons and crouching low to keep their heads out of sight. Oh, he thought, I must be somewhere else.
He glanced sideways, doing his best not to be obvious about it. Whoever these people were, he had a feeling that they were under his command, and therefore had a right to feel confidence in their commander. It wouldn't do for him to start asking disconcerting questions, like Where are we? and What the hell's going on here? They might get the impression that he wasn't in complete control of the situation, and that would never do.
I must be dreaming again, he thought. In which case it's probably all right, nothing really bad can happen to me in the past, because if I'd died or lost an arm in this battle, I'd know it for sure back in the present. So that's all right, he added. This is just a holiday, a guided tour of some momentous event laid on for my benefit, as a reward for beating the volcano.
If he was dreaming, he rationalised, it seemed reasonable to suppose that he wasn't really here, and nothing he did could have a bad effect on the outcome; so he wriggled round to the point where he could put his weight on his feet and pushed up, just enough to let him see over the top of the ditch.
A column of soldiers was approaching. They looked remarkably like the soldiers next to him, as far as clothes, armour and equipment were concerned; the only difference he could see was that they were armed with straight-bladed swords, while in his own right hand he held a curved-bladed object that he recognised as an enemy backsabre (No, not enemy; at least, not as far as the present is concerned. The backsabre is our special design, unique to our people on the island. How he'd come by it, of course, he had no idea, but one of his men in the ditch seemed to have one, which suggested it was some kind of special trophy, an appropriate sidearm for a dashing and popular leader-)
There were, he realised an awful lot of soldiers drawing near, enough to make him very glad that he wasn't really there. Of course, he had no way of telling, crouched down there in the ditch, how many men he had on his side. For all he knew, there could be thousands of them, not just the couple of hundred in the ditch but other units hidden with equal skill and cunning, behind hedges, among the trees, maybe even hunkered down in cleverly disguised pits dug in the field. Since he had no idea just how wonderfully imaginative and inventive he was when it came to laying ambushes and conducting battles, all he could do was keep very still and hope for the best.
There didn't seem to be anything else he could glean from the approaching soldiers, so he turned his attention to the dead bodies. They weren't soldiers. Most of them weren't even men-there were a few old men, some boys, but the bodies were mostly those of women of various ages. All dead, of course, unless they were making a very good job of just shamming dead; but he didn't really think he was clever and imaginative enough to have staged that. Some of them at least were quite palpably dead: heads chopped off or necks slashed half through, ribcages opened, the sort of thing you couldn't really fake. The implication was that someone had massacred two or three hundred helpless civilians. He hoped very much that it hadn't been him, because the sight was pretty grim. The approaching soldiers didn't look too happy about it, for one thing, and they gave every indication of wanting to get their hands on whoever was responsible. That didn't bode well, particularly if he didn't have an extra thousand or so heavy infantry concealed about the place. He wasn't sure he cared much for this dream, after all.
The soldiers carried on advancing; they were no more than a couple of hundred yards away by now, rather too close for comfort. He wondered if he ought to be doing anything, or whether whatever was going to happen next could be left to take care of itself. Probably not. If he really was the leader of the men in the ditch, it'd be up to him; to give the order to attack-assuming that they were planning an ambush and not hiding, though if these few with him were all there were that could well be the case. Really, it was no better than being awake, the frustration of not knowing who he was or what he was meant to be doing. He could get as much of that as he wanted just by hanging round the farm, without having to travel back in time for it.
The man next to him budged him in the ribs. 'No offence,' he muttered, in a tone of voice that suggested the exact opposite, 'but you're cutting it bloody fine.'
'I know what I'm doing,' he replied, much to his own surprise (but that was the other man talking, the one who had a right to be here). 'Shut your face and wait for my mark.'
The man next to him froze, as if he'd just been hit across the face. He felt ashamed and embarrassed-the poor fellow had only been trying to help, and as far as he could see, the man had had a point, the enemy were getting closer all the time and it wasn't going to be easy getting out of this bloody ditch. By the time they'd scrambled up the bank and retrieved their weapons and kit, there wasn't going to be much in the way of an element of surprise. Still, he thought, there's no logical reason to believe that the momentous event I've come here to see is a victory. For all I know we're about to make a horrible mess of it and get slaughtered. He stole another look at the dead women and children scattered about the field like decoys, and added, Serve us right.
Then he realised what he'd been waiting for. The enemy, having come right down the field, within fifty yards of the ditch, were turning to the right, from column to file, with a view to marching off somewhere. You'd never try such an unwieldy manoeuvre on a battlefield in the face of the enemy; but they didn't know there was anybody in the ditch, so it was a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Obviously he'd foreseen that, his remarkably perceptive tactical brain allowing him to read the enemy commander's mind, right down to the minutiae of timing and procedure. He couldn't help admiring He was on his feet, clawing at the grass with his left hand to pull himself up the steep bank. On either side his men were doing the same thing, most of them rather more athletically than him. Already the first few dozen were up and on the move, hurling themselves against the enemy flank with a cold fury that argued a definite sense of purpose-probably they had a score to settle, some grievance that justified killing women and children, and prompted them to such a display of aggression. As for the other side, they didn't know what was happening. (By now he was out of the ditch, hands and knees filthy with mud, catching his breath and straightening his cramped back like an old man while all around him his soldiers were charging.) For one thing, it seemed, the other soldiers couldn't figure out why their own people were attacking them; they didn't seem to want to fight or use their weapons, not until they'd given away the advantage and lost all semblance of order and cohesion. Meanwhile, there was more movement going on in other parts of the field-he'd been right, there was a large contingent of his men tucked away behind the far hedge, another lot were rising up out of the ground like sprouting corn (another ditch, he assumed, or something of the sort) and it was soon pretty obvious that he had as many men as the other lot, if not more. That was a relief, at any rate. In fact, the result was already a foregone conclusion, if his instincts were anything to go by. He had the enemy in flank and rear, with another unit rushing up to block their front and complete the encirclement. His lot, the men from the ditch, were in the process of cutting the enemy column in two, which he was fairly sure was a very good thing in a battle. All things considered, the other lot didn't stand a chance, and all that remained was the tedious job of chopping them down where they stood. He was pleased to see that he, the leader of the winning side, was apparently content to leave the actual killing to his subordinates. It was turning into a very nasty business, and he didn't actually want to get involved, even if he wasn't really there and so couldn't come to any harm.