They came up onto the hog’s back almost without knowing it. One moment they were dragging themselves up a steadily increasing gradient, having to use halberd-shafts to pole themselves up the hill; the next, the ground seemed to fall away under their feet, and Juifrez found himself staggering, waving his arms to try and keep his balance. He signalled a halt, wiped the rain out of his eyes yet again, and tried to make sense of the landscape.
They were on the top of the ridge all right, but directly to the west he could see the hillside tumbling down in just such a combe as the scouts had described – which was bewildering, since the combe where the village lay should be to the east, and about three miles further along. Either this was a different combe entirely, or else they’d taken a diagonal course up the hill, overshot the combe and come up on the other side. The combe itself, of course, was full of cloud, which billowed up onto the sides of the crest like the head on a mug of beer. Ridiculous; but here he was, and he had to do something. He could send scouts to see if the village really was down there, but somehow he didn’t feel that was wise. The thought of any of his bedraggled, unhappy-looking force being able to descend that steep slope quietly enough to avoid detection was, he felt, fairly remote. Nothing for it but to order the advance, lead his men down the hill and hope he’d got the right combe. Ridiculous. Ah, hell…
He raised his halberd and pointed down into the mist. The question wasn’t so much whether they’d be able to get down the slope quickly enough to be onto the enemy before they had a chance to get ready. It was more a matter of whether, in all this filthy, slippery mud, they’d be able to stop at all. A vision of a hundred and fifty heavy infantrymen tobogganing into battle on their backsides, frantically trying to steer with the butt-ends of their halberds, flitted through his mind and made him cringe. Austerity and Diligence, he muttered to himself, victory or death. Does it count as a victory if the enemy can’t fight back because they’re laughing so much?
With severe misgivings and a general sense of being in the wrong place, he led the way. Their best, or only, chance lay in zigzagging their way back and forth across the slope, slowly working their way down until he felt the risk of detection was too great; then he’d have no alternative but to charge down the rest of the slope and trust to luck that there really was a village in the bottom of the valley. Wouldn’t the scouts have mentioned it if there were two basically identical combes right next to each other? Maybe they had, and he hadn’t been listening. And assuming, just for fun, that there really is a village down there, what are we supposed to do about it, exactly? Burn it to the ground? In this rain?
Maybe they’re already waiting for us; bows strung, arrows nocked, just waiting for the command, ‘Loose!’ Maybe we’re all about to die, any minute, here in the rain and the mud. No way of knowing, of course. I hope I don’t die today.
It took a very long time to work their way down the side of the combe, maybe more in subjective than objective time, but it’s the time you feel that matters. No signs of any life whatsoever, which was reasonable enough. Either this was the wrong combe and there wasn’t a village down here at all, or else it was the right combe and everyone was safe and warm indoors, where any sensible person would be on a day like this. Only idiots and raiding parties go slobbering about in the rain and the mud. Idiots, raiding parties and people who are hopelessly lost…
Juifrez stopped dead, digging his heels in to keep himself upright. Below, through a curling wisp of cloud, he could see a thatched roof, no more than hundred yards away. Damn it, he thought, holding up his arm for the halt. He stood for a moment, trying to see or hear something, anything at all apart from the patter of rain on his helmet, like the drumming of a bored child’s fingers on a desktop. Around him he could see the fuzzy outlines of his men, blurred by rain and mist, standing the way he’d seen herds of wild ponies, still and aimless in the rain, just standing and dripping. Here goes nothing, he muttered under his breath, and gave the signal for rapid advance.
The next moment he had more than enough to occupy his mind. Rapid advance was one way of describing it. The general philosophy behind it all seemed to be that if you ran fast enough you had a chance of keeping from falling over, as if instability was a pursuer hot on your heels. The three platoons of the Fifth Company (Austerity and Diligence) scampered down the hill like reckless, over-excited children, skipping and bouncing, sliding and careering, and all amid a dead, eerie silence that was quite unnerving. The danger they were in was very real indeed; if a man stopped suddenly (assuming such a thing was possible) it was virtually certain that someone’d go charging into the back of him and spit him clean through with the spike of his halberd. Being aware of this, everyone was trying to run faster still, so that the whole unit was accelerating, racing ahead like falling rocks bouncing down a mountainside, a hundred and fifty men all terrified of each other, running away from their own men directly towards the enemy. By the time the ground under their feet started to level out and the first houses loomed up at them out of the mist they were covering the ground at speeds most athletes would never aspire to, skimming over the mud like flat stones spun over still water. Ludicrous, Juifrez told himself, ludicrous…
Then a shape reared up at him like a hostile animal – a log-built house, almost a shack, and he was heading straight for it. He did the best he could to avoid it and ended up colliding with the corner, feeling the impact bumping all the air out of his body. His feet shot out from under him and he slammed down onto his back, trying to cry out as his head hit the ground but entirely lacking the breath to cry out with. Somewhere in the mist in front of him he heard a woman screaming, and he could see his men streaming past, halberds levelled, completely out of control. More screams followed, and crashes like someone dropping an armful of scrap metal, and then the first scream that was pain, not terror. An accident, probably; a halberdier blundering into somebody with his weapon at the level, a collision like two carts crunching into each other at a street corner on a foggy day. As he fought for breath he could make out the voice of one of his sergeants, bellowing orders – he couldn’t hear the words but he recognised the inflections – form ranks, dress ranks, present arms. Another scream, quite close. Contact with the enemy established.
He dragged himself into a sitting position and forced himself to breathe; the instinct to do so seemed to have been buffeted out of him, he had to issue commands to his body to fill and empty his lungs. His halberd must be somewhere; there it was, slippery with mud and unpleasant to hold, like something dead fished out of a river. He trawled it towards him and levered himself up with it; knees weak, body still winded, no pain yet but only because of the shock. As he took a deliberate breath of air, a shape materialised near him out of the fog, a tall man, not a soldier, not a member of the Fifth Company. Instinct, which had abdicated responsibility for getting him to breathe, made him level the halberd and lunge. The man just stood there. The spike went clean through, until the blade obstructed it.
He looks surprised. Why does he look surprised? Doesn’t he know there’s a war on?
The man put both hands round the halberd shaft, opened his mouth to speak, died and fell down, sliding neatly off the halberd spike. He didn’t appear to have a weapon of any kind. It was then that the thought occurred to Juifrez: maybe this is the wrong village. Maybe this isn’t the village where, according to our spies, a platoon of Scona archers has been stationed for an attack on Bryzis. Oh, wouldn’t that be…?