Davy Read online

  Clouds swarmed eastward playing dark games before the sun. Edgy weather, a petulant wind stirring the oak leaves with sultry insistence. A spring storm might be advancing.

  The road was nearer than I thought. I saw a red gash less than half a mile to the east. It could only be red clay, where the road approached and crossed a rise of ground. Though the road was empty I heard an obscure and troubling sound that was no part of the forest noises. Turning my head to puzzle at it, I found I was staring down on what must be another section of the same road, startlingly near my oak, hardly fifty feet away, a spot where branches thinned out to reveal the red clay and some gravel. Confirming it, the unstable breeze brought me a whiff of horse-dung. Not fresh — this near part of the road was empty like the other, but I didn’t like it, and clambered to a lower spot where I was better hidden. Whatever the sound might mean it was fairly distant, a dry mutter not resembling either voices or a waterfall.

  I cut off an end of my gray loin-rag and tied it around my bead. I don’t mind being red-haired, but it doesn’t help you look like a piece of bark. While I was busied with that, a dot of life appeared on the distant road between me and the uneasy sky.

  Even far off, a human being seldom looks like any other animal. In Penn, with the Ramblers, I’ve seen the flapeared apes they call chimps, the chimpanzees of Old Time. I could always tell one of those from a man if I wasn’t drunk or spiteful. The man I saw on the red clay road was too distant for me to be sure of anything but his humanity — that rather arrogant, rather fine human stance by which even a fool can defy the lightning with a hint of magnificence — and his alertness, his observant stillness under the intermittent sun.

  10

  That dot of man printed against the sky was studying the road. The noise ceased while he paused, then a tiny arm swung up and forward, and the uncertain sound resumed. Men must have used that signal from ancient days, when there’s been good reason not to shout aloud: “Come ahead!”

  He was followed at first by a few like himself in brown loin-rags and red-brown shirts, walking with the long stride of men used to extended journeys with light burdens. Advance scouts. The sound strengthened as the first horsemen appeared over the rise.

  Feet of a mass of men and horses — having once heard the surge of it as I did that morning you’d never mistake it for anything else, whether the men are marching in rhythm or coming broken-step like the soldiers who followed that mounted detachment. This was no parade. They were coming to defend the city. I saw presently a group of men without spears surrounding a handsome motion of white, blue and gold — our Moha flag.

  The advance scouts would not take much time to reach that near section of the road. I drew back all the way behind the tree-trunk, waiting. They were good — to tell of their passage I heard only a faint crunch of gravel. Then came the plop and shuffle of hoofs. I dared peek around the trunk as the cavalry went by; they’d leave it to the scouts and never think of looking upward. Thirty-six riders — a full-strength unit, I happened to know.

  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, b
oth 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.

  But now came the cavalry of the first battalion returning up the hill roaring calamity, crashing first against the green band around the color guard and smashing it like a splintered wheel. The flag danced and moved up the rise. Then Moha’s foot-soldiers — recovered, eager, their panic overcome by a simpler lust. My mind could hear their steel cuting through air and crushing flesh — for a minute or two I think I was shivering myself with my own insanity of pride. This was the accomplishment of my golden horn.

  I watched a man in dark green flee for the forest cover with three Moha soldiers after him. One pursuer had lost his loin-rag and most of his shirt; distance made the naked man an insect — weedy, prancing high-kneed. A javelin caught the fugitive in the back. The naked jo and his companions slowly shoved steel into him as he lay motionless.

  Since that day I have fought without disgracing myself in two wars, against the pirates in 327 and in the rebellion of this year, when we fought to defend Dion’s reforms and were compelled to learn that the people will not and cannot benefit from any reforms unless they come gradually; I have never again taken my golden horn near the scene of war…

  All Katskil men were now in retreat, and the flag of Moha already throbbed in beauty at the top of the rise. I saw no banner of black and scarlet; it must have gone with the retreat back into the woods. I saw no more sunlight. The fresh cavalry unit joined the broken one and their captains conferred under a gray sky. Only foot-soldiers were chasing the Katskil men into the woods. One cavalry captain was jerking his arms as if talking in wrath, or self-justification maybe. The other must have managed to strike flint and get a light to his pipe in spite of the dancing uneasiness of his horse, for I saw a tiny spook of gray float above his head.

  A trumpet presently recalled the infantry — they could hardly have done much in the woods, where the Katskil men might regroup and make them sorry for it — and the Moha battalions were again in motion. Hardly more than twenty minutes could have passed since I saw that first scout. A skirmish, engaging less than a thousand Moha men, on the Katskil side perhaps four hundred.

  The cause of the war was a dreary boundary dispute that had been kept alive one way or another for fifty years. So far as I can see, nations exist because of boundaries and not the other way around; the boundaries are drawn by people more or less like you and me and your Aunt Cassandra, and we like to think that as human beings we know enough not to sit down in wet paint bare-ass, or lift a porcupine by the tail, or hack the baby’s head off to cure a teething pain. It’s a curious thing; I can probably give you a perfect solution to any contradictions involved, next Wednesday, if I don’t oversleep.

  Words floated up to me from the road: “Did y’ see the Katty I got, tall sumbitch with a beard? My God ’n’ Abraham, don’t look like they teach ’em to cover the gut aytall.” Another voice was crying and petulant — the wounded were being carried by. A man wanted to see his daughter. They could bring her, he said — it was safe here, no stinking soldiers around — she was nine, she’d be wearing a brown smock her Ma made her — that voice faded out and another said: “My head hurts.” Over and over, that also growing fainter, obscured by a shuffle of footsteps, clash of gear, other voices: “My head hurts — my head hurts…” They were gone, leaving the morning peaceful if there is such a thing as peace.

  I had heard no noise of dogs behind me; now I was released from that and other fears. Skoar would be soon celebrating the entry of a glorious army, and never mind fugitive yard-boys. There’d be crowds, bonfires with kids dancing naked and shrieking, churches adrone with hymns of thanksgiving, taverns and whorehouses squaring off for a long night’s work, policers busy with brawls and drunks and the quackpots who bounce out of their holes at the first whiff of excitement, and public speakers being trotted out of their stables — you know, with a rope at each side of the bit and a third handler in case the speaker should fumble at the happy task of ramming the splendid mahooha into the quivering public mind.

  I studied the countryside, wishing the rain would arrive and lighten the air. Black dots were growing large like separated shreds of cloud. The crows were already on the scene; they would have been cynically watching from nearby. Other creatures would join them before long, the rats and wild yellow dogs and carrion ants.

  A soldier who should have been dead reached upward and let his arm fall over his eyes. The motion, small to me as the stir of a fly’s leg, caused a crow to flap away. I saw a snap of brilliance as light touched something on the moving hand, a ring or bracelet. He was like a sleeper who covers his eyes to preserve a dream. I thought: Man, turn over, why don’t you? Turn away from the light if it hurts your eyes!

  In the talk of the Moha men who passed below me I had heard no one speak of the horn call. Maybe each man supposed the music was for him alone.

  It seemed to me I must go to that man whose arm had moved, or I would dream of him. I climbed down from my oak and walked boldly to the road. No danger. A red squirrel was already on a branch beside the road, watching me without scolding. I stepped out from the bushes and turned left, toward the battlefield, and reached it in a few minutes after only a few turnings of the road
. The crow sentinels squawked word of me. I saw the lurching run and climb of one of the larger birds, red-necked and hideous, who circled so closely above me that I caught his stench and was almost fouled by a spatter of his muck

  The first man I passed wore dark green. He lay in the roadside ditch, face upturned and no-way angry. His bow was shorter and heavier than mine; it would be hard to bend but easy to carry in thick woods. I might have taken it but for a superstitious feeling that to do so would put me on a level with the vultures. I felt absurdly that all the dead were delaying me, as if they could wish to speak. A wart-nosed Moha veteran, for one, his gashed neck so twisted that although he lay belly-down his spiritless eyes appeared to watch me — why, alive he’d have had nothing to say to me, more than a snarl to get off the sidewalk if he noticed my gray loin-rag.

  The man whose arm had moved lay as before, but he was dead. Maybe he had been all the time, the motion only one of those aimless things that occur after death. That sparkle on his hand was a ring, ruby-colored glass. Knowing him dead, I was free to be afraid again. The Katskil soldiers might not have fled far; slave gangs would come from Skoar to carry in the Moha dead. I crossed the rise and started down the other side intending to get back under the forest cover.

  There had been some fighting on this side of the ridge; not much. I was halted by the sight of a small sandycolored beast crouched at the edge of the road. A scavenger dog, large for his breed. They are said to be clever enough to follow an army on the march, as sometimes they follow brown tiger, and for the same reason. The dog, unaware of me, was watching something beyond a patch of bushes at my right. I had come quietly; his nose would have been already charged with the smell of human beings and their blood.