Chapter 6 #5
Imagine a chessboard, with white pieces and black pieces.
Introduce into the tactical scenario a red knight, but don’t tell anyone.
The danger is, assuming red is on white’s side, that red will plunge in and start thrashing about, thereby wrecking white’s carefully laid strategy.
I reached the beech trunk, bent my knees and squatted down, trying to be as small as possible.
I considered what I knew, which wasn’t much.
The silence had already told me everything it could.
The scream suggested – no more than that – that bad guys had attacked Svangerd, one of them had come to harm and the rest of them were about the place somewhere.
I reminded myself that the enemy almost certainly knew about my existence and would be wondering, among other things, where I’d got to.
That wasn’t a happy thought. I edged very carefully round the trunk of the tree until I had my back to it.
I now had the strongest position on the board, not that that was saying much.
I heard a noise; a grunt. I tried to translate it. It could be a man, lifting a heavy object, but that didn’t seem likely in context. It could easily be a pig. It had sounded very close indeed.
I tried to remember everything I knew about wild boar.
We don’t see them very often in the Mesoge, where forests are few and far between, so my knowledge of them comes from the Huntsman’s Mirror, a how-to book written by an archdeacon during the reign of Sechimer IV.
There are seventy-two known copies of the Mirror, three of them made by me, so I know big chunks of it by heart, and people reckon it’s an accurate and authoritative text.
Now then; a wild boar startled in its nest will charge, and it’s very fast and determined, and one sweep of its tusks will slice you open like gutting a fish.
That, I realised, might possibly account for the scream.
Once it’s charged, it’ll try and run, but not if its lines of escape are blocked.
In that case, it may well go to ground; it’ll sit still and quiet, hoping the monsters will go away, but if the monsters will insist on barging in and treading on its tail, so much the worse for them.
Not three colours on the chessboard: four. Now that, I had to concede, would be interesting.
A bit too interesting for my taste. If the grunt was a pig, it was no more than five feet away from me. I would, of course, fall neatly within its definition of a monster.
Thrasonius in his Art of War constantly invites us to consider the bigger picture.
So I did that. A unit of bad guys is stalking Svangerd in the pitch dark, but one of them treads on a sleeping boar and gets eviscerated.
Everybody then freezes and stays perfectly still.
On a personal note, the boar is practically on top of me; it knows precisely where I am because it can smell me, but it won’t do anything unless, until, I make the slightest movement.
The grunt would have been the moment when it located me, like the click when the roller of a spanned crossbow locks into position.
Wonderful. There’s got to be an easier way of making a living.
By this point I’d reached the stage in being terrified where you’re about an inch away from seizing up solid.
I could feel the chill spreading upwards from the pit of my stomach, and down into my bowels and bladder.
Any moment now and I’d be incapable of making any movement whatsoever – a good thing, in its way, and you can see why it’s helpful to get like that when the slightest movement will unleash a pair of razor-sharp tusks backed by half a ton of muscle and bone.
But it’s no way to play chess. What I needed to do was give the pig an escape route.
The question was, could I get the other side of the tree before the pig got me? Answer: don’t know.
Then I realised I was being stupid, and groped down beside me for something to throw.
It seemed to take for ever, but eventually my fingernails brushed against an unmistakeable stone.
I picked it out of the dirt – it was half buried, goes without saying – then lobbed it sideways, in the direction of the grunt.
I heard it pitch in something tangled, and then all hell broke loose.
The pig exploded out of its hiding place like a dyke bursting, making that high-pitched squealing noise.
Something else moved, in a desperate hurry to get out of its way.
I tried to lock in on it, but I was too busy getting myself round the back of the tree.
I flattened myself against the trunk, and something hit me.
On the head, as it happened. I registered that particularly debilitating splitting pain, as my legs folded under me and I slid down the tree trunk into a heap.
Something whacked into the tree; the follow-up blow, presumably, but I wasn’t there to receive it, which was probably just as well.
I couldn’t think. The pain flooded me like a river filling a dip in the ground, and there was no room left in the world for anything else.
Several seconds later, I can’t be more precise than that, I felt a boot on the side of my neck, pressing me firmly down until I was flat on the ground. The boot rested, applying pressure but not enough to crush my windpipe. There was nothing I could do, and I did it to the utmost of my ability.
Someone yelled out, “Got her”, and then a woman’s scream; “No, you don’t”, in another man’s voice, and another scream from the woman.
I tried to move, but the boot wasn’t having it.
The boot’s owner was clearly the sort of person I’ve always wished I was: smart, calm, clear-minded in stressful conditions, capable of judging his actions with extreme precision.
He applied just enough pressure to my neck not to break or crush anything, but only if I kept still and behaved myself.
“Over here,” he called out, in a high-pitched voice.
“I’ve got the other one.” He sounded moderately pleased with himself. He was having a good night.
“Stay there,” came the reply. Some vague movement noises, someone or something being hauled about, a woman’s gasp of pain, a man saying, “Up”, like we used to say to the pig when we wanted it inside the shed to be killed.
I was beginning to emerge from the pain in my head; it was still there, but I could peep round the edge of it and see glimpses of the outside world.
I remember thinking: well, you made a real mess of that. True, but unhelpful.
“Bring him in,” said the voice. A hand grabbed my hair, and I tried to stand up. My legs told me not to be so stupid. I felt my scalp lift off my skull, which is something I particularly dislike. I stood up, and a hand shoved me forward.
Then someone lit a lantern, and information came gushing into the world.
I saw three men and Svangerd. Two of then were pinioning her arms while the third one was busy with a rope.
She was hanging off them with her head lolling to one side; her lips were moving, but I couldn’t hear any words.
Off to the left, on the edge of the circle of light, were a man’s feet, lying on the ground.
There was also a man holding the lantern; I couldn’t see more of him than a silhouette, naturally.
“We’ve got no quarrel with you,” I heard him say, and realised he was talking to me. “You stay out of it and you’ll be just fine. Piss about with us and we’ll break your legs, and then the wolves will get you. Capisce?”
It was an educated voice, and I guessed that it could probably recite the entire litany by heart, and quite possibly large chunks of the better-known secular poets, the stuff they teach you in school to improve your grammar.
I concluded that I was talking to a fellow officer of the church militant, almost certainly a member of the outfit I tried unsuccessfully to join, all those years ago. “What have you done to her?” I said.
The man nodded, and somebody hit me. I went down on my face, and the boot was back on the nape of my neck.
The logical thing, I realised in a flash of insight, would be to kill me.
It was a delicate situation, poised on a knife edge, and I had the potential to wreck it all with one sudden movement, just enough distraction to let Svangerd’s demon break the men’s grip and start slaughtering.
Even if they had orders not to kill me, out here, in the dark, with wild pigs running around, who the hell would ever know?
I couldn’t see the man with the lantern any more, so I couldn’t tell if he was nodding or shaking his head.
The reference to breaking my legs hadn’t been lost on me.
There’s a difference in ecclesiastical law between killing someone and breaking his leg; and if the latter results in a pack of wolves getting lucky, that’s unfortunate or the will of the Invincible Sun.
That sort of refinement is what you get when you allow lawyers to decide questions of conscience.
The Order of Intercession has some of the best lawyers in Holy Mother Church.
I waited. Nothing happened. I waited some more, and the boot connected with the side of my head.
I woke up, which wasn’t what I’d been expecting.
I opened my eyes, then closed them quickly, because the sunlight hurt. So did everything else. It took a whole second for the memories to come surging back. I can’t tell you how I felt because there isn’t a word for it in our debased vernacular form of Robur.
I sat up and went methodically through my limbs and appendages. They were all still there and more or less functional, apart from the pain. My head was splitting and I had a cricked neck like you wouldn’t believe.