The Belly of the Bow (48 page)

Avid Soef hesitated for a moment, then nodded. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘My suggestion’s fairly self-evident, I reckon. Let’s hear what you’ve got to say.’

‘Thank you.’ Mogre leant across the table and drew the big chart towards him. ‘All right,’ he went on, ‘here’s the map of Scona.’ He jabbed at a corner with a sausagelike finger. ‘Here’s Scona Town. Point to bear in mind: it’s the only sheltered anchorage capable of receiving more than a handful of ships, so from that angle it’d be a good place to land. Against that, of course, it’ll be the most heavily defended place on the island. Looked at another way, if we’re going to win this war then sooner or later we’ve got to take Scona Town, either by assault or siege, and siege is out of the question unless we can maintain an effective blockade.’

Rehamon Faim, a tall, broad-shouldered man in his early forties, nodded vigorously. ‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘Sooner or later we’ve got to take them on at their strongest point, so why not sooner? The key phrase for this whole war, it seems to me, has got to be
overwhelming force
. There’s a point in any battle where, if you outnumber the enemy by a sufficient proportion, you can hit so hard and so overwhelmingly that there’s absolutely nothing they can do about it - smother the bastards, in other words - and that way you keep your losses to a minimum. Well,’ he added, ‘that’s how I see it, anyway.’

Avid Soef shook his head. ‘I’ve read the same books as you, Rehamon,’ he said, ‘and you haven’t quite got that right. In a land battle, on the flat and in the open, then yes, I’d have to agree with you. But an opposed landing on a defended position like Strangers’ Quay - that’s asking for trouble. Now, if you’d ever
finished
the book, you’d have read the bit where it’s explained how, in a bottleneck or defended-causeway scenario, too many is actually worse than too few; and I say that’s basically what a seaborne attack on Scona would be.’

Sten Mogre, who’d been pouring himself a drink, rapped the table for attention. ‘You’re both of you getting too far ahead,’ he said. ‘Scona Town’s obviously the key to this war, but it’s not the only potential beach-head, not by a long way. If you’d care to look at the map, you’ll see the other choices ringed in red.’

With a general scraping of chairs and hunching of shoulders, the committee studied the map. ‘You’re being a bit optimistic, aren’t’ you?’ said Mihel Bovert, the acting treasurer. ‘Some of these you’ve marked are just little coves, places you’d be hard put to it to land more than a fishing boat.’

‘I’m coming to that,’ Mogre repled patiently. ‘Here’s my point. Now, before I start, this isn’t a suggestion or a proposal, so there’s no call to go jumping down my throat. It’s a straightforward question. Which is going to be better, a single landing in force, or a number of simultaneous landings all round the island?’

Soef shrugged his shoulders. ‘You’ve obviously been mugging up on this, Sten,’ he said. ‘You tell us what you think.’

‘All right.’ Mogre resumed his comfortable sprawl. ‘Let’s just think for a moment about how the rebels fight. Quick word-association game: someone says Shastel, you say “halberdiers”. Someone says Scona, immediately you think “archers”. Right? So, we agree on that, now what we’ve got to do, the way I see it, is to organise this war so that halberdiers will be at an advantage over archers. And where are archers at their best? I’ll tell you what the books say - not me, the books, the people who know about these things. And they’ll tell you, archers are most effective when deployed defensively from a position of strength against a massed advance of the enemy across open ground.’

‘We know all this,’ interrupted Mihel Bovert. ‘Make your point.’

‘All right.’ Sten Mogre nodded pleasantly. ‘A massed advance of the enemy across open ground, gentlemen: that’s what we’ve got to avoid. And here’s where Avid’s point about numbers sometimes being a handicap is important. When you’re marching down the throat of a line of archers, the more of you there are, the better their chance of hitting something; simple as that. Better to have smaller, more mobile assault units converging on the enemy from different directions; you make them divide their forces - and with archers, as everybody knows, there’s a magic ratio, somewhere between thirteen and ten to one, depending on distance between the armies and quality of troops. Once you go below the magic number, archers simply can’t stop a determined advance of heavy infantry. So, our aim’s got to be, split them up enough to take the individual units below that threshold. And we do that by dividing our own forces and making them do the same.’ He paused and looked round. ‘How are we doing so far? All agreed?’

Avid Soef did his best to look bored. ‘Like you keep saying, Sten,’ he said, ‘we’ve all read the books. All you’re really saying is, let’s use a basic encircling strategy. Common sense.’

Mogre smiled at him. ‘It looks that way, doesn’t it, until you look at the map. Look at the map, Avid. You see these brown bits, all round the edges? They’re mountains. Scona is basically one big mountain, with pockets of straight and level stuff scattered here and there. And when I was doing the first year of the course, they made me write out a hundred times, where there’s mountains, there’s problems. You know the sort of thing - ambushes, supply, communications, the right hand now knowing where in hell the left hand’s got to, basic stuff really. If we turn six thousand men loose in parties of a few hundred in the Scona hills, sprinkled all over the shop like handfuls of seedcorn, we’ll deserve what we’ll undoubtedly get. Are you following all this, or shall I go back?’

Avid Soef scowled impatiently. ‘Now what are you trying to say?’ he sighed. ‘First it’s
Let’s divide our forces
, now its
We’ve got to stick together
. Would you please make up your mind?’

‘Calm down, Avid,’ Mogre replied, ‘nobody’s getting at you. All I’m doing is trying to point out what I think is a pretty obvious fact about this war, which is that there’s no simple answer; we can’t just copy out a few relevant passages from the set books and follow them to the letter, we’ve got to use our heads. We’ve thought about the enemy, sorted out their strengths and given a little preliminary thought about how to avoid them; now let’s do the same for the terrain.’

Pier Epaiz, the youngest member of the committee, raised his hand. ‘As it happens,’ he said, ‘I’ve been doing a bit of work on this very point. I teach a class in property law, and I had my second years go through the Cartulary records and pull out all the old copy mortgages and leases from way back, anything to do with land transactions on Scona. We’re correlating them now, and once we’ve married up our findings with the old tithe maps and census returns, we should be able to put together a far more detailed geographical survey than anything we’ve got in the main archive. Which means,’ he went on, grinning nervously, ‘that if we do a proper job, we ought to be able to produce reliable maps that actually show our people where things are.’

‘Now
that’s
the most intelligent thing—’ Avid Soef started to say; but Mogre interrupted him.

‘Point of interest,’ he said. ‘Any idea how long this exercise is likely to take?’

Pier Epaiz thought for a moment. ‘Six months at the very most,’ he said, ‘and there’s every chance we can do it in four, if I can get some more people assigned from other classes. In fact—’

‘Four months,’ Mogre repeated. ‘You’re suggesting we hold up the war for four months while your students read their way through old property deeds.’ He shook his head. ‘Tell me you can let me have something that’s an improvement on what we’ve already got in four
weeks
, and yes, that’ll be a useful contribution. Otherwise I guess we’re just going to have to make do with the tithe maps, from which,’ he added, ‘if I remember my law classes, all the plans and diagrams you get in title deeds were originally copied anyway.’

‘Yes, but there’s usually further details in the text—’ Epaiz tried to say, but the rest of the tables was looking at him, so he sat down again and pushed his chair back. ‘All right,’ Mogre went on, ‘there is actually a valid point here. Geography - know the terrain. Maps - where we’ve got two or more units working towards a common objective, make sure they’re all using copies of the same map, drawn to the same scale. Don’t laugh,’ he added, ‘it’s been known. One commander runs a pair of calipers over the map, calculates it’s two days to the city. His colleague on the other side of the city’s got a different scale map so he gets a different time estimate - result, one of them gets there before the other one does, ends up facing the enemy on his own and gets a hammering. What I’d like you to do,’ he went on, looking across at Pier Epaiz, ‘is get this mapping school of yours turning out precisely identical campaign charts copied from the tithe map, beginning with twenty copies just for starters and then keep ’em coming till I say When. All right?’

Epaiz nodded silently.

‘This is wonderful,’ said Sten Mogre, ‘we’re actually starting to make some progress. Let’s see if we can make some more. Now then, we’ve got Pier on map-making, what else needs to be done before we can make a proper start? Ernan, would you like to put together some figures for me on, first, what we’re likely to need in the way of supplies and materials - right across the board, from halberds to boot-buckles to bacon - and then second, what we’ve actually got, and finally third, what we need to get, where’s our best chance of getting it, how long and how much. Are you happy with that?’ Ernan Mines, small and painfully nervous sub-dean of the faculty of Mathematics, nodded several times. ‘That’s fine, then,’ Mogre went on, turning to the tall grey-haired man sitting to his immediate left, ‘Hiors, why don’t you get your History students cracking on the best profile we can put together of the rebel forces - number, training, equipment, everything you can get? Grab hold of as many traders, fishermen, spies, whatever as you can lay hands on, anybody who’s likely to know anything useful - recent shipments of military supplies, best guess at manpower reserves, all the demographic stuff, accounts of previous engagements in the dispatches archives; see if you can scrape together a few samples of rebel kit so we can see what we’ll be up against.’

He paused to draw breath, then leant forward a little and looked straight at Avid Soef. ‘And what I’d like from you, Avid,’ he continued, taking no notice at all of the expression on his colleague’s face, ‘since you raised the issue, is a rundown on what kind of ships we’ll need, how many of them, where we can hire them from and how much it’s likely to cost. Keep in touch with Hiors, he’ll be able to tell you what the rebels have got in the way of fighting ships so you’ll be able to make provision for keeping them off our backs while we’re trying to land troops. Now then, anybody, have I forgotten anything?’ He waited for two seconds, then went on, ‘Nobody? Well, if anything occurs to anybody after the meeting, let me know. Meanwhile, I’d like to suggest that we meet up in two days’ time and see where we’ve reached. Agreed? Splendid.’ He stood up. ‘I think we’ve actually managed to get some valuable work done here today, so thank you, all of you. If we keep on at this rate, who knows, we might just all still be alive this time next year.’

The committee filed out, except for Avid Soef and Mihel Bovert.

‘I know,’ Bovert said, before Soef could speak, ‘it’s a disaster.’

‘You reckon?’ Soef smiled cheerfully. ‘I don’t think so. In fact, I think it’s all going wonderfully well.’

Bovert stared at him. ‘Really?’ he said. ‘That Redemptionist pig hijacks the meeting, hijacks the whole damn war, makes us look like idiot children—’

‘Relax.’ Avid Soef perched on the edge of the table and pulled a discarded map towards him. ‘Use your brains. So Sten’s taken charge; if you remember, we aren’t exactly here by choice. Now, if it all goes wrong, we can turn round and say, Nothing to do with us, you want to talk to Sten Mogre.’

Bovert conceded the point with a brisk nod. ‘And if all goes well?’

‘In that case, we share the credit and nobody’s any worse off. And besides, there’s still a long way to go. But my guess is, since Sten would insist on taking everything on himself, he’s going to be so busy running the damn war that he won’t have time to remember why we’re fighting the wretched thing in the first place.’

 

‘Don’t take this the wrong way,’ Zonaras said over breakfast, ‘but just how long are you planning on staying?’

Breakfast consisted of the remains of the previous day’s loaf, a slab of cheese aged to translucence and a jug of cider in urgent need of using up. Nobody seemed particularly hungry.

‘I don’t know,’ Bardas replied. ‘To be honest, I hadn’t given it any thought. Why? Do you want to get rid of me?’

Zonaras and Clefas looked at each other. ‘This is your home too, you know that,’ Clefas said. ‘But we’ve got to be realistic.’

Bardas raised an eyebrow. ‘Realistic,’ he repeated.

‘That’s right,’ Zonaras said. ‘Face facts, Bardas. We produce enough to keep the two of us, just about. Three would make it tight.’

Bardas stirred in his seat. ‘That depends,’ he said. ‘Three useless losers like you, perhaps. Shut up, Clefas, when I want to hear from you I’ll let you know. This is a good farm, or it was in Father’s day. All right, we were never rich; but it provided for all of us and paid the rent as well, and nobody ever went hungry or barefoot that I can remember.’

Zonaras was bright red in the face. ‘We work damned hard, Bardas,’ he said. ‘We were up and seeing to the herd while you were still asleep in your pit. Don’t you come here telling us how to do our job.’

‘Someone’s got to,’ Bardas replied calmly. ‘Oh, I’m not saying you’re idle,’ he went on. ‘Nobody could accuse you of that. You’re just useless. Stupid. Everything you touch goes hopelessly wrong. If there’s ninety-nine right ways of doing a thing and one wrong way, you’ll choose the wrong way every time. And you know why?’

Clefas got to his feet, hesitated, then sat down again. ‘I suppose you’re going to tell us,’ he said.