CHAPTER
TWENTY-FIVE
“Okay,” Surjan said. “Everything you know about spear-fighting is great, if you find yourself fighting an enemy one on one. If you’re isolated and in hand-to-hand combat, you can forget most of what I’m about to say to you.”
He faced two dozen men, lined up in two rows. Each held a long stick, which Surjan had carefully collected and kept along the road for this very purpose, and an oval shield made of leather.
In the distance, the host’s banner watched, flapping in the breeze.
Two dozen men, and one woman. Tafsut.
Surjan’s female friend, from Ahuskay village. She had joined the spear-fighting training he had organized, and for the three days during which Surjan had been observing their sparring, she had willingly thrown herself into the fights. Like any of the men, she fought with great personal courage. She was beautiful, with her dusky-clay complexion and her shimmering black hair. They leaped, they threw their spears when they had openings, they slashed as well as they thrust. It was a fighting style that exposed their bodies to counterattack but also generated strong, violent hits.
It was also totally unsuited for fighting in a unit. It was the fighting style of barbarians, and Surjan aimed to teach them all an additional way to approach battle.
He wasn’t entirely sure where they were going with this army, but it seemed they were heading into combat. And specifically, against the violent, thick-skinned Sethians. When that battle came, Surjan wanted them to fight like a unit, not like a mob of uncoordinated heroes.
“We are going to learn how to fight together!” Surjan bellowed in his parade ground voice. “The first, the single most important thing you need to know has nothing to do with the spear. We must learn to stay together as a single body. Shoulder to shoulder.”
“If we stand shoulder to shoulder,” Badis said, “are we not easier for enemy archers to shoot?”
“We will prepare for archers later,” Surjan said. “But the answer is no. Shoulder to shoulder you will protect each other from arrows and other missile weapons. But let us consider an enemy with a spear or sword. Badis, raise your spear into a guard position. Back hand near your waist, blade at eye level. You two, to his left and right, do the same. Now observe.” He made as if attempting to break through their guards. “To either side, you have a brother, Badis. Behind you are brothers. All you have to worry about is the two feet in front of you.”
“Yes,” Badis said. “But if we move, we will have to move together.”
“That is correct!” Surjan bellowed. “So here is the first rule of fighting together: hold the line.”
“Even in retreat?” Munatas asked.
Tafsut spat. “We do not retreat.”
“Hold the line,” Surjan said.
“What if we have to turn?” the other woman in the spear-fighting group asked.
“We will learn to turn together,” Surjan said. “And when we turn, we will hold the line.”
“What if a fighter falls?” a short spearman pressed.
“Hold the line,” Surjan said.
“Do we go back to get our wounded?” the same man wondered.
“We go forward together,” Surjan said, “and we go back together. The second rule of fighting together is this: follow your leader.” He tried to think of a word for sergeant, and couldn’t, so he made one up. “Each platoon will have a Speaker for the Spears. A Spearspeaker. He will tell you when to turn left, when to turn right, when to step forward, and when to step back. And you will do as he says.”
“We will hold the line!” Usaden barked.
The other warriors all looked at him and nodded.
“We will walk with bent knees,” Surjan said. “Torso straight up and down. For now, we’ll hold our spears in guard position if we’re in the front line, and in shoulder position if we’re on the second line. Watch your brothers to left and right out of the corners of your eyes. You want neither to get ahead, nor to be left behind. We will learn by doing, and we will drill until we know without thinking how to take steps that are the same length, so that our line holds.”
“Hold the line!” Usaden grunted.
“Hold the line!” others answered.
“Are you the Spearspeaker?” Tafsut called to Surjan.
“For now, at least. I will call out your steps, one at a time. First, forward. Step! Step! Step!”
The line was ragged at first, and tended to become more ragged at it moved. But Surjan kept barking, moving the line forward and then backward until they did so without breaking formation. Then he taught them to pivot one hundred eighty degrees, swinging their spears with the hand placements that ensured the shortest possible range of motion for the weapons, and then marched them back and forth again, until the sun went down.
Eating roast antelope beside a fire an hour later, he found himself sitting next to Tafsut.
“I think I won’t be Spearspeaker,” he told her. “I’ll command the Spearspeaker. Or maybe there should be two Spearspeakers, who both answer to me.”
She nodded. “Are you asking my advice?”
“Your thoughts, at least.”
“Badis should be Spearspeaker,” she said. “Or Usaden. The other warriors all respect them.”
“The other warriors?”
“That is not why I joined the spear-fighters.”
Lowanna held up her sling to demonstrate to the crowd of assembled warriors. “Some of you are shepherds or hunters and already have experience with this weapon,” she told them. “We’ll be shooting stones at the target I have painted in goat’s blood on that large rock over there. If you can hit the target three times in a row using your own form, and that’s different from what I’m about to show you, then you can ignore what I’m about to teach. Otherwise, this is how you use the sling.”
She had made the slings with Kareem’s help, and Kareem himself stood with the group, brow furrowed as he focused on learning how to use the weapon. Lowanna had been unable to bring herself to eat meat since arriving in the ancient world and discovering she could hear the speech of animals, but she had made her peace with using and crafting things from leather. She had chosen the sling because it was portable, and deadly, and because projectiles were abundant.
She had grown up using the sling as a child in the Northern Territory. First, it had been a toy. Later, she had taken small game with it and driven off predators.
She held her sling up. “The entire length should be about as long as your two arms together. The small patch of hide in the middle is where you put the stone. A good stone is the size of your thumb or maybe a little larger. Notice that one length ends in a loop and the other ends in a knot. Place the loop around your index finger and hold the knot loosely between your thumb and forefinger. Just pinch it, lightly.”
The group followed along. Several of them were already lethal with the sling, but no one showed any impatience. Lowanna herself had learned to use the sling to protect sheep on her uncle’s ranch in the outback, using stones to chase away dingoes, and then to kill rabbits. She’d taught grad students on three continents to shoot with the sling. She’d never had to use it to attack a human being, but she knew she could cause damage.
She taught her band to swing the pouch in a figure eight and release, and also to hold the loaded pouch at arm’s length and then fire in a single overhand throw. They practiced pacing out the distance they’d need from one another so they could stand together, and then she took them to the target she’d marked on a boulder by splashing blood on it.
“The main thing to do with the knife is stab.” Marty demonstrated, thrusting. “If you slash, like this, you can only wound parts of your enemy that are near the surface. You can blind him, or maybe you’ll get lucky and hit a vein.”
He had thought that he would work with their warriors on moving quietly. He’d expected Surjan to be helpful with that, and that he might be able to enlist Kareem, as well. They had quickly learned that their warriors walked differently from the people from the future. Rather than rolling heel to toe by habit, they stepped with the blade and ball of their feet first, and then rolled the heel down. Was that because they didn’t have lifetime habits of wearing heavy Western shoes? In any case, it made for a naturally quiet walk.
So Marty had moved on to teaching them to fight hand to hand. He’d worked through some punches, kicks, and throws, and now he was instructing them to be effective fighting with knives, and fighting against knives.
His warriors were all comfortable using knives as tools, but few had fought with them. By preference, they fought with spears.
“But if you thrust, you can hit him in an organ.” Udad grinned. It was a shocking expression on the face of a young man still several years shy of twenty, but Marty reminded himself that ideas about adulthood were very different in the ancient world. Udad was no child.
And if Marty was going to allow him to be part of the host, he couldn’t very well fault the boy for understanding Marty’s point about how to use a weapon.
He couldn’t fault the man.
Marty nodded. For the next point, his grandfather had explained how wrong movies usually were, but that was obviously not relevant now. “You hold the knife up in front of you,” he said, demonstrating. “Point up. The knife itself keeps your enemy away and protects you, and is here in a position to strike at the belly and the chest. That’s where you want to attack.” He gestured at his own center of mass. “This space is full of organs that make great targets.”
“And you parry the knife with your knife?” Udad asked, hesitantly.
Older men clucked their tongues and shook their heads.
“Good question.” Marty grabbed Tafsut by the elbow and brought her forward to demonstrate. Surjan watched her intently; was that jealousy? “No. That would be you trying to catch a tiny piece of metal with your own tiny piece of metal, and it will almost certainly go wrong. When someone attacks you with a knife, you have two options. You can move out of the way. Or you can block the attack.”
“Block the attack?” Tafsut stared at him.
Marty chuckled as he realized this was the first time in his life he’d ever taught anyone any piece of martial arts. “Like this. You attack me.”
They both had short sticks snapped to the right length to represent fighting knives. Marty held both hands at his centerline, his right tightly gripping the stick, ready to block any incoming attack. Tafsut held her practice knife low and forward, as Marty had described. She circled to her right, encroaching on Marty’s left and forcing him to join her in the same slow circling motion. “Good,” he said.
After a quick feint—not a maneuver he had demonstrated—she lunged in to stab him in the belly. He shifted slightly to the right, and slapped the inside of Tafsut’s wrist with his stick, sending her attack flailing outward.
He gently poked Tafsut in the belly with his own stick and grinned.
“I see,” she said.
“By keeping your weapon, even if it’s only your fist, at your centerline, you can make yourself ready for an attack for any direction.” Marty said. He quickly walked them through examples of an inside, outside, high, and low block. His men nodded their recognition and then their approval. Several cheered.
Surjan stepped forward. “Everyone, practice. With your partner, take turns. One of you attack and the other block and counter. Then switch.”
The Sikh stepped between Marty and Tafsut, who promptly put up her practice knife and circled. Marty found himself bumped aside and partnerless.
Marty withdrew a few paces and watched them. There was a spark in the woman’s eyes, a kind of combative laughter as Surjan returned her smile. Marty felt a sudden sense of unease. Not because of any jealously—on the contrary, it was because he knew that Surjan and the rest of the main crew were to return home to the future. Her heart might certainly be broken if Surjan vanished from this world, but would he have misgivings about leaving her behind? Marty had never interfered in the relationships any colleagues had had with locals on any archaeological dig in his career, and wasn’t this the same thing? Was he worried about discipline? But fundamentally, he and his companions were organizing a premodern war band, a host, not a company of the U.S. Army.
It wasn’t his business to interfere.
Marty sighed and left the warriors drilling with Surjan.
Marty and the rest of the crew stood on a low rise to watch. He leaned on a practice spear as if it were a staff. Below them, gentle hills spread in all directions. To the west and south, the hills were anchored and carpeted by tall dry grass, while to the east and north, they churned into coppery red sand, giving way on the eastern horizon to long dunes.
A knife ridge of rock, fifteen feet high, had been marked with two circular targets, each three feet across. The company’s warriors stood in a spear-bearing division nearer the rock, and on their far side, slingers. Usaden stood as Spearspeaker to one side, and the First of Sling was a sling fighter named Idder who had joined them in Jehed. He wasn’t from the town, apparently, but a shepherd who lived in a village nearby. With the slingers was a platoon of archers, warriors who had their own bows as well as slings.
Badis began belting out orders in a voice he had learned from Surjan. His warriors advanced toward the ridge and then moved away from it. They turned one hundred eighty degrees. They pivoted ninety degrees one direction and then ninety degrees the other. They thrust in unison, they planted their spears to take a charge. They raised their shields and drew them back into an overlapping carapace, like a turtle withdrawing into its shell—leaving more than a few spears poking out between the shields, so the turtle was also prickly. The shields had been fitted with long straps tying them to the warriors’ bodies, to make it easier to fight with shield and spear; the straps had been Gunther’s idea, but Kareem had made them and Surjan had taught the fighters how to use them.
Marty felt a sense of pride growing within him as he watched the warriors drill. In a few weeks’ time, they’d transformed from a pack of individual fighters into a cohesive force, and that was impressive.
He also felt disquiet. What was he doing at the head of an army?
And when he took this army into battle, and its soldiers began to be wounded and even die, how would he feel? What would he do then?
These were not game pieces, wooden meeples or cardboard chits to be tossed back into the box. These were people who would bleed and die, based on the fortunes of war and on decisions Marty made.
He looked at Surjan and saw pride and satisfaction on his face. Pride, satisfaction, and appreciation—Surjan was keeping a special eye on Tafsut.
At a barked command from Idder, the slingers and archers went into action. He ordered them to march left, and right, to change direction, to take cover. They didn’t move shoulder to shoulder like the spearmen did, but in a loose swarm. Then Idder called out targets—left, then right—and his slingers hit the targets indicated. The archers mimed shooting, but didn’t loose the arrows, which weren’t always easy to replace. He marched them backward fifty feet and the slingers hit the targets again. He marched them back a second time without hurting their accuracy, and it was only when he’d marched them back a third time, and they were some two hundred feet away from the targets, that they started to miss.
Even at that distance, they’d still inflict real damage on a massed crowd of soldiers.
If they fought human soldiers. If they fought Sethians, it wasn’t clear that they’d be able to do any damage at all.
“Look,” Kareem said, interrupting Marty’s train of thought. “Look to the east.”
“I can smell them.” Surjan growled.
Marty looked. At first, he saw nothing, but after a minute had passed, he saw a rising cloud of dust on the road. Someone was coming.