Weaves of Ashes

Chapter 578 -573: Ground

Location: Stell’s Ford, on the Kessig water

Date/Time: 22 Blazepeak 9943 AZI, Quenchday

Realm: Lower Realm

Hu Bing’s rider came in at the second bell, and Ruifen had her company moving at the third.

That was the number she cared about. Not the tide, which she had not seen yet and could not do anything about, and not the village, which she had never been to. The hour. Warning to movement, and one hour was the best anybody had ever managed on that ground and she had been trying to get it under one since the founding and had not managed it yet, and the reason was boots.

Eleven of her people had been out of boots that morning. Eleven. It had taken twenty minutes to find them boots.

Ruifen wrote 60 on her slate and under it 20 = boots and put it in her coat and went to find a horse.

***

A tide is not a migration, and it is not a hunt.

That was the thing every new ranker got wrong for the first year, and Ruifen had stopped explaining it in words and had started drawing it instead — one stroke of chalk for the high ground, one for the water, and a long smear coming down between them.

Something moves in the deep country. Nobody knows what. The things that live at the edge of the deep country move away from it, and the things that live at the edge of those move away from that, and by the time it reaches ground where people are, it is not one kind of animal. It is everything that could not stay where it was, coming down a valley in the same direction at the same time, frightened, hungry, and no longer afraid of a fire.

Her company had met three since the corps was founded.

Two had gone past four days’ walk away and had been watched and written down. One, in Emberrise, had gone through a hamlet on the Suhe side before anybody knew it existed, and Ruifen had ridden in afterward and had counted, and had put the number in a report, and had not needed to be told anything about it since.

This one was coming down the Kessig water and Stell’s Ford was in the way.

***

“Three hundred and forty,” said Hu Bing, at the survey point above the ford, with the glass still up.

“That is not a count.”

“It is not. I have counted three hundred and forty and I am not going to pretend the number is the number, because the front of it is in the trees and I cannot see the back of it at all.” He lowered the glass. “Hellhounds are most of it. Pack and a half, maybe two. The rest is everything that runs in front of hellhounds.”

“Rate.”

“Walking pace. They will be at the treeline at the sixth bell and in the village by the seventh unless something changes.”

“How many in the village?”

“Two hundred and six,” said Hu Bing, “which is the number the tax roll says and which I do not trust, so I sent Deng Hao to count doors, and the doors come to two hundred and forty.”

Ruifen looked at the ground.

That was all she did for about a minute, and the three officers behind her had worked with her long enough to stand still through it. The shortest person on that hill by a head and a half, she had been the shortest person in most rooms of her life and had never once found the fact worth an opinion.

The ford. The village on the west bank, forty-odd houses, a mill. The east bank rising into scrub. The water low — it was Blazepeak — and fordable in three places she could see and probably five she could not.

“We do not hold the village,” she said.

***

They argued about it for four minutes, which was three minutes longer than she wanted and exactly as long as it needed.

“It is what we came for,” said Zheng Wei, who had the Second Company and was not wrong about very much. “Two hundred and forty people. They are behind a wall that is not a wall, and the tide comes down onto them at the seventh.”

“Yes.”

“Then we stand in front of them.”

“We stand in front of them where,” said Ruifen.

She crouched and drew it in the dirt, which is what she does.

“Here is the village. Here is the ford. If we stand at the village we are fighting on a bank with forty houses behind us and five crossings we cannot all see, and the first time something gets round the flank it is in among the houses, and then we are not fighting a tide, we are fighting in a lane with children in it. Every man I have ever heard describe that has described losing.” The stick moved up the drawing. “Here is the neck. Two thousand paces upstream, where the valley closes to about ninety paces of floor between the water and the scree.”

“That is ninety paces of front.”

“It is ninety paces of front instead of four hundred, and it is the only ground between the trees and the village where the tide has to come to us instead of round us.” Then she stood up. “We take the neck.”

“And if they go up over the scree.”

“Then they are climbing, in the open, uphill, slowly, in front of Feng Lian’s crossbows, and they have stopped being a tide and started being targets.”

Zheng Wei looked at the drawing for a moment.

“And if they do not come through the neck at all.”

“Then two hundred and forty people have a very ordinary evening,” said Ruifen, “and I will have moved two companies for nothing, and I will put that in the report as well, and I will do exactly the same thing next time.”

***

Two hundred and eleven people went across ninety paces of valley floor in ninety minutes, and it was, in her private opinion, the best piece of work she had ever done.

Nobody would ever write that down. That is the whole trouble with Operations, and she had made her peace with it early. What gets written down is the fight. What decides the fight is whether the shield line is four deep instead of three at the place where the ground dips, and whether the bolt crews have somewhere to stand that is not behind their own people, and whether the water flank is anchored on something, and whether every single one of those two hundred and eleven people got a drink of water and knew where they were standing forty minutes before anything arrived.

Bai Shu’s syllabus had done most of it. Ruifen had simply placed them.

She walked the line twice. Once from the water to the scree and once back, and she said perhaps a hundred words in all of it, and most of those were to a nineteen-year-old on the second rank whose hands were bad.

“Name.”

“Aldric, ma’am.”

“Aldric, you are in the second rank. Nothing will reach you until the man in front of you falls down, and if he falls down you step into his place, and you do the thing you were taught. That is the whole of it. You do not have to be brave for the next two hours. You have to stand where you are standing.”

Then on down the line.

It is not a speech. She has never made a speech and does not intend to. But she has never in her life left a nineteen-year-old standing in the second rank without telling him what the second rank is for.

***

They came through the neck at twenty past the sixth.

Hu Bing had been right about the rate and wrong about the number, which he had said he would be. The front of it was not hellhounds. It was everything that runs in front of hellhounds — deer, and the low gray things out of the scrub whose name Ruifen had never learned, and a great many birds — and it came through the neck in a wave and went straight into the shield line and broke round it like water round a stone, because a frightened deer does not want to fight anybody.

That lasted a hundred heartbeats and did the one thing Ruifen had been afraid of, which was that it made the line think it was easy.

“Hold,” she said, and it went down the line in both directions, and the rankers who had begun to relax stopped relaxing.

Then the hellhounds came.

***

They come low, and they come in families and they do not stop.

That is the whole of a hellhound, and it is enough. Chest-high at the shoulder, black-red, no bark and no howl, and a bite that takes a shield edge off in one, and they came into ninety paces of shield line at a dead run in a mass Ruifen did not bother to count because counting was Hu Bing’s job, and he was up on the scree doing it.

The line bowed. It did not break.

That is the entire difference, and she had known it would come down to that, because she had picked ground where bowing was survivable. Four deep at the dip. Three everywhere else. The bolt crews standing where they could see, pouring into the second rank of the mass and not the first, because the first was already on the shields and the second was the one that would decide it.

Ruifen stood at the dip with her back to nothing, and moved seven people twice in the first four minutes, and it held.

Seven people. Two moves. That was the fight.

***

At the fourteenth minute, something came up out of the water flank that was not a hellhound.

Ruifen did not know what it was. She learned later that nobody did, and that Hu Bing’s report described it as a thing the size of a cart that came out of the Kessig water, and that Eden’s eventual entry in the survey register said the same in more words.

It went through the water-flank shields as though they had been made of paper.

Three men went down in the first two seconds, and one of them was going to keep the arm and two of them were not, and the line at the water end began to fold inward, and every single thing Ruifen had built in ninety minutes started to come apart at exactly the place she had thought was anchored.

Ruifen was already moving.

“Peng!”

He had the lance crew forty paces back at the scree side, where she had put them and where they had spent two hours being bored, because a siege lance is not for hellhounds and everybody there knew it.

“Ma’am.”

“The water flank. Now.”

They came at a run with the thing on the frame, and they set it in twelve seconds, which is three seconds better than Ruifen had ever seen it done, and Peng Deshi put his eye down the line of it and did not hurry, and the folding at the water end got worse while he did not hurry, and she let him not hurry, because that is what the crew is for and she was not going to be the officer who shouted at an aimer.

He fired at the sixteenth minute.

There is a sound. It is not a bang. It is a single enormous note, like the largest bell in the world struck once and stopped, and the air in front of the frame goes white and stays white for about a heartbeat, and then the thing the size of a cart was in two pieces and the water behind where it had been was standing up in a wall.

The flank closed in under ten heartbeats. Bai Shu’s people had drilled that closing more times than anybody had kept count of, and had complained about it every time.

The rest of the tide went round the scree at the twenty-first minute, found it was climbing uphill in the open in front of crossbows, and stopped being a tide.

***

It was over at the fifty-first minute, and Ruifen stood in ninety paces of churned valley floor and did the arithmetic that only she was going to do.

Two hundred and eleven deployed. Four wounded badly enough to be carried, two of whom would not have the arm. Nineteen wounded enough to be written down. Nobody dead.

Two hundred and forty people at Stell’s Ford who had spent the evening indoors listening to something a long way upstream and had come out at the eighth bell to find the corps sitting in the road eating.

And one lance.

That one she stood with for a while, because she was the only person on that field who had been in the room when Feng Lian said four hundred and six.

Four hundred and five now.

Ruifen got out her slate and wrote it down. Not the wounded, which Bai Shu’s people would have already, and not the tide count, which was Hu Bing’s. She wrote: 1 lance expended, Stell’s Ford, 22 Blazepeak. Target unidentified. Water flank. Would have lost the flank without it.

And underneath, because it was the true thing and she was the only one who would think to put it:

Nothing else we had would have stopped it.

***

The village fed them, which she had not expected and had not planned for and which took two hours she had intended to spend marching.

Ruifen let it happen. That was the other half of the work, and she had learned it from watching Ryo do it in three provinces: a village that has been saved and not allowed to feed you is a village that owes you something, and a village that has fed you is a village that has done something, and those are different places to live for the next forty years.

She ate a bowl of something with barley in it, sitting on a wall, and a woman of about sixty came and stood in front of her and did not say anything for a while.

“You were up the valley,” the woman said finally.

“We were at the neck.”

“We heard it. We didn’t know what it was.” She was turning a cloth over in her hands. “My husband said it was the mill race.”

“It was not the mill race.”

“No.” The woman looked at the barley bowl, and then at the ninety paces of nothing she could not see from where she stood, and then at the shortest officer in the corps sitting on her wall in a coat with somebody else’s blood on the sleeve. “How many of you are there?”

Ruifen thought about the honest answer, which was four hundred and eleven in four provinces building roads, and gave her the other honest answer instead.

“Not enough,” she said. “There will be more.”

***

They marched at the tenth bell, and she wrote the report on the road, on a board across the saddle, in the fair round hand Zhong had made all of them learn.

The sixty minutes went in it, and she put 20 = boots in it, because that was the part that would still matter in ten years when everything else about Stell’s Ford had gone out of everybody’s head.

Then she stopped, and looked at the top of the sheet for a while, and wrote a line she had not planned to write.

This is the first deployment where we arrived before the thing did.

She looked at that, and did not soften it, and did not explain it, and sent it in.

Somebody would understand what it cost to write it down that plainly. Probably not the person who read it first. That did not signify. It had gone into the record in the hand she had been made to learn, and the record is long, and Ruifen had spent her whole life being the person who does not let go of ground.