The Undesired Princess (11 page)

12

When Hobart reached his own tent, his companions started off toward their respective quarters. The engineer called: “Hey, Sanyesh, I’m not through with you yet!”

“What is?” queried the elder, turning back. Hobart led him into the sham’s tent.

“Sanyesh,” said Hobart, “I want to start a little war with the Marathai right away.”

“War!” cried Sanyesh. The old man jumped up, hand on his sword. Hobart was alarmed until it transpired that the gesture had merely symbolic significance. “War! Ha! Cut! Stab! Shoot! Kill lots Marathai! Gr-r-r.” Then the ferocity suddenly left the leathery face; Sanyesh stared blankly. “Sham, cannot start war right away! Must gather men, tell chiefs, plan battle!”

“How long will that take?”

“Five—six days.”

“Oh, that’s all right.”

“Huh,” grumbled Sanyesh, sitting down again. “If you not mean right away, why you say right away? Get me all excited for nothing. You fight fair war?”

This question puzzled Hobart; he answered with a vague, “Yeah, I suppose so.”

“Good.” Sanyesh went to the entrance and hollered into the darkness. Presently a dapper young barbarian appeared; Hobart supposed him to be some sort of adjutant. Sanyesh spoke to him in Parathaian, then came back to Hobart and asked: “How many men you want take?”

“How many can we raise?”

“Twelve thousand, four hundred, nine,” replied the elder promptly.

“Okay, we’ll take ’em all.”

Sanyesh whistled. “Why you say little war when you mean big war? You terrible hard sham understand. I thought you meant little battle, one hundred each side.”

“No, I’m playing for keeps. But what do you mean, a little battle with a hundred on each side? Do you pick even numbers like a game?”

“Sure, everybody knows that!”

Hobart shook his head wonderingly. “I can see where it might have advantages. You’d settle things without much bloodshed.”

“Oh, it is not that,” said Sanyesh comfortably. “Brave Parathai not afraid die, and even in big war hardly any get killed. Just in—inconvenient for so many leave during lambing season and things.”

“I’m glad your wars are so unsanguiary, but how can that be if you’re so brave?”

“Look, Sham,” said Sanyesh with the air of explaining two times two to a backward child, “here is company of men, we suppose, yes? All right. Company can fight in formation, yes? Cannot fight if dis—you know, all scattered. All right. Battle start. Men get knocked down, pushed around. One or two get shot. Company not in formation. Cannot fight, so run away. Not cowardly to run when cannot fight, no?”

Hobart thought it was too bad that all the military units in history who had run at the first casualty had not had Sanyesh’s logic to excuse themselves with. He abandoned the argument to get down to the material questions of organizing a campaign. The elder drew him a rough map on a piece of hide with charcoal and pointed out several alternative routes for the invasion.

“Really, I don’t know,” said Hobart. “Which one do you think best, Sanyesh?”

Sanyesh immediately indicated the most direct approach to Marathaia. Hobart shrugged. “Okay, if you say so,” he said, though with mental reservations. He thought vaguely that he would have preferred an indirect approach, but since he could not really run the expedition he considered it wise to interfere with Sanyesh’s judgment as little as possible.

His next shock came when he was sitting on horseback with Sanyesh outside the tent-city the following afternoon and watching some troops go through evolutions. He asked casually: “Say, Sanyesh, who was that young fellow who sat in with us at our conference last night? Haven’t seen him around today.”

“Him herald,” grunted the elder. “Gone to warn Marathai.”

“What?”

“I said him gone warn Marathai; tell them when we attack, what route, everything.”

“Oh my lord! You mean he’s a traitor or a spy?”

“No, no, Sham! You said you want fight fair war. All right. When you fight fair war, you send herald to challenge enemy, arrange battle place. Simple, yes?”

“Too damn simple,” groaned Hobart. “Guess we’ll have to change the plans, to provide for an unfair war.”

“Cannot do that,” said Sanyesh calmly.

“Why the devil not?” snapped Hobart.

“Orders already given out, to get ready for fair war, battle in five days in Uzgend Valley. Now you want to change. So must countermand orders. Will take days to get everything back like was, and six days more get ready for unfair war. So we could not get to Uzgend Valley in time for battle. If we do not come, Marathai will be insulted, say we betray them. Then they invade us before we are ready. Impossible, Sham.”

Hobart argued, but the elder was adamant. As he explained it, you prepared either for a fair or an unfair war. The preparations were different in each case, and therefore it was out of the question to prepare for one kind and then wage the other. You simply had to go back to the beginning and start over.

Hobart gave in for the time being, but during the night he had an idea for a daring coup to circumvent Sanyesh’s quibbles. The next day he determined the fact that over two thousand men had been mobilized, and armed. He ordered Sanyesh: “Tell ’em to get their blankets and enough food for twenty-four hours. I want to take ’em on an overnight practice march.”

“Good,” said Sanyesh, and carried out the order. The party got under way by noon. There were 841 infantrymen, sturdy phalangites with twenty-foot pikes, and the rest horsemen.

Hobart endured a desperately dull afternoon, occasionally thanking his stars that he was not a professional soldier and hence did not have to submit to such boredom often. About an hour before sunset they reached a place where the yellow sand they were crossing gave place sharply to white. Along the line of demarcation was a long row of little obelisks, stretching out to the horizon on either side. The army halted, unordered, at the line.

“What’s the matter, Sanyesh?” inquired Hobart.

“Border of Marathaia,” said Sanyesh.

“I guessed that. But why are they stopping?”

“You say this practice march, not invasion, Sham.”

“Okay, I know I did. But here’s my idea: if we keep on going we’ll reach the Marathaian capital late tonight. We can surprise them—”

“Impossible, Sham. Cannot start training for fair war and change to unfair one in middle.”

“Damn it!” cried Hobart. “You tell ’em we’re going ahead! That’s an order!”

Sanyesh looked surly, but translated the message to the subcommanders. These looked even more displeased, and passed it on to their men. Instead of resuming its march, the army stayed where it was, buzzing with angry talk. Then little groups of men detached themselves and began to trail off toward home.

“Hey!” yelled Hobart. “What’s this? Mutiny?”

Sanyesh replied nonchalantly: “They desert. They say you deceived them. Not like deceitful sham. Pretty soon I desert, too, by damn.”

“Tell ’em I just changed my mind—”

“Make no difference. Not like changeable sham either.”

Hobart swore himself blue in the face before he capitulated. “Okay,” he groaned. “Tell ’em I was just having a little joke. I’m a humorist, see?”

Sanyesh looked surprised. “You funny man? Good! Fine! Parathai like jokes.” He raised himself in his stirrups and shouted:
“Gish!”

The men wandered back slowly; there was more palaver, and the soldiers began to grin and laugh in a reassuring fashion. A couple of them sidled up to Hobart, laughing and clapping him on the back and spouting Parathaian.

Then they suddenly seized his arms, twisted them behind his back, and tied his wrists. Another produced a rope whose end was doubled in an efficient-looking hangman’s knot. The loop was slipped over Hobart’s head, and the other end tossed over a branch of a convenient thorn tree.

“Hey!” screamed Rollin Hobart. “What’s the idea?” But nobody answered him. The soldiers, grinning, tightened the rope; several hefty phalangites anchored themselves to the free end. Hobart saw with horrid clarity what they were going to do: slap his horse into motion, so that it would bound out from under and leave him dangling. His yells of protest made no impression.

Smack!
A horny hand came down on the animal’s rump. It leaped forward. Hobart braced himself for the shock of the noose. The rope tightened, jerked—and whipped over the branch to trail loosely behind.

A calvary-man cantered up alongside and gathered Hobart’s reins; another untied his wrists. When he turned around he saw that the entire army was helpless with laughter, rocking in saddles and rolling on the ground.

“Sanyesh!” gasped the engineer. “What’s the idea?”

“Haw-haw-haw!” bellowed the elder, his kalpak tilted over one eye with the force of his mirth. “You like joke, yes? Ha-ha-ha-ho-ho-hoo!”

Hobart kept silent lest a worse thing befall him. It did anyway. As soon as he dismounted, strong arms seized him and dropped him into an outstretched blanket. Those holding the blanket heaved, and Hobart bounced into the air. When he came down they heaved again, and up he went, higher. He churned the air with his limbs, trying not to come down head first and remembering that people had received broken necks that way. Up—down—up—down—he was dizzy and breathless when they finally spilled him out on the yellow sand. He reeled over to Sanyesh and clutched the elder’s arm for support.

“Haw-haw-haw,” chortled Sanyesh. “More fun. You like more jokes, yes?”

Hobart croaked: “Heh, heh, very funny. But tell ’em that’s about all the humor I can stand for one day. We’ll march back a couple of miles from the border and set up our tents, and after that I’ll follow your advice on the campaign.”

The thing that griped Hobart most was the thought that if he had simply let the whole crew desert without interference, he would have been free of this gang of logical lunatics. Damn obligations!

He was not quite through with the Parathaian sense of humor yet. His jangled nerves relaxed, after a frugal soldier’s supper, over the thought that at least others would do the sham’s camp chores for him. As sham, he had a real bed, or at least a mattress. He entered his tent with the hope of forgetting his plight by intimate contact therewith.

Some jokester had carefully piled, in the center of his bed, a bushel of horse manure.

###

It was past noon, days later, when Hobart’s scouts brought word to him, the nominal commander of the army of the Parathai, that the Marathai were drawn up in battle array a short distance up the valley. That was not news to Rollin Hobart, who had already noted the twinkle of sunlight on military equipment. Sanyesh had begun to deploy their own army.

Hobart did not have too much confidence in the elder, but the only alternative would have been to try to run the war himself, an entirely impractical scheme. Even if he had known something about strategy and tactics, he could not in a few days have trained the barbarians to use any other than their traditional methods of fighting. At that, the terrain was such that the traditional methods were likely to prove as effective as any. They marched between vertical walls of black rock forty feet high, just far enough apart to allow the armies to deploy comfortably, but too close together to permit any wide flanking movements in the style of Subotai or Sherman.

Sanyesh gave all the orders, though he usually unbent far enough to inform Hobart of what he was doing after he had done it. His conferences with Hobart gave the troops the impression that their sham was really running things as a sham should. Since they could not understand how a man could be the commander and not be the commander at the same time, they were satisfied for the nonce. Oddly enough they showed no sign of resenting the fact that Hobart was most decidedly not one of them. That, he told himself gloomily, was no doubt due to the fact that they were all keyed up with the excitement of the invasion. How they would act after a defeat was something else; Hobart had his own ideas, and they were not nice.

Meanwhile he had nothing to do but to watch the bloody drama unfold with a certain degree of detachment. These people’s actions were so devastatingly consistent, and their motives so childishly simple, that they never seemed quite real. If this attempt failed, he supposed he would have to let his whiskers grow and penetrate Marathaia single-handed, disguised as a repairer of old clichés or something. He might of course have tried that in the first place, but such a piece of romantic knight-errantry was for him the last resort, not the first.

And not a soul among the Parathai had been able to help him in his quest for Hoimon. The late Khurav had, at the beginning of his reign, let it be known that any ascetic who wanted immediate promotion to the rank of martyr had merely to set foot inside his principality. A few had availed themselves of the offer, but after the supply of would-be martyrs had been exhausted there had been no more contact between the brotherhood of ascetics and the Parathai.

He turned to Sanyesh. “Better set up the stepladder.”

“That so,” said Sanyesh, and gave the order. The stepladder was Hobart’s one contribution to the military art, and was just what its name implied, except that it was larger than most stepladders. From its top he could see over the heads of men mounted and men afoot, and thus keep a better tab on the progress of the battle than if he had remained on the flat valley floor.

He climbed the rungs. “Theiax!” he called, but the lion had slipped out of sight among the soldiers, who, once they had gotten used to him, had become inordinately proud of such a formidable ally.

Directly in front of Hobart was the phalanx, six thousand men strong, holding their twenty-foot pikes upright like the bristles of a gigantic brush. On each side of them, small bodies of light infantry were getting into formation; beyond the light infantry, the heavy cavalry. The light cavalry—horse-archers—were strung out in a thin line across the entire front of the army. If the idea was to fool the enemy as to their dispositions, Hobart doubted whether it would work, since the Parathai always fought in one invariable formation.

The enemy were now close enough for individuals to be distinguished but not recognized. They appeared to have come to a halt, too, in a somewhat different formation. There was a heavy block of cavalry on each wing, and between the wings stretched a chain of infantry—squares of pikemen alternating with oblongs of musketeers.