The Far Side (40 page)

Ezra looked at her.  “The choices these guys face are all bad, Andie.  They don’t have a clear superiority over the Tengri.  You don’t go home though, with a report that you didn’t fight, given a fifty-fifty shot at victory.  Be aware if they take the chance, and if we’re there with them, and if they lose -- we’re dead.”

“So, we make sure they don’t lose.”

He laughed.

Melek greeted them in the name of the new captain.  Kris wished the man’s name was pronounced with a long “U” rather than a short one, making it sound entirely too much like an unfortunate English word.  Eventually Ezra turned to Andie and Kris.

“Andie, Captain Dumi has some questions,” Ezra said, after listening to them for a few minutes.  “Is it true that you can make more crossbows if you had more sword blades?”

“Sure.  But ask Collum how many bolts he has and if he can find more,” Andie told him.

Ezra whistled.  “Yeah, that old bitch on the battlefield: logistics.  Just when you think you can ignore her, she bites you in the ass!”

Ezra translated and clearly the answer didn’t please Melek’s superiors.  Four quarrels, Ezra told them, and he had no way to make more, not here.

Captain Dumi said something, and Collum replied at length.  Again after listening to them, Ezra spoke to Kris and Andie.  “He asks why not use arrows, and Collum says that he has tried that, and he says that the wire split the arrow lengthwise.”

Andie grimaced.  “At least he didn’t get hurt, which is good.  That sort of thing is dangerous.”  She thought for a moment.  “Ask if they have any copper or brass -- not bronze.”

It took a while to get the meaning across, and one of the privates fetched a small copper object that looked a miniature bell.

“How many of these do they have?” Andie asked.

“About a hundred,” Ezra translated the response.  “But they aren’t very happy about it.  They keep using a word I haven’t heard before.”

“No more?  I can do something with these, put a cap on the ass end of the arrows, to spread the impact of the acceleration more, but a hundred isn’t going to cut it.”

“Why not?” Kris asked.

“Because a hundred divided by fifty is two.  I don’t think many of these guys would be comfortable going into a fight with just two shots.  We need at least a thousand if they want to arm everyone with crossbows -- not to mention we need to know how many spare swords they have.”

The answer to that was that were six spare swords.  “Okay, six,” Andie told Ezra.  “I can make those up tomorrow if they want; the bottleneck will be getting the wooden parts shaped.”

“If it took you a day by yourself,” Ezra asked, curious, “why would you think they could make a half dozen in a day?”

“Henry Ford!  Henry Ford!  You are needed on the Far Side!” Andie said sarcastically.  “We teach them assembly line strategies.  One guy we show how to make the wire, another we show how to wrap the blade in place, another guy does the cocking mechanism.  Give me a half dozen men, and I’ll have a regular assembly line.”

Ezra laughed and told them.  “Well, Captain Dumi isn’t quite sure he believes you, but he says with six more crossbows and a hundred bolts, he’s happy.  That’s a few more than fifteen bolts apiece, and then they’d still have their regular bows.  They seem more concerned about those copper bells, though.”

“I take it then, that it’s like you said,” Kris asked, ignoring the concern.  “They are planning on fighting.”

Ezra looked at Melek and showed no expression on his face.  “Military officers have to show some degree of aggression or they get the boot.  To have a fifty-fifty shot at the bad guys and not take it -- the man can’t avoid the fight, Kris.”

Melek translated for Ezra, and after a few minutes Ezra ran his hand over his face before turning to the two girls.

“It’s the best plan, I guess.  They’ll leave five men here and most of the crossbows, except Collum’s, with you two and Chaba.  The rest of us go south.  He’s not sure if what Melek and Collum say is true about how effective our weapons are, but if they are right, he’s correct to assume that I’ll be able to kill half or more of their enemies, all by myself.  If they break and run, which most armies would do after fifty percent casualties, he’s confident of final victory.  He knows he’s going to lose at least twenty men, killed or wounded -- and that’s if everything goes as planned.”

“We can’t be separated,” Kris said, a little desperate.

Ezra nodded.  “Yeah, I told him the same thing.  Except he’s got his honor and his duty to think about -- in this case I think it’s duty ahead of honor.  He wouldn’t be a good officer if he didn’t pick the best option available for himself and his men.  That means that I have to go south with them.  Kris, Andie... I just can’t take you with me.  It’ll be a roll of the dice, no matter what we do.  Yeah, the odds are on our side, but people make 1D20 saving rolls all the time in Dungeons and Dragons.”

Andie stuck her tongue out at him. “You can have your pistol back.  I’ll make myself a crossbow, if I have to tackle one of their soldiers and steal his sword.”

“Andie, if I get close enough for them to shoot me, the plan is busted.  A pistol might help me for a few minutes, but those 9mms have just fifteen-round magazines.  My own weapon is in better shape, but not for something like this.  I have exactly three mags, and about a quarter of the rounds are gone from one.”

“What kind of rifle do you have?”

He laughed.  “I thought you would have recognized it...  You like SG-1 so much...”

“Pardon?”

“The basic weapon is an FN90, a Belgian light machine pistol.  That’s P90 on SG-1 -- they use the Belgian parachute version of the weapon.  This is an S90, their idea of a ‘Sport’ version.  They sell it as a semi-automatic rifle, tongue in cheek.  The kit to make it identical to the military version is about a hundred bucks, and they are freely available.”

“So, how many rounds in a magazine?” Andie asked.

“What, you think this isn’t SG-1, where they never run out?  For your information they come in thirty-two and fifty-round magazines.  I have three of the fifty-round variety.”

“I still don’t like it,” Andie said heatedly.

It was Kris who spoke next.  “Andie, we’ve been here for God knows how long.  It’s been three weeks, Andie, and I can’t think that the odds of our being able to go home are getting better with each passing day.  We have to accept at some point that this is it -- we’re not going to leave.

“And if we can’t leave, we have to secure the best possible position for ourselves.  We saved Melek and his men.  We rescued a maiden from the slavers...”

Ezra interjected, “Which is, by the way, an almost magical, historical moment for them.”

“Yeah.  Andie, this isn’t Kansas.  Life with Melek’s people is, I suspect, as good as we’re likely to get here.  We have to do whatever we have to do, to secure our welcome.  And if that means putting our asses, individually or collectively on the line, that’s what we have to do.  This is as good as it gets,” Kris told her friend.

Collum said something and Melek turned to Ezra and spoke a few words.  Ezra turned to Kris.  “Kris, they have to know what we’re talking about -- they’re not stupid.  But Collum wants a translation of what you just said.”

“Then give it to him,” Kris told Ezra.

Ezra and Melek conferred for a bit, but finally it was Collum who nodded.

There was a long explanation from Melek to Ezra, that Ezra had to go back and explain a few things.  Finally Ezra turned back to the two young women.

“Politics!  Don’t you just have to love it!  One of their fighting groups or societies or whatever you want to call them, is trying to get all the others to join them in fighting the dralka.  Melek says that the beasts are numberless, and that for the next thousand years they will do nothing but fight dralka, and the ancestors that they once promised to return to rescue will be forgotten.

“That is, by the way, another reason why they want to go south.  Defeat the old enemy, rescue some of the dozen-and-a-half slaves, and their political opponents will be without ground to stand on.  If they run away, those enemies won’t be considered as a terrible scourge, not if this one fighting group goes south and puts paid to them.”

“Christ, I wonder if those people in the SCA with their ‘back to the Middle Ages’ have a clue what that would mean?” Andie said with a laugh.

“Considering SCA and Ren Faire politics, I think most of them do,” Ezra told her.

“Yeah, so off you go, Ezra.  You have to promise us you’re not going to fuck this up,” Andie told him.  “If you go and get killed, I’ll fire your ass.”

“If I get killed, I’ll have quit first.”  They all laughed, but it was forced.

Collum had turned serious and was in deep discussion with the captain and Melek.  Ezra once again translated. “We’re going to go a little south this afternoon, in the last dregs of light.  There are two hills we saw, near the shoreline, about a thousand feet high.  Collum wants us to camp on the easternmost hill and a cold camp at that.  He wants a fire lit every morning and evening on the other hill -- the idea is to attract any scouts to the wrong place.”

They prepared for the last push, and Kris had to admit the thought of riding in a wagon instead of having to carry her pack was a pleasant relief.  It was done quickly and as it got lighter, she had a chance to study the draft animals.

They looked more like buffaloes than horses or oxen.  They were definitely not happy with being harnessed and having to pull heavy loads, and were mean and nasty.  She asked Ezra who talked to Melek who confirmed what she’d thought.  Originally the draft beasts had been meat animals, but the loss of anything else to do draft work had made them turn to the faux buffaloes.  Probably, she thought, in another few hundred years, they’d be better domesticated, but not yet.

At the night’s stop it was Rari who was the center of attention, with his tales of Chaba’s life.

Finally, Andie tugged at Ezra’s sleeve.  “See if you can get her to talk about that ship of theirs.  Can it tack?  Sail upwind?”

Chaba wasn’t educated and her captors hadn’t spent any time educating her.  But, Andie had been right -- she made it clear that their ship had been able to sail into the wind.

That right there nearly got the results Kris would have preferred -- that everyone would turn around and go back to the city where these people had come from, because once again Andie had stressed she could show them how to do the same thing.

The actual result was that Captain Dumi assigned ten men to protect Andie and Kris instead of the five he’d originally planned on.

Andie showed Kris what was needed to make arrow caps the next dawn.  She had a half dozen men with hammers to supervise, and she kept them at it until there were no more of the little copper shell-things left to fashion.  They had a hundred and three crossbow bolts prepared, and it wasn’t even a tithe of the arrows that filled cask after cask in the wagons. 

Andie had men learning their individual tasks, and as she’d expected, the bottleneck was fashioning the crossbow stock.  Still, that was something that Collum showed two other men, both older.  In a short while they were showing others how to do it.  Kris wasn’t sure why they made ten stocks, but that’s what they produced.

As night was falling, men worked to assemble the weapons, and by supper time, they had finished.  Kris was aware that all of their hosts were impressed that so many new weapons could be fashioned so quickly.

They wouldn’t let Andie, Kris, or Ezra test them -- that fell to privates.  Only one failed, and while it left a nasty gouge in the man’s cheek, he survived when the sword blade broke.  It was replaced by another and that weapon worked.

Much later Kris found Andie sitting in a dark corner of the camp, chewing on something that she couldn’t identify.

“Are you okay, Andie?”

“I’m ashamed,” she told Kris.  “Did you see them today?”

“They worked hard,” Kris told her.

“Yeah.  Me, a teacher!  Go figure!  I would never have thought I’d be a teacher in a million years!  A good teacher?  Ha!  I hate the fuckers!  Now I are one!”

She lapsed into silence for a while, and Kris waited patiently for her to speak.  Finally Andie looked up at her.  “It was like pouring water onto dry dirt, bone-dry dirt.  They sucked it up, Kris.  They just sucked up whatever I had to teach.  They were eager, hungry to learn.  I’ve never seen people like this.

“I mean, you and I were good students, but I don’t think you were that different than me.  We learned what they put in front of us, and hardly cared what it was.  They could have taught us basket-weaving, and we’d have dutifully turned out the best baskets in the class.  We didn’t give a shit what it was, we just learned.”

“You did have one or two objections along the way,” Kris pointed out.

“What the fuck does a teenager know?  Like I hated history and geography.  What the fuck did I care about how some stupid fucker screwed up a thousand years ago?  Two thousand years ago?  Who the fuck cares?”

She stopped talking again.

“And yet,” Kris ventured, “here we are, where it does matter -- even to where things are on a map and how far apart they are.”

“Yeah.  I can’t believe how much I took my brain out of gear and parroted all that crap they were filling our heads with!  What a useless bunch of shit!  The fucking teachers didn’t care anymore about geography, history and learning foreign languages than we did!  What the fuck does a teenager know about what’s going to be useful later in life?  For that matter, those fucking teachers weren’t much smarter than we were!”