kroth:  the slant

9: the battle of neydio

A new man, wiped free of fear, I stepped out of the tea-room, in that strange condition known as readiness for battle.
    Of course, as usual, I distrusted the mood, was convinced there must be a catch to it, a price that in the long run would have to be paid for it. On the other hand I was also willing to try out my calmness in the open. I would be a fool not to test how it performed; a fool not to reap what advantage I could from it while it lasted.
    But (came the thought) – suppose it lasted forever? Perhaps my nature had changed permanently!
    Perhaps, in adapting me to the Slope, the Slant had turned me into a warrior.
    I would have preferred to have been asked.
    Fine, yes, to become brave, but what about the accompaniment to this change, the blanked-out feeling, the odd hesitation in recognizing myself? Courage at the cost of identity.  Must life bring such package deals?  One sensible precaution I could take: look, now, at the running crowds in front of me.  Look at nothing else. Maintain, in other words, the narrow focus of attention, the guarded motions of my eyes.  I’d learned to do that during the descent to Latitude Sixty.  Having joined the throng of regular soldiers, local militiamen and civilians who were rushing down-Slope, I’d allowed myself to be swept along while clinging to the motto, one thing at a time.
    Would it work as well here and now, I wondered.
    We jogged over the east-west railway nicknamed the Spoing, which connects Volost with the other villages strung along Latitude Sixty.  We then came to what was poised on the track’s southern edge: a dramatic line of boulders, quite finely balanced it seemed, which hinted at certain dire possibilities…  We passed through this line, to continue downwards towards the far greater landmark, the great defensive embankment which ran parallel to the railway but a couple of thousand yards further south.
    It was called the Vallum, that artificial ridge.  Despite the name, no ancient Roman army ever built an earth-wall that size.  It looked like a magnified Offa's Dyke with a Great Wall of China running along the top of it.
    During the past couple of days I had found out something about the structure. Its immemorial prehistory was intertwined with folklore; its construction and maintenance had for ages been a national hobby for the folk in these parts. Time had not crumbled it; had, instead, made it stronger, since through millions of days it had become pervaded by the tough root system of shovelgrass.
    Within minutes the vanguard of the crowd reached the base of the embankment and began swarming up its close-cropped north-facing slope. I, and those with me, each followed at our own speed, knowing that there would be space for all of us at the top; we had an easy climb, with plenty of footholds on the exposed shovelgrass roots, much easier than what the enemy would have to face if they tried to climb the southern side, which we had preserved with its slippery coating of dark green blades.
    I reached the stone topping.  This was marked on the near side by a line of low pillars rather like hitching posts for horses.  From here it was just one stride for me to step onto the crenellated summit.
    Many of those who had got there before me were already opening the storage bins, containers the size of skips, which rested along the wall's outer edge, one of them every ten yards or so.  Out of them some of our men were taking hand-weapons, mostly a variety of spears, eighteen feet long, which were then stood against the battlements' notches, ready to be seized. (I call them “spears”: you could more literally refer to them as forks, since they were double-pointed, with two barbed prongs at the end, ten or twelve inches apart.) But most of us were given no job to do as yet.
    Among thousands of men (and some women and children) along a line that reached for tens of miles, I saw with new eyes, and learned new things.
I had crept up here before, during the past few days of being quartered in Volost village, because the view from such a landmark, the line where Upland officially ended, was a “must” for tourists; but I had not been able to bring myself to look around properly until now. Now I was able to gaze directly into the blue southern gulf, the sagorizon, coldly and unafraid. The old psychological bias towards flatness, towards assuming that flatness was normal, was – click! – gone. “Horizontality” no longer formed a part of my nature. From now on it was the permanent tilt, the forward foot lower than the other, which would seem normal. What one of the modern poets of Kroth has called the “expectation of roll and slide and angled consequence” meant that my inner mountain goat had come alive. In other words I had got the Slant. The Slant can be defined, simply, as the attitude you have to have, if you're to cope below latitude 60 without going nuts. And I had “got it good”.  I've changed, it's done, the news kept blaring in my head. The immediate result was that I could stand on a viewpoint and stare freely – stare down the slope of the world without flinching in the slightest – and so in a relaxed manner I could satisfy my eager curiosity concerning the landscape south of the great frontier wall: the northern edge of the immensity of Slantland, which must steepen all the way down to the vertical Equator.
    The tilted plain, dotted with groves, fuzzily receding into an apple-green haze under the plunging sagorizon, seemed quite peaceful and still; the Gonomong had been sighted, but not from here.
    Their approach must therefore have been noted from higher up, and this is where I must mention the second thing I learned.
    I turned and looked to the right, westwards, to where, a few miles off, stood the fortress of Neydio. At such a moment I could have done with a twin brother, a second self to confide in and to compare impressions with. Though the enormity of the fortress no longer scared me, as it had done at that horrible moment I saw it illustrated in the encyclopaedia in the library in Savaluk, nevertheless a grimness remained in my heart where fear used to be.
    Because I had done my homework, I had been informed of the thing's scale; therefore I knew it was no good pretending to disbelieve my eyes as they gawped at that artificial crag: its horizontal summit really did jut forth for two miles, coming to an end with a vertical drop of about a mile.  Of course I knew better than to suppose that such a mass had been built up entirely by human hands. It must have been fashioned from an already existing scarp slope, engineered into the regular, indecently huge shape I now saw. Grudgingly, my mind could admit that it was possible, borderline possible, to sculpt a geological feature in that way. But it set an unfortunate tone. By this I mean that Neydio's flouting of the Slope, far from doing anything to blot the Slope out, accentuated it. You will grasp what I'm trying to express if you ever get to see the thing; you too may be driven to conclude that one extreme abets another, that Neydio's outrageous bulk threatens to unbalance an already wonky stage. You've just laboriously achieved some acceptance of what is going on, you've just “got the Slant”, and then along comes this, and you're left with a skin-prickling sense of unreality.
    I suppose that if I had grown up in Volost or one of the other villages round about, I would have taken the thing for granted. As things were, I would forever be too much of a stranger here to get as used to it as that; nevertheless, I was able to look at it. That was the important point I now learned. I was a different person from the Duncan Wemyss who a few hours ago had cowered in the tea-shop with his back turned from the uncanny sight of the fortress. Here, then, was another confirmation of the change in me. What might earlier have been a dagger of terror that ripped into my mind, now was nothing much worse than a pinprick. It took a bit of an effort – but my recent acclimatization was preserved. I had indeed “got the Slant” for good.
    “Wemyss,” said a level voice.
    I turned. It was Captain Murena, wearing the slightly pitying look I had often seen on his face.
    “Sir,” I said.
    Murena's tone was quite mild: “The General wants to see you. Come on. I'll take you to the car.”
    The General? I swallowed some bitter saliva. Suddenly I was afraid I knew what this might be about.
    It was popularly supposed to be random, the way in which Faraliew sampled the morale of the ranks. Certainly there was no known pattern in his choices. But had my number really come up just like a raffle ticket pulled out of a bag? Unfortunately for my peace of mind, I could immediately think of an obvious reason why I might be chosen today of all days. A very unflattering reason, which made me feel sick. “If a mere oneiro like Wemyss can stand and fight, the rest of the army should do quite well.”
    The injustice of it! I, the sensitive, stress-avoiding Duncan Wemyss had, after all, made sufficient progress that I could now stand calmly scanning the scene while many of my friends and companions, whom I might never see again, had been turned back days ago and were at this moment far to the north, retreating up-Slope back towards an easier life. For not everybody could function down here; not everybody could click into tilt-mode as I had managed to do; and the army did not want people who could not adapt. I, for some reason, had adapted, had got The Slant, and that fact, in my view, should outweigh the blemish on my record, my dubious status as an “oneirogeocentric” Earth-dreamy. If they just gave me a chance, I could show them I could blend in, I needn't stick out in any way at all….
    I growled helplessly under my breath as I kept up with Murena's eastward stride along the summit of the Vallum. His habitual expression of faint, ironic mockery did not help my mood, but at least he made no further remark, and I made an effort to rise above personal resentment, to take the opportunity to observe, especially whenever he stopped and I likewise had to stop and wait while he spoke to people. Sometimes he held brief conference with other officers; sometimes he would take a moment to borrow a spyglass that was held out to him by an important civilian, to assure the owner that he, Murena, could not yet see “the twinkling” on the sagorizon which would betoken the enemy advance. As far as all that was concerned, I asked no questions, and so the gap in my knowledge remained as huge as ever. I did not seek to know more. The approach of battle, I told myself, is too late to change one's approach to life. For me it was enough that the people in charge seemed confident that they knew what they were doing. I gathered the impression that when the officers spoke they were calming the exuberant militiamen, persuading civilians to go home, and assigning regular troops to various stations along the wall, but whatever the case, I would just obey orders like a good cog in the military machine, so long as I was allowed to remain a part of it. We had time; the Gonomong were still some hours away. Just then (silly though this sounds) I was more perturbed by the thought of seeing the General than by the thought of fighting the Gonomong.
    Finally we reached a blocky metal housing which marked the lower end of one of the cable-car lines that link the Vallum with the Spoing. An empty car, ready to go, hung at rest beside it. Murena motioned me to get in. It held room for four, but I was the only one to be using it this time. “Sit there; press that lever,” the captain said. I obeyed without a word.
    A wobbly jolt, and the dangling car swung away, carrying me off the summit of the Vallum. Skimming upwards back over the ground I had run in my recent descent, I was as pleased as a little boy who had been given a treat, having all to myself a conveyance normally reserved for officers. Not bad, this, not bad at all! Stupid to get touchy a few hours before I might get dead! The delightful ride, enjoyed for its own sake, put me in a much better mood, and that sensible attitude persisted as my eye-level finally rose to the ominous line of boulders, parallel with the Spoing railway; a zone of silent preparedness, solemn enough to dampen any ego: the Marraspang, the Dislodgeables. Each boulder was now attended by its squad. Each boulder-squad, I guessed, included one man whose job it was to be ready to handle the release lever, and another man whose job it was to ensure that the order to do this – when it came – was obeyed.
    No doubt these men, like those who waited in nuclear bunkers on Earth, had good hope that the order would never come; but though it was thought unlikely that an enemy could ever take the Vallum, yet if one did, the Marraspang were the next, the final, line of defence. I’d now thought it through and had realized the obvious: that great weights rolling under gravity must constitute the ultimate weapon on Kroth. I seemed to remember reading that the unrestricted use of such weapons on an endless gradient was contrary to the principles of civilized warfare, and banned by the Savaluk Convention. Nevertheless the presence of the Vallum less than a mile further south meant that here they could be used in a restricted sense; for the idea must be that the Vallum would be bulky enough to stop the boulders from continuing their irresponsible roll down the entire slope of the world; stop them therefore from crushing their way across neutral and enemy countries alike, killing and destroying all in their path right the way down to the vertical jungles of the Equator, through which they would smash and finally plunge into the endless void…
    In other words, the Vallum thus permitted the Toplanders to use the principle of the avalanche without flouting international law.
    It would of course be very bad news for anyone, friend or foe, caught in the boulders' legally permitted limited path.
    I was glad I was not a general.
    Then, looking east, I beheld a railway carriage moving in my direction along the tracks of the Spoing, at hardly more than human running speed; a deliberately slow, observational speed. I waited with my arms at my sides. I forbade myself to shuffle or fidget. I did not try to talk to anyone in the nearest boulder crew.
    Faraliew's inspection coach drew to a stop about twenty yards away from me; I remained standing still.
    I had sorted myself out. The not-very-flattering idea, that “if a mere oneiro like D.W. can face battle, the rest are likely to stand firm too”, no longer offended me. I now thought: if Faraliew wants me as the barometer of his army, he can use me that way.
    There seemed no reason to doubt that the authorities, contemptuous though they might be, would at least allow me to fight in the battle.  Therefore, let that content me. Physical battleground under my boots; orders from my superiors; the chance to cope…. a crack at the glittering prize of self-respect, of afterwards knowing I was there…. Given the situation, it was not too bad a deal.
    The coach door opened; Faraliew's tall form stooped in the doorway. He exchanged some words with the sergeant of the nearby boulder-crew, went back in, and some more minutes passed; then the sergeant, after looking at his watch, came towards me. When he had got half way he called curtly, “Wemyss?”
    “Yessir.”
    “In there.” He jerked his head; I came forward.  Telling myself to be a good, credit-worthy sample, I stepped into the coach.
    After one glimpse at the General and his side-kick I defocused my eyes and retreated into a semi-dreamlike internal cringe, in which I remained vaguely aware of where I was standing, Faraliew seated in half-profile, and the side-kick standing some way beyond and behind him, silhouetted at the far window of the carriage.
    The General was saying, “Face it, we may have to. The balloon-scouts know what they are about. Since they confirm that we have to deal with an entire Rip-Mig of Gonomong….”
    “I still maintain,” said the other man, “that a water-dam would have been better than these boulders. We could even have placed a line of dams south of the Vallum. Because any flood unleashed would get re-absorbed by the ground after a certain distance, water-defences are not forbidden by the Savaluk Convention….”
    “Quite the strategist, Chandler!” Turning to me, Faraliew said: “Ah, Wemyss. You already know my Civilian Advisor, of course.”
    “Yessir, I do.” Thank heavens I had the sense not to add anything stupid like “Hello, Uncle.” My suspended mind could hum along with its “pause” button depressed for quite a while, if necessary.
    Faraliew continued, “Yes, of course you do, I was forgetting….” He turned back to Vic. “We've been through this water idea before, Chandler. Let me point out that whereas a flood would sweep away foot-soldiers, the Gonomong are mounted men; the Fingers would cling to the turf with their claws. Besides, dams would require further expense, further engineering. We must work with what we have.”
    “It may not be too late, General, to divert some of the pipes….”
    “No, I won't hear of it! Enough now!” Faraliew turned to me with a whimsical smile. “What about you, Wemyss? Do you have any thoughts on strategy?”
    The kind Providence that looks after these things took care of me again and prevented me from uttering some stupid sycophantic laugh. Instead I responded seriously enough to give the General the minor amusement he was doubtless looking for.
    “Neydio seems a pretty useless fortress, sir.”
    “Really? Do go on.”
    “Of course it's impregnable from the South, sir, but it's no more than ordinarily defensible from the North, at the point where it juts from the Slope; so what's the use of its enormous size? Just a colossal, expensive, tempting target - sir.”
    Faraliew chuckled. “Hey, Chandler, what do you think of that? Shall we tell His Excellency Governor Fodnam what this lad thinks of his fortress-city? Neydio the Great, Neydio the Impregnable – what word would you use to describe it?”
    “Preposterous,” said Vic.
    “Hm.” Faraliew looked sharply at both of us in turn. I kept my face straight and indeed my amusement was short-lived, quietening to a solemn appreciation of the perfect word my uncle had chosen. Neydio the Preposterous. That sure said it all.
    Then the General let out a short sigh.
    “Your remarks were well put, lad. But since the thing's there, we have to defend it. Always we have to defend whatever we have, using what we have. Thank you, you may go now. Return to your unit.” Silent and blank of face, I saluted, turned and went out, full of surprise that he did not mind my suggestion of the futility of the great fortress.
    Rumour had been wrong in one respect. There had been no offer of tea.  
The sergeant took me back to the cable car.

                                                   *

Captain Murena received me with the words, “Come on, we'll jam you in somewhere.”
....The scene on the Vallum had developed quickly during my absence. The civilians had all departed. Along the miles of wall, thousands of soldiers, serried and waiting, in alternate companies of militia and regulars, now leaned in readiness beside their spears.  They were all concentrating their gaze upon a sight that had not been visible half an hour ago: the crawling light on the sagorizon.
    One thing at a time, I told myself as Murena escorted me to one of the few spaces left in the Topland line: the small gap between the left-most man in our unit and the right-most man in the unit to our left. I took my place; an extra spear from one of the bins was propped against the parapet in front of me.  It was ready for me to seize when the time came.
    To my immediate right was Jason Kerallg, the gingery Wild West buff with whom I was acquainted from the march south. Appropriately, he had been issued with what looked to me like a Colt .45.  Other museum pieces had met my wondering gaze during my walk down the line. I myself had been issued with a Browning automatic. Long ago I had ceased to trouble myself with our inconsistencies of weaponry; by now I accepted the terms of our existence as passively as an ocean floor receives the down-floating remains of a jumble of past ages. Why chew on it? Neither machines nor logic worked well on Kroth.  The various ingredients of the culture of Topland functioned intermittently, spasmodically, but what did any of this matter, in the face of death?
    “Seen the General?” asked Jason.
    “Yep.”
    “Well, what did you think of him?”
    “It's a bit late for thinking.”
    “Yeah, that's the spirit; welcome to the Ploing.”
    The dry tone in which he spoke that local slang term for the Vallum, caused me to glance at the militiaman on my left, to see how he took the jibe.
    I saw a mop-haired fellow scowling southwards, his right arm curled round his spear.
    “That's Shaz,” continued Jason loudly; “whether it's his first, last or only name, I haven't discovered. Shaz, this is Duncan Wemyss.”
    Shaz briefly turned his head and grunted a surly greeting which I would have found off-putting in normal circumstances. In these moments, however, it did not matter at all. In fact I viewed his unsociability in a positive light. For he, I guessed, was taking the only attitude which might get us out of this pickle alive: a dive into rage-mode. Sullen rather than berserk rage; nevertherless I could sense a belated remedy for a lack which I had been complaining about for weeks, namely the army's lack of serious emotional commitment.  Better late than never, we were being stirred by the sight of the enemy. Yes, that's what had done it: those dreadful advancing lights, the actual sight of the Gonomong. For I could see them at last: the twinklings that meant so much pain and suffering headed our way.  I settled, hunched forward between battlements, spear-shaft at my elbow, feeling at last that I was part of a long projected wave of hate and defiance on collision course with the long-rumoured horror now at last visibly creeping up from the South.
    My eyes eventually smarted with hours of staring. “One thing at a time”, I had muttered often enough; now the enemy was that one thing. Steadily the milky mass of winking southern reflections very gradually brightened and broadened: their vanguard was merging with additional ranks of Gonomong, mid-afternoon sunlight glancing off innumerable shields. The horror lay in the slithering vastness of this mass.  Mounted men; mounted on what, though? I did not yet know. I heard comments: “Damn Mongees, what do they think they are, a row of silver trophies?” “They ain't gonna win any trophies today.” I ought to have joined in with my companions' stoical expressions of contempt and their good-humoured, laconic repartee, but instead I suddenly asked myself: What the hell am I doing here?  With that devastating question – that treacherous stab of moral confusion – every decision, every attitude, every slide and drift that had brought me to this point now clamoured for review.  Finally (thank goodness) into my floundering mind there popped the most telling point of that old classic film High Noon; namely that when time comes you can't be expected to remember the arguments to fight. You must simply hope that those arguments exist and are good; for it's too late to draw back. Never mind that film's lack of historical realism; the main thing is, it captured the great truth, by showing how moments came for Marshal Kane when he was too tired to think, too tired to understand why he was taking the course he’d chosen. He could no longer prove, even to himself, that he was doing the right thing, yet he went on with it because he trusted that what he had once understood was still valid though he could no longer grasp it. In other words it wasn't so much his courage as his obstinacy that saved the day. Well, I wasn't too hot when it came to courage but I could – just – manage the obstinacy. Big deal, you may say. Absurd to compare myself with the Marshall, considering he was left alone to face his enemies, whereas I had an army around me! Nevertheless there is a sense in which all of us are always alone against our internal enemies.  For each lonely one of us, “going through with it” is an essential statement of who we are. End of question. I re-focused my attention upon the enemy.
    With the Slope against them the horde nevertheless were advancing tirelessly.  They must have been climbing for months, perhaps years. Originating in a land where the gradient was far more extreme, their steeds, unfortunately for us, must now be finding it comparatively easy to climb a tilt of ‘merely’ thirty degrees. There seemed to be no end to the oncoming enemy tide.
    “Keep yer strength up, I would,” advised Shaz, munching a ration bar.
I knew I could not eat a bite; I was so keyed up I feared to be sick.  “I don’t reckon I need food,” I muttered.
    “What do you need, then?”
    “Binoculars!” said I.
    He lent me his (the militia seemed better equipped in that respect) and with their aid I could start to make out individual Gonomong “Fingers”, at first not clearly enough to give me more than a confusing glimpse of their odd shapes and motion, but enough to reinforce my impression of their awesome numbers. Hundreds of thousands, at least. And why were they coming this way; why didn't they detour round the Vallum, which surely did not encircle the entire globe? Well, there was no end to whys. So numerous did the questions become that they shrank to particles of drizzle, continually sinking into the ooze of passive acceptance – my brain once more in ocean-floor mode. What else could I expect? I was just a spearman. Generalship was no business of mine. Besides, there was one question which shockingly answered itself. “Why do we call them Fingers?” I muttered as I squinted through the binoculars, but no sooner had I said this than my mind grasped what I was seeing – the humping “inchworms” twice the size of horses, with armoured head-shields the shape of fingernails. Yes, the creatures could resemble giant crooking fingers if you looked at them that way.
    I continued to stare, frozen and wide-eyed, while the occasional jutting elbow or peeping head revealed the riders behind the “Fingernail” shields.  Riders astride exaggerated caterpillars? - should I laugh or should I have guessed long before, that the extreme gradient far down South must produce a monstrous divergence of life? The question answered itself. Way down there, evolution must favour creatures that could claw and cling.
    I saw the disgust on the faces of my companions. They, naturally, had known. They had not had a policy of keeping themselves in ignorance.
    Now that I saw what we were up against, I felt a vast puzzlement. This whole business seemed ridiculous. High Noon was all very well, but what chance did we have against these monsters?
    I muttered to Jason, “You'd think we would have lined this wall with cannon, or something….”
    “What, and try to blast holes in that?” he asked. “Like shooting at a plague of locusts.”
    More hopeless than that, I thought. Like standing on the shore and shooting at the tide.
    “Well then, why haven't we captured and bred those decapod things….” I spoke without thinking. If I had thought, I'd have realized it was ridiculous to suppose that any gimmick I might dream up had not already been considered by our High Command.
    My bright suggestion caused Jason to snort, “Ugh! You're crazy! We leave that sort of thing to the Mongees.” He sounded really put off, quite sickened by what I had said.
    “Sorry, sorry. Forget my stupid remark.”
    But although his aversion to the idea was so strong that I back-pedalled immediately, I did wonder if maybe I wasn't so stupid. After all, why hadn't we bred and trained decapods or other Slope-adapted steeds of our own? Deadly indeed they looked, but (to me) not disgusting.
    Perhaps my Earth-mind allowed me a certain immunity to Krothan phobias. Sure, the Gonomong were out to kill us and seize our country, but their weird steeds did not unsettle me any more than well-trained war-horses or war-elephants would have done. And so, while the monsters did dismay me in a practical sense, I was spared the aversion which – I learned by and by – they seemed to inspire in each and every one of my companions.
    Anyhow, all creatures must fit perfectly well into their own environment, else they would never have evolved in the first place, so what were that lot doing encroaching on ours? What was this invasion all about? There must have been some big historical or ecological cause, big enough to be known, to be studied, and a way found round it; whereas to neglect the question, to let it boil over like this, and then “solve” the problem by large-scale bloodshed – it just wasn't good enough! We should refuse to take part! We should force our leaders to think again! And so on, and so on; this was me being seized by my second bout of moral confusion. It took the form of an atrocious squeamishness, a one-sided nausea about killing. Never had I believed in pacifism before, and now I was about to become a pacifist on the very verge of battle! To do me justice, I did know that if I acted on these feelings (supposing I was in a position to act on them), I would be letting everybody down. I saw that much.
    But then a more intelligent whisper attempted to seduce me from the path of duty and loyalty. All right, it does seem outright cowardice to become, as you call it, “a pacifist on the verge of battle”. But supposing pacifism is not only true but also the kind of truth which you can only expect to learn when battle looms? What do you do then? Go through with the killing just out of pride and shame, these emotions which so often have let humanity down? In other words, “let people down so as not to let them down”? Come off it! The only way to start better habits is to say, blow this, I want no part of it. Go home, and never mind what people think!
    Of course there was absolutely no chance, wedged in as I was, that I could simply turn for home. But there was the danger that the whisper might sap my will to fight, might make me useless to my own side and an easier prey to the enemy. So it must be rebutted.
    The rebuttal came.
    You whisper that I'm doing wrong, and indeed I know that it is obscene to kill. But why is it obscene to kill? Because, ultimately, it is a desecration of the spirit. In which case we must care most about spiritual things. Which means caring about more than just the flesh. Loyalty is a spiritual thing.  Loyalty, honesty, reliability are more important than life or death, and so the thought returns full circle: we kill when we must, else we lose life in another way.
    As for the point that wars should be prevented at an earlier stage –
    That, too, was dealt with. The answer came quick as a spear-thrust. Indeed you could say that inside my head the battle had already started, insofar as the strife between attitudes must affect my performance against the Gonomong. Imagine the following paragraphs condensed into one flash of thought:
    Of course it would be good if everyone were to cultivate a general awareness of the pressures on humanity which lead to war; if everyone could then pay his tax of personal attention, of allowance, to alleviate those pressures before they resulted in conflict. If those “attention taxes” were paid by the great majority, no warmonger would ever find excuse, or ever rise to a position in which he might give orders.
    But we're individuals, not group minds. We have the limited attention-span of individuals. Most of us aren't rich enough in awareness, to pay the attention-tax! That is the true cause of war. It is not badness. Badness gets as far as causing crime, but war is another matter. In war we are paying the penalty, not so much of our plentiful badness, as of our lack of concentration. Nobody, except maybe for a few professors and philosophers, has an attention-span stretched far enough to maintain deliberately those complex conditions of economic, social and environmental equilibrium which are necessary for universal peace.
    And even if you, Duncan Wemyss, happen to be one of those philosophers, it's too late to skive off now, so shut up, stay put and do your bit.
    Whew! I shook my head to clear it. Nothing like waiting for battle, if you've got a fidgety mind! You find yourself arguing with yourself rapidly, intensely, and then all of a sudden the bout is over. It was obvious that here was a case of kill or be killed; obvious that the Gonomong must be repelled at all costs.
    The only problem was, I could not see how we were going to win this battle. If cannon were no good (and no doubt it was against the Savaluk Convention to fire projectiles down-Slope anyway), just precisely how were we supposed to defend ourselves and our land? One thing seemed certain: my remarks were a waste of time, my “common sense” (as usual) a waste of time; so I subsided further into that ocean-floor mood of quiet acceptance.  My muscles tightened on the haft of the spear at my right. If I had to play the part of some medieval infantryman at Bannockburn or Agincourt, so be it. Panic was the killer; salvation lay in discipline. And the experts must know best.
    An awareness of some methodical activity at my back prompted me to turn my head and I saw that another line had formed, not of spearmen but of men who were lifting coils of rope from the bins. In the minutes that followed, members of this rear line quietly threaded our spears like needles, putting a rope through a hole in the back end of each spear and tying the other ends to that line of “hitching posts” along the north edge of the wall's summit. Good, thought I; I liked that idea. A spear that had been let go of in the heat of battle, and had fallen southwards, could be retrieved by means of hauling on the rope. As for why the ropes were being added now, rather than earlier –  Not my problem! From somewhere on the crag-like summit of Neydio our high command must have telescopes trained on the enemy, and must make decisions on deployment according to what they saw. Which meant that the “preposterous” fortress was doubtless some use after all, if only as an observation post.
    “Look tough,” Shaz broke into my thoughts.
    “Eh? What?”
    “That's Captain Fadron,” he warned, out of the corner of his mouth.
    Sure enough, the militia company commander was approaching from our left. He strolled alongside Captain Murena as they inspected their units together. I saw something that chilled me. Every so often Fadron would tap a soldier with his cane, whereupon the man would abandon his spear and retreat into the rear line, his place being taken by someone from there. If he does that to me…
    I hunched ferociously forward. To all appearances, I stared south at the enemy, but in reality during those moments I hardly saw the Gonomong, which were now only about a quarter of a mile off, almost dazzling us all with their polished “Fingernail” shields; instead I thought daggers at the object of my greater hatred, Captain Fadron, who suddenly represented to me a threat I could not accept. Rejection. Demotion. Don't you dare touch me with that cane...
    I had slipped again into one of my phases of being more alarmed by some aspect of my own side than by the enemy. Of course I had no real reason to assume that the rope-haulers' line was any less honourable a position than the spear-line in front of it; nevertheless the skin crawled on my back as I waited for the dreaded nudge.
    My ears told me that Fadron and Murena had stopped somewhere close behind me. They were discussing something, I couldn't hear what, but it wasn't hard to guess, that decisions regarding the deployment of personnel in this part of the line were equally the business of both commanders, since any weakness in either company would affect the position of the other. After a minute or so the voices receded, and I was again able to draw breath. A theory constructed itself in my head: Fadron had wanted to swap me over, but Murena had dissuaded him. In my relief at the outcome, my resentment still flared at Fadron on account of what, I was convinced, he had wanted to do. Demote me, would he? Pull me back to the rear line? The rat, the krunk! Hot resentment, not a very nice emotion in normal circumstances, had its uses just then, putting a certain fizz in my blood as the Gonomong drew ever closer. Just as Tarzan, swinging rapidly through the jungle, will use whatever branch or creeper comes to hand, so the untrained soldier, living on his nerves, must swing from dodge to dodge, from one emotional tactic to the next, the object always being to cross the next gulf, survive the next challenge. My terror of the Slope had been evaded in this way; the next test must be the violence of battle.

                                                   *

A quarter of an hour before the clash, our captain walked to and fro, repeating final instructions. “Don't waste energy in thrusts; aim to lodge the spear-points in chinks between the decapods' scales; you gotta push, gotta repel; fire your pistols in spare moments, but otherwise leave that business to your support; remember, that's part of the rear line's job, to aim past you at any vulnerable spot that presents itself – but meanwhile you are the backbone of the army, you must not break. Hear that, men? Don't break before those misshapen krunks! All right, the Mongees outnumber us grossly, but they're just a mindless horde….”
    I wished I had been issued with dark glasses; the reflections off the “Fingernail” shields were by this time a serious irritation, wetting my face with tears. Through narrowed lids I could see that the Gonomong ranks were maybe about fifty deep. Far, far too many, but it was no good complaining, this was our task and we had to face it; if we failed, if our line broke, the enemy's killing spree would really begin.
    Captain Murena fell silent when our adversaries were four hundred yards away. Unhappily for us, the riders didn't present much of a target.  Their heads were hidden behind the “Fingernail” crests, through which eye-holes (I now noticed) had been pierced; their legs, astride their mounts, were completely protected by a kind of flared scaly ruff around where the decapods' necks would have been if they had had definable necks. However, now and then I caught a glimpse of the riders' long, over-muscled arms, which seemed to have the musculature of legs. (“Man, just look at those Mongee apes,” somebody muttered close by.) A minority of the Gonomong held pistols, confiscated (so I had been told) from the native population through which the horde had passed on their long climb northwards. But most of them had swords gleaming in their right hands. Their left hands held long hooked poles. If our eighteen-foot spears did their stuff, we'd never be in reach of the swords, but what about those hooks? With my foreshortened view, I couldn't be sure of their length; my nerves knotted as I considered that life-or-death question, of the precise reach of those hooked poles.
    Then, to my right and left and in the line behind me, some snatches of conversation stirred my spirit with their defiant chorus of decent ordinary life.
    “Glad I stayed. It's a long plod back.”
    “Won't matter if we win. Take our time, then.”
    “Yeah, but meanwhile, here's our excuse to stop awhile….”
    And again and again, It's a long plod back; as if my phrase, which back in the teashop had made Jason and Juldwin laugh, had now become a kind of verbal mascot for the whole army.
    The enemy wave reached the foot of the Vallum. Daft jumbled thoughts tripped over one another in my mind as we leaned over the parapet: we were each holding our spears as though we were about to fish with them.  I was gladder than ever to know that a rope held my spear, for the weight of it meant I would not be able to brandish it downwards for long; but anyhow I wouldn't have to, since, the rate things were going, the enemy would be jamming his upward pressure against our front line in the next few seconds.  The decapods' front claws were already tearing handfuls of turf from the Vallum slope.  They were creating crude steps by which to scramble up –
Pistol-cracks from friend and foe made me jerk my head for a second or two; none of my companions seemed to be hit, nor could I see any sign that our own firing was effective. Even if guns had worked as efficiently as they did on Earth, the Gonomong were shielded by their mounts' armoured scaly fronts and “Fingernail” heads.  We, on our side, had the parapet and battlements of the Vallum, though this still left me feeling terribly exposed from the chest upwards. And now, inexorably, the enemy wave began to flow up the embankment. O God, I pleaded, make me the right sort of person for this. I thought of the Vikings and their berserk joy of battle. I had often thought how stupendously thick that sort of person must have been; this moment made me admit, “I could use some of that thickness right now.”
    Appalling as the sight of the ground that comes up to meet a parachutist on his first jump, the humping line of Gonomong Fingers reared at our spearpoints.  To my amazement as the clashes began, the Toplander army shouted as a war-cry, IT'S A LONG – PLOD - BACK!
    My own forked spear hit a “Fingernail”, glanced off this invulnerable head and onto the decapod's chest, lodging between chest- and shoulder-scales. I held tight and leaned, as far as I dared, to add my weight to that of the spear. I was glancingly aware that to either side of me the other roped spears like mine, the entire Topland line, formed itself during those seconds into a bristling, anchored, united weapons system. I felt, rather than saw, this unity; mostly I didn't dare peer around: I had to put all my effort into focussing upon my pair of lodged spear-points while hoping that the arrangement would not slip. I pressed, I held, I yielded a bit as the decapod scrabbled to rise further, I held, I pressed it down; to either side of me my companions likewise strove to hold the line.  The decapods continually pushed forward and upward, both by their own efforts and with the pressure of those behind them. More than once it happened that a decapod shook off the pressure from the points of my spear by means of a twisting dodge followed by a forward lunge, to dart upwards through the gap between my spear and that of my neighbour. I couldn't draw back and re-aim in time; I didn't have the strength – but the support fellow behind me saved the situation: he had been watching, he pulled on the rope, my spear drew back up to a position from which I could re-aim, and I caught the Gonomong steed again before it could finish its climb. Our line held, though the individual enemy facing me had, by his manoeuvre, gained a higher foothold on the south face of the Vallum. And now that Gonomong rider, who had been hardly visible so far, concealed as he had been behind the upper half of the “Fingernail” crest of his mount, leaned a bit sideways as he jabbed, so that I glimpsed his face – the only feature of which I remember is that it was the face of my enemy, the man who was trying to kill me personally.  He tried to reach me with his hook, but he still couldn't get me and after a couple of seconds, probably at the sound of a pistol shot, he jerked his head back behind the shelter of his steed, so that little round went to me; but a yelp and a choked-off cry from some yards to my right told me that one of my company had been less fortunate in his fight, and out of the corner of my eye I saw a man's body being dragged by the neck over the battlement and down. This sight must either harden or unnerve me; I must mark it “lesson”: So, one of ours has made his last mistake, because he was not strong enough, or had not been supported quickly enough. I concentrated harder than ever on managing my spear, but aware, now, of what a fool I had been to suppose that the rear line was less prestigious than the spear-line: at any moment my life might again depend on the man behind me handling the rope. Also, that man was more free to use his pistol than I was to use mine, and in fact he did have a go at trying to hit my opponent every time the Gonomong's head or arm was exposed in an attempt to use the hook. Bullets spat past me in both directions.  In my opinion it was just as well that so many shots were duds; quite likely I owe my life to the tendency of Krothan guns to misfire. Occasionally someone got hit; cringing inwardly as I awaited my turn, I tried telling myself that my own screams when they came would be nothing special. Mercifully my sense of time got lost somewhere among the stretched minutes that seemed to crawl in circular repetition.  Those mindless animal minutes of pounding blood and darting reflex constituted most of what happened; lost amid those pulsings, any thoughts or speculations were mere jabs of awareness.
    The enemy's gradual climb towards the parapet confronted us with the unpleasant choice.  We could either stand further back, or shorten our grip on the spears and thus put us in reach of their hooks.  Some ghastly individual results taught us that to stand back was the wiser alternative. So the tendency was for our line to retreat. Gonomong voices began to impinge on my ears; shouts in a lingo full of “eengs” and “ungs”. Answering shouts came from our people: “It's a long plod back!” “C'est un long retour!”  “Rückgang lang!” “¡Regreso – paso pesado!”  The rearing Fingers were almost on a level with us now, and our spears were almost horizontally levelled at them. At this stage, fortunately for us, it became evident that the point where Vallum slope met vertical battlements was too much of a challenge for the humping decapods. Their front ends reared again and again and had to fall back without getting a proper hold on the actual ridge summit. Jason on my right yelled at his support man (whose own gun seemed to have had a high proportion of dud firings) to snatch his Colt .45 and re-load it and pepper the joints of a decapod whose paws were clutching at the parapet right in front of him. The creatures seemed un-killable, but just as you or I might flinch from a stinging nettle, so did that particular decapod draw back from the heavy lead slugs of the .45. Meanwhile I had some success also, as I lunged and actually toppled my opponent – to my own surprise just as much as his. In no time his place was taken by another, but I minded this little; I had become curiously immune to disheartening logic; curiously undismayed by the overwhelming numbers which opposed us; for at some point in these nightmare minutes I had become a person I had never been before, so that all the garbage I had read about the “joy of battle” turned out to possess some truth, this much truth: never had I felt so alive. If the next trick, which was to get out of this in one piece so as to profit from the experience, could somehow be managed, how nice that would be.  But in the meantime I must be like those sensible Vikings, aware of the sound practical point that mad, berserk, frothing rage was the antidote to fear and pain, and so I must value the dazing quality of this boiling mess, for it would be fatal to cool down. Somewhere there was a person whose job it was to stay cool, namely, General Faraliew.  His duty it was to implement whatever battle plan had been decided; he must have a plan.  After all he had not sounded too surprised that we were to face an entire Rip-Mig of Gonomong, whatever a Rip-Mig might be. Alternatively, if events had ruined his plan, why then, he must adapt! And yet when – as happened at odd moments amid the hot-blooded din and the stretched emotion – my brain allowed itself an honest thought, then I had to ask, was I really able to believe that even Faraliew, or anyone, could improvise a victory out of this? I could imagine no way. But so what? Faraliew, no doubt, could see the whole picture, like those marvellous football-professionals who have that mysterious spatial awareness that tells them where to pass the ball, as though they're watching themselves on TV, looking down on the pitch from above. He must have that skill. Trust the experts.  And, hey, what was that bit of relief I sensed just then? In what small way did things seem to be better? Pistol cracks were now sounding only from our side! The enemy must have run out of ammunition!  We, on the other hand, still had bins stacked full of cases of the stuff, as much as we could ever use.  What good it could do us, given the decapods' apparent immunity to bullets, and the fact that their riders were so difficult to target, sheltered as they mostly were behind their steeds except when they made astonishingly skilful lunges with their hooks-on-poles – I wasn’t sure. The swaying, rearing motions of the decapods confused our aim; the creatures, now that they were almost level with us, gripped with their four back limbs the highest bit of turf on their side of the Vallum, and with their six front limbs in the air weaved their bodies about like a line of outsize cobras above the parapet – yet surely if we could just hold our position, they could not break it, else they would already have done so. No, thank goodness, they just weren't managing to get over that last bit of wall.  And as the dusty, sweaty hours dragged on, while the sun to our right slunk towards its setting close to the foot of the fortress of Neydio, and the most nerve-jabbing moments became dulled with frequency, another hopeful thought came to me: no matter if their ranks were to double, or treble, no matter if the entire land down to the sagorizon became carpeted with Gonomong, only a certain number of them could fit along the Vallum at one time, only so many of them could come at us at the same time, so, in that sense, our position was a kind of Thermopylae, impregnable so long as it could not be turned.  
    That raised a question I'd wondered about before. Could we be outflanked? Were they already trying it, somewhere out of my range of vision? Hard to believe that Faraliew had not made provision against such an obvious manoeuvre. Perhaps, indeed, all was well; for all my ignorant mind knew, the Vallum might extend around the whole world, or (since every time I wondered about that, I found it too hard to believe) perhaps it stretched so far east and west of the Wayline, that the Gonomong would run out of supplies and maybe starve in desert wastes if they tried to go round. Which would explain why they had thrown their entire strength directly up this central route. Yes, that must be it: their only possible strategy was to meet us head on and force their way over the wall, and although our strength was stretched to the limit, we weren't letting them do it, we weren't letting them past us, so that was all right, that must mean they could not win! The time must come when the force of their attack was spent, they must fall back and that would be our cue to counter-attack. For when their formation broke, we could get at the riders. So – that must be how we were going to win.
    Oh yeah? Who says we must win?
    More than a voice in me, it was a sly ingredient in the scene, which I could not at first identify, that shook its invisible head at my optimism.
    Ah, there – down in the blue, in the void above the sagorizon: it must be those spots, yes, a little cloud of spots, rising in the air since a while back, that now gave me my presentiment of disaster.
    Quick glances to either side confirmed to me that others besides myself had caught the same whiff of foreboding, intensifying into dismay, so that before long a slump of despair aged the faces and flattened the voices of the men around me. But perhaps I was not so shocked as they, for all along, in a dark corner of my mind, I must have been more than half expecting that the tide would turn against us.
    The cloudy spots grew into blobs. Continuing to rise from the depths of the South, in another minute or two they were high enough in the sky to be level with us. Still they rose, so that it became hard to keep them in view because all our concentration was still needed immediately in front of us, leaving us hardly a moment in which to crane our necks. Nor could I spare the attention to discuss the matter with anybody, and so I wasn't sure what the others thought; no one expressed any firm idea as to what the things were. I only wished I had not thought of Thermopylae.  
    When the objects came in sight again, they were revealed as several hundred Gonomong, each man borne in harness slung underneath four great birds larger than eagles, rapidly dropping in unison towards a part of the Vallum summit some few hundred yards to our right. Their descent was silhouetted against the setting sun, so that only with odd blinks snatched against the dazzle could my eyes follow the manoeuvre – but its significance was obvious. We had been outflanked in the third dimension, the dimension of the air. Pistol shots met the descending enemy but my sinking heart told me, Faraliew hasn't foreseen this. Faraliew is Leonidas, and we're his doomed Spartans, and the wing-filled sky is about to do for us what the Persians’ secret pass did for the end of that story.
    A breakthrough on any part of the Vallum must blow our entire defence apart like a punctured balloon. I and my companions had no choice but to fight on as hard as ever, but now we fought with our senses attuned to the developing disaster on our right, somewhere between our position and Neydio; though it was almost impossible to see anything of what was happening at the spot where the birdman task force had landed, rumour spread quickly down the line, confirming that that position had been seized. I could picture it all with complete clarity: spearmen and their supports reeling as the birdmen came down on their heads; the decapods exploiting the chaos to prance over the parapet and onto the Vallum summit at last. Now, nothing could stop them.
    A cry, “Untie! Untie!” came from behind us. The ropes were unthreaded, flung away. It was an essential move, but also it was an admission of imminent defeat. Our spears must be freed for that moment when the enemy, expanding the breach they had made in our defences, rolled up our line far enough to reach this part of it. For then we'd have them coming at us from our right as well as in front and we'd have to fall back eastwards.
    “This,” panted Jason, “is not looking good.” “We ain't dead yet,” muttered someone else. A mere technicality, thought I.
    For the Gonomong had the game in their hands. All they had to do, to finish off our whole army, was, firstly, to overrun the entire Vallum summit – which now could only be a matter of time – and then, by means of another attack by their bird-men, do a similar job a bit further north, capturing our last defence, the Marraspang, the line of boulders. And it was no use trying to forestall this move by an early use of the Marraspang. For us to set off an avalanche while the enemy stayed up on the Vallum summit would do us no good; it would only be of use if they were stupid enough to swarm off the ridge and into the avalanche's path, and no general has any right to rely on his opponents being that stupid.
    The overwhelming truth burst upon me, that the Topland strategy had been fatally flawed from the start. We had staked everything on the strength of a fixed line. Didn't history suggest that such fixity was a bad idea? Earth history, anyhow. And no matter what universe you inhabit, if your Maginot Line breaks or is outflanked, you've had your chips. You can't expect to beat a principle like that. Big blanket principle, to cover one's deathbed. Oh, well.  Defeats happen. One side or other has to lose. This time, we're elected. You take it when your turn comes.  My world narrowed down to my own little share of the fighting, and for several more minutes I gave every ounce of my concentration to the maintenance of a steady grip on the spear-shaft, to the perpetual task of making sure that the point did not slide off the armoured scales of the decapod which faced me from the parapet’s other side.
    A strange, seemingly useless fact came to my notice. This particular decapod had a pair of mauve stripes down its front. Decoration of some kind, presumably. It reminded me, in some ways, of a caparisoned horse. Maybe its rider was someone specially important. My brain had just revolved around to this conclusion, when, crack! a lucky shot of ours smote the said rider from the side, I saw him topple off, and his mount reared back. I gave an extra push with my spear and encouraged the thing to retreat a step or so further. That was the last miniature success I can remember, before – a few dozen heartbeats later – everything went haywire.
    First came shouts from Captain Murena, ordering the regulars some way at my right to wheel to their right and form a line across the way, so as to form a barrier against what was coming at us from that direction. The men obeyed as fast as they could, but hardly had they done so than the flanking Gonomong were upon them like the wave-crest of a tsunami, causing the new line to buckle inward almost as soon as it was formed. What made the momentum of the attack irresistible, was that here we had no advantage of slope; this lot were pushing at us along the flat summit instead of up the embankment's side, which made all the difference. Murena's men were forced back, back, eastwards along the top, their retreat rolling up our front until the wave of chaos reached me and buffeted me out of position: I was forced sideways, fearing to stumble and be trampled by both friend and foe, while Captain Fadron shouted futile orders as he urged his militiamen to shore up Murena's crumbling line. I utterly ceased to think, which was fortunate in one way, as else I would have known that I was by this time physically exhausted, each jerk of muscle borrowing energy from heaven knows where. Now we were being squeezed towards the northern edge of the Vallum ridge; the Gonomong to the immediate south of us had vaulted over the parapet and were joining with their fellows in a co-ordinated assault on what remained of our position; and if my ears did not deceive me I heard another tumultuous blend of thuds and cries which told me that yet another large body of the enemy were coming at us from the north, behind us; they had overflowed that way and were flowing back now to surround us.
    Our company's best attempt to break out of the trap was led by the amiable lout named Archie, known amongst us as Archie the Speller because of his dim hesitations when signing his own name. Built like a tank, he had a good go at forcing his way into the briefest of gaps which chanced to open in the wall of foes, so as to wedge it further open, with the help of some dozen supporting spears. I watched him try it, I saw him fail and go down as the gap closed upon him; this is what you get, Archie, for making one wrong decision; I've made several, and my big one was to enlist. It just goes to show, Archie, that if you had learned to spell, if I had learned to think, each of us might have found a better job than this.
    I could no longer spot Shaz, or Jason, or my other former neighbours in the line that had ceased to be. I was part of a jostling mass of spearmen being edged towards the northern slope of the embankment, and once we were forced over that edge we must lose our footing and be trampled, or so I assumed; but when the moment came and I went over, I found we were wedged so tight, we remained upright.  This was more thanks to the new enemy pressure from the north, than to that from the south.  Anyhow it was enough to keep us on our feet. I felt relief at still being able to stand; but our numbers were rapidly diminishing; we still bristled in defensive formation but only because we were caught in it.  Gradually our spears were being wrenched out of position, leaving us to be cut down one by one by the enemy's tearing hooks and slashing swords.  Presently only a few of us were left, and although I glimpsed other such pockets of resistance nearby, we had no hope that we could co-ordinate.  Silently, therefore, I said my remote good-byes.  Be a good boy, Duncan, replied my mother; make sure you've got all you need for the journey. You haven't packed that suitcase very well, have you? Sorry, Mother. This, added Uncle Vic, is an unpromising situation. I wouldn't start from here if I were you. Sorry, Uncle.
    The inner voices, the garbled memories, were drowned out by a new, real sound.
    Not merely a noise but also a tremor and a smell of shaken dust.  New panic was rising into a hubbub of many screams.  I experienced a terrible growth of understanding.  Came a collective shift, a retreat before a power that threatened every living thing in its path – and, wedged like a tinned sardine, I let myself be pushed back up to the Vallum summit. There I was safe from the avalanche, but I was not able to stop there: those who were not yet at the top were still applying pressure to the packed mass of bodies and so I was swept on, till I was forced to plunge over a battlement on the south side.  I rolled over and over and down and down, until my head hit hard and my light went out.

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