28A/N: Given Card's stark violence in Ender's Game, I couldn't really write one of those clean, cheerful wars that the Narnia series seems to prefer.
Chapter 3: Peter
There's an old saying about pulling teeth.
I'd received forty-something of Jadis's "soldiers" for what I'd hopefully christened my platoon. After two weeks of migraines in an Advil-less world, I had a rudimentary unit.
Jadis didn't employ humans, and many of her nonhuman servants couldn't work with modern weapons. Some, like the wolves and vultures, lacked opposable thumbs. Others' spectral forms prevented them from holding things for a reasonable amount of time. The sentient plants were out, for obvious reasons. And most of the rest – Black Dwarves, Giants, Ogres, and the People of the Toadstools – had size problems. If you've ever seen a twenty-foot humanoid trying to pull a trigger, you'll understand what I mean.
That'd left me with a mess of Minotaurs, Evil Apes, Ghouls, tall Dwarves (the irony does not escape me), two Succubi, and one Hag who'd showed uncanny aim with a rifle.
With only two weeks, I'd started with the rudiments of marksmanship and weapon maintenace. Not that I knew much myself (at all), but at least I'd looked at the manuals. And at least they were veterans of something.
I'd divided them into eleven teams of four critters apiece (one leader, three subordinates), but the organization was purely nominal. Most had fought shoulder-to-shoulder in shield walls, usually around a standard of some sort. They didn't do the whole command-and-control thing very well.
Fortunately, Aslan's forces didn't have grenades or artillery. I permitted them to bunch up. For now.
On the bright side, most came from hierarchical cultures. They brought their servants to war in roughly the same spirit that a Regency country squire would bring his manservant. So the buddy system worked well enough, with a few modifications.
As for fire discipline…pah. The Evil Apes seemed particularly fond of spraying entire magazines at targets while hooting excitedly. Worse, everybody traveled at different rates. Five-second rushes usually ended with the Minotaurs almost a football field ahead of the main body. Not to mention the Hag. Ghouls, for their part, seemed to enjoy low-crawling, while Evil Apes did not. (And yes, they referred to themselves as "Evil" Apes.) The Dwarven hirðmenn seemed to delight in dueling. I lost Grikklak Somebody-Or-Othersson that way.
The "medic" had learned her craft from leather-bound books of Galenic medicine. The radiotelephone operator was a Person of the Toadstools. ("Toadstool Person", I was informed, was highly offensive. "Person of the Toadstools" was not, for reasons that were apparently self-evident). Like most People of the Toadstools, ours was a "nobleman"; his military experience mostly consisted of cattle rustling in his boggy homeland. His silver-hilted sword was roughly the size of a butterknife. He rode on the Minotaur's back in a leather harness, and did an okay job as long as he kept his spores out of the electronics.
I didn't even attempt to explain field sanitation.
We set off for Beruna fifteen days after I arrived. We didn't start moving until the sun had already sunk in the sky, painting Narnia's snowdrifts orange. Like most preindustrial people, Her Imperial Highness was apparently polychronic. Time was more a vague suggestion than a fact.
As the days crawled on, our road got deeper, wetter, and squishier. Half-frozen mud penetrated boots. Brown slush pattered, until the cold and moisture bit into everything. My calves ached each time I pulled a foot out of the mud, accompanied by a slurping sound.
It was getting warmer. The White Witch's domain was shrinking accordingly, retreating before Aslan's spring.
We arrived at Beruna after several days' march. The river was brown, and roared from decades' worth of snow melting at once.
The enemy was waiting for us.
The Narnian host across the river looked like a perverse cross between Beowulf and The Wind in the Willows. Centaurs wore gleaming Sutton Hoo style helms, complete with silver knotwork and eye-guards that looked a bit like goggles.
Dwarves with leaf-bladed spears jostled each other. They formed a wall of shields shaped like kites. At first, I thought that they had no swords, but soon noticed scabbards protruding from under the mail hauberks, their handles poking out from slits in the mail. It seemed like a tripping hazard, but I guess it must've worked well enough. Battlefield customs don't survive by shortening their users' life expectancies.
I was considering just how to pry them out of their position (Shoot across the river and reveal our advantage early? Pick off a few with a target rifle until they back up? Ford at a thinner section further upstream?) when a herald rowed across to meet us. It was a faun with a wren's feather in his hat. A herald.
The herald slopped through the shallows and handed me a rolled-up parchment. It even had a wax seal. I read it. Butchered Medieval Latin. Of course.
My eyes must have widened, since one of the Minotaurs asked me what was wrong. I showed him. He barked a laugh and passed it to the other squad leaders.
We greet the son of Men-beyond-Narnia's-sky. As he is outnumbered, we invite him to cross the river unobstructed. If he dares. We shall wait until his troops have crossed before offering battle.
- Naierus, Centaur Lord
"Well, well…" I said. "So Christmas comes to Narnia after all."
The Centaurs across the river were jeering at me, beating swords and spears against their shields. I noticed a few waving long iron javelins, like Roman pila or Germanic angons. I doubted they'd do much damage. A warrior can usually sidestep or catch them. It's only when he's crammed into a shield wall that he loses that ability. Mine were in loose order.
I rolled the message up and handed it back to the herald.
"Convey my thanks to Lord Naierus," I said. "We'll be crossing."
The Faun bowed and clicked his hooves together. He waved at the host on the other side. The ensuing roar sent ripples through the air.
And then, as one body, they rumbled back about a hundred yards from the water's edge.
I turned to the Minotaur.
"Get the boats."
He obeyed. As we crossed, I kept as many rifles trained on the shore as I could spare rowers.
I needn't have worried. The Narnians stayed back.
Idiots.
We reached the other side. Oddly enough, it reminded me of our schoolyard's back lot. I could smell grass and pollen. A bee buzzed. Possibly sentient. I narrowed my eyes and blocked the sunlight with my palm.
Sixty yards, maybe. Close enough that the Narnians could use their bows, but also close enough for massed automatic fire. We hadn't quite mastered marksmanship yet, so that was just as well.
We crouched, reducing our target areas and hopefully increasing our accuracy. Slightly.
I formed my soldiers up in a half-circle around the landing site. Fool that he was, our opponent let us. Hundreds of Dwarves, big cats, and centaurs clinked in their armor. Light glinted from their helmets. Banners fwopped in the wind. I'm sure it all would have looked very intimidating and noble to someone without assault rifles.
All I saw was densely packed ranks.
Forty-odd rifles clicked.
"Fire."
It was like watching a toddler's hand sweeping across a row of dominoes. Sunlight punched through shields. Single-edged seax knives fell from nerveless hands. Blood dripped through mail links. Centaurs reared and screamed and died.
Aslanist Dwarves tore at their armor. The quilted gambesons that should have protected them from crushing impacts only blocked their fingers from reaching the neat pinholes that had felled them.
A few hastily-loosed arrows thumped around us. Most had antler arrowheads. The rest were iron. None hit us.
To my left, a Ghoul banged his rifle against the ground. Jammed, presumably. Ghouls do not handle frustration well. A Dwarf named Ildrik ran in front of the firing line to get a better view – incidentally obstructing six of his fellows' lines of fire.
"DUCK!" I screamed.
He did. The rest fired over him. I made a mental note to sic a Minotaur sergeant on him later.
A few Fauns hurled yard-long darts at us from atlatls. They were fletched with red feathers, and one of them buried itself in a Minotaur's bicep. He snapped the shaft, pulled the flint head out, and spat.
Centaur bows twanged. Some were recurved horn-and-sinew models, like the Scythians must have carried. Others were man-sized, and made of yew.
"Kill the Centaurs up front!"
"But the flanking force…"
…Oh. Right. I blinked and nodded. Target fixation. I'd been aware of it before, theoretically. It's surprisingly tricky to keep track of forty-odd soldiers.
Fire had slackened on my right flank. A pair of Fauns crashed into the Dwarves there, turning aside bayonet thrusts with bronze bucklers. The Kalashnikov does not make a very good spear substitute. Three of my soldiers went down.
A Minotaur plugged the gap. He gored one Faun and clubbed the other. But how had they gotten so far…?
"RELOAD!" I shrieked.
Of course. They'd forgotten that in combat, hadn't they? Some of them, at least. I was gratified when our rifle cracks became a solid wall of noise again.
The Minotaur bellowed when a pair of arrows sank into his neck. Another hit him in the chest. He collapsed. A final shudder confirmed my suspicions.
One of the Evil Apes scurried up to the body, firing over it like a parapet. His makeshift cover stopped a couple arrows. The rifle cracked in reply. Little puffs of smoke blew through the Minotaur's fur.
A Ghoul danced from one foot to another. He cackled, tossing a spent magazine over his shoulder and jiggling the second into place. Or trying.
"Get down when you reload!"
An atlatl dart rendered my warning irrelevant.
The Narnians were brave; some stood within ten or fifteen yards of our position before the bullets cut them down. A few skidded to our feet, dead in mid-charge. The survivors stood off near the fifty yard mark, hurling arrows and insults until they also went down.
Some of them raised their shields. Bullets shredded poplar and linden wood. A red stag bellowed, and flopped over.
Finally – finally – the Narnians broke and ran.
I learned my soldiers' military experience wasn't entirely useless. They didn't tire themselves sprinting, for one thing. They knew exactly how far they could rush at the enemy before they were exhausted. And they moved well with heavy backpacks.
What followed went by quickly.
Centaurs vaulted over obstacles like gazelles. One cleared a six foot stone wall. We mostly let them go, except for one enterprising group that ripped down trees and set up a log rampart. We hit it with dynamite. Splinters and dust blasted in all directions. So did most of the Centaurs.
Another group of Centaurs and cheetahs thumped across the crest of the hill. The sun painted them as black silhouettes against the sky. Easy targets.
They went down. All of them went down. A dying Centaur is not pleasant to watch. The horse part and the human torso do not move in synchronicity when they thrash about.
The Centaurs' slower counterparts were even less fortunate. At least they seemed to have grasped the value of cover, zipping between boulders and through bushes. A bear lurched from behind a tree. He killed a Succubus with a swing of his paw before a machine gun brought him down. We kept closer together after that, and kept an eye on the bases of trees.
I started at every sound of hooves on gravel, or fur rustling through leaves.
And then, relative quiet.
I checked my watch when it was over. Twenty minutes. Combat, I am told, has an odd way of manipulating time. It had seemed like an hour. The Dwarves had already started rifling through their opponents' clothing. The Hag was eating a cheetah.
The tang of burned cordite mixed with the smell of death. The wind blew away from us that afternoon. Life's little mercies. I looked down and realized that my safety was still on. Seven full magazines lay at my feet. It took me a moment to work out that I'd been compulsively changing them.
"Stay alert," I said. "Clear the area first. They may not be all gone."
At least I didn't need to warn them about "wounded" Aslanists playing possum. Dwarven hatchets saw to that. One Dwarf seemed to take particular glee in stealing a tunic with embroidered wool clovers. I considered ordering them to leave the wounded alone, and then realized that the Witch would probably do worse to prisoners. So instead, I sank to my knees and threw up.
A gaggle of Dwarves passed around a wine pitcher. It was hard and sandy gray, with what looked like traces of quartz. One of them munched on that weird clove-flavored rye bread that his people preferred. Another bit the head off a dried eel.
I vomited again.
When the last screams and pops of gunfire had stopped (and the remaining prisoners had become monster-chow, to my apathetic annoyance), I sounded the bugle call for everybody to return. My soldiers took their fingers off triggers. That much, I'd drilled into them.
"You're shaking, 'Locke'."
"Eh?"
"Or is it Peter now? Trembling little Peter and his queasy stomach…"
I glowered at the absurdly tall woman standing behind me. She returned the glance with those creepy gray-on-gray eyes. And a smirk.
She almost convinced me. But I noticed the way that her eyes roved across the battlefield, and her fingers were clenching her wand like a vise.
Far be it from me to pass up an opportunity.
"Three hundred dead at least. Only seven on our side. Dunno about wounded. Lucky we outperformed your expectations, or I might have been pushing up daisies right now. Eh, Majesty?"
The smile dropped.
"You will teach my armorers how to make these things," she said.
"Ever heard of replaceable parts?" I said. "Smokeless powder? Brass cartridges?"
Silence.
"No? Then I'm afraid you'll just have to rely on the Wiggin Import-Export Business."
Jadis's voice took on a sweeter lilt.
"Have you ever been suspended by your arms until they pop out of their sockets, Mr. Wiggin?"
"Can't say that I have," I said. "Y'know, Your Majesty…Funny thing. I might have kinda-sorta-accidentally sent a couple...historical manuscripts to Aslan."
"What?"
"Yeah. Firearm blueprints. Flintlock breechloading rifles, cartridges, Minie balls, that sort of thing. Stuff that a preindustrial society can build. Especially a preindustrial society that controls the territory with most of Narnia's iron and saltpeter. Which your own fiefs don't have. Oops."
I could almost hear her teeth grinding. The explosion came as expected.
"You DARED to—"
"Yup. Now unless you want to keep bickering, I recommend we withdraw to your castle and train a couple more platoons with these things. Before Aslan does. Heh."
"I'll hold you hostage! I'll put you through pain that you wouldn't believe!"
"Maybe. But Valentine has orders to cut off contact - and ammo shipments - with Narnia if I don't report in two days. For that matter, what d'you want to bet that she finds a way to get to Aslan directly?"
Jadis was shaking. Her hand clenched and unclenched around her wand, doubtless imagining that it was my throat.
"Oh, you could try anyway," I said. "It's not as if I can escape. Who knows? Val might even back down and send you more ammo. But it would be a risk, wouldn't it…Majesty?"
Her laughter took me completely by surprise. It was high and soft - another surprise. Albeit accompanied by a predatory grin rather than a true smile. I wasn't sure that her pale, sharp face could truly smile.
"You know…" she said. "I think we'll get along just fine, Mr. Wiggin."
"Wh...huh?"
Jadis headed back to her waiting boat. The wood had been carved into the shape of a sleeping swan, and was inlaid with mother-of-pearl.
I must have been staring, since she smirked again.
"Ask me about Charn sometime," she said. "I may even tell you."
And then, the boat pushed off.
"Sergeant," I said.
The remaining Minotaur grunted.
"We're heading back," I said. "Run them through their drills a few more times. We'll need a training cadre."