Rincewind and the Redskins – c2

Colonel George Reynaud Rjuister sat in his tent and brooded. He was furiously angry, which in many ways was his datum state. He summoned his soldier-servant to remove his tight riding boots, and took pleasure in sending him stumbling across the tent. Dismissing him, Rjuister brooded on the damned injustice that had seen him demoted from General's rank, which he'd briefly enjoyed during the War of Independence and the consequent Civil War.

Twirling his greying-blonde moustaches, he damned Blots to his Kerrigian Hell, him and his damnable reasonableness about it all.

Be realistic, George! The war's over! We've driven out the Ankh-Morporkians. Their army, or what was left of it, surrendered to us, at least in parts in thanks to you. Then we got the Morporkians in the Carp Colony to see sense and realise their future is assured in an independent state, no longer a colony. We have no interest in throwing them out. We need them, to make this nation work! But now the fighting's over, the Ankh-Morporkians will never return, and we're a new Republic at peace, we do not need so large an Army. If the Army shrinks, as it must, it will not need so many Generals. The only job such an Army has for you, and it is a honourable one, is as a colonel commanding a very much reduced cavalry regiment. It's that or leave the Army, George. (1)

Again, Rjuister damned General Jan Blots, the architect of what Ankh-Morpork was already referring to as the Boor War.

The Motherland had sent an army to help defend the colony against the Kwa'Zulu threat nearly thirty years before. Despite the early disaster at Isandlhwana, where the inept Eorle, assisted by Lord Rust, had lost two thousand men in a morning against an enemy they had woefully underestimated, they had recovered and held the consequent Zulu invasion of the Boor homeland at Lawke's Drain. This had given the redoubtable Lord Ramkin, possibly Ankh-Morpork's only capable general, time to gather an army together that had smashed the Kwa'Zulu at Ulundhi, and took away the threat to the Staadt from that quarter for quite a long time. Ramkin had then pulled his Army out of the Kwa'Zulu homeland, pointing out he was not there to bring about its complete destruction. If you Boors want to invade it, he had said, you're on your own and you do not have my support. Without the strength on their own to deliver a killing blow to the hereditary enemy, the Boors had reluctantly retreated to their side of the border.

And the Ankhians had stayed. Lord Ramkin had been acclaimed as Governor-General in the name of the Patrician, but had privately said to Boor leader Jan Blots and Carp Colony leader Charles Smith-Rhodes that as far as he was concerned, he was a figurehead: it's your country. "You make the decisions, and if they're good ones, I'll just nod". Ramkin had treated his tenure as Governor as an extended holiday for himself and Lady Ramkin; it had even involved unofficial state visits to the Kwa'Zulu, who respected him as a war leader who had beaten them fairly and dealt with them with justice and wisdom afterwards.

And then he'd returned home and a new Patrician took over. And their army stayed. And relations deteriorated. And when the new Governor, Lord Eorle, insisted on directly ruling the Colony, war broke out. Eorle insisted on leading the Ankhian troops in "restoring civil order". He did this so ham-fistedly the whole of the Boor nation rose in revolt. A series of shattering defeats followed, at Magersfontein, Stornberg, and Spion Kop. Harried by General Rjuister's cavalry forces, the remnants of the Ankh-Morporkian Army fell back on the fortress garrison town of Mafeking and were besieged there, desperately awaiting relief from home. Only when it became clear that no relief would ever come did they surrender. General Blots disarmed them, and allowed them the choice of remaining as citizens of the new republic, or a one-way sea passage home. (2) Lord Ramkin, by then retired, was said to have wept tears of rage, frustration, and sadness, at the stupidity of the men who'd wasted an army and set back everything he'd tried to bring about in Howondaland.

And Rjuister looked back on the War of Independence with justifiable pride. It had been his finest hour as a fighting soldier.

And this was how they rewarded him! Demotion to Colonel. Postings to Gods-forsaken frontier postings on the edge of civilization, endlessly patrolling the borders for signs of incursion, with only brief leaves back to the city where he could petition the politicians for restoration of his old rank.

This expedition to the northern plains to fight the redskin might well be his very last chance to prove himself as a military leader… and to make it a thousand times more aggravating, it has to be done with that dratted damned jumped-up Boor farmer General Kriminel. (3)

Rjuister sighed.

Although a Boor, he took it as an article of faith passed down the generations of his family that he was directly descended from, and related to, the noble Rust family of Ankh-Morpork. He rather prided himself that his was where his presumed military genius came from, and an artlessly modest reference or two to his family relationship with one of the Heroes of Lawke's Drain hadn't harmed his career.

In fact, this was actually correct.

A couple of hundred years ago, his many-times great grandmother had been a Kerrigian housemaid in the service of the Rusts. One night, the then Lord Rust had taken his droit de seigneur out for exercise, taking it as his right that mere housemaids should be glad to succumb to his attentions. And if the general stock of the peasantry should be improved by a few Rust genes, she should be jolly grateful, even though there was no question of his ever acknowledging a bastard, dear me no.

Dismissed without a reference as soon as her pregnancy became apparent, for immoral behaviour and becoming a fallen woman, with Rust characteristically denying any part in the affair, Rjuister's strong-minded ancestor took passage on a colony ship bound for Howondaland. Here, she reinvented herself as a widow of a fallen soldier in one of Rust's regiments, and a kindly Boor farmer, coincidentally called Hans Rjuister, took her in and made a honest woman of her.

And although he had inherited some useful military sense from generations of men who had ridden with the Boor civilians' militia, the kommandos, all the native arrogance, all the unshakeable belief in abilities he did not in fact possess, all the rudeness and incivility, all the exaggerated sense of entitlement and all the thick-skulled stupidity of the Rust family had run true down the generations and coalesced, some might say congealed, in young George.

And here he was now, in command of six hundred officers and men of the Seventh Cavalry. Bound for death or glory. Their death; his glory.

There was a discreet coughing from outside the tent.

"Yes?" said Rjuister, impatiently.

"Scouts are in, sir."

Major Reno, his second-in-command, no breeding and a liability in the Mess, but he'd been told not to even think of transfering him out of the Seventh. They were stuck with each other.

"Bring them in." the colonel commanded.

He looked with distaste at the two local Indians recruited to track down others of their kind and act as local guides. There were Crow Indians, he knew. Other Indians seemed to regard the Crow as suspect, as if their loyalty were conditional, but there were worse turncoats than the Crow. The two specimens in front of him were in fact Scalbie Indians, members of a tribe that the rest of the Indian nation would pointedly sit as far away from as they could, at a pow-wow or chiefs' gathering.

Dirty, scruffy, addicted to tobacco, firewater and any other vice man had devised, they were the Gnolls of the Indian plains, living at the margins, prone to knocking on a neighbour's tepee door to beg a buffalo haunch, a light for the fire, oh, and have you got any spare wampum, guv?

No, the Scalbie tribe were unreliable and untrustworthy, but with the rest of the red buggers having disappeared into thin air, they were the best he could get.

"Report." he said, briskly, trying not to breathe through his nose and wanting them out of his command tent as quickly as he could.

"Sioux warriors seen patrolling, kemo sabe." said the lead Scalbie, knucking his brow. "They ran when they saw us"

Ran when they smelt you, more probably, thought Rjuister. But he nodded.

"We think they are in valley of the Big Horn, kemo sabe. Chiefs have called Plains Nations there to make last stand."

"How far away is this Big Horn?"

"Six, maybe seven days march, kemo sabe"

"Good!" Rjuister said, dismissing the Indians. Their smell lingered, however.

"We send out patrols of our own, Reno. Bring them to battle! Test our mettle and their quality as a foe!"

Rjuister thumped the map-table, exultantly.

"By the way, what's this kemo sabe mean?"

Reno cleared his throat. This was going to be a tricky one.

"I believe it to be a term of respect to a social better and great white leader, sir."

Rjuister beamed. He was getting the respect due to him. Good.

Meanwhile outside the tent, the two Scalbie scouts watched a herd of bison lumber by. A large cow cocked her tail and paused to deposit a great steaming heap of kemo sabe on the prairie. The two Indians nodded, in a moment of harmony with the world. Somewhere in the distance, a coyote howled.

"Did we make it clear whose Last Stand happens at the Big Horn?" one said to the other. The second Scalbie shrugged, indifferently.

"He seems to have got the idea it's going to be somebody else's."

"Good..."

(1) This, of course, was at the heart of George Armstrong Custer's poisonous resentment – his necessary demotion from General to Colonel in a reduced peacetime army at the end of the American Civil War. He saw men he perceived to be of lesser ability allowed to keep higher rank, and allowed envy to eat at him. The next eleven years after 1865 were ruled by his ego and his attempts to demonstrate to higher command that he should be promoted to General. After alienating himself from his officers, offending his superiors, and making life hell for his enlisted men, the culminating attempt to prove his ability was the Battle of the Little Big Horn in 1876. He didn't prove his military ability – in fact the total opposite – but created a legend that lives on to this day…

(2)Loosely based on the Boer War in Roundworld, except here the Boers defeat the colonial power of Ankh-Morpork. Dealt with in more detail – or will be when it's finished – in my novella Ripping Yarn.

(3) The military commander of the US Army's expedition down the Big Horn Valley was not Custer, but the rather plodding and uninspired General Crook, who he despised. Think Selachii and Venturi in joint charge of an Army… yes, recipe for disaster here.