Rincewind among the Redskins 12: The Day of Greasy Grass
After despatching Reno to the left with a hundred and eighty men, and Bentine to the centre with a hundred and twenty, to face what he judged would be minimal Indian opposition, Rjuister led the lion's share of the Seventh down the Medicine Tail Coulée so as to be able to obliterate the Indian encampment with overwhelming force. He would come sweeping through the Indian village bringing death and destruction in his wake, with Reno and Bentine's forces converging on his as the other jaw of a pincer moving to encircle the hostiles, to cut them off from all hope of retreat, and to destroy them in detail.
It was a good plan in theory and might have worked if Rjuister had commanded a cavalry division, not a mere regiment, and if there had been a lot less hostiles with pressing and immediate reasons to fight back.
Rincewind had long since passed the point where, left to himself, he kept falling off things with four legs unless securely tied to them. Especially if he had good reason to stay on – let's say if pursued by hundreds, no, thousands, of implacable savage warriors prepared to treat him as an enemy just because he was riding with the horse-soldiers they were at war with – he tended to stay on, these days. His new-found riding-away skills were a logical extension of his unhorsed running-away abilities.
And right now, on the Medicine Tail Coulée, Rincewind was doing what he was good at. In this case, riding away in a frenzy of gibbering fear and mortal terror.
In front of him, he had heard a last protest from Reno to Rjuister, just before the Major had been sent away to attend to his own orders.
"This is madness, sir! All these ravines and escarpments! This is not cavalry country, sir! We cannot gallop, we cannot charge, we will inevitably lose men and mounts. And even that the trail, that Coulée, will only allow you to ride three or four abreast!You'll be strung out for the best part of half a mile, sir!"
Rjuister had not listened, and had swung his men down the trail. Riding near him at the front of the column, Rincewind had thought he could hear muted disbelieving sniggers, hastily cut off, from the long grass on the sloping bluffs to the right, and down in the thickly grassed ravine to the left.
His mind raced. If I were Bull, I'd hold everyone back until Rjuister has committed his entire column to riding on this trail, when even if he wanted to, he couldn't about-turn half a mile of cavalrymen strung out in a thin line. Once he's committed them, the only possible way they can ride on a trail this narrow is forwards. Then I'd hit them with everything I'd got, from both sides. I'd give it maybe, fifteen, twenty minutes? (1)
Rincewind considered the bluffs to the right and the ravines to the left. There was room for quite a lot of Indians to hide in the undergrowth, waiting for the moment.
This is it then. Ohshitohshitohshit, I'm going to die!
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Another man who had made the same assessment of the situation was Lieutenant Gibson. As the most junior officer, his troop was right at the very back of Rjuister's column and would enter the Medicine Tail Coulée last of all. Gibson remembered the last conversation he had had with Reno and Bentine.
When the moment comes, your first, only, and last duty is to the thirty-odd men in your troop. If Rjuister is hell-bent on getting everyone else slaughtered, you have to leave him to it and find a a way to save your men. You'll know what to do when the time comes.
Hre deliberately held his men back from the rest of the column. This had to be carefully judged: going too fast would lead them into hell. Going too slowly could afterwards be termed cowardice or deliberate dereliction of duty. He kept a clear idea of where Bentine and Reno were in relation to him and assessed the distance.
Holding back Ensign Caffrey, he waited and watched the sign, allowing a wider and wide gap to open between him and F-Troop in front. Then it happened, as if a hidden someone had touched off a powder trail. The bluffs above and the ravines below exploded with Indians, some mounted, mainly on foot, whooping and war-crying, running in close to press and harry the cavalry. It all started further up the line, where Rjuister was, (and, Gibson noted with satisfaction, Captain Quirke would be) and flowed back towards the tail, a flow made up of thousands of painted Indians.
Gibson called his bugler to sound the "withdraw!" just as Indians began exploding form the grass around them, flowing in to attack the rear of F-Troop, irrevocably cutting Gibson's troop off from the main column.
Well, that's it. I'm cut off from Rjuister's command now and I can quite legitimately issue my own orders.
"About-turn! Ride for Captain Bentine's column!" Gibson ordered, spurring his horse into a gallop. His men, momentarily shocked, needed no urging, and followed him at a full gallop back the way they had come, using the weight of their horses to barrel through the onrushing natives.
There was trouble behind them and on the left flank too, although it appeared the bulk of the hostiles were chasing down Rjuister, preferring to attack the column led by the great white chief. They can come back later for us, probably, thought Gibson, as he slashed at a warpainted face with his sabre arm, trying desperately to maintain control of his horse with the reins in his left.
He could see both Bentine and Reno had come to grief. Their respective charges had faltered in the face of the broken ground and the massive press of hostiles. Gibson could also see that both columns had been forced to a defensive position on whatever high ground they could reach, and that there was now no Discly way of breaking through to Bentine: the press of enemy around the knoll his men now defended was just too thick. Gibson revised his order, seeing that further on, Reno had been similarly forced to cover, but his command was not yet completely beset by Indians, There was, fleetingly, clear ground between them. He ordered :
"Make for Major Reno! Repeat, make for Major Reno!"
They barely made it: a trickle of men were lost all the way across the broken ground, victims of groups of Indians leaping up from seemingly nowhere, physically dragging troopers off their horses heedless of flashing sabres, or taking advantage of sheer bad luck, men thrown when horses stumbled on the uneven broken ground that Reno had warned was no good for horsemen.
But, slowly, agonisingly slowly, they were within range of defensive fire put up by Reno's men, who had been forced to go to ground on a high knoll, and the Indian surge let off to allow them into a friendly enclave. Gibson shook hands with Reno.
"Lieutenant Gibson reporting, sir. Cut off from the main body by hostile action. Beg to report one officer, three NCO's, and… twenty-two other ranks."
He paused.
"Ten men lost in action."
Reno gave his shoulder a steadying pat.
"Better than the full thirty-six. You did well. Get some of your men posted down there in the dip with the horses. Watch for Indians getting in to the horse lines. We're going to need them to get out. Colonel Rjuister…" their eyes fell on a distant dust-cloud, with red figures darting in and out of it, one whom was leading a booty horse, "..is, I fear, beyond our help now. But I warned him!"
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That twenty-minute ride was something that Rincewind would rate as one of the ten most horrible and frightening experiences of his life. Even though horse-bows were firing and sabres were flashing, Rjuister's long strung-out column was taking a severe pounding from the Indians harrying it on both sides. Rincewind had a nightmare glimpse of a trooper brought down screaming by three Indians. Seconds later, there was the flash of a knife and a brave was whooping, waving something both hairy and bloody as a taunt to Rjuister's horse-soldiers. Other Indians were donning the jackets and hats of dead troopers, partly as booty, partly because it made it difficult until they really got up close to see who was who.
The sadistic Trooper Els coolly shot one such in the face with a horsebow, sending him flying back over the saddle. Rincewind gloomily noted that whatever else Els was, he wasn't a coward.
"Sir! Colonel Rjuister! " called a sergeant. "We must get off this track! There's a hill over there we can defend!"
Rjusiter nodded assent, and steered to his left, pointing with his sabre. Rincewind took stock as the cavalry poured to the illusory safety of the knoll, which overlooked the Indian village. Already, fresh Redskins were pouring out of the village, most mounted, to put a physical block between Rjuister and his target. As for Rjuister, his first sight of the sheer size of the Indian encampment he had hoped to overwhelm seemed to leave him stunned: that, and the weight of numbers facing him, appeared to restore a temporary measure of sanity, or something approximating it.
But he had barely two hundred men left, perhaps two hundred and thirty at most, of well over three hundred he'd set out with. In twenty short minutes, his command had been stripped by a third, in the sheer attrition of running the Indian gauntlet. Rincewind tried to guess Indian losses: there were a lot of red bodies out there. Two hundred, maybe three? Out of twenty thousand, not a great number. But most of them would have family back there…
Men tried to draw semblance of order out of the chaos. Some men tried to wrangle the horses into a makeshift herd, one man to every five or six sets of reins, as the rest dismounted and set up a long defensive circle with the horses inside. Some men, but by no means all, even thought to grab their reserve of spare crossbow bolts from their saddlebags first, before surrendering their mounts. But by then, they were in the middle of a swirling line of mounted Indians, shooting bows and crossbows into the defensive line, firing over the heads of the dismounted soldiers into the horses, trying to take out the horse-handlers as preference targets. Panicked horses started to free themselves and gallop off, often to have their reins taken by Indians who vaulted into the saddle and joined in the circling mass of attackers. The defensive circle broke and shrank as men dropped. Men who were now losing their horses and their last chance of escape, their mounts either bolting or killed or captured.
Some men philosophically dropped behind the cover of dead horses and began picking their shots, methodically seeking to take as many Indians as possible with them.
Rincewind just dropped to the ground, rolled into a ball, and whimpered.
Trooper Els, evil and savage, grinned at him.
"I'll take you with me, renegade. There's no escaping from this one, not for anybody."
In the press, Rjuister was methodically loading, firing, and reloading his pistol crossbows, now just another man among many dying men, his command shattered, the end a matter of time. But his eyes betrayed his insanity and his words betrayed that reality was something he may have glimpsed retreating fro him at full speed some time earlier in the day.
"We've caught them napping! Sound the charge! We have them on the run!" Rjuister bellowed, as one of his men caught a crossbow bolt through the chest and slumped to the ground.
"Take no prisoners!" he roared, as another man fell to earth.
"Get off of your knees, men! Rjuister's with you! Rjuister's up! Stay with me!"
Rincewind tried to shut the awful noise of battle, of screaming horses, of dying men, of whooping Indians, of the whosh and meaty thud of crossbow bolts, of Rjuister's burbling insanity, out of his head. And failed.
"What are they doing?" Rjuister said, in a plaintive querulous voice. "Why aren't they charging?"
"Because there's nowhere to charge to." Said a voice. It took a second or two for Rincewind to register that it was his.
Rjuister looked around him. Men were steeling themselves to kill the last of the horses to deny them to the Indians and to make a last defence breastwork with. Rincewind thought it was a hateful sight. What had those poor horses done to anybody to be slaughtered this way? Slaughter… ohshitohshitohshit, I'm going to die…
"Fools! They're shooting their own horses! Arrest them! Arrest them!" screamed Rjuister.
"Bugler! Sound the charge!" But nobody was listening.
Dully, Rincewind saw the mounted Indians were pulling back now. A wave of Indians was streaming forward on foot to fininsh the job. Almost pathetically, the last survivors of the Seventh waited for them.
"We've got to make breastworks! Make breastworks, men!" Rjuister bleated, somewhat behind the times. The Indians attacked.
"Show them no mercy! I said, give them a volley!"
One of the last surviving sergeants lifted his head and said
" We're running out of ammunition"..
Then he turned from his broken reed of a colonel to the business of picking the enemies his last few crossbow bolts would kill.
-"Right".muttered Rjuister. Now we are running out of ammunition. I told him this would happen!".
To Rincewind's pity and disgust, Rjuister went into a dribbling self-pitiyng rant against the politicians who'd brought all this about by demoting him from the rank of General. Then as the Indians closed in to the last of the defensive perimeter, and the eerie silence was broken by fresh war-cries and screams, a little reality surfaced.
"This is horrible. We're being wiped out!"
"Oh. You've noticed, have you?" muttered Rincewind.
Go on, White Howondaland! Let your arrows fly, savages! I am unbowed! I am Rjuister!"
Rincewind found his voice speaking again, unbidden.
"Why don't you shut up?"
The ice-cold blue eyes locked onto the wizard.
"You, man! Get on your feet and face the enemy!"
One of the pistol crossbows swung to point at Rincewind. The Indians were now well among the last men standing. Only a handful of cavalrymen were left to face them.(2)
" Go away, General." Rincewind muttered, now somewhere on the far side of fear and feeling oddly calm about it all. He saw the Indians coming up behind Rjuister, doing a double-take and nudging each other. And there were other figures there…
GOOD MORNING, RINCEWIND.
"Is it still only morning?"
EIGHT-FIFTY AY-EMM, ACCORDING TO CENTRAL HOWONDALANDIAN TIME.
"Doesn't time drag, when you're having a thoroughly miserable and frightening time?"
INDEED, RINCEWIND.
Death took an hourglass from his robe and looked at it.
From a further distance, he heard Rjuister say, in normal time
" All right. The sentence is death."
He levelled the crossbow at Rincewind, who looked, without fear (Death was such an oddly calming influence) at a point just behind Rjuister's shoulder.
At the tomahawk that thudded down onto his head, sending the former General slumping silently to the ground.
"Uggg" Rincewind said. "Why does it always have to be so messy?"
GENERAL GEORGE REYNAUD RJUISTER?
The shade of the Cavalry officer sat up, and looked down at what was being done to his corpse.
"I see" he muttered. "Well, I suppose the Redskin won that trophy fair and square." And then it registered.
"You called me General?"
"YOU HEARD CORRECTLY. Death said, swinging the sword gently.
NORMALLY I WORK WITH THE SCYTHE, BUT GENERALS, LIKE ROYALTY, ARE ALLOWED THE PRIVILEGE OF THE SWORD. THEY LIVE BY IT, AFTER ALL.
The General's shade stood up.
"I never wanted this. I wanted to be a participant in such a glorious battle that it would still be talked about and discussed in military colleges and history lessons a hundred years from now. That the name of Rjuister will never die".
STRANGELY ENOUGH, THAT WISH HAS BEEN FULFILLED. IN EVERY RESPECT. I CAN ASSURE YOU YOUR NAME WILL BECOME A BYWORD FOR A PARTICULAR SORT OF MILITARY SPECIALITY. AND EVEN THOUGH YOU DIED A COLONEL, IN DEATH YOU WILL BE REMEMBERED AS A GENERAL.
Death ushered the shade of Rjuister onwards.
"Oh…my…"
The dead of the Seventh Cavalry were in full rank and order, waiting for him. Every so often there was another "pop" and their ranks were augmented by one.
Troop-Sergeant Callaghan and Lieutenant Colhouhoun saluted smartly.
"Seventh Cavalry awaiting general's inspection, sir!"
AND YOU GET TO RIDE THE HAPPY HUNTING GROUNDS TOGETHER. THIS IS ONLY FITTING, REALLY.
Death disappeared. In his place, War rode forward and saluted Rjuister.
"Be honoured to take the inspection, old boy" he said.
Back on the battlefield, Rincewind goggled at the Indian who was triumphantly holding up the bloody scalp of Ruijster.
"Two-Dogs?"
"Strike a bleedin' light, it's Mr Rincewind!" Dogs exclaimed. "Bucket, help Mr Rincewind out of bother, would you? Any of the lads who don't know him see him, he's in strife!"
Rincewind looked gratefully into One-Man-Bucket's grinning face.
"Just get that robe off, Mr Rincewind. You're in buckskins underneath, and there's still some warpaint showing from the other day, that's good. We was all really impressed, by the way, when you charged 'em single-handed and counted coup on eight of the buggers! Now give me your hat."
Bucket pushed the point of the hat down inside itself, and reshaped it into something looking like a floppy Indian hat with a squared-off crown.
"Anana said to get you out safe. She thinks it won't be long before your people come looking for you, you and your medicine box. Ah, she sewn a band on it. Lovely. Let's get you looking more like an Indian…"
Bucket foraged, and found a fallen Indian with a lot of feathers in his headdress.
"He won't need this any more, poor bugger. Now let's see how it works. Anana told me. You rode out on the warpath the other day. And you're here today. That's two long feathers."
He plucked them out of the bonnet and threaded them into Rincewind's hat band.
"And you counted coup eight times. That's eight shorter ones.."
Rincewind was presented with a modified Wizard's hat with ten feathers in it.
"That'll do. You look like one of us now. Let's get you back to the camp."
"Not while I'm standing. I said I'd kill you, renegade!"
It was Trooper Els, still standing, still a bottle covey, still a thug, who still carried a loaded crossbow. He lifted it and pointed it at the Wizard.
"Say goodbye, Wizard!"
And then the Luggage, striped with warpaint, bowled into him, lid open. There was a crunching noise, and finally a long mahogany-red tongue licked round the lid.
"Uggh" said Bucket and Dogs together. "Does it do that sort of thing a lot?"
"You'd be surprised" Rincewind said. "I've never worked out where they go, that's the funny thing!"
Together, the battle over, the three of them made the short walk back to the encampment.
"I see you kept the Luggage safe" Rincewind said, conversationally.
"Well, to be honest, Chief Bull got Dancing Weasel to try and open it. Weasel had enough brains to make the Scalbie Indians we captured do the hard work. After it sort of ate two of them, we all thought better of it."
"Sort of ate?"
"It spat them out, though. Or sicked them up."
Rincewind nodded. Back to normal, then.
They walked on in silence.
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The gallopers sent out by General Kriminel to recall Rjuister got far enough into the valley to witness the death of the Seventh from a distance. They were shocked by the sheer number of Indians the army faced. Two scattered groups of cavalrymen were still fighting. But they saw, through binoculars, the destruction of the third and largest group. Knowing the cavalry was beyond aid, they sadly turned to ride back.
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"Do we send men down to kill them?" Crazy Horse asked Chief Bull, noticing the gallopers in the distance.
"No. Let them report back. It will take the heart from the rest."
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The fighting around Reno's and Bentine's positions grew more intense, but at least here the troopers had had time to prepare an intelligent defence without deliberately sacrificing any horses.
Even though crazed by heat and lack of water, they kept up their defence all day against repeated attacks, losing a steady but significant trickle of men, with brave men volunteering to scavenge for re-useable crossbow bolts from the dead and the debris of war, and other brave men fighting down to a nearby stream to replenish at least some water bottles.
With the onset of night, the Indians broke off their attacks. They knew warriors who died in darkness faced additional post-mortem perils on their way to the Happy Hunting Grounds, and much preferred resuming combat by daylight.
But there wasn't going to be a second day. Reno and Bentine cautiously exchanged scouts and messages, and decided they had only one chance. They took it, electing to retreat by night, a cautious trot that became a near gallop as the braver Indians chose to risk post-mortem hazards and fight them anyway.(3)
Fewer than a hundred men returned to the laager that night. Kriminel, his cavalry gone, gave orders for the retreat to begin in the morning.
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Not all the Seventh died or took their own lives on Greasy Grass.
Rincewind witnessed an unedifying scene as a weeping and cowardly officer, a captain, was dragged into camp by the Indians who had captured him. They had found him huddled up, trying to raise the nerve to shoot himself with a crossbow and failing, and had elected to take him alive.
"You're a white man? You're both white? Oh thank the gods! I'm Captain Quirke, Seventh Cavalry. The savages took me alive! They'll torture me and kill me! Help me. You're obviously well in with the brutes!"
Rincewind turned to Skin-Meself-Alive-Dibbler, who'd opted to remain a guest of the Indians for the duration.
"Well… I saw what they did to that Indian clan out there. to the women and kids. That was brutal!"
"And his face looks familiar. yes, Anana Ogg's scrying glass. She witnessed it all. You were there, you bastard. You could have stopped it!" said Rincewind. He wasn't normally vindictive and could respect a fellow abject coward, but not one who'd done what this one had. Besides, after a battle, you had to have captive enemy for the Sun Dance and the sewing, didn't you? Very important and traditional. You didn't mess with tradition, nor did you try and muck with anthropologically established and vital tribal folklorique pathways.
He turned his back.
"Help me!" screamed Quirke.
Rincewind looked at him.
"Oh, I'll help, alright. After what I saw, I'll help them thread the needles!"
It was said later that that the captive white man lasted nearly four days and was a well-aspected offering to the Gods.
But Rincewind saw nothing of this.
It was during the victory feast. He was asking the brothers about their plans.
"I think I'll stay on" Two Dogs said, cheerfully, regarding Small Damson. "There's a lot this land can offer a bloke, Mr Rincewind. A lot. Besides, Chief Bull wants to rename me. Says that I did a great deed in battle and can take on a new name as I was reborn in war. I can be Two Dogs Fighting."
His eyes misted over and he smiled. "It's a big country, Mr Rincewind. Under big skies."
One-Man-Bucket smiled.
"I'll stay for the wedding, Mr Rincewind. Then I'll be going home to Ankh-Morpork. Maybe go into construction, like our old man. He had a head for heights, our dad. Right up until the accident with the high wind and the ornamental gargoyle."
He paused, and asked
"Mr Rincewind, Anana says I'll do alright in the end. She seems to think I'll end up saving the city from some peril or other?"
Rincewind nodded. But first you get disillusioned and dead drunk and then just dead. Then life begins again when Mrs Cake stars touting the Afterlife for a spirit medium. And then you save the City.
"Just don't give up hope, Bucket. That's the key thing. And give my regards to the Drum when you get home! It's the Broken Drum to you, isn't it?"
"Can't see our local ever being called anything else!"
A couple of peace-pipes circulated before dinner. It was a reflective smoke, punctuated by victory song, the lamenting of widowed squaws, and the distant screaming of Quirke. Anana Ogg had excused herself, having joined with the Ladies' Sewing Circle to offer advice and encouragement to the needleworkers.
Rincewind was inclined to be thankful and generous: he pretended not to notice the Luggage slipping into the circle and persuading various Indians to blow some smoke into its keyhole.
As Rincewind was receiving the fulsome thanks of the Latoka and honorary tribal membership he felt the Disc slipping under him. He tried to hang on to the Luggage for support, but everything whirled and slipped and danced in a way he couldn't wholly blame on the smoke.
And then he was sprawled on familiar flagstones in the High Energy Magic Building, with Ridcully looking down on him and saying "Welcome home, that man!" and "Now you're back, you can start doin' some serious lesson-plannin' for your new teachin' career!"
Rincewind sighed. He was home. And by the feel of the day, he might be able to talk Glenda in the night kitchen into providing him a cheese-and-potato pie. He hadn't eaten one for over a hundred years…
(1) Anyone wondering about Rincewind's ability to acccurately work out military strategy should remember that he is a direct linear descendant of the great Ephebian general Laveolus, another abject coward who, uniquely among generals, was capable of thinking about what he was doing, and devising strategies to win battles with the absolute minimum loss of men and material and most crucially, minimal risk to himself.
(2) This is a fairly accurate acount of the last moments of General Custer at the Big Horn. The battle itself, so far as Custer was concerned, lasted less than an hour from start to finish. A lot of the dialogue has been freely adapted from the film "Little Big Man", with Rincewind playing the Dustin Hoffman role.
(3) On Roundworld, Major Reno and Captain Bentine fought seperate battles but combined forces later in the day. Luckily, they had the pack horses with the reserve ammunition. They were only relieved by an infantry attack the following day, but their joint action possibly prevented complete destruction of the Seventh. Afterwards, with the Custer myth in full force, they were treated shabbily by the US Army and the press: accustations were levelled that Reno had been cowardly in not riding to Custer's rescue, despite the weight of enemy numbers and the impassibility of the ground for cavalry. The myth arose that the heroic General Custer had been abandoned by the coward Reno. Neither Reno nor Bentine advanced in rank in the US Army and both ended their careers low down the ladder, not even having regimental commands. And Custer, after death, is erroneously thought of by many as having been a general, so he got one thing he wanted...
There may be an epilogue wrapping up loose ends, but this tale is now substantially finished.