The Price of Flight – part nine
The Big Wing Raid
V0.1. As with everything, it has room for revision. Watch this space. In "The Shepherd's Crown", after months and weeks of escalating raids into Lancre, the elven leader, Lord Lankin, finally mounts his major attack only to discover he cannot get his forces very far outside the Dancers. He has made the error of telegraphing his intentions with all the small raids beforehand which have largely been mopped up piecemeal. The witches and the defenders of Lancre are prepared, have organised their forces, and meet him at the Dancers: the fighting is a hard and nasty but short field battle that goes on for some hours, intensively, throughout the night but is finally, conclusively, won by Lancre's makeshift Army under Queen Magrat. So – apart from a few glimpses, perhaps – I can't really think of too many ways to describe the Air Witches' involvement here.
I know Terry was run out of time and was trying hard to get some sort of concluding book out before he died. What you read is understandably a bit rushed and perfunctory towards the end and the reader does wonder what sort of a book a Terry Pratchett at the full height of his abilities might have finished: it reads as if he is sketching out the main events and leaving a few things, tantalisingly, unfinished. The final battle reads – well, like a story intended for children under ten. It has a lot of whimsy and not enough of the sort of harder "realism" a different Pratchett might have introduced: it has a sort of David Walliams quality about it with, perish the thought, forced jollity which feels out of place for a desperate engagement. It had me thinking of the TV show "Xena; Warrior Princess" where a typical show would have Xena upping the body count quite considerably by the end – but nobody ever bleeds and the mooks, once killed, are just background props who were never really characters in the first place.
We start, I think, with the Air Witches, coming back down to the ground, and remembering what organisation they belong to most of the time…
Also discovered, with great satisfaction, a pioneering British aeroengineer called Beatrice Shilling, wondered why the hell I'd never heard of her before (because she isn't a man?) - who overcame a design flaw in the Merlin engine which, if it hadn't been rectified, would have meant iconic British planes like the Spitfire might have not got the reputation they did. Thank you to reader Dr Frankenburger. I now have A Challenge.
The Dancers, Lancre. After the battle.
Olga Romanoff looked around her. She noted, abstractly, that it was beginning to rain. The weather fitted the desolation around her. Churned ground, elven bodies in various states of repair, abandoned weapons, dazed people, both witches and civilians, not believing they were still alive, and triumphant Feegle beginning victory chants.
She shook her head. The fighting was all over here, then. It had to be.
Olga studied the elf in front of her. She felt him attempting a glamour. Even at this late stage where he had been humbled several times over.
You can still be Tsarina. Why are you fighting for a country which is not yours, in the service of tinpot nobility which you already socially outrank? Sam Vimes. Who is he? A city peasant who struck lucky and got above himself. Who married a desperate spinster with a title. Vetinari. Cunning as a rat on top of a stinking city which is bankrupt in every way. Go to your people, Tsarina Olga, and lead them! That's if you are capable….
Olga scowled and strode forward. Angry, she grabbed the elf, shook him, and slapped his face.
"Be told, brat! I do what I do because I choose to. I respect Mr Vimes. I admire Lady Sybil. As for being Tsarina? I reject it. I do not want it. I never wanted it! The only empire I want is the sky. To fly with people who think like me and love the sky too. And even then I respect that the sky is only mine on loan. On sufferance. That is the price of flight!"
Olga let Lord Lankin slump. She controlled her anger.
"You are a fool to continue tempting me with something I do not want. Which I know I would fail at if I ever tried. Listen, brat. I fail in the sky, only I am dead. I fail as Tsarina, I take a people with me. I have the name, yes. But I have not the right to carry others into death with me. I renounce the title. I renounced it years ago. All the titles."
Olga remembered, and reached into a pocket. She brought out Ankh-Morpork City Watch badge no 588 and clipped it to the right place on her breastplate. Wearing Watch badges had been considered to be out of place on this assignment. Till now.
"I could kill you. Easily. But there are now limits. Govno, I do not know if I can make this stick. But, Elf known as Lord Lankin, I now arrest you for conspiracy to cause breach of the peace, multiple counts of murder, grievous bodily harm, criminal damage and …" Olga paused. A clear picture came into her mind of Mr Vimes. He was grinning.
"And of Being Bloody Stupid."
She nodded to the other Air Policewomen. One even had a set of handcuffs, and passed them to Olga. Lord Lankin shrank back.
"Those are iron!" he pleaded.
She shrugged.
"Steel, certainly. Do not make me add a count of Resisting Arrest."
And the elf-lord fell into a moaning slump as he was led away to join the others. Lots of Elves, unwilling to fight any more or show defiance, were clustered together under guard. A stack of discarded yarrow stalks was piled some distance away. (1) It was a damp grey anticlimactic end to the days and nights of air war.
"What happens next?" Nottie Garlick asked. Olga made another shrug.
"I do not know. Your mother and the other senior witches are conferring. To tell you the truth, I'm not sure if I have any authority here to make such an arrest. Lancre law applies here, not Ankh-Morporkian. It is possible I have exceeded my authority. Whatever happens is now out of my hands but remind your mother and father that I would like the handcuffs back."
Olga called her force together.
"One last flight. There is no news out of the Chalk. We will proceed there. We defeat the elves there. Then our action is done, and we are Watchwomen once more. Mount up!"
An Air Witch asked Olga for a quiet private word. They conferred quietly together. Olga felt a sudden desperate sadness. Then they hugged, kissed, and mounted up for the flight to the Chalk.
The only problem for Olga on the flight was that bloody siren. Or syren. It started the moment they were airborne and it just would not shut up.
A disputed borderland on the metaphysical edges of The Chalk.
Irena Politek knew she was in trouble. She'd deliberately crossed into the Fairy Realm to rescue two of her pilots who had strayed there. The intention was to get them out. The Feegle behind her was an older, more serious, Pictsie who had some of the skills of a Gonnagle. He had got her in. He assured her he and his fellows could get them out again.
But in the interim they had elves to fight. Lots of them. In their own realm.
Irena zigged, zagged and evaded as seven or eight elves got on her tail. Arrows and darts zipped past. She felt a definite lurch, scrape and clunk as one narrowly missed lodging in the staff of her broom, cutting a gouge in the wood.
She rather hoped she was buying time for the rest of the Flight to get onto the Elves behind her. And she had a distinct impression she was being steered, or chased, away from the portal where they had entered. It was cold here, and the landscape underneath was uniformly white. The sky was grey and not just any grey, the sort of steely-bluey-grey that promises more snow.
"This will not do, mistress." Her flight-Feegle said, behind her. Irena risked a moment to look over her shoulder and aim a fireball at a pursuer. Then she jinked again.
"It will not. No." she agreed.
"I have an idea, Mistress. Leave it with me."
"Wh…" Irena began.
Then there was a dizzying, disorientating, shift in reality. Irena blinked and realised she was looking into the improbable colours and geometries of Feegle Space, the non-dimension used when her Pegasus was being craw-stepped to another destination on the disc.
"..at did you have…"
The old Feegle was counting.
"Yin, tan, tethera, pethera… get ye ready… pump!"
There was a flash, and they were back. Exactly, as far as Irena could reckon, where they'd been five seconds before. Except that her elven pursuers were now in front of her.
"..in mind?"
Irena was now throwing a spread of fireballs.
And her battle-flight regrouped. She saw two brooms abruptly pop back into place in previously empty air, and grinned. The Feegle had evidently thought about this…
Then she looked down and her smile faded.
Elves. Drawing up in battle order. On the ground. Lots of Elves. Hundreds, maybe…
Then she looked up.
"Where do they get so many yarrow stalks? It's not as if they can grow yarrow in six feet of snow!"
Irena looked to her small command.
"We can slow them up a bit." she said.
Darleen replied, laconic and Fourecksian:
"Nice knowing you bunch of bastards. It was okay."
They studied a lot of elves in the air. Irena gave up trying to calculate how many they were outnumbered by. No point, really. And that was an Army underneath. Infantry and cavalry.
Hanna von Strafenburg, reduced to a regular Watch broom since the MIG-21 had run out of its special ammunition, looked determined and grave.
"I have an idea." she called to Irena. "Please give me cover as best you can."
Then she zipped off on her own. Flying straight towards the elven army.
"HANNA!" Irena screamed. Then she winced.
"Govno. It's up to you if you follow me."
It might not have been the best rallying cry in the history of warfare. But all four brooms followed her as they sought to give top cover for whatever sort of attack Hanna was going to make. Nobody hesitated.
It was dark by the time Olga Romanoff got the rest of the Air Watch to the Chalk. They found no activity and hardly anybody to be seen. Olga dismounted, and heard the familiar sound of a Teknik working on a broom, hammering, whistling and snatches of Dwarf-song. She went to the sound.
"You know, you girls don't half give these brooms a battering." the Teknik said, without looking up. "I'm nowhere near getting this one air-ready. Needs quite a few bristles replacing after that elf tried to light it up…"
He looked up. Then straightened up.
"Ah. You might be Lieutenant Romanoff?" he asked.
"No "might" about it." Olga replied. "Report."
Sally Treadaway ran into the shed.
"Ma'am, this is Mr van Fokker. Irena… Sergeant Politek… recruited him as a Teknik. Errr"
Olga recognised Emily Maitland behind her. And the third girl, who she didn't recognise and who was looking dazed.
"We're the reserve, ma'am. After a while there weren't any more elves coming out of the Stones. The ones we saw didn't want to fight and just ran back into the stones. Errr. Hanna and Bethany sort of, err, chased a couple back into the Stones."
"Go on." Olga invited her. "Who exactly is Bethany?"
"New recruit, ma'am. Came with Matilda here. Sergeant Politek signed them both up."
Olga remembered. She nodded to Matilda.
"I'll speak to you later." she said. She returned to Sally.
"Carry on."
"Sergeant Politek said she was going to get them out, ma'am. She told us to stay put here and she took the others. Errr. Darleen, Tatiana, and.."
Sally's voice trailed off.
"Did she." Olga said.
"She took Feegle with her, ma'am. Some of them were gonnagles. The ones with the extra skills. Err."
Olga nodded, then turned on her heel and walked out.
Sally breathed out.
"Well, that seemed to go okay." she said to Matilda, who nodded mutely.
Olga noted the MIG-21, inert and unattended outside. Apparently, it had run out of ammo. Hanna had blazed a gleeful way through it until there was nothing left to blaze. Olga accepted that. She spoke to the carpet pilots, who were brewing coffee, for want of something to do. She told them to brew enough for everyone, and to stand by.
Fuming with irritation, Olga Romanoff led six of her pilots into the air, leaving the rest as a reserve. She had also sent a runner to put the word out, that she'd quite like a word with Tiffany Aching if that was possible.
Then she waited to see what happened next. She noted more and more Chalk Witches and others were making their way to the Stones. The air felt hot and oppressive, as if a thunderstorm was imminent. And nobody with even the slightest magical power would doubt. It was going to happen soon. Out of these stones. The big battle.
The Air Witches manoeuvred for the height and position to dive on anything coming up and, as Olga put it, to beat the living govno out of it. They waited. They were ready.
Irena Politek and five air witches dived and fireballed into the packed ranks of Air Elves. As Irena expected, there wre too many of them in too relatively small a space to manoeuvre effectively. For now. They seemed surprised such a small number of enemies were actually attacking them, for one thing.
Irena felt the glamour beating down on her, stronger than it had ever beaten down on her before. Furiously, she kept the reply going on her mind in a repeating loop
Your mother. Your mother. Your mother… (2)
A long way below her, Hanna von Strafenburg flew fifty feet or so above the ground. She was focusing the power she would need for this. She was also aware that somewhere nearby and getting closer, there was a really powerful Elf, a Lord. She had to do this quickly…
She focused and released the power. She sang the spell:
Lass es wachsen, Lass es wachsen...
And in a place fuelled by a sort of magic, the permanent winter snow of Fairyland fountained up and began taking a distinct form.
Hanna von Strafenburg could do fireballs. It was a basic magic-user's skill. She did this readily enough. But her real power in magic was something else. Something she was really good at. Out there in the real world, she needed the raw material: she could not conjure it from nothing and she certainly couldn't do it in July or August.
Here in Fairyland, the raw material was abundant.
Irena looked down. She saw the snowmen, in long serried ranks, rising from the ground. The snow fountained and churned and flurried as she flew, ranks forming in her wake. The elves were watching too. Magic and enchantment fascinated them. It gave the fighting air policewomen a respite, for one thing. All air duelling ceased, as a snowman army rose up.
Irena motioned with her sabre.
Down.
As they descended the emerging details came into focus. These were not the sort of friendly affable snowmen little girls dreamt of, best friends to lonely children who promised exciting adventure. These snowmen might take you on a journey. But you would soon wish they hadn't.
They were in perfect ranks and radiated intent.
Irena and Tatiana registered, in a sort of bowel-chilling ancestral memory, that they had been sculpted to look as if they were wearing helmets. Like absurd coalscuttles. A helmet that radiated Essence of Helmet-ness. A helmet style that Far Überwaldeans were hard-wired to feel very threatened by.
Hanna came to a halt at one end of her army. A tall snowman who, absurdly, appeared to be wearing a monacle, looked up at her and asked an unspoken question. Irena pointed at the elves. The snow-general nodded.
"Auf Marsch! Vorwarts! Fur dem Seig! Heil!" Hanna screamed.
And her snow-army began parade-marching forwards. Towards the Elves.
"Slava bogu." Irena said. "Dear Gods."
Tatiana Grigorenko, who had flown next to her, nodded.
"An army of zombie snowmen. Hearts of ice. No emotions. Marching in that silly constipated way. And in perfect ranks. Wearing those helmets." she said.
"Da. Fritzes." Irena agreed. "Our people also parade-march like that, by the way."
"Da." Tatiana agreed. "But that shows perfect parade discipline and the stern resolution of the Rus people. On them it shows they are stupid Fritz zombies."
"Either way, we get out. I suspect Hanna has slowed the enemy. And we need to get her. That amount of magic expended is not good for her."
"With you, Mistress." Irena's flight-Feegle agreed. "Steer this way."
The snowman army marched on the elves. The airborne elves dived to attack it. Disregarded, Irena got her small command together, remembering, with Tatiana, to grab Hanna, who was now slumping over her stick and in danger of falling into the snow below. Darleen, coming up behind, recovered the stick.
And people outside the Stones saw six Air Witches, one seemingly wounded and slumped unconscious, hurtle into existence into the everyday world.
"Get ready!" Irena screamed to the Chalk's army. "They're coming!"
She now had to report to Olga, Irena realised. This was not going to be pleasant…
It took Lord Peaseblossom about three quarters of an hour to restore order, fighting his way through panicked Elves, angry that those impudent women had dared raid into his domain, angry with the ice-witch who had used his own world against him, angry with the mindless army she had created that was slowing and damaging his forces.
He decided the ice-woman would die, very slowly and painfully.
The snowmen had thinned his army, sent large parts of it running in fear and chaos, were fighting Elves in response to the imperative command that had created them. But they were no match for Lord Peaseblossom. Under his command, in his own land, they inexorably melted into the snowy waste again. The one who appeared to be their general, the one in the absurd monocle, the one who, if only Peaseblossom had known, Hanna had sculpted from a memory of her own father, a near perfect likeness: that one had been boiled into steam. (3)
They had served their purpose.
Peaseblossom led a far smaller Elven army into the Chalk. One demoralised by the audacious air attack, and further frightened and unsettled by the snowmen.
And it met everything the Chalk could throw at it. (4) That account is elsewhere in the annals of the Chalk.
"We'll talk later." Olga said to Irena, tartly.
And the air witches fought as hard as anybody else.
Olga Romanoff knew, without a doubt, at least one more shoe was going to fall that night and perhaps a second. Two witches had asked for quiet face-time with their commanding officer. The first had been absolutely certain she wasn't going to come back; the second hadn't been so sure. But one had definitely had Advance Notice. That was definite. When you were a magic user, you knew. And, Olga knew, it would happen in this final decisive battle.
She envied military commanders without magical ability who were not burdened with things like this. And it led to the agonising decision. Did she tell everybody else that one of their number was going to die tonight? Especially that person's wing-mate? There certainly wasn't the time or leisure – or the inclination- for a Going-Away Party.
Olga finally elected not to tell. She didn't want everyone to go into battle in with that agonising awareness. That should be the commanding officer's burden and only hers.
When Sally Treadaway died, she was halfway prepared for it.
It was one of those things that happen in a confused fight. Young witches on the ground had been throwing fireballs up at airborne Elves. And they were getting careless. Her pilots were getting tired.
Above the battle, Sally flew right into the ground fire. A huge explosion as the fireball hit the magical field of her broomstick. A few blazing meteors. And nothing.
Sally wasn't sure, Olga thought. And it was pure accident and bad luck. Friendly fire from the ground.
She was glad when the rain really set in, with the promise of thunder and lightning. The air battle was almost over. Her pilots were now looking for yarrow stalks that were not in the sky any more. And a lightning strike on a broom in flight could be destructive. As the rain intensified and distant lightning got nearer, she recalled everybody and reorganised them to fight in the ground.
"We all have pistol crossbows and reloads." Olga said. "Use them. You also have swords and knives. You know how to use those. And of course we all have fireballs. But only use them when you are sure of the target."
She would have said more. Then Tatiana and Nadezhda appeared. They were both riding horses; the big black Elven warhorses which were usually spitting, malicious, bundles of fury. They were perfectly under the control of their riders.
"Hey, Olga! Plenty of horses for the taking!" Nadhezda called. "No riders. Salvage."
"And they don't have sirens on." Tatiana added, pointedly. Olga winced. She was sure a lot of witches' memories of the battle would be that bloody Watch siren that had dopplered in the air over the battlefield. Vexingly, on landing in the increasing rain, Olga had kicked the damn thing, hard. It had then stopped.
"Elf horses? How do you get to ride them?" Olga asked.
Tatiana gave her a pitying look.
"We're Cossacks. We can ride anything. Besides, get on their backs wearing steel armour, and they're docile. Easy."
Olga reflected. She looked at Tatiana. Who was going to die tonight. She'd had the Message. She is Rus and Cossack like me. And three others. Maybe we can have a going-away party.
"Irena? Marina? We're going to catch our horses. Nottie, you and Kiiki take charge here. No silly risks. Just look after people. Kiiki. I require that vodka flask you were expressly instructed not to carry. Spassibo."
The five riders each took a drink. Olga passed the flask back to Kiiki.
"I thank you. Now wear it where I cannot see it."
Olga smiled.
"horoscho. Now we ride."
A little while later, another memory of the battle was etched in the minds of people who witnessed it. The five horsewomen in the outlandish fur caps brought a touch of the foreign and the exotic to the battlefield. They rode captured Elven horses against their previous owners. They laughed and joked and punctuated their riding with cries of "Hip" and "Hup" and "Ya Kazack!" as they rode down isolated groups of Elves who were still resisting.
Tiffany Aching was busy elsewhere. But when she heard of it, she nodded quietly and said "Better not inquire. This is one of those primal memory things going on. And in any case they're fighting on our side."
The Chalk saw something very rarely seen, if at all, on this side of the Hub. A full-blown all-out Cossack charge. Glamours thrown by desperate elves bounced off: there was simply no way for them to get in. Cossacks are a long-established fighting race. They live to ride and fight. They have a mystique. And no other kind of glamour was going to get past that. Elves realised this, belatedly, as the sabres rose and fell.
Thunder crashed and lightning fell. Elsewhere on the field a queen died, a King rose in wrath, and Peaseblossom in his turn died. And the fighting and the war ended.
"Thought you were going to die tonight." Nadezhda said to Tatiana.
Tatiana shrugged as the rain poured down.
"I know I am. Had the Message."
"But you're still breathing."
"Da." Tatiana agreed. "Maybe sometimes it screws up."
She lifted her sabre and saluted the sky.
"I'm still here!"
The sky answered. With lightning. A Cossack warrior was soaked to the skin and raising a long length of metal.
TATIANA ELENAVICHNIYA GRIGORENKO?"
"Govno. It was the lightning, wasn't it?"
"I'M AFRAID SO. LIGHTNING MAY HAVE COME AT THE CALL OF TIFFANY ACHING. BUT ONCE UNLEASHED IT IS INDISCRIMINATE.
"So I'm dead. Govno."
YOU DIED FIGHTING. ON HORSEBACK. WITH A SABRE IN YOUR HAND. WITH NO MORE ELVES TO FIGHT YOU CHALLENGED THE LIGHTNING STORM. A COSSACK DEATH.
Tatiana brightened.
"That's true. No regrets. It was good."
YOU KNOW, I WAS SURPRISED TO BE CALLED TO YOU TONIGHT? YOU WERE MEANT TO DIE TOMORROW NIGHT, TATIANA. AT THE CELEBRATION PARTY AT LANCRE CASTLE. AFTER CONSUMING A LOT OF VODKA, YOU WERE DUE TO MEET ME, SHORTLY AFTER ATTEMPTING TO DEMONSTRATE IT IS POSSIBLE TO DO THE STEPS OF THE SABRE DANCE, AT THE TOP OF THE GREAT STAIRCASE.
Tatiana considered this. Then her spirit grinned.
"Hey, that's a Cossack death too. So what's next?"
Death heard hoofbeats in the distance, getting closer.
HAVE I INTRODUCED YOU TO MY COLLEAGUE, WAR? I BELIEVE HE AND HIS AGENTS WILLTAKE IT FROM HERE .
To be concluded in one more "aftermath" chapter…
(1) The Air Witches would take some as trophies and for the Tekniks to research on, but the majority would be burnt.
(2) no small thing. Swearing in Russian, I have read, is called "mat" – "mother". Because one of the strongest Russian swearies, more or less, roughly and incompletely translates as "your mother". Using this in conversational Russian is like dropping a nuke, unless you know that Russian very well indeed.
(3) Yes, hands up: thinking "Castle Wolfenstein" and all those computer games/ novels/films of Nazi German super-soldiers being resurrected from the grave to fight again… Hanna might have quipped that for once her father had shown some sort of warmth, if only briefly.
(4) See the account in The Shepherd's Crown. Stolid Chalk folk with whatever weapons came to hand, lots of witches including those who fought in the air, old men of the, err, Home Guard, mad inventors with ideas, Tiffany Aching helped by a renegade elf-queen, and channeling the very power of the Chalk itself in a thunderstorm. The elves had no chance.
Notes Dump: think of it as a sort of dispersal area for recovered ideas which can be cannibalised for spare parts so as to get new ideas up into the air again.
The Big Wing Raid: this was Douglas Bader's idea in 1940-41. Bader (got to say this for completion, even though the story is well known) lost both legs in a peacetime air crash. He refused to believe he was done as a pilot and chalked up a succession of firsts: he was the first man to do what had hitherto been thought impossible, which was to walk again on two artificial legs. Nobody thought this possible for a double amputee, but Bader scorned a wheelchair and proved medical opinion wrong. Then he got back into the air again, also hitherto thought impossible. Then he got into an RAF fighter plane again, just in time to start shooting down Germans. Shot down over France, he then began trying to escape and nearly managed it, ending up in Colditz, the bad-boys camp for hard cases. As the Battle of Britain wound down, he loudly advocated for Britain going on the offensive where it could and argued if the Germans had operated fighters over Southern England, we could do the same over northern France. Bader's "Big Wings" of fifty to seventy fighters at a time then began sweeping over France being hooligans to the Germans, following the philosophy of taking the air war over their turf and not ours. The British air offensive into Northern France was helped in 1941 as Luftwaffe strength moved East for the attack on Russia: Bader's being shot down didn't stop it muc