the revised excerpt

I have revised the opening to my short story, The Shepherdess and the General. You can read the original version here. This is the new and improved version, plus several subsequent paragraphs for 'flavah'.

The only man the General killed during the course of the battle was one of his own. First he mounted the soldier's horse and tucked the man's gold-bound knife into his belt. Then he rode the soldier down as he fled, trampled him beneath iron-shod hooves, and thundered from the battlefield with the arrows of the enemy shrieking past. He rode east, driving the horse harder than any arrow it feared.

The General's forces had met the enemy in the gray shadows of the morning after marching all night. The invaders were not engaged as expected in taking the fortified town of Brindy. Instead they were entrenched and waiting in the hills south of town. There was a false dawn in the north and a smoldering stench in the air. Brindy was burning.

With quiet urgency the General marshaled his forces on the opposite hill and prepared for battle. He arrayed the archers on the flanks of the hill and his men-at-arms at the foot of the smooth face. Then he assembled his mounted knights on the crest to order their attack. Their mounts twitched nervously as he spoke. He tasted ash in his mouth.

The cavalry roared away down the hill in an avalanche of pebbles and loose shingle and passed between the ranks of the footmen at full gallop. Thundering, hammering, they swept across the little valley and broke in a gold-crested wave against the ranks of the enemy. But the enemy waited patiently behind their defenses with their shields and pikes like a fence and did not expose themselves, and the charge was thwarted. Then the General had the horns blown and there was another charge, and another, until he looked down on a field choked with the broken and flailing bodies of toy horses, often with their riders beneath them, dimpled armor winking in the sun.

So the General sent out the men-at-arms and arrows from both sides covered them like locusts, and the real, bloody and brutish business of battle commenced. As the sun climbed high in the sky, war ebbed and flowed in the little valley and around its hills, a sea of blood, mud and metal. Ash fell in a slow, silent rain, dimming bright mail.

When the day had worn itself out, spent in long lines of fire on the face of the hill; when the General's armies had exhausted themselves against the fence of shields and arms; when the enemy forces had finally surged out from behind their bulwarks and run through them like a spear; then the General called for a retreat. Those that could would run. The rest would surrender. The General sent his page and his heralds away to gather his remaining captains and set off down far side of the hill for his horse.

The first paragraph recieved the most substantial revisions. I wanted it to be clear that the horse and the knife belonged to the soldier, not the General. I also wanted to clarify how he killed the soldier. This could easily be accomplished by breaking things up, but I really liked the flow of the original - the act of killing the man, taking his knife and riding away from the battlefield was like a single fluid motion in the original second sentence and I wanted to keep that feeling. That proved harder to do. But this version, I think, mostly accomplishes these goals: clarity and flow.

The rhythm and flow of writing is very important to me. I'll sometimes read things I've written aloud, to see how they sound. It's always very instructive.

Anyways, let me know what you think.