Dark Crusade (7 page)

Jarvo felt a fierce rush of pride to command such an army. Momentary doubt vanished even as it formed, and his only misgiving was that there was small glory in the slaughter of peasants. Rising in his stirrups, Jarvo gave the signal to attack.

There was no formal battle line to the Sataki front--only a vast polymorphic mass of bodies advancing on foot. Now they milled in confusion before the impending charge of Sandotneri cavalry. Trained officers might have forced them into some sort of effective defensive posture, but the Satakis had scrupulously massacred whatever armies and garrisons that had vainly defended Shapeli's cities from their onslaught. Such officers as Orted had were chosen from the worst cutthroats and bullies of the rabble. While their commands were obeyed out of fear, none of the Prophet's generals had any effective knowledge of warfare, to say nothing of how to receive a cavalry charge.

Wary of some hidden ploy, Jarvo opened the battle with a tentative thrust of four regiments of light horse along the enemy van, and split his six regiments of mounted archers into a two-pronged sweep of either flank. His heavy cavalry he entirely withheld until initial contact could furnish certain measure of the Sataki army.

The Sataki front struggled to present a firm wall of defense to the Sandotneri attack. Scattered companies of horsemen detached themselves from the main body of the army, galloping forth to meet the charge of light horse. Behind them, the mass of foot compressed along the van to form a wall of shields and spears. Desultory archery fire spattered from behind the mass of bodies--more of a danger to the Sataki horsemen than to the Sandotneri charge, still well beyond range.

Silver and deadly in the morning sun, the Sandotneri light cavalry swept toward the approaching wave of riders. Each trooper wore a hauberk of fine chain mail, and carried a round buckler and the long cavalry sabre common to the southern kingdoms. Like all warriors of this limitless savannah, they were horsemen almost from birth.

The Sataki horsemen were mounted on such horse as had fallen to them in the conquest of Shapeli, armed and armored with whatever spoils came to hand. While outnumbering the four Sandotneri regiments, they galloped to meet them with somewhat less precision than a stampede.

Maneuvering swiftly, the Sandotneri archers closed from either flank. They were two darker masses in the distance, as in place of drawn sabres they wielded the short composite cavalry bows of the southern kingdoms--heavy weapons whose iron-barbed shafts could penetrate mail. Clad alike in hauberks, the archers also carried sabres in saddle scabbards, and could act once the supply of arrows was exhausted.

Watching from his vantage, Jarvo waited with his five regiments of heavy cavalry as his center, the remaining regiments of light horse drawn up on either wing. He studied the imminent contact with heart-stopping intensity--unwilling to commit further men until he felt certain of the enemy.

Across the sea of grass, the Sandotneri horse slashed through the Sataki riders as a scythe reaps ripe wheat. Sabres flashed beneath the rising sun; riderless horses plunged away in flight. The amber grassland stirred beneath a rising mist of yellow dust; the tall stalks were crushed and trampled, drenched in sodden blotches of scarlet.

The Sataki horsemen were no match for the veteran troopers of Sandotneri. Unskilled both in horsemanship and in the use of weapons from horseback, they might have fared better on foot. In a slashing tumult, the Sandotneri rode through them--sabres emptying saddles with sudden finality. The skirmish--it could hardly be termed a battle--held for only a few minutes of swirling carnage. Then the survivors broke away, attempted to turn back for the main body of the Prophet's army.

A number of the horses did return to the Sataki line.

Now, cutting across the Satakis' flanks, the mounted archers strafed the discomfited front ranks with devastating effect. The short composite bows--laminated horn and dense wood and sinew--drilled their iron-headed shafts through plundered mail and improvised shields. In the packed masses of humanity, every bolt found its fatal target.

Return fire--badly aimed arrows arid hurled spears--took negligible casualties amongst the streaking archers. Officers yelled in vain for their men to hold their spears to await the impending charge; in a panic, the Satakis threw away the best defensive weapon they could claim.

Demoralized by the slaughter of their own mounted force, raked by the deadly fire of the Sandotneri archers--the Sataki line reeled back in disorder. The yet advancing masses behind them checked their retreat--bringing the advance to a milling halt as van and center entangled.

From his saddle, Jarvo grinned crookedly beneath his demon-mask vizor. There would be no cunning artifices from the Satakis today. The numberless horde stumbled in helpless fright from stings and scratches; it was time now to begin the killing.

"Lancers! Forward, ho!"

A thunderous shout answered Jarvo's command--folIowed by the deafening clangour as six thousand armored warriors couched their steel-headed lances. Battle horns quickly relayed the command. Jarvo was holding nothing in reserve now. Once in motion, their charge would follow the battle plan previously agreed upon.

A monstrous metallic avalanche, the charge of heavy cavalry rumbled across the trampled veldt. The pounding hooves of their great warhorses gouged a dusty swath through the dry sod. Steel plate armor--burnished, silverchased, etched and blued--threw back six thousand scintillant reflections of destruction to the climbing sun, and the smooth steel heads of their lances glinted like stars of a tropic night. Lance and heavy shield for each man, and stung from saddle or scabbard--broadsword, ax, or mace, to deal with those who withstood their dread charge.

Five regiments of armored, battle-hardened warriors--the most awesome fighting force of the age. Developed over centuries of internecine warfare upon the vast plains of the southern kingdoms, their heavy cavalry represented the elite military power in the land. Ordinarily a charge such as this would have been directed against a similar mounted force of some rival kingdom--with the temporary solution of one of the interminable border disputes or wars of succession in the balance. The Satakis had no comparable force, only a teeming mass of human flesh to await the Sandotneri charge.

The first regiments of light horse--virtually unscathed--swung aside before their thunderous charge. Archers fired a last few arrows into the crumbling Sataki vanguard, then rode to contain the flanks as the charge tore into the center. Behind the hooves of the heavy cavalry, the reserve regiments of light horse galloped to support the armored force, as the charge carried past the Sataki line.

Faces dull with panic gaped stupidly at the looming wave of steel. Mouths made black circles of dumb terror. Even before the wave broke over the poorly ordered line of battle, men hurled their weapons in blind fear, flung down their clumsy shields and sought to flee.

The Sandotneri charge clove through the Prophet's peasant army as a warhorse's hooves scatter a dunghill. Already drained from the ordeal of their long march, utterly demoralized before this unstoppable onslaught of steel-fanged death--the poorly armed rabble broke and fled. They were not soldiers, but a mob united by greed and by fear--a mob that would plunder and murder, yet a mob withal. They had neither the heart not the ability to stand before disciplined, heavily armed troops.

They could do little but die.

Even flight was denied them. As the routed front of the Sataki army sought to retreat, the howling fugitives collided with those in the rear--still advancing like some blind and brainless behemoth, unaware of the annihilation that awaited. Panic spread instantly as the terrified fugitives forced through the melee, outdistancing their mounted pursuers only because it took more time to slay than to flee in the thick press.

Even as the entire Sataki horde sought to turn and flee, any semblance of orderly retreat was impossible--and any hope of a rally or rearguard action rather less likely. Burdened with ponderous trains of baggage and impedimenta, wagons of women and children, the Dark Crusade was less an army on the march than a tribal migration. The fugitives were thrown back against their own masses, hemmed in by their baggage train and the press of panicstricken humanity.

Early in the charge, Jarvo left his lance impaled in a peasant's back. Now the Sandotneri general mechanically hewed about him with his broadsword. Only the resistance of packed human flesh brought up the Sandotneri charge, impeding it as a morass of weed clutches at a bull. For all the armed resistance they encountered, the cavalry might have ridden through unchecked.

Ranging like wolves in the fold, the light horse moved around their armored comrades, cutting down the Satakis until their arms ached and their bloodlust grew as dulled as their sabres. Strategy and tactics were vain conceits now; the task was only to hack at the shapeless and bleeding mass that sought brokenly to writhe away from its dismembered fragments. Archers exhausted their shafts, little troubled to tear them out of the dead. This was a day of meat cutting.

Across the gore-drenched field of battle, Jarvo led his troops. Some resistance flared in tiny pockets--a few had the desperate courage to die with steel in their teeth instead of in their backs. But the outcome of the battle was not in doubt--if ever it had been. The balance of war is inexorable: When one army turns and runs, there can only be one gory, unequal conclusion.

Jarvo wondered where Orted Ak-Ceddi might be--whether their leader was dead or in hiding. Jarvo had promised ten marks of gold to the man who brought him his head--with or without the Prophet's shoulders attached. Throughout the battle there had been no report of the Prophet's whereabouts.

Ridaze eventually furnished the answer. Bored with the slaughter, he paused to interrogate a few captives. Presumably they used their last breaths of life to speak truly.

"Not here," he explained to Jarvo. "He didn't even come. The Prophet ordered his generals to lead his Dark Crusade into Sandotneri--and stayed home, snug in his palace in Ingoldi while his followers took the measure of our cavalry."

Jarvo spat out a mouthful of dust. "At least then, the stories of Orted's cunning weren't exaggerated."

The Sataki mass was broken--the survivors fleeing across the veldt in a thousand directions, pursued by mounted slayers. Jarvo decided it would be too much effort to hunt them after nightfall.

It was midafternoon.

Rising from the treeless horizon, the full moon burned over the trampled savannah like a white-hot coal above a troubled sea of blood. Against the horizon, beneath the white orb of the moon, a horse and rider rose from the distant veldt.

The tableau was one of eerie silence. Replete and torpid, carrion birds that had assembled before twilight croaked somnolently to one another, as they roosted beside their unfinished banquet. Silent save for quarrelsome snarls and yelps, dingoes and jackals prowled through the field of carnage. Now and again a ripple of ghoulish laughter or the explosive crack of a bone marked the presence of a feasting hyena.

The tens of thousands of dead made no sound at all.

With the approaching drum of hoofbeats, those who feasted turned their eyes toward the interloper. Vultures stretched their wings nervously. Lips drew back over gory fangs in jealous greeting. Curious wallabies and other small nocturnal creatures halted, then slipped shyly away from the oncoming rider.

The tens of thousands of dead made no move at all.

Slowly--for in the clear night air distances across the savannah seemed dreamlike and unreal--the rider approached the silent battlefield. Dark against the moon and the horizon, he might have been Death in black mail astride a black stallion. A faint breeze rustled through the high grass where the fury of battle had not torn apart the sod, carrying the scent of butchered flesh and spilled blood and violent death,

The rider slowed to study the sea of blood, then urged his snorting stallion to wade along its shores. The black stallion's heavy tread sounded like muffled drumbeats on the torn and spattered sod.

Here and there the carcass of a horse, stripped of saddle and harness. The victors had taken their own dead and wounded--there could not have been many by the signs of it--and left the field to the vanquished. A plain of the dead--men, women, children by the thousands and thousands. Peasants and gutter trash for the most part, scarcely a one of them with the aspect of a veteran fighting man. Just meat to dull cavalry blades. Crude homemade weapons and rags and tatters in place of decent blades and mail. The dead had not been despoiled, nor were there spoils here worth taking. It was a field of dead meat, and of interest only to the thousands of scavengers who would glut themselves until only bare bones remained. Then the grass would grow again, richer and greener for the nourishment, and the bones would vanish beneath the verdant sea.

Beyond the great mass of the slain, a less dense moraine of dead marked where the battle turned to retreat, and the retreat broken into rout. Away across the savannah the flood of war had washed, leaving its drift of broken bodies, cut down from behind as they fled in panic from mounted steel. The trail of death littered a swath that stretched across the far horizon, disappearing toward the shadowy forestland many miles distant. Until the pursuers tired of butchery, that trail of bodies would extend unbroken to the forest--unless there were no more to be slain.

Shadowed beneath the rising moon, the rider picked his course amidst the dead, picturing the battle that bad been fought here, and the horrific slaughter that ensued. Before his practiced eye the battle was reenacted. The dead stirred and rose, fought their final battles, and died again. To his ears came the echoes of that battle, the dim ghosts of shouts and death cries.

Vultures croaked and sidled away with wings upraised. Predators snarled and slunk back from their spoil. He paid them no more heed than he paid to the slain. His thoughts were elsewhere now, and the field of carnage no longer held interest.