Forging the Sword (The Farsala Trilogy) (5 page)

The Hrum reached the bottom at almost the same time the Farsalans reached the summit. A few arrows skittered among them, but the Hrum archers were firing uphill, the range was long, and they all missed. For a moment Jiaan was tempted to order his men to return their shots, since the height would extend their range, but all his good archers were gone, and the Hrum force now outnumbered his by almost three to one.

He pulled Rakesh to a halt and turned back to watch the Hrum begin their ascent. Their stocky, agile mounts might have an easier time of it on the hill, but they were tiring too, Jiaan was pleased to see. Before they reached the top, his troop would make it down and gain more distance crossing the next field. Looking at the irrigation ditch on the far side of that field, he knew that would be all they needed.

“So why not fire back at them?” Fasal asked, pulling his sweet-tempered
mare up beside Rakesh, black to the gelding’s dappled gray. “Aren’t you supposed to be good with that?” He gestured to the unstrung bow strapped to Jiaan’s saddle.

“Well, it might just make them mad,” said Jiaan. “And I’d hate to do that.”

“You saw the ditch.”

For a moment, Fasal seemed to forget that Jiaan was a peasantborn bastard who had snatched command of the army away from his betters. His grin held only the fellowship of one horseman for another.

“Let’s hope the Hrum aren’t as quick as you are,” said Jiaan, matching Fasal’s grin as the last of his men trotted over the hilltop and started down the other side.

Picking their way down the slope was almost as slow as climbing up. The Hrum’s horses had gained some ground and were starting down themselves by the time the Farsalans reached the bottom of the hill, where another wide field lay before them.

Jiaan took the lead, holding Rakesh at a canter, for he wanted to save the horse’s strength.

The Hrum must have assumed the Farsalan horses were slowing from exhaustion; their horses charged off the hill and into the field, hoofbeats rolling like thunder.

Jiaan turned Rakesh toward the irrigation ditch and let go of the reins, firmly clasping the streaming gray mane. There were very
few riders good enough to stay on a jumping horse with only the strength of their legs gripping the horse’s body to keep them in the saddle. Jiaan had never heard of the Hrum doing so, though the deghans had made a sport of it. Jiaan, peasant-born, wasn’t as good a rider as most deghans.

The banks of the ditch were only a few feet high, but it was five feet across, and most streams in this part of the foothills were deeper than they looked. Jiaan hoped he wouldn’t find out about this one the hard way.

Rakesh, who knew more about jumping than Jiaan ever would, quickened his stride to a rapid lope, shortening his paces as he neared the earthen barrier. Then he gathered his muscles and surged upward.

Jiaan suppressed his shout of exaltation, for it didn’t do to startle your horse as you sailed through the air, one with your mount, one with the sky. Then, as it always did, the ground arrived.

Rakesh’s hooves thudded to the earth, and Jiaan slammed into Rakesh’s withers, trying to grip the horse’s slippery hide with his knees and mostly failing. Only his fists, clenched on a double handful of mane, kept him from falling—though Rakesh’s forward surge into a rocking canter helped him to regain his seat. He glanced aside in time to see Fasal’s mare sail over the ditch and land daintily. Fasal took the landing much better than Jiaan had, but Jiaan had no time for envy—the rest of his troop was approaching the
ditch. Only three men fell, and they quickly rolled to their feet and remounted, cantering across the field after the others. Jiaan followed the last of them, tracking the Hrum’s progress with his ears. When the Hrum neared the ditch, he pulled Rakesh to a halt and looked back.

The idiots tried to jump it. Perhaps they had seen the Farsalan chargers going over and assumed it was something any horse could do. Fortunately, their horses knew better.

Approaching a barrier that had been almost too big for the larger, stronger chargers to jump, with water of unknown depth on the other side and awkward, unbalanced riders on their backs, the Hrum horses planted their feet and stopped.

Several of the Hrum promptly discovered the depth of the water, hurtling over their horses’ heads and into the ditch. It
was
deeper than it looked, Jiaan noted—almost five feet deep, and muddy, too. The riders floundering in the ditch were the lucky ones. Other Hrum riders hit the ground when their horses stopped, and the horses behind ran into the horses in front, stepping on the fallen men and unseating their own riders. Only a handful of Hrum, riding at the rear of the pack, managed to remain in their saddles.

Shouts of pain arose amid the storm of cursing, and Jiaan winced. He had fallen off his horse at the Sendar Wall, when the Hrum had suddenly raised a hedge of long lances, and broken his
collarbone. It was barely healed even now, and he vividly remembered how much it had hurt.

Then he remembered the slaughter that had followed, and any impulse to sympathize with the Hrum died.

He turned Rakesh and cantered after the others. They would reach their remounts and be gone long before the Hrum sorted out that mess. In fact, with the extra time this had given them, they could probably lead their tired horses instead of having the local peasants return them later. The risks involved in having the horses returned were small, but Rakesh had been his fathers horse—Jiaan hated to take any risk with him.

Fasal was waiting for him at the entrance to the valley that led to a track in the foothills—the track that would ultimately take them to the small mountain meadow where their army had been hidden for so long.

“They’ve not going to give up, you know.” Fasal turned his mare to walk beside Rakesh. “This is probably that Hrum officer your peasant spy said was assigned to hunt us down. They’ll send the foot soldiers to look for our riders who left the main force. They’ll probably find at least a few of them.”

“They probably will,” said Jiaan.

“But the Hrum will torture them! They’ll reveal the location of the croft!”

“I’ve been told that the Hrum don’t torture prisoners,” said
Jiaan. “But they won’t torture our men in any case. I told them that if they were captured and even threatened with physical harm, they were to tell the Hrum where our army has been hiding. In fact, I ordered them to talk if they were threatened.”

“You ordered them to reveal our location to the Hrum? Why didn’t I hear about this?”

Because you’d have argued.

“I want the Hrum to find the croft,” Jiaan reminded him. How many times was Fasal going to forget the plan?

O
F COURSE
, J
IAAN
reflected four days later, the reason Fasal kept forgetting the plan was probably because he disapproved of it so deeply.

“No deghan would ever come up with a plan as … as …”

“Cowardly?” Jiaan suggested coldly.

A bright half-moon sailed high, but he and Fasal lay in the shadow of one of the pines that covered the slopes around the long valley where the new Farsalan army had been created. He would miss this place, Jiaan realized. But so many knew of its location that it was only a matter of time before the Hrum found it. Better to reveal it himself and let its destruction serve his cause.

“Cowardly, sneaky, and dishonorable,” Jiaan went on. “A peasant plan that no true deghan would tolerate. But considering how the deghans’ plans worked out … well, I can hardly do worse, can I?”

Fasal winced, and Jiaan felt a surge of guilt. He might be an inexperienced commander watching the unfolding of his first solo battle plan, but he had no right to take his self-doubts out on his subordinates.

“Your father,” said Fasal, just as coldly, “would have said this plan is too complex.”

Jiaan’s father had died with the rest of the deghans.

Jiaan turned away, gazing down at the army camp that had sprung up around the deserted farmhouse. It was too late for lights to show in the barracks, but wisps of smoke rose from their chimneys. Sentries patrolled; the soft thud of a stamping hoof came from the stables. All looked exactly as it should. But plans hardly ever ran exactly as they should, even simple ones, and this plan …

“You’re right,” Jiaan admitted. “It is too complex. But I couldn’t think of anything that would cost us fewer lives.”

Even in the dimness he could see Fasal’s eyes roll. “The point isn’t to save our lives—it’s to kill more of them! If we wanted to stay alive we should lie down like dogs and lick the Hrum’s hands.”

He had a point, despite the ridiculously arrogant phrasing. “There are more of them,” Jiaan pointed out. “If we don’t—”

The flicker of movement that caught his eye was so small he almost dismissed it. And it could have been a deer, or a jackal, but …

“If we don’t, what?”

“Shh,” said Jiaan, straining to see into the shadows below the trees.

The Hrum burst from the cover of the forest beside the track, shouting, their drums sounding the charge. They’d gotten their whole unit within striking distance of the camp, and Jiaan had barely glimpsed them—and he’d been watching!

“Kanarang take them, they’re good!” said Jiaan. His own sentries shouted a realistic alarm and fled as if the djinn of destruction really were on the Hrum’s side. “Most of the Hrum I’ve seen couldn’t sneak into a kitchen for a snack, much less creep up on a battlefield like that.”

“The Hrum are warriors,” said Fasal. “Warriors don’t sneak.”

“These did.” Half a dozen Hrum were already in the farmhouse; Jiaan could hear their muffled shouts, though he couldn’t understand them. A trader who spoke Hrum had joined the Farsalan army a few months ago, and Jiaan was learning the language as fast as he could, but he could only pick a few words out of the rapid commands. “I wonder who’s leading them.”

The main body of troops spread out, storming toward the barracks. Soon they would reach them.

“Well, whoever’s in charge,” said Jiaan, “we’re about to outsneak the bastard.”

He rose to his knees, nocked an arrow, and drew his bow, feeling the powerful pull in his shoulders and back. He had
trained as an archer—not even his father, who had commanded the Farsalan army, had dared to raise his peasant-born son to a position of command. But the Wheel his mother’s folk believed in had spun, and things were different now than they’d been in the deghans’ day.

“Fire,” Jiaan called, releasing his own arrow as the word left his lips.

A flock of dark shafts lofted into the sky, almost invisible even when the moonlight struck them. Then they hissed down toward the Hrum.

In the darkness, it would take several flights for the Hrum to figure out what direction the arrows were coming from, and Jiaan had further confused the issue by placing his archers on two different slopes. Scattered as they were, with murder raining down on them, the Hrum lifted their shields and ran for the shelter of the barracks, swords drawn to fight their way in.

There was no need for weapons, Jiaan knew, as he drew and loosed another arrow. All the Farsalans who weren’t here on the hillsides were long since on their way to the new camp in the desert—a camp so well hidden in the badlands’ rocky mazes that Jiaan wasn’t sure he could find it without a Suud guide.

He fired again. Shrieks of pain told him that at least some of their arrows were finding targets!

Most of the Hrum had entered the barracks now, several dragging wounded comrades with them.

Jiaan smiled grimly and prepared to launch the evening’s second surprise.

“At the roofs!” he shouted. Even if the Hrum heard him it wouldn’t make sense, and even if they’d understood it wouldn’t matter. Jiaan snatched up another arrow, pulled his bow, and sent it up in the high arc that would bring it down on the roof of one of the farther barracks. Ordinarily that would have been an exercise in futility, for the planks of an ordinary roof would stop a light arrow.

But as the Hrum were about to discover, the last act of the departing Farsalans had been to strip the ceiling planks away, replacing them with thin strips of wood that were barely strong enough to support the thin wooden shingles. Of course the beams that supported the roof would still catch an arrow, but the flimsy construction that now lay between those beams would not.

The bellow that arose from the barracks as the first flight crashed through the roof held as many cries of anger and panic as of pain. Jiaan added several more Hrum words to his vocabulary—terms the respectable trader had refrained from teaching them.

Men were emerging from the deceptive shelters now, dashing out into the open, where they could construct their shield wall and then carry the battle to their enemy. Jiaan thought that fewer men emerged than had run in, but in the chaotic darkness it was hard
to tell. And letting these men reach his archers was no part of his plan.

“Whistle,” he told Fasal. “You can do it louder than I can.”

“But they’re not even … oh, all right….

Fasal raised two fingers to his mouth—the resultant shriek made Jiaan wish he could clap his hands over his ears, but he was too busy firing a last shot and gathering up his bow and quiver. It might take the Hrum a few moments to realize that Fasal’s whistle was the signal for the archers to retreat, and Jiaan wanted his whole force mounted and away by the time they did. They were only a few marks’ ride from the trail that led down the cliff face to the rocky desert below, and the Hrum, on foot, would never be able to catch them before they reached it. Once they were in the desert … Jiaan was grinning as he started up the dark slope.

“We barely scratched them,” Fasal protested, falling into step behind him. “We could have done some serious damage tonight! Especially if you’d kept the footmen here to charge while they were so disorganized. This will only make them more eager to follow us!”

“Exactly. I want them to follow us, remember?”

Fasal snorted. “You said you didn’t want to make them mad.”

“I changed my mind,” Jiaan told him. “Mad is exactly what I want right now. Mad will carry them deep into the badlands. Too deep to back out.”