Doom's Break (34 page)

The mots bent before this storm of flesh as the struggle went on. Their line was driven back here and there, but reinforcements coming up behind hurled themselves into the fighting at these places, and the pyluk were stopped in their tracks. For a precious ten minutes, the Third Regiment held its ground until the huge column of pyluk completely surrounded them. At that point the pyluk left them and went on across the hilltop toward the sea. The Third Regiment was left like an island of survivors amid mounds of dead.

But for the gallant stand of the Third Regiment, the rest of the army would have taken a death blow that day. But with those few minutes' warning, Toshak and Thru managed to rouse three more regiments and get them into a rough line, northwest-southeast across the center of Bear Hill.

As soon as that line began to form, Thru left the job to the sergeants and ran over the hill. The Sixth Regiment, which had been camped on the south slope, was forming up to march, and Thru shouted to them to hurry while he ran past and down into the village. He tore through the streets of Warkeen and over the old bridge. Folk were scurrying to their stations as he passed. At Aeswiren's perimeter the guards saw him coming and waved him through.

He found Aeswiren's army already forming up. Aeswiren's scouts had heard the uproar from Bear Hill.

The Emperor listened calmly to Thru and then sent him back to Toshak. "The men of Shasht will march at once to Bear Hill. We will seek to position ourselves inland of General Toshak's line. And if he's left any of them for us, we'll be happy to engage these pyluk."

Thru and Aeswiren exchanged a strong handclasp, and Thru turned and ran back the way he'd come.

The regiments of Shasht were already in motion, rank after rank of veterans of many wars. Watching them march, with a swift, economical stride, Thru felt renewed confidence. He'd fought against these men often enough. Now they would fight on his side for a change. He shook his head at the strangeness of the thought.

He took a deep breath and started jogging. He needed to get back to Toshak at once with his message. Back through the village he went, warning them that Aeswiren's men were coming through. The village shutters started coming down in a hurry. On the other side of the village, donkey carts were jammed on the road. Thru ordered them to pull their animals to the side.

"Let the men through. They're fighting on our side now."

Naturally, it took a few minutes for this to be done, and by then the first Shasht regulars were in sight, swinging through the village to a beat of a drum. The cartmots redoubled their efforts. Thru ran on, toiling up Bear Hill, with Aeswiren's army coming after him.

The effects of the earlier run, coming on top of the long walk before that, slowed his pace before he reached the top. Gasping for breath, he halted at the crest of the hill to survey the scene.

Somehow the mots had survived the onslaught. A great tide of green warriors still stormed against the front of Toshak's army, and the roar of the fighting continued, but, crucially, the line had held. The pyluk had swarmed out of the trees and fallen on the mots, but discipline and good weapons had brought them up short. Toshak's mots had never panicked.

The pyluk charge had lost its impetus. The stabbing swords and spears of the mots were taking a grim toll on the unarmored lizard-men, whose clubs and long wooden spears were not designed for close-order combat.

Behind the regiments were the wounded, dozens and dozens of them, and here and there a pyluk lay where death had taken him. On the road, Thru found a group of older mots loading wounded into donkey carts. A little ways on, he found a huge pyluk bull lying on its back, a spear driven into its immense chest. This was the farthest the enemy had come. More bodies were lying nearby, pyluk and mots mixed together.

Thru found Toshak on a hillock, set about a hundred yards from the former headquarters tent. The general had a fixed, determined look in his eyes, but Thru could tell he was worried.

General Toshak listened to his brief message from Aeswiren and then turned, nodding slowly, back to surveying the battle.

The mot regiments were pressing forward, pushing the pyluk back on their heels. The pyluk had no training and no techniques for this sort of fighting, and they paid heavily. Mots and brilbies with pike and spontoon took many pyluk when they tried to fight while moving backward.

"Well," said Toshak after a moment, "we've held this attack. But something doesn't smell right to me. Why would he make this solitary assault? It seems meaningless."

"Meaningless? It could have destroyed our army."

Toshak shook his head. "No, it wasn't strong enough. If our scouting reports are to be believed, he used barely a third of his strength."

Both looked up at the same time.

"A landing!"

"Of course, it makes perfect cover for a landing."

As Toshak whirled toward his orderlies, Thru drank a mug of water and got ready to run like the wind once again. By the time he'd drained the mug, Toshak was thrusting a packet into his hands.

"Tell Aeswiren the enemy fleet must be attempting a landing. Probably farther north. I'd say the river Shell would be most likely. Aeswiren must march his men right through here and engage the enemy before they can all get ashore. We will finish off these pyluk and then join him."

The pyluk were not reinforced. Toshak's army broke up the assault column, turned it into a fugitive mass, and drove it back down into the Lupin Valley where much of it was lost, slaughtered in the dark thickets by mots with pikes and bows. The few hundred survivors escaped across the moor beneath Stag's Head. Scouts followed them and ascertained that the remnants had rejoined the main mass of pyluk bunched along the river Shell.

Seeing that he was not needed in this fight, Aeswiren, with Thru Gillo among his headquarters group, marched straight north, past the recent battlefield, and on toward Blue Hill. The Shell debouched to the sea on the far side of the jagged pinnacle of Cormorant Rock.

Mot scouts, passing back from the river, were met by the pickets of Aeswiren's force. There was a certain amount of tension initially, but Thru was able to calm them. The mots told him what they'd seen and then loped away to find Toshak. Thru turned quickly to Aeswiren.

"They are landing, as we expected, on the north shore of the Shell. Many thousands."

Aeswiren's eyes hardened at the news. The Old One had shown a calculated blend of tactical and strategic moves.

On they went. Aeswiren's men were all veterans, with iron-hard determination settled in their minds. They weren't going to fight monkeys this time. They weren't even going to slaughter these lizard-men. They were going to fight men! Men who had the misfortune to be the slaves of the priests. Nothing united these soldiers more than their hatred of the Red Tops.

Thru sensed the ferocity lurking in the ranks around him. He had marched with several armies and had felt everything from boisterous anticipation to terror, but never had he sensed this hardened murderousness. "We are as strong as they are," he thought, "but we are not driven by the same demons, for we did not arise on our own. We were made by Man."

Thru thought again of the pattern he had invented, "Men at War." He liked the work. If he lived, he would weave it again. It was a portrait of Man as he really was. Men had been warriors since the beginning of time. If they hadn't been, they wouldn't have survived. And thus they were filled with an elemental fury that the mots and brilbies could never match.

This insight lifted his spirits for some reason, and he marched along, head high despite the lingering winds and occasional sharp showers of rain.

The storm was lifting. The strange dark clouds had drifted away inland. Cormorant Rock loomed up in front of them. Its sharp upper spike suddenly caught the sun. Thru remembered a day, years before, when he'd turned away near here to get down to the creek. He'd been in pursuit of some sea lilies for little Iallia Tramine, the mor he'd been so in love with then.

He shook his head with amazement. All of that seemed like part of someone else's life now. A world that had only known men as the disembodied Man the Cruel of the old prayers from the Book.

They dipped down to the crossing of the Rocky Canyon and over the stream. If young mots were ever to come here in the future, seeking sea lilies for their beloved, the coming battle had to be won.

As they came up the far side of the canyon, on a trail that switchbacked up the last two hundred feet, they began to notice something strange. At the crest of the hill, all signs of the recent storm stopped. It was as if a line had been drawn across the land. On one side, the trees were wet and torn by the wind; downed branches littered the ground; pools of water glistened in the returning sunlight. On the other side, there was none of this; no rain had fallen.

Thru felt the hair on his neck stand up. This could only have been done with sorcery. In his mind's eye, Thru again saw that strange, horrific little dance performed by the giant man before the mob of savage pyluk.

The men muttered about the strange line, but they never wavered, continuing over the top of the ridge with a will.

At last, they caught sight of the enemy. The estuary of the river Shell was laid out beneath them, and it was filled with shipping. On the far side of the river, the massed troops of the enemy were visible. The water was dotted with hundreds of small craft, ferrying men and supplies ashore. Helmets and shields by the thousand caught the sun.

Thru realized that the enemy had already succeeded in getting his army ashore. Then he saw a party of men riding horse animals along the far bank of the river, and a shiver went through him. Fifty strong or more, they galloped down to the narrow bridge that spanned the river a mile from its mouth. There was no village on the Shell. It was a wild river, left to the creatures of the Land, so it had only a trader's bridge, wide enough for a single donkey cart. If the enemy wanted to cross the river, though, that bridge would be essential.

He became aware that sharp orders were being announced up and down the marching columns. Aeswiren's army came to a halt, and the Great King himself pushed forward to take a good look a the scene before them.

Less than a minute later, more orders came down. The army was to retire from the ridge top and move off the road and into the woods. The enemy was not to discover their presence.

Thru was impressed by the speed and skill the men showed in following these orders. They vanished from the road, slipped back between the trees, and did their utmost to hide their passing.

Aeswiren and his staff came hurrying back along the road, pointing out places where thousands of feet had worn trails on soft ground. More orders were given, and teams of men worked over all these places with rakes and spear points, laying leaves and broken branches to cover the worst.

Thru took the opportunity to go forward and, keeping behind cover, to take another look at the enemy.

There was no sign that Aeswiren's forces had been spotted. The landing continued. Small boats thronged the shoreline. Units of men were forming up on the shingle above. A couple units were already marching inland, up the narrow donkey path to the bridge.

The horsemen were at the bridge and they were beginning to cross.

"My enemy has won this round," came a voice beside him, speaking in the tongue of the Land, and Thru started at finding that Aeswiren had come up so quietly behind him.

"You are too late to stop him landing."

"Yes. But we have to destroy him, and we cannot do that until he offers battle."

"He has greater numbers than you."

"Not once General Toshak arrives."

"And the pyluk are out there." Thru gestured inland, across the Shell.

"True, we will have to be on our guard for them."

Aeswiren rubbed his chin for a moment as he studied the scene down below. "We will have a degree of surprise in our favor, too. All in all, I am confident."

The Emperor heard something and took a look down the trail to the bridge, which lay a couple miles distant.

"Better step into cover."

Thru needed no further urging, and along with the Emperor and his staff, he moved back under the trees and hid himself from view. A screen of archers was set out in front of them under cover.

Aeswiren sat down with his back to a tree. He had his sword out and was examining its edges.

Thru squatted close by.

Everyone kept strict silence for several minutes while the cavalry scouts rode over the crest of the hill, right past the waiting regiments of Aeswiren's army, hidden two hundred paces back in the trees.

When the sound of the hoofs had faded, Aeswiren gave a chuckle.

"You know we never could have pulled that off if we had any horses of our own. There'd have been at least one horse that gave us away. Horses always do that."

"What is that bit of land down there called?" Aeswiren asked Thru as they watched the enemy army crossing the bridge about two miles away. About three thousand men had crossed by this point, in Thru's estimation.

The ground was open in places, covered in forest in others. The river had changed its course many times there, creating a braided channel.

"That is Shelly Fields, on either side of the river Shell."

"A beautiful spot. Good land, too, and yet no one plows it?"

"Shelly Fields has always been left to the wild. The Spirit tells us that we should leave some of even the best land unfarmed."

Aeswiren expressed surprise. "Wilderness, you say?"

Thru understood what Aeswiren was thinking. The only wilderness left in Shasht was high in the mountains.

The enemy continued to pour across. Their regiments were clearly visible, bunched along the road.

Thru watched Aeswiren count the enemy and then make his decision. The Emperor gestured to his chief of staff, Gottbix. Immediately orderlies were dispatched to carry prepared orders for the regiments.

Aeswiren clapped Thru on the shoulder.

"The game has begun, Colonel Gillo. When the situation begins to clear, you should return to General Toshak and bring him up to date. Though he should join us before much longer."