King's Shield (71 page)

When in doubt, fight the way you know how.

A horn winded weirdly, and a rustling hum became the hissing rush of arrows. Noddy jerked up his shield. Four, five clunks jolted his arm.

The straw men jerked as arrows pierced them.

Cold fear washed through Noddy, followed by wordless rage when a shot, either better aimed than most, or carried by errant wind, struck his own Runner, who’d begged and pleaded to ride at his left. The boy clutched at his neck, then toppled away from Noddy’s reaching hand and vanished.

“Lances!” Hawkeye shouted. “Archers high!”

Right arms brought up lances, heels locked down hard behind the stirrups. Horses, trained, began the deliberate walk forward, muscles bunched for the expected command to leap to the gallop. Archers brought back arms, points high, a straight line from arrow tip to back elbow.

“Archers: loose! Second line: lances!”

From the Marlovans arced a lethal hissing of arrows. The front ranks of the Venn serried under the impact, but kept moving forward. Noddy’s heartbeat thundered in his ears.

The second line fell in step, slow at first, then more rapidly; the horses’ ears pricked, tails flicked, one whinnied as the third line formed up behind them.

The Venn blatted horns, the sound echoing like wailing ghosts.
Thump, clatch!
The men shifted, standing square, the big square shields braced and tight one against the other in a wall. They used round shields in the back ranks, but the front had extra heavy metal shields, locked edge to edge by big men with powerful arms, the only difference being no swords spiking between each shield for they wanted horses, they were ordered to just kill the riders. Their second row formed up on their heels.

“Hold,” Hawkeye warned, eyes forward now, gauging. “Hold . . . hold . . .”

And when the enemy was a hundred strides off he shouted, “Charge!”

The front row’s horses sprang to the gallop. “Yiyiyiyi yip yip yip!” Hawkeye shrieked, a high, harrowing cry, the sound picked up by the men in a shrill and savage echo.

The front of the Venn lines faltered as those behind shoved forward; the ranks shifted just before the thudding crack and smash of fifty lances striking shields, helms, chest plates.

“Charge!”

And it worked the way Inda had drilled them: the first line was still even, fighting furiously as the second line galloped up and neatly as a comb passed the first line and smashed into the Venn front lines, driving them back some twenty paces.

Many of the lances splintered. Hawkeye’s did not, and he wielded it with enormous strength, screeching, “Yip! Yip! Yip!”

“Yip! Yip! Yip!” the terrible shriek was taken up behind, the canyons echoing it back.

Venn front liners lost balance and fell, to be trampled under the feet of their own forces, far too tightly packed. The lancers used their spear-tipped weapons until they broke, and then out came the curve-tipped swords and the powerful downward strokes.

The captain of the third line shouted, “Charge!”

They hit with a thundering smash, driving the Venn ten more paces back: the Venn at the rear had stood fast, making a press as lethal an enemy as the Marlovan warriors. Men fought to stay upright, fought just for air.

The mass shoved against Talkar’s struggling mount. He peered through the arrows, the weapons, the swirls of vapor: he had vastly underestimated the power of a charge. You couldn’t really charge your own men in drill—

“Kill the horses!” Talkar shouted, but not even his ensign, separated by fifty shouting men, could hear him over the din.

There was no more thinking, just the whirl and judder of sword and shield, the plunging of horses, the flying of mud, while the slowly emerging rays of sun beat down on steel helms.

For longer than they believed they could, the Marlovans shoved the Venn down the incline, perhaps a hundred paces in all. For that length of time the Venn did not see anything beyond the high point but horses’ heads and waiting men, shadowy and ill-defined, some shooting, some waiting for attack.

But then the lancers began to fall. Talkar grinned in satisfaction as Marlovans with hacked joints toppled from horses to disappear under the melee. Waiting hands gripped the riderless horses and muscled them inside the Venn lines. Just as well no one heard the order, Talkar decided, and did not reissue it.
Now just bring us a few thousand more—

Another massive surge: the yellow-haired Marlovan commander, his teeth flashing as he laughed, had rallied the remainder of his front lines into one, this time joining it himself and together, stirrup to stirrup, the horses reared and threw the Venn front line back into more chaos.

Talkar shot his arm up in the signal for “form attack circles.”

Venn horns blatted with angry insistence, and Talkar urged his horse forward as he whacked the flat of his blade against helms to get the men into bands to surround each rider.

Noddy yelled something, lost in the noise, but his tip of the chin alerted his trumpeter, who sounded the retreat. The horses plunged, kicking out, biting, smashing with forefeet, forcing the humans back so the animals could go with their fellows.

The surviving lancers backed out of the surge to reform their lines and the Venn—directed by the mournful howl of horns in a new pattern—stamped, locked shields together, and charged uphill.

Hawkeye stopped his chargers at the top of the slope.

Runners brought fresh lances from the back. When the Venn were twenty paces off, the horses charged. They were tired, but a short charge downhill still packed power.

Again the lances smashed hard into the Venn shield wall. The Venn horns bleated. The men in the center of the shield wall performed a rapid retreat before those lances and the wing men scrambled along the canyon walls to flank the Marlovan horsemen.

Hawkeye and Noddy made their horses rear, followed by the others. The animals struck out with hooves. When the horses came down, their riders’ slashing blades hummed through the air, cutting and hacking at the press of Venn.

Unbidden, the men from the back abandoned their ruse with the wagons and formed into a rough and ready line, sighting on Hawkeye and Noddy.

Noddy glanced back, saw them, and jabbed his sword skyward in the command to charge.

The line serried as the flanking Venn surged out of the way, exposing the Marlovan lancers, who had lost all semblance of order. The new chargers turned to one another for clues and then it was every man for himself as Venn pressed on them, trying to surround each mounted man.

Hawkeye laughed, kicking shields, striking down with maddening speed and force at the forest of swords around him. “Yip! Yip! Yip!”

“Yip! Yip! Yip!”

For a time he held the front by force of will and speed of blade, surrounded by his personal Runners tight on either flank. No one got past those three.

But on one wing five horseman went down under a concerted attack, and the Venn, running over the top of the high point, discovered the straw army.

The cry shrilled back through the ranks, “Ruse! Ruse!”

Talkar grunted in surprise. The straw men had probably taken most of the covering arrows. Smart move. But—

A series of images followed by a new idea: were they as lamentably shorthanded as their brethren on the far side of the pass? If so, would a spearhead attack be more effective?

Talkar scowled impatiently up at the cliffs. On the east side they were impossibly high, rugged at the top. But no one could scale those heights. And behind the cliffs, bodies of water made army access even more impossible. There was no getting an army up there, not without a year to prepare.

He peered more closely at the Andahi River side, which was rockier, full of chasms and cracks. Maybe there was some kind of—

He motioned to his Scout Chief. “Take a look along the western face here. If there’s a way up, I want you to get high. Count the Marlovans.”

Another charge, another roar, this one bright with howls of laughter as the Venn knocked down the straw men, grappling for the plunging horses. The real Marlovans abandoned the straw men and formed up for a desperate last charge—

“Yip! Yip! Yip!” Hawkeye screamed.

“Yip! Yip! Yip!” Horsemen erupted through the middle of the straw army, the last of Noddy’s and Inda’s dragoons, striking hard into the Venn warriors. But the Venn were over the top now, and it was the Marlovans’ turn to be forced backward, step by step, downhill.

Hawkeye was closed in by the forest of steel.

“Yip! Yip! Yip!” His fox cry rose to a nerve-ripping shriek, and screeches answered him—primal cries like the terrifying shrills of predator birds—

From the heights.

Arrows whirred down and smacked with liquid thuds into Venn. Eyes on both sides lifted skyward at the impassable stone walls to discover men lining the tops of the cliffs. One of them carried a huge pennon, just visible in the swirling mist: a crimson-and-gold eagle.

“Inda!”
Hawkeye yelled, teeth flashing—

And dropped his guard, just for that moment. A sword smashed the back of his elbow; as he lunged up in his saddle, another blade cut viciously behind the knee. He fell back onto the saddle as the swords struck again and again.

Noddy was breathing through his mouth, which cut down the stink of fear-sweat, blood, and death-voided bowels. Sorrow had flared into hatred and rage, directed at the horn-helmed men trying to kill him: beneath was rage at the senselessness of it all, the meaty crackings and thunks no one should ever have to hear as men he knew were smashed out of life one by one.

A flurry at his left—he lifted his head, arm poised to block—and a Venn longbowman took aim just under his upraised arm, shooting at the shadowy gap in the chain-mail sleeve under his tunic.

Noddy recoiled as white fire bloomed behind his eyes. He clutched at the arrow in his armpit, fighting for consciousness, bitter and furious that there was no hope after all. He swayed, fighting against his fading strength. Two Runners slashed and hacked in a frenzy to get near and catch him; one pulled him over the shoulders of his horse.

Rage pumped through Hawkeye, the hot glorious rage of intent. He took shield position behind the Runners, fighting off a circle of Venn, as arrows struck all around him. He’d lost use of his left arm and right leg, but he stayed in the saddle even so, laying about him at a crazed pitch.

Five, six, ten closed in; crimson blooms of pain blossomed once, again. He willed them all away, but his body no longer obeyed, and he slowed. Again and again he lifted the blade, and then once more. The roaring, rushing sound in his ears grew—

As he fell the sweet, brassy ripple of horns echoed down from the heights. Cama’s men appeared on the eastern cliffs and began a furious barrage of arrows, each aimed with deadly precision.

And from behind.

Muddy to the eyebrows after four days of running, horses flecked with foam, Tuft and his men had arrived, the trumpeter blowing wildly.

“They’re here,” Hawkeye said, as his own Runner caught him, sobbing. “Evred.
Here.
”

“Charge!” Tuft roared, and horses thundered by, wild-eyed and sweating.

Blood ran from Hawkeye’s mouth, but he didn’t feel it, he only heard the horns, the horns of triumph. Evred was here—the Sier Danas were here, he was not alone . . . the bond of brethren . . .

With the words “Sing me” on his bloody lips, Hawkeye lost grip on his broken body, his mind winging through ethereal streamers of honor and glory until it winked out beyond the world.

 

 

 

“What?” Talkar shouted, trying to peer round the shields his own men raised to protect him against the deadly arrows.

“There! Is! A! Path! Up! The! Cliff!” one of his skirmish chiefs shouted through cupped hands, pointing at the cliffs they’d recently gained. “It looks like their king is up there!”

Talkar waved his sword up at the men near that insolent eagle banner. “Take a Battlegroup—take two, or three—but kill him!”

The skirmish chief grinned, for here was eternal glory indeed. He waved out a Battlegroup of the best men to follow him, and they surged through their fellows toward the trail.

“See that?” Tau asked, pointing down at them with a fresh arrow, which he slapped to the bow and shot. It flew straight and true—and clattered against a helm before spinning away. Damn. “They’re coming up to dance.”

“Right.” Inda swung his sword from hand to hand, loosening his arms. “You and me at the front. They can’t come at us more than three across if we get to that turn in the trail right there and hold it. Rest of you keep the cover shots, one arrow one man.” He turned to Evred. “You better stay up the path.”

“No.” Evred gestured toward a spot directly above the high point of the pass, and the clashing, roiling forces below. “I have to see.”

Of course he did—he was the king. Even if he’d pitched hay by your side when you were ten years old.

 

 

 

Talkar watched from below as the pirate (identified by his ruby earrings) and his golden-haired companion in blue moved to a broad bend in the trail. This position kept a good fifty paces between them and the redhead in crimson, who had to be their king. The latter stood partially shielded by a large boulder from below. The king could obviously see in all directions from that vantage.

Talkar cursed, wishing he’d arrived just half a day earlier. He would have been able to get his men on those heights instead. He waited for his skirmishers to make their way up, impatient with the lingering drifts of vapor revealing and obscuring those crimson-clad figures.

His signal ensign came forward at that moment. “Battle Chief Vringir is a watch’s march from the pass.” He held up a slip of paper.

Talkar smiled for the first time in days.