Sunbird (58 page)

^{'Hold!' he shouted. 'Lighten your blows!' And slowly out of this terrible confusion order emerged. The slave-masters were there ordering the captives into squatting lines, the infantry swept the town clear, and the flames burned themselves out, leaving only black mounds of smoking ash.}

^{The dawn came up, a red and angry dawn - across which drifted banks of dark smoke. When Huy led the praise chant to Baal, the cries and wailing of the captives rose with the voice of the legion.}

^{Huy hurried through the devastation ordering and organizing the retreat. Already two cohorts under the young Bakmor had started back towards the great river driving an uncounted herd of captured cattle before them. Huy guessed there might be as many as 20,000 head of the scrubby little beasts. Bakmor had Huy's orders to swim the cattle across the river and return immediately to cover the retreat.}

^{Now his concern was to get the slow unwieldy columns of slaves moving. The approach march that his legion had made in half a day and night would surely take two or three days on the return. The newly captured slaves must be chained, and unaccustomed to their bonds they would move but slowly, retarding the march. Every hour's delay was dangerous, and would make the heavily encumbered legion more vulnerable to attack or reprisal.}

^{One of his centurions accosted him, his tunic blackened with smoke and his beard singed. 'My lord!'}

^{'What is it?'}

^{'The slaves. There are few young men amongst them.'}

^{Huy turned to examine one of the masses of squatting black humanity. They were festooned with the light marching chains, shackled at the neck like hunting dogs in leash.}

^{'Yes.' He saw it now, they were mostly women and immature youths. The slave-masters had weeded out the old and infirm, but there were very few men of warrior age and status. Huy picked a bright-looking youngster from the squatting ranks and spoke to him in the vernacular.}

^{'Where are the warriors?' The youth looked startled at being addressed in his own language, but he dropped his eyes sullenly and would not answer. The centurion half drew his sword, and at the scrape of steel in the scabbard the boy glanced up fearfully.}

^{'A drop more blood will mean nothing,' Huy warned him, and the boy hesitated before replying.}

^{'They have gone to the north to hunt the buffalo.'}

^{'When will they return?' Huy demanded.}

^{'I do not know,' the slave shrugged expressively, and Huy now had a more telling reason for haste. The fighting regiments of the Vendi were intact, and this towering beacon of smoke would draw them as meat draws the vultures.}

^{'Get them up, and moving,' he ordered the centurion and hurried away. Lannon came out of the smoke followed by his armour-bearers and men-at-arms. One glance at his face was enough to warn Huy, for it was flushed and scowling.}

^{'Did you order the slave-master to spare those they reject?'}

^{'Yes, sire.' Suddenly Huy was impatient with the king's rages and tantrums, there were more important matters to occupy him now.}

^{'By what authority?' Lannon demanded.}

^{'By the authority of a commander of a Royal Legion in the field,' Huy answered him.}

^{'I commanded a burning.'}

^{'But not a massacre of the aged and infirm.'}

^{'I want the tribes to know that Lannon Hycanus passed this way.'}

^{'I leave witnesses to it,' Huy told him shortly. 'If these old ones would burden us, will they not also be a burden upon their tribe?' Lannon drew himself up. Huy saw his rage boil over - and he took Lannon's arm in unexpectedly conspiratorial grip.}

^{'Majesty, there is something of importance I must tell you.' And before Lannon could give vent to his rage Huy had led him aside. 'The regiments of Vendi have escaped us, they are in the field and out in battle array.'}

^{Lannon's rage was forgotten. 'How close are they?'}

^{'I do not know - except that the longer we talk the closer they come.'}

^{It was past noon before the long files of shuffling slaves were all tallied and moving. The slave-masters reported in to Huy's command post, and the final count was almost 22,000 human beings.}

^{Despite Huy's orders to keep the column bunched and under control, the files of chained Vendi stretched over four miles and their pace was that of the slowest. At a laboured crawl like a crippled centipede, they wound through the hills and down into the bad broken ground of the valley bottom.}

^{The first attack hit them a little after midnight on the first night. It came as a shock to Huy, for although he had taken every precaution for a night camp in enemy territory, he had not expected anything like this from the tribes. A few sentries with slit throats, a flight of arrows from ambush, even a swift rush and withdrawal at some weak spot along the line, but not a full-scale night attack which showed every evidence of planning and control, and which was pressed home with murderous intent.}

^{Only training and discipline held his legion together before that howling torrent that hurled itself upon them from the darkness. For two hours they closed up and fought, with the trumpets blowing the standfast and the rallying cries of the centurions ringing out in the darkness.}

^{'On me, the Sixth.'}

^{'Steady, the Sixth.'}

^{'Hold hard, the Sixth.'}

^{When the moon came out and lit the field, the attackers melted away into the forests and Huy could stride among his cohorts and assess his position.}

^{The dead tribesmen were piled chest deep about the square where the cohorts had stood. In the torch light the skirmishers were finishing the enemy wounded with quick sword thrusts, while others were tending their own wounded and laying out their dead for cremation. Huy was relieved to see how small a toll the enemy had exacted from the defence, and how grievous a price they had paid themselves.}

^{In the confusion of the battle many of the files of slaves had responded to the calls of the attackers and, with a concerted rush, had broken out of the square and escaped into the night still linked together. But there were still more than 16,000 of them howling with terror and hunger and thirst.}

^{The legion lit its cremation fires in the dark and sang the praise chant to Baal on the march. Before the sun had been up an hour, it was clear what tactics the Vendi had decided upon for that day. Each feature along the route was contested by groups of archers and spearmen. They had to be laboriously dislodged, always falling back before the charges of Huy's axemen, but at the same time the flanks of the column and the rear were harried and tested by repeated attacks in considerable strength.}

^{'I have never heard of this happening before,' protested Lannon during a lull while he unbuckled his helmet to air his sweat-sodden curls, and wash his mouth out with wine. 'They behave like drilled and trained troops.'}

^{'It is something new,' Huy agreed as he accepted a cloth one of his armour-bearers had wetted for him. Huy's arms and face were speckled with droplets of thrown blood, and blood had dried black and crusty on the blade and shaft of the vulture axe.}

^{'They have direction and purpose - I have never known tribesmen regroup after a charge has broken them. I have never known them come back after a mauling.'}

^{Lannon spat red wine upon the ground. 'We may have better sport than we had bargained for before the day is out,' he laughed with anticipation and passed the wine bowl to Huy.}

^{There was a place where the track crossed a narrow stream and then passed between two symmetrical rounded maiden's breast hills. There was a ford at the stream and on the approaches to it sixteen spears had been set in the earth and spiked upon them were the severed heads of legionaries who had been with Bakmor's cohorts that had gone ahead with the cattle.}

^{'Bakmor has not got through unscathed either,' Huy remarked, as he watched the heads taken down and hurriedly wrapped in leather cloaks.}

^{'Sixteen from twelve hundred is hardly a disaster to rank with Lake Trasimene,' Lannon remarked easily. 'And with their grisly display they have warned us of their intention to hold the ford - weak tactics, Sunbird.'}

^{'Perhaps, my lord,' Huy conceded, but he had noticed the faces of his men who had seen the ragged red throats and the dull staring eyes of the trophy heads. Their stomachs had cooled a little.}

^{The ford was held as Lannon had predicted. It was held by a force that Huy guessed was not less than twice his own, and while they attempted to hack their way through the attacks upon the flanks and rear never let up. Twice Huy pulled his axemen and infantry out of the reddened mud of the ford to rest and reform. By now the day was baking hot and the legionaries were tiring.}

^{Lannon had received a spear-thrust in the face which had opened his cheek to the bone, a wound that looked uglier than it really was and his beard was thick with blood and dust. A physician was stitching the wet lips of the wound closed when Huy joined the group around the king, and Lannon dismissed his anxious inquiry with a chuckle.}

^{'It will leave an interesting scar.' Then without moving his head he told Huy, 'I have discovered the solution to the mystery, Huy, and there it is!' He pointed across the stream to the closest of the two hills. The crest was just out of random arrow range, perhaps 500 paces away. Although the slopes of the hill were forested the crest was a dome of rounded bare granite, and upon the dome stood a small group of men. They were gathered about a central figure.}

^{Huy would always remember him as he was that fateful noon on the hilltop beside the ford. The distance did not dwarf him as it did the men about him. In some strange fashion it made his physical presence more imposing. He was a huge man, fully a head and shoulder taller than his com-panions. The sun shone on the oiled black muscles of his chest and arms, and a tall head-dress of blue heron feathers stood wind-tossed and proud upon his head. He wore a short kilt of leopard tails around his waist, but Huy did not need that to know he was a king.}

^{'Ah!' he said softly, and he felt something stir in him, a cold sliding thing like an uncoiling snake. On the hilltop the Vendi king made a sweeping gesture, and then stabbed towards the ford with his heavy war spear. It was clearly the delivery of a command, and from the group around him a messenger broke away and raced down the slope of the hill carrying the order.}

^{'At last the tribes have found a leader,' said Huy. 'I should have guessed it earlier.'}

^{'Take him for me,' Lannon commanded. 'I want him. Nothing else is important. Take that man for me.' And Huy heard a new tone in Lannon's voice. It puzzled him and he glanced at his king. He saw it then. It was not the pain of his crudely stitched cheek that made dark shadows play in the pale blue eyes. For the first time in all the years Huy knew that Lannon was afraid.}

^{Huy timed it carefully for the last hour before dark, for the last of the day when the shadows were long and the light uncertain. During the afternoon he skirmished at the ford in half-cohort strength, but in the thick forest on the banks of the stream he held his main strength in reserve. He let them rest during the heat of the afternoon, let them eat and drink and sharpen their blades while he made his preparations. He chose fifty of his finest, selecting them by name from the ranks and he took them well back where they would be screened from prying eyes on the heights beyond the stream.}

^{From the bottoms of the cooking-pots they scraped the thick black soot and mixed it into a thick paste with cooking oil. There was not enough to darken the skins of fifty men so for their arms and legs they used the black mud from the river. They were all of them stripped stark naked when the slave chains were shackled about their throats, but instead of the iron pins a thin dry twig was used to close the links on every collar. They could not take shields with them, and they smeared their weapons with a thick coating of black mud to hide the twinkle and flash of naked metal, then they strapped them to their backs so they could run empty-handed.}