The Shasht War (18 page)

Thru prayed for the umpteenth time that his messenger had got through to the Meld during the night.

At the edge of the polder land of Farnem, a slash of bright green waterbush planted in neat rows down the river bottom, the army halted again. Smoke still rose from the embers of the village. The sight of the ruined village had rekindled the mots' anger, and cries for revenge riled the lines of regiments.

Blana called a conference with Thru and all the regimental commanders. Blana seemed wide awake. His eyes were preternaturally bright despite the long march without sleep.

"No signs of fighting here at Farnem, I'm told," he said as they gathered around. "The village was burned, but the folk were gone and no resistance was given."

"Any report of the enemy's whereabouts yet?" said Kremen, commander of the Seventeenth Regiment.

"Not yet, scouts are working toward Chillum, but we still have no confirmed sightings of men."

"Should we deploy into line while we wait here," said Ter-Saab with a quick look to Thru, who nodded gratefully for not having to ask that question in front of the regimental commanders.

"No, I want to be ready to move out on a moment's notice."

Thru, still nervous about an ambush winced, but said nothing. He understood the Grys Blana's character a little now. If he pushed the fellow, it would only make him dig his heels in, even if he was obviously wrong.

After that it was only a matter of making reports about each regiment and being told to be ready to fight to the death. Then the meeting was dismissed. Thru pulled Ter-Saab and the Grys Glaine to walk with him.

"We have to be ready to march in column, but I want enough space in the column so we can deploy into a line at a moment's notice. We've practiced it often enough; now's the time to do it."

"Yes, sir," they chorused.

"Form up for the march. I don't want it to look as if we're openly disobeying the Grys."

Off they went. Thru waited at his command post, temporarily set up around the trunk of a huge fallen oak. Major Ilb and Sergeant Burrum handled the routine complaints and problems there—blisters, worn-out boots or sandals, lost equipment, and the few cases of mots and brilbies who'd collapsed, too worn out to go on.

There were surprisingly few of those.

He closed his eyes for a few moments and thought about Nuza. He visualized her face, heard her voice, felt her lips against his.

He opened his eyes again. Before him stood the good Major Ilb, dealing with a case of a lost spontoon pike. The lacquer on the mot's helmets glittered in the torchlight. By the fallen tree the brigade flag had been thrust into the ground.

They waited, growing more anxious with every minute.

Then at last three scouts returned at a run, hastening to the Grys Blana's standard. Within moments messengers were on their way, running full tilt along the columns to reach the regimental commanders.

The enemy was attacking the Meld's force, on the far side of the village of Chillum. The battle had already begun!

They kept up a steady jog now, all fatigue forgotten as they ran between the famous orchards of the valley of Farnem. They forded the river and moved on across the strip of polder and into the village of Chillum. Now they caught the first sounds of the battle ahead: a dim, distant roaring with occasional high shrieks that cut through the rest.

Chillum was undamaged, though there were a few bodies, men with mot arrows in them. Here and there a door banged in the wind. The regiments deployed into a battle line, with the Eighth Brigade in front and the Sixth behind it. They moved out of the village in nice orderly lines, maintaining a steady pace.

Now upslope, across the trampled fields, they could see many more still forms. Sometimes the bodies were heaped up around a gate; mostly they were scattered across the wheat.

As they passed them, Thru saw men, mots, brilbies, even a kob, all sharing the same wild grimace in death. Some were pinned to the ground by spears, others lay facedown. There was a stink of blood and shit. A hedge had been broken and trampled to pieces, and bodies wedged into it, a pile of them on the far side. A lot of dead men lay here, mixed in with the mots and others. The only way forward was to climb over these bodies.

The sound of war grew louder. Bugles and drums, a sullen harsh chanting, it all wafted back to them as they hurried on. Thru felt a now familiar dread in his heart. War brought a terrible exhiliration and a burning fear that Thru hated.

And now they saw wounded men limping from the field and others, clearly scouts, who were scurrying up through the wheat toward the crest.

Grys Blana came jogging by with his staff.

"I think we should attack immediately, don't you, Brigadier-Colonel?"

The Grys was literally rubbing his hands together, but whether in triumph or anxiety, Thru could not tell.

"I think we better hurry, sir," said Thru, thinking of the Meld's force trying to stave off six thousand men.

The Grys appeared to hardly hear him, and it didn't matter.

"Forward! Forward at the double!" shouted Grys Blana waving his sword toward the crest of the hill.

"Open out into line of battle immediately," Blana said to Thru before he turned to rejoin his own brigade.

Now the Twelfth Regiment dressed out to its left, formed into squads, and marched out to form a line. The Sixth Regiment hurried to form its own line. Soon all four regiments charged for the hilltop.

Wounded men, emerging from the trees, scrambled to get out of the way. Thru observed one man hopping frantically through the orchards, until the lines of the Sixth Regiment swallowed him up. He wasn't visible after their passage.

Chillum would suffer a poor harvest after this, Thru observed as they helped trample the grain. Wounded survivors struggled here and there. A brilby called out for aid, but all they could offer was a promise to come back for him.

"We'll be back soon for you, brother."

"Just have to sort out this trouble first," said another voice.

And then they came to the crest of the slope. Orchards grew here, and now they could see the enemy. A line hastily formed ahead of them as the enemy turned around to face this threat from the rear.

The fighting ahead was very loud. Screams, shouts, and the endless clanging of steel on iron, drums thundering, brass bugles braying, all boiled up from the orchards just ahead.

They kept moving, lifting the pace a little, losing cohesion around the trees, climbing a low rock wall. And then the lines joined in conflict.

The pikes lead the way, stabbing and thrusting, picking off men from the enemy front. But now the men hurled a volley of javelins and several pikebearers went down. Spontoon pikemots took their place, but more javelins came and more gaps appeared. The two sides were pushing closer as the men did their utmost to get under the pikes and close in on the mot front.

Swords and spears clanged while both lines pushed at each other, shield to shield. The pikes and spontoons struggled to keep the men back.

Thru noticed, though, that the momentum of the mots' charge had stopped abruptly. The lines were stabilized, shoving back and forth over a space of ten yards. He also observed that the mass of men facing them seemed to be growing stronger every moment. More and more arrows and javelins came flying over. Sergeant Burrum went down, skewered through the neck, dead before he hit the ground. Another javelin brushed past Thru's shoulder, missing by less than a finger's width.

The infernal drumming grew louder, and now a host of shrieking bugles gave Thru a sudden premonition of disaster.

They had come too late! The Meld of Daneep had been careless, and the enemy had caught up with him in time to destroy his army before the Grys Blana could join. The Meld's army had been defeated, and the entire enemy army now turned around on Thru's regiment.

He got up on a tree stump and looked up and down their line. The Sulmo regiments were still holding a good line. An arrow flashed past his nose, and he ducked down again.

The woods ahead of them were filled with men and their banners as far back as he could see.

Thru ran to the Grys Blana's position, visible beneath the banner of Blana.

"Sir, the enemy are coming on with their full strength. They must have driven the Meld from the field."

"Impossible," said the Grys, but in his eyes Thru saw fear. The Grys had at least noticed that the charge had stopped, as if it had hit a brick wall.

"I don't think so, sir. I recommend strongly that we fall back in good order to the village and fortify it. We're going to have to hold off their entire army."

"I... How can you be so sure?" The brittle ebullience of the Grys had suddenly boiled away.

"Just get up somewhere and take a look over there. They'll be marching to outflank us on both sides in a few minutes."

The Grys glanced nervously left and right. A staffer pointed to a broken gate in a low wall.

When the Grys jumped down again, he had a new look in his eyes.

"Something is wrong. Perhaps the Meld has withdrawn." He swallowed. "You are right, we must move back to the village."

"Quickly, sir. No time to waste."

But a withdrawal while under full engagement was a difficult maneuver even for highly trained troops. The young regiments of the Grys Blana were not ready. Their line broke up as they tried to pull back. More and more men came swarming forward. Men broke out onto the open field to their right now, lapping around the flank of the Blana regiments.

On Thru's side of the line, the Sixth Regiment held fast while the Twelfth retired in an oblique line, refusing its flank to the enemy. When the Twelfth had gone a hundred paces back, they halted, and the Sixth began to retire in order, trying to keep a crescent-shaped front to the enemy.

On their right the Blana regiments teetered on the brink of collapse, then pulled themselves together with great effort and threw back the men. The fight hung in the balance, but the mots and brilbies had seen total disaster staring them in the face and this gave them a desperation that momentarily overwhelmed the men in front of them.

Their power did not last for long, though, because the Blana mots were outflanked and forced to move farther down slope as their left moved forward.

Thru pulled a company away from the Sixth Regiment and sent it at a run to help the Blanans.

The little army was now halfway back to the village. But the men poured down on them and soon surrounded them completely. On the front line the fighting continued, but less intensely. The men could only muster spasmodic bouts of fury.

A flurry of bugle notes confirmed this fact, and the men on their front pulled back ten yards, retiring to the ranks behind them. The second and third lines also pulled back and retired, but immediately a horde of fresh men came through to fill the front rank. A forty-yard gap opened up between the lines.

It was the last chance for the mot regiments.

"Now!" Thru said to Ter-Saab. "We have to get back to the village. Run for it." Ter-Saab screamed the order himself, running along the back of the Sixth Regiment. The Grys Glaine followed suit, and the two Glaine regiments began to back away as quickly as they dared from the line of battle. They ran back a few paces then stopped and turned, then ran some more as they found the gap widening between the two forces.

On their right the Blana regiments were still in place, beset on the far flank.

The Shasht bugles wailed. The enemy realized what the mots were up to, but the men's ranks were still in transition. They could not pursue for a few more seconds.

Finally they began to advance, but their line was ragged, and harsh voices could be heard raging at them about that. Correcting the problem didn't take long, with well trained Shasht soldiery though and they soon charged forward with a roar.

"Hurry!" Thru ran among the retreating troops. "Back to the village, we have to try and fortify it."

The men were coming at a run now, more regiments of them pouring over the crest of the hill.

The Blanans suddenly turned and ran, their units breaking up entirely as the mots and brilbies bounded down the slope and into the village. When they reached the village, they bunched around the pump in a mob, panicked and became helpless. Men stabbed and hacked at the hindmost, since the mots were so jammed up they could hardly swing their swords.

Thru and his officers tried desperately to shape the retreat of his own brigade and form barricades in the streets to hold the village, but the men pressed the Blanans into a hopeless mob right in the center.

More men came forward on the far left and threatened to surround the village entirely. In fact, Thru could see, this was inevitable; there were just too many men.

The Sixth Regiment had managed to build loose barricades in the two main roads leading into the village from the north. They had filled the houses, occupied the roofs, and were breaking up stone walls for rocks to throw. The men of Shasht now pulled up to the barricades, and both sides traded arrows and javelins.

To the left, the Twelfth Regiment had not had time to build any barricades, so they fought in the streets, in the houses, and in the courtyards.

The flank company from the Sixth fought a cohesive retreat in a square across the field and rejoined the northernmost barricade force.

The Blanans continued to mill, while being hacked and stabbed from behind. Thru saw the Grys Blana, with other officers, trying to pull the mots out of the central square of the village and push them down the narrow street running south.

But time ran out. Men filtered in rapidly on the south side to fully encircle the village.

A fight began on the southern road and rapidly advanced into the heart of the village. Men savagely carved through the Blanans.

In desperation Thru lead a company of the Sixth Regiment in an attack on the seam between the enemy units facing their front and those pressing the Blanans. They got over a wall into the street and through a courtyard, but then ran into a granary occupied by men. From its roof men hurled down rocks and javelins. More men pressed in on either side of the yard.