Timewalker

by Luke Norris

  “I dunno Cougar, we drivers sense each other somehow. He will know there is more to these skirmishes than Highland villagers rebelling. Think about it, we knew there was a driver behind those victories in the Lowland wars. We can smell each other, our strategies and tactics. The second-stagers themselves may not even realize that we are here, I suspect they think you died from your infection. But he will have suspicions.”

  Oliver knew that was the truth. “Do you think we can talk to him? I mean, if he knew the truth about the second-stagers and what they did to him…”

  “Na, I doubt it, Cougar. I remember this one. He was quiet, and he obeyed the others without question. He is a driver through and through. The drugs wore off, but his mind had been controlled for so long that the man he once was, is gone.”

  Oliver felt a stab of sadness. At least I still have my memories and know who I was.

  “He must be an old one then. Probably hundreds of years old, I wonder how many planet raids he’s been on?”

  “A lot is my guess,” Ponsy replied. “He will be dangerous. We both know you don't survive that long as a driver unless you are very good.”

  “Damn it!” Oliver slammed his fist on the map. “We knew he would come eventually. I had just hoped we would have longer to train the men first.”

  “Well-trained, heavy infantry will crush our militia in open combat, that is for certain.”

  “Did the spy say they were here?” Oliver indicated to a valley on the map. Ponsy's small features squinted at the point where Oliver's finger was.

  “Yes, here in this valley…” his eyes opened wide in recognition. “Aaghh, I see what you're thinking, Cougar! This whole valley was flooded not a week ago, they'll be trudging through marshland. They are heavy infantry too,” Ponsy grinned, “so they won't have archers. Our men will be able to get in close.”

  “This is the answer!” Oliver declared, tapping the location. “This is where we make our stand! Let's call the men to assembly. We have to move quickly before they leave this valley and the opportunity is gone.”

  “I need to send a message to Ayla,” Ponsy said standing to leave.

  Oliver stopped, this man has a wife and child. “Ponsy, go to her! You're not coming with us! We may not come back from this one. If that driver is as dangerous as we think he is…”

  “No Cougar!” Ponsy cut him off. “We have the best chance of defeating him together. If you fail alone, then it will just be a matter of time before I will eventually have to face him alone too.”

  Oliver simply nodded, he could not argue with the logic. “Send the message!”

  Oliver had requested the fittest soldiers to be assembled at short notice, and now he began to regret it as he struggled to keep up with these people that seemed bred like mountain goats. He estimated they had covered twenty-five kilometers at a steady jog. Five hundred trained Highland soldiers ran lightly along the hidden Highland trails, both in front of him and behind.

  They carried only water for the run, a small ration of dried meat and the two small bags of tar per person. The only weapons they had been allowed to carry were a light sword for the infantry or a short recurve bow and a small quiver of arrows for the archers. He had made them leave all their armor behind, including heavy leather clothing. Now, unencumbered, they dashed quickly across the trails, stopping every few kilometers to hydrate.

  The unrelenting pace strained Oliver to his limit, but he didn't mention it to the men.

  “I swear these men descend directly from mountain goats.” Ponsy puffed beside him.

  “I know,” Oliver agreed, red-faced, “I'm going to keel over if we don't get there soon. It's unfair though, they have smaller frames, stocky legs…”

  “You can stop your fretting Cougar! Looks like we are here.”

  The men had begun to fan out along the ridge of the hill overlooking the valley, and lie flat on the crest, so they couldn't be seen from below. Oliver looked down at the wide flat valley floor, the meandering river glistened on the far side. But it was clear that over the millennia the river had carved its way right across this valley, cutting into the hills on both sides. The entire valley floor was a riverbed at one time or another.

  He examined the base of the hill one hundred meters below, it seemed to rise abruptly from the flat valley floor. It looked, from Oliver's viewpoint, as though the ancient riverbed below was dry solid ground. However, the men had crossed it only five kilometers up the valley, in order to be on this side, and it was still a sodden bog from the flood a week earlier.

  “If we hadn't had that flood this would have been a highway for the driver to march his infantry up,” Oliver remarked.

  “Too right,” Ponsy agreed, “scouts tell me they are still hugging the hillside to keep on harder ground.”

  “How long?”

  “An hour or more before they reach us.”

  “Thank god! I need a rest after that Olympic effort.”

  Ponsy raised an eyebrow.

  “A contest of physical ability on Earth,” Oliver explained. “Everybody in the world competed at different disciplines…”

  “We had this on my world too, among the ruling class.”

  “Only ruling class? It was open to everybody on my planet, so when you found a champion, it could truly be said he was the best in the world.”

  “You let slaves enter these games?” He realized his mistake and held up a hand to stall Oliver. “Yes, yes, we were slaves on the ship, and no the second-stagers are not better than us.” He laughed as he preempted Oliver's response, it was the argument he had heard for two years from him. “It just seems that every society, no matter how advanced, will see other people as inferior for one reason or another. On this planet, it’s the highlanders, on my planet, it was anybody not born into the ruling class. You’ve told me that, even on your Earth, slavery happened. And, now it’s these second-stagers.”

  “I know, it's strange.”

  Finally, after nearly two hours of tense waiting, the signal reached Oliver that the lowlanders had been seen. The two drivers shuffled to the ridge of the crest and scanned the base of the hill. Ponsy used the telescope Oliver had made for him. He was suitably delighted because Oliver had made several improvements to the lenses, rendering the magnification more powerful than his own. Now Oliver regretted giving Ponsy the better of the two devices because he often made a big deal of pointing things out in the distance, an interesting geographical feature or rare animal sighting, that were beyond the range of Oliver's own telescope. But it was when the big driver had allegedly seen a fish wrestle an eagle out of the air and pull it back into the lake that Oliver began to wonder at the legitimacy of the driver’s claims, and how long he’d been pulling his leg.

  “Here they come!” Ponsy whispered, snapping Oliver's attention back to the ambush they were about to execute. “Two abreast. They are keeping to the hillside as we hoped. These must be the shadow soldiers we've heard rumor of. Wow wee, those boys are heavily armored! They would make a formidable force on open ground.”

  The line of soldiers slowly marched around the bend coming into view. Their thrusting spears glinted in the sun, but every other part of their attire including the large solid shields and iron visors were mat black. After several minutes the end of the line filed around the corner.

  “That's all of them?” Oliver was surprised. “That's only two hundred men! Our scouts reported three hundred and fifty. Were the scouts wrong?”

  “I don't know Cougar, but they are almost in position below us. We have to move now!”

  “Yes, you're right.” He looked along the ridge at his men crouched in position, weapons drawn, watching him eagerly for the signal. Something doesn't feel right here. Only two hundred men? Where are the rest? We set the ambush, then why do I suddenly feel like…

  “Oliver!” Ponsy insisted. “We have to move!”

  Oliver raised his hand for his men to see, then brought it down in a chopping motion to signal the charge. A Highla
nd battle cry went up as the men poured over the crest, swords raised, running down the hill. The two hundred archers stayed on the ridge with the two drivers and waited for Oliver's second signal to loose a volley.

  As soon as the shadow soldiers saw the threat, they turned and locked shields in a single unified motion. The charging highlanders now faced an impenetrable wall of black, bristling with glinting spears. Oliver watched his men plummeting towards the menacing sight. Stop, he thought, they're going too fast. But his men were dressed lightly and were able to stop their momentum and pull up ten yards short of the enemy. A few unfortunate highlanders tripped or couldn't stop in time and were skewered. Oliver winced at their screams.

  Oliver’s highland soldiers didn't attack. Instead, they unclipped the two sacks of tar they had carried on the run. Each highlander lobbed their first sack at the iron shin-guards of the soldier before him. Black oily tar splashed over their legs, some landed on the ground and some against the hardwood shields. The shadow soldiers instinctively lowered their shield line to counter the projectiles. As soon as this happened the second sacks of tar were thrown over the shields to splatter the liquid against breastplates, iron visors, some landing on shields again. Once they had thrown their last bag, the Highland men turned and ran back up the hill. The lightweight clothing they wore made it easy for them to scale the gradient quickly, and it was almost impossible for the shadow soldiers to pursue.

  As soon as the men were halfway up the hill a hail of fiery arrows whizzed over their heads from Oliver's archers. The shadow soldiers had expected this and were already in an expert tortoiseshell formation preventing any arrows from getting past the shell made of interlocked shields.

  The flaming arrows instantly ignited the droplets of tar on the ground, and on the shields, the clean blue flames spread like wildfire.

  The tar was sticky and burned extremely hot. They heard the screams of the men, as the tar on their clothes and armor began to burn. They dropped their shields, and the line disintegrated as men tried to get away from burning victims beside them. Oliver’s light infantry watched from halfway up the hill as a second volley of flaming arrows whooshed above their heads, decimating what was left of any order among the shadow soldiers. Men ran, arms flailing, into the swampy ground behind them and threw themselves into the muddy pools in hope of some respite. But they didn't receive any. The merciless tar compound, Oliver had concocted, wasn't so easily extinguished, and burned even under water.

  The men waiting on the hill charged back down into the foray. They were met with virtually no resistance, mostly just writhing soldiers in agony as their skin burned, or they roasted in their armor. The sweet smell of the tar had been replaced with the rank stench of burning flesh, which wafted up to the men on the hill. Oliver's soldiers dispatched them easily, with cries of, for the Highlands! and, Oliver!

  “That is a grim scene, my friend!” Ponsy remarked.

  Oliver nodded, “Aye! Do you think the driver was among them?”

  The answer came before Ponsy could speak. A cry came from his archers further along the ridge of the hill. It took a moment for the two drivers to absorb the situation. A black wall of shields came into view on top of the ridge. Shit! They've flanked us, that’s the remaining one hundred and fifty soldiers. Now we are the ones in the ambush.

  Even as he watched, he could see a black figure in front of the enemy's line cutting through archers. They were being tossed aside, like the cresting wave on the bow of a ship.

  “That's him!” Ponsy said. They could see Drake, taller than the rest, moving with the lethal grace of a panther.

  “Archers,” Oliver screamed, “To the marshes! Retreat to the valley floor.” They hardly needed to be told. They had no weapons apart from their bows, which were useless against the armor at such short range. They were defenseless against this new onslaught. They streamed down the hill to join the other highland soldiers. The shadow soldiers pursued them down at a careful march, their heavy kit made them much slower.

  If we hadn't beaten that force at the base of the hill, our men would have been sandwiched in. It would have been a massacre, thought Oliver. He went to leap over the crest and join the fight but was stopped by Ponsy's hand on his chest. He turned to see they were now alone on the ridge of the hill apart from a single lone black figure. Drake stood watching them, his helmet was discarded on the ground, and his black head gleamed with sweat. He raised his sword in a menacing salute toward the two drivers.

  Below, the men were following Oliver's original plan and were making as if to retreat across the marshes. Soon they were joined by the archers, whose numbers had taken a hit from the ambush. In total there were still more than four hundred and fifty highlanders, and they began to fan out, in what looked like a chaotic retreat.

  The shadow soldiers reached the base of the hill to find their comrades decimated. They suddenly realized their all-knowing leader, who had reached demigod status in his battle record, was no longer with them. With nobody giving orders they continued on and pursued the highlanders into the marshland.

  The further Drake's soldiers went the slower and more grueling the going became, and soon their heavy iron-clad legs were sinking deep into the mud. With every step sucking out their energy, the men were becoming tired. Eventually, they came to a consensus to turn back and make for the hard ground. But as they turned, it became evident that the chaotic retreat, staged by the highlanders, was nothing but a ruse.

  The highlanders had been subtly surrounded them and were closing in. They appeared to be moving with ease, in their light clothes, across the muddy ground. Drake's men frantically tried to break from their straight line formation and form a defensive circle, but their movements were hindered by the mud. Some of them tripped and fell, hands sinking in the marsh, and getting their shields and weapons stuck in the boggy ground. Everything was sluggish for them. They weren't able to defend their backs with the interlocking shield technique.

  All the while the highlanders closed in with frightening sped, like lions surrounding a mammoth stuck in a tar pit. Some of the shadow soldiers saw the odds, of four to one, stacked against them, and threw down their weapons and raised their hands in surrender. Others decided to fight, the last thing they saw was revenge burning in the eyes of the highlanders, lust for retribution for the destroyed lives the lowlanders had brought them.

  “It's over!” Oliver called to Drake. “Look down there! Your men are defeated.” The faint cries of Drake's men could be heard on the plain.

  Drake didn't so much as glance in the direction of his men. A cruel smile formed on his lips and he spoke in the driver-tongue. “They served their purpose!” He waved his hand dismissively. “They smoked you two rats out. The last two drivers. The others forgot about you, but I knew you were behind these attacks.”

  “The others!?” Oliver exclaimed. “You mean the pirates! You wouldn't work with them if you knew the truth.”

  Ponsy laughed but didn't say anything.

  “They destroyed your world!” Oliver insisted. “Just like they destroyed Ponsy's and mine. They made you what you are! They made you a slave! They aren't one of us like they claim to be.”

  “My world,” Drake paused as if to consider his next words carefully, “was a shithole!” He laughed then drew suddenly serious. “I was in prison on my world, considered a criminal, and they freed me! I was happy to see my world burn. You think I don't remember, but I remember. Hell, I helped. They think I haven't realized who they are, that they are control, but I've known for a long time. But look where I am now! Look what they made me! I am a conqueror, on any world I go to."

  “You don't understand,” Oliver said. “Everything they tell you is lies. You think you're like one of them? They will discard you as soon as you're not useful to them.”

  “Ha, you want to fight them!” Drake said. “I can smell it on you. I can hear it in your voice. Well, even if you got the chance, you couldn't beat them! Even we drivers can't fight them. I know
I'm not one of them and never will be. They are not like us, they are...better. I've seen them in battle with my own eyes. They move quicker than is physically possible.” Drake was visualizing something, but then his eyes snapped back to the two drivers in front of him. “You won't ever get the chance though, because I've come to finish you vermin myself.”

  Drake raised his shield and threw a spear, so suddenly it caught Ponsy on the shoulder as he leaped aside. Oliver heard the crack of the collarbone, and his friend yell in pain as he crashed to the ground.

  “Cougar!” Ponsy yelled. “Look out!”

  Oliver turned to see Drake bearing down on him with a shield and short sword drawn. The sudden rush of adrenaline that pumped into Oliver's body brought with it a strange sensation. This sensation was starting to become familiar. Sounds began to drag out, becoming deeper. His sense of color became keener, everything around him more vibrant, the edges more defined. What is happening to me?

  Oliver watched Drake thrust forward with the short sword, perfect form. But it was as if the driver was moving underwater, it was slow enough for him to avoid the deadly blow at the last minute. Oliver used the momentum of his motion to turn full three sixty and bring his own sword to Drake's side. But the driver, although appearing slower to Oliver, had anticipated it, and his shield was already there. Oliver's sword bit deeply into the hardwood shield, the force of the blow causing it to crack. Drake threw the broken apparatus at him

  Oliver focused on the deadly disk hurtling toward him. The sensation deepened. It was as if the air thickened around the object, slowing its advance. He felt as he concentrated, he could control the speed of things around him or was it the speed of himself he didn't know. He easily dodged the next slash Drake angled at his head. He was able to shift his focus and see Ponsy lash out from where he lay on the ground behind Drake, to slice his Achilles' tendon. Drake screamed and dropped immediately to one knee. The tendon slid inside his calf, making the leg useless.

  Ponsy was now lying, extended on the ground, with his sword hand outstretched. His whole flank was open and vulnerable. Drake turned with murder in his ivory eyes. Oliver dove to deflect the blow that would have taken off Ponsy's arm. In Oliver’s heightened state he seemed aware of everything. From the corner of his vision, he saw the arrow sail through the air into the side of Drake, and penetrate deep behind his breastplate. It was traveling quickly, but he could easily follow its path with his eyes. Impossible.