The Excalibur Alternative

by David Weber

  On the other hand...

  "The Tairnanto are becoming restless." Computer's tenor voice was as emotionless as ever as he spoke in Sir George's ear. "Some of their subchiefs are pressing for permission to attack."

  "Tell Chief Staramhan to remind them of the plan!" Sir George said sharply.

  "Acknowledged," Computer replied calmly, and Sir George reached into the front of his bascinet to rub his nose irritably. All he needed was for his "allies" to revert to their normal tactics at the last moment!

  There was no doubt in his mind that they would have done precisely that if left to their own devices, even though they must have known that the disparity in numbers would have led to inevitable defeat. They were even more like the French than he'd thought, in that respect, and only his "archangel" status had permitted him to break them, even imperfectly, of that gallic impulsiveness. Unfortunately, he couldn't be certain that they would remain broken of it.

  He swung himself into the saddle and took his reins from Snellgrave. For a moment, he considered riding down the line to Staramhan's position to make his point in person, but he banished the temptation. It would take him several minutes, even on Satan, to get there, and those were minutes he could not afford to waste. He had a much better view of the approaching enemy from here than he would from Staramhan's location on his left. Besides, riding over to quell one trouble spot would only ensure that he was out of position to deal with any others as they arose. Better to rely upon Computer's ability to relay his commands and stay where he was.

  This relying on superior communications took some getting used to, he thought with a snort. He must remember not to let old habits betray him into casting away the advantages they bestowed.

  The enemy force's pace was increasing. They were still too far away for him to make out individual voices, and even if he'd been able to do that, he would have been unable to understand what they were saying. But he didn't need to be able to hear individuals or to understand the natives' language to know what they were shouting. The deep, guttural rhythm of a chanted war cry rolled back along the lengths of the columns, the war drums thudded harder, louder, faster, and the entire mass of the opposing army accelerated quickly.

  There was a new note to their war cries, one of what he rather thought was contempt. They were jeering at his own troops, taunting them for standing their ground rather than charging to meet them as proper warriors would. A small stir went through the ranks of his own army, but the chiefs and subchiefs stilled it quickly, and Sir George permitted himself a nasty smile as his formation settled back. His allies were holding their ranks after all, and that meant the oncoming natives were about to discover how much more dangerous than warriors soldiers were.

  The enemy moved from the long, steady lope with which the natives normally covered ground into a full run, hurling themselves forward, and Sir George felt himself tighten internally as a cloud of javelins went up from their dart-throwers.

  "Shields now, Computer!" he shouted, and all along his formation, the large, rectangular pavises he had introduced went up like protective roofs.

  The baron's native allies had protested vociferously when he first introduced the concept of shields. None of them had liked the idea of giving up half of their hand-to-hand weapons for what was basically a useless piece of wood. But he'd insisted, and when he demonstrated the reason for his insistence, much of the protest had faded into silence. There were still reservations, but they were prepared to give the concept a try... especially when Computer reported to them the number of dart-throwers the enemy had managed to amass.

  Now the slender javelins came sleeting down like lethal rain, and Sir George heard the rattle and thud as their bronze heads slammed into the interposed shields. Screams went up as some of the javelins found a home in flesh and bone, but the vast majority of them were intercepted and bounced harmlessly aside or embedded themselves in the shields.

  The rain of fire from the enemy dart-throwers seemed to hesitate for a moment as the unprecedented shields blunted their attack, and Sir George smiled again. Pavises were more common at Earthly sieges, where they were used to protect archers against return fire, than in the field. But that was because human archers required both hands to use their bows, and so each pavise had to be held by someone else or else mounted permanently in place on a supporting framework. The natives of Shaakun, on the other hand, had four arms each, and so they could shield themselves and still have two hands free for weapons. They might have felt under-armed compared to someone with weapons in all four hands, but they seemed to be getting over that, Sir George thought. They were shouting just as loudly as their foes, now, and most of what they were bellowing sounded like insults directed at the enemy dart-throwers.

  The rest of the enemy army howled furious war cries and lunged forward, but Sir George had expected that. As the twin columns came on, he barked another order, and his own dart-throwers sprang into action. Because they, too, carried pavises, their rate of fire was lower than that of their opponents, but despite the smaller total size of his army, Sir George actually had more missile troops than the other side did, for he'd recruited them ruthlessly from every tribe. It hadn't been easy, because the locals were as prejudiced in favor of hand-to-hand combat as French knights were, which explained the low proportion of dart-throwers he had initially observed. The combination of javelins and throwing sticks was the customary hunting weapon of Shaakun, and most of any tribe's warriors had at least some skill with it, yet they stubbornly insisted on meeting their enemies one to one.

  Sir George had solved that problem by being even more stubborn than they were, and in the end, over half his total native force consisted of dart-throwers. Many of them had insisted upon bringing along axes or flails as backup weapons, but each of them also had at least one full quiver of javelins, and now they sent a lethal cloud of darts back at their enemies.

  Despite the fact that the other side's dart-throwers could use all four arms, and thus could maintain a considerably higher rate of fire, the contest was brutally uneven. Sir George's missile troops swung their pavises aside and exposed themselves only when they actually launched one of their own javelins. Their targets, on the other hand, were totally unprotected, and the oncoming columns began to slow as the warriors in the lead ranks stumbled over the javelin-sprouting bodies of their fellows.

  Half of Sir George's dart-throwers concentrated on the heads of the columns. The other half sent their javelins directly back at the opposing dart-throwers, and the enemy's fire faltered as the lethal shafts showered down upon them. The air was clotted with javelins, war cries, dust, and the shrieks of wounded and dying natives, and Sir George strained his eyes to see through the dust of thousands of charging feet.

  "Computer! Tell Rolf to concentrate on the right-hand column!"

  "Acknowledged," the passionless voice responded, and a moment later something twanged like half a thousand discordant harps. There were far fewer human archers than native dart-throwers, but their rate of fire was higher, their range was longer, they were more accurate, and the heavier armor the demon-jester's "industrial modules" had provided them with was almost completely proof against the incoming javelins.

  Their arrows slashed into the right-hand enemy column, the one which had been least disordered by the fire of Sir George's dart-throwers, and the consequences were immediate. What had been a steady tide of casualties became a flood, and the entire column stumbled to a halt in a tangle of dead and wounded bodies. It hung there for a moment, the decimated survivors of its lead ranks standing shocked and confused, knee-deep in shoals of writhing bodies, and in that moment it was lost. Sir George had seen it on a dozen other fields—the instant when the belief that victory was within one's grasp suddenly transformed itself into the conviction of defeat—and he recognized it now.

  The column hung on for a few more moments, wilting as the terrible waves of arrows and javelins slashed through it, and then, suddenly, it disintegrated. It didn't fall back, d
idn't retreat. It simply... came apart. One moment it was a solid mass of warriors; the next, it was a fleeing mob of individual refugees, each seeking his own safety in flight.

  "Tell Rolf to shift to the dart-throwers!" Sir George barked. "And instruct Walter and Sir Richard to advance their wing and take the Mouthai flank guard from the right. If they can, I want them to circle completely around to the enemy's rear and come at them from the back!"

  "Acknowledged."

  Sir George heard Computer's acknowledgment, but he hardly noticed. The right column had been shattered and driven into flight, but the left one was still coming on. He would have preferred to rake it with arrows as he had the other, but the attackers hadn't hit the exact center of his line. He'd placed his archers there to receive the assault, but the way the enemy had slipped to Sir George's left meant his bowmen were concentrated too far to his right, and a slight rise would have shielded the oncoming natives from much of Grayhame's fire. Better to throw the longbows' weight into completing the destruction of the enemy's missile capability and let his allies, stiffened by Sir Bryan and his armored foot and horse, deal with the column.

  Javelins continued to slam into the oncoming natives up to the very last moment, and the dreadful weight of fire tore huge holes in their formation, but they came on anyway, carried by their battle frenzy and howling their war cries. The rows of pointed wooden stakes and the thickly-seeded caltrops which had been strewn among them slowed the attackers, but still they came on. The warriors in their lead ranks absorbed stakes and caltrops alike with their own bodies, as their predecessors had absorbed the javelins, and at last the survivors were able to close with their foes.

  But Sir George's waiting allies were more than ready for them. Unlike the charging column, they were unshaken, and they scented victory in the blood. They'd taken their own losses from the javelin exchange, but those losses, however painful, were a pittance compared to what they might have been. What they would have been without the pavises their human commander had insisted they use. Even the most stubborn among them realized that, and they also knew their enemies were already more than half broken.

  Many of them discarded their shields, now that it had come down to the melee. The dart-throwers dropped their throwing sticks and snatched up axes, and Sir George heard a gleeful howl go up from his allies as they hurled themselves to meet what was left of the left-hand column. The enemy's dart-throwers might have taken advantage of the sudden disappearance of the shields which had so blunted their own attacks, but they were no longer capable of taking advantage of anything. Those of Sir George's native troops who weren't part of the melee continued to hammer them with javelins of their own, but it was the steady, pounding rain of clothyard shafts which truly broke them. It wasn't even that the arrows were more accurate or more destructive than the javelins flaying their ranks. They were more accurate and destructive, but that was almost beside the point. What truly mattered was that they were the emblem, the symbol, of the strange, two-armed demons who had completely changed the way war was supposed to be.

  The right-hand column had already disintegrated. Now the dart-throwers began to follow suit, shedding individual warriors, first in trickles, and then in floods. For all their courage, the tribesmen lacked the discipline to stand under the vicious pounding, and the entire dart-thrower force came apart in turn.

  The left-hand column was still in action, but its front was splintered and broken. Almost half of the total attacking army had already been driven from the field, and the flattened, blood-slick grass was heaped and mounded with the bodies of warriors who would never again be driven from any field. The conviction of defeat was upon the column, and as more and more of Sir George's allies swarmed forward to meet it, it found itself enveloped and outnumbered. The column formation which had given it so much weight as it charged forward now hamstrung its ability to defend itself, for those at the center of the formation could only stand there, unable to advance or retreat, while their more numerous enemies cut their way inward from both its flanks.

  And then Sir Richard Maynton and Walter Skinnet completed their enemies' ruin. The handful of human cavalry were an armored spearhead of steel, the wicked tip of a sweeping charge of over three thousand of their native allies, almost as fast on foot as the humans were mounted. The charge had swept out to Sir George's right and then, at his relayed orders, hooked back and in, sweeping around the troops the enemy had put out to cover his left flank to take what was left of the dart-throwers in the rear and then thunder onward into the rear of the one remaining enemy column.

  Sir George watched that column fly apart, like a bag of meal thrown into the air on a heavy wind. It shattered into thousands of individual, fleeing warriors, and he knew the battle was won. It was not yet over, for there were still thousands of enemies upon the field, and some of them would stand and fight to the death. His allies would lose many more warriors before they swept up all the pieces, and his own men would take casualties, as well. But the outcome was no longer in doubt, and he allowed himself the luxury of a brief, fervent prayer of thanks.

  Then he opened his eyes once more, straightened his shoulders, and nodded to young Snellgrave.

  "Let's be going," he said, and sent Satan trotting forward to join the slaughter.

  -VI-

  "You have done well. My guild will be pleased," the demon-jester's voice piped in Sir George's ear.

  The small alien sat in his air car, hovering no more than six feet above the ground so that Sir George could look almost straight across at him through the open vehicle window as the baron sat in Satan's saddle. The light, expressionless voice seemed even more grotesque than usual as Sir George turned his head away to gaze out over the heaped and mounded bodies of the slain. Never in all his days, not even at Dupplin or at Halidon Hill, had he seen such slaughter. Not even the devastating defeat of the Thoolaas had littered the field with so many corpses, and human or not, the groans and whimpering moans of the wounded and dying sounded much the same. The aftermath of battle, the smells and sights and—especially—the sounds, was what had always truly haunted the baron, and as the aftermath of this battle washed over him, a sudden wave of fury filled him.

  His armor was splashed and spattered with blood. His sword had been gummy with more of the same and clotted with hide and hair before he cleaned it, and his body ached in every muscle and sinew. A final, despairing charge of warriors who had known they were defeated, whose only remaining purpose in life had been to reach and kill the author of the destruction of their tribes, had very nearly succeeded. The howling tide of ax-wielding barbarians had slammed into his personal bodyguard, and if they hadn't—quite—managed to kill Sir George, they had hacked down his squire. Thomas Snellgrave would never be knighted now, the baron thought grimly. The young man had flung himself between three shrieking Laahstaar warriors and his liege while Sir George was fully engaged against two others, and not even the Physician could restore life to someone whose head had been entirely severed and whose body had been hewn limb from limb by the vengeful axes of warriors who had known they were doomed.

  Nor had young Snellgrave been the only human fatality. Seven more of Sir George's men were "dead," and from the reports he'd received, it seemed likely that at least two of them would remain that way despite even the Physician's healing magic. Three lives might not weigh for much against the thousands upon thousands of other lives which had been taken away this bloody day, but in an odd sort of way, it was the very smallness of the number which made it hit so hard. It was one a human mind could envision and feel, not a vastness impossible to truly comprehend. And unlike the anonymous natives whose bodies covered the plain as far as the baron could see, the men those lives had belonged to had been part of his own life. They had been his men, faces he'd known, individuals—people—for whom he had been responsible. They'd gone into battle under his orders, and they had died there, and one of them left behind a wife and three children.

  The filth and suffering, t
he horror and the loss, weighed down upon the baron. A hard man, Sir George Wincaster, and a tough one. A soldier who'd seen massacre and casual cruelty enough before this day even when both sides had been human, and one who was no more immune to the fierce pride of victory against overwhelming numbers than any other man. Oh, yes, he was all of those things. But he was also the man who had wrought the savagery which had covered this purple-colored grass on this alien world with agony and blood. His was the mind which had created the alliance which had made it all possible, and his was the voice which had launched his men and their allies into the vortex. He knew that, and the guilt for what stretched as far as he could see weighed down upon him like the very millstones of God.

  And now the demon-jester hovered beside him, floating like some evil sorcerer of legend above the Hell-spawned landscape, untouched and clean despite the unspeakable carnage. Congratulating him. Telling him how well he'd served in that voice which was never touched by emotion. No doubt that emotionlessness was largely the product of whatever translated the demon-jester's language into English, but not all of it was. Sir George had spent too much time with the demon-jester, heard too many of his dismissals of his "inferiors' " right to be considered even remotely his equal, to doubt that for a moment. His "Commander's" satisfaction was genuine, however little feeling there might be in his voice, and that satisfaction was unshadowed by even a trace of the horror which haunted Sir George. The demon-jester and his precious guild were responsible for every drop of blood, every wound, every corpse... and the alien didn't even care.

  Did the demon-jester ever so much as think about it? Did it even occur to him that the beings, human and otherwise, whom he had so casually condemned to death had been living, thinking creatures? It was impossible to tell, but Sir George very much doubted that it did. Whatever else the bodies tumbled about the field of battle might have been, they had never been people to the demon-jester. They'd been mere obstacles, "primitives" to be compelled to submit to his will or destroyed, whichever was required, by the equally primitive Englishmen he'd stolen from their homes. And if there had been any reason to feel guilt or remorse—there wasn't, of course, but if there had been—then that guilt would have belonged to Sir George and his men, not to the demon-jester. If, of course, such primitives as they could possibly have possessed the sensitivity to feel such things.