Cast Under an Alien Sun (Destiny's Crucible)

by Olan Thorensen

  Yozef looked up and down the line of islanders standing behind this part of the barricade. Too few men of fighting age interspersed with older and young men, women, and even children. He thought he glimpsed eight-year-old Yonkel Miron holding a rusty sword and looking anticipatory, as if this were a game or part of some legend. Muskets and crossbows were brought to the ready. More people poured from the buildings, many without weapons, because there were no more available, ready to pick up weapons of those who fell. The abbot ran partway into the courtyard. He held a spear in one hand and traced gestures in the air in front of himself, praying and calling on God for strength, then tore back to the barricade.

  I hope, Yozef prayed. God, I hope it works!

  “Can you fire a musket?” graveled Carnigan at Yozef, who stared back as if Carnigan had asked him to speak in some different language. “Yozef!” Carnigan bellowed. “Can you fire one of these?”

  Yozef shook his head. He’d never touched a firearm of any kind, much less a musket.

  Carnigan picked up one of the shorter spears and shoved it at Yozef. “Take this. Stick anyone who gets by me. Try not to stick me.”

  Yozef held the wooden shaft with both hands. The six-foot spear ended in a narrow, wicked-looking blade that gleamed in the morning sun just now shining over the main wall. He shivered, his breath coming in gasps, as he gripped the shaft with both hands held against his body. A thought rose like a hand reaching for safety, a thought he had not had for many months.

  Let this be all a dream! A nightmare! I’ll wake up back home!

  That all of this had been an elaborate fantasy was momentarily more plausible. He had been a chemistry major at the University of California at Berkeley. An alien spaceship had destroyed the plane he was flying in, saved him, then dumped him on another planet with humans put there by parties unknown. And now he held a spear and was about to take part in a battle where most likely he and everyone else around him would be killed?

  Maybe I am crazy, and all of this is merely some complex illusion. Please let that be it!

  His plea ended before it could paralyze him further, when Cadwulf and the bait party reached the gate. Yozef saw Denes say something to Cadwulf and the others. Yozef could now see the women up closer. They were all young—nineteen to twenty-two years old (fifteen to nineteen Earth years). All breathed hard, both from the run and from fear. Several had tears streaming from their eyes. Two women discarded bundles of clothing masquerading as babies, as they ran to the barricade. In one of those inane thoughts that appears at inappropriate times, Yozef predicted that the girl with the generous breasts would have back problems when she got older and had children. All such thoughts ended and were replaced by sheer terror, as the first of the raiders came through the gate.

  Chapter 32: Battle for St. Sidryn’s

  To the Death

  “We’re going to make it!” Omir Abulli exulted, as he neared the gate. Not that anyone heard him over the din of almost two hundred men running, the beat of their feet on the earth, the clanking of metal from armor and weapons, and the shouts of defiance as they neared the abbey’s main gate—still open! The islander rats were stupid to worry about saving too many of their people! All that much easier for the raiders! Now, even if they tried to close the heavy gate, it’d be too late.

  Abulli led the initial charge at the gate, but by now half of his men had passed him, as they all raced to get inside the abbey walls. If he had wanted, he could have stayed closer to the front, but while he needed to be seen as leading his men, he didn’t have to be in the forefront. He let a few more pass to save his wind and put himself in a less exposed position for first contact. His scars and reputation dismissed the need to demonstrate his bravery, and being leader also meant not foolishly exposing himself.

  His focus on the gate and the walls caused him to almost trip over an old couple huddled on the ground. The woman knelt with her head on her knees and her arms covering her head, the gray-bearded man draped across her as if to protect her. A rusty sword lay nearby. Abulli leaped aside and slashed at the man, cursing and yelling, “We’ll deal with you later!” as he continued on.

  He couldn’t see beyond the opening in the wall; too many of his men were between him and the last of the fleeing islanders. He kept glancing at the abbey masonry wall, watching for the first flash of muskets. Still no firing by the islanders. Were they so timid to be mounting no defense at all?

  The first of his men passed through the open gate. Still no firing. His elation ebbed, as instinct surfaced. Alarm flags hoisted, but there was no stopping. By the time he reached the gate, sixty of his men were already inside the walls. He needed to get to the front to see what was going on!

  The first raiders rushing through the gate focused only on the islander women being chased, with only yards between the fastest raider and the slowest woman. It took several seconds for the foremost Buldorians to recognize what they found in the courtyard. Instead of a chaotic panic of islanders and an abbey open for looting, on three sides they faced the hastily constructed barricades, with heads and torsos of men and women facing them. Some of the Buldorians tried to stop, and a few recognized the danger and would have retreated, if not for the press of men behind them pouring through the gate.

  Denes agonized over each flaw in their desperate plan. As each flaw passed without disaster, the next took its place. Thus, the worry that the raiders wouldn’t take the bait was replaced by the fear that they’d recognize the trap and stop outside the walls, which in turn was replaced by the possibility that only a few raiders would pass through the gate before they recognized the trap and retreated or warned the others. Hope surged when the first raiders stopped in the middle of the courtyard. It was the best of all actions for the Keelanders and the worst of all for the raiders. The raiders still coming into the courtyard saw only the backs of their countrymen. Seven endless seconds elapsed between when the first raider entered the courtyard and when Denes fired his musket.

  Omir Abulli could see the movement of his men slowed. Why? As he pushed through his men, he heard a single musket firing, then a flurry of muskets from three sides. He felt the whisk and sharp whine of a musket ball pass his ear.

  The mass of men blocking his view thinned as men fell. In a glance, he took in their wounds from musket balls and crossbow quarrels. His elation at breaching the abbey walls disappeared in shock when he saw the barricade and the islanders. Many were older men and women, some frantically trying to reload muskets, and others holding spears and swords. A fractional second glance behind him showed more men still coming through the gate. To stand still was death. To retreat back through the gate would be chaotic, as the islanders shot at their backs. His years of experience told him their best chance was to attack and break through the barricade. The islanders were short real fighting men, so once his men engaged face-to-face, they would prevail.

  These recognitions, calculations, and the resulting decision lasted no more than two seconds. Abulli rushed to the front, knocking aside shocked men and leaping over bodies of dead and wounded, raised his sword, and screamed, “Shoot at them, you idiots, then drop your muskets and draw your blades. To me, for the glory of the Benhoudi!” He turned and charged a gap in the barricade, assuming correctly that his men would follow.

  Denes had fired his musket at the closest raider. The ball hit the raider in mid-chest and knocked him on his back, unmoving. All of the other muskets and crossbows followed Denes. It wasn’t a simultaneous volley, but a rolling firing that lasted three to four seconds. Sixty-nine muskets and thirty-one crossbows sent their projectiles into the mass of raiders. Twenty shots went into the ground or over the heads of their targets. Ten projectiles, nine musket balls, and a single quarrel somehow passed through the raider mass without hitting flesh. One musket ball found the throat of an unarmed Abersford woman peering over the barricade on the opposite side from the ball’s origin. The other seventy projectiles hit raiders. Seven raiders were hit more than once. One unlucky
raider was hit four times by musket balls and once by a quarrel. Of the fifty-three raiders struck in the first volley, forty-five of the hits were fatal or incapacitating.

  Denes saw a grizzled raider shout, gesture with his sword, and lead a charge straight at himself, Carnigan, a cowering Yozef, and the opening in the barricade.

  A second, smaller rolling volley followed from those barricade’s defenders having a second loaded musket, pistol, or crossbow at hand. Another thirteen raiders went down.

  Yozef crouched behind the edge of the opening of the barricade. He had a perfect view to see what appeared to be an unstoppable mass of savage men screaming bloodlust and charging straight at him. His imagination envisioned blades lopping off his limbs or his head or cleaving him in half. Carnigan, Denes, and three other men filled the gap. One man went down without a sound, landing next to Yozef, a hole just above his right eye, both eyes staring skyward and blood running into the earth under his head. Yozef’s stomach contracted as if prepping to retch. He wanted to run. He wanted … to live! More than anything, he wanted to drop the spear and run for the back of the abbey complex. There were other gates, or he could drop on the other side of the wall from a rampart. He could go somewhere else in Caedellium and start over. Or go to the Narthani and convince them of his worth and maybe end up more secure and honored than here on this primitive island. He wanted to be anywhere else but here at this moment.

  He didn’t know why he didn’t run. Maybe because he didn’t know where to run. Maybe because no matter how terrified he was, he couldn’t leave his friends. Carnigan. Cadwulf. The abbot and the abbess who had cared for him. His workers and their families. Brak and Elian. Dour Denes, who pretended to ignore Yozef most of the time but listened when it counted.

  Even if he wanted to run, his legs didn’t feel strong enough to take him there. So he crouched, both hands death-gripped to the spear shaft.

  Abulli felt his men behind him. They had a chance, though perhaps he didn’t, as he faced the enormous islander in the middle of the gap. He snarled, voiced an appeal and an acceptance at the same time to whatever gods there were, and swung his sword.

  Carnigan deflected the sword of the first raider to reach the gap with the shield on his left arm and, with the same twisting motion, brought the battle axe down onto a shoulder at the base of the swordsman’s neck. A shower of blood sprayed six feet and washed over Yozef. Within seconds, a melee engulfed the entire forty-foot section of barricade—defenders fighting for their lives against the wave of raiders.

  Several raiders leaped over lower spots in the barricade to land in the midst of Keelanders. The raiders died quickly, though not before hewing down men and women.

  The most desperate action centered at the gap. The tip of the raider assault followed their fallen leader. All that stopped them was that the gap was too small for the number of raiders wanting to hit it at the same time. A flurry of swords, axes, and spears held the gap long enough for defenders to flow in that direction.

  A man next to Carnigan went down, a slash across his sword arm causing him to drop his weapon, and a second raider stabbed him in the belly. A white-haired man rushed to fill the place of the fallen man but went down himself from a pistol shot.

  Another pistol shot glanced off Carnigan’s old shield, briefly staggering him. The deflected ball smacked into Yozef’s leg. He cried out but was too terrified to check for a wound. Carnigan stepped forward again, a new dent in his shield, as more raiders pushed forward.

  Yozef was barely conscious of glancing down the line and seeing islanders fend off raiders who tried to climb over the barricade. Here and there, vicious exchanges started and ended within seconds. The brutal fact was that a blade fight with minimal protection tended to be short, one opponent or the other going down quickly. For the raiders, if they dispatched one islander, another took his place. If an old man fell, a teenage boy or girl was there with a spear, a sword, or even a pitchfork to stick any raider occupied with a defender.

  Denes yelled, fending off raiders and yelling instructions at the same time. Not having the brute power of Carnigan, he made up for it with speed and form. His sword never stopped slashing, warding off other blades, and stabbing. Raider bodies mounded in front of the gap.

  Yozef edged away from the barricade, though he never remembered moving from where he was crouching. Carnigan fended off several raiders by swinging his axe in mighty swaths. No raider was willing to come too close, but neither was the axe wielder able to concentrate on any one attacker. One raider slipped to one side of Carnigan, when a woman who had rushed to fill a space vacated by a wounded man went down from a spear. Carnigan could not turn to face the threat to his side, fully occupied with those to his front. The raider raised his sword to slash at Carnigan, and, without thinking, Yozef lunged forward and stabbed at the raider. His spear-point hit the raider’s leather armor just under the armpit and buried the blade into exposed, vulnerable flesh. The raider screamed and dropped his sword, blood streaming down his side, and turned a shocked face toward Yozef. Their eyes locked. Yozef stood frozen. Another defender slashed at the wounded raider, opening the side of his neck and severing an artery. The raider fell without a sound.

  Seeing the raider he’d stabbed fall jolted Yozef. He had no idea how to handle any weapon, but he could stab with the spear he held in a death grip. He made no attempt to face a raider on his own, but two more times he came to the aid of defenders in trouble with raiders. His stab attempts did no damage, but both times it forced the man to divert effort to avoid Yozef’s feeble efforts, and the other defenders made good the distraction.

  There was no time to reload firearms. After the initial volleys, it was all steel against steel, and steel into flesh. Underneath the yells of defiance, the screams of the wounded, and the clashes of metal, there was the scything of blades through air in their search for blood. Ssst . . . Sst … SSST . . . Ssssst . . . the sound and intensity varying with a blade’s shape and size and changing tone when metal found flesh or other metal. Somehow Yozef heard every Ssst, and every one seemed aimed at him.

  What saved the defenders from being overwhelmed was the raiders initially charging a single point in the barricade. They were in one another’s way, instead of bringing all of their men to bear on the villagers at the same instance. By the time the raiders spread outward on both sides of the gap to climb the barricade, it had given the defenders farther away time to run to the points of attack.

  The fighting was vicious but brief. Raiders died in front of the barricade, on it as they tried to climb over, or amid villagers on the other side. Of the 175 raiders who followed Omir Abulli’s order to charge into the gate, 153 entered the courtyard. Of these, 45 fell dead or were wounded in the first volley and 13 in the second. The remaining 95 raiders rallied to Abulli’s call and charged the barricade section in front of the cathedral.

  The entire Battle of St. Sidryn’s, as it came to be named, took fewer than five minutes, from the instant the first raider entered the courtyard until the last of the surviving raiders fled back through the gate. Later, Yozef recollected that the battle had lasted hours.

  The villagers and the abbey staff stared, stunned, at the courtyard. Bodies carpeted the blood-covered cobblestone. A few portions of the barricade had fallen or been pulled down, mostly the side facing the gate and including the gap. Bodies of both raiders and defenders lay inside the barricade in several places. No raider was standing, but many were wounded and unable to flee with their comrades. The disbelief that they’d survived held the villagers for almost a minute, then the moans and screams of the wounded from both sides brought them back from wherever their minds had gone. A roar of hatred swelled, and the defenders poured over the barricades to finish those who had intended to destroy their world.

  Yozef saw one raider sitting on the ground, one leg nearly severed at the knee, wildly swinging his sword to ward off three women with spears and a pitchfork. They didn’t kill him immediately, but danced around him and
kept him trying to watch all three, pulling their stabs enough for the blades or prongs to pierce flesh but not deep enough to be fatal. Finally, either from loss of blood or fatalism, he gave up and dropped his sword. One young woman Yozef recognized as part of the decoy group, still bare from the waist up, stood in front of the raider, shook her breasts at him, and yelled, “Take a look, you asshole! These are the last tits you’ll ever see!” and drove her spear into his throat.

  Most raiders were dispatched quickly. The islanders weren’t interested in prisoners.

  Yozef turned to Denes. “Denes, we need a few prisoners to question.” Denes looked at him but didn’t respond.

  “Denes! Prisoners can tell you who these people are, where they come from, and how many more there might be!”

  Denes’s eyes focused on Yozef’s for the first time, as his mind processed what Yozef had said. He then strode out into the courtyard and yelled out something. Whatever he said, two of the men stood guard over a small knot of wounded raiders, while the rest were dispatched to whatever god or afterlife they believed in.

  Yozef’s legs gave out, and he dropped to the ground, before he realized it was covered with blood. He jumped back to his feet, looking down at himself. His arms were covered in dirt, sweat, and drying blood from the raider Carnigan had axed. Yozef felt his pants wet. He looked down. He had peed himself. Carnigan walked over to Yozef, grabbed him by the scruff of his neck, and marched him over to a water trough.