by Dragon Lance
Tylocost rose to his feet in one smooth motion. Such graceful movements reminded Tol his charge was no ordinary fellow. Whatever his looks and high-handed manner suggested, Tylocost was a mature Silvanesti elf, with all the intelligence and subtlety that implied.
“It’s not the nomads I fear, nor even the bakali,” Tylocost said. “You just declared war on the empire, and that, my fortunate foe, is a losing proposition.”
Tol grinned widely. “Perhaps. Can I count on your support?”
“To the death.”
“Good. I intend to give you a command of your own.”
For once the elf had no quick comeback. He stared at his conqueror, then recovered his accustomed poise.
Inclining his head graciously, he said, “Thank you, my lord. I will do my best.”
And someone will suffer for it, Tol thought. He hoped it would be the enemy, and not himself.
As Tol retired to his lean-to, Tylocost went for a walk along the fringes of the camp. Hands clasped behind his back, eyes on the trampled grass in front of him, his thoughts were far away.
He’d circumnavigated a quarter of the sprawling camp when he suddenly stopped and pointed the stick he still carried toward the outer darkness.
“Half-breed, why do you shadow me?”
Zala emerged from the night. “You heard me?” she said, impressed.
“You’re only half-stealthy.”
She grimaced. “You never speak to me without flinging mud on my ancestry!”
“The mud is already there. Answer my question.”
Biting back the retort that sprang to her lips, Zala settled on simple truth: “You’re a goodly distance from your bedroll. You might be thinking of running away, to betray us to the nomads.”
His eyes widened. “Twenty years I’ve lived as Lord Tolandruth’s paroled prisoner. I could have escaped any time I wanted, but I pledged to honor my surrender until he released me, and I shall.”
“Silvanesti have no allegiance but to their own kind!” she snapped.
The silence held for a moment, then Tylocost shrugged and tucked the stick under his arm like a cane, turning away and resuming his walk. She fell in step beside him, and they proceeded in silence for a while, circling the sleeping camp from south to north. Cookfires dying to dull embers dotted the scene. Dark mounds of sleeping humans, covered in salvaged blankets, lay in irregular ranks on the dewy ground. Everywhere was the smell of smoke, sweat, and desperation. Zala’s pity for the survivors was obvious. If Tylocost felt anything, he did not show it.
“What do you know of my homeland?” he asked, his low voice just audible over the sound of their footsteps.
“Very little,” she admitted. “My mother was Silvanesti, but she never returned home after she married my father.”
“Foreigners cannot imagine the glory of the Speaker’s realm. Silvanesti worship, above all things, beauty. They have, by art and artifice, made Silvanost the single most beautiful place in all the world.” Zala had heard the same from those few fortunate enough to have seen the capital of the elves. “Imagine how I was regarded in such a place.”
Her footsteps faltered only slightly before she recovered. Zala could indeed imagine. The unsightly gardener must have stood out like a boil on the face of a beautiful girl.
“My paternal ancestors were noble in the extreme. They stood at the right hand of Silvanos himself. My grandfather slew a dragon – the black dragon Tasak’labak’kanak, in the First Dragon War. He rode his war griffin Skyraker up to the monster’s very jaws and drove a silver spear through its eye and into its brain. My father, if he still lives, is high counsel to the Speaker of the Stars.”
“You don’t know whether your father lives?” she asked, and he shook his head. She thought of her own father, the frail, kindly scholar whose life depended on her success. When he died, wherever she was, she would know it.
Tylocost continued. “One day, as the great Silvanos held court in the Tower of the Stars, a comely lady caught my father’s eye. Her name was Iyajaida, an exotic word meaning ‘moth-wing.’ No one knew her. It was said she’d come from the northland. In spite of her unknown lineage, my father pursued and won her, besting several other rivals. Not long after, I was born.”
Tylocost abruptly stopped walking. For an instant Zala thought he’d seen a danger, nomads lurking in the night perhaps, but he only stared straight ahead and said, “The day I was born my mother vanished, never to be seen in Silvanost again. People said she took one look at me and fled in shame.”
In spite of his even tone, Zala knew he was baring soul-deep wounds to her. As diplomatically as she could, she asked him why he was telling her these things.
“Because you will understand,” he replied. “Comely though you are, you’re a half-breed, and despised by elves and most humans, too. I am a full-blood Silvanesti from a fine and noble line, yet all my life I’ve been persecuted for my ugliness. The first time I ever felt wanted was when the Tarsans hired me to lead their army. But the first person who ever showed me true respect was that damned peasant, Tolandruth.”
Males were very strange, Zala decided. Tolandruth, so imposing with his muscles, piercing eyes, and great victories, seemed an overgrown boy, burning with notions of justice and honor. This elf, more arrogant than a cartload of emperors but one of the shrewdest people Zala had ever met, was consumed with loneliness and shame. She began to understand the empress’s devotion to Tol, and Tol’s trust in his former foe.
When Zala returned to the here and now, Tylocost had slipped away. The stick he’d carried stood where he’d been, its end thrust into the sod.
Chapter 8
ROLLING THE BONES
Dust rose in choking clouds around the Juramona camp, churned up by the feet of hundreds of men. The dust of the Eastern Hundred was infamous, a fine, floury, yellow soil that coated everything once the anchoring grass was stripped away.
The members of Tol’s new army bore weapons salvaged from the town – spears, halberds, or in many cases, merely sharpened wooden stakes – as they practiced moving in unison and deploying to attack or defend. He organized them into squads of ten, with five squads making up a company. Ten per company would have been better, but he didn’t have the manpower. Twenty days after his arrival at Juramona, his effective force comprised a scant thousand men under arms, a single horde of raw infantry. At least that many more had slipped away or begged off joining Tol’s tiny army. He let them go. A man unwilling to fight was no asset anyway.
At Tol’s side stood Wilfik, the former High House guard he’d appointed as chief of his company captains. Less than a handspan taller than Tol himself, Wilfik had proven a capable drillmaster. Perhaps to counter his bald pate, he sported the thickest, blackest beard and brows Tol had ever seen. The eyes beneath those redoubtable brows were an unusual color – pale gray. The combination of light gray eyes and beetling brows gave him an especially fearsome aspect when he was angry. He was angry now. Shouting curses, Wilfik stormed over to a company that had maneuvered clumsily. He grabbed the captain of the wayward group and spun him around.
“Left!” Wilfik roared directly into the fellow’s face. “You purblind donkey! I said ‘counter-march left’!”
After shoving the fellow back into line, Wilfik rejoined Tol.
Spitting a mouthful of dust, the bald soldier said, “Lambs to the slaughter! Dull-witted, thick-headed lambs to the slaughter, that’s what this lot will be when we meet the nomads again!”
“They’re willing enough,” Tol responded mildly. “What they need is confidence.”
The troops, dubbed the Juramona Militia since they were volunteers instead of levies, were drilling on the plain south of the camp. Further west, Tylocost and a work gang were preparing surprises for any nomad attackers.
Tol had offered the Silvanesti command of half the militia, but Tylocost declined. Although a warrior from birth, he knew the training of raw troops was not his strong suit. A better use of his time, he tactful
ly suggested, would be building field fortifications. For three days now those not fit to fight had labored for the elf, hauling timbers, brick, and other debris from the ruined town to the open plain. Mounds of masonry rose, interlinked by fences of heavy timber.
Tol bent to uncover the water bucket at his feet, but the wooden lid was whisked off by another hand. Zala’s.
The huntress rarely left his side, having appointed herself his personal guard in order to fulfill the pledge she’d made: to bring Tol to the empress and thereby collect her payment. The half-elf was a capable tracker, and certainly knew the sharp end of a blade from the dull, but Tol wondered how she would stand up to open battle. She’d never tasted the terror and mayhem of war.
He sipped from the gourd dipper, then offered it to Wilfik. Wilfik poured the contents over his sweating head. As Tol refilled the dipper, Wilfik drew his attention to the southeast, where dust was rising from the plain. They had no men training or working in that direction.
Tol dropped the gourd into the bucket. “Have the men fall in.”
Once the companies had assembled, their marching feet stilled, the hot breeze soon cleared away the dust they’d churned up. All eyes watched the rising cloud; it was moving from southeast to east, toward the morning sun.
“A scouting party?” Zala asked hopefully.
“I make it five hundred horse, at least.”
Tol’s comment erased the hopeful expression from Zala’s face and she grimaced. Not a scouting party – more likely, an entire nomad tribe on the move.
A runner was dispatched to warn Tylocost. The militia and its leaders headed back to camp at a quick march.
The dust column was moving fast, circling wide to the east at a distance of two leagues or less. There was a dry stream bed along that line, Wilfik remarked. The horsemen were probably using it for concealment. The rising dust had given them away.
Reaction to the ominous portent was quick back at the camp. The returning militia found no one except those too old or sick to work for Tylocost. The rest had abandoned their tents and lean-tos, seeking the imagined protection of the Juramona ruins.
Tol deployed his raw troops in company blocks of one hundred men. He spread sixty hand picked men, all young, in a skirmish line a hundred paces in front of his foot soldiers.
Although he had a horse, Tol chose to lead on foot. Zala, white-faced with worry, stuck to him like dew on a leaf.
The dust column died away. The horsemen had stopped.
Tylocost appeared, striding through the trampled grass. His floppy gardener’s hat shaded his face, and he gripped not a sword or spear but his long walking stick.
“Poor sports, these nomads, coming up on our undefended side,” he said. “Still, what else can you expect from barbarian —”
“Shut up,” Tol said. To Zala’s amusement, the elf obeyed.
A covey of partridges flew up from the tall grass a long bowshot away. Tol drew Number Six.
“Skirmish line, kneel.” He didn’t shout. A calm, even voice was needed to steady his men. All went down on one knee, including Tylocost and Zala.
“Present arms.”
His skirmishers, armed with salvaged pikes, extended their weapons, sweaty hands gripping the fire-blackened poles too tightly. Tol suddenly wished Kiya was at his side. Her unfailingly accurate bow and unflappable calm would have been a welcome addition to this pitiful force.
A distorted wail rose from the plain. It began as a single voice, then others joined in.
Several of the men closest to Tol began to shift nervously. The unease spread outward, along the skirmish line.
“Tylocost, did I ever tell you how I acquired this dwarf steel blade?” Tol said conversationally.
Never taking his eyes off the horizon, the elf replied, “No, my lord, you never did.”
“It was in the Harrow Sky hill country, after the surrender of Tarsis.”
As Tol continued to speak, his voice carrying, the general nervousness visibly lessened, but he didn’t get to finish his story. From where the partridges had flown now rose a swarm of nomads. Tol knew this trick. Short-legged nomad ponies had been trained to crawl on their bellies while their riders crawled alongside. When they were close enough to charge, man mounted horse and both sprang up.
The abrupt appearance of the enemy, seemingly from nowhere, drew gasps from the defenders. More than one of the skirmishers showed signs of panicking.
“Stand fast!” Tol barked, raising his voice now. “Run now and they’ll kill us all! Remember: we must stand together!”
The enemy came on, screaming. Again, Tol called for his men to stand fast, but his mind was busy reckoning the numbers. Only eighty or ninety were approaching. The others lurked out of sight.
The nomads covered the ground quickly. They made straight for Tol’s line, confident they could ride down the few, widely spaced foot soldiers. The upraised pikes should have given them pause, but they had beaten Ergothians before, and in greater numbers than this. Howling and waving their swords, the nomads kept coming.
“Aim for the riders not their animals,” Tol said.
The first wave of horsemen ran themselves straight onto the skirmishers’ pikes. A score of nomads and their horses fell. The impact drove the Ergothians back, and many lost their pikes as the impaled riders fell.
“Fall back to me!” Tol ordered. Terrified, the skirmishers formed a knot around him, and Tol told them, “Don’t just stand there! If you’ve lost your pike, draw your sword!”
There was no more time for orders as the second wave of nomads broke over them. Tol warded off a blow from one rider, ducked a second, then delivered a sideways slash that emptied the saddle of a third attacker. When the nomad hit the ground, Tol planted a foot on his chest and stabbed him through the throat.
Something snagged his leather jerkin. He turned to find a nomad swinging a saber at him. Zala dashed by Tol, her sword pointed, and ran the attacker through the ribs. Tol acknowledged her help with a quick wave, then faced new enemies.
More from self-preservation than training, the skirmishers formed a tight circle to fend off the horsemen, who continued to gallop around them, yelling and taking opportunistic cuts at the Ergothians. Bowmen could have picked off the nomads at their leisure, but what few archers there were Tol had sent to guard Tylocost’s work party.
A bold rider, full of battle-lust, plunged straight into the ring of desperate foot soldiers. Tol’s newly minted warriors cringed before his mount’s flailing hooves, but Tylocost stepped up and thrust his blunt stick at the man’s face. The attack caught the nomad squarely on the chin, and he flew backward off his horse. Neck broken, he was dead by the time he hit the ground.
The fight went on until, as at some silent signal, the nomads suddenly withdrew. Tol sent his skirmishers back to Wilfik’s line. A third of their number remained behind, dead in the torn-up, bloody grass.
Wilfik, good soldier that he was, had not broken ranks to rescue Tol’s company. He held the Juramona Militia in line as the retreating skirmishers filtered back among them.
“Brisk set-to,” he observed, pale eyes fixed on his men.
“They’re aggressive all right,” Tol agreed. He was covered in sweat and blood, the latter not his. Zala, her sword gripped in both hands, stared with wide eyes at the plain. She, too, was spattered with the blood of others. Tylocost pushed her blade down gently.
“Draw a breath,” he advised. “You’re safe for the moment.”
A moment was all they had before the full complement of nomads came charging out of the dry creek. About five hundred of them this time, Tol noted, taking grim satisfaction at the accuracy of his earlier estimate. There were men and women both, all furious at their initial repulse.
“Companies, present!”
The Ergothians held a numerical advantage. They were nine hundred eighty-eight strong, although only a fraction were experienced warriors. At Tol’s order, they presented their spears and a thorny hedge blossomed in t
he front of each block of one hundred men.
“Standfast!”
To the experienced eyes of Tol, Tylocost, and several others, it was obvious they faced members of several nomad tribes. Some of the oncoming riders were covered head to toe in buckskin, others fought bare-chested. Hair was long, either braided or loose, or heads were shaved, then painted or covered by leather skullcaps. Their favored weapon was the saber, much like those wielded by the Imperial hordes, although some carried the short bow or light, throwing spear. Fully a third of the attackers were female – as formidable in battle as their male comrades. Like the Dom-shu, some of the nomad tribes made little distinction between male and female warriors; it was skill that mattered, not gender.
Tol sheathed Number Six and took up a pike. Zala stood on his left, trembling. On his right, Tylocost leaned casually on his staff.
“One charge is all we’ll get,” the elf said.
Wilfik looked back over his shoulder. “Eh? How do you know?”
“I’ve been fighting human nomads since long before you were born,” Tylocost replied. “They’re fierce, but they don’t have the determination to stand and fight it out with steadfast troops. If we don’t give way, they’ll give up.”
“Ten gold pieces says you’re wrong!” Wilfik said, eyes glinting beneath his fearsome brows.
The Silvanesti nodded. “Accepted.”
The enemy was closer now, their screeching cries audible over the pounding of their horses’ hooves.
It was too much for one company of the militia. The Seventh, to the right of Tol’s position and some forty paces away, threw down their pikes, turned tail, and ran. Wilfik bellowed curses to no avail.
Half the nomads veered, heading toward that gap in the formation. Immediately, Tol ordered the three leftmost companies to advance as they swung right. The two companies on the far right, isolated by the desertion of their comrades, were given leave to fall back, but in a slow and orderly fashion.
With the lines seemingly giving way before them, even more horsemen concentrated on the gap yawning ahead. The nomads had no formation, no discipline. None of them noticed the troops on the left moving out and arcing around them. None of them noticed that the ground over which they galloped sloped gradually upward, slowing their charge.