by Dragon Lance
Instead, Tol ordered Tylocost to have the dead cut down and decently buried. The elf departed, and Tol was alone with Zala.
“In war horror begets horror,” he said.
Tol’s loathing of executing helpless prisoners had been learned at a tender age, when he was forced to watch the Pakin rebel Vakka Zan beheaded in the town square of Juramona. Egrin had been required to do the deed, honor-bound to obey the marshal of Juramona, Lord Odovar.
There was nothing more he could do for the dead, so Tol turned his attention to the soldiers who’d guarded the captives. Once they were brought to him, he asked whether the prisoners had said anything useful to them.
One fellow scratched his head with a meaty hand. “Some of’em talked bold,” he allowed. “Said as how their chief, Tokasin, would come back an’ kill us all.”
The captives had mentioned two other chiefs – Mattohoc and Ulur – but it was on Tokasin they pinned their hopes. He was chief of the Firepath tribe, which they called the boldest and hardest-riding folk on the plains.
Tol, like most Ergothians, saw the nomads as a faceless mass of mounted foes, cruel, with quicksilver tempers. Learning the names of their chiefs was worthwhile information.
The guards contributed one other piece of information gleaned from the nomad captives. The prisoners claimed to be scouting for a much larger band. Their comrades who had survived yesterday’s battle would return to the main force and that, they boasted, would be the end of Juramona’s pitiful defenders.
Tol drilled the militia all day. He didn’t share what he learned from the guards, but word got around. There was no more trouble with shirkers. The twin specters of nomad blades and the deserter’s noose had resolved all qualms. It was fight or die.
The trick, as Tylocost dryly noted, was to make certain the militia fought, and the nomads died.
*
Two nights later, Tol went to inspect Tylocost’s work west of camp. The wind was up, sweeping across the long grass. Zala, his omnipresent escort, carried a torch that flared wildly with every gust.
Tylocost had erected a large number of obstacles to screen the vulnerable western approaches. What appeared as random piles of loose masonry and fire-blackened timbers hid a grim purpose. Riders would have to slow their mounts to navigate the narrow passages. When they did, they would be perfect targets for archers and pikemen concealed behind the mounds.
As he drew nearer and details of Tylocost’s defenses became clear, Tol’s brisk pace slowed.
The elf had left an open lane through the center of the field. The enemy would be funneled into this lane. The thigh-high plains grass gave way to loose dirt. A length of rope was buried just under the surface. Some distance further along, Tol could see another patch of disturbed soil. The seemingly clear lane was filled with traps.
“That elf is tricky as a kender,” Tol muttered. Trained Ergothian warriors would never fall for such an obvious ploy, but the reckless, unsophisticated plainsmen just might.
Zala interrupted his admiration of Tylocost’s deadly ingenuity. “My lord, do you hear that?”
Tol started to shake his head – all he could hear was wind moaning around the piles of debris – then came a lull, the gusty breeze died, and he heard it. Zala’s keen ears had discerned a faint rumbling. Not like thunder, rolling through heavy clouds, this was more like the steady, distant roar of a waterfall. Tol knew that sound.
“Run!” he shouted, and they legged it for camp.
Zala’s torch expired, snuffed by the wind of their passage, and she threw it aside without pausing. She covered the ground rapidly, with Tol only a few steps behind.
As soon as the camp came into view, he raised the alarm. Sentries took up the warning, beating an improvised gong – a battered brass tray from a Juramona tavern. Men and women came stumbling out of their shelters, grappling with helmets, bits of armor, and weapons. Tylocost, moving with all the speed and agility ascribed to his race, dodged the clumsy humans and hurried to Tol.
“Horsemen,” Tol panted. “Massed horsemen coming from the west!”
Tylocost rounded up his makeshift troops and led them out to his crazy-quilt fortifications. The able-bodied men had joined Tol’s foot companies, so following the elf was a motley band of boys, women, and old men. It was a lot to ask, that these folk should bear the brunt of the nomads’ first assault, but the survival of every soul at Juramona depended on their steadfastness.
It was two marks before midnight, and the night sky was streaked with clouds. Moving fast across the field of stars, the clouds were stained pink by the light of Luin, no more than a crescent of scarlet and hanging low on the horizon. Solin, the white moon, had already set. Tol hated night battles. Facing horsemen with green militia was difficult enough, but the dark gave an even greater advantage to veteran fighters.
He arranged his militia outside the dark, frightened camp in an arrowhead formation. Foremost was the reconstituted Seventh Company, led by Tol himself, with two of his steadiest companies behind them, and the rest echeloned behind. At Tol’s order, any who fled the coming battle were to be cut down in their tracks. The soldiers clutched their pikes, looking sleepy and frightened at the same time.
To the west, Tylocost doffed his gardener’s hat and tied a strip of white cloth around his forehead, to make it easier for his people to pick him out in the dark. He climbed atop the highest of the brick mounds to search the deep darkness for signs of the enemy. He could certainly hear them. Even the dull-eared humans couldn’t miss the low, constant thud of so many hooves.
In the open lane, he had arrayed a few troops as bait. Should the nomads prove reluctant to charge into his trap, the presence of those pitifully equipped foot soldiers should entice them.
Shards of brick skittered down the side of the mound on which Tylocost stood, shaken loose by the growing vibration of the enemy’s approach. The Silvanesti’s vision, far keener than a human’s, detected movement upon the plain. Bits of brass horse tack glimmered, as did hundreds of bare iron blades. It was only the advance guard. From the sound of it, thousands more nomads were behind the outriders.
Tylocost had done his best with the defenses, but inwardly he doubted that few if any of his people would survive the night. For the first time in his long life, he admitted the possibility of his own death, acknowledged he might never again look on the crystal spires of Silvanost, never walk among his own graceful, civilized people. Ugly, despised Janissiron Tylocostathan would die before his time, alone, surrounded by crass, bloodthirsty humans. Astarin and all the gods would weep!
The first wave of nomads cantered toward him. None seemed to take particular notice of Tylocost’s defenses, which looked very like the rest of the ruined town. The riders now were only paces from the stakes the elf had driven into the turf to mark maximum effective arrow range.
He removed the white cloth from his head and raised it high. “When I give the signal, loose all!” he called down to his troops. “Mark your targets well, but don’t dawdle! There are plenty for all!”
The first line of horsemen rode over the wooden stakes. Tylocost brought the white cloth down sharply. His archers let fly.
A rain of arrows in the dark is an unnerving thing. The nomads couldn’t hear the snap of bowstrings, or the thrum of the approaching missiles, over the noise of their horses. They glimpsed the hardwood shafts falling through the air only an instant before the arrows struck.
Riders toppled from their horses. The vanguard hesitated, then spied the bait troops huddled in the open lane between the obstacles. With much shouting, the enraged nomads charged.
Tylocost descended from his perch and stood beside his tiny band. Most were visibly trembling, but all remained where they were, gazes shifting between their unlikely leader and the oncoming horsemen.
“Remember what I taught you,” he called over the swelling noise. “At my command, fallback!”
Archers in the front ranks continued to sting the nomads, and marksmen atop the moun
ds also took their toll. A few plainsmen shot back, concentrating on the bowmen they could see silhouetted against the stars. One by one the Ergothians were picked off.
“Steady,” Tylocost said. “At my order, not before.”
When the nomads were just twenty paces away – close enough to see the flaring nostrils and gnashing teeth of their hard-charging ponies – Tylocost gave the command, and the small block of townsfolk broke apart. They streamed back down the dirt path, still clutching their weapons.
Ten paces along, the elf general halted and gestured with his bared sword. Eight Juramonans dropped to their knees and took hold of the buried ropes. Tylocost raised his sword, and the Ergothians hauled on the lines. Sixteen sharpened stakes rose up, hinged at the base, which was buried in the dirt.
There was no time for the leading edge of nomads to avoid the trap. They piled up on the stakes, and the press of horsemen behind them added to the carnage. Men and horses screamed.
“Withdraw!” Tylocost ordered. The Ergothians let go the ropes and followed as he backed slowly away.
Their charge disrupted, the nomads milled about in confusion. Finally, twenty riders worked their way around the first obstacle, and came on. Tylocost’s people uncovered a second set of ropes. The nomads reined up.
After raising the second hedge of stakes and tying the ropes to anchors already driven into the ground, the Ergothians withdrew further, and raised a third line of sharp pilings. Their part of the battle done, Tylocost’s troops filtered back through the waiting militia and returned to camp.
Donning his floppy hat once more, Tylocost joined the militia.
“Not much of a helmet,” Tol remarked.
“So far I’m having good luck with this hat. I’ll keep it.”
Their respite was brief. Horsemen had picked their way through the garden of traps and obstacles the elf had created, but arrived at the camp to find Tol’s troops drawn up to meet them. With veteran soldiers, Tol would have attacked the disorganized riders, but he didn’t dare break ranks to advance with his newly minted militia. Much of their courage came from solidarity with their fellows.
The nomads threw spears and showered arrows on the motionless blocks of Ergothians. Now it was the defenders’ turn to fall prey to death arriving out of the darkness. They raised their shields high, but not everyone had a shield, and the arrows slowly pared their ranks.
Tol held his men steady, knowing that, as bad as it was, the bombardment was another ploy to make the Ergothians break formation.
Zala, standing behind him, said, “Can’t we do something to stop the arrows?”
He watched shafts pepper the turf at his feet. “Send word to the leftmost companies,” he said. “At my order, they will advance into a solid line with us.” Zala hurried to deliver his message.
Tol’s blood was up. The nomads wanted to make things hot for them – he’d teach them what war was really about!
With much shuffling and clanking, the companies on Tol’s left moved forward. Immediately, the hail of arrows faltered as the enemy horsemen crowded forward. Pikes leveled, the militia halted in place.
“All front ranks will kneel,” Tol said. His order was repeated by his officers throughout the companies. The first line of Ergothians went down on one knee.
He drew Number Six. “There will be no retreat. When a soldier falls, the man behind him will step up and take his place in line.”
Tylocost drew a slim, straight blade and stood beside Tol, darkness cloaking his homely features.
“Juramona!”
Tol’s battle cry boomed out over the anxious Ergothian line. Raggedly, they echoed the shout. He repeated it, and this time the response was stronger.
The nomads hit the end of the line, trying to outflank the leftmost company. Tol’s men faced about, forming a square bristling with pikes. The horsemen couldn’t reach them with their shorter swords. After a sharp struggle, the riders broke off.
This continued for a seemingly endless space of time – nomads surging against one spot, only to be repelled by Ergothian pikes.
“This isn’t like them,” Tylocost panted, gesturing with his sword at the withdrawn enemy. “Usually, it’s one hard charge, then they quit!”
Tol agreed. Since their first attack on Tylocost’s defenses, the plainsmen had been fighting the Ergothians persistently for many marks, probing here and there. Although they broke off when things got too hot, they didn’t ride away, but came back at a different point.
Drenched in blood and sweat, the Ergothians battled on, leaning on their pikes to rest whenever the enemy gave them breathing space. Perhaps this was the nomads’ new strategy – to wear them down – but surely they and their animals must be exhausted, too.
Clouds in the eastern sky showed the first pink tinge of the coming dawn. Tol’s little army was drawn up on a slight rise below the ruins of Juramona, the western plain spread out before them. The first sliver of sun peered over the horizon at their backs, its light sending their shadows out ahead of them, banishing the last of the long night.
On beholding what the new sun illuminated, Tylocost exhaled slowly, face blank with disbelief.
“Astarin have mercy,” he breathed.
From north to south, as far as the eye could see, the western plain was covered with horsemen. The prisoners’ boasts had been true – the main body of nomads had returned when word of their advance party’s trouble reached them. The defenders of ruined Juramona, whittled by battle to barely eight hundred, faced thousands upon thousands of fresh, ferocious enemies.
*
The banquet hall of the imperial palace in Daltigoth was an enormous room one hundred paces long and forty-four wide, paved in black granite and walled with the finest North Coast gray marble. The vaulted ceiling rose to a height of two stories. A single massive table filled the center of the hall. It seated six hundred, and more guests could be accommodated at temporary tables erected alongside. For an imperial banquet, massive bronze ovens were wheeled in to keep hot the tremendous quantities of food necessary to serve so many.
The hall was so large it had its own weather. On damp days, mist formed in the high crevices of the ceiling, and dew collected on the cold stone floor. The worst heat of summer never penetrated the thick stone walls. If the great ovens weren’t present, roaring with contained fire, the chamber could be downright chilly.
Most found the banquet hall unpleasant unless it teemed with diners, but Empress Valaran relished it. In the vast open space, she could tell she was not being spied upon. Her every whisper in the palace was heard frequently by the wrong ears. In the echoing emptiness of the banquet hall, she almost felt free.
Clad in a white dressing gown quilted with red thread, the Empress sat at the head of the long table. Her son, Crown Prince Dalar, sat on her right. The only other occupant of the hall was a single female servant, standing a few steps away by a wheeled sideboard.
Dalar slurped loudly at his soup. The empress rapped her pewter spoon once on the rim of her golden bowl. Chastened, the five-year-old prince swallowed his next mouthful more decorously.
Twenty rooms and three floors away, the Consorts’ Circle was celebrating the birthday of Princess Consort Landea, the emperor’s fourth wife. A well-fleshed, vain chatterbox with a fondness for sweetmeats, Landea followed her husband’s example: the news of Lord Breyhard’s defeat did not interfere with her merrymaking. Her suite rang with shrill laughter, as sweet wine and honeyed confections were consumed in staggering quantities. The festivities would go on all night. Never mind that Breyhard’s army lay dead along the Dalti shore. Never mind the city seethed with discontent, riots, and murder. Not even the execution of Breyhard’s young wife dampened the spirits of Landea and her idiot friends.
A clang of metal on metal echoed lightly in the hall, pulling Valaran out of her dark thoughts. Dalar had tapped his spoon on the rim of his soup bowl and was looking up at her with a glint in his green eyes.
“Mama,” he said, “y
ou’re fidgeting.”
Valaran realized she’d been drumming her fingers on the tabletop, just the sort of restless behavior for which she always chided her son. The look on his face was so endearing she couldn’t help but smile, but she thanked him quite seriously.
The boy returned his attention to his soup, pleased at having caught her. His mother never fidgeted. She could sit unmoving through even the longest, most boring speeches and ceremonies.
Her own dinner had congealed by this time, but Valaran didn’t notice. She continued eating mechanically, her thoughts once more on the terrible situation in the city.
Since word of the debacle at Eagle’s Ford, Ackal V had been on a rampage. Enraged beyond the point of reason, he ordered the families of the leading warlords in Breyhard’s hordes punished. Labeled as weaklings unfit to serve the empire, the warlords’ adult sons were beheaded. Their wives, sisters, and daughters were condemned to slavery on imperial estates far from the city. Any councilors or courtiers known to have favored Breyhard were likewise punished. The headsmen had been at it for days – another reason Valaran supped in the banquet hall. Here she was spared the sickening sound of the executioner’s axe.
The doors at the far end of the hall burst open. Two Wolves entered, one announcing, “His Majesty, the Emperor of Ergoth!”
Valaran touched her lips with a snowy napkin, and stood. The servant stepped forward to shift the heavy chair for the young prince, and Dalar hopped down.
Ackal V stormed in. These days he was perpetually furious. No richly bedecked councilors or warlords in glittering panoply dogged his heels. He was surrounded, as always, by his brutal, loyal Wolves. A black bearskin cape of prodigious weight was draped over his shoulders, and he had taken to wearing gloves, even indoors, but never could seem to keep warm.
“Lady, why are you here?” he rasped. Out of breath from his continuous tirades, he was disheveled, red hair and beard untrimmed and wildly awry.