“We are working, Pepper! Can’t you see?” red-bearded Zhirgzan panted in his deep bass voice.
“Then you’re working too slowly! Load faster!”
“Wait, Pepper!” said Honeycomb, who had borrowed the gnome’s spyglass to take a look at what was happening at Nuad. “Swing the cannon round.”
“What? What for?”
The Wild Heart handed the spyglass to the gnome without saying a word. Pepper looked in the direction indicated and roared.
“Agh, damnation! Looks like our turn’s come! Swing it round! Swing it! And stick that ball up your backside! Load it with grapeshot!”
“My prince, I’m afraid the gnomes will not have time to fire a second salvo,” said the Beaver Cap standing beside Stalkon: Two of the Beavers had been attached to the Prince of the Spring Jasmine as his bodyguards.
“Sound the alert!”
He had seen the cavalry’s unsuccessful attempt to break through the left army. Now the combined forces of the Crayfish would try to break the center.
“Tell the bowmen to aim at the horses!” the commander of the center ordered, keeping his eyes fixed on the approaching enemy.
“Already done!”
“Your Magicship! Is there any way you can help us?”
“I do not have any attack spells of sufficient power, Your Highness,” replied the magician sent by Artsivus. “I doubt if I could eliminate even fifty at a time.”
“Well, what about five times instead of one?”
“Then I’m afraid I would not be able to protect the soldiers against the magic of the shamans.”
The prince pursed his lips.
“But I think I can do something that will be useful to you.”
“What?”
“The Skating Rink,” the magician said, and smiled.
* * *
Izmi Markauz cursed the moment when his men were sent into the reserve. The center would need help now. That massive cloud of horsemen would sweep over the hill like an avalanche and not stop until it reached Avendoom. It looked as if the king had been too hasty in dismounting the cavalry. With them, there would have been a chance. Now everything depended on the will of Sagra and luck.
The Crayfish infantry had already appeared on the left road, and their sheer numbers were appalling. They were deploying along the Rega Forest, with the clear intention of attacking all three Valiostran armies. And with numbers like that, they could pull it off. In addition, several hundred warriors from the northern tribes were already hurrying along the road from Nuad to Slim Bows. The castle was still showing its teeth and mauling anyone moving along the road on the right, and as far as Izmi could see, the enemy hadn’t stopped trying to take the most northerly bulwark of Valiostr’s forces. But a large part of the Nameless One’s army had passed Nuad, completely ignoring the hail of arrows.
* * *
The sorcerer’s army was moving straight into battle from the march, and that was the defenders’ only advantage. If the enemy had arrived all at once and bided his time, the defense would have been crushed like a ripe berry. But as it was, Valiostr still had a chance. All that had to be done was beat those who were at the front, then the ones who followed, and so on to infinity, for as long as their strength held out. Sagra be praised that the enemy had been deprived of his ogres!
* * *
“Just look at that! Look at it, will you! That’s a massive force moving up on us. Looks like the lads in the center will have a hard time of it!” one of the pikemen shouted.
“Don’t be so quick to bury them,” said Jig’s neighbor, spitting on the ground. “We’ll see how the horsemen handle their lances running uphill.”
The cavalry advanced, and the riders set their horses to the gallop. The enemy passed the area where the bodies of the men killed by shots from the gnomes’ cannons were lying, and started climbing up the hill. From the center of the Field of Fairies the uphill slope didn’t look very steep. But the reality of things is usually far worse than what we expect. Weighed down by their armor and their riders, the horses found it far from easy to manage the climb.
* * *
“Three fingers of arc! Take your aim from the unit commanders! Fire!”
A throng of arrows shot up into the air from the three thousand bowmen, hurtled over the heads of the infantry, and came crashing down on the front ranks of the enemy. Then another volley followed. And another. Even in their heavy armor men were killed—with that number of arrows many found their way in through a joint.
But the horses bore the brunt of the blow. Without any effective protection, they fell, leaving their riders with no chance of escaping the bombardment. The commander of the cavalry had apparently not expected to come up against such a large number of bowmen.
A horn sounded the retreat, and then something unbelievable happened: The ground under the hooves of the horses and the feet of the men turned to ice, and the unmitigated slaughter began. The bowmen fired arrow after arrow at the enemy without pause. The unit commanders yelled commands continuously, changing the angle of fire and making adjustments for the wind. The cold-blooded execution continued. The front rows of the infantry and the dismounted cavalry became impatient and started bombarding the Crayfish from their crossbows.
* * *
“They’ve massacred them, milord! I swear by Sagra, massacred them!” Vartek exclaimed.
“I can see,” said Izmi, watching as about six hundred dismounted enemy horsemen launched a desperate attack on the line of infantry.
The skirmish was brief and bloody. The Crayfish were not well loved, and they paid the Valiostrans in the same coin. When it was over there was nothing left of the cavalry of the Crayfish Duke, a force that he must have spent years assembling and training. Stalkon’s men took no prisoners.
“Ah, may the darkness take me!” said Vartek, pounding himself on the leg in his frustration. “I’d give everything to have been in the place of the foulest louse-ridden infantry man in the center!”
“And you’re not the only one, Marquis! Not the only one!”
* * *
“Wait!”
“What should we wait for!” the red-bearded gnome asked indignantly. “We have to fire!”
“I’ll fire you! Wait, I’m telling you!”
“What for? They’ll be trampling all over us in a minute, Pepper!”
“Then let them! If I tell you wait, then you wait!” the cannon commander roared furiously.
“Rott!” Honeycomb called to the commander of the crossbowmen.
“Yes, sir?”
“Are the lads ready?”
“Oh, yes!”
“Act as you think necessary!”
Rott nodded and readied the powerful army crossbow standing on the wall for action. Weapons like that were used for defending castles and fortresses. Six long, heavy steel bolts could be loaded into this monster at once. Naturally, this miracle of military ingenuity was heavy, and carrying it around was a good way to get a hernia, but for firing at the enemy from behind a wall, there was nothing to beat it. Apart from its formidable penetrating power, which put the sklots of the infantry of the line in the shade, the “hailstorm” also possessed another absolutely invaluable quality—its rapid rate of fire.
Honeycomb slapped his helmet, lowered the nose guard, and glanced out from behind the wall.
There was a disorganized brown and gray rabble moving toward them along the right-hand road—barbarians and northern tribesmen. He could recognize both of them from his sorties beyond the Needles of Ice.
The barbarians wore only skins of mammoths and polar bears, along with boiled leather with plates of seal bone sewn onto it, and, instead of helmets, they used the skulls of animals from the Desolate Lands, which gave them a rather terrifying appearance. They were armed with axes and clubs, because they knew almost nothing about bows and arrows. In battle they often went completely berserk. Honeycomb would never have denied that the barbarians of the Desolate Lands were good warriors, but the
y were no match for the warriors of the northern tribes.
Ask any Wild Heart who he’d rather fight against if he had a choice—a thousand barbarians or five hundred northern tribe warriors, and he would choose the barbarians without any hesitation. There’d be some chance of finishing that battle without too many casualties. But that could never happen with the savage northern tribes. These short men with black hair and narrow eyes were magnificent hunters, and even better warriors. They were highly skilled in using short spears to hunt seals, and to skewer their enemies. And in addition, these lads were hardy, they lived where no other people could live—on the Shore of the Ogres.
Now here they were, totally ignorant of words like “strategy” and “tactics,” “reserve” and “flanking maneuver,” advancing on Slim Bows with the obvious intention of taking the fortified village. And the frightening thing was they just might be able to do it.
The catapults installed inside the second wall started bombarding the attackers with crocks of incendiary mixture and rocks. The small detachment of Wind Jugglers added its efforts to those of the catapults.
“At the enemy!” Rott barked. “Fire at will!”
Slim Bows launched a hail of steel. When he had used all six bolts, Rott dragged the crossbow down off the wall, handed it to the loader, and was immediately given another one. Honeycomb was using an ordinary sklot. He aimed it at a tall barbarian with a beard and a face daubed with blue paint, held his breath, and pressed the trigger. The bolt went straight through the skull helmet with no difficulty.
“Pretty good,” Pepper said with a nod of approval, and then suddenly he yelled, “They have bowmen!”
The northern tribe warriors started peppering the wall with arrows from their short-jointed bows. One of the arrows hit a gnome in the neck as he held a smoldering fuse. Another bounced off the cuirass of the soldier who was reloading Rott’s “hailstorm.” A third went through the leg of a swordsman standing behind the crossbowmen.
“Healer!” Honeycomb roared. “Increase the rate of fire!”
“How can we fire any faster?” asked the commander of the crossbowmen, raising his sklot. “These brutes are good shots!”
“Ugh, damnation! I’ll give them what for!” Pepper picked up the fuse dropped by the dead gnome and carried it over to the cannon.
Honeycomb managed to put his hands over his ears in time. The cannon roared, and the wall was wreathed in smoke. The two other cannons farther along the wall fired immediately after the first.
“Those gnomes are always inventing some tricky gadget or other!” said one of the crossbowmen, coughing.
The blue-gray, foul-smelling smoke stung their eyes. Pepper was already tongue-lashing his team to make them get a move on and reload as quickly as possible. When the smoke cleared, it was obvious that the grapeshot had cut a broad bloody swathe through the ranks of the enemy. The northern tribe warriors were retreating in panic. But six hundred barbarians—either completely witless or delirious with battle fever—had carried on and were already swarming across the moat.
“Swordsmen! Make ready!” Honeycomb yelled so hard that his voice almost cracked and broke. “Pepper! Leave that cannon for now and you and your lads get behind shields!”
“Damned if I will!” The gnome cursed, threw aside the swab that they used to clean the cannon, and took up his battle-mattock. “You’ll never see gnomes hiding behind anyone else’s back! Zhirgzan! Give me my helmet!”
* * *
At Nuad the battle was raging. The enemy had obviously decided to finish off the indomitable castle, no matter what the cost. The battalions standing on the left road heard a distant cannonade.
“My nephew’s over there,” the pikeman suddenly said.
“What’s your name, brother?”
“Bans.”
“I’m Jig.”
“My hands are frozen. They’ll freeze to the pike even through my gloves soon,” Bans complained.
“Want some garlic?”
“Will it warm me up?”
“They’re the ones who’ll warm you up,” said Jig, nodding in the direction of the Crayfish infantry advancing on them. “In a couple of minutes it’ll be hotter than in a gnome’s furnace.”
“How many of those lousy mongrels are there?”
“As many as there are of us. Or more.”
* * *
From the hill Izmi Markauz saw the enemy infantry divide up into three unequal sections and start moving toward the positions of the army of Valiostr. The smallest detachment, which was the farthest away, advanced on Slim Bows, almost at a run. About ten thousand Crayfish, split into five sections, made for the left army. The rest of the infantry and a countless horde of barbarians moved to attack the center.
“Why are our magicians not doing anything, milord?” Vartek asked indignantly. “The entire Council of the Order is up there on the hill!”
“The entire Council, my dear Marquis, is a standing in a circle, holding each other affectionately by the hand,” one of the guardsmen growled from under his helmet. “It’s thanks to them that the Nameless One hasn’t done anything to us yet.”
“Commander!” panted a guardsman who came running up at that moment. “The king has ordered us to watch the left flank of the defense and go into action if they need help!”
“At last!” Vartek growled in delight.
“Is there anything else?” Izmi Markauz asked the messenger.
“They say all the ogres are dead!”
A rumble of joy swept through the lines of guards.
“Who says so?”
“Everyone does. I heard it myself from one of the scouts.”
“Excellent. You can rejoin the ranks.”
* * *
“We fought the lousy brutes off! My, but they were stubborn buggers!” said Pepper, waving his bloody mattock.
The barbarian attack had broken down. Two thousand crossbowmen along the entire front of the right army had wrought carnage in the ranks of the attackers. The few barbarians who had managed to cross the moat and the embankment had been finished off by the swordsmen. Now there were mounds of bodies lying under the walls and Honeycomb was afraid that after a few more attacks like that the enemy would be climbing up onto the wall over the corpses of his comrades, like a stairway.
“Zhirgzan! Drop that repulsive thing!” Pepper told the red-headed gnome, who was examining a captured skull helmet curiously. “Get loading! You saw the way those slanty-eyes legged it, didn’t you?”
“They won’t run a second time.”
“What makes you think that, centurion?”
“They’re good warriors, even if they are superstitious. Next time they’ll realize that not everybody dies when the thunder roars, and they’ll continue with the attack.”
“Honeycomb!” called the company commander, walking up to them.
“Yes, commander?”
“Our losses?”
“Eight killed and seven wounded.”
“Here, take this fellow into your unit,” said the commander, indicating a pale, taciturn young lad. “This is His Magicship Roderick. He’ll give your boys a hand if need be.”
Roderick nodded rather nervously and cast a fearful glance at two swordsmen who were throwing a barbarian’s body over the wall.
“Do you have chain mail, Your Magicship?”
The Wild Heart didn’t really believe this lad was a magician. By his reckoning, even Kli-Kli could run rings round this pallid youth.
“Yes,” said the youth, nodding hastily.
Horns sounded outside the walls. The enemy had launched another attack.
* * *
There was a loud crash behind him, the heavens echoed the sound, and the smoking comet fired from the Crater hurtled down right into the center of the front square of infantry that was advancing on the center.
It was an appalling blow. Everyone who was anywhere near the explosion was torn to pieces. The impact of the Crater’s shell put Izmi in mind of a god
stepping on men by accident.
* * *
The infantry was advancing in five units. Three in the first line and another two behind them, at a distance of a thousand yards.
Jig gazed with a strange indifference through the ranks of men and raised pikes at the steel tortoise moving toward them.
“They’ve got crossbowmen!” one of the pikemen shouted.
Jig’s blood ran cold. If the enemy infantry had sklots, then even in their armor the front ranks would be hit hard. At close range a bolt would go straight through the armor as if it was paper, not glorious Isilian steel.
The elves started bombarding the detachment advancing against the left battalion.
“Let me through! Let me through, I say!”
The magician, who had stood behind Jig all this time without saying a word, was scrambling his way forward.
Jig gave a piercing whistle and yelled: “Let the magician through to the front, you damn blockheads! Quick now, or we’ll all be catching steel bolts!”
That did the trick, and the pikemen moved aside to make way. The magician dashed forward, stood in front of the first rank, and held out his hands with the open palms toward the detachment of infantry that had almost reached the Wine Brook. A blinding ball of fire went darting from the magician’s hands and struck the first row of shields, vaporizing them, together with the men, then moved on to the second row, and the third row, and the fourth row of the crossbowmen, until it finally exploded.…
That set them wailing! Jig could hear the howls of dying men as they were burned alive. Many of the soldiers in his battalion swore in satisfaction when they saw how many casualties a single man could inflict on the enemy.
Meanwhile the magician created another fireball, then another, incinerating men by the dozen. The lines of infantry faltered and broke, scattering in panic along the bank of the Wine Brook. The smell of burnt flesh even reached Jig’s battalion.
Suddenly the magician swayed and collapsed in a heap on the snow. Someone from the front ranks dashed to the fallen man, picked him up, and pulled him back into the battalion.
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