Dark Tide: Book Five of the Phantom Badgers

by RW Krpoun

  Kirpinar kept his shield in front of his chest, and watched as the First Kani dissolved into a chaotic mass of shouting nomads and rearing horses around him as the fires started and the arrows whirred in from the hedges. Halfway between cross-lanes the Threll shot down two horses in the front of the column and two more in the rear, the beasts’ death throes blocking the passage. The Shuket howled in an attempt to get his orders heard about the maelstrom as the arrows drove in like a flock of angry hornets, telling his troops to face outboard and return fire, lance the hedges, to fight back. Most were doing it, of course, and he saw one of his Moonsingers spur her horse across the ditch and lean into the hedge, then back her mount away dragging a impossibly tall humanoid clad in soft leather who had been wounded by two Eyade arrows. She and two comrades quickly hacked the dying Threll to pieces seconds before a flight of arrows swept them from their saddles in savage retribution.

  Nomads tried to crash their horses through the hedges but the thickly intertwined branches stopped any charge they could mount given the tight confines. Several tried to hack openings through the lower reaches where the stalks were thicker but less densely interwoven, and in fact could have escaped through the resulting holes if they were willing to abandon their mounts, which none would save those whose horses were already dead. The blind return fire from their horn bows had no appreciable effect, although Kirpinar knew that the Lanthrell would be taking some losses, although certainly not enough to divert them from their business.

  Some Eyade were escaping the trap, he saw as he urged his horse toward the front of the command: some quick-thinking archer had shot both wounded horses repeatedly, ending their dying struggles, allowing the better horsemen to urge their war-trained mounts over the dead beasts and on to freedom. Confident in his abilities and his mount, a four-year-old gelding with nerves of steel, he worked his way through the milling rider-less mounts and took a run at it.

  Just as his horse leapt, however, a pain so savage that it sucked away his breath and sent blackness dancing across his vision transfixed his right side nearer to his back than his front, and perhaps a hands-breadth above his belt. As he twisted and arced his torso against the white-hot jet of agony that tore through him he involuntarily hauled back on his reins, twisting his horse’s head and causing the beast to trip and fall on the other side of the barrier.

  Half-blinded with pain, Kirpinar was still too veteran a horseman to be crushed under his mount, kicking himself free of the saddle and jumping as he felt the animal loose its footing and roll. The shock of striking the ground wrenched a half-scream as the arrow in his side shifted with the impact and he clutched at the ground to hold his body steady to prevent any more such jars. Gasping in a half-dozen shallow breaths to steel himself against the pain, he carefully discarded his shield and eased himself to a sitting position, the raw agony in his side wiping out all thoughts of the battle. He knew that the passage through his chainmail would have ruined the barbs of any broadhead arrow, and if it were a bodkin point all the better; in either case he intended to draw it out to reduce the pain caused by movement. He had just reached around to find the shaft with a trembling hand, too much in pain to worry about the larger struggle when another nomad leapt the barrier of dead horses and inadvertently rode his commander down, one iron-shod hoof slamming into the back of Kirpinar’s helm with enough force to plunge him into painless darkness.

  Kirpinar had been knocked unconscious more than once in his long and violent life, and thus recovered his wits quicker than most; he lay still as awareness seeped back into his aching skull, the flaring pain in his lower back reminding him of the arrow which had gotten him into this mess in the first place, while the back of his head ached from the blow that had sent him under and his nose throbbed in counterpoint, apparently having been broken at some point in his adventures. When he felt some strength and control filter back into his limbs he instinctively reached to check that his sabre still rode on his left hip, only to discover that he could not move his right arm. Neither arm, he discovered, nor his legs, and the noise around him, while loud, was not in fact that of battle as he had initially thought.

  Opening his eyes and blinking blearily, he found himself propped up into a sitting position in a ditch not far from the tangle of dead horses that he had tried to jump just before being wounded; his own mount lay not far beyond them, one leg broken and its throat cut. Three lances had been driven deeply into the ground in a line six inches apart, serving him as a back-rest and as an anchor point for the ropes which bound him. His weapons and armor were gone, he noted muzzily, as was the arrow from his back, as evidenced by a dirty bandage wound about his middle. To his left, past the dead horses, was the area in which the First Kani had been trapped; no living horses remained in the area, but the Shuket saw men moving about before be closed his eyes against the haziness and pain within his skull.

  As his senses cleared he realized he had been unconscious for some time: the blood on his mount’s neck was clotted and its eyes were glazed. Taking a dozen breaths as deep as his wound would allow, he carefully rolled his eyes and concentrated on repeating the names of the officers in his Ket to speed the clearing of the darkness from his thoughts. Clearer-headed, he took in his surroundings and saw that a score of Realmsmen were moving along the lane stripping the dead of their weapons and armor, their voices and the noise of their activities raising the din that he had mistaken for battle when he had first recovered consciousness.

  Looking to his right he saw that two Eyade saddles had been stacked one atop the other and staked into place with lances; a woman had been bent over the topmost saddle, her wrists bound to a lance driven into the dirt on one side of the saddles while on the other side her ankles were bound to lances driven well apart to hold her legs spread. Laughing men were passing a flask around and joking while one industriously mounted her, certainly a scene Kirpinar had seen thousands of times before, except that the woman was one of his Moonsingers, a Shunya whose name escaped him still wearing her mail and sword belt although her breeches had been cut away, and the men were Realmsmen guerrillas. For a moment he wondered if the blow to his head had driven him mad: after all, he had seen such rapes since he was old enough to remember anything, but this was an Eyade on the saddles and the men were Realmsmen, dirt-grubbers who fought on foot.

  A bucket being emptied over his head jerked him back from his amazement; twisting in shock at the slap of the cold liquid the jolt of pain from his skull nearly sent him back under, but a second cold bucket-full swiftly brought his senses back. The man who had done the pouring tossed the bucket aside and knelt where Kirpinar could face him, a sun-browned Realmsman with thick dun-colored facial hair and a semi-bald pate toying with the Shuket’s rank-torc. “Do you speak Pradian? Ah, good, then the wait wasn’t wasted. As you might have gathered, the fight’s been over for a while, the Threll and us chopped up your two Kani as they tried to get through the lanes, and then we shot up the two Kani you left on the ridge when they tried to sortie down here, although they didn’t get marked up nearly as bad as the four you brought with you. The Threll are trailing them as they head back to the Bohca while we clean up the mess. Too bad about the village, but you’d have torn it down anyway, and we saved the flocks.”

  The Moonsinger screamed in pain and fury as another man took his turn, and the guerrilla caught Kirpinar’s flinch. “Yep, kind of a change of pace, isn’t it? We’ll all have our turn or two, and then whip her to death, that’s what you’ve done to so many of ours, haven't you? We only got two or three women at the other fights today, but this site gave us a half-dozen, more’n enough for everyone to get a taste of what an Eyade’s like. Don’t worry, we’ll do ‘em just like you taught us during the summer, no detail left out; why, we might even keep a couple around for a full-scale Moonhowler night-ceremony, how ‘bout that? I’m a little hazy on the exact sequence of events, but we’ve buried the remains after enough of ‘em to be able to perform a pretty close approximation. I bet you n
ever expected to see the boot on the other foot, now did you?” The man chuckled humorlessly, and Kirpinar saw the marks of sorrow stamped deep into his face. “No, not once when you took one of our villages and had yourself an amusing time with our wives and daughters and sons did you ever think that maybe things would come full circle and it would be you and yours on the receiving end and...” With a visible effort the man pulled himself together. “We just beat the men we captured to death, did it with rocks and clubs and weren’t too quick about it, but I figure a Shuket’s something special, deserves a better send-off, eh? Here we go.” A teen-aged boy trotted up, a crossbow banging against his back and a sheaf of unstrung Eyade bows under his arm. In his other hand was a lit torch.

  With a lurch of his stomach Kirpinar realized that what had been poured on him was not water, but lantern oil; even now the sharp odor had yet to penetrate his broken, clot-plugged nose. He looked down at his sodden clothing and the slimy puddles of oil that he was sitting in, and wearily shook his head.

  He knew it had been a trap when he had led his Ket into the village, but he had had no idea just how strong the jaws would be.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Durek wasn’t clear on what made fords; rivers underground flowed in stone passages much like blood flowed through veins in one’s body, but he understood that a ford was a place where for whatever reason, the river ran shallow, sufficiently shallow to allow it to be crossed, or forded as the surface-dwellers called it. The ford has been situated in what had originally been called Brown’s Wood after the settler who had claimed it, he had been told by some lore-inclined irregulars, but Brown was centuries dead and the term had been shortened to Brown Wood, and in any case the trees themselves were long gone, replaced by a patchwork of fields and pastures hemmed in with the field stone and hedge walls that were common in the south-central portions of the Realms. The Dwarf had heard of the hedge-fields from others more familiar with the Border Realms, but until lately he had never seen them, having never been further south than Apartia in his travels within the Realms. The habit of such field-borders died out no more than twenty miles north of the river, whether because of differing traditions or because the hedges didn’t like the soil the Captain couldn’t say.

  The Bercer ran between deep banks in this region, although for the length of the hundred-foot-long Ford the banks had been cut and worn by the passage of feet, wheels, flocks, and herds down to gentle slopes leading to the water, which was thirty yards wide, fast moving, cold, and roughly three feet deep. The north and south banks were clear for about fifty feet from the ford, and then the hedge-walls began. The area immediately around the ford lacked any significant slopes or depressions that would provide an advantage to defenders or attackers, leaving both the Hand force and Durek with a straight-forward situation, battlefield-wise.

  The Third Invoquar had showed up as promised and its commander, Thomas Bowden, had been just as willing to follow Durek’s orders as Strolz was, giving the Dwarf four hundred irregulars and about three hundred civilian workers to add to his Company and their impressed artisans. After carefully walking the area with Arian, Maxmillian, and Kroh, the Captain settled on a plan of defense and set his people to work.

  Starr had scouted the river for a dozen miles in either direction with local guides and determined that the only way to get significant numbers of troops across the Bercer in this area was to rebuild the bridge Strolz’s people had dismantled six miles upstream or to take the Ford. Eyade might swim their mounts across an unguarded stretch of the river, but given the high banks they would lose between one quarter to one half of the men they committed to the effort.

  Accordingly his defenses were simple: the main line of defense was the first hedge-wall paralleling the ford; it was a bit close, and had two cart-trails leading away from it within the width of the Ford, but it was what they had to work with and Durek made the best of it. They dragged up boulders from the river banks, dismantled other hedge-walls for their field stone and closed off the cart-lane openings with solid stone breastworks, then built circular fighting positions along the length of the wall inside the hedge-wall, using the hedge-topped wall as the river side of the fighting positions, with the hedge-wall itself vastly strengthened.

  Two angled ‘wing-walls’ were built of stone with circular fighting positions studded along their length running from the river banks fifty yards above and below the Ford back to the main defense line to prevent the Hand troops from flanking their main line of defense, thus enclosing the Ford into a stony pocket. Three tall towers were erected behind the main line so that watchers could spy upon the foe, the scaffolding facing the river covered with planking to protect anyone ascending or descending from arrow-fire. Circular fighting positions were scattered in a loose half circle three hundred yards behind the Ford to be used should the Hand get Eyade across the river elsewhere and send them to assault the Ford defenses from behind.

  Timber platforms shielded with planking breastworks were built just behind the main line to lift the two ballista Kroh had stripped from Apartia’s towers above the hedges so that they had a clear field of fire over the Ford, and posts were emplaced in every fighting position to mount the heavy siege crossbows the Waybrother had obtained from the city’s arsenals.

  To harry the attackers the ground in front of the defensive works on the north bank was carpeted in sharpened stakes, knee-breaker holes and tangles of tripping-ropes. Abatis, lengths of tree trunks studded with out-thrusting sharpened stakes until they resembled hedgehogs, were staked in place end-to-end along the water’s edge, chained together to hold them in place. Boulders were split into slabs and holes drilled into these slabs to accommodate fire-hardened stakes; the slabs were then placed under the water in the Ford to make crossing an unpleasant activity.

  Stake-belts were spread across the south bank of the Ford as well, and three teams of four diggers each were set to digging trenches across the road leading to the Ford from the onset of the defensive preparations, digging a trench every twenty yards, cutting an average of five trenches per team per day, beginning about a half-mile from the Ford and moving twenty yards to the south with each trench. The hedge-walls on the south bank were laboriously torn down until the south bank of the Ford was cleared of obstruction for two hundred yards.

  Stoneworks and stakes would not hold the foe at bay for more than minutes, however, and Durek knew it: it would be the men and women in the positions that would buy the time that Forgetamer needed back in Apartia, and he did not neglect the training of the troops assigned to him. He reformed the two Invoquar while leaving the commanders in place. The Sixth was assigned all the archers and the best crossbowmen, with a few halberdiers as well, roughly two hundred men in all, while the Second was reformed as a purely melee formation of four platoons of fifty men each. There were eight fighting positions along the parallel wall facing the Ford, and three each on the ‘wing’ walls; Durek numbered them from the west to the east, number One position being on the riverbank where the west ‘wing’ wall met the Bercer. On the day of the battle the Sixth Invoquar would be split between the fourteen positions, while the Second’s platoons would be positioned behind the west wing and the western half of the central line; Silver Platoon would be behind the eastern half of the central line, Gold Platoon behind the east wing, and Blue Platoon operating the ballista, while the Scout Section manned the towers. Swift-running non-combatants would be positioned well to the rear and flanks to bring warnings of any Hand forces approaching from those directions while sentries would be posted up and down the river to warn of any crossing attempts.

  The defense would consist of missile fire from the fighting positions, ballista, and towers; when Hand infantry reached the walls the melee forces standing back in safety beyond the sight and reach of Hand missile troops would advance to the wall and support the Sixth Invoquar in repelling the attack.

  It sounded simple in theory but Durek knew the terrible confusion that battle brings and saw to i
t that every defender spent several hours each day rehearsing his or her role.

  On the twelfth of Frosteil a small caravan of carts brought sheaves of Threll arrows and supplies, and the word to expect a hundred Lanthrell archers within a day of the Bohca’s arrival. The cart-drivers also brought news of the outside world: on the thirtieth of Hoffnugteil, two days after the raid into Apartia and the Third Battle at the Royal Bridge Lady Eithne Sorgen was crowned as the Seventeenth Duchess of Sagenhoft, ending the Regent’s reign. Bernian Chaton was appointed as her Lord Chancellor and on the fifth of Frosteil her betrothal to Colgan von der Strieb was announced. On the seventh Bohca Tatbik had taken the western forts of the Royal Bridge, having pounded them nearly to rubble in doing so, beginning operations against the eastern forts the next day. In Apartia Commander Forgetamer’s forces were clearing the Hand garrison from one position after another, while Dwarven engineers labored to repair the breach in the walls and prepare for Bohca Ortak’s expected assault.

  Heartened by the news Durek gave his mixed force the thirteenth off; eight days of constant work and drill had built up their positions and hammered them into the beginnings of an effective military force.

  Work had resumed for only a half-day on the fourteenth when a company of a hundred Lanthrell appeared, bringing word that the Bohca was only a few miles distant, and would be in sight by nightfall. Durek recalled all his work parties, sent the bulk of the non-combatants off, positioned his river-sentries and rearward watchers, and spent the rest of the day drilling his troops and briefing the Lanthrell commander on his plan of defense.

  Markan-Hern Gichin sat on his horse and stared across the river, trying to ignore the sleet that was mixed in with the rain that was pattering on his helm. The mail shirt he was wearing had chafed his shoulders raw, but he lived with the pain, as the alternative was worse; it was late in the afternoon of the fourteenth and the lead elements of his army were struggling up the last miles of road to the Bercer River, a stretch of road which looked as if it had been strip-mined. It would be another twenty-four hours before he could assemble his entire force here at the Ford and begin operations to clear the far bank.