Pale Nothos was the first moon over the eastern horizon. By the time he rose, the warriors had managed to drive the monsters back into the wood from which they’d come. ‘The more wood on the fire and start another one over here,” Gerin shouted. “We have a lot of work to do yet tonight.”
His army was still at it when Tiwaz, Elleb, and Math rose in a tight cluster a couple of hours after Nothos appeared. The men went out by squads to bring back the horses that had bolted, but that was the smaller part of what they needed to do. Treating the animals’ wounds—and their panic—was a far bigger job. The drivers, men who dealt most intimately with their teams, did the greater part of the work. The rest of the troopers lent what help they could.
“I mislike everything about this,” Gerin said gloomily. “Who knows what the beasts will do when they next face the monsters, or even smell them?”
“I’d not yet thought past this night,” Aragis said. “Did we bring enough spare animals to make up for the ones we lost and those hurt too badly to pull a car?”
“I think so,” the Fox answered; he’d been trying to run his own mental count, but confusion didn’t make it easy. He looked at the hairy corpses scattered over the grass. “We hurt the monsters badly here; I don’t think they’ll try anything like that again. The question is, was the once enough?”
“We’ll know come morning.” Aragis yawned. “I don’t know if we’ll have any wits left by then, though. I’m dead for sleep, and I’m for my blanket.”
“And I,” Gerin said with a matching yawn. “One more thing for Adiatunnus to pay for—and he shall.”
When the sun rose, Gerin stumbled over to a nearby stream and splashed cold water on his face to give himself a brittle semblance of alertness. Then he examined the horses the monsters had attacked. They looked worse by daylight than they had in the night, with blood dried on their coats and matted in their manes, with gashes the drivers had missed by the light of moons and fires, with mud slapped on the wounds the men had seen. He wondered how they would fare when they had to draw the chariots, but had no choice. He waved for the drivers to harness them.
Because the animals were sore and nervous, that took longer than it might have. But once they were hitched to the chariots, they pulled them willingly enough. Van drew a clay flute from a pouch on his belt and began a mournful, wailing tune that sounded as if it had come off the plains of Shanda. He assumed an expression of injured dignity when Gerin asked him to put the flute away for fear of frightening the horses.
The border post Adiatunnus had set up in imitation of Elabonian practice was empty and deserted; he must have got wind that Gerin was moving against him.
“We move straight on,” the Fox commanded. “No stopping for loot anywhere. Until we run up against Adiatunnus’ main force and smash it, we haven’t accomplished a thing.”
But when the army came to a peasant village, Aragis ordered his chariots out of the road to trample the wheat and barley growing in the fields around it. After a moment’s hesitation, Gerin waved for his warriors to join the Archer’s. “I hate to hurt the serfs,” he said, “but if I strike a blow at the Trokmoi thereby, how can I keep from doing it?”
“You can’t, so don’t fret yourself,” Van answered. “You go to war to win; you said as much yourself. Otherwise you’re a fool.”
The peasants themselves had vanished, along with most of their livestock. The army took a few chickens and a half-grown pig, set fire to the serfs’ huts, and rolled on.
Perhaps the next village they came to had planted earlier than the first; the wheat and rye growing around it had already turned golden. That meant the crops were nearing ripeness. It also meant they would burn. The warriors tossed torches into the fields near the road, watched flames lick across them. The serfs would have a hungry winter. Gerin vowed to himself to work enough destruction in Adiatunnus’ holding to make their Trokmê masters starve, too.
Every now and then, a red-mustached barbarian would peer out of the woods at the invaders. Gerin ignored those watchers; every man afoot was one he wouldn’t have to face in a chariot. “I want to reach Adiatunnus before the sun sets,” he said grimly. “Spending a night in his lands with the monsters prowling about sets my teeth on edge.”
“Ah, but Captain, does he want you to reach him?” Van said. “You ask me, that’s a different question altogether. If he can get the monsters to come out and soften us up again, you think he won’t do it?”
“No, I don’t think that,” Gerin said. “But he pays a price if he hangs back, too. The deeper we penetrate into his lands, the more harm we do him, and the hungrier his warriors and serfs will be come winter. It’s a nice calculation he has to make: can he afford what we will do to him for the sake of what the monsters might do to us tonight?”
“You think he’ll weigh the odds so—this much on this side, that much on the other?” Van shook his head vehemendy. “That’s what you’d do, certain sure. But Adiatunnus, he’ll be watching the sky. As soon as he sees so much smoke there that his fighters start screaming at him louder than he can stand, he’ll yell for them to jump into their chariots and come at you. Whether that’s today or tomorrow morning we won’t know till we see the woodsrunners drawn up in a meadow athwart our path.”
“Or, better yet, till we catch them trying to get across our path,” the Fox said with a ferocious smile. “But you’re likely right; if you try to judge what the other fellow would do by what you’d do yourself, you’ll be wrong a lot of the time.”
The army moved past the small keep Gerin had burned out in his earlier raid. The castle at the keep’s heart had burned; the roof was fallen in, and soot covered the outer stonework. No one moved on the walls. Gerin grinned again. He’d struck Adiatunnus a blow there.
To his surprise, the Trokmê chieftain did not sally forth against him while the sun remained in the sky. He’d pushed close to the keep Adiatunnus had taken for his own and to the woodsrunners’ village that had grown up around it by the time failing light at last made him halt. Behind him, all the way back to the border of Adiatunnus’ lands, lay as broad a swath of devastation as the Fox could cut. Gerin’s eyes were red with the smoke he’d raised; his lungs stung every time he breathed.
When he encamped, he treated the horses as if they were pure gold come to life. He placed them and the chariots in the center of the camp, with the warriors in a ring around them and sentries out beyond the main force. That meant spreading his men thinner than he would have liked, but he saw no other choice. Without chariotry, what good were the warriors? The Trokmoi would ride circles around them.
Rihwin the Fox said, “The first of the moons will not rise tonight until even longer after sunset than was so yestereven.”
“I know,” Gerin said dolefully. “And the other three, moving more swiftly in their rounds than Nothos, will have gone farther still and will rise later still.” He pronounced the words with a certain amount of gloomy relish; every now and then, he drew perverse enjoyment from imagining just how bad things could be.
Few men sought their blankets right after they ate. No one put weapons out of arm’s reach. After one attack on the horses, another looked too likely to take lightly.
Twilight still lingered in the western sky when, in the black shadows of the woods, a monster screamed. Warriors who had tried to sleep snatched up swords and shields and peered about wildly, waiting for a sentry or perhaps a horse to cry out in agony.
Another monster shrieked, and another, and another. Soon what sounded like thousands of the creatures were crying out together in a chorus that sent icy fingers of dread running up Gerin’s back. “Damn me to the five hells if I see any way to sleep through this,” he said to Van, “not when I’m already on edge looking ahead to battle tomorrow.”
“Ah, it’s not so bad, Captain,” the outlander said. When Gerin stared at him in some surprise, he explained, “I don’t care how loud they scream at us. Last night, we taught ’em something they hadn’t known before, else t
hey’d be running out of the woods at us with slobber dripping off their fangs. Now with all the moons down’d be the best time for ’em to try. Me, I think they don’t dare. They’re just trying to make us afraid.”
Gerin considered. All at once, the hellish cries seemed less terrifying than they had. “You may well be right,” he said, and managed a laugh. “They aren’t doing a bad job of it, either, are they?”
“It’s nothing but a great pile of noise.” Van refused to admit fear to anyone, most likely including himself.
“We won’t stop staying ready for a fight, whether you turn out right or wrong,” Gerin said. “That’s the best way I know to make sure we don’t have one.”
The hideous chorus kept up all night long, and got louder as the moons rose one by one. By then, though, most of the troopers had concluded the monsters were screaming to intimidate rather than as harbinger to an attack. Those not on sentry did manage to drop off, and their snores rose to rival the creatures’ shrieks.
Gerin didn’t remember when he dozed off, but he woke with a start at sunrise, having expected to pass the whole night awake. Most of the men were in the same state, complaining of how little they’d slept but grateful they’d slept at all. The horses seemed surprisingly fresh; an attack like the one of the night before might have panicked them, but they’d resigned themselves to the monsters’ screams faster than the warriors who guarded them.
“Will we fight today?” Aragis asked rather blurrily; his mouth was so full of smoked sausage that he looked like nothing so much as a cow chewing its cud.
“We will,” Gerin said with grim certainty. “If we don’t, we penetrate to the heart of Adiatunnus’ holding before noon, and torch the big Trokmê village that’s grown up around the keep he’s taken for his own. He won’t let that happen; his own warriors would turn on him if he did.”
“There you’re right,” Aragis said after a heroic swallow. “A leader who won’t defend what’s his doesn’t deserve to keep it. My men will be ready.” Gerin had the feeling the Archer primed his vassals for battle by making them more afraid of him than of any imaginable foe, but in his own savage way the grand duke got results.
Not half an hour after the chariots rolled out of camp, they passed the meadow where Gerin’s forces and Adiatunnus’ had dueled fewer than fifty days before. Some of the ruts the chariot wheels had cut were still visible; grass had grown tall over others.
Gerin had wondered if the Trokmê chieftain would pick the same spot to defend his lands as he had in the last fight. When Adiatunnus didn’t, the Fox’s anxiety grew. Fearing an ambush when the road went through the next stand of woods, he dismounted several teams of fighting men and sent them in among the trees to flush out any lurking woodsrunners. That slowed the rest of the army, and the searchers found no one.
Past that patch of forest, a broad stretch of clear land opened up: meadows and fields that led to Adiatunnus’ keep, the Trokmê village, and the meaner huts of the Elabonian peasants who still grew most of the holding’s food. Mustered in front of them was a great swarm of chariotry: Adiatunnus, awaiting the attack.
The Fox was lucky—he spotted the Trokmoi before they spied his car in the shadow of the woods. He ordered Raffo to a quick halt, then waved the chariots of his force up as tight together as they could go without fouling one another. “We’ll need to be in line before the woods-runners can sweep down on us,” he said. “The gods be praised, they don’t look all that ready to fight, either. My men will form to the left when we burst out into the open, Aragis’ to the right. I expect we’ll all be mixed together before the day is done—that’s just a way of keeping us straight when we start. May fortune roll with us.”
“May it be so,” several troopers said together. Gerin thumped Raffo on the shoulder. The driver flicked the reins and sent the horses forward onto the meadow. A great shout rose from the Trokmoi when they caught sight of the chariot. They swarmed forward in a great irregular wave, hardly bothering to shake out into line of battle in their eagerness to close with their enemies.
“Look at ’em come,” Van said, hefting his spear. “If we can get ourselves ready to receive ’em, we’ll beat ’em to bits, even with the monsters running between their cars there.”
“They don’t care much for tactics, do they?” Gerin said. “Well, I’ve known that a great many years now. The trouble with them is, they have so much pluck that that’s too often what decides things.”
He nocked an arrow and waited for the Trokmoi and the monsters to come within range. Behind him, ever more chariots rumbled out of the woods to form line of battle. Each one drew fresh cries of rage from the woodsrunners. Gerin saw he had more cars than the woodsrunners did. Whether they’d all be able to deploy before the fight opened was another question.
When the Trokmoi closed to within a furlong, Gerin waved his arm and shouted “Forward!” at the top of his lungs. Chariots depended on mobility; if you tried to stand to receive a charge, you’d be ridden down.
Raffo cracked the whip above the horses’ backs. The beasts bounded ahead. A chariot wheel hit a rock. The car jounced into the air, landed with a jarring thump. Gerin grabbed the rail for a moment; his knees flexed to take the shock of returning to earth.
He’d pulled all the way to the left, to be on the wing of his own force. That also meant he was far away from the track that led toward Adiatunnus’ keep. The horses galloped through ripening rye, trampling down a great swath of grain under their hooves. The Fox’s lips skinned back from his teeth in a predatory grin. Every stride the horses took meant more hunger for his foes.
An arrow hissed past his head. Adiatunnus’ hunger was distant, something that would come with winter. Had that arrow flown a couple of palms’ breadth straighter, Gerin would never have worried about it or anything else, again. Planning for the future was all very well, but you had to remember the present, too.
Gerin loosed the shaft he’d nocked, snatched another from his quiver, and set it to his bowstring. He shot once more. The Trokmoi were packed so closely, the arrow would almost surely do them some harm. He shot again and again, half emptying his quiver as fast as he could. The rest of the shafts he thriftily saved against more specific targets and urgent need.
His men had followed him on that wide sweep to the left, encircling the Trokmoi on that wing. Had Aragis taken the same course on the right, the woodsrunners would have been in dire straits. But Gerin’s deployment order had left the Archer with fewer chariots there, and he commanded that wing with a blunter philosophy of battle than the Fox employed. Instead of seeking to surround the enemy, he pitched straight into them. Some of his men kept shooting at the Trokmoi, while others laid about them at close quarters with sword and axe and mace.
A monster ran at the chariot in which Gerin rode. It came at the horses rather than the men, and from the right side, where Van with his spear had less reach than the Fox with his bow. But the creature reckoned without Raffo. The driver’s long lash flicked out. The monster howled and clutched at its face. Raffo steered the car right past it. Van thrust his spear into the monster’s vitals, yanked it free with a killing twist. The monster crumpled to the ground and lay kicking.
A Trokmê driver whipped his team straight for the Fox. His car bore two archers, both of whom let fly at almost the same time. One arrow glanced from the side of Van’s helmet, the other flew between the outlander and Gerin.
Gerin shot at one of the archers. His shaft also failed to go just where he’d intended it, but it caught the Trokmê driver in the throat. The reins fell from his fingers; he slumped forward over the front rail of the car. The team ran wild. Both of the archers grabbed for the reins. They were past before Gerin saw whether either one managed to seize them.
“Well aimed, Fox!” Van cried.
“It didn’t do what I wanted it to do,” Gerin answered. Uncomfortable with praise, he used bitter honesty to turn it aside, like a man trying to avert an omen he didn’t care for.
“Hon
h!” Van said. “It did what it needed to do, which is what matters.” That left Gerin no room for argument.
His hopes built as the battle ground on. The Trokmoi were ferocious, but not all the ferocity in the world could make up for a bad position—and, this time, he’d brought more men into the fight than Adiatunnus had. The monsters helped even the odds, but not enough.
He spied the Trokmê chieftain, not far away. “Well, you robber, you asked what I’d do next,” he shouted. “Now you see.”
Adiatunnus shook a fist at him. “To the corbies with you, you black-hearted omadhaun. You’ll pay for this.” He reached for his quiver, but found he was out of arrows.
Gerin jeered at him. He pulled out a carefully husbanded shaft, set it to his bow, and let fly. Adiatunnus realized he had no time to grab for his shield, so he threw up his arms. The arrow caught him in the meaty part of his right upper arm, about halfway between elbow and shoulder. He let out a howl any monster would have envied. The wound wasn’t fatal, probably wasn’t even crippling, but he would fight no more today.
Van swatted Gerin on the back, almost hard enough to pitch him out of the chariot onto his head. “Well aimed!” the outlander boomed again.
And again, the Fox did what he could to downplay praise. “If that had been well aimed, it would have killed him,” he grumbled.
The Trokmoi tried to slam through Aragis’ men. Had they succeeded, they’d have regained their freedom of movement. But Aragis’ chariots were grouped more tightly than Gerin’s, and the woodsrunners could not force a breakout. When they failed, they began falling back toward the cover of their village.
“We’ll roast ’em like mutton!” Aragis’ fierce, exultant cry rang over the battlefield, though the Trokmoi still fought back with fierce countercharges—they were beaten, but far from broken.
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