From somewhere near, there lifted a clatter great enough to drown out the straggle around him. Wace jumped up on a ram's framework and looked over the heads of his engineers.
A body of Drak'honai had resorted to the ground themselves. They were not drilled in such tactics; but then, the Lannachska had had only the sketchiest training. By sheer sustained fury the Drak'honai were pushing their opponents back. From Trolwen's airy viewpoint, thought Wace, there must be an ugly dent in the line.
Where the devil were the machine guns?
Yes, here came one, bouncing along on a little cart. Two Lannachska began pumping the flywheel, a third aimed and operated the feed. Darts hosed across the Drak'honai. They broke up, took to the sky again. Wace hugged Sandra and danced her across the field.
Then hell boiled over on the roofs above him. His immediate corps had finally gotten to an underground passage and made it a way of entry. Driving the enemy before them, up to the top floors and out, they seized this one tower in a rush.
"Angrek!" panted Wace. "Get me up there!" Someone lowered a rope. He swarmed up it, with Sandra close behind. Standing on the ridgepole, he looked past stony parapets and turning millwheels, down to the bay. Trolwen's forces had taken the pier without much trouble. But they were getting no farther: a steady hail of firestreams, oil bombs, and catapult missiles from the anchored rafts staved them off. Their own similar armament was outranged.
Sandra squinted against the wind, shifted north to lash her eyes to weeping, and pointed. "Eric—do you recognize that flag, on the largest of the vessels there?"
"Hm-m-m . . . let me see . . . yes, I do. Isn't that our old chum Delp's personal banner?"
"So it is. I am not sorry he has escaped punishment for the riot we made. But I would rather have someone else to fight, it would be safer."
"Maybe," said Wace. "But there's work to do. We have our toe hold in the city. Now we'll have to beat down doors and push out the enemy—room by room—and you're staying here!"
"I am not!"
Wace jerked his thumb at Angrek. "Detail a squad to take the lady back to the trains," he snapped.
"No!" yelled Sandra.
"You're too late," grinned Wace. "I arranged for this before we ever left Salmenbrok."
She swore at him—then suddenly, softly, she leaned over and murmured beneath the wind and the war-shrieks: "Come back hale, my friend."
He led his troopers into the tower.
Afterward he had no clear memory of the fight. It was a hard and bloody operation, ax and knife, tooth and fist, wing and tail, in narrow tunnels and cavelike rooms. He took blows, and gave them; once, for several seconds, he lay unconscious, and once he led a triumphant breakthrough into a wide assembly hall. He was not fanged, winged, or caudate himself, but he was heavier than any Diomedean; his blows seldom had to be repeated.
The Lannachska took Mannenach because they had—not training enough to make them good ground fighters—but enough to give them the concept of battle with immobilized wings. It was as revolting to Diomedean instincts as the idea of fighting with teeth alone, hands bound, would be to a human; unprepared for it, the Drak'honai bolted and ran ratlike down the tunnels in search of open sky.
Hours afterward, staggering with exhaustion, Wace climbed to a flat roof at the other end of town. Tolk sat there waiting for him.
"I think . . . we have . . . it all now," gasped the human.
"And yet not enough," said Tolk haggardly. "Look at the bay."
Wace grabbed the parapet to steady himself.
There was no more pier, no more sheds at the waterfront—it all stood in one black smoke. But the rafts and canoes of Drak'ho had edged into the shallows, forming a bridge to shore; and over this the sailors were dragging dismounted catapults and flamethrowers.
"They have too good a commander," said Tolk. "He has gotten the idea too fast, that our new methods have their own weaknesses."
"What is . . . Delp . . . going to do?" whispered Wace.
"Stay and see," suggested the Herald. "There is no way for us to help."
The Drak'honai were still superior in the air. Looking up toward a sky low and gloomy, rain clouds driving across angry gunmetal waters, Wace saw them moving to envelop the Lannacha air cover.
"You see," said Tolk, "it is true that their fliers cannot do much against our walkers—but the enemy chief has realized that the converse is also true."
Trolwen was too good a tactician himself to be cut up in such a fashion. Fighting every centimeter, his fliers retreated. After a while there was nothing in the sky but gray wrack.
Down on the ground, covered by arcing bombardment from the rafts, the sailors were setting up their mobile artillery. They had more of it than the Lannachska, and were better shots. A few infantry charges broke up in bloody ruin.
"Our machine guns they do not possess, of course," said Tolk. "But then, we do not have enough to make the difference."
Wace whirled on Angrek, who had joined him. "Don't stand here!" he cried. "Let's get down—rally our folk—seize those—It can be done, I tell you!"
"Theoretically, yes." Tolk nodded his lean head. "I can see where a person on the ground, taking advantage of every bit of cover, might squirm his way up to those catapults and flamethrowers, and tomahawk the operators. But in practice—well, we do not have such skill."
"Then what would you do?" groaned Wace.
"Let us first consider what will assuredly happen," said Tolk. "We have lost our trains; if not captured, they will be fired presently. Thus our supplies are gone. Our forces have been split, the fliers driven off, we groundlings left here. Trolwen cannot fight his way back to us, being outnumbered. We at Mannenach do outnumber our immediate opponents by quite a bit. But we cannot face their artillery.
"Therefore, to continue the fight, we must throw away our big shields and other new-fangled items, and revert to conventional air tactics. But this infantry is not well equipped for normal combat: we have few archers, for instance. Delp need only shelter on the rafts, behind his fire weapons, and for all our greater numbers we'll be unable to touch him. Meanwhile he will have us pinned here, cut off from food and material. The excess war goods your mill produced are valueless lying up in Salmenbrok. And there will certainly be strong reinforcements from the Fleet."
"To hell with that!" shouted Wace. "We have the town, don't we? We can hold it against them till they rot!"
"What can we eat while they are rotting?" said Tolk. "You are a good craftsman, Eart'a, but no student of war. The cold fact is, that Delp managed to split our forces, and therefore he has already won. I propose to cut our losses by retreating now, while we still can."
And then suddenly his manner broke, and he stooped and covered his eyes with his wings. Wace saw that the Herald was growing old.
XIV
There was dancing on the decks, and jubilant chants rang across Sagna Bay to the enfolding hills. Up and down and around, in and out, the feet and the wings interwove till timbers trembled. High in the rigging, a piper skirled their melody; down below, a great overseer's drum which set the pace of the oars now thuttered their stamping rhythm. In a ring of wing-folded bodies, sweat-gleaming fur and eyes aglisten, a sailor whirled his female while a hundred deep voices roared the song:
". . . A-sailing, a-sailing,
a-sailing to the Sea of Beer,
fair lady, spread your sun-bright wings
and sail with me!"
Delp walked out on the poop and looked down at his folk.
"We'll have many a new soul in the Fleet, sixty ten-days hence," he laughed.
Rodonis held his hand, rightly: "I wish—" she began.
"Yes?"
"Sometimes . . . oh, it's nothing—" The dancing pair fluttered upward, and another couple sprang out to beat the deck in their place; planks groaned under one more huge ale barrel, rolled forth to celebrate victory. "Sometimes I wish we could be like them."
"And live in the forecastle?" said Delp dryly.<
br />
"Well, no . . . of course not—"
"There's a price on the apartment, and the servants, and the bright clothes and leisure," said Delp. His eyes grew pale. "I'm about to pay some more of it."
His tail stroked briefly over her back, then he beat wings and lifted into the air. A dozen armed males followed him. So did the eyes of Rodonis.
Under Mannenach's battered walls the Drak'ho rafts lay crowded, the disorder of war not yet cleaned up in the haste to enjoy a hard-bought victory. Only the full-time warriors remained alert, though no one else would need much warning if there should be an attack. It was the boast of the forecastle that a Fleet sailor, drunk and with a female on his knee, could outfight any three foreigners sober.
Delp, flapping across calm waters under a high cloudless day-sky, found himself weighing the morale value of such a pride against the sharp practical fact that a Lannach'ho fought like ten devils. The Drak'honai had won this time.
A cluster of swift canoes floated aloof, the admiral's standard drooping from one garlanded masthead. T'heonax had come at Delp's urgent request, instead of making him go out to the main Fleet—which might mean that T'heonax was prepared to bury the old hatred. (Rodonis would tell her husband nothing of what had passed between them, and he did not urge her; but it was perfectly obvious she had forced the pardon from the heir in some way.) Far more likely, though, the new admiral had come to keep an eye on this untrusted captain, who had so upset things by turning the holding operation on which he had been contemptuously ordered, into a major victory. It was not unknown for a field commander with such prestige to hoist the rebel flag and try for the Admiralty.
Delp, who had no respect for T'heonax but positive reverence for the office, bitterly resented that imputation.
He landed on the outrigger as prescribed and waited until the Horn of Welcome was blown on board. It took longer than necessary. Swallowing anger, Delp flapped to the canoe and prostrated himself.
"Rise," said T'heonax in an indifferent tone. "Congratulations on your success. Now, you wished to confer with me?" He patted down a yawn. "Please do."
Delp looked around at the faces of officers, warriors, and crewfolk. "In private, with the admiral's most trusted advisors, if it please him," he said.
"Oh? Do you consider what you have to say is that important?" T'heonax nudged a young aristocrat beside him and winked.
Delp spread his wings, remembered where he was, and nodded. His neck was so stiff it hurt. "Yes, sir, I do," he got out.
"Very well." T'heonax walked leisurely toward his cabin.
It was large enough for four, but only the two of them entered, with the young court favorite, who lay down and closed his eyes in boredom. "Does not the admiral wish advice?" asked Delp.
T'heonax smiled. "So you don't intend to give me advice yourself, captain?"
Delp counted mentally to twenty, unclenched his teeth, and said:
"As the admiral wishes. I've been thinking about our basic strategy, and the battle here has rather alarmed me—"
"I didn't know you were frightened."
"Admiral, I . . . never mind! Look here, sir, the enemy came within two fishhooks of beating us. They had the town. We've captured weapons from them equal or superior to our own, including a few gadgets I've never seen or heard of . . . and in incredible quantities, considering how little time they had to manufacture the stuff. Then too, they had these abominable new tactics, ground fighting—not as an incidental, like when we board an enemy raft, but as the main part of their effort!
"The only reason they lost was insufficient co-ordination between ground and air, and insufficient flexibility. They should have been ready to toss away their shields and take to the air in fully equipped squadrons at an instant's notice.
"And I don't think they'll neglect to remedy that fault, if we give them the chance."
T'heonax buffed his nails on a sleek-furred arm and regarded them critically. "I don't like defeatists," he said.
"Admiral, I'm trying not to underestimate them. It's pretty clear they got all these new ideas from the Eart'honai. What else do the Eart'honai know?"
"Hm-m-m. Yes." T'heonax raised his head. A moment's uneasiness flickered in his gaze. "True. What do you propose?"
"They're off balance now," said Delp with rising eagerness. "I'm sure the disappointment has demoralized them. And of course, they've lost all that heavy equipment. If we hit them hard, we can end the war. What we must do is inflict a decisive defeat on their entire army. Then they'll have to give up, yield this country to us or die like insects when their birthing time comes."
"Yes." T'heonax smiled in a pleased way. "Like insects. Like dirty, filthy insects. We won't let them emigrate, captain."
"They deserve their chance," protested Delp.
"That's a question of high policy, captain, for me to decide."
"I'm . . . sorry, sir." After a moment: "But will the admiral, then, assign the bulk of our fighting forces to . . . to some reliable officer, with orders to hunt out the Lannach'honai?"
"You don't know just where they are?"
"They could be almost anywhere in the uplands, sir. That is, we have prisoners who can be made to guide us and give some information; Intelligence says their headquarters is a place called Psalmenbrox. But of course they can melt into the land." Delp shuddered. To him, whose world had been lonely islands and flat sea horizon, horror dwelt in the tilted mountains. "It has infinite cover to hide them. This will be no easy campaign."
"How do you propose to wage it at all?" asked T'heonax querulously. He did not like to be reminded, on top of a victory celebration and a good dinner, that there was still much death ahead of him.
"By forcing them to meet us in an all-out encounter, sir. I want to take our main fighting strength, and some native guides compelled to help us, and go from town to town up there, systematically razing whatever we find, burning the woods and slaughtering the game. Give them no chance for the large battues on which they must depend to feed their females and cubs. Sooner or later, and probably sooner, they will have to gather every male and meet us. That's when I'll break them."
"I see." T'heonax nodded. Then, with a grin: "And if they break you?"
"They won't."
"It is written: 'The Lodestar shines for no single nation.'"
"The admiral knows there's always some risk in war. But I'm convinced there's less danger in my plan than in hanging about down here, waiting for the Eart'honai to perfect some new devilment."
T'heonax's forefinger stabbed at Delp. "Ah-hah! Have you forgotten, their food will soon be gone? We can count them out."
"I wonder—"
"Be quiet!" shrilled T'heonax.
After a little time, he went on: "Don't forget, this enormous expeditionary force of yours would leave the Fleet ill defended. And without the Fleet, the rafts, we ourselves are finished."
"Oh, don't be afraid of attack, sir—" began Delp in an eager voice.
"Afraid!" T'heonax puffed himself out. "Captain, it is treason to hint that the admiral is a . . . is not fully competent."
"I didn't mean—"
"I shall not press the matter," said T'heonax smoothly. "However, you may either make full abasement, craving my pardon, or leave my presence."
Delp stood up. His lips peeled back from the fangs; the race memory of animal forebears who had been hunters bade him tear out the other's throat. T'heonax crouched, ready to scream for help.
Very slowly, Delp mastered himself. He half-turned to go. He paused, fists jammed into balls and the membrane of his wings swollen with blood.
"Well?" smiled T'heonax.
Like an ill-designed machine, Delp went down on his belly. "I abase myself," he mumbled. "I eat your offal. I declare that my fathers were the slaves of your fathers. Like a netted fish, I gasp for pardon."
T'heonax enjoyed himself. The fact that Delp had been so cleverly trapped between his pride and his wish to serve the Fleet made it all the sweeter.
>
"Very good, captain," said the admiral when the ceremony was done. "Be thankful I didn't make you do this publicly. Now let me hear your argument. I believe you were saying something about the protection of our rafts."
"Yes . . . yes, sir. I was saying . . . the rafts need not fear the enemy."
"Indeed? True, they lie well out at sea, but not too far to reach in a few hours. What's to prevent the Flock army from assembling, unknown to you, in the mountains, then attacking the rafts before you can come to our help?"
The Van Rijn Method Page 40