The Ancient Enemy

by Christopher Rowley

  "Make room for the Veteran Sixth," bawled sergeants.

  The famous Sixth Regiment had arrived on the field, ready to save the situation as they had done so many times before.

  Grudgingly, the Blitzers gave the Sixth some of the line, and the men fresh off the ship went in hard. They hurled javelins, then smashed into the line of mots and brilbies, stepping over a dozen dead monkeys while others broke away from the line and fled back up the dune.

  Thru sent more orders for withdrawal. They needed to reorganize before the fight turned completely against them. Again the orders were sent in vain.

  Disaster loomed. Thru could see that his line was about to break. The men were already through in several places. But he could not recover control; the mots and brilbies were lost in the chaos of war. They fought in a dense mass, with spears jabbing at the gaps between shields while they pushed back and forth in a heavy scrimmage.

  The men, however, responded to orders and bugles. They were exploiting the openings in the lines, turning the flanks on either side.

  And then he heard the clatter of equipment and the thud of feet, and Toshak arrived with two more columns of mots and brilbies, brought up at the run from the nearest regiment.

  "More are coming. We must hold them here. This will be the vital point of the battle."

  Thru nodded, and ordered the catapults brought up to the dune at the double.

  A defensive line was formed. More orders were sent down to the struggling masses below, and finally a large group broke away from the main battle and started back up the dune.

  They were immediately targeted by the rows of Shasht archers lined up behind the battle. Climbing the dune, watching out for interloping men, and dodging arrows was a difficult task. Many failed, and their bodies rolled to the bottom and built up in drifts.

  The first fugitives reached the top of the dune and were welcomed through gaps in the new, disciplined line that had formed there. Behind that line they found Thru and some of the other officers waiting. Among them was the Grys Norvory, who had blood streaming from a head wound.

  More fugitives came back, but they were taking terrible casualties as the men pressed them hard. Perhaps two hundred were down, and others were bearing stab wounds and arrows in backs and shoulders. They retreated up the steep part of the slope with the men stabbing at their backs, and threw themselves into the gaps in the waiting line of mots.

  The gaps shut behind them and the men came up against the new wall of shields and disciplined stabbing spears.

  The Sixth Regiment were determined to show the Blitzers a thing or two, and they hurled themselves into it. Once again a real roar of battle went up as the two sides clashed. But most of the men were without their throwing spears, and they were fighting up a slope while standing on sand that gave way beneath their feet.

  It was a near-suicidal task. Men staggered back, again and again with stab wounds to their eyes and faces. Then catapults were pushed forward and fired down into the ranks of men while bodies were hurled back, spitted like chickens.

  It couldn't go on for long, and soon the men of the Sixth Regiment, like the Blitzers before them, discovered that they could not necessarily break a line of monkeys behind shields. The men fell back a few feet. Their disadvantage on the slope was too much for even their skills and experience to overcome. The damned catapults let go again with that chilling crack-whine noise, and there were brief shrieks as the long spears hammered home.

  General Raltt was the new commander of the army, and a nervous fellow. The situation he'd inherited from that oaf Uisbank was not good. Standing on the beach looking up the dune he could see that the Sixth Regiment was just taking casualties up there and not gaining a yard. He ordered them back, then moved on to take a look at the disposition of the other regiments.

  The Sixth were veterans and they accepted that there was just no getting around the fact that they had to retreat. So they withdrew in good order, disciplined lines moving backward while keeping shields and spears up toward the enemy.

  At the bottom they passed through the re-formed Blitzers, then they turned and re-formed behind the Blitzers.

  Sergeants bellowed for silence as the two units exchanged a few insults here and there. In truth, the Sixth and the Blitzers got along well, and often fought side by side. It was the pestilential Third and Fourth Regiments that they hated.

  All of them stood there, shields resting on the ground, spears in hand, and looked up the long slope of sand and swore to the Great God that the battle was going to be won. The sodomistic, fornicating, ass-wipe monkeys were not going to get a victory on this field!

  Unfortunately, the damned monkeys had those catapults up on top of the dune, and they could range over just about the whole fornicating beach.

  General Raltt was careful to set up his command post farther toward the city, at a point that was out of range of both the catapults on the dune top and the stone-throwing catapults on the battlements. He discovered that only an uncomfortably small area was safe from both, and stones could still skip and bounce right into the center of the command post. Twice in the first hour, Raltt and his staff had to jump up and scatter when a rock the size of someone's head came rolling through at high speed. On the second occasion it smashed the map table and ruined the map on which they'd drawn up the battle plans.

  A new table was brought up and a fresh map begun at once by the mapmaker. But the incident left everyone nervous and uncomfortable.

  Raltt cursed vehemently. There were three thousand men ashore, and they were boxed in on the plain between the city walls and the tall dunes above the beach. The monkeys effectively controlled the right and left side of the field. In front was a line formed by three regiments of monkeys, all armed with spears and shields and capable of putting up a stout resistance to a charge.

  It was going to take some miracles from Orbazt Subuus and some huge efforts by his devoted servants, the officers and men of the army of Shasht, to get them out of this one.

  At about the same time, up on the dune top, Thru was rejoined by Toshak and his exhausted staff, who had run back and forth to the city battlements and this dune many times, covering more than a mile on each trip.

  "They've just been standing there while we shoot at them."

  "Having success?"

  "Every second arrow seems to strike amongst them, but they have spaced themselves out, and most of our shots don't hit anyone."

  "Slow the rate of fire, conserve the spears. We've halted them for now. I doubt the new commander down there will risk another attack today."

  Thru nodded; as usual Toshak made sense. Thru passed orders for the catapults to slow their rate of fire.

  Toshak studied the enemy down below, drawn back into a hunched beachhead.

  "Look! They're entrenching on the plain."

  Thru saw that behind the line of spearmen other men were digging a ditch.

  "What will happen tomorrow?"

  "We will watch them leave."

  "How can you be so sure."

  "You will see, everyone will see, tonight."

  Toshak turned away with a mysterious smile. His staff rose with a few groans as he set off once more for the city.

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  That night, with the army's first wave ashore and holding a beachhead, Admiral Heuze dined with some regular companions in the admiral's cabin. There was Captain Pukh of the Anvil, there was Chalmli, chamberlain to Nebbeggebben and an invaluable source of advice concerning the Imperial Court and its agents. And there was Filek Biswas, the Surgeon General of the Fleet.

  Pukh was an excellent seaman and a fine fellow, with an interest in the arts, who had sailed with Heuze on many a voyage in the cold south seas. Most important he and Heuze shared a similar sense of humor. Much of the world they found to be simply so absurd that you had to laugh.

  Both the admiral and the captain listened agog while Chalmli described events at a feast Nebbeggebben had held just before setting out on t
he voyage.

  "So they opened the first cake and out came the maiden. A very pretty little thing. And not a slave, oh no, she was actually wellborn, and had been tricked into thinking she was going to meet the prince afterward. Such wickedness can hardly be imagined."

  And indeed, the vicious goings-on at Nebbeggebben's court were not for young things with starry visions of bedding a prince.

  "So, then they popped the second cake and out came this huge cretin from some slave farm in Pangifica."

  The captain's jaw fell open.

  "What?"

  "Oh yes, and of course the maiden is bound by silken cords at the knee so she can only take tiny steps. The cretin was all over her like some cheap gown in less than a minute. I swear everyone laughed for the next ten minutes while it went on."

  The seamen roared and pounded the tabletop.

  Filek Biswas winced. The traditional wedding feast was supposed to feature the two cakes, which when cut into would reveal a man and a woman, a married couple who would merely kiss and hug before stepping aside to polite applause. This degrading spectacle of Nebbeggebben's merely showed the depths to which the imperial family had descended. Aeswiren was a bloodthirsty thug, but all his progeny had been even worse. The city of Shasht had no doubt breathed a sigh of relief at seeing the last of Nebbeggebben. Only now, of course, they could await the eventual reign of Aurook, the second son of Aeswiren. Aurook liked to kill drugged gladiators, and boasted of killing a hundred men before his nineteenth birthday.

  "And how fares the Lord Nebbeggebben, my dear Chalmli?" said Filek after the laughter had died down.

  "Ah, well, 'tis good of you to ask, Surgeon General, but he remains weak and fretful. His appetite is low; he eats very little and keeps even less of it down."

  "I do wish he would allow an examination." Filek wondered what sort of poisons the witch doctor was giving the prince in the name of medicine.

  "He will not. Like his father, he distrusts modern medicine."

  Filek smiled and dissembled. "I understand, of course, perfectly natural response considering some of the things that go on under that name. Often the term 'modern' in today's medicine is a complete joke. There are new understandings of the body and disease, but many so-called medics ignore them."

  Chalmli nodded agreeably, full of good humor and spiced dumplings.

  "Every discipline seems split by a group that refuses any change to established procedures even though they're far behind the times. In the magics it has become a scandal. In the Arcana League the Obdurates remain in command, and will not allow any rewriting of the First Ten Words. What makes it so ridiculous is that everyone has ignored the First Ten Words for a hundred years. Thus it doesn't matter if the Obdurates give way or not, since nobody obeys the dictates anyway."

  "How does that sit with the holy priests of the Great God?" said the admiral with a roguish smile.

  "Well, of course, the priests are allied with the Obdurates. Anything that cripples the magics serves the priests well. But try as they might, they have never broken Aeswiren's links to the magic schools."

  "The priests also know that attacking the Schools of Magic upsets the witch doctors."

  "I cannot believe the priests are worried about the witch doctors. The priests have all the power now over such matters," said Filek.

  "Ah, but not in the colonies," said Captain Pukh. "We see some wild old things in the colonies. The witch doctors have the power out there it seems to me."

  Heuze chuckled. "Anyone who has been to Seducer's Island in the open season has seen things beyond the realm of the normal!"

  Captain Pukh roared, almost knocking over his goblet when he banged down a huge hand on the table.

  "Seducer's Island in the season, oh my! Oh yes."

  Heuze's servant poured more wine, and then the meal was brought in. Some porpoise had made the mistake of straying too close to the bows of the tender Slicer and had been gaffed and hauled aboard in no time.

  "Do have some of this excellent porpoise, Biswas." Heuze was happily carving thick slices from the fillet. It had been marinated in wine and then baked briefly before being flash-fried in a skillet to brown. Finally, brandy was poured over the skillet and set alight to glaze it. It was superb, medium rare with a delicate crust on the meat.

  A toast to Admiral Heuze was proposed by the captain. Then a toast to Nebbeggebben was made and Chalmli smiled on Heuze.

  "And what will General Raltt do tomorrow?"

  "Oh, I expect he'll break out of this beachhead and invest the monkey town."

  "Do you really think it's going to take a siege to capture the place?" said Chalmli.

  "I do."

  "It seems extraordinary to think that could be possible. They're only monkeys."

  "Well, they stopped the army cold this day. You've seen the report."

  Chalmli hesitated. "Well, yes."

  "We attacked their line in the morning and were beaten off. They struck lucky at midday and captured that fool Uisbank. They attacked in the afternoon, broke through but were stopped on the beach. They now hold the high ground south of the city."

  "I've heard they've got catapults up there."

  "That can be confirmed," said Filek emphatically. "Today was a very bloody day."

  "Well, we can't afford that," said Heuze, leaning forward suddenly. "We don't have the margin to allow for error now. My timetable is to get this colony ashore and in decent housing by the first snows."

  "Then a lot is resting on General Raltt's shoulders," Chalmli said before taking a sip.

  "Indeed there is. But the rest of us must do our bit, too. I know the men will make short work of them once we break up their formations and get to grips."

  "Aye, aye, absolutely, sir." Captain Pukh raised his goblet.

  "And tomorrow we will land the reserves and use our combined strength to break their lines and bring this to an end."

  "Of course, exactly what the prince would have done in your position, Lord Admiral." Chalmli raised his goblet and drank a toast to the admiral.

  "Thank you, thank you, friend Chalmli. And let me respond by toasting His Highness, the Prince Nebbeggebben, long may he live."

  None of them could mistake the honest fervor in Heuze's voice when he said this, but they understood. Nebbeggebben's survival kept the Hand away from Heuze.

  "So, tomorrow General Raltt will be given fresh troops. Then we'll winkle them out and drive the rest of them into the hills. Then we can get on with building the colony."

  "There is something that's been troubling me," said Filek.

  "And what is that?" said the admiral.

  "Are we going to eat them this time?"

  "Of course, they are good meat."

  "But they are not just animals, they are intelligent."

  "Oh, come now, surely not?" Chalmli's thick lips had drawn together in a pout.

  "I think they demonstrated it today. Did they not capture General Uisbank? Last week the general dined with us, tonight he dines at the pleasure of those monkeys."

  "If they haven't baked him on a bed of onions and eaten him, the stupid fucker!" roared Admiral Heuze.

  Captain Pukh convulsed with laughter, too, and the pair of old salts raised their glasses to each other.

  "Winning a flukey fight is not necessarily a sign of genuine intelligence," said Heuze. "After all, other creatures fight; look at army ants. Are they intelligent?"

  Filek sighed. "These creatures build cities and defend them, they make objects of such beauty that all of you are participating in an illegal market in them. How can they not be intelligent?"

  "Well now," rumbled Chalmli, "we don't know that they built anything at all. They're just living in these structures. They probably inherited them from proper men who seem to have died out in these parts. The same goes for the rugs and plates and fine things we've found. They're animals; they don't even know the value of these things."

  Filek shrugged, wishing he could believe this.


  "It doesn't matter, Biswas," said the admiral. "It doesn't matter if the monkeys made these things or not. I know you mean well, my friend, you've got a generous heart. This is not a criticism of a surgeon. You are the best surgeon in the world, Filek, you know my opinion there. But a kind heart clouds the mind's eye, see. There are always practical difficulties to consider. Our very survival depends on our landing here and seizing this land. There won't be room for both the monkeys and us, and we know that if we don't eliminate them entirely, then later on, in a century say, they'll haunt our descendants. We need to remove them from the landscape. Since they have to be slaughtered, we might as well not waste 'em, eh?"

  The admiral and captain guffawed again and thumped the table.

  "Very droll, sir, very droll," Captain Pukh toasted the admiral's wit.

  Filek knew he could not show annoyance.

  "Well, of course." He forced a smile. "That is a consideration. But surely future generations will curse us for eliminating the source of this incredible art of theirs."

  "Oh we don't know that. Art has its fashions. And anyway, we'll have been dead a long time by then. And so will the damned monkeys."

  More laughter rocked the table and Captain Pukh called at once for more wine.

  —|—

  Out in the darkness beyond the line of ships there was a cog, square-rigged with a full set of sails. But her sails were daubed with black pitch, and she was virtually invisible without moonlight.

  It was old Pebbles, a boat that had traded up and down the coast for twenty-five years. Now she was making one last trip, a short one.

  Aboard her were a crew of six, and behind her she towed a boat.

  Her hold was stuffed with bales of bush fiber, soaked in paraffin. She nosed toward the line of Shasht ships, all of them giants compared to her.

  The wind was on her beam now, and she was making good speed, moving toward the center of the line of ships. They had chosen the center in case their first target got away, in which case there would still be others inshore and within reach.