War of the Misread Augury: Book One of the Black Griffin Rising Trilogy

by D. S. Halyard

  Groundshaker caught a pike early on, and Sir Brant fell from the horse, even as it rolled onto his leg and pinned him. His helmet flew from his head and something struck him a terrible blow to the head, and his battle was over.

  The High Cavalier Aurix D’lio was glad that his lancers were behind the godsknights and got a good look at what was happening to them before he committed his men to joining their charge. Instead of veering to his right and coming in behind them, which was obviously just adding meat to the Cthochi’s dinner, he ordered his columns to turn left, riding at all speed along the rear of the godsknight formations and away from the disaster that had been their last maneuver. Whenever his men encountered knights afoot, they grabbed their hands and dragged them out of the battle, but this did not happen very often.

  The attack by the godsknights had put the Aulig formations into some confusion, and certainly the knights had killed many pikemen and shield holders, and this made it possible for the lancers to withdraw in good order. Aurix ordered the lancers out and away from the Cthochi front before they could be encircled and rode half a league east, to the platform on which Busker O’Hiam stood watching.

  “What now, Captain O’Hiam?” He asked the man, for the Privy Lord had put O’Hiam in charge of the battle.

  Busker looked over the field and saw that the center Cthochi hedgehog had stopped advancing to loot the dead. Even from this distance he could hear them yelling and laughing.

  “Continue with the battle plan.” Busker said. “Keep on as you were doing. We need to yield the field to them.”

  “But the knights? Should we not advance and secure their position?”

  “No.” Busker replied coldly. “You’d only be sending in men to die. If those hedgehogs stop advancing their archers will cover the field with your corpses. Harry their flanks but don’t try to stop them.”

  From his position on the north wall of the Wood Castle Horrus watched the knights fall to the advancing Cthochi pikemen, and he watched the lancers pull back. Horrus didn’t know why the Privy Lord had ordered more than half of the archers back from the west side of the river to this castle, nor did he know why the knights had been ordered to sacrifice themselves against the pikes. It looked like they had inflicted some damage on the Auligs, but not nearly enough to justify the loss of so many well-trained men and horses.

  Still, he’d just turned sixteen and knew nothing about tactical considerations. He assumed the Privy Lord knew what he was doing, and he lined up twenty arrows along the palisade and waited. He knew his job, and he meant to see it done. He had marched with his fyrde and many other archers through the long tunnel yesterday, moving at evening. Horrus hated the tunnel, and he always felt like there were tiny voices whispering and plotting down the hallways that periodically branched off from it, going to Lio knows what kind of subterranean hell.

  It had been a relief to reach the Wood Castle, even though it meant working through half the night building ramps and securing the five mangonels that shared space on the wall with the archers. He’d had a few short hours of sleep, and the piss-purples were bitching about that, but Horrus had been robbed of sleep many times during this war, and he knew it was better than being robbed of life. He looked down at the Cthochi hedgehogs and the phalanx of spearmen coming forth from the siege of Redwater to join them. Plainly whoever was in command of the Aulig army below was intent on taking the Wood Castle this time, for the lancers were clearly too few to stop them.

  For another quarter of a league the Cthochi advanced, putting them less than a hundred paces short of the stakes the engineers had driven into the ground this morning, marking the extreme range of the bowmen on the walls. Horrus watched the hedgehogs stop, and the Cthochi archers began moving forward among the pikes, many of them carrying arrows with tips made of bundles of rags soaked in pitch. Horrus was not worried about the flaming arrows yet. They had soaked the walls with brine and built up barriers of earth to ensure that they would not burn, and several dozen firemen stood on the ground behind the wall, ready to extinguish any fire that caught. The wall was still out of range for the Cthochi archers, and its elevated position ensured that Horrus would be able to shoot them long before they would get close enough to shoot back.

  Meanwhile the lancers swept the field on the flanks of the advancing Cthochi pikes, hemming them in so that they approached within a specific area. The Aulig drums changed their rhythm, and the three large pike formations marched quickly forward, crossing the line defined by the stakes.

  “Let them have it, men.” A loud voice called from midway down the wall, and Horrus saw Captain O’Hiam standing behind one of the mangonels, having ridden up to the Wood Castle after the disaster with the knights. All five mangonels bucked and heaved, threatening to tear loose from the ropes and bolts that held them in position. Buckets full of large stones leaped forward and slammed against the stops, releasing the tension in the cords that made the machines work, and a thousand pounds of deadly stone missiles fell among the advancing pike formations.

  Horrus loosed an arrow, but he did not wait to see what it hit, or if it hit anything. He could not have followed its flight anyway, for it was but one of five hundred, and they fell among the pikes with devastating effect. He grabbed another arrow, nocked it and sent it down to kill, and his second arrow was in the air almost before his first one landed.

  Horrus’ fyrde loosed five more flights before the mangonels fired again, this time flaming balls of some pitch-like substance that hit the Aulig lines and exploded, spreading fire and ruin among them. “Hold them to the tree line, boys.” Busker shouted. “Don’t let them get into the trees!”

  The Cthochi who had shields put them over their heads and advanced, but most of the men below were pikemen, and they had no shields. The great square formations melted into a formless mass before the onslaught from above, but when maybe two of every five men below had fallen, the rhythm of the drums changed again, and the pikes withdrew beyond the line of the stakes.

  “Look at that withdrawal.” Busker O’Hiam said admiringly. “Whoever their chief is, he’s done a fine job with them. He’s turned them into Mortentians.”

  Still, the stakes had marked the archers’ range, not the range of the mangonels. The fact that arrows no longer reached them meant little solace to the retreating Cthochi, for they still had another three hundred paces of retreat before they were out of range of the flying stone and burning missiles. Having seen the knights fall, the engineers spared them nothing, flinging death from on high as fast as they could load the engines, until the Cthochi finally broke formation and ran.

  “Forward men, full gallop!” Aurix commanded, and the lancers moved in swiftly, cutting across the line of the Cthochi as they ran back toward their main force. A few still carried their pikes, and one particularly disciplined little cluster managed to form a short line against the lancers, but the horsemen swept around these men to kill the Cthochi running beside them. Aurix was disappointed when he heard the horn on the wall sound the order to withdraw. The remnants of the Cthochi pikes and archers were in full flight, and he would have liked to run them down, but a large mass of Cthochi was coming up from the area around Redwater town in their support. He knew today’s battle was over.

  The godsknights were a complete loss, and Aurix was saddened by it, for he’d shared many meals with them, and he had admired their prowess and their pride. Ultimately it was their pride that killed them, of course, but still it had seemed a fine thing. He would have liked to have been one of them, but he did not come from a great house, nor could he have afforded to maintain the squires and remounts that the knights needed.

  The lancers had driven the Cthochi back well beyond the site of the earlier battle, but the Auligs had been thorough in their looting. The pale and pathetic forms of the dead knights lay still amid the bodies of their enemies and their dead horses. Already flies were gathering.

  He shook his head and rode back toward the Wood Castle.

  He wo
ke in darkness, shivering. He stared up at the cold and distant stars, and when he moved his head a tremendous pain shot through it, causing him to groan weakly. He was a strong man, but his entire body felt torn and broken, and he lay naked among the dead. He had moment of panic when he touched his stomach, for he felt the slimy mass of intestines and entrails, and he thought he had been disemboweled. But the stinking mass of entrails were not his. They belonged to his horse, perhaps, or maybe one of the other men who lay dead about him. Their presence had likely saved his life, making him appear to be one of the dead.

  He could see almost nothing, but the pale and naked forms of his former brothers in arms were dimly illuminated by the starlight. Some of them had been mutilated, with ears cut off or hair and scalp removed for trophies, but the battle had moved over this place before the Auligs could truly complete their plundering of bodies, and his scalp and ears were miraculously intact, although matted with dried blood.

  He gingerly touched his scalp and felt a large and painful bulge above and behind his right ear, a wound that must have bled copiously, for it was scabbed over and all of the hair on his head was a solid mass of dried blood. He tried to remember his name, but he couldn’t. After a moment he decided it did not matter, and he slept again.

  Hours later he awoke again to some noise, and he was Sir Brant the fallen godsknight, and he remembered. He was wracked with cold, but he felt feverish at the same time. Every light in the sky had a twin when he awoke, as did every bloodied and broken form on the ground beside him, and he knew there was something wrong with his vision. He had heard of double vision, but never experienced it, and it made moving difficult.

  The agony in his head made moving difficult, too, but he knew he must move if he wished to live, and he wished to live. The noise that had awakened him resolved itself into an animal sound, for some kind of scavengers were eating the dead. Were they wolves? Foxes? He did not know, but they were some kind of dog-kin, and they cringed and whined and fled from him when he moved, so that was all right.

  In his mind he thought he might remember other scavengers, people who had come out under cover of the night to seek among the bodies for hidden treasures, but he was not certain. Surely his former companions could be no more dead than they were, and if a few more ears or scalps were missing, he was unaware of it. Perhaps the sight of his head, coated in dried and blackened blood, had convinced the looters that he’d already been scalped, or that maybe his hair was not worth taking given the amount of cleaning it would need before it could be properly hung in a war tent or whatever these Cthochi slept in.

  What he knew was that he was on a battlefield, and that when daylight came it very well might be a battlefield again, so he had better be gone from it. He had no sense of direction in the night and he had never learned the stars, so he cast about with his eyes and his vision returned to something like normal. In the distance, on a hill, there was a line of torches. He had found the Wood Castle, and he attempted to stand so that he might walk to it. He could not stand for long, for when he attempted it his head felt like it was filled with burning oil, and every movement was agony. Slowly and methodically he began to crawl toward the line of torches.

  “Hell, boy. That was a hell of a price to pay.” Faithborn said, and Aelfric nodded agreement.

  “I know, but you yourself said that their commander was good, and that he was learning from every little skirmish. I had to teach him some lessons.”

  “But the godsknights, Aelfric? Were they part of your calculations?”

  Aelfric sighed. “We told them and told them, Aldrid.” He put his hand to his forehead and ran it through his hair. “I gave them the same order four days in a row. Do not engage the pikes. You were here when I said it. Bishop Weymort said the same thing to them half a hundred times, so did you.”

  They were sitting around a table in the expanded sleeping fort on the western side of the Redwater River, and Busker O’Hiam had just given his report from the battle. It was some time in the middle of the night, but Aelfric could not say how long it was to dawn.

  “But you knew there was a chance they would disobey.” Busker said. “Especially with Celdemer leaving. You knew it was a risk.”

  “Of course I knew. You and I spoke of the risk. But the objective is achieved, Busker. Their chief has now learned two important lessons I wanted him to learn. The first lesson is that his pike hedgehogs are invulnerable. The second one is that our forts are impossible to break. I had to convince him of that.”

  “Well, I imagine he knows it now.” Faithborn said grimly.

  “And if Eskeriel has done his job, we’re almost there.” Aelfric replied.

  Haim crouched in the forest beside the rest of his fyrde and the half dozen piss-purples of the ninth spears and waited, peering between the fronds of some dense, dark green plant. The leaves of the thing smelled sweet when he crushed them between his fingers, and he smelled his fingers surreptitiously in the darkness in the shadow of the trees. It was odd to think that his people, or at least the people on his Aulig mother’s side, came from a place like this. She had been Cthochi, and she sometimes spoke of her home in the northern woods, but Haim had never expected to see it. The fact that very soon he would likely be encountering his distant cousins in these self-same woods gave him a vague feeling of unease.

  The scout was nearly invisible in front of him, and they waited patiently for the Cthochi to come. When the little caravan did finally emerge from the forest, walking quietly down the path with an animal’s wariness, Haim didn’t even see the boy leading the little group until he was already dead, impaled on the scout’s spear. The five women attempted to run, but the spear fyrdes were spread out in a circle around the little ambush spot, and they knocked their feet from under them and held them at spearpoint until Haim arrived.

  “You.” He said. “Marus O’Gorim. This lot is yours.”

  One of the women looked at Haim and spat. “You are a turncoat.” She said in the Cthochi dialect of Kirluni, along with a stream of invective spoken so quickly that he did not understand. He ignored the insults, for he wasn’t Cthochi at all, but a free man of Mortentia, and he’d seen what the Cthochi had done to his friends.

  “You are a prisoner.” He said in his simple Kirluni. His mother had taught him only a basic understanding of the language. “You will go with this man or he will kill you.”

  Marus took charge of the four women, binding their wrists and tying them together with a single length of rope around their necks. The spearmen gathered up the fallen baskets, put the dried meat and grain back into them, and returned them to their places on the harnesses the women wore on their backs. He drove them eastward on a previously cleared path toward the expanded sleeping fort, and Redwater town.

  It had been a long night, and Haim was tired. Together with the scouts, Haim’s fyrde and half a hundred others had first followed the sounds of drums, then ambushed the Cthochi drumspeakers, killing them and throwing their large drums into fires or shattering them with axes. Some of the drums were in camps with warriors, but they were not many and they were not expecting attack. The spear fyrdes had killed them without quarter, for that was the way of this nasty war. A protective screen of sword fyrdes and spear fyrdes lay spread in two loose lines on both sides of them, a screen that was nearly ten leagues long. They kept the way clear for the captured Cthochi women to be redirected to the Privy Lord’s fort, what they called the Expanded Fort, for the mangonels had driven off the archers who had been harassing the place.

  The food was important, for Redwater had been under siege for a month and the people would be hungry. Once the bridge across the narrows was completed, the food would essentially end the siege, for the way west was now open, and the town could be supplied from the Cthochi side of the river.

  The food was not the most important part of this plan, however. They were to camp at these supply lines for five days, for with the drumspeakers killed, it would take that long for the Earthspeaker to lea
rn that the throat of his army had essentially been cut, and that no food would be coming from his southern provinces. He would have to respond, and when he did, that was the payoff.

  Haim was one of the few fyrdmen who knew the plan, and he was hardly ardent in his grudging acceptance of it. He’d seen the plan in its entirety, and there was no way that this worked without a tremendous butcher’s bill on both sides.

  Anbarius watched with satisfaction as the last planks in the bridge between the expanded sleeping fort and the besieged town of Redwater were nailed into place. The bridge was nothing so large as the one it replaced, the one the defenders of Redwater had destroyed in defense of the town and whose high supports held the ropes on which this new bridge was suspended, but it was serviceable, and horses and even small wagons could now cross it. Behind him a long column of Cthochi women waited, under a guard of spearmen, their sullen faces inscrutable in the early morning light.

  The Silver Run Army now had two ways to cross the Redwater, the secret tunnel that ran beneath it and the newly constructed bridge. His old men had been hard at work for several days, but the most skilled of them had not been working on the bridge. Instead they had been building mangonels, using the design grudgingly provided by Bendrim O’Maslit. The apprentice siege engineer had been reluctant to turn over his designs, but Anbarius had, for the very first time, imposed his will through force. He’d threatened to have the man flogged.

  Now the west wall of the expanded fort was secured by a broad perimeter of open space and five mangonels. The Aulig snipers there had been forced to move out of range of the siege engines, and that meant hundreds of paces out of bowshot. The ones who had not initially retreated had been peppered with shot until they either died or fled. The river itself was similarly secured, with half a dozen mangonels positioned so that no boat or war canoe could pass without the risk of being sunk by flying shot, and the water in the river was very cold this Leath.