American Science Fiction

by Gary K. Wolfe

  As I hoped, this insolence rocked him back. We sat down.

  After chewing on it a moment, Huruga exclaimed: “About your prisoners. I am responsible for the safety of residents of this planet. I cannot possibly treat with creatures who hold Wersgorix captive. The first condition of any further negotiations must be their immediate release.”

  “’Tis a shame we cannot negotiate, then,” said Sir Roger via myself. “I don’t really want to destroy you.”

  “You shall not leave this place until those captives are delivered to me,” said Huruga. I gasped. He smiled coldly. “I have soldiers on call, in case you, too, brought something like this.” He reached in his tunic and pulled out a pellet-throwing handgun. I stared down the muzzle and gulped.

  Sir Roger yawned. He buffed his nails on a silken sleeve. “What did he say?” he asked me.

  I told him. “Treachery,” I groaned. “We were all supposed to be unarmed.”

  “Nay, remember no oaths were sworn. But tell his disgrace Duke Huruga that I foresaw this chance, and carry my own protection.” The baron pressed the ornate seal ring on his finger, and clenched his fist. “I have cocked it now. If my hand unclasps for any reason before ’tis uncocked again, the stone will burst with enough force to send us all flying past St. Peter.”

  Through clattering teeth, I got this mendacious message out. Huruga sprang to his feet. “Is this true?” he roared.

  “I-i-indeed it is,” I said. “B-b-by Mahomet I swear it.”

  The blue officers huddled together. From their frantic whispers I gathered that a bombshell as tiny as that sealstone was possible in theory; though no race known to the Wersgorix were skillful enough to make one.

  Calm prevailed at last. “Well,” said Huruga, “it looks like an impasse. I myself think you’re lying, but do not care to risk my life.” He slipped the little gun back in his tunic. “However, you must realize this is an impossible situation. If I can’t obtain the release of those prisoners myself, I shall be forced to refer this whole matter to the Imperium on Wersgorixan.”

  “You need not be so hasty,” Sir Roger told him. “We’ll keep our hostages carefully. You may send chirurgeons to look after their health. To be sure, we must ask you to sequestrate all your armament, as a guarantee of good faith. But in return, we’ll mount guard against the Saracens.”

  “The what?” Huruga wrinkled his bony forehead.

  “The Saracens. Heathen pirates. You’ve not encountered them? I find that hard to believe, for they range widely. Why, at this very minute a Saracen ship could be descending on your own planet, to pillage and burn—”

  Huruga jerked. He pulled an officer aside and whispered to him. This time I could not follow what was said. The officer hurried out.

  “Tell me more,” said Huruga.

  “With pleasure.” The baron leaned back in his seat, at cross-legged ease. I could never have achieved his calm. As nearly as I could gauge, Sir Owain’s boat must now be at Stularax; for recall how much slower this conversation was than I have written it, with all the translation, the pauses to explain some uncomprehended word, the search for a telling phrase.

  Yet Sir Roger spun out his yarn as if he had eternity. He explained that we English had fallen so savagely upon the Wersgorix because their unprovoked attack led us to think they must be new allies of the Saracens. Now that we understood otherwise, it was possible that in time England and Wersgorixan could reach agreement, alliance against this common menace. . . .

  The blue officer dashed back inside. Through the door flap I saw soldiery in the alien camp hurrying to their posts; a roar of awakening machines came to my ears.

  “Well?” Huruga barked at his underling.

  “Reports—the far-speaker—outlying homes saw bright flash—Stularax gone—must have been a shell of the superpowered type—” The fellow blurted it out between his pantings.

  Sir Roger exchanged a look with me as I translated. Stularax gone? Utterly destroyed?

  Our aim had only been to reave some more weapons, especially light portable ones for our men-at-arms. But if everything had vanished in smoke . . .

  Sir Roger licked dry lips. “Tell him the Saracens must have landed, Brother Parvus,” he said.

  Huruga gave me no chance. Breast heaving with wrath, amber eyes turned blood-red, he stood shaking, pulled out his handgun again and screamed: “No more of this farce! Who else was with you? How many more spaceships have you?”

  Sir Roger uncoiled himself, till he loomed above the stumpy Wersgorix like an oak on a heath. He grinned, touched his signet ring meaningfully, and said: “Well, now, you can’t expect me to reveal that. Perhaps I’d best return to my own camp, till your temper has cooled.”

  I could not phrase it so smoothly in my halting words. Huruga snarled: “Oh, no! Here you stay!”

  “I go.” Sir Roger shook his close-cropped head. “Incidentally, if for any reason I don’t return, my men have orders to kill all the prisoners.”

  Huruga heard me out. With a self-mastery I admired, he replied: “Go, then. But when you are back, we shall attack you. I do not propose to be caught between your camp on the ground and your friends in the sky.”

  “The hostages,” Sir Roger reminded him.

  “We shall attack,” repeated Huruga doggedly. “It will be entirely with ground forces—partly to spare those same prisoners, and partly, of course, because every spaceship and aircraft must get aloft and search for those attackers of Stularax. We will also refrain from using high-explosive weapons, lest we destroy the captives. But—” He stabbed a finger down upon the table. “Unless your weapons are far superior to what I think, we will overwhelm you with sheer numbers, if nothing else. I don’t believe you even have any armored wagons, only a few light ground cars captured at Ganturath. Remember, after the battle, such of your folk as survive will be our prisoners. If you have harmed a single one of those Wersgorix you hold, your people will die, very slowly. If you yourself are caught alive, Sir Roger de Tourneville, you will watch all of them die before you do yourself.”

  The baron heard me render this for him. The lips were very pale in his sunburned face. “Well, Brother Parvus,” he said in rather a small voice, “it’s not worked out as well as I hoped—though perhaps not quite as badly as I feared. Tell him that if he will indeed let us two return safely, and confine his attack to ground forces, and avoid high-explosive shells, our hostages shall be safe from anything but his own fire.”

  He added wryly: “I don’t think I could have made myself butcher helpless captives anyhow. But you need not tell him that.”

  Huruga merely jerked his head, an icy gesture, when I gave him the message. We two humans left, swung into the saddle and turned back. We held our horses to a walk, to prolong the truce and the feel of sunlight on our faces.

  “What happened at that Stularax castle, sire?” I whispered.

  “I know not,” said Sir Roger. “But I’ll hazard that the blue-faces spoke truly—and I didn’t believe it!—when they said one of their more powerful shells could wipe out an encampment. So the weapons we hoped to steal are gone. I can only pray that our poor raiders were not also caught in the blast. Now we can but defend ourselves.”

  He raised his plumed head. “Yet Englishmen have ever fought best with their backs to the wall.”

  Chapter XIII

  * * *

  SO WE rode into camp, and my lord shouted haro as if this battle had been his dearest wish. In a great iron clangor, our folk went to their stations.

  Let me describe our situation more fully. As a minor base, Ganturath was not built to withstand the most powerful forces of war. The lesser portion, which we occupied, consisted of several low masonry buildings arranged in a circle. Outside that circle were the armored emplacements of the fire-bombards; but these, being meant only to shoot upward at skycraft, were useless to us now. Underground was a war
ren of rooms and passages. There we put our children, aged, prisoners, and cattle, in charge of a few armed serfs. Such older people, or others not fit for combat, as were spry enough, waited near the middle of the buildings, prepared to carry off the wounded, fetch beer, and otherwise aid the fighting line.

  This line stood on the side facing the Wersgor camp, just within the low earthen wall erected during the night. Their pikes, bills, and axes were reinforced at intervals by squads of bowmen. The cavalry poised at either wing. Behind them were the younger women and certain untrained men, who shared out our all too few pellet weapons; the force screen made fire guns useless.

  Around us shimmered the pale heat-lightning of that shield. Behind us rose the ancient forest. Before us, bluish grass rippled down the valley, isolated trees soughed, and clouds walked above the distant hills. It all had the eerie loveliness of a landscape in Faerie. Preparing bandages with the aboveground noncombatants, I wondered why there must be hatred and killing in so sweet a realm.

  Flying craft thundered skyward and out of sight from the Wersgor camp. Our gunners dropped a few ere they were all gone. A number remained on the ground, held in reserve. They included some of the very largest transport ships. At the moment, however, my chief interest was the ground.

  Wersgorix streamed forth, armed with long-barreled pellet weapons and in well-ordered squads. They did not advance in close ranks but scattered as much as possible. Some of our folk let out a cheer at this, but I knew it must be their ordinary ground-fighting tactics. When one has deadly rapid-fire guns, one does not attack in solid masses. Rather, one employs devices to take the enemy’s guns out of action.

  Such engines were in fact present. Doubtless they had been flown hither from the central bastion of Darova. There were two kinds of these horseless war-wagons. The most numerous sort was light and open, made of thin steel, holding four soldiers and a couple of rapid-fire weapons. They ran immensely fast and agile, like water beetles on four wheels. As I saw them whip and scream about, bouncing at a hundred miles an hour over broken terrain, I understood their purpose: to be so difficult to hit that most of them could work up to the very bombards of the foe.

  However, these small cars hung back, covering the Wersgor infantry. The first line of actual attack was the heavy-armored vehicles. These moved but slowly for a powered machine, no faster than a horse could gallop. This was because of their size—big as a peasant’s cottage—and the thick steel plating which could withstand all but a direct shellburst. With bombards projecting from their turrets, with their roaring and dust, they were like unto dragons. I counted more than twenty: massive, impervious, grinding forward on treads in a wide line. Where they had passed, grass and earth were smashed into stone-hard ruts.

  I am told that one of our gunners, who had learned how to use the wheeled cannon which threw explosive shells, broke ranks and dashed for such a weapon. Sir Roger himself, now armed cap-a-pie, rode up and knocked him asprawl with his lance. “Hold on, there!” rapped the baron. “What’re you about?”

  “To shoot, sire,” gasped the soldier. “Let’s fire at ’em ere they break over our wall and—”

  “If I didn’t think our good yew bows could deal with such overgrown snails, I’d have you priming yon tube,” said my lord. “But as it is, back to your pike!”

  It had a salutary effect on the badly shaken spearmen, who stood with weapons grounded to receive that frightful charge. Sir Roger saw no reason to explain that (judging from what had happened at Stularax) he dared not use explosives at such short range, lest he destroy us, too. Of course, he should have realized that the Wersgorix would have many kinds of shell of graded potency. But who can think of everything at once?

  As it was, the drivers of those moving fortresses must have been sorely puzzled that we did not fire on them, and wondered what we held in reserve. They found out when the first war-wagon toppled into one of our covered pits.

  Two more were similarly trapped ere it was understood that these were no ordinary obstacles. Surely the good saints had aided us. In our ignorance, we had dug holes broad and deep, which by themselves would not have been escape-proof for such powerful vehicles. But then we added great wooden stakes, almost by sheer habit, as if we expected to impale outsize horses. Some of these caught in the treads which girdled the wheels, and erelong those wheels were jammed tight with wood pulp.

  Another wagon evaded the pits, which were not continuous. It approached the breastworks. A rapid-fire gun spat from it, seeking the range, and stitched small craters along our earth wall. “God send the right!” roared Sir Brian Fitz-William. His horse spurted from our lines, closely followed by half a dozen of the nearer cavalrymen. They galloped in a semicircle, just beyond reach of the gun. The vehicle lumbered in pursuit, seeking to bring its smallest-bore cannon to bear. Sir Brian got it headed the way he desired, winded his war-horn, and galloped back to shelter as the wagon plunged into a hole.

  The war-turtles drew back. In that long grass, and with our cunning camouflage, they had no way of knowing where the other traps were. And these were the only such machines on all Tharixan, not to be lightly hazarded. We English had trembled lest they continue. Only one would have had to get through to wipe us out.

  Even though his information about us, our powers, and our possible spaceborne reinforcements was scanty, I think Huruga should have ordered the heavy wagons onward. Indeed, the Wersgor tactics were deplorable in all respects. But remember that for a long time they had not fought seriously on the ground. Their conquest of backward planets was a mere battue; their skirmishes with rival starfaring nations were mostly aerial.

  Thus Huruga, discouraged by our pits but heartened by our failure to use low-power shellfire, withdrew the great cars. Instead, he sent the infantry and the light vehicles against us. His idea was plainly for them to find a path between our traps and mark it for the giant machines to follow.

  The blue soldiers came at a run, scarcely visible through the tall grass, divided into little squads. I myself, being placed far back, saw only the occasional flash of a helmet and the poles which they stuck up here and there to mark a safe channel for the heavy wagons. Yet I knew they numbered many thousands. My heart thudded within me, and my mouth longed for a beaker of ale.

  Ahead of the soldiers came racing the light cars. A few of them went into pits and at such speeds were horribly wrecked. But most sped in a straight line—straight into the stakes we had planted in the grass near our breastworks, in case of a cavalry charge.

  So fast were they traveling, the cars were almost as vulnerable to such a defense as horses would be. I saw one rise in the air, turn over, smash back to earth, and bounce twice ere it broke apart. I saw another impale itself, spout liquid fuel, and burst into flame. I saw a third swerve, skid, and crash into a fourth.

  Several more, escaping the abatis, ran over the caltrops we had scattered around. The iron spikes entered the soft rings encircling their wheels and were not to be gotten out. A car so injured could at best limp feebly from the battle.

  Commands in the harsh Wersgor tongue must have rattled over the far-speaker. The majority of the open cars, still unscathed, ceased to mill about. They drew into a loose but orderly formation, and advanced at a walking pace.

  Snap! went our catapults and crash! went our ballistae. Bolts, stones, and pots of burning oil hailed atrociously among the advancing vehicles. Not many were thus disabled, but their line wavered and slowed.

  Then our cavalry charged.

  A few of our horsemen died, caught in a storm of lead. But they had not far to gallop to reach the enemy. Also, the grass fires started by our oil pots confused Wersgor vision with their heavy smoke. I heard a clang and boom as lances burst against iron sides, then had no more chance to watch that struggle. I know only that the lancers failed to disable any car with their shafts. However, it startled the drivers so much that these often failed completely to defend themselve
s against what followed. Rearing horses brought down hoofs, to crumple the thin steel plates; a few quick swipes of ax, mace, or sword emptied a vehicle of its crew. Some of Sir Roger’s men used handguns to good effect, or small round shells which burst and scattered jagged fragments when thrown after a pin was released. The Wersgorix had similar weapons, of course, but less determination to use them.

  The last cars fled in terror, hotly pursued by the English riders. “Come back, there!” bellowed Sir Roger at them. He shook the fresh lance given him by his esquire. “Come back, you caitiff rogues! Stand and deliver, you base-born heathen!” He must have been a splendid sight, gleaming metal and fluttering plumage and blazoned shield upon the restless coal-black stallion. But the Wersgorix were not a knightly folk. They were more prudent and forethoughtful than we. It cost them dearly.

  Our horsemen must quickly retreat, for now the blue foot was close, firing their guns as they pulled into larger masses for the assault on our breastworks. Armor was no protection, only a bright target. Sir Roger bugled his men to follow him, and they scattered out onto the plain.

  The Wersgorix set up a defiant cheer and rushed. Across the seething confusion of our camp, I heard the archer captains howl their command. Then the gray goose flock went skyward with a noise as of mighty winds.

  It came down, gruesomely, among the Wersgorix. While the first arrow flight was still rising, the second was on its way. A shaft with so much force behind it pierces the body and comes out on the other side with its broad cutting head all bloody. And now the crossbows, slower but still more powerful, began to mow down the nearest attackers. I think that during those last few moments of their charge, the Wersgorix must have lost half their folk.

  Nonetheless, dogged almost as Englishmen, they ran on to our very wall. And here our common men-at-arms stood to receive them. The women fired and fired, pinning down a goodly part of the foe. Those who came so close that guns were useless, must face ax, spear, billhook, mace, morningstar, dagger, and broadsword.