“Ladders!”
The four ladders thumped against the top of the wall, and men started running up them.
Horace bellowed a warning. “Attack! Attack on the north wall!”
They could hear the rattle of feet on the assault ladders as men swarmed up and over the top of the palisade. The two defenders raced down their own ladder, then grabbed it and hurled it clear of the walkway. At the same time, Horace bellowed another order.
“Beacons! Now!”
On the north wall, the three torches that had been sitting on top of the braziers were tipped onto the oil-soaked wood. There was a brief pause, then a flash of flame as the wood took fire.
The light flared up, revealing a mass of some twenty men on the walkway. Instantly, the archers on the east and west walls drew, aimed and shot. A storm of arrows slammed into the attackers as they bunched together. Four of them went down immediately. The others fanned out left and right as more men rolled over the top of the wall to join them. The backlit figures raced for the ends of the walkway, expecting to find stairs down into the compound below. Instead, they found a three-meter gap between them and the east and west walls and a sheer drop below them, with no way down.
More arrows slammed into them as they hesitated. More men went down. The others huddled behind their shields, staggering under the impact as the powerful bows slammed their arrows into the metal and wood. Then their leader, realizing what had happened, shouted a new order.
“Get the ladders! Get them over this side!”
Covered by their comrades’ shields, his men reached up and hauled two of the attack ladders over and inside the fort, letting them slide into the compound below the walls. Their leader ran to be first down one of the ladders. But, five paces short of it, he was struck by an arrow and hurled back against the rough timbers of the palisade. His men, however, followed his orders and began to pour down the ladders in a solid stream.
“Damn! I didn’t think of that!” Horace muttered. He had been heading to join the archers on the eastern wall, but now he stopped as the raiders began to clamber down the ladders into the fort. The ten troopers left to face them moved forward with their lances ready. But they’d only ever been intended as a mopping-up operation, and the Foxes surged forward, deflecting the lance points with their shields, battering and hacking at the lances with swords and axes.
Once the lances were deflected, their length became a disadvantage, and the troopers hurriedly discarded them, struggling to clear their swords from their scabbards.
“Gilan!” shouted Horace. “Come on!”
The Ranger Commandant had been heading for his own assigned post when he heard Horace’s call and turned to see the struggling mass of men at the base of the wall. As more of the raiders came down the ladders, the archers on the east and west walkways were forced to stop shooting, for fear of hitting their own men.
Drawing his sword in his right hand, and his saxe in his left, and muttering a low curse, Gilan dashed forward to join Horace.
The two warriors stood shoulder to shoulder, facing the attackers as they gathered at the foot of the ladders. For a moment, the raiders hesitated, studying their enemies, then they surged forward. Their choice of opponent seemed simple. On their left was Horace—tall, muscular and wearing mail armor and helmet, armed with a long, gleaming sword and a round buckler. Many of them recognized the Kingdom’s foremost knight. To their right was Gilan—slim and agile, armed only with a sword and a saxe. The attackers veered toward him, sensing he was the easier target.
It was a mistake. Horace might have been the champion knight of the Kingdom, with a long reputation of victories in battle and single combat. But Gilan was an expert swordsman. As a boy, he had trained under the legendary swordmaster MacNeil, and he had maintained his skill with the weapon ever since—the only Ranger who was permitted to carry a sword.
He was blindingly fast. In addition, he was agile and light on his feet. Now, as the first two raiders moved to attack him, he advanced to meet them. His action was unexpected. Most men facing two advancing opponents would instinctively retreat. For a moment, they were startled, but then they recovered quickly.
The first lunged at him with a sword. He was on Gilan’s left side, which the Red Fox warrior felt was relatively unprotected. Without even looking at him, Gilan caught the sword blade on his saxe and deflected it downward, maintaining contact and jamming the longer blade against the ground. Even as he nullified this threat, his own sword darted out at the attacker on his right. He had seen a gap between the man’s shield and his shoulder. Gilan’s sword, gleaming blood-red in the smoky firelight, struck like a viper, driving into the man’s upper body, piercing the chain mail there. The swordsman gasped and stepped back, stumbling as he did so. In the same fraction of a second, Gilan freed his sword and swung in a diagonal overhead cut at the man on his left. The stroke went home and the man fell to his knees, crying out in pain and shock. Then he toppled sideways.
In the space of a few seconds, Gilan had dispatched two of the raiders. Their companions realized their mistake too late and began to back away. Gilan’s speed and accuracy had caught them by surprise, and none of them wished to face the Ranger.
But now it was Horace’s turn to engage and he surged forward. He was big and powerful, and every bit as fast as Gilan. He slammed his shield into one man, sending him sprawling, and taking down one of his comrades as he went. Then Horace brought his razor-sharp, super-hard sword whistling down in an overhead stroke. The man it was aimed at raised his own sword in defense and was horrified to see Horace’s sword slice through his blade as if it were soft wood.
The man screamed and fell, mortally wounded. But Horace barely paused. He continued his charge into the enemy ranks, his sword flashing from side to side in a deadly series of arcs, his buckler deflecting and blocking the blows aimed by his opponents, or slamming into shields and sending their owners flying, seemingly without his needing to think about it.
Then Gilan joined in again, cutting and thrusting with blinding speed, and the two of them mowed down the attacking force like harvesters cutting down a crop of wheat. Men stumbled and fell. Shields splintered, sending pieces of wood and leather spinning in the air.
And the enemy turned tail, heading for the ladders that had given them access to the fort. They bunched at the foot of the ladders, the rearmost men turning to face the two deadly attackers, the first to reach the ladders scrambling back up to the northern walkway.
Even the Araluen troops were stunned by the deadly efficiency of the two companions. They stood back, knowing they weren’t needed, watching in awe as the invaders fell away beneath the two flashing, whirling swords.
“Let ’em go,” Horace called finally, and he and Gilan lowered their swords as the panicking raiders pushed and shoved one another out of the way to reach the relative safety of the walkway.
Relative safety only. Once they reached the timber platform, they were exposed once more to the deadly shafts from the archers. The first few to arrive there, thinking they were finally safe from the two grim swordsmen below, neglected to keep their shields up. They paid for the mistake with their lives, falling, riddled with arrows, to the rough planks.
The leader of the attack, who had been hit by an arrow when he led the initial charge toward the ladders, lay slumped against the parapet, his vision slowly fading as he watched his men stumble and stagger to the two ladders remaining on the outside of the wall. Those who didn’t make it in time to avoid the congestion there simply hurled themselves over the parapet, preferring to risk the fall rather than the deadly hail of arrows from the east and west walkways.
Horace leaned on the hilt of his sword as the last of the attackers fled over the wall. He took his helmet off and pushed his mail coif back off his head, letting it fall in folds around his neck. He didn’t exult in the mayhem he and Gilan had caused among the attackers, but he knew
that their swift and brutal action had been necessary. The attackers had been on the verge of gaining the advantage as they swarmed down into the compound. Had that happened, the result might have been very different. If he and the Ranger Commandant hadn’t intervened and broken the attack, the Red Fox Clan might now be pressing for their surrender, with Horace’s men scattered dead on the sandy compound floor. He looked to his left and met Gilan’s steady gaze. He sensed that the Ranger was sharing his thoughts.
“Good work,” he said quietly.
Gilan nodded. “I might say the same to you.”
It had been some time since the two had fought side by side against a ruthless enemy like this. Horace watched as Gilan wiped his sword blade clean on the cloak of one of the fallen men. “I’d forgotten how fast you are,” he said.
Gilan gave him a faint smile. “I’d forgotten how terrifying you are,” he said. “What did the Nihon-Jan call you—the Black Bear, wasn’t it?”
“That was more to do with my appetite than my battle skills,” Horace replied. Then he turned away as a sergeant approached and saluted. “Yes, Nilson?”
“Casualty report, sir. We lost two troopers when the enemy first got to the compound floor. Three others are slightly wounded. No casualties among the archers, of course.”
“Of course,” said Horace. The archers hadn’t been engaged in the hand-to-hand fighting, and the enemy hadn’t had any long-distance weapons. “How did the opposition make out?”
“Not so well, sir. I’ve counted a dozen dead and another eight wounded. Some of those who made it back over the wall were probably wounded as well.”
“That makes it a costly raid for them, doesn’t it?” Horace commented. “And to think they were planning on whittling down our numbers.” He indicated the scaling ladder, still leaning against the inner side of the walkway. “Better get some men onto the north wall to keep an eye on them, Nilson. Not that I expect them to be back in a hurry. Pull their ladders up and inside. We may as well use them.”
“Yes, sir.” The sergeant saluted again and turned away to organize a watch on the wall.
Horace wiped the back of his hand across his forehead and spoke to Gilan. “I’ll call a truce tomorrow morning,” he said. “We’ll let them have their wounded men back. We don’t have the men to guard them or look after them.”
He leaned back, stretching stiff muscles, and rubbing the small of his back with one fist.
“Then, tomorrow night, we’ll see what Maddie has to say about matters,” he said.
17
Vikor Trask, commander of the besieging force, looked at the sorry group of men slumped on the ground before him and scowled.
They were the survivors of the ill-fated raid on the hill fort the previous night. They were battered and bleeding, some with multiple wounds roughly bandaged by their companions. All of them sat with their eyes downcast, not wishing to meet his gaze.
When they had straggled back into the Red Fox camp in the early hours of the morning, Trask refused them permission to return to their tents and rest. Furthermore, he forbade his healers to help them with their wounds. Instead, he made them stay here, on the rough assembly ground in front of the camp, without warmth or shelter, without firewood or food. Grudgingly, he allowed some of the other men in camp to bring them water, but that was all.
“Let them think about how they’ve failed me,” he told one of his lieutenants, when the man protested at the cruel treatment of wounded, exhausted men.
Trask was a Sonderlander, and the leader of the group of mercenaries who had answered Dimon’s call for assistance. By dint of the fact that his Sonderlanders made up the majority of the besieging force—there had been one hundred and ten of them in the original group, compared with forty-three local recruits—he had been placed in command of the combined force.
But he was not a good commander.
He was an experienced fighter, having served as a mercenary on the Iberian peninsula and in several campaigns in Gallica. But in those battles, he had been under the command of capable local leaders, who would determine the tactics to be used and set him with simple tasks to carry out. Never, in those battles, had he sought to study or analyze the tactics his commanders were using, or why they might be using them. Trask was a blunt instrument. His favored method in battle—indeed, his only method—was a frontal assault that relied on overwhelming numbers to be successful. He was inflexible and unimaginative, two fatal flaws in any field commander. Worse, he was a vain man, and he failed to recognize his own shortcomings.
Early in this campaign, at the aborted river crossing, he had been wounded in the arm by an arrow. It was only a slight wound, and it was largely due to his being unused to fighting against archers. Trask had known that Araluen, unlike any of the other western countries, employed a large contingent of archers among their fighting men. But in his opinion, archers were skulking cowards, who would sneak around the outskirts of a battle, shooting men from cover, then fading away at the first sign of a real attack. Although many of his men carried hunting bows, Trask had no comprehension of the power and range of the Araluen war bow. Nor did he have an idea that a force of twenty trained archers could put a storm of sixty or eighty arrows into the air in under ten seconds, with the last arrows already launched before the first volley struck home.
A good commander, knowing he was facing an Araluen force, might have inquired about the capacity of Araluen archers to sway a battle and devised tactics to nullify them. But Trask, as has been stated, was not a good commander.
He glared now at the bedraggled men huddled on the hard, dusty ground before him.
None would meet his gaze. They knew what was coming. His idea of leadership was to hector and rant at the men he commanded when they failed to do his bidding. They may have tried bravely to overcome the enemy—and indeed, many of them had. But that counted for nothing with Trask. They had not just failed. They had failed him. And that he took as a personal insult.
“Cowards!” he roared at them now, unable to restrain himself any further. “Cowards and poltroons. You failed me! I set you a simple task and you failed! Can any of you offer an excuse for that?”
Nobody stirred. Nobody met his furious gaze. They all knew that if they tried to explain how they had been ambushed, stranded on the walkway and decimated by the archers, he would simply brush aside their explanations and scream more insults and abuse at them. That was his way. That had always been his way.
He looked around the haggard faces, seeking one in particular—one he could pin the blame on.
“Where is Bel?” he demanded. Ruka Bel had been the commander of the raid. Indeed, he had planned the whole thing. He was a young officer among the Sonderlanders. Unlike his leader, he was a clever tactician, capable of making a plan and then adapting to unexpected situations when the battle was joined.
And there were always unexpected situations in any battle.
“Where is he?” Trask screamed. He needed someone to blame for the debacle and Bel was the logical choice. If the attack had failed, it was because the leader of the attack had failed. Trask strode among the survivors, shoving them, pulling their downcast faces up to his to identify the man who had betrayed him. But there was no sign of Ruka Bel.
“He’s dead,” a voice told him, and he whirled to face the direction from which it had come.
“What do you mean, dead?” It was a stupid question. But Trask was a stupid man.
“He was hit by an arrow as we were trying to get down into the compound,” a second man told him.
“So you left him?” Trask accused them. “You deserted your leader?” He could hardly use the dead Bel as a scapegoat—but Bel could become an instrument with which he could berate and accuse these sad excuses for soldiers.
“He was dead,” a third man said. There was a hint of rebellion in his voice, as if he realized where Trask was heading.
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br /> “So you say. And you’re lying. A single arrow wouldn’t kill a man like Bel. He was a true soldier! A hero! And you deserted him. You ran! You turned tail and ran! And you left your leader wounded and bleeding when you did.”
There was no reply. None of them would meet his gaze. He glared around at them, and as he did so, his gaze fell on one of his servants, making his way through the crouching, huddled men. The servant held up a hand to signal Trask.
“What is it?” the commander asked roughly, beckoning him forward.
“General, there’s a flag of truce over the fort, and one of their commanders is standing outside the gate.”
A flag of truce? Trask felt an unexpected surge of hope. Perhaps Bel’s raid—he already thought of it as Bel’s raid, not his own—had caused more damage, more casualties, than they had thought. If the Araluens were suing for terms, perhaps he could salvage something from this disastrous expedition.
For, angry as he was, Trask could sense the mood of his men. They were dejected and morose. The fact that his treatment of them might have had a lot to do with this didn’t occur to him. He knew mercenaries needed victory in the field if they were to maintain their enthusiasm and commitment. But this small force of Araluen regulars had thwarted him at every turn. Unless he could do something to change his run of defeats, his men would begin melting away, deserting into the thick forests that surrounded them.
He hurried through the camp, his anger at the failed attacking force put on hold for the moment. Reaching his pavilion, he shaded his eyes and peered up the hill. As his servant had said, there was a white flag flying over the gateway, and a tall warrior, dressed in armor and wearing a sword, stood on the upper terrace of the hill. Beside him stood another figure, dressed in drab green and gray, wearing a strange mottled cloak and carrying one of those accursed longbows. It was those last two items that identified him. He was one of the mysterious Rangers of Araluen, Trask realized. He’d heard of them but, typical of the man, he knew little about them, other than a few fanciful rumors and legends.
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