More arrows swished past, and Rankin repressed the urge to duck or flinch. He wouldn’t display any sign of weakness. He carried no shield, and with his gleaming breastplate-emblazoned with the image of the Sword-and his silver helm, he made a conspicuous target. But it was important to him that the men see their commander’s courage and take heart from his example, so he remained erect and continued to press forward, even amid the hailstorm of deadly missiles. Perhaps Kiri-Jolith had protected him with an immortal shield, for even as his aides and escorting knights were struck down, the general himself remained unscratched as his horse finally plunged through the shallows, churning through water as it heaved toward the gentle, graveled bank.
The edge of the river here was dry and firm, unlike so many other stretches where the banks were muddy and choked with reeds. Now, along with Rankin, the first rank of his troops struggled out of the river, swords drawn.
Hoarse cheers erupted from the men as they made a ragged charge into the waiting defenders.
“Solanthus!”
“For the Swords!”
“By the Oath and the Measure!”
These men, many of whom called that besieged city their home, hurled themselves at the enemy with a vengeance.
A whole row of human fighters, formerly pledged to Mina’s army, met them with their own steel unsheathed. Within moments a tremendous melee raged along the river’s edge. More and more of Rankin’s men surged forward, and the defenders’ line slowly yielded. Grotesque leers, growling determination, and frantic slashing and stabbing rippled along the ranks. In places the Dark Knights fell back, stabbed and bleeding, but in other parts of the line, the Solamnics faltered, with many of the dead and wounded rolling right back into the river.
Even so, the fury of the attack was carrying Rankin’s men forward. He sensed the weakness in the defending line and steered his men to exploit the gaps.
“Knights of the Sword-form ranks, multiple lines abreast! Charge!” cried the general.
The armored knights of the Newforge Regiment, on heavy chargers, came hard behind the footmen. The infantry was well drilled, and the line separated in many places, the swordsmen forming tight squares with the waves of knights charging between them.
Relieved to be on dry ground, Rankin yelled exultantly. His sword raised, he led a contingent of knights right through the enemy line. The general himself cleaved a man from forehead to sternum with one blow. Overwhelmed by the armored riders, the defenders stumbled back. Many were trampled under the heavy hooves, while others were cut down from behind as they tried, with utter futility, to outrun the horses.
But now there were more humans joining the enemy line. Rankin saw the long shafts, tipped with gleaming steel heads and razor-sharp blades, and his heart fell. He grimaced in dismay, but there was nothing else to do, no choice but to continue.
There was only one infantry formation that could stop a charge of knights, and that was a disciplined formation of pikemen. The enemy captain had prepared a three-rank line of pikemen some three hundred yards long. The men in front knelt, those in the second line crouched, and those in the rear stood. All of them held their long-shafted weapons securely braced against the ground, with the heads of the pikes forming a lethal hedgerow of deadly steel. The pikemen blocked the army’s path onto the plain.
“Ride them down!” cried Rankin, hoisting his sword and steering his horse with his knees. Hundreds of knights joined him in shouting as they thundered forward.
There was really no alternative. Retreat, back into the river, through the hail of arrows, would be ignominy. To General Rankin, it was the pikemen or certain death.
“Form on me!” he cried as his own signalman raised his horn and brayed a call that echoed up and down the line. “Men of Solanthus-those wretches stand between us and our city! Ride them down!”
It seemed as though the wind itself ceased to blow, holding its breath for the results of the clash, as the line of knighthood plunged toward the immovable array of pikes.
General Markus watched his Rose Wing column as they crossed at the south ford, meeting fierce resistance. Then the commander’s attention was drawn elsewhere.
He called Sir Templar over.
“The bridging company is in position. Do what you can to give them cover,” he ordered. “And do it quickly.”
“Yes, General!” replied the young Clerist. “I believe I have something that will work. I have posted my apprentices along the shore, and if I can just summon-”
“Don’t tell me about it; show me,” Markus barked.
“Yes, of course, sir! Right away!”
The cleric-knight hastened away. The general turned to watch his attacking troops as they battled at the far side of the ford, making little headway. This spearhead was only a small fraction of the Rose Wing force and did not include any of his armored knights; the bulk of his troops would be hurled across the bridge once it was in place. How long that would take was anybody’s guess, for a bridge had never been tried on a river this large.
Only a few moments later, Markus noticed a hazy mist gathering along the reedy bank north of the ford. The massive pontoons of the bridge sections were hidden in those reeds, he knew, and he felt hopeful as he watched the haze thicken into a genuine, obscuring fog. Whatever the cleric and his men were doing, it seemed to be working. From his position a quarter mile away, he couldn’t see even the riverbank any longer, much less the activity going on there.
Markus mounted and rode quickly to Captain Perrin, the chief of the bridging company. “Look sharp, lads,” he called, with avuncular firmness. “Go there. Now bring in the next one. Now, another, and then the next. Hurry up, fellows!”
One by one, the sections were floated out from the shore. The tubes of the pontoons were aligned perpendicular to the river’s flow, allowing the current to slip past without exerting a lot of pressure on the bridge. After six of them had been put in place, Captain Perrin himself supervised the dropping of a heavy anchor into the silty mud. Another was placed after twelve pontoons were extended. As the sections extended farther out from the shore, these anchors would help to ensure that the span remained in position, as the bridge steadily progressed toward the opposite bank.
Simultaneously, as each new pair of pontoons were arranged, additional troops maneuvered planks across the pieces of lumber and hastily lashed them together. The boards were long and thick, necessarily heavy because the bridge was designed to allow the crossing of mounted knights. Moment by moment the bridge grew across the wide but placid flowage.
The fog remained thick and obscuring, spilling farther and farther across the river as the bridge building continued. As the span passed the halfway point, the general rode out on the bobbing but secure construction and approved the work. When he saw daylight penetrating the fog past the middle of the river, he ordered Templar to come forward, and as the construction proceeded, the cleric remained near the steadily advancing end of the bridge, maintaining the magical fog as more and more sections were laid.
Meanwhile, the troops crossing at the ford continued to suffer heavy casualties. A messenger came back across, asking permission to retreat, but with a heavy heart the general ordered them to remain steadfast. Their sacrifice, he desperately hoped, would not be in vain. Each life lost distracted their foe from the unnatural fog, and the encroaching bridge, ensuring that the enemy remained fixed upon the fording troops.
Markus rode back to the west bank, galloped down to the ford, and sent yet another company into that lethal stretch of water. As they departed, determined to sell their lives at a high cost, he saw his bridging officer approaching at a gallop.
“The bridge is ready, sir!” Captain Perrin reported finally.
“Knights of the Rose-here is your road to victory! Charge!” ordered General Markus, standing aside to watch his armored riders start across. The plank road bobbed and shifted under the hooves of the heavy horses, but the bridge held, and the knights thundered across the river, toward the
east bank, the enemy lines, and the besieged city beyond.
“Fall back!” General Dayr’s heart broke. He gagged on the bile raised by the bitterness of defeat. How many boats had been lost? How many men had drowned or been slain by the rain of arrows? The survivors of his wing were trapped on a small section of the riverbank, fighting for their lives against the continual attacks of the goblin cavalry on their savage, lupine mounts. The snarling jaws of the wolves snapped and drooled practically in his face, and he cut down yet another of the brutes with a chopping blow of his sword. Shaggy and fierce, the size of small ponies, the savage wolves were fleet and fearless and even more deadly than their goblin riders.
Moment by moment more men fell, trying to hold their tenuous position on the bank. For most of the afternoon his brave troops had stood firm, but the small section of dry ground they held shrank with each vicious attack. Several hundred boats were clustered along the bank just in the rear of the battle line, and it seemed the only alternative to annihilation was to load them up with his surviving troops and begin to retreat, back across the river toward the safety of their starting positions.
It galled the proud General of Crowns, but thousands of painted, beastly warriors, crowing and howling in exultation, pressed them from all sides, and Dayr knew it was better to bring some of his men back alive than to lose them all in a hopeless cause.
“Into the boats!” he ordered. “We’re going to retreat.”
The withdrawal was chaotic, swords clashing against goblin shields in the muddy-and bloody-waters at the edge of the river. Men scrambled into the boats so hastily that some of them foundered, and it was only by shouting themselves hoarse that the sergeants and captains were able to bring a semblance of order. Finally the last of the little craft pushed away from the bank, the men paddling through waters they had crossed at cost, while the whole east bank of the river was lined with jeering, hooting goblins.
“They may have used up most of their arrows,” suggested Captain Johns, one of Dayr’s few surviving commanders. Indeed, the barrage that had blanketed them on their initial approach was a desultory shower now. But that was the only thing Dayr could be thankful for. He was leaving behind more than a thousand brave men, and as the last boat pushed away, he had not gained even a single foot of ground to show for those lives.
“Stand firm, there! Raise those shields! Here they come again!”
General Rankin issued his orders from his charger, the weary, bloodied horse still trotting smartly as it carried him back and forth behind the lines of his companies, the men who had fought their way across the great central ford. They had gained the far bank, but his units had progressed no more than a hundred yards from the river’s edge. With a line barely a quarter mile long, he knew that his army was in a desperate circumstance.
The cause of their frustration, he knew, was that wall of pikemen. Hundreds of his knights and their horses had fallen there, pierced by the keen steel tips. The veteran human warriors who gripped those shafts were schooled in Mina’s armies. Rankin’s riders had assaulted them many times, desperate to break through the lines, to shatter the enemy army and race onto the plains.
But the enemy’s determination was strong. Rankin himself had led several charges, had tried to fight his way toward the enemy commander-a former Knight of Neraka he recognized as a man named Blackgaard. Each time, the pikes had drawn tight, an impermeable barrier that cut down any brave riders who dared to come close.
In the end, the Army of the Sword had been forced back to the riverbank. Here they held, exacting a bloody toll on the enemy whenever Blackgaard sent forward a contingent in an effort to drive them into the water. But all they could do was hold their ground, try to stay alive, and pray for relief from one of the other wings of the Solamnic Army.
Without a breakthrough somewhere, it seemed the whole Army of Solamnia was doomed.
“Charge!” cried General Markus. “Caergoth Steelshields, carry the day!”
The planks of the bridge thrummed and vibrated underfoot as the column of armored knights, charging only six abreast because of the narrow span, thundered toward the east bank of the great river. They burst out of the mist, galloping from the edge of the bridge onto dry land.
A small company of goblins, apparently designated to investigate the mysterious fog, stood at the edge of the bridge, but they were smashed without even slowing the momentum of the charge. Warhorses pounded on, cutting down the terrified defenders in their path. The few panicked goblins who turned to flee fared miserably as they were chopped down by swords before they could take more than a couple of steps.
Sir Templar, exhausted, collapsed at the side of the bridge but raised a hoarse cheer as the file of riders continued to thunder past. Others of his Clerist company filed onto the bridge to come and join him, all of them cheering as the knights galloped across.
Ashore, Markus bade his mounted men to form companies. The first three of these he directed southward, to ride to the aid of the beleaguered troops trapped at the eastern end of the ford. The others, as they came across, he dispatched across the plains, or northward to link up with the forces of General Rankin, commanding the center of the great attack.
“General! They’re sending fire ships!”
The alarm was brought to him by a breathless messenger. Markus looked onto the river and saw several massive barrages, ablaze, drifting along with the current. In another few moments they would come into contact with the wooden-flammable-bridge.
Once again it was Sir Templar and his knight-priests who came to the rescue. The young cleric roused himself and started to weave another spell. Within moments a cloud took shape in the air, dark and glowering, that hovered directly over the blazing barges. Soon a light drizzle started to fall from that cloud, and the rain quickly became a soaking shower. Soon the fire rafts merely sizzled, steaming heaps of ash, drifting harmlessly, utterly doused. Carried by the current, they eventually nudged against the pontoons, but presented no threat to the bridge or the attacking Rose Army.
The Rose Knights were all across now, and the columns of infantry came behind. They, too, spread across the plain. Hundreds of men rode toward the horizon, unimpeded by defenders.
An officer rode up from the south, and Markus recognized one of his captains, a man whose company had been attacking at the ford.
“How fares the crossing?”
“The knights who came across the bridge made a flank attack, General, and carried away the defenders at the edge of the ford. Our men are advancing to the east even as we speak.”
Only then did Markus relax. He eased himself from his saddle, for the first time noticing the aches and weariness of a long day’s battle. But the fight had been worth it.
The Army of Solamnia was across the Vingaard.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
THE DUCHESS
‘Use that whip, dammit!” barked Dram Feldspar, as the heavy freight wagon struggled through the last leg of the ford over the Vingaard River.
The hill dwarf teamster in the driver’s seat, already lashing his team of six oxen for everything he was worth, didn’t bother to reply to the mountain dwarf. Instead, he roared at the beasts, hauled on the reins, and called the laboring animals every manner of vile name. The massive bovines responded by lowering their heads, straining in their harness, and hauling the massive wagon up the bank and out of the water. Rivulets streaming from the cargo bed, the wagon rumbled and skidded into the ruts on the muddy road.
“Now you, there-move!” shouted Dram, turning to the next-and last-in the long line of wagons. He reached up to grasp the bridle of the massive draft horse leading the team and tugged until his face turned an alarming beet red, as if by dint of his own strength he could pull the animal and heavy wagon where he wanted it to go.
Whatever small contribution he made, it worked. The four big horses pulling this last wagon surged and strained, and finally pulled free of the river. The broad, hair-skirted hooves of the team churned through mud, an
d the wagon rocked and jolted through the ruts worn by the wheels of previous vehicles, finally rumbling onto the plains road.
Dram’s legs were about ready to give out. Sweat ran in his eyes, and his left shoulder throbbed where he had been kicked early on in the fording process. But finally the entirety of the huge wagon train was across the Vingaard and rolling toward the distant heights of the Garnet Mountains. The big vehicles carried everything needed to rebuild the Compound on its new site, including all of the raw materials, equipment, and personnel to resume operations. Fortunately, as they moved away from the river, the roadway hardened and the dry, solid ground allowed the laboring beasts to pick up speed.
Wearily Dram returned to his horse, where it was being held by a young hill dwarf. Normally he detested traveling by horseback, but now he was honestly grateful to pull himself up into the saddle and to let the animal carry him along. He rode a stocky, short-legged gelding-little more than a pony, actually-but the gruff mountain dwarf had become rather fond of the steed during the long days of riding across the plains.
Now he spurred the gelding into a trot, conscious of the fact he looked far from graceful as he clutched the reins with one hand and the bridle with the other. The saddle jarred and shifted beneath him, and it was all he could do to keep his balance. But it was important he catch up with the head of the column, already several miles away across the plain.
He jounced and bounced past dozens of large wagons. Many were hauled by teams of draft horses. These contained the household supplies as well as food and other sustenance (thirteen wagons hauled thirty-two casks of beer, each) for the whole community that lived and worked in the Compound. The even larger freight wagons, hauled by teams of oxen, carried the vast stockpiles of precious black powder, as well as the charcoal, saltpeter, and sulfur that were the raw materials of Dram’s work.
Other oxen dragged massive timbers of ironwood, hewn from the coastal forests and first hauled up and over the Vingaard range, now drawn hundreds of miles to the east, following Jaymes’s orders to reestablish the Compound in the Garnet Mountains. The Compound had been closed down and packed up in a little more than week, and by that time Dram’s agents had returned after purchasing every wagon within a hundred miles.
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