The result was much the same.
The cavalry powered into the running pickets, spearing some, slashing at others with their swords and in one or two cases just running them down under churning hooves. Convocus found himself part of the carnage, his horse leaping, trying to jump a wounded warrior who had fallen to his knees, but instead catching the man’s head with a hoof mid-jump, killing him instantly.
It was over in a matter of moments, and the horsemen raced on through the forest avenue. The track, still showing the marks of yesterday’s passage, curved to the right, following a contour, passed a small waterfall that created a stream which fell through the woods to the river. And suddenly the enemy were before them.
Still among the forefront of the force, Convocus rounded that gentle curve to see the most welcome sight for which he could have hoped. The enemy encampment’s rearmost section. In the distance, on the hillside, he could see gathered pack beasts and rough native carts – the enemy baggage. That meant…
The tribune’s smile widened as they emerged from the treeline into the wide grassy area surrounding the former northern end of the bridge where the imperial soldiers had been so brutalised the previous day.
And close by, some distance back from the bulk of the enemy force, there rose the timber skeletons of bolt throwers, catapults and ammunition carts. Native warriors, unarmed and frantic, swarmed over them, changing settings, reloading and releasing shots.
Best of all, it seemed that the enemy was in something of an uproar, which meant that despite their proximity, none of the natives had heard the desperate calls of warning from their pickets or the drumming of hooves coming ever closer.
The first the natives knew of the attack was when some poor soul on the rearmost catapult dropped from the edifice and turned to approach the ammunition cart behind only to see what looked like a limitless flood of cavalry pouring from the woodland avenue to their rear.
Panic set in, but still only in small pockets. No matter how much the nearest men shouted their warnings, there was simply too much noise and activity for them to hear or understand.
‘Thank you, Cantex and Bellacon.’
Convocus grinned as the first units burst out of the forest behind him and poured towards the enemy.
‘Remember your tasks,’ he bellowed to the men behind him. ‘Sound the call to deploy.’
It was rather unnecessary. The entire force had become well-acquainted with the plan on the journey. Every man knew his unit and his officer, and every officer knew the plan and their place in it. While his personal guard raced on with Convocus and then slowed beside him, the first two cavalry squadrons poured from the trees in even numbers, veering both left and right. They pounded across the turf towards the war machines, where even now half the crews were still oblivious to the danger.
It was carnage.
The cavalrymen, still fully armed, since the tribune and his guard had dealt with the pickets, raced at the large, heavy timber frames and cast their spears with elegant accuracy. The shafts glided through the air in gentle arcs to thud into turf and into timber, but mostly into flesh. Where Convocus had spent his life training with a sword, these men could cast a spear accurately from a shaky boat, and their skill was clear from the impressive death toll of their first volley.
Native warriors were pinned to the machines they worked. Others tumbled, clutching the shafts that had impaled them. More shrieked as they were plucked from the frames and carried across the grass. Then, after the spears, came the swords. By the time those horsemen reached the frames of the great engines of war, their swords were out and ready, and each blade swept out as they passed, cutting men down from the artillery and felling them with every blow.
They did not stop, though. Just as Convocus had planned, the men cast their spears, then raced past, taking only opportunistic blows with their swords as they moved on.
Then came the second wave, the next two squadrons racing from the trees to repeat the process with a little more difficulty, as the first two had removed most of the obvious, viable targets. Their spears flew and more natives died screaming before imperial swords slashed, stabbed and hacked in passing.
Convocus, now at a halt on the highest point of the turf, watched the attack on the artillery with satisfaction, his eyes drifting to the rest of the battlefield. The first squadron of cavalry had ploughed on past the machines, reforming as they rode, and hit the back of the enemy force in a curving sweep, like the arced blade of a sabre, carving through the surprised and terrified tribesmen and then curving back away, up the slope once more just as the next squadron repeated the procedure, coming in from the far side.
Slowly, the bulk of the enemy force was becoming aware of the threat from behind even as their numbers began to thin, but their attention was still centred mainly on the river and the force across it as it had been when the cavalry had first arrived on the scene. Now, Convocus could see why they had been so distracted.
The lines of imperial infantry were no longer in the camp, but had come down to the river bank, where they had formed shield walls behind which the auxiliary archers lurked, exchanging shots with the native bowmen. But while the imperial forces were taking occasional damage from the missiles, the natives, lacking such a wall of wood and linen, were being consistently brutalised by the auxiliaries.
For a moment, Convocus wondered what could have possessed his friends to bring the men so close and into such danger. Then he realised, as he watched one of the few remaining active catapults launch. The machine had been dropped so that it was at its lowest feasible torsion and angled almost directly forward and still its rock, when loosed, flew over the heads of the imperial lines, crashing into the turf on the hillside. Clever Bellacon and Cantex had moved their men inside the closest effective range of the enemy catapults.
Of course, the bolt throwers were still a danger, as he clearly noted when one of the few remaining active ones launched a huge arrow that tore through a shield and the three men behind it on the far bank. Still, his friends had both minimised the danger of the native artillery and simultaneously drawn all their attention. Convocus couldn’t have hoped for better.
Now was the time.
‘All other cavalry units,’ he shouted to the signaller with the horn, ‘engage the enemy in sweeps. Deploy the secondary force.’
The musician blared out a sequence of notes in a rising melody, and the horsemen, both regular cavalry and irregular draft, reacted instantly. The remaining squadrons ignored the artillery and swept past to either side in formation, racing down towards the hindmost ranks of the enemy that were being carved like a beef joint, slices taken from the rear lines with every pass of the horse.
The pace of the repeated attacks picked up with the increasing number of units taking part. The enemy turned and began to try and deal with this new threat, but they were warriors with swords, not spear men, and not armed with large shields. Most, Convocus realised, were not armoured at all, and some of them had not even bothered with clothes, presumably keen to display the blue whorls and markings they had etched all over their flesh. They were woefully unprepared for dealing with a cavalry attack and their response was pitiful.
In fact, the enemy’s best hope were their spear-wielders, but those men had found their way to the front of the army in the hope of taking a spear point to the imperial soldiers across the water.
And while the warriors at the front concentrated on their foe over the river and the rear ranks failed to do anything about the horsemen carving slices from them, so did Convocus’ secondary force begin their mission.
The horses were winning a small victory now through sheer shock and confusion, but as soon as the enemy changed their formation and brought archers or spear men back to deal with them, the tribune’s cavalry would start to pay an increasingly heavy toll for their actions.
Fortunately, the cavalry were not Convocus’ main reason for flanking the enemy. That honour fell to the numerous horsemen even now reining in
expertly in beside the war machines. The soldiers clambered from their saddles and began to swarm across the artillery just as the natives had done, dispatching with relative ease the few remaining men.
And within precious heartbeats those men he had selected last night on his run through the camp – the legions’ most expert artillerists – were taking control of the weapons, adjusting, tightening and reloading them. Several men ran over to the carts full of rocks and in short order had turned the vehicles and dropped the tailboards. An artillerist shouted to the musician and another melody rang out across the battlefield. In immediate response, the numerous cavalry squadrons left off their attacks at the rear and pulled out to the sides, bringing their specialised brand of steel-edged death there instead, against an enemy still reeling in shock. That left open grass between the artillery and the enemy’s rear lines.
The natives stalled for a moment, battered by the repeated horse attacks that had left hundreds dead, and perhaps unable to believe their luck that they were still alive and there was now nothing between them and the imperial soldiers who had taken over their artillery. They began to howl and run up the slope.
Then they discovered why the cavalry had cleared out to the wings and left the space up the slope.
Two dozen thuds issued from bolt throwers within a matter of heartbeats, and the leading men of the new native attack were plucked from their feet by missiles the length of their arm and hurled into the press behind them. On the others ran, their eyes wide as the men beside them were ripped away in a burst of pink mist that settled on their fellows’ skin as they ran.
Then those six vehicles that had had the tailboards dropped unloaded their burdens – rocks the size of a man’s torso. The boulders had been well-shaped by chisel and hammer into rough spheres, and with the tailboards down it had not taken a great deal of effort for the engineers to heave them into motion.
The enemy came to a halt mid-run as a score of huge rocks suddenly issued from the carts, bounced on the turf mere feet below and then began to roll down the slope towards the river and the enemy force in between, picking up momentum as they descended.
Horrified, the natives turned and fled. Some retreated before the boulders into the press of the army, which simply bought them a few extra moments of anticipation. Others had the forethought to run to the sides out of the path of the rocks, though this merely brought them into conflict with the savage cavalry who were still carving pieces off the native force.
The first victim of the rolling boulders was enough to make Convocus look away momentarily, sickened. The man was not so much killed as pulverised and left as a fleshy smear across the greensward. Even his scream had been squeezed flat the instant it issued, muffled by the huge stone.
Then the boulders hit the fleeing men in force and the army into which they fled. The carnage was impressive, even to a veteran of numerous brutal wars. Unable to move out of the path of the deadly rolling rocks, men were crushed and broken, and only the continual resistance of body parts arrested the missiles’ momentum. They came to a halt in varying positions amid the mass of the enemy, leaving swathes of broken, ruined men behind them.
They had no time to recover from the shock and horror of the attack, though, for a second volley of iron-shod missiles ripped into them, launched from their own bolt throwers. Then, as anger rose and they turned to face this new threat, the cavalry began to press back into the rear ranks once more.
‘They’re about to come for us,’ Convocus shouted across the war machines. ‘One last volley, then mount up.’
Sure enough, the enemy were already beginning to surge up the hill, preparing to remove this dreadful threat from their rear. Convocus, weaned on cavalry manoeuvres, knew better than most how small a chance they stood if the enemy came in force, hemmed in by trees as they were. The less room the cavalry were given to manoeuvre, the more the riders would begin to die.
And if the enemy got to the artillerists at the machines, they would be cut down like a farmer’s grain field, so they at least needed to be mounted and mobile. Besides, when the enemy came this close, the siege weapons would be of little use anyway.
The last volley from the bolt throwers was expertly released, taking the lead elements of this new charge and keeping well clear of the cavalry who were also at work. Then, moments later, the artillerists were once more clambering inexpertly onto their steeds and untying them from the frames. They cleared the war machines only heartbeats before the first of the enemy closed on them, responding with varying degrees of efficiency to the unfamiliar cavalry horn calls.
‘Come on, you two,’ Convocus muttered under his breath, glaring across the battlefield but unable to see quite what was happening through the press until he got higher up the slope. He had given Bellacon and Cantex the best opportunity he could, relieving them of the burden of the artillery, distracting, confusing and worrying the enemy and dividing their force, giving them a second target to consider. With any luck the tribes were, like so many northern peoples, ruled by their pride and their emotions, and not by controlled strategy.
‘Shall we cut the torsion ropes, sir?’
‘What?’ He turned to see one of the artillerists gesturing to the war machines that were about to be met by running, bellowing native warriors.
‘No.’
‘But, sir…’
‘No. If we lose they’ll make no difference, but if we win we might need them to turn against the walls of Steinvic. The machines remain intact. Now pull back.’ He repeated this last to the artillerists in general and to the musician. ‘Pull back!’
Accompanied by a cascade of notes, Convocus and the artillery retreated on their horses to the rear – the top of the slope, where they could attempt to flee back along the avenue from which they’d so recently emerged. But they weren’t to flee yet. They had to keep the enemy confused and split.
‘Cavalry, reform,’ he bellowed, somewhat unnecessarily as the squadrons of horsemen were already racing back from the now howling, advancing mass of the enemy.
Good. They had been thoroughly effective. They had drawn a sizeable portion of the enemy away from the river.
Convocus rose in his saddle, peering down the slope, his skin prickling.
‘No…’
Oh no, no, no, no, no.
It seemed he had been exceedingly effective. Over-effective, in fact. He could see over the heads of the enemy from this high point, and was suddenly horribly aware that almost the entire enemy force was now charging up the hill, bearing down on the cavalry, which numbered at most a quarter as many souls. The enemy were indeed ruled by their fury, and their anger was now aimed squarely at Convocus and his riders, the main imperial enemy seemingly forgotten.
‘Prepare yourself, men. We hold as long as we can, but the moment you hear the signal to fall back, make for the avenue. If you’re separated, we re-form at the crossing upriver.’
He just hoped he’d done enough and that his friends would be able to capitalise on it.
Chapter 21
Bellacon heard Cantex shout long before he saw what was happening on the far side of the river – his friend had the better view, standing further back from the river’s vertiginous bank with the archers. The imperial auxiliaries, mostly drawn from the empire’s eastern and southern reaches, had exchanged flights of arrows with the native force for almost an hour now.
In truth the exchanges had been rather one-sided, since the enemy were densely packed and few could boast any form of armour or shield, and their archers had been thinning gradually now for the last half hour. The enemy shafts, by comparison, were most often caught upon imperial shields raised by the rear ranks to protect their missile troops, held aloft like a mobile, fluid roof that could be dropped to release arrows.
While each cloud of arrows exchanged took a few imperial bowmen, they were killing perhaps two dozen natives with each release.
The enemy were evening the damage, though, with their bolt throwers. Their catapults had
been largely abandoned as ineffective at this range. The machines could land rocks higher up the grassy slope, about half way between the men and the camp they’d left, with relative confidence, but any time they tried to slacken the tension or angle the great monsters to touch on the far river bank they returned to the self-destructive activity as the previous day – machines falling over, rocks released straight up and other similar disasters.
The bolt throwers, on the other hand, had come into their own now, the imperial soldiers on the far bank of the river at the optimum range. It had taken half an hour for them to reach a level of accuracy and conformity of skill, and then the killing had begun. The great iron-tipped bolts were fast, heavy and deadly, and shields were of no avail against them. The first to strike home had ripped straight through a shield, the man behind it and the three men behind him before it lost momentum and dug into the turf.
The next half hour had gone on like that – a constant series of twangs and thuds from across the river, each one a lottery for the men standing on the bank.
It was dreadful watching them die like this, but Bellacon had to keep reminding himself that they had been dying up in the camp in equal numbers, and at least here they were taking some of the enemy with them.
Enterprising natives had tried to swim across the torrent of water while all this was going on, hoping to carry an attack to the imperial force, but the assaults had been short sighted, whether the insane acts of individuals or the concerted press of a score or more.
Invasion (Tales of the Empire Book 5) Page 24
