Debt of Ages

by Steve White

  “Oh, yes. He could see the sense in it. And he was obviously impressed by your guts.”

  “Nice to be appreciated.” Sarnac rode toward the left, down to the lower ground. Here, it wasn’t really a plateau, just a rise. Still, what little slope there was to the northeast would be in their favor. The bad news was that they couldn’t just let momentum carry them downhill, lest a gap open between them and the infantry center on the bluffs to their right.

  “Ho, Bedwyr!” Basileus greeted him. “What kept you?”

  “I was… praying for my wife in Britain.”

  “Ah, of course. But don’t worry—I’m sure she’s fine.” Suddenly, a noise of trumpets from the imperial formation cut short the veteran’s attempts at encouragement.

  “They’re advancing,” Basileus observed. He signaled his own trumpeters, and the lines of mostly leather-armored light cavalry began to move.

  Looking beyond the enemy battle-front, Sarnac saw that the Artoriani were advancing more slowly than the lead elements. Glancing to the right, he saw the dense masses of imperial infantry moving forward, juggernaut-like. They included longbowmen, so Ecdicius’ center would have to take some nasty missile-fire before being able to respond with crossbows.

  Then his attention snapped back to his own part of the battle, as the enemy horse drew closer with hideous speed. Both sides’ ranks included some mounted archers. They weren’t much compared to what was even now standard on the Eurasian steppe, and Genghis Khan’s boys would have reacted with a disdainful “Oh, puh-leeze!” or its equivalent. But they could discharge arrows, some of which found their marks in flesh—generally that of horses. So the momentum of charge and countercharge had been blunted by the time the two met head to head.

  From the twentieth century on, military historians had tried to reconstruct what such a meeting must have been like. They’d agreed that two formations of horsemen couldn’t have simply ridden into each other at full tilt. Even if men—and, with more difficulty, horses—could have been prevailed upon to do it, the only result would have been a chaos of shattered human and equine bodies. Sarnac couldn’t answer the question from past experience, for in his sole cavalry-on-cavalry clash the Artoriani had taken the Visigothic horse on the flank. But now he learned precisely what happened, and why for centuries the only answer to the knight on the battlefield had been another knight.

  At the moment of contact, as though by common consent, there was a general slewing to the right, so men presented their shielded left sides to each other and began jabbing with lances and hewing with swords. Amid the hell of noise and weapon-impacts, Sarnac found a millisecond to reflect that these were light cavalry; the same dynamics must apply even more to a collision of heavy cataphractarii. Charging directly forward with lances at rest was for riding down mobs of undisciplined footsloggers.

  Even without his high-tech goodies, Sarnac was more heavily armored than most in this company. He made the most of it, laying about him with his spatha and stealing a look to the right. The enemy infantry had reached the spear-front of Ecdicius’ center, but was unable to bring its full weight of numbers to bear, for it advanced across ground broken by heaps of its own dead. The massed crossbowmen had done fearful execution, and the large wooden shields being held over their heads were protecting them from the sleet of longbow shafts that arched over from behind the enemy front Sarnac’s heart leapt with the thought that the center would hold.

  Suddenly, he felt as much as saw a shift in the battle-pattern, as the enemy formation partially disengaged and began to part. Then, with a roar of trumpets and throats, a squadron of the Artoriani thundered into the fray and rocked Basileus’ lighter-armed horsemen back. Sarnac gave ground with the rest of the struggling crush of men and horses, and as he did he saw with dawning horror that a gap had opened between them and the center. Very good, Kai, he thought, guiltily aware that he shouldn’t be feeling proud of his old friend. It was with no surprise at all that he caught sight of the column of hard-riding red-cloaked figures heading unerringly for the empty space from which they could curve around and take the immobile infantry mass of the center in the rear.

  But they’d been aware of the danger of sacrificing mobility for firepower by tying their main infantry body to the vulnerable crossbow-loaders. Shouted commands rang out from the high ground, and the center’s left flank bent itself rearward, shielding the loaders. The charging Artoriani, like an incoming tide flowing around a seaside cliff, thundered past the solid infantry wall toward the lightly defended camp.

  “Basileus!” Sarnac yelled across a few yards of hell. “Pull back to the camp—you’ll be cut off if you stay here. I’m going back now.” He wrenched his horse around, freeing himself from the melee, and galloped south. Looking to his left, he could see the flying column of the Artoriani, riding parallel with him; their leading elements would reach the camp before he did. Beyond and above them, the infantry was reconfiguring its formation with greater smoothness than he would have thought possible. They wouldn’t be taken in the rear, so hope still remained. Still further in the distance to the northeast rose the hill from which Kai must be overseeing the battle. To its left were more red cloaks on horses; a squadron of the Artoriani were still being held in reserve.

  “Andreas, Kai’s pulled a fast one: he used some of the Artoriani to push our light cavalry back and open a space between our left wing and our center, then sent most of the rest of the Artoriani through the hole. They’re headed for the camp.” Where Julia is, he didn’t add. “I’m following them, and Basileus is going to pull back. But it’ll take him time to disengage…”

  “Understood. We’ve pushed the enemy left wing back, but not as far as we’d hoped—they’ve got some longbowmen here, and they blunted our charge. I’ll borrow a squadron from Ecdicius and head back to relieve the camp.” The steadiness of Andreas’ voice as transmitted through Sarnac’s mastoid by the implant communicator would have fooled most people.

  “Make it quick! Signing off.” Sarnac ascended the slope to the camp, where the defenders recognized him and let him through the palisade. Without pausing, he turned his horse’s head leftward toward the noise of battle.

  Some of the red-cloaked riders had broken through and were riding among the tents and shacks. Sarnac found himself exchanging blows with one of them. His control of his mount slipped momentarily, and as he was regaining it a sword-slash connected with his thigh, only to glance the hole that had been torn in the camp’s defenses. But there were still these guys who’d already gotten in to deal with. Now they had reached the innermost parts of the camp, and various noncombatants were running or trying to defend themselves—like the slender, chestnut-haired young girl who stood behind a tumble of baggage, swinging a poker from the nearby smithy in great circles to fend off the red-cloaked riders.

  “Julia!” he yelled, knowing she probably couldn’t hear him. “Get away!” He fought frantically to reach her, but the man he was fighting was very good, maneuvering his horse with his knees to minimize the force of blows while striking shrewdly with his own spatha. Sarnac forced himself to fight clear-headedly as he watched Julia lose her footing and go down, while the enemy swarmed around her and began to dismount.

  At a speed that was reckless amid the camp-clutter, a horse and rider burst into the fight, bowling over one of the still-mounted men around Julia and sideswiping one of the dismounted ones. The others turned their attention from the supine girl to the new arrival, and one of them chopped viciously at the horses hocks. The animal went down with a scream, and Andreas rolled free. He got to his feet and hastily wrapped his cloak around his left arm while using his right hand to menace his foes with his spatha.

  off as the impact-armor leggings stiffened to a hardness exceeding steel at the moment of impact. Taking advantage of his opponents dumbfounded immobility, Sarnac lunged. You couldn’t see much of a man’s face with these helmets— the whole idea of the cheekpieces was to leave as little of it exposed as possible. But Sarnac c
ould see that it was a young man’s face just before the point of his spatha destroyed it. For an instant that was like a nerve-pain of the soul, he wondered if he’d served with the lad’s father. Then he was swept along as the fight swirled on into the camp. Somehow—perhaps it was the precise tenor of the shouting—he knew that the perimeter guards had sealed.

  They hesitated—Andreas was a very big man on the standards of this milieu, and obviously in no mild humor— while Julia got up into a semi-crouch and scrambled behind him. Then they rushed. Without waiting to receive the attack, he waded into them, bellowing in what Sarnac supposed must be his native language.

  Deflecting a cut with his left arm, he disemboweled one attacker and continued the motion to cut a leg out from under a second one, then used his shoulder to batter a third aside. A fourth got in behind him, and slashed; but Andreas was wearing his round shield strapped to his back, often the most useful place for it in this kind of fighting, and the cut which might have severed his spine glanced off it. Andreas whirled around and brought his blade down on the man’s head, crashing through helmet and skull. Then another man’s spatha banged against his own helmet. It held, of course—like Sarnac’s, it had a little field generator that strengthened the iron’s atomic bonds—but the impact staggered him and he fell over backwards. The attacker rushed forward for a second, killing blow. But Julia clumsily flung the poker she still held at his legs, and he stumbled forward… directly onto the point of the spatha that Andreas had managed to bring up. He continued his forward motion, and the sword-point emerged from his back, accompanied by a gout of blood. But he managed to bring his own point down, and it pierced Andreas’ shoulder, where the Model 491 scale armor covered the impact armors sensors. Blood flowed, and Andreas emitted a scream which caused Sarnac to redouble his efforts to fight his way past his unreasonably skilled opponent.

  Then two streams of horsemen converged on the scene: Basileus’ men who’d fallen back on the camp, and Andreas’ relief column which he’d outrun. Sarnac was separated from the man he’d been fighting, and he broke through the press to Andreas, who was lying in the death-grip of the man who’d wounded him; Sarnac rolled the corpse off him while Julia cradled his head.

  “You’ll be all right,” Sarnac said as he bound up Andreas’ shoulder and poured a slug of the army’s vin extremely ordinaire into him. He couldn’t mention Tylar’s “field pharmacopeia” with Julia present. The fighting moved away as the remaining intruders were mopped up, but sounds of battle continued unabated from the camp’s northern perimeter, where enemy cavalry waves beat against the palisade whose defenders were now reinforced by Basileus’ dismounted men. The left end of the infantry center had completed its bending-back and was now linked with the camp defenses, so the front was unbroken again. It was also a purely defensive front—any hope of victory must ride with Ecdicius’ cavalry on the right.

  Andreas seemed to read his thoughts. “Get to Ecdicius,” he croaked. “He needs all the help he can get. I’ll… be with you in my thoughts.” The circumlocution was for Julia’s benefit, but the point was well taken: the army’s left was now anchored on the camp, and Andreas was hors de combat there, so Sarnac had better get his tail to the right so they’d be able to continue their communication function.

  “All right,” he said, mounting his horse. “Keep your spirits up.” (Translation: Stay conscious.) “I’ll tell Julia’s father she’s all right.” And he was off toward the east, riding out of the camp under a sky whose cloudiness was growing. An occasional spatter of rain wet his face.

  Approaching the right flank, he saw that Ecdicius had indeed gained some ground there even as his left flank had been driven back to the camp. So the fighting front had rotated almost one hundred and eighty degrees, pivoting on the immovable center. So now the infantry facing Ecdicius fought with their backs to the southern slopes of Kai’s headquarters hill.

  He found Ecdicius organizing his riders for yet another charge. “Bedwyr! What news? Andronicus somehow learned that the camp was threatened… Amazing, the way you two find things out. By the way, what brings you here?”

  In a few swift sentences, Sarnac described what had happened on the left. “And Julia’s all right, thanks to Andronicus,” he concluded. Ecdicius kept his outward composure, but slowly released his breath. “He fought like a lion to protect her. He was wounded, but he’ll live.”

  “He’ll live to receive my gratitude—if any of us live through this day.” Ecdicius kept his voice low, for there were others around. He gazed forward, beyond the enemy front at the hill. Then he turned toward one of his lieutenants. “Ancelius!” he shouted, with the lightheartedness of a man out hunting. “Remember when we broke that Visigothic raiding party outside Clermont, back before you got old and lazy?”

  The man, one of the veterans of the old Brotherhood— he looked slightly younger than Ecdicius—grinned back. “Aye, Augustus! That was a great day. They were drawn up at the foot of a slope, like…” His voice trailed off and his eyes went to the formation they were facing.

  “Precisely!” Ecdicius grinned like a boy. “And that fat-gutted chieftain of theirs was looking down from the top of that slope!” He wheeled his horse around, calling to several other old war-dogs. “Continue drawing back for a fresh charge as you’re already doing. But divide the center like…”

  “like we did that day, Augustus?” Ancelius asked eagerly.

  “Not quite. Instead of two elements, I want three. The one in the very center I’ll lead myself. It will consist of all of you—delegate command of your own squadrons—and a few other picked men. After the front is broken, we’re going to charge straight uphill. Our objective is to kill or capture Kai!”

  All their mouths hung open. “But, but Ecdicius,” Ancelius stammered, “you’re the Augustus of the West! You can’t risk the imperial person…”

  “Hell, Ancelius, if we don’t carry the day my imperial person won’t be worth an imperial damn! Have you forgotten how to hazard everything on a single throw?”

  He swept them all with flashing eyes. “There’s far more at stake now than when we rode against the Visigoths… and it seemed hopeless then.”

  “We were young then, Ecdicius,” Ancelius said sadly.

  “Yes, and can you remember what that was like? Can you remember how it was in those days? The world we’d known seemed to be coming to an end, as though the pagan Fates had turned malevolent with senility, and we rode forth to do one worthwhile thing before the dark closed in over us. And then Artorius came, carrying the dawn in his hands and saving the world another chance!” Ecdicius met all their eyes, and what passed between those eyes was like an electric arc. “Now the world needs yet another chance—and Artorius is gone. But I am his heir, and in his name, and in the name of everything that was ever dear to those young men of the Auvergne who still live inside you, I call on you to follow me. The Brotherhood rides one last time!”

  Sarnac heard the storm of cheers as though from a distance, for he was seeing these grizzled, thickening men as they must have been two decades ago, just before the timelines diverged. In my reality, they did indeed go down into the dark, after performing a gesture of magnificent, gallant futility.

  I said it to Tylar and I meant it: in this reality, gallantry is not going to be futile.

  He urged his horse forward through the crowd to Ecdicius’ side. “Augustus, I’d like to be with you in the center.”

  Ecdicius flashed his transfiguring smile. “I wouldn’t have you anywhere else, Bedwyr. And now, let’s get ready to ride, before it starts raining in earnest and the ground turns to mud.”

  They charged with two elite units in full cataphract rig in the middle of the onrushing line of horsemen. Just behind them came Ecdicius and his picked squadron: what was left of the Brotherhood, the best of the younger men, and Rear Admiral Robert Sarnac, PHLN. Over Ecdicius streamed the blood-red dragon standard he carried as the Restorers heir, twin to the one that floated above Kai’s tent.
/>
  The enemy infantry they faced in this part of the line were Franks, stationed here and not in the center where they might have found themselves opposing their ethnic relatives, as per time-honored imperial practice. They’d long since expended the throwing axes that were their favorite weapons, but their courage was unabated. And the few longbowmen who backed them up kept up an arrow-flight that sent men and horses pitching forward to the ground. Along most of the front, the Franks held solid against Ecdicius’ weakened charge.

  But at its midpoint, under the concentrated impact of two squadrons of armored horsemen, that line strained, heaved, and finally gave way. The riders pressed their advantage, pushing the snarling Franks back to left and right in a maelstrom of stamping hooves and thrusting lances, and the gap widened.

  Sarnac, approaching that gap with the rest of Ecdicius’ chosen men, visualized how this tactic must have been used against the Visigoths, with the two breakthrough units continuing on and then wheeling around and striking their shaken enemies from the rear. But on this day, their purpose was simply to open up the emptiness he now saw yawning ahead. Then they were through, with nothing but hillslope beyond and the battle-din receding behind them. With a shout, Ecdicius spurred his mount forward into a full gallop, and it became a mad race up the slope to the sound of hunting-horns.

  Up ahead, Sarnac saw a spreading confusion along the ridgeline. He also heard trumpet-signals he remembered, and he knew that Kai had summoned his last carefully hoarded reserve of the Artoriani. So it really is a race, he thought as he lowered his freshly issued lance and braced his feet against his stirrups. They’ll be riding up this hill from their position on the far side, and whoever gets to the top first will have the advantage. We’ve got a head start, since it took Kai a little while to grasp what Ecdicius is up to. But they and their horses are rested…