Sir Ewan followed just as quickly and answered the soldiers that were battering Agrias with questions as she sought answers for them in haste. All he told them was to just follow, shut up, and prepare for battle.
Her mind reeled at the possibility of the orcs finding a way around their scouting parties, or even worse, discovering them and butchering them. But they were smart – at least she thought they were. They wouldn't have been so sloppy to get themselves found. Whether or not they had gotten restless and started marching, or had just given up and went out for a full-scale attack, she would have received word, wouldn't she?
These questions filled her now pounding head as she darted through the camp, weaving in and out of the panicked civilians who had been told to gather in the center of the encampment, should they be attacked. She called out for Sir Ewan, but between the now rabid blasts of the war horn and the chaos happening all throughout, he did not hear her.
When they finally arrived at the edge, she was greeted with Boss Gresh shouting his own words of command to his band. Ogrin was busy having his fellow shooters load their guns and prepare their hand-axes, should the orcs get in so close as to make their blunderbusses useless. Gresh barely acknowledged her when she finally came to his side.
“What happened!? The orcs haven't been-”
“It wasn't the shaaving orcs, Commander!” Gresh shouted, nearly knocking her backward. She hadn’t known what the word was exactly, but she took it as an ogre obscenity.
“Then what is it? More Abyssals?” Ewan demanded, finally catching up to Agrias, his hand staying steady on his greatsword’s handle. The humans received no answers from the ogres.
“Gresh!” Agrias shouted in a tone that even Sir Ewan had never heard come out of her. It was one of pure frustration and perhaps even hostility.
The hulking mass of armor and muscle turned toward her and peered downward, standing nearly twice her height. She felt her hair now completely loose from its bun as it fluttered around her shoulders; and yet she stood unwavering against Boss Gresh, who with a single bat could knock her several feet backward.
“Goblins. The damned goblins.” Gresh said as he shrugged his axe off of his back and planted it into the dirt underfoot. “I think we were followed.”
“You what?! You didn't cover your tracks or send a host of scouts to trail behind you?” Sir Ewan screamed. His own anger was beginning to surface, and Agrias could see him let go of his sword, his hands balling into fists.
“You really think ogres are that stupid do ya, man-girl?” The cutting words of Ogrin suddenly joined in on the argument.
“Need I have a better example than this? Your own strategy of swing until it's dead might get us all killed, you idiot!” Ewan shot back.
“Enough of this!” Agrias cut the air with a hand. “The time for talk is over. We're faced with a threat we weren't prepared for. I will not let that mean we're already defeated! Lieutenant, gather all the men you can-”
The deafening blast of a blunderbuss caused everyone to stop and turn in the direction. The war cries of ogres suddenly overtook everything, and the sounds of battle quickly followed.
A fair-sized group of armed and armored men had gathered behind Commander Agrias and Sir Ewan. She scanned the line of her troops. Even though she couldn’t see their faces, their lack of fear was shown by the way they banged their swords upon their shields in well-honed unity. They were ready to fight, and for the first time in her entire military career, Agrias felt that they were ready to die.
She had been bested, she admitted. No time spent staring at her maps could have prepared her for the obvious. The orcs had maybe sent their goblin skirmishers to hide out into the woods, secretly tailing the ogres who probably were loud enough that they needn't come out of hiding to track down their location. Or maybe they sent their best fighters to crash on the camp, thinning the herd for their eventual approach.
“We need to secure positions, Lieutenant. Boss Gresh, can your men handle their eastern approach?” But as she asked the question, she saw that Gresh wasn't looking at her as he slowly picked up his axe; as a matter of fact, neither was Ewan.
She turned to share the direction of their gaze, and her mouth fell open.
Past the wall, descending from the hill in which they had previously taken down the efreet, countless number of torches were lit and cascading downward like a wave on the ocean. Two columns of goblin forces were rapidly approaching up and over the hill. The tactics weren't their own, Agrias thought, no goblins were that organized. This was an orcish strategy. One that they had fought before.
“Look at all the fodder!” Ogrin broke the silence as the loud thump of the barrel of his blunderbuss landed in his mitt of a palm.
“Men!” she shouted, her gaze still not leaving the hastily approaching goblins. “To the wall!”
She unsheathed her longsword and charged. The soldiers behind her gave their best rallying cry but were quickly drowned out by a similar one from Boss Gresh's men. The two forces of human and ogre quickly ran toward the scene of slaughter; her archers had already begun picking targets, and the pikemen guarding the v-shaped hole still stood vigilantly.
When her army linked up with the guardians of the gap, Agrias began to make out individual, horribly fanged faces from the light of their torches.
“Take up positions!” she shouted.
“TAKE UP POSITIONS!” Sir Ewan answered even louder.
Soon, they were as neatly assembled as they could be while shoved behind the wall. It was a sound strategy, Agrias thought. Limit the movement of her soldiers until one army would be able to break through and invade the other side of the wall where the real fighting would begin. What made her nervous now was that her archers were not met with answered volleys. The spitters, or so the goblin-kin called them, were highly valued, and their location during a battlefield was not quickly revealed.
“Gresh!” Agrias shouted among the clamor.
The ogre turned his head toward her and raised a single eyebrow.
“Get your shooters to the top of the wall! Start thinning their numbers!”
“You ain't fought goblins much, eh? My shooters are staying right here.” Agrias took note that Ogrin and his compatriots had lined up several heads behind her pikemen. She cursed the ogre under her breath and shoved her way toward the front of her men.
As she moved through the line, she could see Sir Ewan's black hair whip back and forth as he was hurriedly giving orders. Always the first in the vanguard, that fool.
“Oh, I'm so thrilled you could make it here, Commander! The view is glorious!” he said with a face that purposely betrayed his sarcasm. “We're crammed in here! Our formation is too tight. We're going to be swinging at ourselves soon enough!”
“If they breach this side of the wall, we can't let them get into the camp, Lieutenant. We have to fall on them as hard as we can, should the pikemen go down.”
“I don't think that's the best course of act-” Just as his protest was once again going to be voiced, the slow yet guttural growling of the ogres caught her attention.
“Mawbeasts!” one of the mercenaries shouted.
Before she could even collect her thoughts, the sound of rapidly fired ranged weaponry sounded. Heavy footfalls of something much larger than the average goblin was charging toward the wall. She turned her head quickly enough to see her pikemen uneasily backstep and the tips of their spears reluctantly descending.
“Hold steady!” Sir Ewan shouted. He shot Agrias a look and winced. Before the words could even travel to the pikemen, the mawbeasts crashed into them. In a flash, the tanned hides of the bear-like monsters tore a hole into the frontline, the gnashing teeth bit clean through the chainmail, and first blood was spilled. The creatures whipped their heads back and forth, separating bone from bone.
Commander Agrias went to order her men to start attacking, but a different voice beat her to it.
“Fire, you bloody twits!” Ogrin gave his command, and sud
denly the firing line of ogre shooters all lurched forward, their blunderbusses fell into firing position nearly in unison.
The flash of their guns and the thunderous sound of all of them going off together was enough to nearly halt all of Agrias's men. The mawbeasts exploded into gouts of blood, gore, and viscera.
Agrias and Ewan watched as two, three, even four of the creatures were reduced to mangled heaps. The one mawbeast that remained was quickly put to rest by one of her soldiers, who in a rage, seeing his own men get mauled, plunged his sword into the injured beast’s neck and kicked it off his blade.
“What the hell was he waiting for!?” the knight shouted. “We wouldn't have lost those men if-”
“Now is not the time for this, Ewan. Tell the men to patch the hole, drag the fallen behind the wall, and regroup,” Agrias ordered.
“And where are you going?” he asked incredulously.
“To have a word with Gresh.” She quickly pushed and shoved her way out of the block and walked around, peering over her shoulder, anxiously awaiting the spitters to finally be unleashed. As she walked up the small incline where Gresh stood with No-Tongue at his side, she was lost with the thought of seeing more of those mawbeasts be let loose into her ranks.
“Now you see why I kept my shooters back here, Commander?” Boss Gresh asked, one hand was on the pommel of his axe, the skulls clinking against one another like a visceral wind chime.
“You are being paid by the Kingdoms are you not?” she asked, already knowing the answer, and in turn ignoring the boast he had given her.
“Quite handsomely, too,” Ogrin added as he reloaded his weapon.
“You need to keep your mouth shut or I'll cut your tongue out like this one!” Agrias threatened Ogrin while pointing at No-Tongue, who stood like a stone sentinel.
Boss Gresh laughed at her remark and smiled. “Now you're talking our language, Commander. But, yes. We are being paid by the humans. What of it?” he asked, squinting his eyes at the enemy forces who still remained in their separate columns. She realized now that they were amassed beyond the top of the hill, the columns ready to pounce on any soldiers she sent through the hole in the wall.
“Next time you have something in mind like that? Tell me about it! I could have sent men who would have been decimated by your shooters while fighting those creatures!”
“Mawbeasts, Commander. They're called mawbeasts, and your men will get their chance to whet their blades on them soon enough. Far more of them beyond that hill there, I assure you.” Agrias bared her teeth and cursed. While it was growing easier to communicate with him, she had started to notice that this Gresh was far more well-spoken than his brethren.
“How many more?” As she asked the question, Gresh stood straight and quickly wrapped his arms around and spun her. Before she could even conceive what he was doing, she heard the thwack of arrows crash into his armor and the sound of them ricocheting off of his shooters. She heard the hard impact of one of them hit the ground and the gasping breath as the arrow pierced his throat.
“There they are,” Agrias said as Gresh let her go. She looked toward the base of the hill and saw that Sir Ewan had already ordered more archers to the wall. The commander watched as ladders went up and men scurried up them with quivers slung over both shoulders.
“Aye, damn spitters. They got Gort!” Ogrin spat as he looked at the corpse of his fellow shooter.
“Thank you for that, Boss.” She said, still looking up at him.
“Live long enough to hand us your Kingdoms’ gold, Commander. That's all I care about.” He scratched his beard, and Agrias could have sworn she saw a bug fall from it as he surveyed the area. “Tell your men to fan out, give me and my warriors a lane. We're going in.” Without addressing her further, Boss Gresh walked past Ogrin and No-Tongue, who had since unsheathed his swords.
If it weren't for the sounds of war behind her, Commander Agrias would have all but said the ground shook as the ogre warriors marched to war. Led by Boss Gresh himself, his ‘greataxe’ in both hands, she quickly darted back to the wall. She hadn't had time to seek out her runners who would be doing this themselves, but there was nothing about this fight that she was accustomed to. Her eyes were drawn to the bloody mess that used to be one of her pikemen; Darius’s men had him on a wagon and were wheeling him out of the field.
She nearly collided with the wall itself as she picked up speed in her descent. When she made her way to Sir Ewan's side once more, she saw blood on his hands.
“Yours?” she asked without hesitation. Wordlessly, he nodded behind him, and she sighed when she saw the corpse of one of her soldiers, the arrow from the spitters had found its mark in between the man's armor.
“We need to give the ogres a lane,” she repeated the command that Gresh had given her. “He and his warriors are forming the vanguard. I agree we can't just sit here and wait to be picked off.” Her glance went from Sir Ewan to the archers above her firing their bows in quick waves, as to not allow the goblins any break from the volley.
“Fine, let them get overrun by these things. We'll pick off whatever is left. Easy victory for us, right?” Sir Ewan smiled at her ever so slightly. He walked past her and began to order the men to move into nearly identical columns as the goblins on the other side, with the remaining pikemen forming the outside lane.
She turned back, hearing a loud commotion that she assumed was the ogres preparing to march. Her eyes went wide and she felt a sense of awe as she watched their discipline. From atop the hill, the heavily armored ogres stood, some with swords, some with axes and mauls; they were silent as they cracked their necks and spat on the ground. It wasn't until Gresh himself took steps forward, turned his back to their enemy, and began to give them harsh words that only the fellow ogres began to cheer and holler with ferocity. With a growl that was almost beast-like, Boss Gresh turned around once more and charged down the line her men had given them, and one by one, they disappeared past the wall. The hard foot stomps against the dirt rumbled the ground beneath her.
She realized now that despite it being an entirely different language that she did not know, nor ever cared to, she too felt the strength through their war cry, to take the battle to its end. Just like she had heard them do before, and she herself had done when she was still ‘Emerald Eyes’, she began to bang her sword against her shield.
And soon, the entirety of her troops did the same.
As he stood with his greatsword poised to strike, leading the men to form up once again, Sir Ewan met her gaze. Without words needed, Sir Ewan Alistair nodded in confirmation.
He made his way to the front of the army, a mere fifty feet from the hole in the wall, and raised his greatsword with one hand, high above his head.
“Soldiers of the Kingdoms!” he shouted, his voice so loud, that it drowned out the chaos ensuing on the other side. The men answered with a cry in unison. “We fight!”
Sir Ewan turned toward the fray, his greatsword held with both hands at chest level as he brought it down. There was an answering roar from the behind him, and they charged past Commander Agrias, past the wall, and into the fray. As they did so, Agrias no longer found any humor in the sobriquet of Sir Ewan the Streak.
His host of the vanguard disappeared into the battle and the tremors of fighting grew louder just before her. She peered out into the soldiers left under her command.
“Stay steady, men! Those are our brave brothers out there! While your blood screams to join them, know that behind you lie your homes! Your families! We cannot fall and let those who seek to destroy them get past us!” She felt the conviction of her words take over as she paced the frontlines of her soldiers, meeting as many in turn as she could.
Her unit raised their swords and once again cried out in unison.
“Oh, piss off, lady-knight!” Ogrin shouted from behind them. She could see the smile on his face, and despite the stoicism she tried to maintain before her soldiers, she smiled right back.
“And s
hould any of your blows take that damned ogre’s head off... know that a knighthood shall be rewarded!” She looked back at Ogrin, who was nearly doubled over with laughter. Now she could see what fighting was for them.
“Any of you piss-pots comes near me with a swo-” As volley of jests seized, Agrias saw that something had caught Ogrin's eye. And before she could even turn to see what could have stopped the fierce shooter in his tracks, she gasped as nearly a half-dozen of her archers were sent careening overhead, some not even in one piece. She cried out as her units put their shields up to protect themselves from arrows and... the bodies of their brothers.
“They got throwers, lady-knight!” Commander Agrias saw as Ogrin led his shooters down the hill. With a tenacity that shook the ground they treaded, they slung their blunderbusses onto their backs and climbed the ladders so quickly, Agrias was afraid they’d buckle and snap.
The deafening sound of their guns drowned all other noise as ogres and humans stood side-by-side defending the wall in perfect cohesion. When a shooter ducked to reload, a human archer would stand to cover them. Once their rhythm was achieved, they worked without words, in perfect harmony.
The time was now. She no longer could keep her remaining soldiers huddled together, watching as the men and women who they just shared meals with died. Commander Cassandra Agrias needed to march.
She fell into position and once more unsheathed her sword. No words of encouragement came to her, no rousing speeches were left in her bosom. It had been replaced with the fury of battle once more. She had let too many die against the Abyssals, she hadn't had them prepared for this, and she had wasted too much time trying to find a way to win and not enough actually doing it. Reminded of how easily Boss Gresh roused his men, Agrias let out a battle cry and slammed her sword into her shield.
With her men crying out behind her in anger and fury, she led them past the hole in the wall and into the fight.
Tales of Mantica Page 18
