by RW Krpoun
The Horc from the Black Death Kurvanak were leading the main attack, moving through the trenches to the ruined wall and then clambering over the tumbled stones, followed closely by the Bloody Skulls, both tribes belonging to the Bleeding Mountain Vrapos, one of four clan-nations on the Blasted Plains. The Eye Rippers (from the Iron Lake Vrapos) would attack the intact sections of wall with siege towers, which appeared to be square wooden towers on wheels standing one story higher than the battlement. Slaves would push the towers up against the walls and then Orcs would climb the stairs inside the towers and charge across drawbridges dropped from the tower out onto the ramparts. As the units formed up engineers poured water over the green ox hides nailed to the outside of the towers to help make them fireproof. Similar towers were the main method of attack used in the diversionary assaults as well.
Behind the Bloody Skulls would follow the Grass Viper wolf riders, whose mounts could, if their riders dismounted, scramble over the wall-rubble; once inside the city the Goblins’ mobility would make them very dangerous foes indeed. If the Orcs and Goblins could carry the wall and break the Red Line, he would follow them with the Dayar and Direbreed, and North Town would fall. If the Red Line held well enough, then he would call off the effort and go to meet Laffery.
Either way, the waiting was over. “Give the signal to begin the attack.”
When the Orcs began to move, the Hand artillery ceased their firing; Lord Marshal Pittmann had been concerned that they might lengthen their range and try to reach the Red Line, but apparently the Lanthrell reports that the Hand was having trouble keeping the catapults fed were factual.
The instant the artillery ceased fire the Fifth Cohort set out at a trot along the wall to take up their positions, which had been untenable while the stones were flying. The Fifth was well-equipped and knew their job, having drilled to meet such an attack for weeks. The Lord Marshal admired the way they trotted along the battered catwalk to take up their positions, shouting their defiance out to the Orcs who were laboring through the trenches towards them.
The Lord Marshal took his time in catching up with them; he wasn’t about to risk another chest-seizure by moving too fast in half-armor, and he knew that there would be plenty of time before things got down to cold steel. He trudged up a rude stairs of hammered planks, and his heart quailed to see a third of the Fifth crouching on top of a rubble pile barely ten feet high, sniping at the oncoming Orcs with their crossbows and javelins. “It looks a lot worse up here than I thought it was,” he confided to his aide, a smooth-faced Captain who was a decent enough chap once you got past the fact that he was a silk-handed little fop and the nephew of Lord Ademiet. He was a good aide, too. “Look at those brave boys, no wall left and they’re still ready to hold the line. By the Eight, that’s soldiers for you, men of steel.”
An observer team set up their colored lanterns and flashed signals to the crews of light field engines which had been set up behind the line, and soon five-pound rocks were flashing overhead, blindly reaching for the Orc-filled trenches. More usefully, the engines were also throwing double-walled pots with coals in one chamber and a resin-tar mix in the other that created pools of sticky burning goo on impact. The pots had no better luck in finding the trenches than did the stones, but at least the pools of fire gave the Fifth’s men light to aim by.
Lord Pittmann clambered over the ruined wall, walking behind the waiting soldiers, calling out a compliment to a well-aimed shot here and the odd word of encouragement there as the siege towers rumbled forward through the darkness, axles screeching like a tortured wyvern. He could see that they were buoyed by his presence, and felt a touch of embarrassment; they saw a Lord Marshal, not a sick old man with one booted foot in the grave and the other slipping in. He reminded himself That they could be seeing the Pittmann of a few years earlier: he was no popinjay parade soldier like young Captain Hoadley here, he had enlisted in the ranks as a common soldier and won his officer’s rank on the field of battle, killing Goblins, it was, long before any of them had been born.
Pausing to catch his breath at the center of the breach, he gestured to the cleared killing field in front of the Red Line. “Now, that takes me back, seeing it from this angle. I was not much more than a lad, and these walls were still new when I took the Duke’s shilling, Lady Eithne’s grandfather, he was. The drill fields were right about there, five acres of sandy damnation, young Captain, five acres of sweat and tears. The Drill-Serjeants and Arms-Masters in those times were spine-cracking bastards on their best days, murdered their mothers every one of them, I expect. Drill until your feet blistered, chop poles down with blunted weapons, train from ‘can-see’ to ‘can’t-see’ and then stand-to in the barracks for inspection.” Pittmann stared off into the past, hearing the bellowed commands, the sounds of booted feet crashing into sand in perfect cadence, the fear, pain, humiliation, and weariness that had somehow changed with the days into strength of body, confidence, pride, and skill. “Learned my trade out there.”
“They’re getting close, sir,” Captain Hoadley pointed out rather nervously. “They’ll be coming out of the trenches any second now, and the siege towers are almost to the wall.”
“Yes, so it seems.” Pittmann studied the shadowy figures in the inky trenches; the Orcs were losing troops to the Fifth’s missile fire, but the zigzag trenches kept their losses down. When the trenches ended, they would catch some fire, but by then they would be within yards of the breach and from experience he knew it took a lot to break an Orcish charge. The saving grace was that the breach was as yet too small for the numbers the Hand would need to establish a bridgehead; in passing through the current breach the Horcs would become hopelessly intermingled, vastly reducing the attacker’s effectiveness. Not for the first time did Pittmann admire Laffery’s timing.
“Here they come, sir,” Captain Hoadley observed with a waver in his voice as the Orcs hurled themselves out of the trenches and charged the breach; to their left the weighted drawbridge of a siege tower crashed onto the battlements and Orcs charged across it, the first dozen being mowed down by the defender’s fire.
“Yes, lad, so they do.” Pittmann carefully lifted the chain and the medallion it bore over his head. “Here, take this to Lord Commander Fassburg and tell him it would be nice if one Lord Marshal could last more than a few weeks in the job.”
Hoadley stared at him. “Sir?”
“End of the line for an old dog, Hoadley. Here I stand, and here I’ll fall. Get on with you.”
His aide looked from the medallion in his hand to his commander and back. “Sir, I’m supposed to stay with you, an aide’s place is with his commander.”
“Follow your orders, lad, that’s always been the first rule,” Pittmann drew his sword as he spoke, working it through some basic moves to loosen his arm. He fixed the young man with a kindly gaze. “You’re a fine aide, Captain, but this is work for fighting men. Carry my message to Commander Fassburg; like as not he’ll have another job for you soon enough.”
Hoadley stumbled down the inner pile of rubble like a man in a dream; Pittmann watched him go for a moment, then turned and took his place in the line as the Orcs clambered up the rubble through a hail of quarrels, javelins, and hurled rocks. “That’s the spirit, boys, give ‘em a hot welcome,” he roared, feeling pretty good for an old man.
The first Orcs to reach the top of the wall were cut down without difficulty; Pittmann refrained from taking action, knowing that these hot-heads were the young ones in their first battle rushing too far ahead of the main body. The older Orcs, the veterans, would be mindful of their comrades, advancing as a group even if their units were horribly intermingled. He would save himself for them, as befits a senior commander.
The main body of the Orcs hit the top of the rubble and the waiting Fifth Cohort troops with a crash of weapons and screamed battle-cries that was an almost physical shock. Pittmann ignored the noise and distractions, standing braced but not rigid, his knees slightly bent and unlocked,
hand loose on the worn hilt of his sword, shield ready. He knocked aside a spear-point with his shield, feinted to draw the enemy’s shield up and stabbed the creature through the top of its muddy leather boot, punching the point of his sword through the Orc’s neck when the shield reflexively dropped to protect the wounded area.
He fought as he had so many times before, compensating for his age-weakened muscles and loss of flexibility with the experience of a half-century of training and scores of personal battles, using just enough movement to put his blade where he wanted it or to deflect a blow with his shield. It was hard work nonetheless, and the tightness was growing across his chest and in his left arm, but he wasn’t worried about the pain: the Orcs were dying in numbers, but they were tough, and Sagenhoftian soldiers were falling as well, or stumbling back down the inner side of the rubble-pile with wounds, heading for the Healers. Here and there individual Orcs were getting to the top of what remained of the wall, and while they were cut down quickly, it was just a matter of time before the main weight of the Horc hit.
Pittmann heard the whistles shrilling, and then the horn’s call; the commander of the Fifth was ordering what remained of his cohort to withdraw, the breach was lost and the flanking lengths of wall were too hard-pressed to hold much longer. The Lord Marshal ignored the signals and held his position, bleeding from a half-dozen minor wounds. His blade was wet to the hilt with the reddish-black blood of several Orcs, and there were plenty more to work on. His sons, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren were safe on Dragon Isle, none of his children foolish enough to follow him on the path of a soldier, his wife was well provided for, and the command of his troops left in the hands of a man who was both competent and still young enough to shoulder the burden.
Hergo Pittmann, once a Serjeant of the Sagenhoftian Lifeguards, grinned with bloody teeth at the next Orc to reach him and raised his sword. It was odd, he thought: fifty years to a full circle, back in the front line with nothing to do but fight.
And die.
“The Fifth’s pulling back,” Durek observed unnecessarily to Axel as the Orcs poured through the breach and spilled out into the cleared ground. “Our turn next.”
The inner side of the wall had been white-washed, as had broad swathes of ground in the killing field before the Red Line to improve vision during a night engagement; fires burned in pits scattered all throughout the area as well, holding back the night enough so that archers and artillery spotters could see to perform their deadly tasks. Thusly exposed the Orcs had no choice but to charge the instant they secured the breach, as to reform under fire would be impossible. Roaring, their unit cohesion hopelessly lost, the mass of inhuman warriors surged forward across the cleared ground as five-pound stones, fire-pots, and missile fire rained into their ranks.
Strange lights and bursts of unworldly sparks erupted here and there as Human wizards dueled with Orcish shamans, both sides striving to affect the course of battle while diminishing the other’s effects, and in most cases simply neutralizing each other. The magical battle was largely unseen, producing the occasional spell-effect which illuminated a snippet of the battlefield with a flaring burst of energy or a surge of strangely-colored fire. Men and Orcs were slain, several positions in the Red Line were damaged, and several practitioners of the various Arts on both sides were killed, but the overall effect was merely to raise the casualty levels without changing the odds.
Starr crouched on a narrow plank walk-way in Badger Position One, the left-most warehouse, with sheaves of arrows ready to hand, plying her bow with Lanthrellian skill and expertise, sending shaft after shaft through her narrow firing port into the howling ranks that were sweeping across the open ground towards the Red Line. They couldn’t break the Orc’s charge with the archers they had, there were too many slow-reloading crossbows and too few bows, but every Orc that fell crossing the open ground was another tally in the complex equation of odds that was battle.
Something purple-yellow swept off the battlements, a ball or orb of weirdly pulsing light the size of a ripe pumpkin, and swept over the charging Orcs to strike the barricade that closed the gap between Badger Positions One and Two; the wood and stone barrier exploded into a spray of splintered fragments as the light struck and expanded to engulf it, leaving the passage-way open. A second later a large ball of fire marked where the shaman had been on the ramparts, but the damage was done. Other spells leapt forth from the Orc-controlled sections of the wall to damage positions of the Red Line as the Orcs closed with the improvised defenses on a broad front.
The attackers were a solid wave extending for nearly the width of the Line, a river of dark figures from which totems and banners thrust upwards and bristling with spears and brandished renacs. The Orcs didn’t waste much breath in shouting, confining themselves to a coughing grunt, urrr, urrr, urr, which, when multiplied a hundredfold created a dark, growling roar that shook all who heard it. The thunder of hundreds of boots and the rattle of all the armored jacks created a clattering background to the growling that drowned out the screams of the Orcish wounded, making the dark mass seem to be indifferent to the arrows, bolts, and thrown weapons that rained into their ranks. The light field engines set up behind the Red Line had focused their fire on the breach, and were extracting a heavy toll on the second wave of Orcs who were flooding through.
“There’s a hole between One and Two,” Durek shouted over the rumble of the closing Orcs. “Can you do something?”
Axel shook his head wearily. “I’m all but finished for now, and Henri’s down, unconscious.” He managed a weak smile. “But we accounted for at least two shamans between us, and I got a good flurry of hail into the Orcs off to our right.”
“Take him and get back to safety, then,” the Captain slapped his Lieutenant on the shoulder. “Your part’s done.” He grinned. “We’ll settle ‘em the old-fashioned way: axes in confined quarters.”
“Good luck.” The wizard heaved Henri into a handcart and began to make his weary way back to the Red Fox.
The Orcs who spilled into the opening between the two warehouses found themselves fired on from both sides as they raced between the buildings, the archers hidden behind narrow slots cut in the mortared stone walls. One or two stopped to jam spears through the firing ports in a vain hope of killing the foe, but the rest simply rushed past knowing that the safest course was to get out of the line of fire as quickly as possible.
Waiting for them at the end of the passageway behind a couple overturned handcarts was Durek and a half-dozen hand-picked Badgers, the Company standard rearing over their heads like a portent. To their right and left the Red Line resounded with the sounds of melee as the First and Third Cohorts went into action, and in the distance could be heard horns summoning elements of the Second to come forward to aid a particularly hard-pressed section of the line.
Kroh stepped up on the tongue of a handcart and threw his axe as the wave of Orcs closed, the weapon sweeping out in graceful arcs to cleave a Talachek’s skull, the axe ripping itself free from the section-leader’s shattered skull and flying back to the Waybrother’s hands. He swung the bloody weapon through a couple short swings to seat his grip as the first Orcs clambered over the handcarts and were cut down by the waiting Badgers, then stepped up to the line.
It was easy work for several minutes: the hand carts were a serious impediment to the heavily armored Orcs, but that only lasted until a Largcheck, or Orcish company commander, made his way forward and organized the lead Orcs to start pushing the carts. That the hand-wains were upside down did not matter with a score of Orcs shoving on them, and in moments the Badgers’ slender barricade was scraping across the dirt towards the open ground beyond the warehouses.
Seeing that the carts could now be used against them, Durek shouted orders and ropes were tied to the wheels of the carts while Kroh and Rolf protected those doing the tying; when the carts were shoved clear of the passageway teams of Badgers hauled on the ropes, dragging the carts sideways out of the way while
Blue Platoon and the original six defenders fell upon the Orcs.
Kroh leaned out of the way of a descending renac as he hooked the ‘beard’ of his axe blade over the Orc's shield and pulled down hard, the shield dropping several inches before the Orc could shift its grip and hold the shield in place. Suddenly reversing his pull upon his axe-shaft, the Waybrother slammed the spiked head of his axe into the Orc’s face, staggering it, and then spun his weapon, bringing it around in a hard arc to hew the beast’s left leg out from underneath it, killing the Orc as it crashed to the ground.
In the passageway the archers were raining death onto the Orcs jammed into the narrow alley while other Badgers were thrusting iron rods through narrow slits cut in the wall at ankle height, tripping Orcs as they struggled through the press towards the fighting in the cleared ground beyond. Picken had clambered on top of Position Two with a bucketful of bricks, which he hurled individually onto the packed Orcs; when the bricks ran out he threw the bucket after them and plied his crossbow.
The Badger line was holding the Orc penetration between Positions One and Two to a narrow fan-shaped line around the opening of the passageway between the two warehouses, with Kroh, Durek, and Rolf being the mainstays of the line. The half-Orc had not faced Orcs in years, and like most of his kind raised in Human lands, Rolf hated Orcs and their Goblin cousins with a passion that drove him to fight like a wild man, Moonblade’s entire length coated with the blood of his victims.
