3xT

by Harry Turtledove

  So she watched and tried not to be sick. The really frustrating thing was that, in spite of having a full view of the whole battlefield, she could not fathom what, if anything, V'Zek was up to. The T'Kai right wing was holding; the left, by now, had actually advanced several hundred meters.

  This, she thought with something as close to contempt as her mild nature allowed, was the sort of fighting that had made V'Zek feared all through the T'Kai confederacy? It only showed that on a world with poor communications, any savage could build up a name for himself that he didn't come close to deserving.

  * * *

  F'Rev had no idea what the battle as a whole looked like. The commander-of-fifty had his own, smaller problems. His troop was in the T'Kai center. The line he was holding had stretched thin when the army's left claw drove back the barbarians: it had been forced to stretch to accommodate its lengthened front.

  Now it could not stretch any further. He sent a messenger over to the troop on his immediate right, asking for more warriors.

  The messenger returned, eyestalks lowered in apprehension. "Well?" F'Rev growled. "Where are the reinforcements?"

  "He has none to send, sir," the messenger said nervously. "He is as thin on the ground as we are."

  "A pestilence!" F'Rev burst out. "What am I supposed to do now?"

  * * *

  V'Zek's guards almost killed the red-striped messenger before he reached the chieftain—after one try on their master's life, they were not about to permit another. But when the fellow's bona fides were established, he proved to bring welcome news.

  "There's a stretch in the center, three or four troops wide, my master, where they're only a warrior or two thick," he told V'Zek.

  Z'Yon, who heard the gasped-out message, bent before V'Zek so that his plastron scraped the ground. "Just as you foretold, my master," the shaman said, more respectful than V'Zek ever remembered hearing him.

  The chieftain knew he had earned that respect. He felt the way bards sometimes said they did when songs seemed to shape themselves as they were sung, as if even the sun rose and set according to his will. It was better than mating, purer than the feeling he got from chewing the leaves of the p'sta tree.

  Neither moment nor feeling was to be wasted. "Now we fight back harder here," he told the subchiefs who led his army's right claw. "We've drawn them away from their strongpoint; now we'll make them pay for coming out."

  "About time," one of his underlings said. "Going backward against these soft-shells was making my eyestalks itch."

  "Scratch, then, but not too hard. I want you to hold their left in place, make it retreat a little if you like, but not too far."

  "Why not?" the subchief demanded indignantly.

  "Because that would only hurt them. I intend to kill." V'Zek was already running full tilt toward the center. Here indeed was his chance to fight.

  * * *

  "The M'Sak aren't giving up any more ground on the left," Jennifer reported into Greenberg's ear. "I suppose the T'Kai charge has run out of steam now that they're down onto flat ground." A moment later she added, "The barbarians are shifting a little toward the center, or at least V'Zek is moving that way."

  "Anything serious there, do you think?" the master merchant asked.

  After her usual hesitation, Jennifer said, "I doubt it. What can he do that he hasn't already failed with on the left? He—" She stopped again. When she resumed, all she said was, "My God."

  This time, Greenberg did not blame her for halting. He could not yet see what had gone wrong, but he could hear that something had. He snapped, "What is it, Jennifer?"

  "They found a soft spot in the line somehow—the M'Sak in the T'Kai line, I mean." Another wait, this time for Jennifer to collect herself. "Hundreds of them are pouring through. They're turning in on the T'Kai left wing and—rolling it up, is that the phrase?"

  "That's the phrase," the master merchant said grimly.

  Along with Koniev and Marya, he ran to try to stem the rout. Long before he reached the rupture point, he knew it was hopeless. No mere thumb could repair this dike. The few M'Sak the humans dropped did not influence the battle in the least.

  From the Flying Festoon, Jennifer said, "I'm sorry I didn't notice anything going wrong."

  "I don't think there was anything to notice, Jennifer," Koniev told her. "V'Zek didn't find that soft spot in our line—he made it. He lured the left out till the T'Kai got overextended, and then—and now—"

  "And now," Jennifer echoed ruefully. "A few minutes ago, I was thinking V'Zek a fool of a general for letting himself get driven down the slope. He must have done it on purpose. That makes me the fool, for not seeing it."

  "It makes all of us fools," Greenberg said.

  "But he shouldn't have been able to do it," Jennifer protested. "Humans are a lot more sophisticated than any G'Bur, let alone barbarians like the M'Sak. We had the drones watching every move he made, too."

  "He managed, though, in spite of everything," Greenberg said. "And that makes him a very nasty enemy indeed."

  No one argued with him.

  * * *

  "We are undone!" K'Sed cried. It was not a shout of panic, but rather of disbelief. "They tricked us!" The M'Sak surged against his line and pushed it back. Maybe, he thought much too late, he should not have called for pursuit down off the slope the T'Kai had held. Then, perhaps, he would not have had these screaming, clacking savages in his rear, rolling up his warriors like a molt-ling folding a shed piece of grasping-claw.

  "I did not know trickery was against the rules," B'Rom said. The vizier made as much a point of pride at being unimpressed with everything as V'Zek did with being unafraid. He went on, "After all, we tried to do the same to the M'Sak with what we learned from the Soft Ones."

  "The Soft Ones!" K'Sed shouted. "They tricked us, too! They said we would win if we fought here. This whole botch is their fault."

  "Oh, twaddle, Your Highness."

  K'Sed stared at B'Rom. Under other circumstances, that would have been lese majesty enough to cost the vizier his shell, one painful bit at a time. But now—K'Sed mastered his anger, though he did not forget. "Twaddle, is it?"

  "Certainly." Whatever his shortcomings in behavior, B'Rom was no coward. "They told us nothing of the sort that I recall. They said this was a good place to fight, and it is. You can see that with three eyes closed, as can I. But they are traders, not generals—that, unfortunately, is not a deficiency from which V'Zek suffers."

  "Unfortunately." K'Sed could play the game of understatement, too. Staying detached was not easy any more, though, not when the line was unraveling like a poorly woven basket and the guards were almost as busy behind the prince as in front of him. He did try. "All these unfortunate things being true, what do you recommend now?"

  One of B'Rom's eyestalks pointed behind him and to the left. "Running for the forest yonder seems appropriate at the moment, wouldn't you say? We'll save a remnant that way, rather than all staying in the trap."

  "Our right—"

  "Is on its own anyway."

  K'Sed hissed in despair. B'Rom had a way of being not just right, but brutally right. With a more forceful prince, he would have been killed long since. K'Sed wished he were that sort of prince. The T'Kai confederacy could use such a leader, to oppose V'Zek if for no other reason. He was as he was, though; no help for it. "Very well. We will fall back on the forest." He hoped all the practice he'd put in with the shortspear would stay with him.

  * * *

  Chaos also gripped the T'Kai right claw, if in a less crushing embrace. Still under assault from the M'Sak before them, the T'Kai warriors could do nothing to rescue their cut-off comrades. In fact, the northerners pouring through the gap where the center had been tried to roll them up and treat them like the left.

  "Here they come again!" Marya shouted. The humans expended more precious stun charges. M'Sak fell. Others advanced past them. Dying in battle, even strangely, held few terrors for them. They did not know the stu
n guns were not lethal, but they had seen enough to be sure the weapons were not all-powerful.

  Pavel Koniev perturbed them more than the stun guns could when he sprang out and shrieked "Boo!" at the top of his lungs. The cry was as alien to their clicks, hisses, and pops as his fleshy body was to their hard integuments. Not even their stories held ghosts as strange as he.

  But the M'Sak were soldiers, and they were winning. As with the Flying Festoon, the mere appearance of the unknown was not enough to daunt them. They rushed forward, weapons ready. The humans snapped shots at them. As with any hurried shooting, they missed more often than they wanted to. And they had time to press trigger buttons just once or twice before the M'Sak were on them.

  Marya's scream made the shout Koniev had let out sound like a whisper. The warrior in front of her was startled enough to make only a clumsy swipe with his partisan. She ducked under it, stunned him at close range, then dashed up to crush the brain-nodes under his suddenly flaccid eyestalks.

  Koniev did not use his stunner. He killed his foe with exactly the same move he had practiced on the way north. Then, orange body liquids dripping from his mace, he stood on the fallen M'Sak's carapace and roared out a challenge to the local's comrades. The challenge went unanswered.

  Greenberg did not find out till later how his friends fared. At the time, he was too busy staying alive to pay them much attention. He threw himself flat to avoid a halberd thrust, then leaped up and grabbed the polearm below the head to wrestle it away from the M'Sak who wielded it.

  That was a mistake. G'Bur were no stronger than humans, but their four grasping-limbs let them exert a lot more leverage. Greenberg found himself flung around till he felt like a fly on the end of a fisherman's line. He lost his grip and fell in a heap. The M'Sak swung up the halberd for the kill.

  Before he could bring it down, he had to parry a blow from a T'Kai. The soldiers from the southern confederacy were frantically counterattacking. Greenberg scrambled to his feet. "Thanks!" he shouted to the warrior who had saved him. He doubted the local had done so out of any great love for humans. But if the right wing of the T'Kai army was to escape as a fighting force, it could not let itself be flanked like the luckless left. Greenberg did not care about why the local had rescued him. Any excuse would do.

  The M'Sak gave ground grudgingly, but they gave ground. More and more of them went off to finish routing the left—and to plunder corpses. That was easier, more profitable work than fighting troops still ready to fight back. The T'Kai right broke free of its assailants and retreated south and east along the bank of the stream that protected its flank. The three humans trudged along with it.

  * * *

  Jennifer turned on the Flying Festoon's spotlight. A finger of light stabbed down from the sky. The ship descended, its siren wailing. She wished it were a rocket like the ones she read about—then it might incinerate thousands of M'Sak with its fiery blast. Sometimes mundane contragravity was too safe to be useful.

  By then, the M'Sak took the starship for granted. They ignored it until it came down on top of several of them and smashed them into wet smears beneath it. The rest scattered. Jennifer ordered the air lock open. Her comrades laughed in delight as they scrambled inside. "It's a weapon after all!" Greenberg shouted.

  "Why, so it is," Jennifer said. "Do you want to start squashing them by ones and twos?"

  After a moment, Greenberg shook his head. "Not worth it, I don't think—might as well go smashing cockroaches with an anvil."

  "All right," she said. She looked in the viewscreen. "They are running away."

  "Good. That will let this half of the army get loose." Greenberg ran a grimy forearm across his face. He was swaying where he stood. "I don't believe I've ever been this tired in my life. I think we'll spend the next couple of nights in the ship."

  "All right," Jennifer said again. She stifled a small sigh. With everyone else aboard, she wouldn't get much reading done.

  * * *

  Jennifer walked along the wall of the little town of D'Opt. Her reader was in her pocket; Bernard Greenberg walked beside her. They both looked out at the M'Sak who ringed the place. Jennifer wished the barbarians seemed further away. D'Opt was barely important enough to rate a wall; its four meters of baked brick sufficed to keep out brigands. Keeping out V'Zek and his troopers was likely to be something else again.

  Walking-claws clattered on the bricks, close by her. She turned her head. So did Greenberg. He had the higher rank, so he spoke to K'Sed. "Your Highness."

  The prince did not answer for some time. Like the humans, he was looking out at the encircling enemy. At last he said, "I wish we were back in T'Kai City."

  "So do I, Your Highness," Greenberg said. Jennifer nodded. T'Kai City's walls were twice as high and three times as thick as those of D'Opt, and made of stone in the bargain.

  "You Soft Ones could have done more to help us get there," K'Sed said—crabbily, Jennifer thought. She supposed the prince was not to be blamed for his bad temper. K'Sed had certainly had a hard time of it. Skulking through the woods and fleeing for one's life were not pastimes for which princes usually trained.

  But Greenberg said, "Your Highness, were it not for us, you would have no army left at all, and the M'Sak would be running loose through the whole confederacy. As is, you are strong enough still to force them to concentrate against you here."

  "But not strong enough to beat them," K'Sed retorted. "That only delays matters, does it not? Had we fought them somewhere else, we might have won."

  The unfairness of that almost took Jennifer's breath away. For once, she did not hesitate. Before Greenberg could reply to the prince, she blurted, "But you might have lost everything, too!" You likely would have lost everything, she said to herself.

  "We'll never know now, will we?" K'Sed sounded as if he thought he had scored a point. "And after the fight, you did little to keep the barbarians off us."

  "We did what we could, Your Highness," Greenberg said. "I am sorry the M'Sak did not oblige us by holding still to be smashed one at a time."

  His sarcasm reached the prince where Jennifer's protest had failed. K'Sed bent his left walking-legs, letting that side of his plastron almost scrape the bricks—a G'Bur gesture of despondency. "I knew this campaign was ill-omened when we undertook it. Even the moon fights against us."

  It was late afternoon. Greenberg and Jennifer looked eastward. She rarely gave L'Rau's moon a thought—why worry about a dead stone lump several hundred thousand kilometers away? It looked as uninteresting now as ever: a gibbous light in the sky, especially pale and washed out because the sun was still up.

  "What about the moon, Your Highness?" she said.

  "When it grows full, three days hence, it will be eclipsed," K'Sed told her, as if that explained everything.

  "Well, what of it?" She was so surprised, she forgot to tack on K'Sed's honorific. "You must know what causes an eclipse?"

  The prince was distraught enough to miss her faux pas. He answered, "Of course—the passage of our world's shadow over the face of the moon. Every enlightened citizen of the towns in the confederacy knows this." K'Sed turned one eyestalk toward the soldiers swarming through D'Opt's narrow streets. "Peasants, herders, and even artisans, though, still fear the malign powers they believe to stalk the night."

  "That is not good," Greenberg said.

  Jennifer thought he'd come up with one of the better understatements she'd heard. As low-technology worlds went, L'Rau, or at least the T'Kai confederacy, was relatively free from superstition. But the key word was relatively. And because humans dealt mostly with nobles and wealthy traders, she did not have a good feel for just how credulous the vast majority of the locals were.

  She had also missed something else. K'Sed pointed it out for her, literally, gesturing toward the bronze-hued T'Kai banners that still fluttered defiance at the M'Sak. "Perhaps our color is ill-chosen," the prince said, "but when the swallowed moon appears in that shade, how will the ignorant doubt it imp
lies their being devoured by M'Sak? Truly, I could almost wonder myself." K'Sed was a sophisticate, Jennifer reminded herself, but even sophisticates on primitive planets found long-buried fears rising when trouble came.

  "Maybe we could teach your soldiers—" Jennifer stopped, feeling Greenberg's ironic eye turned her way. She realized she'd been foolish. Three days of lessons would not overturn a lifetime's belief. She asked, "Do your warriors know the eclipse is coming, your Highness?"

  "Sadly, they do. We tried to keep it from them, but even the M'Sak, savages though they be, have got wind of it. From time to time they amuse themselves by shouting it up to our sentries, and shouting that they will destroy us on that night. I fear . . ." K'Sed hesitated, went on, "I fear they may be right."

  * * *

  "Are you sure it is prudent to warn our foes of what we intend?" Z'Yon asked, listening to the M'Sak warriors yelling threats at the southrons trapped in D'Opt.

  "Why not?" V'Zek said grandly. "We spread fear through their ranks, and anticipation of disaster. Having them with their eyestalks going every which way at once can only help us. And besides, they cannot be sure we are not lying. Almost I find myself tempted to delay the assault until the darkening of the moon is past."

  "That might be wise, my master," Z'Yon said.

  "What? Why?" When V'Zek stretched his walking-legs very straight, as he did now, he towered over Z'Yon. His voice, ominously deep and slow, rumbled like distant thunder—not distant enough, the shaman thought. He sank down to scrape his plastron in the dirt. "Why?" V'Zek repeated. "Speak, if you value your claws."

  "The moltings suggest, my master, that we may fare better under those circumstances."

  "So you consulted the moltings, did you?" The chieftain let the question hang in the air.