Tooth and Blade

by Shad Callister

  Without quite knowing why he did so, as the planning continued he followed his gut and lobbied to have his own men positioned on the extreme right wing, far from the hillock called Argos’ Wart. As Lorcos was planning a cavalry charge from the left flank to force Vocke’s men against the walls of the town, Damicos got his wish.

  Lorcos eyed him. “You are the anchor of the whole line, captain. Should we pivot, you will be the pivot-point. If you break, our entire line will lose cohesion.”

  “We shall not break,” Damicos said quietly, trying hard to appear confident.

  “See that you do not.”

  The sun had just gotten high enough to banish the mist from the sands when horns blared and the gates of Vocke’s town were thrown wide. A river of bronze issued forth, burnished greaves and helmets glinting in the morning light. The sea breeze blew gently, unfurling banners on both sides and ending the dawn hours while Telros watched his enemy roll out onto the open beach plain ahead.

  Some would have called it a foolish tactical concession—allowing Vocke to fully emerge from his fortifications and form up—but Telros had deemed it worthwhile. To rush in would have made him seem desperate, and would disrupt his splendid set-piece battle plan. He wanted a textbook victory that would be well remembered, with precise formations and perfectly-timed charges.

  After some delay, Vocke sallied forth from his ranks to hurl his defiance at the gathered host. Telros took Lorcos and a few of his own men to meet the other baron and spew a demand for immediate surrender at him.

  While the commanders went through the motions of their war ritual, the enlisted men stood in the bright sunshine and waited, muttering to each other. Most were eager for action, unafraid and scornful of their adversaries. Among Damicos’ men, however, there was grumbling as well.

  “I am not dying for this baron today,” Cormoran muttered to his comrades on either side. He impatiently shifted his broad-bladed spear to his shield hand and loosened the leather baldric that always cut into his neck when he tensed up. “Fights like this chap my buttocks. No reason it couldn’t be resolved with a duel or a single night-time raid.”

  “There goes the grumbler,” said Mast Malen. “He wants the pay, but he doesn’t want the work.”

  “Fret not, you old lout,” Fieron told the veteran with a hearty laugh. “The Copper Men are no longer in this fight.”

  “They aren’t?” another hoplite asked.

  “No. They wisely moved on from Vocke’s service when he couldn’t pay them for that last battle with the barbarians. You won’t have to slay any brothers in arms today, Cormoran, and it will go all the easier on the rest of us as well. I’ll tell you, though, if I have to take a Black Mane from his saddle with my spear point, I won’t blink an eye. I hate those arrogant horse-riding cockerels.”

  “You’re assuming it will go as planned,” Cormoran murmured, eyes on the opposing host. “You green sticks always do. But if you survive your first battle then you learn: all plans shatter on the enemy’s shield.

  “If our line remains intact, well and good. But if we break and it turns to melee, then you’ll see what their horse can do to scattered foot. It’s not pretty. Telion will have his toll, one way or another. I’ve even seen men struck down by their own comrades, blinded by heat and dust when the melee goes bad.”

  Fieron gripped his spear tighter.

  “And even if we hold the line like old war-hounds—which we’re not—every man that falls today is a trained Kerathi soldier. This conflict does no one any good but Telros himself.”

  “No one forced you here,” Fieron said. “If you hate this kind of work so much, why not quit now?”

  “Because I’m a professional, Fieron. The job comes first, and I always do my job. But I don’t have to like it. Someone always has to muck out the stables, but I never hear them singing whilst doing it.”

  Mast laughed, his teeth shining white in the sun against the darker complexion of his weathered face. He was almost as experienced as Cormoran, evidenced by the number of carefully hammered-out dents in his bronze helmet. And while just as sullen as the other soldier, he had a bloodlust that drove him into battle willingly regardless of the cause.

  “It’s all muck, Cormoran, even the ‘noble’ causes. Remember Anisen Pass? And Kildron, or the skirmishes at Drathmos? The only difference is, if you bolted from those pretty little slaughters you’d have been strung up as a deserter. Here you’re free to go at any time. Free to get no pay, no spoil, and no credit from your fellow soldiers. Go if you want. You back-row philosophers turn my stomach, anyway.”

  Their sergeant told them to shut it after that, and the men of that troop stood stoically, each with his own pre-battle thoughts.

  Down the line, though, another trooper echoed Cormoran’s feeling. Meeks looked a head taller and much more intimidating with his battle garb on, but his shield still covered more of his body than any other soldier’s.

  “This is the kind of dung-hill dickory that should have been settled in a royal court a year ago,” he claimed. “Two fat pigs at a one-pig trough.” He shook his head and spat on the turf.

  “I just want to know what we’re waiting for,” Tamwrit replied. “If we’re going to crush these fools, let’s charge them. I’m tired of standing here in the sand.”

  “Hey, look!” the hoplite next to Tamwrit interrupted, pointing across the field. “There’s Menier Oltan! That Black Mane bastard from the meeting in Belsoria.”

  The commander of the Black Manes, easily identifiable by the crested helm of a Kerathi archus dyed jet black, was leading his horsemen at a slow trot away from the main body of Vocke’s forces. They took a position directly opposite the Red Lancers on the other side of the pointy hillock. By squaring off horse against horse, Vocke’s central infantry lines would be free from harassment during the opening stages of the battle, as would the Deep Shields on Telros’ side.

  Damicos and his men, on the right flank, were now facing the Sun Swords with only a small group of Telros’ personal riders behind them. On a tactical level, that suited Damicos and his men well enough. Their spears would cause havoc for the charging horse of the equally-inexperienced Captain Treliam. Damicos doubted that Treliam would be able to punch through their shield wall, and outflanking them was unlikely due to the rough terrain that began where their ranks ended.

  Personally, however, Damicos was fractured. Treliam wasn’t a friend, exactly, but the two men had trained in concert. Now they were facing off as enemies, and Damicos had to grit his teeth and brace his mind against any unwillingness to commit to battle. His fists clenched and unclenched, and he refused to search the opposing ranks for the young horse captain of the Sun Swords.

  The cock-fight between barons was finally breaking up. Vocke wheeled and hurried back to his own lines. Telros waited a moment longer, shouting after him and waving a sword high, then turned and came back to his army.

  The preliminaries were at an end. No one had expected a peaceful resolution, but Damicos drew a deep breath. In his mind he was suddenly back at the foot of the slope looking up at Black Tur’s camp, wondering how many would die in the next hour.

  Was this how it always felt? Sick dread, mixed with wild anticipation?

  Telros shouted something at his army, which couldn’t be heard over on the right flank, but its meaning was clear enough. Vocke would not be surrendering.

  “Now there’s an end to this waiting,” Mast said, with a shake of his spear. “Telion, with us! For heaven or for hell, to your own liking.”

  The men began to stamp their feet and beat their spears against their shields, chanting a wordless battle-cry that rippled up the ranks and across the field. “Hu! Hah! Hu-hu hah!”

  With the sun warming the land quicker than the ocean, the cool, salt-scented breeze blew across Telros’ troops with increased force. Under foot, the smell of crushed grass rose and mingled with sweat and leather. Fieron’s stomach churned despite his brave words earlier, and he tried to clamp do
wn on it. A quick glance to his left revealed the war-eagerness on Mast’s face. Cormoran just looked grim.

  A horn blasted and Vocke’s host began to move all at once, marching towards them with sweeping synchronization. They fanned out into individual company deployments as the sergeants bawled out commands. Their voices were carried clearly on the breeze.

  Spear-points gleamed and shone, a moving forest coming to meet their attackers. Damicos could make out distant faces on the battlements of Vocke’s keep and town as the inhabitants lined the walls to watch the killing that would decide their fate that day.

  Telros and Lorcos Longhand waited until the opposing host had fully swung into position before signaling their own advance. It was a point of honor that more than a few of Telros’ host shook their heads at. Any advantage at seeing Vocke’s strategy set in motion was negated because there was no time to react to it at this distance, no way Telros could reformulate his own lines. But this was to be a classic Kerathi battle: soldier-play as intricate and formal as anything in the dynastic wars back home.

  With five hundred cubits between the hosts, Telros judged the time for arrow-play had come. A higher-pitched horn screamed across the host and the archers jogged forward, coming up in columns through the ranks of slow-walking infantry. They deployed in a row three-deep across the front of the host, strung their long bows of blue cypress, and nocked arrows to string. Then they waited motionless for the command to loose.

  Telros made a small show of it, waiting for the enemy to come nearer, testing the air with a wet finger, holding up one arm and then finally dropping it.

  The first volley went out, but fell short of the advancing troops. On the right flank, Damicos shook his head in wonder at the arrogance of his employer.

  “Does he not have a master of archers?” he muttered to the sergeant on his left. “Lorcos Longhand, at least, should know how to manage the bowmen better than this.”

  Vocke had deployed his archers across the front of his host as Telros had, and he wasted no time in sending out his first volley. Vocke didn’t need to; the freshening sea breeze was a far better ally than even the best master of archers. Having grown up on the coast, Vocke knew how to use a morning sea breeze to his advantage.

  Damicos’ men saw the sudden cloud of arrows spring skyward like a flock of birds flushed from a thicket, but no one in Telros’ host could track their flight. The bright morning sun was directly in their eyes. The cloud sailed far out over the field, rushing down with the hiss of a murderous rain.

  Damicos gritted his teeth in rage as Telros’ foolishness was revealed. He had his enemy pinned against the strand, true. But for that to matter he had to first close with Vocke. Arrows riding a wind in Vocke’s favor would make that a deadly enterprise.

  “Shields up! shields up!” The infantry sergeants screamed the command without waiting for an order from Telros. With a great clatter of bronze, the hoplites raised their shields in unison, locking them into place to form a massive armored roof. Behind them, Telros’ private retinue of horsemen murmured in appreciation at their synchronous alacrity.

  There was a moment of tense silence, and then…

  A hammering roar of metal as arrowheads pelted bronze shields all down the line. The roof held firm, only a handful of screams telling of those few arrows that fell just short enough to pierce sandaled feet.

  Telros’ liegemen were not so lucky. Horses standing close behind the infantry, they had misjudged the distance badly. The sea breeze carried much of Vocke’s first volley past the bulk of the infantry and into their ranks.

  Horses screamed and reared, throwing their riders. Men cursed or cried out, eyes bulging in disbelief at the arrow-shafts suddenly sprouting from thighs or arms. Blood soaked the dewy grass as stricken horses thrashed, breaking the bones of their riders. A few of them ran maddened into the infantry ranks and disrupted the lines. Vocke, seeing it all, laughed himself hoarse, and his host echoed his merriment with jeers and insults.

  Telros’ archers strained their bows to their limits with a second volley, but succeeded only in planting arrows in the turf at the feet of Vocke’s archers. They sent the fallen shafts back again with a laugh at those who had shot them. Again the breeze carried this return volley over the shield-locked infantry and the cloud of arrows hissed into the cavalry with devastating effect.

  The horsemen had been working frantically to restore order and move the wounded or dead to the rear. Now more screams rent the air as men and horses writhed on the crimson field, transfixed. A few of the farthest-winging shafts even pierced Telros’ command pavilion, sending his staff scurrying for their lives. Breyil led them all, running like a deer, her long skirts billowing.

  “Withdraw!” screamed an officer. “My lord, we must withdraw!”

  Telros, hearing it, turned in his saddle, face scarlet with rage. “Hold! Hold, I say, or I’ll have you flogged! Archers, loose me another volley!”

  Telros’ battle plan depended on softening the ranks in the enemy’s center before the lines joined. His archers drew their bows to the breaking point, aimed high, and loosed. But the fickle breeze was only increasing in power as the morning wore on, and it played havoc with this volley as it had the last. Not a shaft found its mark. The field in front of Vocke’s host was now peppered with spent shafts, free replacements for Vocke’s guffawing bowmen.

  From his position in the center line, Baron Telros angrily screeched an order for his archers to move up. The archers hesitated to put themselves so far from the safety of the armored ranks, but Telros repeated his order with dire threats attached to it as the infantry and cavalry behind them weathered another deadly round of fire.

  The archers moved thirty paces forward and managed to send out a belated volley, but the arrows wavered in flight as they split the wind, clattering against each other, again falling disappointingly short. Only a few of the stoutest shafts found their mark, felling several of Vocke’s archers. The enemy angrily sent more of their own whirring out, hungry for flesh.

  “Rukhal’s beard!” Cormoran snarled from his position in the front rank. “The wind is too strong for this nonsense! Get the archers out of our way and let’s close with them!”

  A fierce argument was raging between Telros and his second-in-command, Lorcos shaking his head and pointing, Telros almost apoplectic in his helpless fury.

  Damicos mouthed a prayer of thanks to Telion. Only one arrow had found a mark in his unit, and the man had plucked the shaft from his thigh and shook a defiant fist, promising to avenge himself on its sender.

  “It would appear,” came Mast Malen’s dry drawl from the second rank, “that this battle will be decided by the infantry.”

  Telros had finally come to the same conclusion. New horns blared, and the archers filed quickly back through the ranks, seething with chagrin and impotent anger. As soon as they cleared the front of the host, the infantry gave a shout and began a measured march forward, shields still held overhead in case of new volleys from the enemy. The ground shook beneath their tread.

  Damicos, more grateful than ever now for his position on the right flank, surged forward with his men, eager for the clash. Telros’ garrison cavalry had been effectively incapacitated, but the Red Lancers on the left were mostly unharmed, and so the infantry could still count on mounted support from that direction to tie up the Black Manes.

  Vocke’s archers were now loosing at will, sending as many shafts as fast as possible to take advantage of the wind while it lasted. Arrows darted here and there like swallows in flight, but Damicos’ front rank kept their shields up. Opposite them, the Sun Swords lowered their lances and began to advance.

  Vocke now ordered his own infantry to move out. His archers formed into columns and let the infantry march through them, then fanned out again behind the foot-soldiers and began shooting over their heads, using Telros’ fallen shafts to good effect until they risked hitting their own. At this point the archers’ game was done, and they scattered around the
edges of the battlefield seeking targets of opportunity. They were skirmishers now, annoying and occasionally deadly, but hardly a definitive influence on the rest of the fight.

  As the distance between the hosts’ infantry closed, Telros finally began to adapt his strategy. On a suggestion from Lorcos, he snapped orders for the Red Lancers to leave their faceoff with the Black Manes, neither of which had moved. Instead Captain Rovos was to swing his horsemen toward the center around the infantry’s left flank, spurring forward and hitting the line hard. It was up to the cavalry now to soften the enemy center ahead of the phalanx clash.

  And now, Damicos sensed, the great game could begin. His advancing infantry were vulnerable to cavalry charges, but cavalry could not break the phalanx. On the other hand, when hoplites stopped and formed their vaunted shield-wall, they could not advance. And so the horsemen would keep moving, seeking to catch the foot before they could form their wall, and the foot strove to advance as quickly as possible before they must stop and form the wall.

  The Red Lancers had a reputation for the swiftness of their charges, and if the timing worked, the infantry would be able to march right through the center, exploiting the hole smashed just ahead of them by their cavalry. Too long a wait, and the enemy line would reform, closing over the hole in the line. Done right, the one-two punch would blast a gap that the hoplite wedge would widen, devastating Vocke’s main mass of troops and deciding the outcome of the battle in one extended movement.

  It was a desperate but brutal tactic, he realized. Grand strategy had evaporated in the wake of the decimation Vocke’s archers had wrought. Now all the baron sought was to hit his foe as hard as possible and bring to bear the strength of his fighting core.

  Damicos quickly understood that the Tooth and Blade’s role in the battle had changed. Far from being the anchor, hanging back to deal with the cavalry and merely holding their end of the field, his company was now integral to the fight if Telros was ever to regain the edge in this battle. They were responsible for the entire push on the right flank, and if they faltered, Vocke’s forces would be able to break away and dilute the effect of Telros’ central charge.