by Wilbur Smith
A slave refilled Huy’s wine bowl and took away his empty dish. Huy cupped the bowl in his hands and stared moodily into the dark red liquid. His silence discomforted the commander who at last blurted, ‘Is it true that the king will arrive here on the morrow?’
‘Yes. Lannon Hycanus will march with my legion in the raid.’
‘I have never been presented to him,’ the man murmured, and Huy had a penetrating insight into the career of an elderly officer doomed to a minor outpost in the wilderness without patron or prospects.
‘I will commend you to him,’ Huy promised, and saw the pathetic gratitude in the man’s eyes.
One of the biremes that patrolled the river landed a century of axemen and archers on the far bank in the night, and before dawn they had rigged the lines across the river.
The river was 300 paces wide at this point, a dirty green flow of water between steep banks which were thickly wooded and covered with reed and dense vegetation. The rafts were carried down to the river’s edge and attached to the looped lines. The legion boarded in groups of fifty, and the elephants walked away with the line drawing the rafts smoothly across the river.
The crossing went with well-drilled precision - it was not the first time a legion had crossed the great river. There were a few minor incidents - two hoplites fell from their rafts and sank swiftly beneath the weight of their armour, one of the rafts capsized a struggling mass of men and equipment into the shallow water beside the bank but all waded to safety, a legionary entangled his arm in one of the lines and had it neatly severed below the elbow - but the crossing was completed before mid-afternoon and Lannon turned to Huy:
‘Bravely done, my Sunbird. Now explain to me your order of march.’
Huy left a cohort to hold the crossing, and to act as a base for his stores, a pile of dried meat and corn in leather bags. His legion would be tired, hungry, and perhaps hard pressed on its return and if all went as was planned, there would also be many thousands of extra mouths to feed.
Then behind a screen of light infantry and archers he began his march on the barbarian town of Kal. Here the weeks of training and hardening during the march from the Zeng-Hanno showed. For although the ground was broken and heavily forested, the legion moved swiftly in compact columns, covering the ground at a pace that pushed a steady five miles behind them every hour. Ahead of them the scouts insured that no one would carry a warning to the town. The few hundred herders and hunters and root gatherers that were met with by the scouts were dispatched with a silent shower of arrows or a swift clean axe stroke. Their bodies lay where they had fallen beside the track, and the columns trudged on past them with hardly a sidelong glance. Huy saw that they were well-formed men and women, dressed in kilts of animal skins and with tribal scars on their cheeks and breasts. Like most of the tribes from the north their skins were a very dark blueish black. Some of them had mutilated their teeth by filing them to a sharp point like those of a shark, and the men were armed with throwing spears and light axes with half-moon-shaped blades.
The legion halted after dark, and ate cold cooked meat and corn cakes from their pouches while the wine-carriers moved amongst them filling the bowls.
‘Look.’ Huy touched Lannon’s shoulder and pointed towards the northern hills. The sky glowed, as though the moon was rising from the wrong direction. It was the reflected light from thousands of cooking fires.
‘A rich harvest,’ Lannon nodded. ‘Just as the witch prophesied.’
Huy stirred uncomfortably at the mention of Tanith, but remained silent.
‘Her words have troubled me - I’ve spent many nights pondering them.’ Lannon wiped his greasy fingers and lips, before he reached for the wine bowl. ‘She preaches death and darkness and betrayal by a friend.’ He rinsed his mouth with wine and spat it on the ground before drinking.
Huy murmured, ‘She did not preach, Majesty - she replied to a question.’
But Lannon said, ‘I believe she is evil.’
‘Sire!’ protested Huy quickly.
‘Do not be misled by a pretty face, Huy.’
‘She is young, innocent,’ he began but saw Lannon leaning towards him and peering into his face, and he stopped.
‘What is this witch to you, my Sunbird?’
‘As a maid, she means nothing. How could she, she belongs to the goddess,’ Huy denied his love, and Lannon leaned back and grunted sceptically.
‘It is as well - you are wise in all things but women, my friend. You must let me guide you.’
‘You are always kind,’ Huy muttered.
‘Keep away from that one, Huy. Be warned by one who loves you, she will bring you nothing but sorrow.’
‘We have rested long enough.’ Huy stood up and settled the strap of his axe about his wrist. ‘It is time to march.’
After midnight they crested the low line of hills that formed the first slope of the escarpment, and before them spread a wide-open basin of land through which the dark river Kal meandered. The basin was moon-washed silver and blue, and the smoke from 10,000 cooking fires spread like a pale sea mist across the river, lying in layers in the still night air.
The fires had died to pin-points of dull red that speckled the town, and the huts were dark and shapeless, scattered thickly without plan or pattern, a vast agglomeration of primitive dwellings.
‘He estimated 50,000 - and he’s not far wrong.’ Huy looked out across the basin, and beside him Lannon asked:
‘How will you proceed?’ And Huy smiled in the moonlight.
‘You taught me how to hunt game, my king.’
His cohort commanders came for their orders, cloaked and helmeted and grim. Huy ordered out a thin screen of light infantry and covering bowmen to the east. During the day the scouts had captured 4,000 of the rangy little scrub cattle belonging to the Vendi.
‘Take the cattle with you. You remember Hannibal’s ruse in Italia, it will serve us as well upon the great river.’
Lannon laughed delightedly and clapped Huy’s shoulder when he had explained it. ‘Fly for me, Sunbird.’
‘Roar for me, Gry-Lion,’ Huy grinned back at him as he settled and buckled his helmet.
Silently Huy led 4,500 of his heavy infantry and axemen around to the west and lay them in a crescent shape at the edge of the forest beyond the town. Huy slept for an hour and when one of his centurions shook him awake he was stiff and cold with the night dew.
‘Stand to!’ he ordered quietly, and the word was passed from mouth to mouth. There was a stirring and a dark movement along the edge of the forest as the legionaries slung their axes and swords and bows, and took up instead the slavers’ wooden clubs.
Huy and Lannon hurried to the command position at the centre of the line, shrugging off their cloaks and flexing cold muscles.
Huy looked out across the sleeping town and the smell of it was wood smoke and cooking food and human excrement, a great sour smell of humanity that wrinkled his nostrils. The town was silent except for the lonely barking of a cur, and the petulant wail of a sleepless baby.
Huy said softly, ‘The time is now.’ And Lannon nodded. Huy turned and gave the order to one of his centurions and the man stooped over a clay fire pot and blew flame to life on the bunch of pitch-dipped rags that tipped the signal arrow. When the flame had caught and blossomed he notched the arrow and loosed it in a high arching parabola against the dark sky. From along the line the signal was repeated, orange flame soaring briefly in the darkness, but the silence was unbroken and the town slept on.
‘They have set no guards, no picket, nothing,’ Lannon remarked scornfully.
‘They are barbarians,’ Huy pointed out mildly.
‘They deserve slavery,’ Lannon said.
‘They will fare better as slaves than free men,’ Huy agreed.
‘We will dress them and feed them and show them the true gods.’
Lannon nodded. ‘We have come to lead them out of the darkness and into the sun.’ And he shifted the heavy slaving club
into his right hand.
From the east, appearing suddenly out of the edge of the forest, stampeded a mass of bellowing, maddened cattle. On their horns burned torches of pitch and grass, behind them they dragged flaming dry branches and they were driven by their own terror and by a line of yelling whooping warriors. The whole scene was hellish with dust and smoke and flame. The line of cattle crashed into the town, knocking down the flimsy grass huts, leaving fire to bloom and spread in their wake, trampling the sleep-drugged naked Vendi that stumbled into their path. Behind them ran the warriors, clubbing down the survivors and leaving them lying in the hoof-churned dust.
Huy heard a steady climbing wail from the town, the sound of thousands of terrified voices. He heard the drumming of running hooves and saw the explosions of yellow flame and sparks mount into the night sky as the tinder-dry huts burned.
‘Hold your line,’ he called to the men in the darkness around him. ‘Leave no gaps in the net for the fish to slip through.’
The night was filled with movement and sound and flame. The flames spread quickly lighting the scene with a great flickering orange light, and the Vendi darted and milled and screamed as the grim line of marauders moved down upon them. The clubs rose and fell and the sound of the blows against bone was that of woodsmen working in a forest. They fell black and naked, and lay in the glaring firelight, or crawled and wriggled and wailed.
One woman with her infant clutched to her breast saw the relentless line bearing down on her, and she whirled like a doe startled from covert and ran into the tall bellowing flames of burning thatch. She burned like a torch, her hair exploding, and she screamed once and then fell scorched and unrecognizable into the flames. Huy saw it, and his blood madness cooled, congealing into revulsion and disgust.
‘Hold!’ he shouted. ‘Lighten your blows!’ And slowly out of this terrible confusion order emerged. The slave-masters were there ordering the captives into squatting lines, the infantry swept the town clear, and the flames burned themselves out, leaving only black mounds of smoking ash.
The dawn came up, a red and angry dawn - across which drifted banks of dark smoke. When Huy led the praise chant to Baal, the cries and wailing of the captives rose with the voice of the legion.
Huy hurried through the devastation ordering and organizing the retreat. Already two cohorts under the young Bakmor had started back towards the great river driving an uncounted herd of captured cattle before them. Huy guessed there might be as many as 20,000 head of the scrubby little beasts. Bakmor had Huy’s orders to swim the cattle across the river and return immediately to cover the retreat.
Now his concern was to get the slow unwieldy columns of slaves moving. The approach march that his legion had made in half a day and night would surely take two or three days on the return. The newly captured slaves must be chained, and unaccustomed to their bonds they would move but slowly, retarding the march. Every hour’s delay was dangerous, and would make the heavily encumbered legion more vulnerable to attack or reprisal.
One of his centurions accosted him, his tunic blackened with smoke and his beard singed. ‘My lord!’
‘What is it?’
‘The slaves. There are few young men amongst them.’
Huy turned to examine one of the masses of squatting black humanity. They were festooned with the light marching chains, shackled at the neck like hunting dogs in leash.
‘Yes.’ He saw it now, they were mostly women and immature youths. The slave-masters had weeded out the old and infirm, but there were very few men of warrior age and status. Huy picked a bright-looking youngster from the squatting ranks and spoke to him in the vernacular.
‘Where are the warriors?’ The youth looked startled at being addressed in his own language, but he dropped his eyes sullenly and would not answer. The centurion half drew his sword, and at the scrape of steel in the scabbard the boy glanced up fearfully.
‘A drop more blood will mean nothing,’ Huy warned him, and the boy hesitated before replying.
‘They have gone to the north to hunt the buffalo.’
‘When will they return?’ Huy demanded.
‘I do not know,’ the slave shrugged expressively, and Huy now had a more telling reason for haste. The fighting regiments of the Vendi were intact, and this towering beacon of smoke would draw them as meat draws the vultures.
‘Get them up, and moving,’ he ordered the centurion and hurried away. Lannon came out of the smoke followed by his armour-bearers and men-at-arms. One glance at his face was enough to warn Huy, for it was flushed and scowling.
‘Did you order the slave-master to spare those they reject?’
‘Yes, sire.’ Suddenly Huy was impatient with the king’s rages and tantrums, there were more important matters to occupy him now.
‘By what authority?’ Lannon demanded.
‘By the authority of a commander of a Royal Legion in the field,’ Huy answered him.
‘I commanded a burning.’
‘But not a massacre of the aged and infirm.’
‘I want the tribes to know that Lannon Hycanus passed this way.’
‘I leave witnesses to it,’ Huy told him shortly. ‘If these old ones would burden us, will they not also be a burden upon their tribe?’ Lannon drew himself up. Huy saw his rage boil over - and he took Lannon’s arm in unexpectedly conspiratorial grip.
‘Majesty, there is something of importance I must tell you.’ And before Lannon could give vent to his rage Huy had led him aside. ‘The regiments of Vendi have escaped us, they are in the field and out in battle array.’
Lannon’s rage was forgotten. ‘How close are they?’
‘I do not know - except that the longer we talk the closer they come.’
It was past noon before the long files of shuffling slaves were all tallied and moving. The slave-masters reported in to Huy’s command post, and the final count was almost 22,000 human beings.
Despite Huy’s orders to keep the column bunched and under control, the files of chained Vendi stretched over four miles and their pace was that of the slowest. At a laboured crawl like a crippled centipede, they wound through the hills and down into the bad broken ground of the valley bottom.
The first attack hit them a little after midnight on the first night. It came as a shock to Huy, for although he had taken every precaution for a night camp in enemy territory, he had not expected anything like this from the tribes. A few sentries with slit throats, a flight of arrows from ambush, even a swift rush and withdrawal at some weak spot along the line, but not a full-scale night attack which showed every evidence of planning and control, and which was pressed home with murderous intent.
Only training and discipline held his legion together before that howling torrent that hurled itself upon them from the darkness. For two hours they closed up and fought, with the trumpets blowing the standfast and the rallying cries of the centurions ringing out in the darkness.
‘On me, the Sixth.’
‘Steady, the Sixth.’
‘Hold hard, the Sixth.’
When the moon came out and lit the field, the attackers melted away into the forests and Huy could stride among his cohorts and assess his position.
The dead tribesmen were piled chest deep about the square where the cohorts had stood. In the torch light the skirmishers were finishing the enemy wounded with quick sword thrusts, while others were tending their own wounded and laying out their dead for cremation. Huy was relieved to see how small a toll the enemy had exacted from the defence, and how grievous a price they had paid themselves.
In the confusion of the battle many of the files of slaves had responded to the calls of the attackers and, with a concerted rush, had broken out of the square and escaped into the night still linked together. But there were still more than 16,000 of them howling with terror and hunger and thirst.
The legion lit its cremation fires in the dark and sang the praise chant to Baal on the march. Before the sun had been up an hour, it was clear w
hat tactics the Vendi had decided upon for that day. Each feature along the route was contested by groups of archers and spearmen. They had to be laboriously dislodged, always falling back before the charges of Huy’s axemen, but at the same time the flanks of the column and the rear were harried and tested by repeated attacks in considerable strength.
‘I have never heard of this happening before,’ protested Lannon during a lull while he unbuckled his helmet to air his sweat-sodden curls, and wash his mouth out with wine. ‘They behave like drilled and trained troops.’
‘It is something new,’ Huy agreed as he accepted a cloth one of his armour-bearers had wetted for him. Huy’s arms and face were speckled with droplets of thrown blood, and blood had dried black and crusty on the blade and shaft of the vulture axe.
‘They have direction and purpose - I have never known tribesmen regroup after a charge has broken them. I have never known them come back after a mauling.’
Lannon spat red wine upon the ground. ‘We may have better sport than we had bargained for before the day is out,’ he laughed with anticipation and passed the wine bowl to Huy.
There was a place where the track crossed a narrow stream and then passed between two symmetrical rounded maiden’s breast hills. There was a ford at the stream and on the approaches to it sixteen spears had been set in the earth and spiked upon them were the severed heads of legionaries who had been with Bakmor’s cohorts that had gone ahead with the cattle.
‘Bakmor has not got through unscathed either,’ Huy remarked, as he watched the heads taken down and hurriedly wrapped in leather cloaks.
‘Sixteen from twelve hundred is hardly a disaster to rank with Lake Trasimene,’ Lannon remarked easily. ‘And with their grisly display they have warned us of their intention to hold the ford - weak tactics, Sunbird.’
‘Perhaps, my lord,’ Huy conceded, but he had noticed the faces of his men who had seen the ragged red throats and the dull staring eyes of the trophy heads. Their stomachs had cooled a little.
