by M. C. Planck
“We have a choice. We can fight.”
There was a ringing in his ears, and his face burned. The Duke had slapped him.
“Come to your senses, fool,” Nordland demanded, flat and ugly. “We cannot fight. If we had all our allies here, we could not win. We were betrayed. I have spent ten years building my troop. I will not waste it, and my own life, in a futile gesture. To flee is hard, but to defy reason is to feed the enemy. We will come back for vengeance, but first we must survive.”
“I have spent only a year building my troop, but I will not throw it away. I will not flee while my men cannot. I will stay and fight.” When Nordland reflexively raised his hand again, Christopher stopped him with a glare. “You have ignored me since the moment you met me. But I tell you, we can win this fight. If you keep the magic off of us, my men can take ten times that number. We have rifles and artillery!” His voice was rising, despite his best efforts. “We are in a fort! They are savages, armed with swords and bows. We can win this!”
“One more word of insubordination,” Nordland said, “and I will take your head.” He stormed off, ignoring Christopher.
“All who can ride, get to your horses,” Nordland shouted at the army. “Bring us your pay-chest, quartermaster,” he told young Charles, “and your magic items. We will see that they are returned to your Church. For the rest of you, I say this. Go back down the mountain, head due south. If you can reach my lands, you will be safe. Do not go together, but one by one. Most of you will die, but some may slip through. We will angle southwest and try to draw them with us. You must do as best you can. Take food and water, and make no fires. Leave your weapons: they will aid you not. Your only hope lies now in stealth.
“Do not stand there!” he bellowed, angered beyond control over his own helplessness. “Run!”
But the boys looked beyond him, not to Christopher but to Karl. Nordland turned to see what they were looking at. Even Christopher looked to Karl. The camp paused, all eyes on the young soldier.
“The Pater says we can win,” Karl said. “I believe him.” There was no way of telling what the suicidally brave young man really believed, but it was unmistakable what he was going to do. He was going to stand and fight.
“Then you will die,” Nordland said. “A foolish waste of the Kingdom’s resources.”
The boys quivered, ripped between fear and loyalty. They wanted to bolt. The approaching horde screamed at them to flee, and even their commander ordered them to cast off their arms and run.
“I’ll save what I can. You six, get on your horses. Your tael belongs to the King.” Nordland pointed at the mercenaries, the ones with Apprentice ranks. Slowly they walked toward their horses, looking at the ground. “And you too, Pater, your tael belongs to your Saint.” Stephram, white-faced and dizzy, moved to obey. “You, boy, fetch me that water bottle. It belongs to your Church.”
Charles jerked like an unwilling puppet. The boys could not bring themselves to disobey a direct order. Their rifles began to slip from their hands, and they cast furtive glances to the north, where the mountain pass beckoned.
And then Nordland went too far.
“And your sword, Goodman. If you choose to throw your life away and feed your tael to the enemy, I cannot stop you. But I will not allow a weapon of rank to fall into their hands.”
Karl, who had so freely and frequently given away so many swords, reacted with immediate and easy hostility.
“You can have my sword,” he said, “when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers.”
Duke Nordland snapped, his patience exhausted, his soul shredded at playing executioner to all these young men. He drew and advanced on Karl, fire in his eyes and death in his hands.
What is the sound of one hundred rifles cocking?
The Lady whimpered, and the Duke stopped. He looked around at the weapons aimed at him, the terrified but angry faces behind them. He understood that he would serve very well as a scapegoat for their imminent disaster.
“You are all mad,” he said, despair overwhelming his anger.
“We are all dead men,” Karl said. “What does madness matter to us?”
“We can win this,” Christopher shouted. “Listen to me! I didn’t cross the galaxy to die on the end of a pointed stick.”
“You cannot win,” the Lady said. “We cannot win. Our troop will sink like a stone in that ocean of evil. Will you not give your men leave to go and let those with horses be saved? Will you not send your magic back for others to use, instead of giving it to the Dark?”
Charles stood paralyzed by indecision, clutching the valuable bottle.
“We’ll need that water,” Karl said, “to walk home with.”
Christopher, steeled by Karl’s steadfast example, turned to the Curate. “Lady,” he begged, “protect us from their magic. We can do the rest.”
“You’ll not kill my wife with pity,” Nordland said. “And you’ll find no pity from me. You have become insolent and delusional in the face of death. I am disgusted.
“We ride!” he commanded, and strode toward his horse.
Christopher watched him walking away and was consumed with a disgust of his own.
“If you leave now,” he called out to Nordland, who spun and glared at him, prepared to cut him down for any hint of a charge of cowardice, for any challenge to his honor, however slight. The entire camp hung on the next words, paused in mid-step, watching the drama play to its climax. In this moment Christopher’s army, his reputation, and possibly his life, would be made or broken.
“If you leave now,” Christopher said, “you’re not getting any of the tael.”
29.
THE PRICE OF VICTORY
D’Arcy rattled in a staccato monotone, delivering information about the habits and abilities of their enemy while the Duke’s troop thundered out of the gate and up the hill. Karl absorbed the lecture like a sponge, until an invisible string snapped and the green knight leaped to his horse and galloped after his lord, in mid-sentence.
Stephram, head hung low, rode out with the Duke. So did Christopher’s mercenary sergeants, stony-faced and avoiding eye contact. His scouts might have gone too, but one glance from Karl and they froze. Better to die a horrible death than be thought a coward by Karl Treyeingson.
“What the Dark are you standing around for?” Karl growled. “Get to work.”
In a frenzy the boys threw themselves back into the task of fortification.
A few minutes later, the guards opened the wooden gate again. Back into the fort rode the six mercenary sergeants. They dismounted, tied their horses to posts.
“Not a word, Karl,” Bondi said. “Not a Dark damned word, or I’ll cut your tongue out and shove it up your arse.”
Karl did not speak, but something in that wintry face might have suggested a smile.
But Stephram did not come back. Christopher was left alone, the only source of magic or healing in the camp. The responsibility was crushing. He stood on the wall, watching the monstrous horde cross the plain and funnel up the mountain pass.
Christopher had two hundred and twenty-three men, counting his officers, scouts, and artillery crews. Karl had seen to the disposition of their forces, and Christopher could not fault his deployment.
The young man had been working with crossbows long enough to understand how to use rifles. A hundred on the south wall, facing the enemy’s advance. Three cannon stood on towers along the wall, their steel arrow-shields deployed. Another fifty men manned the west wall, where the gate was. The remaining two cannon faced the gate, a backup for if—or more likely when—it was breached. A handful of boys kept watch over the north, and two lonely lads stared out over the east cliff. The last two platoons, their youngest and greenest boys, waited in the center of the fort as reserves.
Every man had a rifle, except for Christopher. He always figured he would be too busy healing to shoot, but now he felt naked without a gun. He stood with Charles and Kennet, overseeing the supplies laid out for the
coming battle. They dug holes in the earth and filled them with the explosive stores. If one accidentally went off, it wouldn’t destroy the rest of their ammunition or kill everyone in the camp. He had taken Gregor’s lecture on magic to heart and brought a lot of stores. As a first-rank priest, his magic wouldn’t last more than three minutes, but if the enemy tried to run him out of fireballs, they would be in for a nasty surprise.
When there was no more point to fortifying, when the eve of battle was imminent, Karl stood on a wall and addressed the camp.
“Boys,” he told them, his voice richer and more vibrant than Christopher had ever heard it, “all your life you’ve feared the Dark.” They listened to him, nervous, eager, sad, or angry, each to his own disposition. “The monsters prey on us, like wolves on mice, and we hide in our hovels and pray. All your life you’ve been dismissed by high ranks, by lords and wizards, by the creatures of the Dark, by the ones that matter. Today,” he shouted, “that changes.
“Pater has given you strength, in arms of steel and fire. Pater has given you wisdom, in training and craft. All that is left to need is heart, which you must give yourself. Too long have we cowered from the Dark. Too long have we feared them. Today, we will teach them to fear.” The men roared. “Today, we will teach them that we matter.” They roared, louder.
“Stick to your training. Hold your position. Do not fail the Pater, and he will not fail you.” Karl let that sink in, and then finished, his face flushed with more emotion than it had shown since Christopher had known him.
“Today,” he shouted, “we will teach them a little respect.”
And then the time for preparing was over, and all they could do was wait.
“The wolves seek to bypass,” shouted a sergeant. “Do we let them?”
The wolves and their small green riders streamed ahead of the advancing army, coming up the slope and making a not particularly wide berth around the fort.
Christopher didn’t care about covering Nordland’s retreat, but he did care about his own. “We don’t want dogs nipping at our heels on the way home,” he shouted back. “Kill as many as you can.”
Like popcorn, a scattered few at first, then a rapidly increasing crescendo, the rifles began to fire. In the heat of the moment, the smoke and fear, the flashes and bangs, Christopher felt a tinge of exhilaration. Now was action.
He carefully worked his way to the west wall, peeked out through a firing port. The ground was littered with bleeding wolves, massive animals three feet high at the shoulder. The grotesque creatures riding them were hobgoblins, green and nasty, firing back with short bows. The rifles were barely adequate for the wolves, taking two or three bullets to drop them, but they were overkill on the diminutive hobgoblins, ripping them to shreds in a single hit and scattering ugly green body parts like confetti across the field. Still, the little horrors fought bravely, hiding behind their fallen mounts and popping up to fire arrows.
Some of Christopher’s men were screaming now. The battle looked almost equal until someone threw a grenade, and then it was over, the hobgoblins and wolves racing back down the hill like water.
“By all that is Unholy,” the sergeant said, looking over the carnage outside the wall, “the crazy priest might be right.” The man sounded shocked, as if the possibility of not dying horribly in the next hour was too incredible to grasp.
Karl sent a party with rifles and axes out to harvest the fallen, while Christopher saw to his wounded.
“I’m saving the magic for the dying,” he told them, and patched the cuts and arrow holes as best as he could with bandages. He had plenty of bandages. Svengusta had insisted that he would run out of magic at some point and want them. He said a silent prayer of thanks to the old man.
The damage wasn’t too bad. Ignoring the risk of infection, there were only two serious cases. Two boys had taken arrows to the face. One was dead. The other shrieked in wrenching agony when they pulled the arrow out of his eye, but he calmed down after it was bandaged.
“If you can take the pain, soldier, then you’ll make it,” Christopher told him. “And you’ll be in a very special club. Both Karl and I have lost an eye, at one time or another.”
“I can still fight, Pater,” the wounded boy said. “Don’t take my rifle away.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it.”
The goblins were angry. You could see it in the way they marched up the slope, like ants boiling out to defend the nest. Two hundred yards short of the fort they stopped to arrange themselves for battle.
The north wall guards cried out, and Christopher looked up in the sky where they were pointing. Black winged shapes were battling what might have been an owl. The bird killed at least one of the foul creatures, but then fell into the forest as black shapes circled down around it.
“They’ll come back,” Christopher said. “Once they realize the wolves aren’t after them, Nordland and his lot will come back to see how we’re doing. If they’re nice, we might even let them in.”
The boys, flush with their first victory, whooped it up.
“Pater,” Bondi said, “come look at this.” Karl joined him at the south wall, and they gazed out at the horde. The monsters were arraying themselves for a frontal assault.
“They’re in a hurry,” Karl said, “and we are in their way.”
“Excellent,” Christopher said. “It couldn’t be better. Hold your fire. Let them get into killing range.”
The boys started getting nervous, watching the monstrous host fall out into skirmish formation and begin advancing up the hill, but Christopher was merely annoyed they weren’t bunching up in nice easy-to-hit lines.
“Why are they all spread out like that?” he asked Karl.
“Have you not given them reason to fear magic?”
Gregor had talked about fireballs. Artillery was not unknown in this world, just uncommon. Still, Christopher couldn’t get too worried. The sun was shining, the field of fire was clean, and the enemy was advancing uphill and on foot.
The human-sized green creatures had large wooden shields held in front of them, obviously considering them adequate protection against arrows. Christopher had trained his men to simply aim right through shields. The only thing that would stop his bullets was a quarter-inch of iron, and anything that could carry that much weight they’d just have to shoot with a cannon.
The yellow and brown ogres eschewed shields, favoring large clubs and two-handed axes. They looked impressive in some kind of thick hide armor, but Christopher was more concerned about the horribly deformed green and gray monsters that wore nothing but chains. They strained at their bonds, eager to rush forward and attack, like slavering dogs.
“A pile of ugly, that is,” Bondi said.
The trolls were nine or ten feet tall. Christopher’s wall was eight feet.
Christopher looked for something positive to say. “They don’t have any bows.”
The only bowmen the enemy army seemed to have were the little hobgoblins, and they were hiding at the rear.
“No, Pater, but they can throw a mean javelin. And there’s more out there than you can shake a stick at.”
“Ha, watch me.” He called to his artillery men. “Focus on the big ones. Riflemen, concentrate on the little ones or anything that gets closer than a dozen paces.”
“Get off the wall, Christopher,” Karl ordered, and he had to go. He couldn’t afford to be exposed to their return fire.
When the first cannon went off, it was a shock. A two-inch gun wasn’t something you ever got used to. Then the other guns on the wall opened up, and all the rifles began to fire.
“Take your time and aim,” Karl bawled over the noise.
The gun crews loaded efficiently, too jarred by the concussion of their guns to do anything but operate by habit. Watching from a firing port, Christopher could see the enemy advancing at a slow jog, holding their sparse formation. For some reason he thought of the Alamo. But that wasn’t the image he really wanted at the moment.
At ten yards the rifles finally turned on it, and it went down in a hail of bullets. The men barely had time to reload before it got up again, and this time they brought it down only a few feet from the wall. Kennet leaped up to the railing and hurled a sputtering stick of dynamite at the prone body.
“Fire in the hole!” he yelled, and the boys ducked their heads behind the protection of the wall.
The dynamite went off, the troll remained still, and the rifles resumed firing. The hobgoblins had made some progress in the lull, but now they were closer and the boys weren’t missing many. The creatures fell like grass before the wind.
They could not comprehend. In the way of this world, they pitted their strength against strength. They set their tael against the enemy’s, to see who would fail first. But they did not understand Christopher’s technological cornucopia of destruction, and so they threw themselves into the fire, trying to quench it with blood, while Christopher fed it with gasoline.
At fifty yards the mass of troops broke into a charge, shrieking in hatred. They drew swords and javelins, not stopping to aim but throwing on the run. Their rush was terrifying, and if it hadn’t been for the presence of the wall, Christopher might have fled in a panic. As it was, he flinched, and so did not see them hit the wall, but felt it, as the entire fort shook under their weight.
Others quailed behind the wall, but Karl was already screaming for the grenades. Every fourth boy in the army had been made a grenadier and carried three of them as part of his kit.
