A fearful silence pervaded the forest, and the Hedgehogs moved as swiftly as they could, stumbling in the darkness that hung beneath the trees like the shadow of a gallows. Somewhere in the forest an Aulig drum hammered out a rattling tattoo as their enemies called out to each other in a language of signals that Haim did not understand. The trees made it impossible to know from which direction the fearful drumming emanated.
Another fifteen hastily assembled fyrdes of spears and ten of swords marched and stumbled beside him, and behind him were the blades and spears of the reserves, men who had either lost their shields or never had them in the first place. Following all were a mass of archers, moving to orders that Haim had not heard. It was a thin shield wall, only one shield deep, and would be impossible to maintain if the Auligs had shield formations of their own.
The forest was a weird maze of white trunks and green leaves, and the men stumbled through it in the early morning shadows.
Ahead of him and to the left someone shouted, then another shout came from the right. In the forest he still couldn’t see anything but enormous tree trunks in front of him, but left and right he could hear the clash of swords and fighting. His fyrde split around another house-sized sycamore trunk and they were suddenly right in the middle of the Aulig’s main camp.
He was as awake as he’d ever been.
Gharin the Ruthless laughed. At seven feet he was the tallest of the Sons of the Bear from the Green Rock Tribe of the Karltan Island Aulig, and he was flush with victory. The Green Rock archers had been the first to sweep the enemy’s great camp with their arrows yestereve, and Gharin himself had slain no less than seven of the enemy with his great kraken-horn bow before he ran out of arrows. The Green Rock Sons had been the first to march into the enemy camp, and he had looted a great axe from the body of a huge Mortentian.
The Green Rock Sons had been the first to dare the city gates, and Gharin’s own hand had set fire to their wooden walls. Everywhere the Mortentians dared to stand their ground Gharin found them, and his axe was bloody with those who had dared try to resist him. His great leather sack was full of severed ears and loot taken from burning houses and the dead, and when he returned to his village by the sea he would be as rich as any Chieftain. Hah, richer than a Chief of Chieftains!
The Mortentians carried gold, silver and copper in abundance, and he’d even found a wooden chest full of the stuff, lying in the road with dead Mortentians all around. Ghaill Earthspeaker had been right. This little city of Walcox was a gem to be taken from the Mortentians and hung round the neck of the Sons of the Bear.
The attack had begun at dusk, and all through the night Gharin had slain the enemy. No less than twenty had fallen to his bow or at his hand. He would have his pick of the girls in Green Rock. None had slain like Gharin the Ruthless.
When finally the Mortentians had been defeated, their city burned and all of their folk either taken or slain, Gharin had returned to camp laden with treasure, and chief among his plunder was a great cask of brandy, found miraculously intact in the cellar of their great inn. It had taken five Sons to lift it and carry it back to camp.
It sat like an eight foot tall trophy on a broken stump by the fire, and they had tapped it. It had filled his belly and those of his brothers all morning, and it was still nearly full. Gharin knew that some of the townsmen had escaped in the night, but tomorrow they would hunt them down and kill them. Then they would ravage the country. The women would be taken thrall and men and children killed, for that was the command of the Ghaill.
Today was a day of victory, and the drums sounded all around him, sending word as fast as an eagle could fly all the way to the mouth of the Redwater where the Cthochi sat camped in rings around the stonecutters’ great city. One day the Cthochi dogs would take that city, Gharin supposed, but today belonged to the Sons of the Bear. Gharin looked to the center of the camp where a long line of naked and weeping women squatted in the dirt, leashed by their necks and bound hand and foot.
In the afternoon, after he had slept and restored himself, he would pick one, or perhaps two or three, and they would serve him as thralls should. He laughed again, savoring the looks of terror in their eyes.
Carelessly he set his treasure beside him and lay back on the soft forest floor. He would sleep! None would dare to lay hand on the plunder of Gharin the Ruthless. In a few minutes he was snoring loudly.
“I don’t understand why the Privy Lord put us here. We should be attacking them Aulig bastards.” Horrus O’Rockwall complained.
“I’d ruther not.” Replied Jemmin Looth. He sat his great bow down and squatted with his back against a poplar trunk. The trees were huge in this Whitewood Forest, big like he’d never seen around Silver Run. “I been up all night and if the Privy Lord wants us resting here, I’m all fer it.” Half a dozen bowmen echoed the sentiment. They were the Second Archer Fyrde of the Red Tigers, and they and five other fyrdes lay camped at the very edge of the Whitewood Forest, not more than a hundred paces from the deserted Privy Fort.
It was about the safest place they could be within fifteen leagues, Jemmin figured. They had the trees for cover and they had taken the wooden panels from the Privy Fort and built a barricade all around. If the Privy Lord wanted to post him here, that was just fine. Lio’s bleeding heart, but he could sleep. He wondered if he could sleep standing up or leaning against a tree. Their orders were to stay awake, and if the fyrdman saw him sleeping or laying down, he’d probably get a lashing, but he was so tired he almost thought it would be worth it.
Nevertheless he closed his eyes as he stood, and his tired mind seemed to slip away into some kind of place that wasn’t quite sleep, but wasn’t quite wakefulness either. He thought of his mother and driving cattle and his home in Diminios far away.
Haim was screaming orders. The replacement fyrdman -Haim didn’t remember his name- was dead, taken by an Aulig arrow, and the Fifth Spear Fyrde was deep in the shit, caught in a large clearing with screaming Auligs all around. “Hedgehog! Hedgehog!” He roared, and the men around him raised their shields desperately, forming a rough approximation of the circular formation. The Auligs came in fast and reckless screaming columns out of the darkness between the trees, brandishing swords and axes and hurling their bodies onto the Red Tiger spears.
Haim’s spear was ripped from his hand, lodged deep in the chest of a giant Aulig who had come up from the ground with an enormous Mortentian battle axe held in two hands. A spear’s length away from their shield wall the half-drunk Aulig had swung the axe in wide, sweeping arcs, roaring belligerently and stopping the Red Tigers’ progress but doing no real harm. Frustrated, the Aulig had thrown himself right onto the formation, taking Haim’s spear as he tried to break the shield wall.
The shield wall held and the Aulig died, but Haim’s spear was gone. They formed the bristling hedgehog in a circle around a tree trunk topped with an enormous cask of brandy, and Aulig arrows punctured it, sending a rain of liquor down on his head. Haim drew his short sword. He stuck it into a hairy body that crashed against his shield. He couldn’t see anything through the shield wall, but he knew it was saving his life.
Where in seven hells were the archer fyrdes?
“Hedgehog! Hedgehog!” The shouts rang through the forest among the screams and shouts of Auligs and of men dying. Per the Privy Lord’s instructions, the long shield wall disintegrated and reformed into a series of circles, each one centered by the trunk of a tree. White fletched Aulig arrows flew into the formations, but the short range made it impossible for them to gain the angle needed to drop down onto the formations, and the trees made it impossible for them to strike the backs of the Mortentians. Within minutes shields and shield arms were bristling with arrows, but the formations held, protecting the men behind them.
The deluge of arrows became a trickle as the Auligs exhausted their supply, and so did the flood of Auligs tasked with breaking the shield walls. Naked and half-naked bodies lay stacked like cordwood in the paths between th
e trees, vacant eyes staring out of white painted faces. Then the Mortentian archers arrived.
Suddenly the flights of arrows from the Auligs stopped, and point-blank shooting from the Mortentians began.
Busker O’Hiam was an experienced mercenary, and he’d fought in skirmishes for lords from Jagle Bay to the Whitewood, but he’d never seen a battle turn so bloody so fast. The air was a cacophony of screams and cries of the dying and wounded, mixed with desperately shouted commands and pleas. “More cover! More cover!” Arrows filled the air like a hive of angry bees.
His feet trod a path littered with corpses and soaked in blood, and he felt like he’d just barely survived the first rush of Auligs against his fyrde’s hedgehog when the command came to move. His shield was pincushioned with Aulig arrows and one had penetrated into the flesh of his forearm. “Forward!” He yelled at his men while sweat poured into his eyes, stinging them. “Grind them up, boys!”
Arrows were still whining in the air around him, but now they were as likely to bear the colorful fletching of the mercenary companies as the gull feathers of the Auligs, and they were flying in the direction he wanted, mostly. More than one Mortentian was shot in the back by mistake, but that was how these things went.
Survival in this hell of blood, blade and arrows was now determined not by skill, but armor, he thought. The Auligs were fast, and they could shoot straight and fight like devils, but they were as naked as five penny whores. The men of the Hammers of Arker were already churning them into sausage when they broke and the fyrdmen ordered the reserves in pursuit. Eager men in chainmail armed with spears and swords surged forward, but held to the line defined by the hedgehogs as they slowly battered their way through the Aulig camp.
“Make them fear the forest.” The Privy Lord had said. “Force them out of the Whitewood and into the grass, and this battle is won.” Busker did his best, and it became almost like work. His arm grew tired from cutting them down.
Haim risked a glance over the top of his shield when he heard the command to move. The Aulig camp was a charnel house of dead and naked men, and a dozen Mortentian women lay on the ground unmoving, bound together on a rope like a bunch of grapes, shot through with arrows. Haim remembered them screaming, but there had been no way to rescue them during the initial bloody maelstrom of iron and arrows. He echoed the order to move and his fyrde disentangled itself from the cask of brandy and began moving with the hedgehog line, pushing the Auligs out of the camp and toward the open field at the forest’s edge. Five hundred paces, Haim thought, remembering what Aelfric had said. “Move them five hundred paces and you’ve done it.”
It seemed a terrifically long distance.
The reserves surged between the gaps in the hedgehog formations, driving through the few living Auligs there and killing the wounded with spear thrusts and sword. Haim noticed that many of the reserves were farmers or freemen, walking grimly forward in their tattered woolens, carrying hayforks or scavenged spears and swords. No training was needed to kill the Auligs on the ground, and they did so without pity.
Up and down the line Auligs were breaking, throwing down their weapons and running from the Mortentians. Haim increase his pace, ordering his men to stay in formation. The Hedgehog Fyrde double timed it, turning from a circle to a semicircle so that the men bringing up the rear weren’t tripping over corpses while they drove the Auligs from the forest. The archer fyrdes shot the Auligs in their backs as they ran, leaving more dead to trip over and wounded to butcher.
“Kill all of them.” Aelfric had ordered. “No prisoners, no quarter. They burned a town and butchered farmers so they should expect no less.”
His line of march took him to a place where a young Aulig boy, perhaps thirteen years old, lay on his back among the bodies Tears streaked the white paint on his face, and he held out his hands for mercy. Haim had to lower his shield and stoop to drive his short sword through the boy’s chest, and he didn’t like reducing his cover. He started looking about for a usable spear.
The number of bodies lessened and the light grew suddenly brighter as they came within sight of the edge of the Whitewood. The Auligs did not want to leave the cover of the forest, and they turned at bay. The reserves and the archers fell back to the cover of the trees, the hedgehogs ground forward and the pace of the slaughter intensified.
By the time they broke through the last lines of the Auligs there weren’t many left, only a few hundred perhaps, running as fast as they could across the open field toward the still smoking ruin of Walcox. The archer fyrdes moved forward again and extracted a heavy toll for the crossing of that heartbreakingly long field.
Horrus watched the remnants of the Aulig army as it fled from the Whitewood, less than a thousand paces from where he sat. From this distance he couldn’t see the arrows coming from the Mortentians in the woods, although once in a while he caught a glimpse of the fletching. He saw the result, however. Fully half of the Auligs running from the Whitewood fell and did not rise.
For over an hour he’d listened to the sounds of distant battle as they echoed through the weird chambers of the woods, at times coming from one direction and at times seemingly from the opposite. Sometimes the screams and shouts and the clash of steel seemed right on top of him, and sometimes leagues away. The din had kept him fearful and awake, clinging to his bow and looking warily into the woods around him. The morning was barely half over and he felt like he’d aged ten years. Ten years would see him twenty five.
That Jemmin from Diminios and half a dozen other men were sleeping on the forest floor, but Horrus couldn’t see how. He was so scared he thought he might never sleep again, no matter that his eyes kept sliding shut on their own. He’d already peed four times, and he felt the urge to do so again.
Still, no Auligs had come to this spot, and he thanked Lio for the Privy Lord’s oversight in stationing six fyrdes of archers where no Auligs were. The Privy Fort lay about a hundred paces in front of him, surrounded by a wide and empty field in which only a few crows moved, picking at the bodies of Mortentians who had died the night before and now lay ripening in the sun. Many garishly colored tabards decorated the field, as well as the elaborate springtime dresses of Mortentian women. Mingled in all of the colors were the black of dried blood and crows and the white feathers of gulls.
He prayed that the spear and sword fyrdes were paying the sons of bitches back, but he was glad the battle was way over on the other side of the King’s Road.
Four hundred paces away and on the other side of the Privy Fort, under the eaves of the Walcox wall, still miraculously intact despite the fact that the town itself was nothing more than a charred ruin, dotted with stone foundations and a single fire blackened stone tower, Horrus saw movement. At first it was just a few white faced figures milling around the dark wall, but more and more were gathering.
He was surprised to find the Lord of Privies standing beside him. The big swordsman’s eyes had dark circles beneath them, but they glittered with a concentration that seemed to be on the edge of insanity. “Wake them up and get them ready.” He told Horrus’ fyrdman. “They’re forming up for the counterattack.”
“Go! Go! Go!” Haim screamed at his fyrde. “Back to the main camp. Triple time!”
He’d wound up second in command of his fyrde, mainly because he knew Aelfric, and he knew the battle plan. Now he was the fydrman through attrition. As soon as he saw the last of the escaping Auligs get out of bow range, he leaped in front of his men and began screaming.
“What the hells for?” Shouted Limver O’Topwater truculently. He’d never gotten along with Haim, and called him a stinking half breed behind his back and sometimes to his face. He’d been resentful when the Privy Lord put himself in command, as he saw it, and even more furious when he’d jumped up his half breed friend. “The battle’s over half breed. We won.”
Haim smiled and nodded at Limber, then he smacked him in the side of the helmet nearly as hard as he could, knocking him to the ground. “How about
shut the hell up and follow orders?” He roared, shocking his fyrde into movement. “No time to fornicating argue, DO IT!” He kicked Limver in the ass to get him moving, and Haim was a strong man.
Other fyrdmen were screaming all around him, driving their men, for this order affected one third of the spear and sword fyrdes and all of the archers. “As soon as you get them out of the woods, get the shields back here.” Aelfric had said, pointing to the preset positions. “I mean just as soon as it happens. No delays, no looting, no loitering. Triple time your men.”
A stream of exhausted men, dragging their shields and bitching and cursing copiously, began running back to where they started, slipping in puddles of blood and gore as they made their way back through the butcher’s yard that had been the main Aulig camp. “Move here and move there.” Complained Terric Kalliner bitterly. “Why? Because the Privy Lord says so.”
“Shut up, Kalliner.” Said Barliman out loud and through force of habit, but in his head he was in complete agreement.
When Haim reached the area where Aelfric had said they would be needed, at least ten fyrdes of archers were already lined up, looking toward the ruins of Walcox. “We need a shield wall here.” Aelfric said to Haim, without preamble, waving his arm in a line along the forest’s edge. “Where’s your fyrdman?”
“Dead.” Haim said without elaboration.
“How did it go in the Aulig camp? Did you get them?”
‘Did you get them?’ Haim thought to himself. Seven Hells. “Yeah. We got them.”
“Good. They’ll be counter attacking here.” Aelfric said confidently. “We need seven fyrdes with shields on the treeline in a tortoise.”
“We can’t hit them from a tortoise.” Haim complained. “All we can do is hold.”
“That’s all you should need to do.” Aelfric replied in a voice as cold as the wind off a glacier. “This is the payoff. Here is where we win. It’s the shortest distance between the town and the wood, so they’re going to come here. They’re too dumb to run home yet.”
War of the Misread Augury: Book One of the Black Griffin Rising Trilogy Page 50
