The journey to Torth had been uneventful, and the wind not terrible, if not good. So it was that he found himself again in Mortentia, and it was early in the autumn month the Mortentians called Leath, and winter was just around the corner. He knew that the gentle breeze that carried the smell of the western sea had been warmed by its passage over the waters, for even he understood such things. The wind in Mortentia proper would be much colder, and he shuddered to think of it.
But Rashad and he had decided to set themselves this task, and once decided between them, the thing must be done. A cool breeze ruffled his hair while he contemplated where in this great and primitive land he might find an Aulig guide named Eskeriel, and he rubbed his palms on his arms to warm them.
“It’s only early autumn and already I’m cold.” Rashad complained, as if reading his mind.
Chapter 74: Cthochi Aulig Territory, West of Redwater Town, Early Leath
“You’re not pulling your head down fast enough. You’re going to get yourself killed.” Horrus said to Gulbert O’Rockwall, when the piss purple archer finally put his head down below the palisade wall. Half a dozen arrows stuck out of Gulbert’s place in the wall, and the damned fool thought he was lucky.
“I’m the best shot in the fyrde. Probably in the whole battery, Horrus. You’re not the fyrdman you know, you’re just another archer. Just because you was in the Whitewood doesn’t give you the authority to give me orders. Pray stop telling me how to do my job.”
“Don’t you worry, Gulbert.” Horrus replied in a matter of fact voice. “I’ll never be your fyrdman. You’re going to be dead within the week.”
The two archers were crouched on the raised walkway that lined the western edge of the sleeping fort, and only split timbers a hand’s breadth wide stood between them and the Cthochi arrows coming from the woods that lay in places as close as a hundred paces out. This wasn’t really a proper sleeping fort anymore, for Captain Anbarius and the Privy Lord had expanded the original fort, built two weeks ago when the army had emerged from the strange tunnel that went beneath the Redwater River. This was the outer perimeter of the expanded fort, however, and it looked out over a broad field created by the axe men. The axe men had worked nearly every night, cutting timbers in almost complete darkness, protected by shield walls as they expanded the open area around the fort.
Thirty paces behind Horrus the spear fyrdes had dug a trench twice as wide and deep as the usual one, and filled it with sharp stakes. On the other side of that was the original sleeping fort, laid out according to the standard plan. Another deep trench lay in front of the wall where Horrus and his fyrde provided cover for the men filling it with stakes below them, behind yet another shield wall. One hundred paces beyond that lay the Cthochi wood, and their archers.
Gulbert was right about being the best archer in the fyrde. He strutted about after their practice sessions, for his arrows never failed to be in the center ring. Horrus had never seen anyone who could shoot so accurately at such a distance as Gulbert O’Bremin, but he didn’t doubt that Gulbert was going to be dead within a week. Gulbert liked to see the results of his archery, so he stood there like an idiot after he’d loosed, watching his arrows hit their marks. In addition, the piss-purples in his fyrde had some kind of competition or bet going, so Gulbert was not the only one watching to see how many Cthochi his arrows found. He knew that the piss-purples thought of him as a nervous old lady, too, because he ducked fast and took shots only when he was sure he had a target he could hit.
“Reefin, get your head down.” Horrus told a tall redhead with a scarred cheek. He didn’t know why he bothered learning their names anymore, or why he bothered trying to teach them anything. Neghon had been killed just yesterday walking the wall carelessly and not ducking between the crenellations. He’d taken an arrow to the neck and bled out, bawling the whole time for his mama. “Son of a Whore! Get down!” Horrus yelled when he saw the Cthochi arrow strike the wall within inches of Reefin’s face. Reefin ducked down belatedly and looked at Horrus with a grin on his face.
“Settle down Horrus.” The redhead said, flush with the excitement of having just been shot at. They all thought they were going to live forever. It didn’t help that Horrus was not even sixteen years old. “He missed me.”
“Watch how I do it.” Horrus said, gritting his teeth to bite back an angry retort. “All of you, watch how I do it.” He put his eye to the space between two of the split logs and carefully scanned the perimeter of the wood. He did not see any Cthochi, but Reefin was scanning the same place.
“There’s one by the big sycamore, under your left eye.” They had taken to describing positions in the wood according to where they would be on your face if you looked directly ahead, and Reefin’s directions were clear. Horrus looked carefully at the place described, and he saw what looked like the profile of a shoulder, barely visible on the other side of the sycamore. It was a shot he wasn’t sure he could make, and he stared at it for a long moment to make sure it was a man.
“I got him.” Gulbert said impatiently, rising with an arrow already nocked. He paused a moment to gauge the wind, took a long breath while he pulled it back and then loosed. The arrow flew straight and true, taking the Aulig in the chest, just to the left of the shoulder. A killing shot on a man in shadow with three-quarters cover, and made at a distance of nearly two hundred paces. Several voices rose to congratulate Gulbert, but he was already tumbling back from the walkway. A Cthochi arrow had taken him in the face, right below his right cheekbone, and gone all the way into the base of his skull.
He slammed into the ground behind the wall, arrows flew out of his quiver and his bow bounced twice. Horrus turned to Reefin, whose scar stood stark white against a face gone suddenly greenish over his piss purple jerkin. “Duck after you shoot. Don’t wait to see if you hit anything, understand?” Reefin nodded quickly.
“Still.” Horrus said after a long moment of fearful silence from the other archers. “That was a fine shot.”
Below the wall but on the wrong side of it Soolit cursed, but he did it quietly so that even the man shoveling next to him couldn’t hear. He cursed constantly, artfully, and under his breath because he didn’t want to be heard by the fookin’ Auligs in the woods. Half of his fyrde were digging holes like they were being whipped, and the other half were standing guard, wearing heavy helmets and peering over the tops of their shields into the woods. Soolit was running back and forth, with his back bent and his arms nearly dragging on the ground, grabbing the sharpened wooden stakes and pounding them into the holes. He ran fast, too. He didn’t want an arrow in his ass.
Once in a while one of the shield wall men would spot a Cthochi sniper and tell the archers on the wall where he was, but the only result of that Soolit could see was another flight of hell-damned arrows coming in when the wall archers stuck their heads up. The arrows could land anywhere, and Soolit had been nearly hit twice. Several of the men in his fyrde had been shot, although nobody had been kilt, and Soolit didn’t want to be the first. He kept his head down, kept cursing, and kept putting in stakes.
Anbarius oversaw the construction of the last wooden tower with a sense of satisfaction. When Aelfric had explained what he needed on this side of the Redwater River, Anbarius had had his doubts. The sleeping forts had been his idea, of course, and he thought them good. But to take the sleeping fort and expand it like Aelfric had ordered was difficult, especially under constant harassment by Cthochi archers. The talking drums of the Auligs were rattling away constantly, and Anbarius had feared what would happen if a major force of them attacked during construction of the expanded walls. The Auligs could have used the walls themselves, essentially creating a defended encirclement around the fort and pinning the army in.
His fears had not been realized, however. The Auligs continued to shoot arrows at the men building the walls, but the shield walls protected them, and Aelfric’s own archers paid back better than they got, shooting from an elevated position with excellent cover. Under the haras
sment the walls continued to go up, and there was plenty of timber here, nice tall pines that split easily into wall sections and that could be easily sharpened at the top. This last tower overlooked the banks of the narrows, the part of the river that lay across from the Town of Redwater and had once sported a bridge. The large army of Auligs across the river could have crossed at any time, of course, for they had plenty of war canoes, but once this tower was finished and a mangonel crew installed in it, they would cross under fire that they could not return.
The mangonels were a sore spot for Anbarius. Aelfric had traded horses for four of the things, boxy structures three paces to a side that could launch boulders as big as a man’s head or baskets full of smaller rocks as far as eight hundred paces. Unfortunately, Aelfric hadn’t known at the time that he would need to take them down a narrow passage and across the river, and the things hadn’t fit at all. Instead of disassembling them and carrying them across in pieces, as Anbarius had suggested, Aelfric had installed them in the Wood Castle, the fortification that sat on the distant hill on the east side of the river, thinking that Bendrim O’Maslit, the apprentice they’d taken on in the town of the same name, could build them from raw materials on this side of the river.
Bendrim had built one, although he called it an onager instead of a mangonel, but it had taken ten skilled carpenters all of five days, with half of them standing idle and making suggestions half of the time. They’d had to build a ramp behind the north riverbank tower to install it, then tear the ramp back down once it was in place. It was terribly inefficient, and every time Anbarius passed by their workplace he ground his teeth watching them stand around. On top of that, the poor archers on the western walls had none of the things, and were being forced to stand an exchange of arrows with the Auligs in the woods.
Anbarius was just a farmer, although he was officially a captain of engineers, but even he could see that at the present rate it would take at least ten days to properly secure this side of the river, and the Auligs could attack in force any time. He was determined to shorten that time, and he thought he had a way to do so.
Tuchek crouched behind dense cover between two pines and watched the four Cthochi as they approached the portion of the footpath below him. He didn’t bother to signal to the scouts behind. Their leader was a boy of perhaps sixteen, clad in mottled brown and black leather that blended in well with the forest, and twenty years ago Tuchek might not have seen him, but his eyes and mind had grown accustomed to the hunting of men since then. Behind the boy came four women of middle years in a loose column of formless doeskin dresses, their backs bent beneath heavy wicker baskets nearly as large as themselves and their eyes on the path at their feet.
He was five leagues from the expanded fortification Aelfric was completing on the west side of the Redwater, and deep in Cthochi country. He’d watched this footpath for an hour, and this was the fifth little column he’d seen on it. He’d done the calculations in his head, and he could guess what the baskets contained and about how much they weighed, which was important. He figured fifty pounds of food per basket, roughly two hundred pounds per group, which meant eight hundred pounds per hour and twelve daylight hours in a day, more or less. Five tons of food was flowing northward on this path daily from the southern camps of the Cthochi, which made it a major artery, the fourth one he’d found. If they could close all four they could effectively cut off about eighty percent of the Earthspeaker’s food supply.
The Cthochi would put neither their camps nor their supply lines too far west, he knew. He had been raised among them, and their fear of the giant Muharl was a consistent part of their thinking, for once in a while the Muharl would cross the Bone River and raid them. It made sense that their supply lines would parallel the Redwater, and their southern camps were richer than their northern ones. Tuchek had passed two good-sized camps on his way to this footpath, and he’d gone far enough.
Once the little caravan went on he drew back from his watching place and whistled the scouts together with a birdcall. “We have what we need.” He told them simply. “We can return to the river.”
“Aren’t we going to raid them?” Moss Loften asked. “We seen prolly a ton of food today.”
Tuchek shook his head. “No, there’s a specific way this has to be done, and we’re just scouting it to make sure it’s possible. We need to get back and tell Lord Aelfric.”
“There’s a specific way this has to be done.” Celdemer said to a fuming Sir Munith Vanketer. The big Flanesi knight, his eyes only half hidden under the wide metal brim of his helmet, was rubbing his thick beard with frustration. “We retreat, reform and then retreat again until we bring them within range of the archers in the scrub.”
“It’s ridiculous.” Sir Munith replied. “They’ve left their trenches and are walking across the flat. They aren’t even marching. We could mop them all up before lunch.” Half a dozen knights, resplendent in their house colors, nodded agreement behind Sir Munith.
“I refuse to countenance it.” Celdemer replied. He looked briefly over his shoulder, and less than five hundred paces away the Cthochi were walking toward them, practically inviting attack. The Auligs had left the protective screen of their archers and were advancing across the flat plain toward the Wood Castle, which is what they’d all come to call the fortification Lord Aelfric had ordered built on the hill east of the Redwater. At the base of the hill lay an encircling band of scrub brush where the archers of fifty fyrdes lay concealed, which was all of the archers on this side of the river. “We have orders, and we will follow them.”
“Orders from a jumped up Lord Mayor.” Boden D’Maitlin said sarcastically. He was clean-shaven and his suit of plate armor was polished to a high gloss, making him look exactly like a godsknight should. “I don’t know when we started taking orders from mercenary footmen. My horse knows they’re there and wants to attack.” Boden was riding his Firedancer, an enormous black war-trained stallion, and even under full scale barding it looked ready to throw him in its excitement.
“Lord Aelfric knows what he’s doing.” Sir Celdemer replied. “Our job is to lure their army into range of the archers, not to engage it until it is in full route.”
“Mopping up.” Sir Boden said contemptuously. “We’re trained to break them, not chase them.”
“You’re trained to follow orders. You elected me to lead this company, and those are my orders.” Celdemer replied, reminding them once again that they could get rid of him if they wanted. Eskeriel’s plan to force the godsknights to remove him through a steady stream of indignities had been frustratingly slow to bear fruit. This much he knew to be true, however, the scouts had seen these Auligs drilling in tight lance formations that looked an awful lot like schiltrons or long-spear hedgehogs. Throwing knights against formations of densely packed men in large squares bristling with pikes, whether reinforced with wooden stakes or not, was throwing knights away, and Celdemer loved these men too much to contemplate it.
He rolled his eyes beneath his helmet and gave a frustrated sigh. Out of all the obnoxious and offensive orders he’d given over the past two weeks, this was the only one that truly made good tactical sense. Ironically, it was likely to be the one order that actually got him thrown out of the godsknights, for if the knights followed it properly, the enemy pike formations would be slaughtered by archers. The knights would see this as Celdemer robbing them of the glory of the charge, and pushing them into the role of support troops.
The lancers knew better than to challenge Aelfric’s tactics, of course. They’d been in the same camps with his infantry, and the footmen practically worshiped the man. It was the six hundred heavy knights who had no respect for him. They were Aelfric’s problem, although hopefully soon enough they wouldn’t be Celdemer’s anymore.
Someday, and hopefully someday soon, Celdemer would be able to ride away from all of this, and again see the delicate and beautiful features of the one girl who had ever fascinated him. He knew there were some who called h
im a boy-lover or worse, but it wasn’t true, and nor had it ever been. What he longed for was beauty and grace and elegance, and Lanae Brookhouse carried herself with all three. Someday. Hopefully soon.
It was time for another baiting maneuver. At Celdemer’s signal the knights fell into a broad column behind the lancers, which was in their minds yet another insult to their prestige, and the column swung out to the right flank of the Cthochi pike formations, then charged across their front line, staying a good fifteen paces distant. “Give them the idea that they might get a taste of you, but don’t let them make contact.” Lord Aelfric had said.
Celdemer was at the rear of the cavalry formation and the High Cavalier was leading it. His lancers did exactly as ordered, and Celdemer could see the pace of the men in the front of the marching formation quicken with the urge to get within striking distance of the horse. That they carried long pikes was now obvious, for although they held them flat and close to their bodies to make them look like common spears, Celdemer could see that the second rank was carrying the extra length of the front rank’s pikes, and so on back to the rear, where the last rank had twelve extra feet of long pole hanging out behind.
The knights followed the lancers in perfect order until they reached the center of the Aulig formation, then Celdemer saw a large black and silver shape veer away from his column and a long lance pointing toward the Aulig’s front rank. Damn that Boden! Celdemer reacted instantly, spurring his horse along the right flank of his own formation, coming dangerously close to the pikes as he passed his knights, forcing them to keep formation.
While he raced forward, the front rank of the Auligs smoothly slid their pikes forward and up, forming a massive hedgehog that reached out toward Boden, who was charging sideways to it. “Sir Boden get back!” Celdemer screamed, but the godsknight had his own ideas, and was plainly intent on scoring some blood. Celdemer knew that once one of his number was engaged, the rest of the knights would abandon their formation and throw themselves onto the pikes. Sir Boden was about to get them all killed.
War of the Misread Augury: Book One of the Black Griffin Rising Trilogy Page 97
