Haim marched grimly on, and an arrow punched into his shield, but didn’t hit any part of him. It wasn’t the first time he’d stood to arrows with nothing but a shield to protect him, and the Aulig fire was still desultory, and nothing like the hell the Whitewood had been. Still, despite the cold he was sweating, and men were screaming as arrows found them. From the ridge behind and to his right answering arrows came, and now the Cthochi pike phalanxes were close enough that an occasional lucky Mortentian shot scored, but not nearly enough. “Seven Hells.” He said, just loud enough for Brelic O’Dustin to overhear. “How much closer do we have to get to ‘brush’ these bastards?”
“Just waitin’ on your orders, fyrdman. Sooner the better.”
Haim gritted his teeth and looked for Tolric among the advancing shield wall, even as it continued to grow thinner with men dying. They were barely a hundred paces from the phalanxes now, and the Auligs were shouting and laughing as they advanced. He couldn’t see Tolric, and it was possible the man was down. When Limver O’Topwater cried out that he was hit, Haim shouted. “Retreat in order, men!” He heard Captain Tolric’s voice issuing the identical command less than a second later.
This was the hardest part of the maneuver, to back up as rapidly as possible over uneven ground while maintaining some semblance of a shield wall, and under determined enemy archery. An arrow bounced off of his helmet as he withdrew, and another one killed a piss purple to his left. Seven Hells, they were getting massacred!
Horrus O’Rockwall watched the spear fyrdes seem to fall apart in the valley below him, and he fixed an arrow to his bow. He was drawing back on the string when his fyrdman slapped the arrow down. “Not yet!” The man said, and Horrus cursed.
“They’re getting slaughtered down there!” He exclaimed. To his left and right fifteen hundred archers lay concealed behind the low ridge overlooking the Shallow Pass, and they were watching the men below them fall back before the advancing Cthochi phalanxes. “We need to buy them time!”
“They know their mission, bowman!” The fyrdman replied. “We wait for now. If we show ourselves, this whole battle falls apart. You have to trust that the commanders know what they are doing.”
Horrus growled and lowered himself back down, steeling his nerves to watch the spear fyrdes in their desperate retreat. He knew they had two hundred paces to go yet, and it didn’t look like they would make it.
“Now?” Bendram O’Maslit demanded, looking over the same ridge. He was standing next to one of ten mangonels lined up and anchored just behind the archers, positioned to pepper the Shallow Pass with shot. “Can we start firing now?”
“Not yet.” Anbarius said grimly. He didn’t like watching the spearmen dying any more than anyone else did, but he knew it was part of the plan. “We wait until they hit the logs.” The bloody retreat of the spear fyrdes continued, and they were marching as fast as the Ctochi hedgehogs were advancing. The ones who lacked the footwork skill to march backward fast enough already lay dead on the field, either pierced with arrows or struck down by pikes. Anbarius noted that most of the dead were wearing the dark blue tabards of new recruits, although a few piss purples were dead and half a dozen in rust red or Arker’s Hammer cream.
“We should rush them!” Stalksdeer said to Kerrick the Sword, but Kerrick shook his head.
“We have to march them.” He replied. “We run forward to catch them and our shield wall falls apart. We must be as patient as they are.”
Kerrick was behind the phalanxes, and he was one of the few dozen Cthochi on horseback, even though the horse he was riding was a half-wild hill pony of uncertain lineage with mottled coloring and an eye toward mischief. He didn’t like riding, although he was skilled at it, but there was no other way to see where his men were going. He watched the retreating lines of the Stonecutter spearmen, and he was surprised at how rapidly they fell back, even under pressure from his archers, keeping pace with his own phalanxes. “He’s turned his soldiers into Auligs.” He said in an admiring voice. “Look at how fast they cover ground marching backward.”
But from his viewpoint, even if the retreat was being carried out in good order, it was still quite obviously a route, and his phalanxes were less than five hundred paces from the top of Ugly Woman Hill. Around that hill and in entrenched positions lining the way the Stonecutter commander had thought he would go would be several thousand swordsmen and archers, but once he secured the high ground, his archers would slaughter them at will. Predicting their battle plan had enabled him to flank them, and the speed of his attack had left them no time to readjust.
He walked his pony behind his army, keeping pace with them, and he ordered in the reserves just as the snow began to fall. He needed to secure the hill quickly, for he knew that the Stonecutter general was even now scrambling to reposition his men to either defend it or organize a retreat. The undisciplined mob that was the Faith Island band had arrived at his position just minutes earlier, and he sent them behind his swords and archers. Fully sixty-five thousands now marched in a broad rectangular mass behind the invincible phalanxes, an irresistible force that the few hundred spearmen remaining had no hope of stopping. The enemy’s archers and siege engines had been seen at the Wood Castle just days earlier, and his scouts knew they had not crossed the river since.
The few archers the enemy did possess were perched on the ridge far to his left, and they were too few to significantly impede him now. His captains channeled their men to avoid them, hugging the right side of the pass. He allowed himself a smile and nodded when Areido appeared, riding a horse he’d taken from the battlefield on the other side of the river and brought across hobbled in a war canoe. “We have them!” Areido yelled, gloating. “Why do you not run them down?”
Kerrick shook his head. “We will run them down once we take the hill. They will never make it back to the river now.”
“Lio’s breath.” Busker said to Aelfric as they watched the Cthochi advance. “There must be fifty thousand of them.”
Aelfric nodded, then he took a deep breath like he was about to leap into a lake. “And they’re committed. Sound the attack.” Busker noted that the knuckle of Aelfric’s right hand was bloody where he’d bit through the skin watching the approaching enemy in nervous anticipation.
“Sound attack!” Busker shouted, and three brass horns, each pitched differently for archers, spears and swords, sounded the seven tone command for attack. The engineers began blowing their whistles, and arrows began to fly in earnest.
The High Cavalier heard the horns blow the attack, but the lancers’ horn was not among them. From his redoubt below the southern side of the hill he watched with no little frustration as the archers stood and loosed and the spearmen and reserves began running over the hilltop and down toward the battlefield. He heard the sound of a dozen mangonel arms slamming against the stops, and he could see two or three of them from his position, bucking and heaving against the ground. From his position he could not see the enemy, nor was he likely to, for Eskeriel’s scouts were screening the whole south side of the hill.
Heavy snowflakes began to fall all around him, and the wind picked up. How in the seven hells was he supposed to lead a charge in this?
Haim was exhausted and bleeding from a cut cheek, and he had an arrow in his right calf. The survivors of the spear fyrdes were less than two hundred paces from the command tower at the top of the hill when the sword fyrdes came up to relieve them, passing through their ranks and forming into their strange and staggered triple shield wall. Snow was falling thickly, and so were Mortentian arrows. He had barely passed the first line of fallen logs that formed an obstacle against the phalanxes, stumbling and tripping backward over them at a cost of dozens of men.
He fell panting to the ground, but he had the presence of mind to tuck in his legs under his shield as he did so. He caught his breath and looked around. He saw maybe four of his own men, and out of the fifteen hundred spears Aelfric had sent down the hill to bait the Cthochi, he doubt
ed more than five hundred were left.
Soolit looked in horror at the long battlefield before him, even as he assumed his place among the staggered shield wall. Dead Mortentians lay in a long swath for half a league down the Shallow Pass, and thousands upon thousands of Auligs in all kinds of mismatched gear marched or ran over their bodies while arrows and flung shot filled the air above their heads. The pike phalanxes were floundering over the logs and barriers that had been put across their paths, barriers that were nothing to a man with a sword, but that formed an effective trap for men wielding pole-arms five paces long. An exhausted Red Tiger spearman, a giant with half-Aulig features and an arrow in his calf, stumbled and fell at Soolit’s feet, tucking in beneath his shield.
“Luck, friend.” Soolit said, then the Second Swords smashed into the floundering pikemen, and he began driving forward, stabbing and thrusting with his sword. He was surprised that no arrows seemed to be falling near him, nor any shot from the siege engines, but he was locked in close-quarter combat with Cthochi pikemen who were throwing down their pikes and drawing swords and axes. He gave them a wicked grin and marched forward. “Nice to meet you, motherfucker!” He said to the first man he killed. “Say hello to your ancestors, sheepdiddler!” He told the next. His extensive repository of epithets would be nearly exhausted by the end of the day.
Pikes and phalanxes were wonderful formations on level ground beneath a clear sky on a warm summer’s day, but on obstructed ground made slick with fresh snow and moving uphill? It was the butcher’s yard of the Whitewood all over again. Behind Soolit four thousand swordsmen formed into ranks and began widening their front, catching the beleaguered pikemen within a narrowing crescent, a shield wall that tightened inexorably and close-in, rendering their pikes useless.
Wherever the Cthochi with shields attempted to form walls, the Mortentian shield walls slammed into them, driving swords into weak spots and killing them by the score, but it was hardly a one-sided fight. Soolit watched an Aulig with white hair in a braid drive a pike into Dandin O’Kancro, and Berdim Felder caught an arrow in his eye. The snow was falling thickly now, and the footing was bad for both sides. Still, Soolit slipped and slid down the slope with the rest of his fyrde, and the Cthochi were forced back pace by pace. The Second Swords were killing a lot more than they were dying, and snow was pink with blood where it wasn’t red.
The sky was an eerie yellowish color, and snow was falling thickly with the wind behind it, and packing up and getting slushy beneath their feet. Soolit marched and killed and slipped and floundered in the snow until he was exhausted, and his relief marched up to take his place. The staggered formations made sense to him now, for the enemy had no fresh men to take the place of the men fighting at their front, and they were falling back exhausted before the onslaught of the Silver Run Army.
When Kerrick heard the sound he’d been dreading, the repeated slamming of the mangonel arms against their stops, he knew the Shallow Pass for the trap it was. Even as the sky filled with snow, it also filled with arrows and flung shot, and through the falling snow he could dimly see the Stonecutters forming up into sword ranks at the top of the hill. He had no idea how the stonecutters could have so many archers and siege engines here, when there were yet thousands, he was sure, at the Wooden Castle on the other side of the Redwater. Still, even in this blizzard he could see that he had blundered into a trap.
“Back.” He shouted to his drumspeaker. “Order them back. We need to attack from another angle.” The drumspeaker began hammering out the call for an ordered retreat. Kerrick knew that he’d taken heavy losses already, but so had the Mortentians, and he knew he had still more reserves coming from the Earthspeaker’s camp, most likely by tomorrow. The day was lost, but not the battle, and in fact this was just another skirmish, albeit a heavy one.
He was thinking these thoughts when another horn blew from the Stonecutter’s command camp. He hardly heard it over the sound of the wind.
Finally! Aurix and the lancers, bristling with eagerness to join in the battle, heard the horn and quickly formed into a long column five horses wide. Horses that had stood stiff-legged in the cold began to prance and trot, their riders barely managing to keep them in check. “Now!” Aurix shouted. “We ride to glory! Death to the Auligs!” Fifteen hundred horsemen thundered across a previously marked trail, coming around Ugly Woman Hill from the south to smash into the disordered rear of an enemy attempting a retreat. The Auligs along this flank who were not speared on the first pass of the horses were slammed into the snow by their heavy bodies, and they threw down their weapons and fled back into the main body of their army.
In short order the Aulig army was trapped, penned between the sword fyrdes as they advanced downhill in the Shallow Pass and the cavalry at the bottom of it. In the space between the shot from the siege engines and arrows from fifteen hundred archers fell among the trees, killing many of the Auligs milling about there. The bulk of the Auligs now had their shields over their heads and stood under the trees, waiting for a command and a new direction, for the path of their withdrawal was now blocked.
Kerrick knew that two lines of retreat lay open to him. If they marched north, they would soon be out of range of the flying shot and they could escape into the densely forested area that lay at the foot of the western long ridge. If they marched straight west, they could escape that way, but they would have to endure several charges from the lancers and would risk being run down as they retreated. The northern escape route would have served him well, but it lay under the shadow of a fortification, or so he thought, for one of the false fortifications lay at the end of that hill.
Believing the fortification to be a death trap based on his earlier experiences, Kerrick the Sword devised a desperate strategy to avoid both the lancers and the fortification. He ordered his men to take the ridge on which the Stonecutter’s siege engines stood, changing direction to drive south. Of the ridges surrounding his army, it looked the least steep, and once his spear and sword men were among the archers there, they could break through to the other side and escape south.
The army yielded the east front to the Stonecutter swordsmen, and began a desperate march toward the enemy’s siege engines. Faithborn saw them coming.
“Sound the reserves.” He told his trumpeter, when the Auligs were firmly committed to this new line of attack. A thousand spearmen, mostly new blues, advanced to form a shield wall between the archers and the siege engines. Meanwhile Aurix’s horsemen drove inward, bottling the Aulig army in the pass, and the sword fyrdes advanced inexorably into their left flank. Nearly thirty thousand Auligs, all that was left of Kerrick’s forces, attempted the advance, holding their shields in both hands to protect themselves from archers and shot. There were a few trees here, and the Auligs used them for cover as they marched, but still the archers had their way with them, and the ones in the rear marched forward over the arrow-pierced bodies of their companions.
Kerrick dismounted to follow his men, and Areido walked beside him. They both held shields and swords. “The Earthspeaker will come!” Areido shouted over the din of clashing swords and howling wind.
Kerrick looked at the Faith Island chieftain and nodded. There was no point shattering the man’s illusions. He knew what to expect on the other side of this hill if ever he crested it, for surely the Stonecutter general had not left his siege engines unprotected. Most likely he was walking to his death.
Anbarius watched the Aulig army advancing toward his position on the hill, and he watched his engineers fling every bit of stone and shot at them that they could load. Arrows fell thickly among the Auligs as they slipped on the uneven slopes, and Anbarius knew they would never make it to where he stood. “Throw the fire!” He ordered, and his engineers flung their last loads of rock and shot and loaded up the large clay barrels of pitch and set them alight. The flaming missiles flew among the Auligs and exploded, even though the flames were quickly quenched when they landed in the snow. Then the Auligs reached the brush-cho
ked trench that had taken the spear fyrdes all night to dig, and they could go no further.
They tried, of course, but the trench was fully three paces high on the side closest to Anbarius, and the sides were now slick with snow and mud. It was not completely vertical, for it didn’t need to be to stop them. On hands and knees they tried to clamber up the slope, but they had to drop their shields, and the archers poured arrows into them at nearly point blank range.
Meanwhile the cavalry had flanked their right rear and the sword-fyrdes their left, and no escape lay open to them. A band of some twenty or so came up with the idea to form a human pyramid, and they began running over the bodies of their companions to escape the trench. Anbarius watched one huge fellow wearing the stolen helmet of a godsknight and carrying a spear, as he climbed up over the bodies and started for the archers. It took probably five arrows to stop him, and he fell back into the trench screaming. His engineers no longer needed machines to kill the Auligs now, they just picked up barrels of pitch and ran forward, heedless of the occasional ill-aimed Aulig arrow, hurling the barrels into the trench where they exploded in flame among the densely packed bodies.
It was the fire in the trench that finally broke them. There were perhaps five-thousand of them yet alive in the Shallow Pass when they ran, no longer heeding any command, running to the west as fast as Auligs can run, where the lancers waited for them. Here and there a small band managed to escape the horsemen by running among dense trees where the horses could not follow, hiding among the dead, or even burrowing into snowdrifts, for true dark was now coming, and the snow lay thick and heavy on the ground.
Aelfric watched the snow pile up and saw that the sky was still thick with it. He was cold, despite his heavy gambeson, and the iron chainmail was no help. Busker and Faithborn approached him, and the men beside them carried torches. “The day is ours.” Busker said. “We’ve beaten them.”
War of the Misread Augury: Book One of the Black Griffin Rising Trilogy Page 112
