03 - Call to Arms (11 page)

Startled, Dieter heard another howl as a figure charged towards him from the
side. Expecting another wolf, he was surprised to see it was a goblin—the
rider of the wolf he had killed. Its head bleeding from the wound inflicted when
Dieter had pulled it from its saddle, the goblin let out a weird, undulating cry
as it closed to melee distance and attacked. Dieter knew nothing of these
creatures and their ways, but it seemed to him the goblin was reacting with some
deep emotion as though the death of its mount had moved it to rage.

Whatever the case, it hardly mattered. Without its wolf, the goblin was a
less fearful proposition. Almost as an afterthought, Dieter dispatched it with a
quick stroke of his sword.

Looking about him, he saw the skirmish was over. The other men of the file
had killed the rest of the wolf riders and their mounts without sustaining any
serious injuries. More importantly, none of the goblins had escaped to raise the
alarm.

“All right,” Sergeant Bohlen said, once he was sure all the enemy were dead.
“We drag the bodies back into the undergrowth and set up as before. If we’re
lucky, we’ll take the next group of scouts along this road in exactly the same
way.”

The men moved to follow his orders, but before they could finish their
labours a commotion from further down the trail grabbed their attention.

Another half-dozen wolf riders suddenly appeared at the end of the trail.
Spotting the Scarlets as they were busily dragging away the corpses of the
goblins they had already killed, the wolf riders let loose a hasty volley of
arrows, turned tail and galloped away in the direction they had come. The arrows
fell short, leaving the Scarlets unharmed, but the damage was already done.

“Rhya’s teats!” Bohlen cursed as the scouts rode away. “That’s torn it!
Inside a quarter of an hour every greenskin in the area will be on us like dung
on a bull’s arse.”

The sergeant scanned the trail in both directions, casting watchful eyes at
the looming shapes of the trees in the forest around them.

“We’ve got no choice,” he said, after he had considered the matter for a few
seconds. “Now the greenskins know where we are, they can come at us from every
angle and tear us apart. Our position on this trail is no longer defensible.”

“There’s a woodsman’s hut further along here,” Hoist said, pointing vaguely
eastwards. “One of the local huntsmen mentioned it to me last night. I didn’t
see it when we came this way earlier because of the mists, but from what the
huntsman told me, I’d say it’s over in that direction.”

“There’d be a wood pile there,” Gerhardt said. “Maybe some bigger logs.
Assuming we can reach it before the greenskins, it wouldn’t take us long to
create a barricade we could fight behind. That way, we could make more of a
stand. Give the rest of the regiment more time to escape.”

“We could even set fire to the hut itself,” Rieger picked up the theme. “It
would make it more likely the orc army would be drawn toward us rather than
tracking the regiment. Orcs love nothing more than some smoke and fire. It would
attract them to us like moths to a flame.”

Long seconds passed in silence as the sergeant thought it through. Standing
nearby, Dieter wondered whether they were talking about the same hut where he
and Krug had nearly come to blows. He worried whether he should say something to
someone about the old woman’s body, but a murderous glare from Krug made him
hold silent. It was not so much that the other man frightened him; more that it
seemed an inappropriate time to bring the matter up, given they were likely to
be fighting side by side against the orcs at any moment.

“We’ll head for this hut,” Sergeant Bohlen said, finally. “It sounds like a
better place to make a stand. Hoist, you lead the way. Breitmeyer, you’re our
rearguard. Right then, there’s no time like the present. Quick time, two men in
tandem. Let’s get going.”

Following the sergeant’s lead, the men formed up two-abreast, with Hoist at
the front of the short column and Breitmeyer at the rear. At a signal from
Bohlen, they began to jog down the trail in search of the hut.

Uncomfortably close to Krug and Febel in the marching order, Dieter wondered
what would happen at the hut when they found it.

In the end, they didn’t make it.

Having first encountered the hut when the forest was still shrouded in early
morning mist, Dieter had no clear idea of where it was. He would have had a
better chance of finding an obscure tavern on the docks of Talabheim, a city he
had never visited, than of finding his way back to the hut.

Similarly, having only the half-remembered directions he had heard from a
huntsman to go on, Hoist showed no great aptitude in leading his comrades to
their destination. Nor did Krug or Febel volunteer any information—if they had
any. However, the greatest obstacle the men of Sergeant Bohlen’s file faced in
reaching the hut was not a lack of directions. It was that the orcs did not
leave them alone long enough to be able to find it.

The first attack came after only a few minutes. Bohlen’s men were jogging
along the trail when they heard the sound of wild whoops and war cries. A new
group of wolf riders had appeared on the trail behind them. Foregoing any
attempt at subtlety, they seemed intent on riding the Scarlets down.

“Form up on me,” Bohlen said, his eyes narrowing as he saw the enemy. “I want
two ranks of five, spread across the trail with the first rank in skirmish
formation. First rank, you’re to let the riders pass you. Second rank, stay
tight enough to lock shields with each other. You’re the wall that breaks their
charge. When they see you, they’ll have to pull up. That’s when we’ll skewer
them.”

Following the example of the other men around him, Dieter took up a position
in the second rank.

They readied to meet the wolf riders’ charge in exactly the way that Sergeant
Bohlen had directed. The first rank of five men stood strung across the trail,
posted far enough apart to let the goblins ride through the gaps and pass by the
side of them.

The second rank adopted a tighter formation. The men stood close together,
each man’s shield edge-to-edge with the shields of the men on either side of
him. With their swords held thrusting outward in a high guard position, the five
men had created a shield wall—making an impenetrable barrier across the centre
of the trail, studded with sharp points.

The shield wall was an unusual tactic for a group of swordsmen. Mostly
utilised by units of spearmen who could make better use of the longer reach of
their weapons, it was one of the most ancient and venerable manoeuvres in the
tactical lexicon of the armies of the Empire. Legend had it the shield wall was
one of the many innovations the god Sigmar had brought to human warfare when he
still walked the land as a man.

In his youth, Dieter had practised the shield wall often. Helmut Schau had
insisted on it. As the only experienced soldier in the village, Helmut had been
commander of the local militia as well as a miller. He had drilled the other
members of the militia in the tactic relentlessly, telling them the strength of
their shield wall might one day stand between them and certain death.

For Dieter, today was that day. Using the formation now, to fight mankind’s
natural enemies the greenskins, he felt part of an unbroken line of human
achievement and succession stretching back over two and a half thousand years to
the founding of the Empire and beyond.

“The strength of the shield wall is the collective strength of every man in
it,” Helmut had taught him. “Each man must do his duty. He must hold the line in
face of the enemy charge, in face of his own fear. He must hold the line, or
else the wall breaks and he dooms his comrades.”

Mindful of the lesson, Dieter ignored the nervous butterflies fluttering in
his stomach and set himself to receive the goblins’ charge. As the wolf riders
came closer, it occurred to him it took a special courage, or a special madness,
for a soldier to hold his ground when cavalry were charging towards him.

Setting aside their bows, the goblins held their spears couched under their
arms like lances as they charged. As they closed the distance to the infantry,
the sound of wolf paws padding on the hard ground of the trail grew louder until
it resembled a strange kind of thunder accompanied by the noise of claws
scratching in the dirt. It took every ounce of bravery in Dieter’s soul to hold
the line in the face of the charging enemy. It was the wolves, not the goblins,
that he found most frightening. With slavering jaws and hungry eyes, they seemed
the nightmare creatures of his nursery dreams given wicked flesh.

“First rank! Let them pass!”

Sergeant Bohlen shouted out the order a split second before his men came
within range of the goblin spears. Acting with well-drilled precision, the men
of the first rank abruptly stood aside to let the goblins pass, melting away
before the wolves or their riders could touch them.

Carried on by the momentum of their charge, the wolf riders found themselves
bearing down on the second rank’s shield wall with its line of gleaming
sword-points. Not unnaturally, they tried to halt their advance, the charge
coming to a shuddering halt as the wolves at the back collided with the wolves
further forward.

“Now!” Sergeant Bohlen’s voice sounded among the din of shouting goblins and
snarling wolves. “Shut the gate!”

The men of the first rank charged into the back of the wolf riders while the
second rank advanced forward at their front. Caught between the two groups of
swordsmen, hemmed in on top of each other in an ever-decreasing space, the wolf
riders’ superior numbers counted for nothing.

The Scarlets made short work of them, swords stabbing again and again into
the confused enemy mass. Having learned a lesson when fighting the last group of
wolf riders, Dieter was careful this time to always strike for the wolf first
and not the rider.

Even as he joined in with the others, his sword stabbing mechanically
back-and-forth as blood sprayed into the air and fell to drench the hard earth,
he was amazed at how quickly he had become accustomed to the grisly nature of
warfare. He had never been squeamish, but once he might have felt uneasy at
having to slaughter an enemy who had no chance to escape, to hear their dying
screams, to feel their slick blood underfoot.

In the face of war with the greenskins, all his kinder emotions had left him.
It was not so much that he hated them, though in common with most people in the
Empire he believed it was the destiny of orc and man to be eternal enemies. He
was moved by a simpler, less complex imperative. He killed them because it was
the nature of war; kill or be killed.

More quickly than he would have thought possible, it was over. As the last of
the enemy fell, the Scarlets walked among the fallen bodies of wolf and goblin,
making sure they were dead and dispatching any that were not with quick,
merciless strokes.

Following the lead of his comrades Dieter joined in with their work, but he
had no real stomach for it. Now the heat of combat had left him, he felt queasy
about such tasks. He recognised that any enemy left alive might later try to
strike them down, but it was harder to kill in cold blood—even when the target
was a goblin. It was the way of war between human and greenskin. Neither side
took prisoners. No quarter was given, nor was it asked for. For all that though,
Dieter found it hard to be the one who had to do the bloody work of killing a
wounded enemy.

Looking for some mental respite, he gazed at the forest around him. It
occurred to him that the section of trail where the Scarlets had made their
stand was particularly narrow. At the same time, the trees on either side of the
trail were thicker and positioned more closely together. Realising that Sergeant
Bohlen must have intentionally chosen the best place for his men to take a stand
once the wolf riders were spotted, Dieter was filled by an admiration for his
sergeant.

“Look lively,” Sergeant Bohlen said, his voice snapping Dieter out of his
reverie. “There’s more of them.”

Another group of goblins had appeared at the end of the trail. This time, the
enemy were on foot. There were more of them as well. Several dozen were in sight
already, with more in a long line snaking away in the distance along the trail.

“They’re not scouts,” Gerhardt said. “It’s a goblin mob, could be a thousand
strong or more. And, if they’re here, the rest of the army won’t be far behind.
It’ll take more than ten men and a shield wall to deal with that lot.”

“What do we do, then?” Dieter asked. He looked to the faces of the men around
him. “If that’s true, they’ll have us outnumbered a hundred to one. How do we
hold them back?”

“We don’t,” Sergeant Bohlen said. “We’ve done our best, held back the enemy
scouts long enough for the rest of the regiment to escape. But that lot there
will roll over us like a grinder over oats. We’d last maybe ten seconds against
them. We’ve done our duty. Now, we run.”

That night, and for many nights afterwards, the next hour would serve as a
source for Dieter’s nightmares. Where earlier the Scarlets had jogged along the
trail trying to maintain an even pace, they now ran as fast as they could.

With the goblins behind them, they ran for their lives.

Lungs burning, his breath rasping like sandpaper through his throat, Dieter
tried to keep up with the others. He had thought himself in good shape, full of
youthful energy and vigour, but before they had covered barely three hundred
paces he found himself flagging.

His body was bathed in sweat, soaking through his clothes, the salt of his
own perspiration itching at his skin like acid. The weight of his weapons,
shield and armour seemed unbearable. He wanted to cast them away, to lighten his
load, but he saw the other Scarlets still carried theirs.