The Ancient Enemy (39 page)

A few more arrows fell among them, mostly lodging harmlessly in the mud.

Their own archers were holding fire, not having targets to aim at.

They remained halted there while scouts loped ahead up into the dunes. They vanished from sight. A little later they reappeared and waved red sticks.

Orders rang out. They turned left, re-dressed to the original line, and went forward again, shields up, spears ready. The mists thickened as they moved north along the beach. They crossed a patch where seaweed in considerable quantities had washed ashore and was being dried for harvesting. The stuff crunched and crackled under their hobnails and for a while the smell of it filled their nostrils. Then they were past it and also beyond the end of the dunes.

Quite suddenly there came a sharp whistle on their right and the scouts could be seen signaling.

"Prepare to receive enemy from the right flank!"

They formed up, turning and flexing their lines to be able to receive an assault from the dunes.

Then they saw monkeys, lots of them, clustering along the top of the dune. Arrows flew in both directions, but considerably more were falling on the men. The top of the dune gave the monkey archers a good position for aiming a plunging fire down on them.

Rukkh felt an arrow thud into his shield. Another one clipped the edge and caromed past a few inches from his face. He heard a curse behind him as it struck someone.

More arrows were coming.

Captain Emjex was requesting permission to clear the dunes of the enemy. A few moments later orders came down and Burok sent his men running forward, up the sandy face of the dune. For the first time that day they climbed that hundred feet of sand.

The drums thundered, and they screamed their war cry.

Arrows flew among them. Here and there someone stumbled and went down, but the rest kept going. Rukkh had arrows sticking out of his shield, but none had harmed him yet.

It was tiring work, though, driving up the slope through the loose yellow sand.

At last they reached the top and found the enemy gone. A shout came from Forjal, who pointed down the far slope. A few figures were still visible taking to their heels into the heather, which was braided by ancient game trails.

Burok halted them on the top, and they formed up, dressed their lines with habitual efficiency, and waited. Burok was very unwilling to enter the tangled heather on the inland slope of the dunes.

"Can't keep formation in that!" he pointed out to Lieutenant Braz.

Officers were conferring. Semaphores were flying, red, then blue sticks.

They remained in position, holding the top of the dunes at their northern tip. The Blitzers had a fine view of the battlefield.

The mist was fading by that point. A light breeze from off the bay started clearing the air. The walls of the city appeared, with its towers and steeples within. Rukkh could see that it was a big place, easily as big as the one they'd burned before the plague. Hell, there was a moat, full of water. This city would be harder to take. Rukkh counted three gates on the near side of the city, a small one just above the beach and two larger ones from which came roads. The space in front of the walls was completely clear, right up to the edge of the moat, though farther back, beyond bowshot, the ground was covered in walled-garden allotments and a maze of small paths that connected them to the roads. Inland, to the right of their line of advance, grew a strip of forest, and beyond the forest were small fields, bright green with the burgeoning crop.

Generals wanted to take a look at all this with their very own eyes, and so they waited there while Uisbank and his retinue climbed the dune. By then the mist had receded almost completely. They could see the organized masses of the enemy marching out of the center gate about a mile away. Rukkh's practiced eye took in the loose, but not completely sloppy formations. Regiments of perhaps a thousand individuals, he judged, marching in column. At the head of each was a trio of officers and a standard-bearer. For standards they used small bright pennons in different color combinations.

Uisbank watched the monkeys with their amusing little display of disciplined marching. Regiments of the little creatures? It certainly wasn't what he'd expected. At the fight at Tamf, Uisbank had been on the staff of General Ruus. The monkeys had never tried to do more than hold the wall, and they'd been easily outmaneuvered there. Now they thought to imitate men, did they? Hah! He'd soon show them about that.

Uisbank called his officers together. He planned to use the classic slanted front attack that had won the battle of Kaggenbank and put Aeswiren III on the throne. The army would line up with three regiments in line, facing the monkeys, who were in line along their road. The Blitz Regiment, famous for frontal attacks, would be the closest to the city while the Fourth Regiment would fill in behind it. The remaining Fifth Regiment would be held back in reserve.

The regiments closest to the wall would move off first, pitching into the monkeys around the gate. If at all possible, they would seize the gate. The other two regiments would advance a little later and thus the line would trail back from the left to the right. The monkeys should be forced away from the wall and then compressed and encircled before being slaughtered.

The regiments stepped forward to begin the maneuvers. Rukkh's company went downslope to rejoin the regiment, which would be the lead regiment in the coming fight. Often that was all a battle required, a single clean thrust by the Blitzers through the enemy's belly. They were justly famous for the power of their attack.

The company quick marched down the dune and across the flat ground in front of the walls and took their position in the regiment. They faced inland, with the city walls about two hundred feet to their left. There were monkeys everywhere. A line of them on the walls, keening and wailing, and a great mass of them arrayed along the road near the gate.

On the dune top, General Uisbank decided against sending a force to clear out the monkeys in the heather. His priority was just to hit the damned monkeys on their right flank and push them away from the gate. Then he could be certain of massacring the lot of them.

Skirmishers on the dunes could be attended to later.

The regiments lined up in smooth array, watched by the monkeys from a distance of a thousand feet. A few long-ranging arrows came hurtling out from the walls, on their left, but it was a little too far for them. The shafts sank into the soft ground. Rukkh noticed that there were lots of muddy places ahead, where the night's rain had softened the earth.

The trumpets blew the charge as soon as they'd dressed their lines. Forward at a trot went the men on the left, closest to the wall. At the same moment there came a loud crack from the walls, instantaneously followed by a whining shriek, and a rock as big as a man's head was hurled off the wall to land in the middle of the regiment. By a miracle it simply slammed into a muddy slough and rolled away down the aisle between their lines.

Unfortunately the second one hit poor Blukubo square in the chest.

The loud
crack-whine
sounds kept coming, and with them more rocks. Men went down like skittles as these rocks slammed into them. Without any orders, the pace of their charge was quickened. Arrows from the mass of monkeys ahead began falling among them in drifts. Here and there they brought forth cries of pain and curses. Another rock bounced short, then flew through the squad's ranks at chest height, until it caught Wiggi full on the shield. That wasn't enough protection, and Wiggi was hurled to the ground.

"Close up that file," screamed Burok, and they stepped over poor old Wiggi and went on.

At about that moment there came a blast of trumpets behind them. The men didn't look back; that was for officers to do. They kept going forward until new orders came down to them.

What they didn't see was that the small gate close to the edge of the beach had opened, releasing a force of monkeys that was charging headlong at the rear of the Fourth Regiment, backing up the Blitzers.

Orders were being bellowed. The last two lines of men in the Fourth were halted, turned about, and set to receive the enemy assault.

The rest continued the quick-step charge toward the enemy.

But now the enemy's two other regiments had turned and hustled closer to the one directly ahead. They were shortening their line and deepening it opposite the onrushing assault column.

Rukkh noted the raggedness of the movements, but the end result was still a dramatic thickening of the line ahead of them. And now there was a threat of a force coming in on their right flank as they attacked.

More trumpets were blowing as General Uisbank made corrections, calling on the other regiments to close up formations and accelerate their approach to keep the fornicating monkeys from falling on the right flank of the attack column. His echelon attack was blurring.

With a roar and a clatter, the fight behind the Blitzers began as the enemy came up against the rear guard. More rocks whistled into their ranks and bounced on and then they were moving over the last hundred yards, speeding up to a run but keeping their lines straight. The war cry was rising high and the red tops were still hammering away on their drums.

The enemy gave a great cry of their own and surged forward, and in a moment the forces came together. Rukkh found himself confronted with a row of long spears and behind them oblong shields painted with a number of animal motifs. He tried to deflect the spear ahead, it struck his shield, pulled back, and stabbed at his legs. He cut down with the shield and drove the spearpoint to the ground, but another spear jabbed at him, and he was forced to step sideways.

The monkeys were keeping a forest of spearpoints in their faces. It was hard to go shield to shield and use one's momentum to smash them back.

Rukkh thrust with his own spear, its point leaping and flickering as he stabbed at the monkeys in front of him. Rukkh was impressed, despite himself. They were fighting well, much better than they had in the fights he'd taken part in before. He dodged another spear thrust. An arrow clipped the side of his shield and struck him on the breastplate with considerable force. He struggled to get his breath for a moment, and the enemy spears thrust at him from both sides together, forcing him back a step and exposing Forjal, who gave a curse and stepped back, too.

The whole line of the squad was peeling back, stepping into the men behind them, who cursed them for being weak-willed sons of whores. The regiment was bunching up.

Meanwhile the pressure on the right was growing intense where the attack was flanked. The monkeys had closed around on that side, taking men on two sides. Inevitably the lines had curved back and knots had formed in their formations.

Burok was cursing Rukkh's sodomistic parentage for letting the lines bunch. Then a stone struck Burok on the helmet with a loud clang and he pitched facefirst into the mud. The monkeys were pressing them. More spears were thrusting and jabbing. Rukkh deflected spearheads, felt one stick in his shield, then tug furiously as its owner tried to pull it free. He held on, trying not to be pulled out of line, another spear struck at him, and he pulled his hip aside. He couldn't move the fucking shield.

"Nooooooo!" screamed Rukkh, and Forjal somehow knocked up the spear coming at Rukkh, but also managed to flick his spearpoint back into the monkey's face, sending it over in a fountain of blood. Rukkh's shield came free as the spear snapped.

But then Forjal was tripped up by another monkey's spear and fell backward with a loud curse. Rukkh nipped in, used the shield to clear away the spears pointed at him, and thrust overhand into the breast of the nearest monkey. The armor took most of the blow, but gave enough for blood to run when he pulled back. The monkey fell back, but others pushed forward.

Forjal had regained his feet, but now his spear had stuck in a monkey's shield. There was no time to pull it free. Forjal let go and drew his sword while his shield knocked away one spear thrust and he ducked another.

The monkeys were pressing. There seemed to be more and more of them. The line was buckling. There was a loud scream to Rukkh's right. Yegeb in Hugga's squad had gone down with a spear in his guts. Monkeys broke the first line back around Yegeb's body.

Forjal, now cursing in a continuous roar, was slashing back and forth at the spearpoints in front of him, while Rukkh and Oggi pushed in on either side, trying to halt the monkeys and set them back.

They were halted at spear's length, jabbing away again at a line of monkeys that would not give ground. They were dying, but they were not bending.

Among the monkeys there were some bigger ones, like he'd seen in the previous fight. One of these was opposite now, and for the first time, Rukkh felt that he was the smaller of the combatants.

The heavyweight monkey slammed shields with him, and Rukkh was driven back a step. He cursed, jabbed at his foe's face, and darted to the side. The monkey was quick with the spear, but unskilled. He lunged too far and overbalanced.

"Forjal!" roared Rukkh. "Grab it!"

Forjal had seen the opportunity and he dropped his sword and grabbed the spear shaft. A powerful tug jerked the monkey farther off-balance, and Rukkh thrust home into its side, at the point where the leather plates were tied together. The big monkey jackknifed with the agony, Rukkh got a foot up on the brute's chest while he tore the spear free. Then he had to protect himself from monkeys to his right, who were stabbing at his face. Another monkey had closed up in front.

Forjal tripped over a body and went down on one knee. Oggi covered while Rukkh dueled with the monkey on his right. The problem on the right was Glukk, who had gotten his shield wedged tight against a trio of monkeys there. They were stabbing over it at him, and he was fending them off with his sword. He'd lost his spear in the press. The flanking attack had choked off their assault, and the line was caving in from the right.

Now the inevitable came, and Glukk took a spear thrust in the thigh. He heaved back with a final effort and broke his shield free. Two monkeys were pulled off their feet as he came. But big Glukk was down, leg pumping out bright arterial blood. The monkeys swarmed over him.