The Ancient Enemy (42 page)

Thru kept counting, kept praying, and the spell held while the columns covered three hundred feet of clump grass and compacted sand.

There were maybe a hundred feet to go, when someone looked down from the birds and gave a shriek.

The men had barely time to pick up shields and yank spears out of the ground. Officers were screaming the first orders, something about "forming up," when the catapults let go and seven-foot-long spears hurtled through the line atop the dune. It was a shock to everyone's system, the last thing they'd expected. One spear missed, going too high by a foot, but the others struck men and hurled them back off the dune.

"Close up!" roared a sergeant.

There was something terribly sinister about the silence with which the monkeys came on. They came at them like assassins, on silent feet.

At ten feet's distance the leading line threw their javelins, then slammed in with shield and spear. The massive impetus of the brilbies and mots was enough to drive the men back before them while the harsh sound of war rose up and bugles started shrilling.

The men on the farther slope had been waiting quietly out of sight for hours. They only awoke to the peril when the fighting started above their heads. Suddenly, with loud crashes, a couple of men were hurled back down the duneside. There was a glimpse of something whirring by above them. One of the fallen men had been spitted by a prodigiously large spear.

They came to their feet, grabbed their weapons, and started up the dune to reinforce the line while the bugles screamed.

But the line had already shattered. The young brilbies had smashed open further gaps in the line, and behind them came mots and brilbies boiling with a rage to avenge the dead of Tamf and Creton.

The line of one hundred men dissolved, and the columns surged over the top and down into the three lines of men who had been waiting below. The impact came almost before most men had recognized that it was coming. There was barely time to do more than get the shield up and take the blow.

A shattering crash rang up and down the dune top as the columns bit into the lines of men. Most men would have broken and run for their lives, but these were the Blitzers, rested from the fight that morning and angry about how it had gone. Their pride sent them toe-to-toe with the onrushing hordes, and they knocked aside spears and turned shields and thrust home with their own weapons. For a few seconds the fight teetered there, but then over the dune came the third column, falling right on the men's right flank. The flank collapsed, the lines bent back farther. The slope of the dune completed the disaster because there it grew much steeper for a few feet and the men could not hold their footing. The lines fell back downslope with roars of rage and bafflement, but despite everything the mighty Blitzer Regiment could not hold its position.

Behind, on the top of the dune, they left twenty cut off, still battling.

"Surrender!" shouted a voice in clear Shashti. "Surrender and your lives will be spared."

"We will never surrender!" bellowed several men.

"Is that your answer then?"

"Go fuck yourself with a javelin's end you filthy, fucking monkey!"

"So be it."

Archers shot some of the men down, the rest were buried under a wave of spears and shields. None of the twenty survived.

Only on the shingle top of the beach did they finally make a stand. And as if by a miracle they were greeted with the sight of a dozen boats putting in with the first reinforcements. Red tops were drumming frantically while hundreds of men formed up on the beach.

With a great shout the Blitzers greeted these reinforcements.

"For the wrath of He who Eats!" screamed a voice.

"Kill!" they roared back.

And they went back at the monkeys who were coming right up against them. This time the charge was disorganized, and instead of columns it was as two broad masses that they came.

The impact came with a solid ringing
crunch
up and down the line, and the familiar roar of war arose. The men of the Blitz Regiment set to showing the monkeys how men really fought.

In a few moments the onrush lost impetus and came to a halt. Two walls of shields faced each other at spear's length while rocks and arrows flew overhead. Thru, at the same spot on top of the dune where General Uisbank had once stood to survey the city he intended to capture, saw at once that the charge had died out.

He ordered a retreat to the top of the dune, which they would hold. Catapults would be brought up to fire on the beach below. Unfortunately, his regiment had dissolved into a roaring mob with no sense of organization at all. And now the men from the boats came running up the shingle and pushed through the Blitzers to get at the monkeys.

"Make room for the Veteran Sixth," bawled sergeants.

The famous Sixth Regiment had arrived on the field, ready to save the situation as they had done so many times before.

Grudgingly, the Blitzers gave the Sixth some of the line, and the men fresh off the ship went in hard. They hurled javelins, then smashed into the line of mots and brilbies, stepping over a dozen dead monkeys while others broke away from the line and fled back up the dune.

Thru sent more orders for withdrawal. They needed to reorganize before the fight turned completely against them. Again the orders were sent in vain.

Disaster loomed. Thru could see that his line was about to break. The men were already through in several places. But he could not recover control; the mots and brilbies were lost in the chaos of war. They fought in a dense mass, with spears jabbing at the gaps between shields while they pushed back and forth in a heavy scrimmage.

The men, however, responded to orders and bugles. They were exploiting the openings in the lines, turning the flanks on either side.

And then he heard the clatter of equipment and the thud of feet, and Toshak arrived with two more columns of mots and brilbies, brought up at the run from the nearest regiment.

"More are coming. We must hold them here. This will be the vital point of the battle."

Thru nodded, and ordered the catapults brought up to the dune at the double.

A defensive line was formed. More orders were sent down to the struggling masses below, and finally a large group broke away from the main battle and started back up the dune.

They were immediately targeted by the rows of Shasht archers lined up behind the battle. Climbing the dune, watching out for interloping men, and dodging arrows was a difficult task. Many failed, and their bodies rolled to the bottom and built up in drifts.

The first fugitives reached the top of the dune and were welcomed through gaps in the new, disciplined line that had formed there. Behind that line they found Thru and some of the other officers waiting. Among them was the Grys Norvory, who had blood streaming from a head wound.

More fugitives came back, but they were taking terrible casualties as the men pressed them hard. Perhaps two hundred were down, and others were bearing stab wounds and arrows in backs and shoulders. They retreated up the steep part of the slope with the men stabbing at their backs, and threw themselves into the gaps in the waiting line of mots.

The gaps shut behind them and the men came up against the new wall of shields and disciplined stabbing spears.

The Sixth Regiment were determined to show the Blitzers a thing or two, and they hurled themselves into it. Once again a real roar of battle went up as the two sides clashed. But most of the men were without their throwing spears, and they were fighting up a slope while standing on sand that gave way beneath their feet.

It was a near-suicidal task. Men staggered back, again and again with stab wounds to their eyes and faces. Then catapults were pushed forward and fired down into the ranks of men while bodies were hurled back, spitted like chickens.

It couldn't go on for long, and soon the men of the Sixth Regiment, like the Blitzers before them, discovered that they could not necessarily break a line of monkeys behind shields. The men fell back a few feet. Their disadvantage on the slope was too much for even their skills and experience to overcome. The damned catapults let go again with that chilling
crack-whine
noise, and there were brief shrieks as the long spears hammered home.

General Raltt was the new commander of the army, and a nervous fellow. The situation he'd inherited from that oaf Uisbank was not good. Standing on the beach looking up the dune he could see that the Sixth Regiment was just taking casualties up there and not gaining a yard. He ordered them back, then moved on to take a look at the disposition of the other regiments.

The Sixth were veterans and they accepted that there was just no getting around the fact that they had to retreat. So they withdrew in good order, disciplined lines moving backward while keeping shields and spears up toward the enemy.

At the bottom they passed through the re-formed Blitzers, then they turned and re-formed behind the Blitzers.

Sergeants bellowed for silence as the two units exchanged a few insults here and there. In truth, the Sixth and the Blitzers got along well, and often fought side by side. It was the pestilential Third and Fourth Regiments that they hated.

All of them stood there, shields resting on the ground, spears in hand, and looked up the long slope of sand and swore to the Great God that the battle was going to be won. The sodomistic, fornicating, ass-wipe monkeys were not going to get a victory on this field!

Unfortunately, the damned monkeys had those catapults up on top of the dune, and they could range over just about the whole fornicating beach.

General Raltt was careful to set up his command post farther toward the city, at a point that was out of range of both the catapults on the dune top and the stone-throwing catapults on the battlements. He discovered that only an uncomfortably small area was safe from both, and stones could still skip and bounce right into the center of the command post. Twice in the first hour, Raltt and his staff had to jump up and scatter when a rock the size of someone's head came rolling through at high speed. On the second occasion it smashed the map table and ruined the map on which they'd drawn up the battle plans.

A new table was brought up and a fresh map begun at once by the mapmaker. But the incident left everyone nervous and uncomfortable.

Raltt cursed vehemently. There were three thousand men ashore, and they were boxed in on the plain between the city walls and the tall dunes above the beach. The monkeys effectively controlled the right and left side of the field. In front was a line formed by three regiments of monkeys, all armed with spears and shields and capable of putting up a stout resistance to a charge.

It was going to take some miracles from Orbazt Subuus and some huge efforts by his devoted servants, the officers and men of the army of Shasht, to get them out of this one.

At about the same time, up on the dune top, Thru was rejoined by Toshak and his exhausted staff, who had run back and forth to the city battlements and this dune many times, covering more than a mile on each trip.

"They've just been standing there while we shoot at them."

"Having success?"

"Every second arrow seems to strike amongst them, but they have spaced themselves out, and most of our shots don't hit anyone."

"Slow the rate of fire, conserve the spears. We've halted them for now. I doubt the new commander down there will risk another attack today."

Thru nodded; as usual Toshak made sense. Thru passed orders for the catapults to slow their rate of fire.

Toshak studied the enemy down below, drawn back into a hunched beachhead.

"Look! They're entrenching on the plain."

Thru saw that behind the line of spearmen other men were digging a ditch.

"What will happen tomorrow?"

"We will watch them leave."

"How can you be so sure."

"You will see, everyone will see, tonight."

Toshak turned away with a mysterious smile. His staff rose with a few groans as he set off once more for the city.

That night, with the army's first wave ashore and holding a beachhead, Admiral Heuze dined with some regular companions in the admiral's cabin. There was Captain Pukh of the
Anvil
, there was Chalmli, chamberlain to Nebbeggebben and an invaluable source of advice concerning the Imperial Court and its agents. And there was Filek Biswas, the Surgeon General of the Fleet.

Pukh was an excellent seaman and a fine fellow, with an interest in the arts, who had sailed with Heuze on many a voyage in the cold south seas. Most important he and Heuze shared a similar sense of humor. Much of the world they found to be simply so absurd that you had to laugh.

Both the admiral and the captain listened agog while Chalmli described events at a feast Nebbeggebben had held just before setting out on the voyage.

"So they opened the first cake and out came the maiden. A very pretty little thing. And not a slave, oh no, she was actually wellborn, and had been tricked into thinking she was going to meet the prince afterward. Such wickedness can hardly be imagined."

And indeed, the vicious goings-on at Nebbeggebben's court were not for young things with starry visions of bedding a prince.

"So, then they popped the second cake and out came this huge cretin from some slave farm in Pangifica."

The captain's jaw fell open.

"What?"

"Oh yes, and of course the maiden is bound by silken cords at the knee so she can only take tiny steps. The cretin was all over her like some cheap gown in less than a minute. I swear everyone laughed for the next ten minutes while it went on."

The seamen roared and pounded the tabletop.

Filek Biswas winced. The traditional wedding feast was supposed to feature the two cakes, which when cut into would reveal a man and a woman, a married couple who would merely kiss and hug before stepping aside to polite applause. This degrading spectacle of Nebbeggebben's merely showed the depths to which the imperial family had descended. Aeswiren was a bloodthirsty thug, but all his progeny had been even worse. The city of Shasht had no doubt breathed a sigh of relief at seeing the last of Nebbeggebben. Only now, of course, they could await the eventual reign of Aurook, the second son of Aeswiren. Aurook liked to kill drugged gladiators, and boasted of killing a hundred men before his nineteenth birthday.