The Ancient Enemy (46 page)

However, poor Filek was in for another unpleasant surprise. For with everyone's eyes on the fireship and her nasty brown sails, no one had noticed the swimmers in the water off the beach.

Two dozen brilbies, the best swimmers in all Dronned, were swimming across the water from the end of the harbor mole. They used a careful stroke and avoided kicking up the water. As they got closer, they moved quietly in toward the admiral's barge where it waited on the shore. The bargees, meanwhile, were drawn up in two lines on the sand, waiting for the admiral, who was approaching on his crutches.

Suddenly the brilbies swarmed up out of the water on either side of the barge, flourishing swords and clubs, and took the poor bargees completely by surprise. In a matter of moments five men were down, and the rest were running away.

The admiral gave a weird little scream as he saw the big-shouldered monkeys heaving the barge off the shingle and back into the water.

"No, you fools," he screamed at his men. "Stop them! They're taking the barge!"

The bargees halted, spun around, and with a collective roar of rage sprang back to recover the barge.

For a moment it seemed that a disaster would be averted. Filek even felt a cheer begin in his throat.

But at the waterline a row of even grimmer brilbies turned back and took sword and club to the bargees with a will. Two more men died then and there. The others could do nothing but retreat out of the water, stand on the beach, and throw rocks at the barge. Then the monkeys turned and swam out.

Some soldiers had come up by then and arrows and javelins were hurled out at the swimmers. Just one of the fornicating monkeys was hit and fell off the barge. Another dived in immediately to rescue it and both were pulled from the water. The monkeys worked the oars as if they had been born to them, and the barge swiftly pulled away toward the city harbor. More arrows pursued it, and some hits were claimed, but it did not waver in its progress toward the harbor.

Admiral Heuze was left stranded, a couple of miles from his flagship, while a fireship was sailing out to attack the fleet. Along with him was Filek Biswas, an enormous mass of dismay cooling in his belly.

Suddenly bugles started blowing urgently over on the right wing, where more monkeys were massing on the tops of the dunes, well south of the end of army line. In fact they had occupied the exact part of the dune that Raltt and Heuze had intended to seize with the reinforcements.

Admiral Heuze's eyes had a strange look as they glanced up to Filek.
It's fear,
thought Filek.
He's afraid.

The day was coming to an end, and Simona knew that the fighting was over. The distant roaring and screaming had stopped, so had the strange, ominous thudding sounds made by the huge, unseen trebuchets placed in the streets near the palace where she was confined.

Her eyes were red from weeping, her hands sore from being wrung together. Men and mots were being killed, and she was torn by her feelings as a woman of her race and also by her concern for her newfound friends. The combination left her confused and fretful.

Try as she might to shake it, the fear of a total defeat for the colony gripped her. And yet she could not in her heart wish for a victory for the men of Shasht, either. How could she wish such a horror upon a folk like the mots of the Land?

She shuddered when she thought of the teachings of the priests. The "monkeys," they said, were just animals to be slaughtered and displaced. But she had seen their world, and it was as fine as anything in Shasht. The palace was small, especially compared to the grandiose structures of Aeswiren, but it was beautiful. Carvings in dark wood of fantastic quality covered many walls. Beautiful mats decorated the floors and other walls. Everything was clean and freshly painted and lovingly cared for.

And this ancient civilization was to be simply brushed aside and destroyed to make way for the colony? She could not accept that. There had to be a better way than just out-and-out murder.

Thoughts like these had run through her head all day while she listened to the distant sounds of the fighting. Sometimes she heard vague crashing in the distance, like storm waves on a beach; at other times there were bugles blowing near and far.

At times she wondered if poor Rukkh had been slain. Of course, going back to her own people now was likely to lead to a death sentence. She recalled the hysterical hate in the general's voice when he penetrated the disguise and called her "traitor!"

And then, at last, Thru had come.

"Thru! Thank you for coming. Thank you so much. This has been very hard today."

"I came as soon as I could."

"I heard fighting, but the guards will not speak to me. Will you tell me what has been happening?"

"Well, there has been hard fighting. But we think they are beaten now. Tomorrow we will make them surrender, I think."

Simona was shocked. "How?" she began, one hand to her mouth, her lip trembling.

"Well, on the first day we stopped their attack and eventually pushed them back to the beach. Today we stopped two attacks and pressed them back into a smaller space. They have lost many men. We sent them a message to offer them the chance to surrender and avoid further bloodshed."

"Oh!" Could it be possible? A surrender would surely end the war.

"They killed the messenger and threw his head out onto the battlefield."

"Oh."

"And last night, we burned one of their ships. Sent a fireship."

"Oh, by the Great God, that is awful."

"Yes." Thru was nodding in agreement.

"What happened?"

"The ship burned and sank. Many men, many women died. Their bodies are washing up all along the bay." Thru gave an eloquent shrug. "But this is not a war that we began. We are not trying to invade Shasht. We would not kill any of your people unless we had to."

Simona gulped, swallowed. Oh, by the Great God she was such a traitor, such a vile wretch. But at the same time she knew that he was right.

"Which ship was it?"

"It was the fourth one in the line, counting from the nearest one to the city."

"The fourth?" Simona's eyes grew wide. "It was the
Growler
then." She broke down then and wept for the people she had spent a year's confinement with. Poor Aunty Jemelm, to survive the plague only to die of fire. Unless, poor thing, she had drowned.

Thru understood something of Simona's pain. They had spoken of their families, he knew her mother had died in the plague and that her father still lived. Through no fault of her own, she was now caught in a strange and frightening position.

He took her into his arms and comforted her as if she were a mor while she rested her head on his shoulder and wet his fur with her tears.

When she spoke again it was with a husk to her voice.

"My mother and I lived on that ship for the whole voyage. We transferred only recently. All those people I knew, to think of them drowned like that, is awful."

"Yes, it is terrible. I am sorry for it, but we have to strike back at them with every weapon we have. We have no choice if we are to survive."

"But what of our survival?" she said. "If we cannot have the colony, then I don't know what will become of us all."

"You will have to go back to your homeland."

She sighed. The wrath of Aeswiren III was all too easy to imagine.

Sometime later, Thru made his way to Toshak's command post, now set up in the south gate. The initiative had passed completely to Toshak, it seemed. The enemy had tried to break out and had failed. His fleet had quit the bay and not been seen since. Thru found Toshak enjoying a light meal while contemplating the map of the battlefield that had been set up on the wall of the command post, his head bandaged like half the army.

"Come, Thru Gillo, will you eat with me?"

"Of course, General Toshak. Has anything changed?"

"Not since darkness fell. The enemy stay inside their trenches and lick their wounds. I think they may be running short of food and water. The fleet meant to resupply them today I would imagine, but it has not been seen."

"The winds outside the bay are unfavorable, I heard."

"That is what I hear, too, altogether too fresh and lively."

Thru tore into the fresh bread. A mussel stew thickened with seaplums was brought out.

"They pressed us hard today."

"They were desperate. Those were the attacks of a force reaching the ends of its strength. Both times they put far too much of their force into the assault and left themselves open to attack on the rest of their line. On both occasions it was our ability to flood their line and threaten to cut them off from the beach that ended their assaults on our lines."

"And so they are beaten?"

"I think it is close to that. They occupy less of the Land tonight than they did in the morning. And they have left many dead on our sands."

"What do you expect, tomorrow?"

"They will probably make us kill them. I do not expect them to surrender." Toshak spoke with the certainty of a trained warrior. Thru hoped he was wrong.

"They are brave, but their commanders are stupid."

"Perhaps they underestimated us. They will learn."

"Does that mean that it isn't over?"

"The fleet still exists. They have more men. What other choice do they have?"

Thru tore off more bread and chewed in silence.

Darkness lay over the Land. The great red star had risen in the southeast and cast its baleful light across the beach south of the monkey city. Admiral Heuze, sitting with Biswas and a few surviving members of his barge crew, struggled to contain his rage and anguish.

"We're barely hanging on here," he muttered to Filek.

The wind had come up a little bit, and small waves were breaking on the beach.

The army now controlled only a shallow salient on the beach, with a small extension northward onto the city plain. Twice they had failed to break the lines of the monkey army, and twice the monkeys had fought them back to the beach. Now they were done. There were fewer than nine hundred effective soldiers left. More than a thousand dead lay on the beach or washed to and fro in the shallows. Thousands more were hurt or just worn-out. They had run out of water long before, and their food supplies were very low.

The medical tents had been overrun by the monkeys during the frenzy of the second counterattack. The monkeys took away most of the tools and metal things they found. Filek's work had been severely hampered. Among the things stolen had been the surgical-thread cache.

Men with terrible wounds could no longer be stitched up. But with the lack of surgical alcohol, most of the seriously wounded men would die anyway.

"It looks bad," Filek had to agree.

"This has been a pitiful performance," snarled Heuze. "These are some of the best troops in all of Shasht. They earned the right to be in this colony. It was their chance to raise their social status."

"The enemy is clever enough to take advantage of mistakes, that's for sure."

"Oh, thank you, Master Biswas, for that helpful remark."

"I'm sorry, Admiral. We all underestimated them. Who would think they would know to take our surgical spirits and our knives? Half these men around us will die."

Nor did it help that the admiral had understood from the beginning the depth of his error. He'd advertised his presence to the watching enemy, coming in on his big barge. The enemy had struck at the barge and thus cut him off from returning to the fleet before the fireship got out. The fleet then slipped anchor and ran out of the bay, determined not to allow a repetition of the
Growler
fiasco.

Just like Uisbank, he'd allowed the enemy to decapitate the command. Now he'd be lucky if he didn't join General Uisbank in the custody of the sodomizing monkeys. By the bright blue ass of the Great God, this was getting to be a desperate situation.

"If they attack in the morning, they will overwhelm us," he moaned.

"Then we must kill each other. If you like, I will open your veins tonight, and you can die relatively painlessly."

Heuze grinned at him. "Not yet, my friend. Not yet. I think I'll wait until the end for that."

But inside, Heuze was not grinning. He was the admiral of the fleet, in command of the entire expedition. He wasn't supposed to go out like this, trapped like a rat on the beach.

And at the back of his mind rose the thought, over and over again, that Captain Pukh and the rest of them had betrayed him. They had decided they might as well let the army be destroyed, if it got rid of Heuze and left the command open to them. Heuze sighed heavily. Then they'd start fighting each other, and the Hand would try to kill them off, and it would all end in bloodshed and the demise of the colony. Heuze's name would go down in history as a dolt who'd lost his fleet.

"Look, a light!" A soldier was standing up, pointing out to sea.

"Where?" growled Heuze, getting painfully up onto his good leg with a crutch jammed under his arm. His back was sore from spending the day standing and crouching on this damned beach, but the sudden hope quenched the pain.

There it was, undoubtedly a light.

"Quickly, raise the lantern and then lower it slowly."

Men scrambled to obey and a lantern was lofted up and then lowered slowly down again.

The light winked back a message at once, using the naval code of long and short blinks of the light.

Heuze gave a cheer as he read the blinking light. It was good old Captain Pukh, who'd brought the fleet back.

He ordered the smaller, swifter ships to enter the bay and set down boats to take them off immediately. The larger, less nimble vessels were to stay outside, away from the potential damage from the fireship that was still in the harbor.

Then he passed on orders for water and surgical spirit and tools on Filek's behalf. General Raltt had joined them by then.

"General," said Heuze with a smile, "the fleet is back, and I've ordered three ships to come in and pick us up tonight."

"Thank the Great God, we may yet get out of this alive."