The Dragons of Argonath (33 page)

The dragons were to hold their positions in the woods until the cornet blew. Then they were to move out and attack the Aubinan column. If the Aubinans detected the ambush, fresh orders would be sent out and the dragons would remain hidden.

Of course, it was clear that the Aubinans had to strike a knockout blow very quickly. Given time, the empire would bring greater forces to bear, and the rebellion would be smothered. So they were in haste to reach Sesquila and could not wait for their calvary to return from chasing the Talion troopers.

This, at least, was how Commander Urmin read the situation. Carefully he positioned his force along both sides of the road with the dragons on the left side. When the head of the Aubinan column came in range, he would send his force right at them in a headlong charge and do his best to knock the whole column into a panic. Urmin knew it could be done; he'd seen it work on Teetol war parties several times. The trick was to let the enemy get up close enough and then pitch into him with everything you had. Get the front ranks turned around and running, and you could often panic the rest.

They waited. Time passed slowly as rain dripped from the trees. The clouds lessened just a little as the afternoon wore on. The rain had stopped again.

"Here they come," whispered Jak, who had the keenest sight in the unit.

Bazil confirmed Jak's observation in the next moment.

"Boy right."

A distant flash way up the road, and again, and then a solid mass of marching men was visible up ahead on the road between the trees. At the head of this column came a small group of riders, horses moving at a steady walk. The enemy gave no sign of caution or concern.

On they came while the men and dragons in the woodlots kept absolutely still. This was the critical time. The leading riders were less than a hundred yards from the ambush line. Urmin watched with bated breath. The enemy column kept coming over the rise; they were just marching into it. This was his best chance to snatch victory from the defeat at Redhill, to beat them at the very first contact before the Aubinans had had a chance to measure his strength.

And yet he dared not be too rash, for if this small force were lost, there would be nothing but the citizenry to defend the walls of Marneri.

The Aubinans marched forward, the riders passed through the invisible ambush line. The leading rank of foot soldiers came up to it, and Urmin gave the order. A cornet squealed, and with a roar the Marneri and Bea men came storming out of the woods.

Whistles shrieked among the Aubinans, and they turned and ran back up the road, not putting up the slightest resistance. They even dropped weapons in the road and just ran for their lives.

It was a wonderful moment for Commander Urmin. He ordered the men forward in pursuit. Now to just roll them up and send the whole lot running back to Aubinas in disorder. Urmin could almost taste the victory.

The Aubinans ran back up the road, giving every indication of being panicked. The legionaries followed, more slowly, but at a steady trot. The dragons had emerged and were following, with dragonboys at their sides.

Still, there were those who smelled a rat. Among them was Relkin, uneasy about the swiftness with which the Aubinans had stopped, turned around, and retreated. It had looked almost rehearsed. He confided these suspicions to Cuzo, who thought about it for a while and shrugged as they jogged along.

"I think Commander Urmin will have taken all of that into account, don't you?"

Relkin didn't think Commander Urmin had, in fact, taken such things into account. Relkin had a less generous view of the capability of commanding officers than did Cuzo, who had simply seen far less of the sharp, messy end of war than Relkin. Relkin knew that in the crucible of battle, commanders often let themselves see what they wanted to see rather than what was actually in front of them.

Alas, Relkin was only a dragoneer first class. Cuzo was the dragon leader.

They continued to pad along behind the foot soldiers, up the Wheat Road to a point where the woods on either side grew down close to the road.

Relkin could sense that that was the enemy's ambush line. He could feel the enemy there, waiting in a line on either side of the road, ready to engulf the legionaries and trap them.

Cuzo wouldn't hear of it.

Relkin looked up and down the trotting column with a growing sense that disaster loomed. Way up the road were the Aubinans, legging it back to Aubinas it seemed. Then almost miraculously he saw Commander Urmin riding up with some other officers around him.

Urmin studied the ground ahead where the trees came close to the road. Urmin's own sense of soldierly suspicion had been awakened. There had been perhaps a thousand Aubinans on the road and they were running, but the intelligence he'd received had said there were five or six thousand in the Aubinan army. The set of those trees was perfect for an ambush.

Urmin looked over to the column of legion soldiers. His eye rested for a moment on the dragons, carrying their shields and swords, and then he saw Relkin, just another dragonboy, but one who was staring at him with a most determined expression.

For some reason Urmin wanted to talk to that young man. It was the strangest feeling, but he knew he had to speak to him, and that it was very important.

"Excuse me a moment," he said to his staff, and flicked his horse to move her over to the marching dragons.

"You, the dragoneer," he said pointing to Relkin. "Come here a moment."

Relkin trotted over, aware of Cuzo's astonished gaze on his back.

"Yes, sir!" he saluted. His eyes still resting on Urmin's.

"What do you make of that line of trees up ahead?"

"Sir, it's an ambush. I can feel it."

"Mmmm. You have a propensity for these things?"

"I don't know, sir, but I just feel certain that the enemy will be lined up in those woods."

Urmin accepted the young man's salute, then turned his mare and rode back to the officers.

"Deploy into line, gentlemen. The enemy is waiting for us in those woods. Dragons will hold the road. We will move forward on the cornet. They're in the wood. Let's catch them there and turn their numbers against them."

Commander Urmin looked over to where the dragons were deploying, hauling shields off their shoulders and strapping them to their arms. What had that been, that strangely powerful thought? He just knew that the dragonboy was correct. He'd had his own suspicions, but the boy was so certain, so absolutely sure.

Urmin shook his head. There was a battle to be fought. Later he could think about this strange little episode.

Deployed in the skirmishing line with flank guards and the dragons in the center, the legionaries trotted forward. The Aubinans had not prepared fully for this, expecting the legion general to fall into their trap. It had worked before at Redhill, why shouldn't it work here? As the legion soldiers approached, a shower of arrows came out of the woods, but it was ill-coordinated and ineffective. Legion archers immediately replied, and their crossbows were far more deadly.

Then the troops were in among the Aubinans under the trees. The dragons broke up the middle and encountered almost no resistance. The Aubinan force was cut in half, and both halves were taking a beating from the highly trained legion forces that were engaging along their fronts. It was hard to beat legion men at this kind of thing. They fought in triads in such conditions, and worked to coordinate their efforts by having a spear and shield man rush the enemy and distract several untrained men, allowing two swordsmen to confront a single opponent. The Aubinans were not well versed in such techniques, except for the few old legionaries in their ranks, and they suffered accordingly.

Within five minutes or so the Aubinans had lost a hundred or more men and were moving backward through the trees, bunching up in knots that became helpless as the legionaries compressed them to the point where men found it hard to raise an arm or drive a sword thrust. Such globs of men were ripe for slaughter, and the Aubinan casualties mounted.

Meanwhile the dragons pushed up the road with little opposition. They fanned out into the trees and met the retreating Aubinan foot soldiers in the glades and on the open road. The Aubinans were forced to bunch at the places between the dragons, and that meant they had to scramble through deep thickets. The legionaries coming up behind exacted more casualties on them as a result.

For Commander Urmin there remained only one important question—where was the Aubinan cavalry? According to the young men from Marneri, the Aubinan horse had been decoyed away by the Talion troopers under Calex. Urmin wondered if that could be true. Certainly the Talion riders were not nearby, no trace of them had been seen for hours. Urmin listened to reports from the front, watched with his spy glass, and sent scouts out on either flank. The Marneri riders were ordered to form up, and more scouts were dispatched. Urmin didn't intend to be caught by a surprise flank assault by a mass of Aubinan horsemen.

In the woods the fighting became a haphazard affair, with the Aubinans retreating as quickly as they dared while the legion soldiers chased them, with dragons now spread out among them.

The woodlot checkerboard pattern allowed the dragons a bit of room, and whenever they could catch men in the open, they would charge and send them running. The Aubinans weren't intoxicated with the black drink, and they knew the sheer impossibility of men taking on dragons in the open field. They did not try and make a stand in such situations.

In the thickets and dense groves it was harder work, and dragons and dragonboys had to work together carefully there. Some brave souls would hide themselves in the brush and hope to emerge in the rear of a dragon and run a spear into the wyvern's back.

Dragonboys were there to cope with that.

Under a fallen pine tree, in a lane between two woodlots, Relkin cut his arrow free from the chest of a fallen man. Briefly he looked into the other's face. A young man, not much older than himself, with a brown beard covering a wide face that in death had gone slack, but which had once been alive with smiles and frowns. Relkin felt no sense of victory. This was just a waste of a man's life. Relkin wondered if the man had left a wife and young children behind. Children that would now grow up without a father. Who would hate Marneri and the empire because it had taken their father.

The arrow came free, and he cleaned it and slotted it back into the quiver. He moved on, covering their position and looking for usable arrows. The fighting was over for now. The Aubinans had finally managed to break contact by running away across the first open fields they'd come to.

The legion troops had halted at the edge of the woods; the dragons had been pulled back to the road in the center of the position.

Bazil was crouched behind a group of small pine saplings that marked the end of the woodlot. His shield had arrows in it, but he'd suffered no wounds except some scratches from thorns in the dense thickets. Ecator needed cleaning, however. A couple of unwary men had come too close in one of the fights in the clearings.

The clouds had continued to thin out, and now there were a few visible patches of late afternoon sky. Bazil stared across the open field that lay before them where the Aubinans had run in headlong flight. It was distasteful to the dragons to fight like this. They wished only to fight the true enemies, the Masters and their trolls.

Relkin approached and crouched down beside the dragon.

"Can you see anything?" he said.

"This dragon wonders why we didn't try and keep up with them and chase them all the way back to Aubinas."

"They have a big cavalry force, Baz. All of this might have been a ruse to get us out into that open space. There's only a thousand men here, plus ten dragons, not enough for Commander Urmin to feel comfortable taking that kind of risk."

Bazil clacked his jaws slowly, turning this over in his mind. It was a cautious approach. He realized it might well be the best.

"Take no chances."

"Well, this is the only force there is standing between the rebels and Marneri. Urmin has to keep that in mind. He could lose the city with a false move in this campaign."

"Ah, dragonboy see the strategy clearly. Dragonboy should be commander, eh?"

"You said that, not me."

Cuzo came by to inquire what exactly it was that Commander Urmin had spoken to him about.

"He asked me if I thought there was an ambush in the trees, sir. I told him I was certain of it."

"Do you know the commander, then?"

"No, sir."

"Mmm." Cuzo gave Relkin a puzzled look and then went on his way along the position.

Time passed, and the weary Talion troopers rode in an hour before sunset. Subadar Calex passed on the unwelcome news that the Aubinans had given him the slip hours before, and he had no idea where they were. Worse, the rebel horses had also been reinforced, and he now estimated they had at least twelve hundred horsemen.

This made Commander Urmin uncomfortable. He had scouts out on either flank, but had heard nothing from them. He sent the Talions to refresh their horses, and considered the map.

This part of Lucule was dominated by wheat fields, strips and patches of woods breaking up the monotony of grain. The land was almost flat, but there were long gentle slopes, so the view in any direction was not clear to the horizon. A thousand horsemen could approach quite closely, especially if they came at a walk.

Urmin set out pickets in the woods on either flank. He told the men at the horse watering station back close to Treeves to keep their wits about them. He ordered a boil and a feed for the dragons and everyone else. Some beer was to be brought up from Treeves, and a wagon went rattling back for it. The fires were soon blazing, and the cauldrons were set up on their tripods.

Dragons gathered to partake of the rough-cooked stirabout, liberally stirred with akh. Their big spoons made short work of the biggest cauldrons.

"No beer?" said the Purple Green as he finished his share and more.