Sword of the Bright Lady (55 page)

Every man had a rifle, except for Christopher. He always figured he would be too busy healing to shoot, but now he felt naked without a gun. He stood with Charles and Kennet, overseeing the supplies laid out for the coming battle. They dug holes in the earth and filled them with the explosive stores. If one accidentally went off, it wouldn't destroy the rest of their ammunition or kill everyone in the camp. He had taken Gregor's lecture on magic to heart and brought a lot of stores. As a first-rank priest, his magic wouldn't last more than three minutes, but if the enemy tried to run him out of fireballs, they would be in for a nasty surprise.

When there was no more point to fortifying, when the eve of battle was imminent, Karl stood on a wall and addressed the camp.

“Boys,” he told them, his voice richer and more vibrant than Christopher had ever heard it, “all your life you've feared the Dark.” They listened to him, nervous, eager, sad, or angry, each to his own disposition. “The monsters prey on us, like wolves on mice, and we hide in our hovels and pray. All your life you've been dismissed by high ranks, by lords and wizards, by the creatures of the Dark, by the ones that matter. Today,” he shouted, “that changes.

“Pater has given you strength, in arms of steel and fire. Pater has given you wisdom, in training and craft. All that is left to need is heart, which you must give yourself. Too long have we cowered from the Dark. Too long have we feared them. Today, we will teach
them
to fear.” The men roared. “Today, we will teach them that
we
matter.” They roared, louder.

“Stick to your training. Hold your position. Do not fail the Pater, and he will not fail you.” Karl let that sink in, and then finished, his face flushed with more emotion than it had shown since Christopher had known him.

“Today,” he shouted, “we will teach them
a little respect
.”

And then the time for preparing was over, and all they could do was wait.

“The wolves seek to bypass,” shouted a sergeant. “Do we let them?”

The wolves and their small green riders streamed ahead of the advancing army, coming up the slope and making a not particularly wide berth around the fort.

Christopher didn't care about covering Nordland's retreat, but he did care about his own. “We don't want dogs nipping at our heels on the way home,” he shouted back. “Kill as many as you can.”

Like popcorn, a scattered few at first, then a rapidly increasing crescendo, the rifles began to fire. In the heat of the moment, the smoke and fear, the flashes and bangs, Christopher felt a tinge of exhilaration. Now was action.

He carefully worked his way to the west wall, peeked out through a firing port. The ground was littered with bleeding wolves, massive animals three feet high at the shoulder. The grotesque creatures riding them were hobgoblins, green and nasty, firing back with short bows. The rifles were barely adequate for the wolves, taking two or three bullets to drop them, but they were overkill on the diminutive hobgoblins, ripping them to shreds in a single hit and scattering ugly green body parts like confetti across the field. Still, the little horrors fought bravely, hiding behind their fallen mounts and popping up to fire arrows.

Some of Christopher's men were screaming now. The battle looked almost equal until someone threw a grenade, and then it was over, the hobgoblins and wolves racing back down the hill like water.

“By all that is Unholy,” the sergeant said, looking over the carnage outside the wall, “the crazy priest might be right.” The man sounded shocked, as if the possibility of not dying horribly in the next hour was too incredible to grasp.

Karl sent a party with rifles and axes out to harvest the fallen, while Christopher saw to his wounded.

“I'm saving the magic for the dying,” he told them, and patched the cuts and arrow holes as best as he could with bandages. He had plenty of bandages. Svengusta had insisted that he would run out of magic at some point and want them. He said a silent prayer of thanks to the old man.

The damage wasn't too bad. Ignoring the risk of infection, there were only two serious cases. Two boys had taken arrows to the face. One was dead. The other shrieked in wrenching agony when they pulled the arrow out of his eye, but he calmed down after it was bandaged.

“If you can take the pain, soldier, then you'll make it,” Christopher told him. “And you'll be in a very special club. Both Karl and I have lost an eye, at one time or another.”

“I can still fight, Pater,” the wounded boy said. “Don't take my rifle away.”

“I wouldn't dream of it.”

The goblins were angry. You could see it in the way they marched up the slope, like ants boiling out to defend the nest. Two hundred yards short of the fort they stopped to arrange themselves for battle.

The north wall guards cried out, and Christopher looked up in the sky where they were pointing. Black winged shapes were battling what might have been an owl. The bird killed at least one of the foul creatures, but then fell into the forest as black shapes circled down around it.

“They'll come back,” Christopher said. “Once they realize the wolves aren't after them, Nordland and his lot will come back to see how we're doing. If they're nice, we might even let them in.”

The boys, flush with their first victory, whooped it up.

“Pater,” Bondi said, “come look at this.” Karl joined him at the south wall, and they gazed out at the horde. The monsters were arraying themselves for a frontal assault.

“They're in a hurry,” Karl said, “and we are in their way.”

“Excellent,” Christopher said. “It couldn't be better. Hold your fire. Let them get into killing range.”

The boys started getting nervous, watching the monstrous host fall out into skirmish formation and begin advancing up the hill, but Christopher was merely annoyed they weren't bunching up in nice easy-to-hit lines.

“Why are they all spread out like that?” he asked Karl.

“Have you not given them reason to fear magic?”

Gregor had talked about fireballs. Artillery was not unknown in this world, just uncommon. Still, Christopher couldn't get too worried. The sun was shining, the field of fire was clean, and the enemy was advancing uphill and on foot.

The human-sized green creatures had large wooden shields held in front of them, obviously considering them adequate protection against arrows. Christopher had trained his men to simply aim right through shields. The only thing that would stop his bullets was a quarter-inch of iron, and anything that could carry that much weight they'd just have to shoot with a cannon.

The yellow and brown ogres eschewed shields, favoring large clubs and two-handed axes. They looked impressive in some kind of thick hide armor, but Christopher was more concerned about the horribly deformed green and gray monsters that wore nothing but chains. They strained at their bonds, eager to rush forward and attack, like slavering dogs.

“A pile of ugly, that is,” Bondi said.

The trolls were nine or ten feet tall. Christopher's wall was eight feet.

Christopher looked for something positive to say. “They don't have any bows.”

The only bowmen the enemy army seemed to have were the little hobgoblins, and they were hiding at the rear.

“No, Pater, but they can throw a mean javelin. And there's more out there than you can shake a stick at.”

“Ha, watch me.” He called to his artillery men. “Focus on the big ones. Riflemen, concentrate on the little ones or anything that gets closer than a dozen paces.”

“Get off the wall, Christopher,” Karl ordered, and he had to go. He couldn't afford to be exposed to their return fire.

When the first cannon went off, it was a shock. A two-inch gun wasn't something you ever got used to. Then the other guns on the wall opened up, and all the rifles began to fire.

“Take your time and aim,” Karl bawled over the noise.

The gun crews loaded efficiently, too jarred by the concussion of their guns to do anything but operate by habit. Watching from a firing port, Christopher could see the enemy advancing at a slow jog, holding their sparse formation. For some reason he thought of the Alamo. But that wasn't the image he really wanted at the moment.

The rifle fire settled down from a single thunder into a steady tattoo, men loading and firing at different rates. The goblins began to notice that their shields were worthless as they fell like Christmas lights, blinking out one by one. A troll-handler had been torn in half by grapeshot, and his charge came bounding and leaping toward the fort, dragging its chains and keening in a most disturbing way.

At ten yards the rifles finally turned on it, and it went down in a hail of bullets. The men barely had time to reload before it got up again, and this time they brought it down only a few feet from the wall. Kennet leaped up to the railing and hurled a sputtering stick of dynamite at the prone body.

“Fire in the hole!” he yelled, and the boys ducked their heads behind the protection of the wall.

The dynamite went off, the troll remained still, and the rifles resumed firing. The hobgoblins had made some progress in the lull, but now they were closer and the boys weren't missing many. The creatures fell like grass before the wind.

They could not comprehend. In the way of this world, they pitted their strength against strength. They set their tael against the enemy's, to see who would fail first. But they did not understand Christopher's technological cornucopia of destruction, and so they threw themselves into the fire, trying to quench it with blood, while Christopher fed it with gasoline.

At fifty yards the mass of troops broke into a charge, shrieking in hatred. They drew swords and javelins, not stopping to aim but throwing on the run. Their rush was terrifying, and if it hadn't been for the presence of the wall, Christopher might have fled in a panic. As it was, he flinched, and so did not see them hit the wall, but felt it, as the entire fort shook under their weight.

Others quailed behind the wall, but Karl was already screaming for the grenades. Every fourth boy in the army had been made a grenadier and carried three of them as part of his kit.

The goblins did not even blink at the first fireball. They did not flinch at the second. They did not quail at the third. But when the twenty-fifth grenade went off outside the walls, shaking the air with its concussion, hurtling lead shot in every direction, they had had enough.

“Hold fire,” Karl yelled as the creatures fled. “Hold the grenades, you idiots, keep shooting!” he bawled when men looked at him in confusion. But they couldn't see anything to shoot at, because acrid white smoke hung over the wall like a blanket.

By the time it cleared, the enemy army had withdrawn two hundred yards down the slope.

“Give them something to think about,” Christopher told a cannon crew, and they sent an exploding round into the midst of the creatures. Limbs and parts flew into the air, and the boys cheered madly. The enemy fell back to three hundred yards.

Karl sent a team out front to harvest these heads, Charles and Kennet with them in case any of the trolls were faking it. They had got only two of the foul creatures and a handful of ogres because the goblins had broken discipline at the last and charged ahead.

There were goblin parts everywhere. The boys found it gross and amusing, as boys will. Karl merely complained that he couldn't get an accurate count because of the disorder.

“Another problem with your magic,” Bondi said, “is that sometimes it blows the brains to smithereens. We can't be sweeping the battlefield with a mop to get your tael, Pater.”

They plunked the bags of heads down by the boiling iron kettles. Christopher was sickened by the smell, but it had to be done.

“We did little damage to the giants,” Karl said, “but we've slain perhaps a third of their foot and a quarter of their cavalry.”

Karl was flushed with excitement. Their own losses had been light, relatively speaking. The last assault had resulted in seven men struck by javelins. Christopher patched up the least with cloth and the worst with magic. Even this trivial effort left him depleted, with only a single spell left. He bit his lip to stop himself from cursing Stephram's cowardice.