Homecoming

XXVII

And it came to pass… that the Lord cast down great stones from heaven upon them unto Aze-kah, and they died: they were more which died with hailstones than they whom the children of Israel slew with the sword.

HOLY BIBLE, Joshua 10:10.

There was no longer even a semblance of a road, and on the high plain they needed none. Their formation was a great oblong checkerboard of cavalry units several hours into the morning’s ride, with the dew now dried by the sun.

A scout trotted his horse toward them, riding smoothly, proudly erect, sunlight glinting on plumed and polished helmet and black mail, upright lance tilted a correct ten degrees forward. Another orc detached himself from the small lead formation and galloped to meet him.

Kamal had been experiencing misgivings; something seemed to have gone wrong, perhaps seriously. Draco had not contacted him all of yesterday, either directly or by radio, which was disturbing in itself. As a consequence he’d had no information of the enemy in that time. Judging from the last report, he’d expected to meet the Northmen before noon today, and in fact before now. He’d even made camp early the day before, to help ensure they’d not meet in the evening.

Having decided the preceding evening that he could not rely on aerial reconnaissance, he’d sent scouts out before dawn to fan widely through the countryside ahead. With one of them returning now, his concern was replaced by hard-eyed attentiveness. His aide-de-camp rode back with the scout at heel.

“They’ve found where the Northmen were.”

“Were? So they learned about us and turned back! We’ll have to catch them then!”

The aide-de-camp turned to the scout and gestured for him to speak.

“They don’t seem to have turned back, my Lord,” the man said. “They split into two forces, one turning north, the other south. Yesterday, by the signs. We have riders following both groups.”

“Yesterday! How far ahead was this?”

“About seven kilometers.”

“How large a force? Their entire army?”

“I don’t know, my Lord. A large one, surely; the grass was widely trampled.”

So! And where was the high-flying Draco, the eye of the army? He wished now that Dov, in command of the City garrison, had been left a radio, but there were only three for the entire field army. He also wished for a few squads of horse barbarians, for scouts. They’d have told him how many Northmen had been there and when. It should have been fairly late in the day, for them to have gotten so far east, but one couldn’t be sure, especially with Northmen. If they’d broken camp before dawn yesterday, or forced the march… But why would they force their march? They were too smart to wear out their horses without good reason.

Now he had to decide in ignorance. He had the nasty feeling that the Northmen were in charge of the situation, maneuvering him into doing what they wanted; he’d had too much experience of them in the Ukraine. But how could they even know he was out here on the march? The sky chariot should have seen and killed any far-ranging Northman scouts or patrols.

And the sky chariot should have contacted him the evening before and again this morning.

He looked up as a rider approached at a canter, calling to him. “My Lord! Another scout is returning!”

Kamal squinted westward at the scout, still distant, and ordered out his aide-de-camp to meet him, while a trumpeter halted the army. Minutes later his aide galloped back hard, with something on his lance tip.

“My Lord!” he snapped, and held out a stinking severed head to his commander. “One of the scouts found the bodies of our Lord Draco and others near the place where the Northman army divided. He brought this as proof because the bodies had been stripped and there were no insignia.”

“And the sky chariot?”

“Not there.”

“Any sign of it?”

“He didn’t say.”

That was an answer of sorts. Had it been there, the scout would have told of it. But how else could Draco have gotten there? And yet, how could the Northmen have moved it? Surely they couldn’t fly it; it had taken training by the star men to enable Ahmed’s men to fly them, and the Northmen were barbarians.

The scout was trotting up to them. “Man!” Kamal shouted at him, “don’t you know anything except that they’re dead?”

“Yes, my Lord. Their bodies bore no wounds. They had no marks of arrow, sword, or knife, and they had not been scalped.”

Kamal swore, looking again at Draco’s discolored face. The hair was still there, and the Northmen always scalped anyone they killed. “How many bodies?”

“Four, my Lord.”

All four! “And no sign of the sky chariot?”

“None, my Lord.”

Too many questions were unanswered; there were too many unknowns. But this he did know: he had to deal with the Northmen without help from the air.

“The army will turn back toward the City,” he said finally. “Apparently the Northmen know about us and out-flanked us in the night. And there are only five cohorts left in the City in case they attack it.”

It struck him then. Five cohorts-1,500 men. Draco had rough-counted the Northmen from the sky. Five cohorts were almost as many as the whole Northman army, and they were orcs-trained, disciplined, fighting orcs!

The neoviking mystique, their reputation for supernatural cunning and invincibility, had been overblown, he told himself. And Kamal had no respect for a commander whose automatic response to an enemy was caution, defense. Out here the Northmen had no forests to hide in or attack from, and they bled and died like other men. He’d killed one himself-skinned him and watched him die. Another he’d crucified, to groan to death beneath the Ukrainian sun.

He changed his decision, in part.

“We’re between the Northmen and their people now, so the Third Legion won’t go back with us. They’ll continue to the mountains, to where the Northman army left its people, and wipe them out. They will take no prisoners except girl children and young women.”

Kamal began to expand and glow as he continued. “Couriers to each legion. Inform the commanders. Have each of them signal when he’s been informed. I will then signal the First, Second, and Fourth to begin the return. The Third will stand, and its commander will ride here to me for instructions. I’ll catch up with the rest on their first break.

“Is that clear?”

It was, and the mnemonically trained couriers galloped off to repeat his instructions exactly. Within ten minutes the army was moving.

The men of the Third Legion considered themselves privileged. Instead of riding like the others to battle, they were riding to sport. When they stopped that evening, sentries were posted, and patrols circled the camp, but this was Standard Operating Procedure, not a response to possible danger. And rather than each man sleeping by his picketed horse, the animals were hobbled and picketed within a single large rope corral around which the men camped.

To the Alpha’s infrared scanner,the paddock was conspicuous in the night.

For the Northmen, archery was more than a lifelong sport and sometime tool of war. It had also been an important means of feeding themselves, and its use had developed in them a fine sense of general marksmanship. They knew and used without questioning the basic principle that the way to hit something was to have a target and intend to hit it, not questioning your ability.

Charles had explained the automatic rifles to the four men assigned to him, through the bilingual skill of Sten Vannaren, had demonstrated and given them some dry firing. Finally each had fired several short bursts, and their targets were quickly rags. Afterward, waiting, they’d dry-fired from the door of the grounded pinnace at imaginary orcs, shouting “da-da-da-da-da-da!” like little boys. Charles had grinned at the sound as he worked beneath the nose of the craft.

The targets beneath them now were live, but the barbarians felt no qualms. A floodlight from above startled the sentries; then automatic rifles roused the camp. Slowly the pinnace circled the paddock as two riflemen fired into the horse herd. When one had emptied his magazine he threw an H.E. grenade from the door while another man seated a new magazine in the rifle and took his place. Hobbled horses pulled their pickets, milling madly or crowhopping through the confused camp and into the open prairie.

The well-spaced orc patrols, circling two to three kilometers away, stopped in the darkness to stare at the distant light, listening to the strange and somehow dangerous sounds. In a general way they realized that the camp was being attacked, and fearful and isolated though each squad felt, they did not ride toward the disturbance.

The distant floodlight blinked out, the explosions stopped, and they felt their aloneness even more in the silent and unrelieved darkness.

The darkness did not hide them. To the Alpha they were bright clusters of oblong lights. The pinnace settled undetected above one patrol and two grenades were tossed out, one H.E. and one fragmentation. Then it moved silently on to the second. The patrols were victimized by their separation; only three of the ten realized what the occasional scattered blasts meant and whipped their horses at last toward the crowded anonymity of camp.

Nearly 3,000 orcs huddled in the night, too disciplined to panic, too shocked and bewildered to plan, afraid to go out and hunt their horses. Not until dawn did they round up their animals and count them. Nearly a hundred had been killed or disabled by the Northmen from the air. Hundreds more, wounded or dangerous with panic, had been killed by the orcs to still their frantic hooves. Many, in the open prairie, had been felled with swords by night-covered Northmen riders.

The legion could not seek help or advice; there had been neither radio nor psi-tuner to send with them, nor apparent need. The commander and his staff agreed; they could reach the shelter of foothill forests with two days of steady riding-with only one more night beneath the open sky. Then perhaps they still might carry out their mission.

The eight hundred on foot might make it in four days of hard marching, but they’d be on their own. The men on horseback would not stay with them.

As the climbing sun began to heat the day, the orcs started westward again, heavy with foreboding. The prairie now seemed huge and hostile, with no help to be had, and home almost a four-day ride behind them. To go west, as they were, might be logical, but psychologically it was devastating. Especially to the men on foot as they saw the cavalry move farther and farther ahead and out of sight.

That same night the First, Second, and Fourth Legions had camped on the last extensive dry ground west of the Danube’s old west channel. They numbered 7,300 instead of 9,000; the five cohorts guarding the City had been assigned from the Fourth Legion and were half of its roster.

The old west channel had long been merely a marsh, with a series of lakes and sloughs connected by flood channels. Between it and the river the country was mostly more marshes and wet meadows. Across the marshes the orcs had built a military road to the Danube, of squared stone slabs laid on gravel. It crossed flood channels and creeks on low causeways. On the east side of the river it continued again to the City. The river itself was not bridged; men customarily swam their horses across.

The Northmen had not taken this road, and again Kamal was puzzled and mistrusting. They had followed instead an old road southeastward. This second route was really a cattle trail located to take advantage of what firm ground there was, filled with broken rock in the worst places, with a rough causeway over the main flood channel. It reached the river about six kilometers upstream of the military road, at rough stone docks. The dock location took advantage of the current in barging cattle to the City via the ancient ship canal.

It was disturbing when a shrewd and deadly enemy did the illogical for an unknown reason. It smelled of trickery. The best explanation Kamal could think of was that the Northmen feared meeting a strong orc force on the military road-feared being caught between armies where the marshes would frustrate their freedom of movement. They would have to abandon their horses in order to flee.

That was probably it, Kamal decided, and felt better. The Northmen were always wary of traps and couldn’t know there wasn’t another orc army. Kamal sent a light scouting patrol pounding down the Northmen’s trail while his army rested their mounts. Three hours later they returned on lathered horses. The Northmen, they reported, had followed the route to the river and entered it below the docks.

Kamal still wasn’t sure, but now this was beginning to smell like the overdue stroke of luck that could ensure success. For where the Northmen had crossed would put them on the south side of the ship canal, and the City was on the north side. When they discovered this they’d have another crossing to make, an impossible crossing. The bridge above the City was easily defended, and its center section could be raised. As for fording, the canal’s smooth current was strong, and except for easily defended boat landings, its sides were too steep for horses.

He had his trumpeter signal a speed march. Thousands of horses began an easy trot, taking the military, not the cattle, road. Within an hour Kamal was at the river, its dark water nearly a kilometer wide. Nagged again by misgivings, the grim-faced orc stared across for a bit. But he had to cross somewhere, and this was the logical time and place. Trumpets blew and the lead cohorts spread to form ranks along the shore. With the next signal, the first rank urged its mounts carefully down the rip-rapped bank and began swimming.

Hovering an oblique six kilometers away, Ivan Yoshida switched the visual pickup from the waiting Northmen to the orcs swimming their horses toward the ambush. When the first rank of their tiring horses had no more than fifty meters farther to swim, arrows began to sleet into it.

After a moment’s confusion the line of orcs straightened, still moving forward, the second rank advancing steadily behind them. Three thousand orcs were in the water now. Trumpets blew, and in less than a minute Kamal knew about the ambush. He realized at once what had happened. The Northmen must know the country after all. They had baited him by taking the cattle road, then had swum their horses downstream as they crossed, to land on the north side of the canal after all. He snapped a command. His trumpeter signalled a flanking movement and certain cohorts began letting themselves be carried farther downstream.

Alpha slid through the sky, quartering gravitic vectors, braked, and flew down the fourth rank of orcs at twenty meters, about eighty meters out from the east bank. Charles alternated short bursts from the two automatic rifles he’d mounted beneath the hull. His Northmen leveled oblique fire from the doors.

The run was completed in seconds, chopping up the third, fourth and fifth ranks. Many of the survivors continued their advance, but some milled in confusion and many others turned their horses downstream. Alpha banked and circled for another run. The first two ranks had taken heavier losses to neoviking archery and a few were fighting on the bank. Kniv had platoons of mounted warriors in reserve to hit any bridgehead the orcs might establish.

Meanwhile Beta had also entered the action, flying a deadly first run near the west bank. The orcs swimming there broke and turned back, as much because of a screaming siren mounted on the pinnace as the streams of deadly bullets. Troops not yet in the water held back their horses, looking nervously toward their trumpeters.

Ram himself flew the Beta. His second run was down the river’s midline, siren shrieking again, but he withheld the fire from his mounted guns although his door gunners took their toll. He would be content to break the crossing without maximum kill.

All the swimming ranks began breaking up now in turmoil, trying to get back to the west bank or escape downstream. After his third run, Ram flew to hover seventy meters above the junction of road and river. His voice boomed from the partly raised commast.

“Orcs! Do you surrender? Do you surrender? Dismount, stack your weapons, and line up unarmed, and I will spare your lives.” He paused. “Shout your answer! I will hear it!”

There was no immediate answer. Ram glared across at the Alpha still moving busily up and down the river killing orcs.

Kamal’s aide-de-camp looked worriedly at his commander.

“No!”

“But my Lord, we have no choice! We have no way to fight back!”

“Orcs have never surrendered. Never! I will die first.”

As if in answer, Alpha skimmed across the water toward them, spewing bullets. The command staff threw themselves from their saddles and embraced the ground among stamping hooves and falling horses. When they got up, those who did, Kamal raised his fist to shake it at the banking Alpha, then pitched forward with a dagger between his shoulder blades.

“We surrender!” bellowed his aide-de-camp. “We surrender!”

“Stack your weapons beside the river in big piles,” commanded the voice from the sky, “then line up on the road and picket your horses.”

Beta floated watchfully as trumpets blew and couriers galloped. Alpha was downriver again, killing orcs. Along the banks grew piles of lances, swords and bows. A sluggish stream of mounted orcs flowed onto the road, still disciplined but without their arrogance, finally picketing their horses along the shoulders and forming ranks on foot.

Downstream the short bursts of gunfire from the Alpha retreated to the edge of hearing. Suddenly she was back, strafing the long and unarmed ranks upon the road while fragmentation grenades tumbled from her doors. She made but one run; the orcs scattered into the marsh grass to flee or hide. Ram was screaming invective into the radio, spitting with rage, then shot forward and banked toward Alpha.

Nils shouted in warning; “Alphal Ta flykk!” Alpha shot into an accelerating climb, and after a moment Ram halted, turned to Nils and poured obscenities on him. When his surge of rage had passed, he stood panting, face red, eyes bulging.

“You didn’t ask my people whether they were willing to let the orcs surrender,” Nils responded bluntly. “You made your peace with them, but you do not speak for my people. You presumed too much. To the tribes and many other people, the orcs are a deadly enemy who would destroy them if they could and enslave the survivors.

“And how had you intended to deal with your thousands of prisoners? You have no place to take them, nothing to feed them, and you could not control them for long. Your action was without thought.”

Ram glared. “And Ivan!” he said hoarsely, “that treasonous bastard! He could see what I was doing, and still he strafed them.”

“Why Ivan?” Nils asked. “Sten Vannaren can fly her and probably did. I told him to make sure he learned.”

“I’ll bet you did.” Ram fixed him with his eyes. “I’ll bet you were behind the whole rotten treacherous thing. Well, that’s it, you barbarian filth! Hostages or no hostages, you’ll get no more support from me; no air support and no more ammunition. Absolutely none!”

“Then I’d better explain to Kniv Listi.”

The response had been completely matter of fact. Ram hesitated briefly, then reached for the transmitter switch. The exchange in Scandinavian took several minutes, then Nils turned to Ram. “Listi asks no more help from the Beta, and will kill no unarmed prisoners in your control as long as they are in your control. He retains the right to kill any others. Meanwhile you must bring more ammunition and grenades or he will keep your people.”

“But I have your vow!” Ram snapped. “And your woman and brat! You think I won’t do anything to you. Don’t be too sure.”

Nils’s mind stared mildly into Ram’s, and although the captain usually kept outside thoughts from his consciousness, he felt it opening now to the Northman.

(Ram, Ram, you have become dangerous to yourself. A minute ago you were willing to kill two of your own people; in your rage you didn’t care. If you’d killed them, you would have destroyed yourself as well.

(The tribes are not your enemy. They withhold your people because they see your help as the fastest and least costly method of driving the orcs away. Without it, many of my people will die, and, many others in other lands.

(So go back to your ship before you do something you will not forgive yourself.)

Ram shivered, feeling physically ill. The word-thoughts flowed on with sure calmness. (The land of the orcs is not the place for you. Ugly things happen here-evil things. Perhaps Chandra and Anne Marie will tell you a little of that someday. Perhaps.

(You are Ram Uithoudt, master artisan, maker of wonders, who sails between the stars. You are not prepared to live with war. Let Matthew Kumalo lead your people down here beneath the sky. He is not as smart as you, but he is wiser, and he has a stronger stomach.)

While the two had faced each other in pregnant silence, the crew had looked on soberly. They had not needed to hear speech to know that something decisive was happening or who was prevailing.

Their captain turned now to the co-pilot.

“Take us back up, Lee,” he said quietly, “back to the ship.”

When the Beta had disappeared, Sten made a run along the bank, spraying the orcs who had crept out of the reeds and tall grass and were rearming themselves from the piles. It was time, he decided, to see if the incendiary grenades could really set the heaps aflame, as Charles had told them.