Pirates Of Gohar

Chapter 22

The enemy came to Blade even before the dueling circle was completely out of sight behind him.

A seemingly endless column of Goharan horsemen was cantering out of one of the wooded passes. At least two thousand were already in sight, with more coming on fast. The leading riders were moving six and eight abreast, and all of them carried bows and swords. At the end of the horsemen a red banner flapped in the damp air.

After that, Blade decided he'd seen enough. The leading riders would soon be within bowshot. Now that he had accurate news, the next thing was to get it back to the rebels. The Goharans had managed almost complete surprise, but even a few minutes' warning to the camp would save a good many lives. Blade cursed the rebels' refusal to send out scouts.

Suddenly the leading riders broke into a gallop, with drums thudding behind them. Blade shouted to his companions and all of them put spurs to their own horses. The wild chase went down the hill in a rush. The horse of a man riding with Blade slipped on the grass and went down. The rider rolled free and rose to his feet unhurt, but now he was within bowshot of the Goharans. Blade saw arrows sprout like a porcupine's quills from the man, then he vanished under the thundering hooves of the enemy.

Blade lost two more men as he rode back to join the main army, and several arrows came unpleasantly close to him. The Goharans were gaining, but as they did their leading ranks were getting ragged as each rider spurred his horse to the limit.

If the Goharans had been equipped with spurs and able to press home a boot-to-boot charge with lances, the rebel army would still have been doomed. The few minutes' warning Blade gave them wouldn't have been enough. He found the camp still in a frantic confusion, with riderless horses dashing in all directions and horseless riders chasing them.

The Goharans were horse archers, with their curved swords for close work. They had to shoot until the enemy was broken, then charge. At least all their books said this was the way to fight a battle, and their general seemed to be going by the book.

Somehow Blade didn't wind up sprouting arrows when the Goharans behind him opened fire. The arrows came down all around him, and a solid curtain of them seemed to fall on the man just ahead. Screaming men and screaming horses went down by the dozens, thrashing wildly, the flailing hooves killing men who'd survived the arrows. Blade pulled his horse around to the left and rode clear across the front of the rebel army. Goharan arrows pursued him all the way and finally caught up with his horse as he reached the end of the line.

The horse screamed, reared up, and fell sideways, blood gushing from its nose and torn throat. Blade leaped clear, hit the ground on all fours, and didn't bother standing up until he was a little closer to his friends. He rose to his feet only a few yards from where the teamsters were struggling with their wagons.

«No, Blade. You should stay on your feet, like us!» It was Khraishamo. He was standing beside an upturned barrel of ale, stuffing Rhodina into a scale-mail jacket. «Get one of these for yourself too. This isn't the kind of battle for walking around bare as a frog.»

Blade knew that perfectly well. He was just about to point out that Khraishamo was equally exposed, when suddenly Rhodina screamed.

«Those dirty, horse-dung stinking bastards! They're running out on us!»

Blade's eyes followed Rhodina's pointing finger, and he joined in Rhodina's cursing. As fast as they mounted up, the Maghri were streaming away to the rear and vanishing in the hills to the east. None of them were galloping, but very few of them were staying. It wasn't a panicky flight, it was the orderly withdrawal of an army that is simply refusing to fight.

Blade stopped cursing and turned to the people around him. Some of them were also cursing, while others were looking toward the rear again. Many were too furious to either speak or move. He jumped up on top of the ale barrel and shouted to everyone who could hear: «So the damned Maghri have run off? Well, we're not going to run. We're going to show those bastards that we're better men. And we're going to show the Goharans the same!» He pointed at the horsemen. They were all gathered now, and a glance gave him a rough estimate of their strength.

«There aren't more than four thousand of them,» he yelled. «We still outnumber them, and they're a long way from home. We stand here and beat them, and that's the end.»

«And if we don't beat them?» someone shouted.

«Then we'll die like men, with something to be proud of! Do you think the Maghri are going to be happy after what they've done today?» Blade wasn't sure he was making sense. He wasn't even completely sure what he was saying. He only knew that he had to say something to pull the rebels together, and if it succeeded, so much the better. He and his friends weren't going to retreat, whatever anybody else did, and he didn't really want this to be Richard Blade's Last Stand.

The sudden disappearance of the Maghri seemed to be confusing the Goharans. They were all lined up and ready, a man in a golden helmet out in front, but not moving. The arrow fire slackened, then Blade heard shouted orders and it stopped entirely. Were the Goharans short of arrows?

That was an encouraging thought, but it was only a guess. Silence was falling over the battlefield, and in that silence Blade found his voice carrying from one end of the rebel line to the other.

«Dismount and shoot from on foot. Men with spears and swords, pull the horses back. Archers, aim for the enemy's horses. They've got a long walk back to Mythor!» Horses were bigger targets than men, and a Goharan soldier on foot this deep in a hostile countryside would be lucky to get back alive even if his side won today's battle.

«Hurry, damn-!»

Then the head of the ale barrel caved in under Blade. He plunged chest-deep into stale ale, making everyone who saw him double over with laughter. Khraishamo helped him climb out, coughing and spitting out ale, while all along the rebel line men started obeying Blade's orders.

As the Goharans sat on their horses and watched, Blade began to realize he'd done a good job. The Goharans were either short of arrows or saving them to deal with the Maghri once they'd smashed the rebels. They weren't going to stand off and use a hail of arrows to break the rebels before closing in. On the other hand, they couldn't just charge in. Without stirrups, a Goharan leaning out of his saddle to cut down a man on foot standing his ground would risk tumbling headfirst under the hooves of his own horse.

If he'd had any money, Blade would have placed a sizable bet that the Goharans would make their attack on foot.

After milling around for half an hour, the Goharans began to organize their attack. They dismounted, and some started leading the horses to the rear, out of bowshot. The rest drew their swords, rested them on their left shoulders, lined up, and waited for the order to advance.

It came. The general in the gold helmet rode out in front of his men, waving his sword over his head. He pointed it toward the rebel lines, shouted something in a high-pitched voice, then sat on his horse as his men charged past him toward the enemy.

Most of the rebels were also short of arrows, with only a single quiverful apiece. They'd expected to get more from the Maghri, who were now riding merrily off with their arrows and everything else they had. Most of the advancing Goharans also wore scale mail shirts, which provided more protection than anything the rebels were wearing.

So the advancing Goharans weren't shot down by the hundreds. The best archers among the rebels opened up first. By the time they ran short of arrows the range closed to where it was hard to miss. With wounded men dropping out at every step, the Goharans advanced steadily, their line growing more ragged as they did. Blade realized the Goharans weren't used to holding formation while fighting on foot. Perhaps he should have kept a few hundred men mounted, to take advantage of this fact? Probably, but it was too late to make such a big change now, with the hand-to-hand fighting about to start. His battle plan was working fairly well for something dreamed up on the spot.

Khraishamo now had an ax in each hand and was tramping back and forth across the circle of wagons. As he moved he encouraged the people around him with gruesome descriptions of what would happen to the Goharans if they dared to get close. Beside him walked Rhodina, looking like a-Valkyrie in her armor. Khraishamo's end of the rebel line was in good hands. Blade started to walk along the line toward the center, where they might need more leadership. He hadn't seen Gribbon since word of the attack came, and couldn't help wondering if the rebel leader might have fled with the Maghri.

Then the Goharan advance struck the rebel line, and Blade had too much else on his mind to think about Gribbon.

The discipline, the armor, and the long slashing swords of the Goharans gave them an edge in some places. Rebels began to go down, skulls split open, arms lopped off, chests gaping-ghastly wounds which made their comrades turn pale but didn't make them run. In places the Goharans drove bulges into the rebel line, but they didn't break through.

Meanwhile Goharans were also going down. Wounded rebels who fell often found themselves under the swing of the Goharan swords. They stabbed upward with their own swords and knives, swung clubs at kneecaps and shins, bit and gouged if they didn't have any other weapons. Goharan soldiers fell on top of their victims and rolled over and over in desperate bare-handed struggles. The ground became covered with thrashing bodies, and Goharans coming up to join the battle had to pick paths around or through them.

In other places the rebels had enough men with spears to form pike-walls. Sometimes they invented the formation for themselves on the spot, at other times it was Blade shouting orders and pushing men which got them into position. In either case the result was a strong point in the rebel line, where the rebels had a longer reach than the Goharans. The Goharans could go around the flanks of the pike-walls, to be sure, but those flanks got fewer and fewer as the rebel line tightened up.

Blade helped defend one of those flanks himself. He'd just finished showing a boy who couldn't have been more than sixteen how to hold his spear when seven or eight Goharans raised a shout and charged straight at him.

«Get out of here!» Blade shouted at the boy.

«No.» He stood, holding his spear with the grip Blade had just showed him. Then he stepped forward and thrust hard. A sword cut missed his spear and the point drove into a Goharan throat. Before the boy could pull back, one sword chopped through his spear and another nearly took his head off. He dropped, spurting blood and still clutching three feet of his spear.

This left the Goharans to face a thoroughly enraged Blade. He feinted with his sword at the man who'd killed the boy, then closed to blind another with a dagger slash across the face. He blocked a descending sword with his dagger, losing the weapon in the process but bringing his sword around to cut off the attacker's sword arm. Then he stepped back, caught up a fallen spear, threw it straight at the man he'd blinded, and hit him in the chest. Two more Goharans had the courage to try pulling their dying comrade out of Blade's reach. All that courage brought them was a quicker death.

Then rebels were coming up all around Blade, pulling him back to safety while they moved into position on the flank of the pike-wall. Blade wiped his sword on a dead man's clothing and went back to being a general instead of a fighter.

Now the rebel line was holding nearly everywhere, but the Goharans were still pressing it hard. In a few places Goharans broke through and headed for the horse lines. Blade shouted for archers to shoot these intruders. If they managed to stampede many of the horses, it would be the rebels who'd have trouble retreating from this battlefield. Granted, they would be in friendly territory, but-

It suddenly occurred to Blade that two could play at this game. The rebels' archers weren't doing much in the fight now, because the fighters were now too mixed together for safe archery. But if a few hundred of them mounted up, slipped around to within bowshot of the Goharans' horses, and let fly?…

Blade started walking along the rebel lines, speaking to every archer he found who wasn't already using some other weapon. There weren't as many of these as he'd hoped. The rebel line was slowly falling back, leaving more and more men on the ground. Each time a man went down, someone had to take his place, and slowly the archers were being sucked into the hand-to-hand fight.

Blade managed to scrape up about eighty men with bows and full quivers. He led them toward the horse lines and watched them mount, then gave them their orders. «Move fast. Don't shoot at anything except the horses. Hit as many of them as-«

He stopped, because a low rumble was floating over the battlefield from beyond the hills to the east. Everyone else was hearing it too, and as the rumble grew louder, the fighting died down. Heads turned toward the hills-then Maghri drums sounded, and the whole rebel army exploded in wild shouts of joy and surprise.

The Maghri came over the crests of the hills on a wide front, moving at a trot. As they started downhill they broke into a canter, the fastest pace they could manage on the wet ground. Blade saw at once they were heading straight for the Goharan rear. A moment later he saw they were going to reach the — Goharan horses long before the Goharan soldiers could run to them.

Blade grabbed the bridle of the nearest free horse and swung himself up into the saddle. Then he shouted to the mounted archers.

«It looks as if the Maghri are going to do our work for us. Follow me!»

Blade remembered leading his mounted archers toward the rebel flank. He had some vague idea of getting a clear shot at the Goharans as they broke and ran. Then the whole battlefield dissolved into a chaos of running, fighting, screaming, and dying men, on horseback, on foot, and on the ground. He had only a few clear memories of anything happening after that.

— Seeing Khraishamo lead the teamsters and the other rebels who'd fought from the wagons out into the open. The pirate really deserved the name Bloodskin now. He was spattered from head to foot. His two axes still swung like scythes, reaping Goharans at every step.

— Seeing Goharans dropping their swords and going down on their knees to beg for quarter. Some of them were lucky enough to find a rebel or one of the Maghri in a good mood.

— Seeing a big bearded man on foot trying to rally his men, shouting, grabbing them, even beating at them with the flat of his sword. Blade rode in through the mob of Goharans and slashed downward with a captured Goharan sword. Only when a golden helmet fell off the dead man's head did Blade realize that he'd killed the Goharan general.

After a while the chaos began dying down, with only little knots of fighting men scattered here and there. Somewhat later, the fighting stopped entirely. Rebels on foot rounded up the prisoners, collected the dead, salvaged usable weapons and equipment, and started preparing dinner and tending the wounded. Rebels on horseback joined the Maghri in riding off to track down enemy fugitives and find the Goharan camp if they could.

«I think there will not be many who ran from this battle,» said Sigluf when he rode up to Blade. «But we should go out and look for others who may be coming.»

Blade resisted the temptation to point out that if scouts had gone out before the battle, the Goharans wouldn't have surprised the rebels in the first place. As far as he was concerned, his quarrel with Sigluf was over and done with.

So was Gohar's only field army in Mythor, as it turned out: Stunned and bewildered prisoners talked freely, and Blade was able to fill in the details they didn't give. General Kaurget, the man in the golden helmet, knew that Gohar couldn't face a long war against the rebels. As soon as he heard the rebels were gathering, he assembled four thousand picked mounted men and rode inland. When he learned that the rebel army was close at hand but apparently not on its guard, he decided to strike quickly. It was a gamble, trusting to surprise and discipline to offset three-to-one odds. With a little more surprise or a little less stubborn courage, the gamble would have been a success. Even then, without the Maghri attack the Goharans might have been able to retreat safely. There was more than enough glory to go around among the victors. Blade hoped this would reduce bad blood and bad tempers between the Maghri and the rebels.

There was also an open road to Mythor itself, if they didn't waste any time.