The Torian Pearls

Chapter 25

Blade was staring ahead into the silent darkness when both the silence and the darkness were suddenly broken. The faint thud of Vodi alarm drums and the slightly louder thud of muskets drifted faintly up the breeze. The earthworks around the siege camp were suddenly crowned with a ring of flickering torches. From where Blade sat on his horse, they looked no brighter than fireflies.

The Torians were going in now, abandoning their horses to hurl themselves against the earthworks on foot. They might not break through and many of them would die whether they did or not. Blade was sure they would push the attack in spite of this. They had too many dead to avenge, and Queen Kayarna would be leading them. She might have to lead from a litter to spare her twisted leg, but lead she would!

Blade lifted a wet finger to test the breeze. Good. It seemed to be holding. It would carry sound from the enemy camp toward where his own attack was assembling in the darkness. It would also carry the canoes of the Hauri straight down onto the enemy fleet. They would still have to run the gauntlet of cannon fire, but they would be low, fast-moving targets coming at the gunners out of pitch darkness. The weather had contrived an overcast, totally moonless night for this battle, and Blade was grateful. There would be just enough light for his people to see each other's white armbands, not enough to give the Vodi a dangerous amount of warning.

More sparkles of torchlight and musket fire, closer now. That meant the Kargoi were launching their attack, with all the pikemen marching straight up to the Vodi. If the Vodi somehow managed to come out to meet them, there would be a pitched battle in the open. If not, the Kargoi would drop their pikes, draw their swords, and go into the camp after the enemy.

A distant murmur of voices joined the drums and guns. This must be the faintest hint of an appalling din of screams, yells, war cries, shouts of fear and agony as the battle exploded far away along the shore.

It was time to move in. The Vodi would be awake and alert now, looking in all directions, and there was no point in giving them the slightest chance to brace themselves for his attack. Blade picked up the horn slung from his saddle, put it to his lips, and blew as long as he had breath in his lungs.

Before he'd stopped blowing, a weird and hideous uproar answered him from behind. War cries of Kargoi and Torians, the neighing of horses, the bellowing of angry drends, and then a swelling thunder of hooves. Blade spurred his horse inland; away from the beach, as the thunder became deafening. He was barely out of the way when the vanguard of a thousand furious stampeding wagon drends pounded past, toward the camp of the Vodi.

Behind the drends, around them, even among them rode Torians and Kargoi on horses and riding drends. They shouted at the stampeding animals, they blew horns and beat drums in their ears, they even prodded them in the rumps with swords and lances. The wagon drends moved faster and faster, angry and frightened at the same time.

The noise of the stampede became deafening; the Vodi in their camp would certainly be hearing it by now. That wouldn't make much difference when the drends reached the camp. They were an unstoppable battering ram of living flesh, like the sea reptiles controlled by the Menel.

A moment's thought about the Menel passed through Blade's mind. What would happen if tonight's defeat drove the desperate and reeling Vodi to ally themselves with the Menel? That was a risk, but one that had to be accepted. The Vodi were a menace already at hand, while the Menel were one lurking in the background. The Vodi had to go first.

There was another risk to run tonight. All four of the people who knew the secret of the Menel were in the forefront of the attack-Blade here, Paor with the Kargoi pikemen, Fudan and Loya with the Hauri coming in from the sea. Their people demanded leadership from in front, and any or all of them might die because of this. If they all died, who would be left to plan against the Menel?

Sometimes there were advantages to a general's being able to sit out a battle safe in a bunker far behind the lines!

Behind the drends rode more Torians and more Kargoi, a thousand of them, all armed with every weapon they could carry. On the flanks of the drends bounced bulging sacks of naphtha. When those sacks started going into the Vodi campfires…!

Blade rode back and forth along the landward flank of the stampeding drends. Sometimes he had to ride in and hold back the mounted attackers. In their eagerness some of them would gladly have ridden into the stampede or even ahead of it, willing to risk being trampled for the sake of more quickly getting at the enemy. Blade drove them back with shouts and curses and a waving sword. Tonight's battle would be confused enough, without hotheads making it worse!

Dust boiled up from under the hooves of drends and horses, making the dark night darker. It was beginning to be like riding through an old-fashioned London fog. Blade was edging his own horse out of the dust cloud when the palisade around the Vodi camp appeared ahead. The Vodi had built it well enough to stand against men or horses. They hadn't built it well enough to stand against a stampede of maddened drends. The sentries at the palisade held lighted torches, and by the light of those torches Blade saw everything that happened.

The drends went over the shallow ditch made to stop charging horsemen, went over it as if it wasn't there. Some of them went down and others piled up on top of them and around them, but the wild bawling and bellowing simply made the ones left on their feet move faster. They came up to the palisade at a speed Blade wouldn't have believed drends could reach. Somehow they sensed what lay in their path; they lowered their heads and charged on. Two hundred sets of horns struck the palisade almost in the same moment.

Blade heard an explosion of cracking and splintering wood and all the torches along a wide stretch of palisade went out. As the torches died, a hideous chorus of screams rose, lasting for the few seconds it took the drends to trample the palisade flat. Caught first under the logs and then under the hooves of the drends, most of the Vodi sentries were simply crushed into jelly after those few seconds of screaming. The drends were slowed but not stopped. They plunged on, straight among the tents.

Now the riders were following the drends as fast as their mounts would move. Blade could have yelled his lungs out or killed half of them without slowing them down at all. The riders scented the blood of their enemies, and like a pack of wolves they wanted to make their kill while their chances were best. The horses and the riding drends poured forward, catching up with the stampede, finding gaps in it, dashing out ahead of it into the camp of the Vodi.

Now it was by the light of enemy campfires that Blade saw what happened. Most of the Vodi were awake and armed by now, so few of them died in tents trampled flat by the drends. A good many died on their feet. Blade saw one of the Vodi swing his axe at a drend, smashing in its skull, then die pinned, writhing and screaming in agony as the beast fell squarely on him. Others tried to flee, tripped and were trampled, fell into campfires and were burned alive.

Those who survived the stampede had to face the mounted Kargoi and Torians moments later. At that point most of the Vodi lost whatever courage they had left, turned, and tried to run. Many of them didn't get very far before Torians rode them down, thrusting lances neatly into the backs of their necks or other vulnerable points. Blade saw one musketeer turn to fire, bringing down a Torian and his horse. Another Torian charged him, striking him a glancing blow with the lance. The Vodi stumbled to one side, fell into a fire-and the powder flask on his belt exploded. Even the battle-trained Torian horses shied away from what was left after the explosion died.

Other explosions now sounded farther down in the camp. Blade saw long tongues of flame spurting up and out. Either the Vodi had somehow managed to turn their siege guns on some of the attackers or some of the attackers were getting through to the powder magazines. Paor had a dozen men of his personal guard specially assigned to burn or blow up anything that looked like gunpowder. Blade hoped some of the men would survive their assignment, but doubted it. They'd been too enthusiastic about the damage the explosions might do to the enemy to worry much about being caught themselves.

Flames were also booming up behind Blade, with the distinctive color of naphtha fires. He hoped his men weren't wasting the naphtha on minor targets, and also hoped they wouldn't destroy too much. If the camp could be captured with some of its gear intact ….

Blade spurred his horse into a gallop toward the shore. It was there the battle would become completely decisive, there and out among the ships. Danger to their boats and ships-their line of retreat-would break or destroy the Vodi more certainly than anything else.

The horse responded to Blade so eagerly that he reached the shore well ahead of his own men. Suddenly he found himself trotting along the beach, the lathered and sweating horse kicking up sand instead of dust. He was far enough from the rest of the battle to find darkness and silence around him again.

The darkness and silence lasted only a few seconds. Muskets began banging as the sentries on the drawn-up boats let fly at the first target they'd been offered all night. Blade was a target impossible to miss, even for the most inaccurate weapons in the hands of the worst shots. A bullet ripped Blade's shortsword from his belt and another ripped his helmet from his head. A third ploughed along his temple, cleaning off the hair and opening the skin so that he felt blood flowing. Then two more bullets slammed into the horse; it went down and the half-stunned Blade went down with it.

He managed to roll clear of his dying mount and struggled for footing in the sand. The Vodi dropped their empty muskets and ran toward him from all directions. Blade was just ready to defend himself when the first two came at him.

One raised an axe, then reeled back with a hand missing and the axe falling from the other hand. As the second man slashed down at Blade with a sword, several tons of gunpowder went off farther inland. The long rumbling explosion and the searing flash of light paralyzed the man, breaking his attack. Blade kicked him in the knee, slashed his thigh as he fell, and cut off his head as he landed. Then he snatched up the fallen man's sword and met the next attacker with two weapons dancing in his hands.

With the two swords Blade wove a steel curtain around himself for several minutes, killing one attacker after another. He was never sure exactly how long he fought or how many he killed. He knew that in the end there was a litter of dead and dying Vodi on the beach around him, and others stumbling or crawling off in the darkness to die there alone.

He also knew that he saw two boatloads of Vodi rowing in toward him. There were at least twenty men in each boat. They would be too few to help with the battle in the camp, but they would be more than enough to kill him if he didn't run. Since he couldn't see there was anywhere to run to, he decided to stay where he was and take his chances. He waited for the two boats, clearheaded and cool enough to even pick out his first opponent from each one.

Then dark shapes rose from the water alongside each boat, and dark objects soared into the air to land with faint thuds in the boats. Before any of the Vodi could react, spluttering blue lights dropped among them. Then the standing and sitting men were silhouetted against sheets of flame as the naphtha blazed up.

Most of the men died screaming in those flames or dragged down by the weight of their armor and weapons as they leaped overboard. A few were strong swimmers or sailors who wore no armor. Some of them were dragged down as they swam by Hauri with sharp knives, that would slit open human throats as well as green sharks. Two or three made it to shore.

Blade ran to meet them. A sailor swung an oar at him, knocking one sword out of his hand. Blade ran the man through with the other. A soldier got to the fallen weapon before Blade. He advanced on Blade with the sword in one hand and an axe in the other, water dripping from his beard, mail coat, and the horns of his helmet. A lithe dark figure rose from the water behind him, ran lightly through the shallows, and struck at the base of his skull with a long staff. The soldier went forward on his face without a twitch. Blade retrieved his sword from the dead hand and went forward to embrace Loya.

Now a battle was beginning out on the water, spreading along the line of anchored ships. The muzzle flashes of the ships' guns lit up Hauri canoes, darting in and out among their high-sided enemies. Most of the shots went over the low-lying targets, doing no harm. Some hit, the heavy stones breaking canoes apart like bathtub toys in the hands of an angry child. Few of the Hauri died even then, for they took to the water as readily as fish.

Meanwhile, more bags of naphtha flew up onto the decks of ships and into boats, and more blue torches followed them. Flames roared up from a dozen ships, then from twenty more. Blade saw the flames race up tarred rigging, leap into sails, and strip them from the masts in a minute. Explosions began to boom as the flames reached ready-to-use powder on deck, and masts began to topple in showers of sparks and clouds of steam. The ports of ships glowed as the fires spread below decks. Other ships, still intact, began to drift as Hauri swimmers cut their anchor ropes.

Blade shouted and danced in delirious triumph at the spectacle of the Vodi fleet dying before his eyes. Meanwhile explosions thundered and roared behind him as well, as the attackers swarmed into the camp and went to work on the powder magazine. Some of the explosions were violent enough to throw burning timbers and pieces of human bodies all the way to the beach, where they landed around Blade.

Beside him, Loya danced and capered just as wildly.

Gradually their attention settled on one large ship in the center of the enemy fleet. A continuous roll of gunfire there told of a particularly vigorous defense. It was gallant, but in the end it was useless. The Hauri drifted a canoe filled from stern to stern with bags of naphtha against the ship, then set their fires. The ship's stern vanished in a sheet of flame that towered up and seconds later engulfed the mainmast. Sailors with their clothes on fire hurled themselves from the yardarms, falling like meteors into the water. The flames spread forward, the foremast became a torch, powder on deck went off violently enough to toss several guns overboard-then the magazine deep down inside the ship exploded.

The ship's deck rose; its sides blew outward; both masts simply vanished. A sphere of flame sat on the water where the ship had been, its surface dotted with planks and guns and human figures. Then the flames shrank into themselves and vanished while the wreckage and the bodies hissed down into the water or fell with thuds on the beach. In the silence that followed the explosion, Blade put his arm around Loya. They stood there for a moment, deaf and blind to everything except each other, then turned back to the battle.

There wasn't much left of that battle. Perhaps the exploding ship had been the flagship of the whole expedition. In any case, the explosion seemed to take all the fight out of the Vodi. They fled or tried to flee or tried to surrender if they had no hope of fleeing. Blade was able to save a few prisoners, but only a few. The Torians were giving no quarter, and neither the Kargoi nor the Hauri felt much like arguing with them on the point.

Dawn came, and Blade was able to write the epitaph for the Vodi expedition. In the commanders' tents he found papers that made it clear the Vodi had put nearly the whole military and naval strength of their people into the expedition. They had lost nine out of ten of the men, two-thirds of the ships, all their siege guns, equipment, and supplies-in short, they'd met complete disaster.

Blade decided to stop worrying about the Vodi being driven to ally themselves with the Menel. It would be a generation, possibly two, before the Vodi had enough fighting men to be worth anything as allies. If the Menel did accept Vodi support, they'd be saddling themselves with an ally even weaker and more helpless than they were.

Blade met Queen Kayarna as she rode about the battlefield on a horse, her fourth of the night. Unable to walk, she'd ridden the other three right into the battle until they'd been killed under her.

She rode up to Blade, a triumphant grin on her face. The grin faded as she saw Blade's arm around Loya's waist. Whatever she'd been about to say died on lips that tightened into a straight line. She turned her horse and cantered off, her back rigid.

Loya was equally sober-faced as she watched the queen's receding figure. «She did not like seeing us together, I think.»

«No, she didn't,» said Blade wearily. «I hope she may think otherwise, someday-or at least be silent about it. If she is jealous, though…»

He could not quite find the energy to finish the sentence. He'd thoroughly disposed of all the problems involved in winning the war. Now began the problems involved in keeping the peace.