“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.