The group behind was not so orderly. Carts drawn by mules and arrocks, crossbowmen mingled with pikemen, camp followers, cooks, prostitutes, and priests all mixed together.
A trumpet sounded, and Camithon’s heavy cavalrymen trotted forward over the piled brush toward the top of the pass. They raised their banners. The brushcutters scrambled away behind them, down and onto the road, running back to Dravan, raising a thin cloud of dust as they ran.
Another trumpet sounded from the leaders of Sarakos’s army, and the column halted. The group behind became even more disorganized as the marching horde piled onto one another. Trailing elements caught up and mingled with the leaders. Pity, Tylara thought. If the knights could get among that press for ten minutes, Wanax Sarakos would feel the losses. But the lead group was not disorganized, and it outnumbered her entire army.
Once again she felt doubts and fear, and she looked up into the vault of reddish-blue sky above, searching for a sign. But there was none. A cloudless cold day in the mountains; rare enough, the Day-father showing himself in all his, glory—but he showed no signs of favor. Would he care? Or would the ancient One-eye govern the day, choosing the most valiant to be slain, sending victory by whim? There were more trumpets from Sarakos’s column, and the vanguard knights spread across forty abreast. They moved forward at a walk, then at a trot. The lines rippled as lances fell into place, and the trumpet sounded once more. The trot became a canter as the charge swept forward.
“Now,” Tylara prayed. “Now. In Yatar’s name, NOW!”
Her own trumpets sounded. Her knights wheeled, and spurred their mounts ahead, trotting down the road toward Dravan, riding after the dust cloud raised by the retreating woodcutters.
Tylara muttered thanks to the Dayfather. That had been the first of the many things that could go wrong. If the knights would not run, if the sight of the enemy had brought them to a hopeless charge because it would be dishonorable to run—more than one battle had been lost through blind obedience to the dictates of a cavalier’s honor. As this one might yet be.
“They flee! The cowards run!” The shouts rose from Sarakos’s charging knights.
As her own knights rode away, there were tiny movements in the brush at the roadsides. Men hidden in holes beneath the brush thrust torches upward, then fled toward the sides of the pass. Thin wisps of smoke rose, here and there a flame. The waxy stalks caught fire quickly.
Her knights reached the wide place where they had waited earlier. They wheeled as one, facing the enemy. Their lances came down.
“The cowards hide behind fire!” someone shouted. “We will teach them!” The charging enemy came on harder, a hundred paces into the brush. Two hundred, and still they rode. Tylara held her breath.
When the leading elements were three hundred paces into the brush-strewn pass, a hundred paces beyond the top of the pass, her own trumpets sounded. There was a flash of movement on the hillsides above the pass. Bright kilts, dull leather, the dull shine of steel caps painted with earth colors. A moment before there wasn’t a man to be seen. Now almost two hundred archers were standing behind shrubs, behind rocks, seemingly having risen from the very ground. They raised their bows, nocked arrows, and drew back to cheek and eye.
There were shouts from Sarakos’s troops, but it was obvious to even the most stupid that there was no halting the charge. Safety lay ahead, through the screen of knights, out of the growing fire and away from the archers. The leading horsemen spurred harder.
Another pause. Then a shout from the hillside. “Let the gray gulls fly!”
The arrows flew with a deadly sound. In a moment the air was thick with them. Even as the first flight struck, another was on its way. Shafts the length of a tall man’s arm and tipped with steel sped from bows drawn by men who’d used them since childhood. The second flight struck, and another arched out.
The slaughter was terrifying. The arrows pierced horses, saddles, even armor itself. Horses reared and bolted, crashed into each other, tripped and fell and stumbled over fallen horses. The centaurs screamed in rage and pain, their stubby arms flailing wildly, their half-hands frantically plucking at the arrows, their heads twisted to lick wounds. They seized their riders and tried to throw them off, or fell into the brush and rolled on their backs. Some plunged uphill off the road, to be shot down before they could climb far.
Still the arrows flew. The charge was broken into scattered groups, driblets of twos and threes and fours; not a solid wave of armored men with lances, but a disorganized horde fleeing past the archers, away from the growing fires, out into the broad area beyond— To be struck by the countercharge of Tylara’s knights. With a hundred paces to build momentum they struck the leading elements of Sarakos’s force, driving their enemy back toward the flames and the falling arrows, then wheeling away as yet another wave charged through to strike and turn. They too wheeled and joined their fellows; halted and dismounted.
Dismounted. One-eyed Vothan had smiled on her, had not maddened her knights as he so easily might have done. They had obeyed orders. Most western knights wouldn’t fight dismounted; the Eqetas of Chelm had trained these well.
They stood with leveled lances, poised just beyond the ‘burning brushwood, an impenetrable wall on which Sarakos’s men could break themselves again and again, but never get through. They could not have withstood a mounted charge by an organized group, but there was no danger of that. Sarakos’s force milled about in the smoke and flame, galled by the ceaseless shower of arrows, held by the fire and the bodies of their own comrades. The dismounted line was more than able to kill the few who rode out of the smoke.
A brisk wind came up to whip the flames. They grew and flamed higher, until for five hundred paces the pass looked like the very Pit—a tangle of smoke and fire, shouting men, men unhorsed, dying horses, riderless centaurs maddened by fire and plunging into everyone. And through it all the Tamaerthon gulls flew with their deadly bite, flight after flight of the grey shafts.
The Sarakos trumpets sounded a frantic retreat, but for far too many there was no retreat possible.
The arrows did not come in flights now. The archers picked single targets, concentrating on men still mounted, bringing down their mounts to leave the armored men helpless in the burning brushwood. The pass filled with sounds of pain and terror.
Tylara sat her horse grimly, her mouth set in a hard line. I thought I would enjoy it, she thought. These are the men who killed my husband. I should enjoy their agony.
But she felt no joy at all, only sickness and horror which she must hide from her shouting escort, and the numbing realization that this was only the beginning. There would be far more, weeks more.
I hadn’t known the horses would scream so, she thought. I expected to see men die, but I had not thought of the horses.
She continued to watch in sick fascination until she suddenly realized what she was doing. She had almost made a fatal mistake.
Sarakos was bringing up his own archers. Most were crossbowmen, or mounted archers with short bows they drew only to the chest; none were a match for her Tamaerthon clansmen, but two hundred cannot fight a thousand. It was time to go. She raised her hand and waved vigorously.
Her trumpets sounded in the pass. Cadaric waved acknowledgment and began sending his archers out; the forward ones first, then others, leapfrogging so that they kept a continuous fire onto the Sarakos troops piled up at the edge of the brushfire.
Another trumpet call. Nothing happened. Her knights stood at the pass. A few left the line, but they went only for their mounts, and when they were mounted they came back.
“Fools!” Tylara shouted. She spurred her horse down the knoll to where the knights and bheromen of Chelm stood. More mounted as she came, but they showed no signs of leaving.
“Ride!” she shouted. “Before the fires burn down and their whole army comes through! Ride, my lords. You’ve done well. One-eyed Vothan smiles on you. Sarakos will not soon forget this day. Now, in the name of the Dayfather, ride!”
Bheroman Trakon sat motionless. “The fire protects them no less than us. There was nothing behind their vanguard but foot. We have more work to do this day.”
“Not true,” Tylara shouted. “They were bringing up their horse archers even as I watched, and they have their crossbowmen. You will ride into their volleys, and the remnant will be charged by their cavalry.”