Sergeant Crusos was very glad that, like his detail, he was still facing out into the dark, so broad was his grin. Someone had finally told off the supercilious swine! He was still grinning when the arrow buried itself in his chest. __
The pikemen and torch bearers never had a chance and their few gasps of surprise or agony could not have been heard in the camp a hundred yards distant. As for Staff-Lieutenant Foros, he was still red-faced and spluttering, too outraged even to speak, when Tomos’ hard-swung saber took off his ugly head.
Two thousand horsemen swept into the sleeping camp. Sabers slashed tent ropes and arrows pin-cushioned the heaving canvases before torches were tossed onto them. The guards at the commander’s pavilion died messily, under lance and dripping sword blade. The Vahrohnos Martios, too besotted to even draw steel, was split from shoulder to breastbone by Chief Hohlt’s broadsword. Knots of two or three grim riders fanned out after the initial charge, ruthlessly shooting or lancing or slashing at any figure afoot, while select details put the torch to wagons or looted useful supplies and hastily packed them on captured horses and mules.
When he had seen the pack train well on its way, Tomos tapped his bugler’s shoulder and the recall was sounded, while the Vawn mindcalled his Horseclansmen. The bugler had to repeat his notes three times, ere the raiders ceased of riding down screaming, weaponless foe-men and reassembled. By that time, long columns of torches could be seen approaching from both south and east.
As the last of the exhausted, blood-soaked, but exultant horsemen headed back toward the mountains, Tomos, Hohlt, and the Vawn surveyed the fiery, gory “acres that had been camp to four thousand pikemen.
“We’d better get back and prepare the main passes,” remarked Tomos conversationally. “Picking off scouts or stragglers is one thing, but for the morale of the rest of his army, Zastros is going to have to send retaliatory columns after us.”
And they rode off in the wake of their men. Milo’s huge castra was already too small for the heterogeneous forces that were still responding. Almost every principality in the Middle Kingdoms -was represented, though only one other had been able to match in size the forces of Harzburk and Pitzburk. The Princes’ Council of Eeree had dispatched some thousand mounted axmen and sent word that five thousand heavy infantry were on the march. And Milo might have begun to entertain thoughts of meeting Zastros in open battle, were it not for that ambiguous prophecy.
Sitting alone in his pavilion, the volume of his private journal that contained! the list of prophecies open before him, Milo shook his head slowly. Old Harri had been amazingly accurate in predicting future events, but the High-Lord would be far happier if the man of powers had worded his forewarnings less bardically and more specifically.
The hosts of the south will come in due time, Led by two bodies that share but one mind. But hold well, God-Milo, cross not the river, And the tribe, from ancient evil, deliver.
So he refused all blandishments of his captains and his allies to erect any sort of serious fortifications south of the bridge, though he did authorize a scattering of the more suicidally inclined troops to establish and occupy small strong points, with orders to retreat in the face of any really determined opposition … if they could.
Captain Portos had proved a goldmine of information. First, in the matter of the elephants, Zastros had only eight of the beasts, two of which were being used for nothing more martial than to draw his huge headquarters wagon. Portbs had served both against and with the big animals and he assured Milo that, while they had been trained to use their long, immensely strong noses to hurl stones and darts, and while their charge could
crumple any formation of pikemen or other infantry, they were relatively useless against fortified positions. Nor, he went on, were they so large or so invulnerable as rumor had it; Zastros’ elephants, averaged between twenty-two and twenty-six hands at the withers, not all of them had tushes, and those that did seldom used the three- to four-foot protuberances in fighting, rather lifting men and hurling them to earth with their serpentine noses or trampling them. The menace of fire set them wild, as did sudden loud noises.