The Tyrant by Eric Flint and David Drake

In truth, most of the tribes couldn’t have managed it. But the Reedbottoms had three advantages. First, they were farmers rather than herders. Reedbottom villagers were accustomed to working together throughout the year in the fields, not just during the periodic great hunts. Second, their own style of fighting, adapted to their marshy lowlands, favored heavily armored warriors wielding axes and flails in close formation. As close, at least, as those weapons permitted. Out on the open plains, the other tribes could savage them with swirling cavalry tactics and mounted missile fire. But whenever someone had to meet the Reedbottoms on their own terrain, it was another story.

Third, there was Prelotta. The Reedbottom chief was charismatic enough that he’d been able to impose a degree of discipline on his tribesmen which was unusual for barbarians. Charismatic enough—and, when necessary, brutal enough.

A fourth advantage, too, now that she thought about it. Peeking through the gunport, Helga saw that four of the crew—judging from what she could see of their tattoos and hairstyles—came from other tribes. Life was brutal for the nomads. Their incessant feuds and blood vendettas constantly shredded people from their own tribes. Whether declared official “outlaws” or simply on the run from victorious clan enemies, hundreds of them could be found roaming loose at any time in the southern half of the continent, taking what livestock they could salvage and desperately trying to find shelter somewhere.

The Reedbottoms were one of the traditional “shelters.” Had been for centuries. As distasteful as their lifestyle might be to most Southrons, there had always been enough refugees trickling into the lowlands to have steadily increased the size of the “Nephew of Assan.” To the point where, now, the Reedbottoms were certainly as numerous as their Grayhills rivals.

She stepped back from the gunport and examined the wagon as a whole. Then, slowly turning her head, surveyed as much of the laager as she could see. Which was all of it, except for the part obscured behind the central compound—and, of course, those parts obscured behind the masses of mounted Southron warriors from other tribes. Just as Adrian had predicted, fragments of the other tribes had come scampering to the Reedbottoms for shelter.

Chief of Chiefs Norrys himself was here, she’d heard, brought there by Adrian’s brother Esmond and his own still-large force of warriors.

She scanned the area, trying to spot Esmond. She couldn’t see him, but she assumed that the largest group of mounted warriors toward the eastern side of the laager—maybe a thousand in all—was where he was located. Esmond had distinguished himself in the fighting which had taken place since the breach of the Wall, by all accounts. Although Helga wondered, sarcastically, how a man “distinguishes” himself in slaughter and rapine.

But . . . perhaps she was being unfair. She’d never liked Esmond, even before his rupture with Adrian. There had been some fighting, after all, against sizeable Confederate garrison units in the southern provinces. From what she’d heard, Esmond had usually played the leading role in breaking those units.

He’d even, according to rumor, managed to hold off Tomsien’s huge army long enough to rescue Norrys and keep the badly-wounded Chief of Chiefs from falling into Confederate hands. That had been the one and only major encounter so far between the Southrons and Tomsien—Norrys must have been seized by delusions of grandeur—and Esmond seemed to have been the one barbarian warleader who came out of the fiasco with his reputation enhanced.

The wagons which made up the laager were huge—sixteen feet long and six feet across, with a covered roof about six feet from the floor. They were drawn on wheels to match—great clumsy things, which protruded beyond the sides of the wagons themselves because they were four feet in diameter and couldn’t have cleared otherwise. The wagons were not much more than two feet off the ground.

Helga couldn’t really see the ground itself, under the wagons. Once the laager was locked into position, heavy wooden shields had been lowered to prevent any enemies from crawling under the wagons. Similar shields, except taller, had been fitted into the interstices between the wagons. Like the walls of the wagons, those shields had loopholes through which guns could be fired.

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