Lesser officers echoed the command. Cheering, the prince's force obeyed. They knew as well as their leaders the edge the high ground gave them. Iron clashed and belled off iron, crunched on carapaces, and sheared away limbs and eyestalks.
With their greater momentum, the T'Kai stopped their enemies' uphill advance dead in its tracks. The two lines remained motionless and struggling for a long moment. Here, though, the stalemate did not last. The T'Kai began to force the M'Sak line backward.
"Drive them! Drive them! Well done!" D'Ton shouted. V'Zek truly had made a mistake, he thought.
Prince K'Sed, gloomy since the day he learned of the M'Sak invasion, was practically capering with excitement. "Drive them back to M'Sak!" he cried.
"Driving them back to level ground would do nicely," B'Rom said, but as he spoke in normal tones, no one but K'Sed heard him. The T'Kai warriors picked up the prince's cry and threw it at the foe. "Back to M'Sak! Back to M'Sak!" It swelled into a savage chant. Even B'Rom found a grasping-claw opening and closing in time to it. Irritated at himself, he forced the claw closed.
"Hold steady! Don't break formation! Hold steady!" V'Zek heard the commands echoed by officers and underofficers as the M'Sak gave ground. He wished he could be in the thick of the fighting, but if he were, he could not direct the battle as a whole. That, he decided reluctantly, was more important, at least for the moment.
"Back to M'Sak! Back to M'Sak!" The shout reached him over the din of battle and the yells of his own warriors.
"Amateurs," he snorted.
"They aren't fond of us, are they?" Z'Yon observed from beside him.
"They'll be even less fond of us if they keep advancing a while longer." And, V'Zek thought but did not say, if my own line holds together. He would never have dared try this with the T'Kai semirabble. Even with good troops, a planned fighting retreat was dangerous. It could turn unplanned in an instant.
But if it didn't… if it didn't, he would get in some fighting after all.
Being a trader was different from what Jennifer had expected. So was watching a battle. It was also a good deal worse. Those were real intelligent beings trying to kill one another down there. Those were real body fluids that spurted from wounds, real limbs that lay quivering on the ground after being hacked away from their former owners, real eyestalks that halberds and bills sliced off, real G'Bur who would never walk or see again but who were in anguish now and might well live on, maimed, for years.
She tried to detach herself from what she was seeing, tried to imagine it as something not real, something only happening on the screen. Koniev or Marya, she thought, would have no trouble doing that; about Greenberg she was less sure. She knew she had no luck. What she watched was real, and she could not make herself pretend it was only a screen drama. Too many of these actors would never get up after the taping was done.
So she watched and tried not to be sick. The really frustrating thing was that, in spite of having a full view of the whole battlefield, she could not fathom what, if anything, V'Zek was up to. The T'Kai right wing was holding; the left, by now, had actually advanced several hundred meters.
This, she thought with something as close to contempt as her mild nature allowed, was the sort of fighting that had made V'Zek feared all through the T'Kai confederacy? It only showed that on a world with poor communications, any savage could build up a name for himself that he didn't come close to deserving.
F'Rev had no idea what the battle as a whole looked like. The commander-of-fifty had his own, smaller problems. His troop was in the T'Kai center. The line he was holding had stretched thin when the army's left claw drove back the barbarians: it had been forced to stretch to accommodate its lengthened front.
Now it could not stretch any further. He sent a messenger over to the troop on his immediate right, asking for more warriors.
The messenger returned, eyestalks lowered in apprehension. "Well?" F'Rev growled. "Where are the reinforcements?"
"He has none to send, sir," the messenger said nervously. "He is as thin on the ground as we are."
"A pestilence!" F'Rev burst out. "What am I supposed to do now?"
V'Zek's guards almost killed the red-striped messenger before he reached the chieftain?after one try on their master's life, they were not about to permit another. But when the fellow's bona fides were established, he proved to bring welcome news.
"There's a stretch in the center, three or four troops wide, my master, where they're only a warrior or two thick," he told V'Zek.
Z'Yon, who heard the gasped-out message, bent before V'Zek so that his plastron scraped the ground. "Just as you foretold, my master," the shaman said, more respectful than V'Zek ever remembered hearing him.
The chieftain knew he had earned that respect. He felt the way bards sometimes said they did when songs seemed to shape themselves as they were sung, as if even the sun rose and set according to his will. It was better than mating, purer than the feeling he got from chewing the leaves of the p'sta tree.
Neither moment nor feeling was to be wasted. "Now we fight back harder here," he told the subchiefs who led his army's right claw. "We've drawn them away from their strongpoint; now we'll make them pay for coming out."
"About time," one of his underlings said. "Going backward against these soft-shells was making my eyestalks itch."
"Scratch, then, but not too hard. I want you to hold their left in place, make it retreat a little if you like, but not too far."
"Why not?" the subchief demanded indignantly.
"Because that would only hurt them. I intend to kill." V'Zek was already running full tilt toward the center. Here indeed was his chance to fight.
"The M'Sak aren't giving up any more ground on the left," Jennifer reported into Greenberg's ear. "I suppose the T'Kai charge has run out of steam now that they're down onto flat ground." A moment later she added, "The barbarians are shifting a little toward the center, or at least V'Zek is moving that way."
"Anything serious there, do you think?" the master merchant asked.
After her usual hesitation, Jennifer said, "I doubt it. What can he do that he hasn't already failed with on the left? He?" She stopped again. When she resumed, all she said was, "My God."
This time, Greenberg did not blame her for halting. He could not yet see what had gone wrong, but he could hear that something had. He snapped, "What is it, Jennifer?"
"They found a soft spot in the line somehow?the M'Sak in the T'Kai line, I mean." Another wait, this time for Jennifer to collect herself. "Hundreds of them are pouring through. They're turning in on the T'Kai left wing and?rolling it up, is that the phrase?"
"That's the phrase," the master merchant said grimly.
Along with Koniev and Marya, he ran to try to stem the rout. Long before he reached the rupture point, he knew it was hopeless. No mere thumb could repair this dike. The few M'Sak the humans dropped did not influence the battle in the least.
From the Flying Festoon, Jennifer said, "I'm sorry I didn't notice anything going wrong."
"I don't think there was anything to notice, Jennifer," Koniev told her. "V'Zek didn't find that soft spot in our line?he made it. He lured the left out till the T'Kai got overextended, and then?and now?"