They wore their long black hair pulled back, away from their faces. Unlike other armies of Maztica, no feathered banners fluttered overhead. Aside from Gultec, no man wore the spotted garb of the Jaguar Knight, and there were no Eagle Knights among the Itza at all.
But these men who had been born and lived in peace now proved ready to make a last stand in war. They stood in ranks of ten or twenty. Each rank had gathered a large pile of rocks and boulders nearby. Each man carried a bow and several dozen arrows, all of the precious missiles that the women of the tribe had been able to make.
The warrior beside Gultec cleared his throat nervously “All the old ones and the children are safely down the slope, that is, except Zochimaloc. He insisted that he would see the battle, though 1 tried my best to persuade him otherwise”
Gultec cursed. “Where is he? 1 will speak to him myself!”
The warrior pointed to the old chief. Zochimaloc sat upon a high knob of the ridge, his legs crossed comfortably before him, looking as if he desired nothing more than a few moments of quiet meditation.
Gultec cast another look into the valley below. The file of ants had not yet emerged from the forest, so he judged that he had several hours before the battle would begin. Trotting along the ridgetop, he headed toward his teacher.
“Master,” he said, with a peremptory bow, “you must not remain here! You can add nothing to our defense, and your life must be spared! What will the people do if you perish?”
Zochimaloc smiled, an irritating, patronizing look that nearly brought Gultec’s blood to a boil. “Patience, my son,” said the old man. “You must not talk to your old master this way!”
Gultec flushed. “Forgive me, but I speak strongly to reflect the depth of my concern! What do you hope to gain by remaining here?”
“Remember,” Zochimaloc chided him gently, “that although you have learned many things, you do not know everything. Perhaps there is a surprise or two in this old gray head.
“Or perhaps I simply wish to have a look at what war is like,” the old man concluded with that same smile. “I have never seen it, you know.”
“It is not worth seeing,” replied Gultec. “I thought you knew that.”
Zochimaloc chuckled quietly “There was a time when you would have argued long and hard with yourself over that very point. It is true that your time in Tulom-Itzi has changed you.”
“But you are still the same stubborn old man I first met,” the Jaguar Knight retorted. His deep affection for Zochimaloc would not allow him to speak more directly but he dearly wished that his teacher would depart from the mountaintop.
“If the ants press through,” Gultec continued, trying a different tack, “we will have to flee quickly Even young warriors, fleet of foot, may not survive. How do you expect to
outdistance such monstrous creatures?”
His teacher smiled a trifle sadly “I know enough of war in understand that this mountain is the only place you have. chance of stopping them. If they press through here, what will there be to flee to?
“Now, see,” added Zochimaloc, drawing Gultec’s attention with a pointing finger. “Here they come. Do not worry your self about me, but instead tend to your warriors and your battle. I shall take care of myself.”
The warrior turned to stare into the valley bottom a thousand feet below. He saw a red rank of crawling insects advance from the jungle fringe and press forward into the swamp. More of the segmented bodies surged behind, then still more, and soon it seemed that the earth itself was a crawling mass of festering destruction, creeping toward the base of the cliff.
The ants looked oddly proper from this height, like the tiny insects that they were supposed in he. The Jaguar Knight suppressed a shudder as he tried to imagine the dark and corrupt power that had perverted the creatures into the monstrous horde below him.
Gultec growled in frustration with Zochilmaloc’s stubbornness and in genuine shock at the extent of the insect army. Always before he had seen it as a long, snakelike column stretching into the distance, but to a distance that he could not see.
Now the creatures had massed into a broad front, and still they came forth from the forest. There were many thousands of them, and still they came! How could his line of mere humans hope to stand against such an assault?
At the same time, he knew that they had no choice He trotted back to the center of the line, pausing to pat a warrior on the shoulder here or to speak encouraging words to a young man there. The men of Tulom-Itzi stood ready to fight-and to die.
They watched, tense and fearful but still determined to hold their ground, as the huge creatures forced their way through the entangled brush of the swampy valley bottom* Caught in the tangles, some of the ants hesitated, and these buried by the press of others behind them. Soon the bodies of the slowest sank into the mud, forming a ghastly bridge for the following ranks.
The ants pressed forward, faster and faster as their footing became more secure. Soon they reached the base of the
steep slope- They scrambled ahead and upward without pause, and finally the last of the creatures emerged from the forest. Gultec tried to spot the man-bugs among them, but among the sea of insects, he could see no sign of the larger black bodies-or the white one.
“Archers, stand ready!” he criedA thousand bows tensed, slim arrows tipped with sharks’ teeth, nocked, and pointed downward. The Itza warriors awaited Gultec’s command. Though the ants were still far away, a great portion of that distance dropped away from them, so the Jaguar Knight judged that they were within range.
Now! Shoot!” he called, and the missiles soared into the air. “Keep shooting! Aim for their eyes!”
The insects crept up the mountainside while the shower of arrows rained down. The ants took no note of the steepness of the terrain, clutching the clifflike shoulders of the rock as if they were low obstacles on level ground. Many of the arrows clattered harmlessly from the stony surface of the rock, while others bounced from the laugh, shell-like carapaces of the monsters.
But still others found the vulnerable eyes, or, aided by the momentum from their long descent, struck the upraised heads of the ants and punctured the hard shells. One ant, then another, then many of them altogether slipped backward and tumbled from the rock face, falling among the moving mass of their fellows below.
The archers fired volley after volley, sending the sharp and deadly heads of their missiles into the steadily advancing faces of their foes. But finally, when most of the arrows had been exhausted, the firing tapered off.
Still the ants crawled and crept upward, twitching and grasping as their six-legged forms gripped the nearly vertical surfaces with apparent ease. They crawled over the
knobs and shoulders of the slope’s higher places, gathering in thick red streams to cluster upward in the shallow ravines.
Closer and closer they came, advance seemingly unaffected by the cessation of arrow fire. They climbed at the same methodical, unhurried, yet inevitable pace as they had before.
Only now they were close enough for the Itza warriors to see the flat, translucent surfaces of their many-faceted eyes, close enough to hear the clicking jaws of the creatures’ mandibles, opening and closing hungrily. They climbed steadily and came closer still.
Now Gultec stood ready to unleash the second, and most potent, line of his defense.
“The rocks! Let them go! Push them back to the mud where they belong!”
Instantly the Itza warriors dropped their missile weapons, seizing the great boulders that they had carefully stacked along the ridge. Two or three men combined to 1 move the larger stones, while others hefted good-sized rocks by themselves. As the ants pressed upward, one warrior raised a heavy stone over his head, staggering under the weight, and then pitched the rock with both hands toward the swarming mass below.