The light failed, dusk descended, and the world turned shadowy and uncertain. The Northlanders brought fire to the barricades and set some ablaze, but the Elves had purposely made them of green wood. The grasses caught fire, but the Elves had dug trenches to separate themselves from the barricades, and the fires burned themselves out east of the defensive lines.
The Elves waited until darkness began to mask everything, then counterattacked from the slopes in a series of controlled strikes.
Because the Elves had the Northlanders bottled up on the valley floor, their target was certain even in the deepening gloom. One company after another came down off the heights, forcing the Northlanders to turn first one way and then another to defend themselves. Fierce hand-to-hand fighting ensued, and the valley became a enamel house.
Still the enemy would not fall back. Northlanders died by the hundreds, but there were always more waiting to be brought up, a huge, massive force crushing relentlessly inward. Even as the Elves fought to hold their positions against those already in place, reinforcements were advancing. Slowly, inexorably, the enemy pushed forward. The barricades held the Northland army in check at the valley’s center, but the slopes were being overrun. The Elves under Cormorant Etrurian who held the cliffs were slowly driven from their defensive positions and compelled to fall back.
Foot by foot, yard by yard, the Northlanders advanced, seizing the heights and breaking free of the vise that Jerle Shannara had clamped about them.
Word of what was happening reached the king. The skies were clouded and rain was beginning to fall, turning the ground slick and treacherous. The sounds of battle echoed off the slopes of the valley, creating a maelstrom of confusion. The darkness made it virtually impossible to see anything beyond a few yards. Jerle Shannara took only a moment to consider. Quickly he sent runners to withdraw Etrurian’s men to the barricades established as a redoubt high on the slopes parallel to his own lines. There they were to stand and hold. He sent runners to pull back Am Banda and the longbows. Then he marshaled two companies of Elven Hunters under Rustin Apt and formed them up to attack. When Etrurian’s fighters and the bowmen were safely withdrawn, he ordered pikes brought to the fore, and he marched his command directly into the heart of the enemy advance. He engaged the Northlanders just as they were breaking through on the right flank and pinned their front ranks against the barricades. He ordered torches lit to identify their position to the re-entrenched bowmen, then had them rake the enemy from the slopes.
Caught in an enfilading fire, the Northlanders rallied under a massive clutch of Rock Trolls and counterattacked. They shoved and twisted their way past the barricades and hammered into the Elven Hunters. Huge, winged shapes appeared out of the smoky haze as Skull Bearers took to the skies to lend their support. The line of defense buckled. Grizzled Rustin Apt went down and was carried from the field. Trewithen and the Home Guard hurried forward to reinforce the sagging defense, but the enemy were too many and the entire Elven front began to collapse.
In desperation, Jerle Shannara put his spurs to Risk and charged into the battle himself. Surrounded by Home Guard, he cut his way into the enemy front, rallying his Elven Hunters to him.
Northlanders came at him from all sides. They tried to drag him from his horse, to knock him from the saddle, to do anything to slow mm. Behind him, the Elven army, battered and worn, surged to its collective feet and followed in his wake. Battle cries rose out of the shrieks and moans of the injured and dying, and the Elves thrust into the Northlanders yet again. Jerle fought as if he might drive the enemy all the way back to the Northland by himself, his gleaming sword catching light from the torches, ringing out as it hammered down against enemy weapons and armor. Massive Trolls appeared in his path, great faceless monsters with battleaxes. But the king cut his way through them as if they were made of paper, refusing to be stopped, seemingly invincible. He outdistanced even his personal guard, and his soldiers threw themselves at the enemy in an effort to reach him.
Then lightning struck an outcropping on the slope closest to where the battle was being fought, and fiery clots of earth and shards of broken rock exploded skyward and showered across the valley floor. Men covered their heads and cowered at the fury of the explosion, and for just an instant time froze. As the Northlanders hesitated, turned momentarily to statues, Jerle Shannara stood tall in his stirrups and thrust the Sword of Shannara skyward in defiance of everything. Battle cries rose from the throats of his men, and they charged into the enemy with such ferocity that they overran them completely. Those farthest away and yet able to escape retreated behind the shattered barricades, the fight gone out of them. For a moment they held their ground in the forest of jagged wooden bones and scorched earth. Then sullenly, wearily they withdrew to the Rhenn’s east pass.
Massed against the barricades, streaked by rain, dirt, sweat, and blood, Jerle Shannara and the Elves watched them go.
The victory for this day, at least, belonged to them.
Chapter Thirty-One
The sun broke through skies turned gloomy and gray from the night’s heavy rain, and the scorched and rutted floor of the Valley of Rhenn was blackened and steaming in the half-light. Drawn up in their ranks, weapons held ready, eyes peering expectantly through the gloom, the Elves stood waiting for the attack they knew would come. But no sound came from the heavy mist that cloaked the camp of the army of the Warlock Lord within the valley’s eastern pass, and nothing moved in the empty, blasted landscape before them. The light brightened with the sun’s rise, but the mist refused to thin and still there was no sign of an attack. That the massive army had withdrawn was unthinkable.
All that night it had scratched and worried at itself like a stricken animal, the sounds of pain and anguish rising up out of the mist and rain, transcending the fading thunder of the receding storm.
All that night the army had tended to its needs and regrouped its forces. It held the eastern pass entire, the floor and the heights alike. It brought forward all of its siege machines, supplies, and equipment, and settled them within the lines of its encampment across the broad mouth of the pass. Its progress might be slow and lumbering, but it remained an inexorable, unstoppable juggernaut.
“They’re out there,” muttered one-eyed Am Banda, standing just to Bremen’s left, his face twisted in a worrisome scowl.
Jerle Shannara nodded, his tall form fixed and unmoving. “But what are they up to?”
“Indeed.” Bremen pulled his dark robes closer to his lean body to ward off the dawn chill. They could not see the far end of the valley, their eyes unable to penetrate the gloom, but they could feel the enemy’s presence even so. The night had been filled with sound and fury as the Northlanders prepared anew for battle, and it was only in the last hour that they had gone ominously still. The attack this day would take a new form, the old man suspected. The Warlock Lord had been repulsed the previous day with heavy losses and would not be inclined to repeat the experience. Even his power had limits, and sooner or later his hold on those who fought for him would weaken if no gains were made. The Elves must be driven back or defeated soon or the Northlanders would begin to question the Master’s invincibility. Once that house of cards began to topple, there would be no stopping it.
There was movement to his right, small and furtive. It was the boy, Allanon. He glanced over surreptitiously. The boy was staring straight ahead, his lean face taut, his eyes fixed on nothing.