“As you are well aware, you have left me insufficient strength to risk an open battle with you. However, because I am operating in lands I know well and because our two minds seem to function similarly, I seem to have scant difficulty in escaping your envelopments.
“As for the damages you are doing to these counties, perhaps the injured counts will, upon your eventual departure, have sufficient to occupy them at home that they will bide there for a few years and stay out of my hair in Mehmfizport.” Duke Alex had made his landfall on a stretch of beach just below the bluffs to the north of Tworivercity—he insisted on calling it by the name it had had prior to the coming of his hated rival, Tcharlz—but the invasion had been a disaster almost from the moment the ships and towed barges had left the waters of the Great River.
His plan had been to send a bevy of shallow-draft safl-and-row galleys ahead to run up on the shelving beach and discharge enough men to hold the landing area against possible attack until the big, clumsy barges could be towed out of the channel and rowed in to land horses and men to scour the immediate area and make it safe for himself, his staff and the mountains of supplies, stores, weapons and transport to be put ashore.
In theory it had been a good plan, but it had reckoned without the keen mind of Count Martuhn and his staff.
First, a lucky long-range shot from one of a pair of medium-light war engines which had been concealed atop the bluffs over the beach holed and sank one of a string of overloaded barges in midchannel. The barge ahead cut the sinking craft loose, but before the trailing barge could do so, the weight on the connecting cable had pulled its bow so low that it began to ship water and founder as well. Then, without awaiting orders, the masters of the galleys began to make for shore at flank speed, rather than with the slow caution Duke Alex had intended, said masters knowing that on the beach they and their ships would be out of either sight or danger from the deadly engines atop the bluffs. Some half of the ships beached safely. Of the unlucky ones, two were holed by sixty-pound boulders hurled by the eingines, and yet another was set afire by a pitchball from the same source. The rest, within but a few yards of the beach, ripped out or seriously damaged their bottoms on underwater obstructions unmarked on even the latest charts.
The loss of life was not really heavy, not even among the slave rowers, for the water was too shallow for any of the ripped galleys to sink deeply. But the hulks made the subsequent landings of men and horses much more difficult and far longer in accomplishment… and, all the while, boulders and pitchballs continued a constant hazard to the ships and barges from near shore to the center of the channel.
At the duke’s command, his larger warships, at anchor in the channel, had attempted a counter-battery offensive with their own deck-mounted engines. But, as the ship masters and army officers could have told him, the range was just too great for these lighter engines, and most of their shots fell among the already hard beset shorebound vessels, while the few that actually struck the face of the bluffs did sore hurt to the troops gathered at the foot of those bluffs to escape the showers of arrows and slingstones with which they had been greeted upon landing.
Raging at the dashing of his plan, Duke Alex ordered that the warships cease fire until they had upped anchor and sailed closer inshore. However, when the bowsprit of his flagship was neatly sheared off by a stone from the bluff-top battery, new signals fluttered aloft: “Return to channel anchorage.” Only the fall of night saw the eventual landing of the entire force, less casualties, for the lanterns which the barges and lighters had perforce to mount to avoid rammings provided winking, blinking targets for the engines, bowmen and stingers high on the bluffs.
In the gray light of dawn, a hundred picked marines from the galleys scaled the towering, mist-slippery rocks of the precipitous face of the bluffs. But they found nothing atop the bluffs save piles of stones for engine or sling and a single broken hornbow. They also found tragedy, however, for when a dozen or so of them congregated on a spot near the edge, the lip of rock suddenly collapsed, hurling them all to a quick if messy death on the beach far below and crushing or injuring men and horses on that same beach. One of the chunks of rock—a stone of more than the weight of two armored men—bounced once, then splintered its way through the fore-deck of a beached galley to smash the keel and exit from the side planks.
With men, animals and equipment at last ashore, Duke Alex saw the wagons and carts assembled and loaded, the teams hitched and the men in column. Then he sent a strong advance guard of mounted men ahead and set out along the beach, bound for the track that Duchess Ann’s people had sworn would serve to place his army over the bluff line and within a short march of Tworivercity. At the place where that narrow, winding track mounted upward, the van met the battered remnants of the advance guard, most of them wounded and only a few still mounted. After hearing their tale, Duke Alex realized his error in sending cavalry into such ugly, broken terrain and dispatched, instead, three companies of light infantry, stiffened by a detachment of his marines, to scout the route of advance. The wounded he sent back to the beachhead, to be rowed out to a ship and returned to Traderstownport. With them went a nobleman messenger with orders to come back with reinforcements, supplies to replace those lost or ruined during the landing and more horses. Then, after allowing time for the slower infantry to gain an interval from the main body, he advanced. Captain Barnz was the fifth-eldest son of the Archduke of Tehrawtburk—a principality that lay a month or more east and north of Pahdookahport—and had had to swing steel for a living for most of his life. From his beginning as a pink-cheeked ensign in the condotta of a renowned captain, he had advanced to the command of a full regiment of light troops—six companies of infantry, two troops of lancers and a large support company of artisans and the like; a total of nearly a thousand men.
He had enjoyed a fair measure of success in recent years, choosing the proper contracts and managing to emerge from each of them with his full wages and usually a bit of loot besides. Shrewd investments in his homeland had by now assured him a comfortable retirement whenever age or wounds necessitated such, so now he fought for the sheer love of campaigning, and a large part of his profits went to recruiting the best men and officers and fitting them all out with the finest in weapons and equipment. Such had become his fame that he had not had to seek out contracts for years, while younger sons of noble lineage came from as far away as the Middle Kingdoms—far to the east, on the shores of the salt sea—to vie for places in his companies. Rather than detailing the dangerous chore to a lieutenant, he was presently leading these three companies with a spirit of vengeance. It had been one of his troops of lancers that had been chewed up while serving as advance guards, and he meant to see blood for it. He did, more than he would have preferred. They had marched more than a mile from the beach, the track mounting ever higher, the scale-shirted men sweating, envying the officers and sergeants their horses. For jdl that the drums were covered and mute and the column proceeded at a route step, every man was a blooded veteran and knew that he was in enemy-held territory and in imminent danger. They marched with targets strapped and gripped, one dart ready in hand and the other five loose in the quiver. The archers, every fifth man, marched along with their infantry bows—heavier and longer-ranging than the cavalry horn-bow—an arrow nocked and an additional two shafts in the fingers of the bow hand. The officers and sergeants rode with bared blades.
Even so, the wickedly planned and well-executed ambush took a heavy toll of Captain Barnz’s prize companies.