Blade's eyes followed Rhodina's pointing finger, and he joined in Rhodina's cursing. As fast as they mounted up, the Maghri were streaming away to the rear and vanishing in the hills to the east. None of them were galloping, but very few of them were staying. It wasn't a panicky flight, it was the orderly withdrawal of an army that is simply refusing to fight.
Blade stopped cursing and turned to the people around him. Some of them were also cursing, while others were looking toward the rear again. Many were too furious to either speak or move. He jumped up on top of the ale barrel and shouted to everyone who could hear: «So the damned Maghri have run off? Well, we're not going to run. We're going to show those bastards that we're better men. And we're going to show the Goharans the same!» He pointed at the horsemen. They were all gathered now, and a glance gave him a rough estimate of their strength.
«There aren't more than four thousand of them,» he yelled. «We still outnumber them, and they're a long way from home. We stand here and beat them, and that's the end.»
«And if we don't beat them?» someone shouted.
«Then we'll die like men, with something to be proud of! Do you think the Maghri are going to be happy after what they've done today?» Blade wasn't sure he was making sense. He wasn't even completely sure what he was saying. He only knew that he had to say something to pull the rebels together, and if it succeeded, so much the better. He and his friends weren't going to retreat, whatever anybody else did, and he didn't really want this to be Richard Blade's Last Stand.
The sudden disappearance of the Maghri seemed to be confusing the Goharans. They were all lined up and ready, a man in a golden helmet out in front, but not moving. The arrow fire slackened, then Blade heard shouted orders and it stopped entirely. Were the Goharans short of arrows?
That was an encouraging thought, but it was only a guess. Silence was falling over the battlefield, and in that silence Blade found his voice carrying from one end of the rebel line to the other.
«Dismount and shoot from on foot. Men with spears and swords, pull the horses back. Archers, aim for the enemy's horses. They've got a long walk back to Mythor!» Horses were bigger targets than men, and a Goharan soldier on foot this deep in a hostile countryside would be lucky to get back alive even if his side won today's battle.
«Hurry, damn-!»
Then the head of the ale barrel caved in under Blade. He plunged chest-deep into stale ale, making everyone who saw him double over with laughter. Khraishamo helped him climb out, coughing and spitting out ale, while all along the rebel line men started obeying Blade's orders.
As the Goharans sat on their horses and watched, Blade began to realize he'd done a good job. The Goharans were either short of arrows or saving them to deal with the Maghri once they'd smashed the rebels. They weren't going to stand off and use a hail of arrows to break the rebels before closing in. On the other hand, they couldn't just charge in. Without stirrups, a Goharan leaning out of his saddle to cut down a man on foot standing his ground would risk tumbling headfirst under the hooves of his own horse.
If he'd had any money, Blade would have placed a sizable bet that the Goharans would make their attack on foot.
After milling around for half an hour, the Goharans began to organize their attack. They dismounted, and some started leading the horses to the rear, out of bowshot. The rest drew their swords, rested them on their left shoulders, lined up, and waited for the order to advance.
It came. The general in the gold helmet rode out in front of his men, waving his sword over his head. He pointed it toward the rebel lines, shouted something in a high-pitched voice, then sat on his horse as his men charged past him toward the enemy.
Most of the rebels were also short of arrows, with only a single quiverful apiece. They'd expected to get more from the Maghri, who were now riding merrily off with their arrows and everything else they had. Most of the advancing Goharans also wore scale mail shirts, which provided more protection than anything the rebels were wearing.
So the advancing Goharans weren't shot down by the hundreds. The best archers among the rebels opened up first. By the time they ran short of arrows the range closed to where it was hard to miss. With wounded men dropping out at every step, the Goharans advanced steadily, their line growing more ragged as they did. Blade realized the Goharans weren't used to holding formation while fighting on foot. Perhaps he should have kept a few hundred men mounted, to take advantage of this fact? Probably, but it was too late to make such a big change now, with the hand-to-hand fighting about to start. His battle plan was working fairly well for something dreamed up on the spot.
Khraishamo now had an ax in each hand and was tramping back and forth across the circle of wagons. As he moved he encouraged the people around him with gruesome descriptions of what would happen to the Goharans if they dared to get close. Beside him walked Rhodina, looking like a-Valkyrie in her armor. Khraishamo's end of the rebel line was in good hands. Blade started to walk along the line toward the center, where they might need more leadership. He hadn't seen Gribbon since word of the attack came, and couldn't help wondering if the rebel leader might have fled with the Maghri.
Then the Goharan advance struck the rebel line, and Blade had too much else on his mind to think about Gribbon.
The discipline, the armor, and the long slashing swords of the Goharans gave them an edge in some places. Rebels began to go down, skulls split open, arms lopped off, chests gaping-ghastly wounds which made their comrades turn pale but didn't make them run. In places the Goharans drove bulges into the rebel line, but they didn't break through.
Meanwhile Goharans were also going down. Wounded rebels who fell often found themselves under the swing of the Goharan swords. They stabbed upward with their own swords and knives, swung clubs at kneecaps and shins, bit and gouged if they didn't have any other weapons. Goharan soldiers fell on top of their victims and rolled over and over in desperate bare-handed struggles. The ground became covered with thrashing bodies, and Goharans coming up to join the battle had to pick paths around or through them.
In other places the rebels had enough men with spears to form pike-walls. Sometimes they invented the formation for themselves on the spot, at other times it was Blade shouting orders and pushing men which got them into position. In either case the result was a strong point in the rebel line, where the rebels had a longer reach than the Goharans. The Goharans could go around the flanks of the pike-walls, to be sure, but those flanks got fewer and fewer as the rebel line tightened up.
Blade helped defend one of those flanks himself. He'd just finished showing a boy who couldn't have been more than sixteen how to hold his spear when seven or eight Goharans raised a shout and charged straight at him.
«Get out of here!» Blade shouted at the boy.
«No.» He stood, holding his spear with the grip Blade had just showed him. Then he stepped forward and thrust hard. A sword cut missed his spear and the point drove into a Goharan throat. Before the boy could pull back, one sword chopped through his spear and another nearly took his head off. He dropped, spurting blood and still clutching three feet of his spear.
This left the Goharans to face a thoroughly enraged Blade. He feinted with his sword at the man who'd killed the boy, then closed to blind another with a dagger slash across the face. He blocked a descending sword with his dagger, losing the weapon in the process but bringing his sword around to cut off the attacker's sword arm. Then he stepped back, caught up a fallen spear, threw it straight at the man he'd blinded, and hit him in the chest. Two more Goharans had the courage to try pulling their dying comrade out of Blade's reach. All that courage brought them was a quicker death.