“And Fourth. The rest of the regiment will follow the road. The governor’s keeping it simple. We’re to keep them from retreating south.”
“And they’ll end up backed up against the swamp if they go north?”
Meinyt nodded.
“They can still go west.” Quaeryt pulled the uniform shirt on over his browns, glad that the morning was comparatively cool.
“They could … and there’s enough ground between the eastern hills and Boralieu that they might escape … but that would also give Commander Zirkyl a chance to strike them on one side while we press the other. Or something like that. The governor’s the one who makes those decisions, not me. We need to mount up.” Meinyt paused. “Good idea with the shirt.”
“I’d prefer not to stand out too much.”
The captain just nodded and headed for his mount.
Quaeryt mounted and then followed Meinyt as the company formed up by squads. Then they rode south and slightly west. Quaeryt let the mare trail the captain slightly, so as not to interfere with the officer’s line of sight.
After about two milles, Meinyt raised his arm, and ordered, “Five-man front!”
When the company came to a halt some fifty yards short of where the trees began, intermittently spaced, Quaeryt glanced to his right toward the next company, noting that it was the one commanded by Gauswn, although the undercaptain did not glance in Quaeryt’s direction, not that Quaeryt noticed.
“We’re not to give quarter in battle, but we’re also to leave the fallen alone.” Meinyt snorted. “The major made that clear.”
Quaeryt understood. Stopping to deal with the fallen simply weakened the attack, and Rescalyn wanted to destroy the hill holders as a force for generations to come-if not forever.
“Fourth Battalion will be to our right, just beyond Gauswn’s company. We’ll move when the governor orders the horn signal to break camp. That might confuse the hill folks, since they do know our signals.”
Almost another quint passed before the notes of the horn-off-key-drifted southward.
“Sixth Battalion! Weapons ready! Forward! Standard walk!”
As the first light of sunrise spread from the east, Quaeryt again took station on Meinyt, who rode about a half length back of the leftmost ranker in the front line. There were no sounds of birds or insects, only those of underbrush occasionally crackling and crunching under hoofs. Quaeryt kept his eyes moving, but he saw nothing but tree trunks and low-hanging branches. The trees thickened as he rode northwest with the others. Since most of the trees were evergreens that had left a carpet of needles on the ground between the trunks, there was comparatively little undergrowth, and he could see between ten and twenty yards ahead most of the time. Every so often there was a massive oak or maple that looked to have been there far longer than the pines and spruces.
What bothered him, even carrying his shields, was that anyone waiting or watching could also see the riders of the two battalions.
After a quint, or perhaps slightly longer, another horn signal, far closer, sounded.
Within moments, there were yells and then the sound of a wounded horse. Meinyt and the company kept moving.
Then … there was that pattering sound, like rain, followed by a grunt, and one of the riders ahead and to the right of Quaeryt doubled over in the saddle.
“Deliberate speed!” ordered Meinyt. “Deliberate speed!”
Quaeryt wanted to follow the captain, but couldn’t because of a fallen tree trunk he hadn’t seen quickly enough, and he edged the mare to the right, around another massive trunk. He glanced forward, and slightly up, as another volley of shafts swept past him. Ahead was a young, scared-looking man, wearing what looked to be a leather shirt and britches and straddling a wide oak branch some three yards above the forest floor. He held a crossbow, aimed directly at Quaeryt.
The quarrel’s impact on the scholar’s shields threw Quaeryt back in the saddle. He struggled forward to regain his balance. The youth leapt from the oak toward Quaeryt-a pair of glittering knives in his hands-then slammed against the scholar’s shields, dropped to the ground, and staggered back. Before Quaeryt could even think of stopping the mare, the weight of the horse and the shields threw the rebel into the thick trunk of a pine. There might have been a crack, but Quaeryt didn’t hear it. What he saw was the young man’s neck snap forward, hanging loosely, before his dead body slid down the trunk.
“Keep moving!” ordered Meinyt, not necessarily to Quaeryt. “You slow down and you’re a potted pigeon.”
Quaeryt remembered, belatedly, that he did have a half-staff and struggled to get it clear of the leather straps as another leather-clad rider plunged through the trees in his direction. When he raised the staff, the rider veered toward Meinyt, apparently not seeing the captain, whose sabre slammed into the hill rider’s neck.
Quaeryt tried to keep up with the others, but he was more abreast of the second line than just behind Meinyt, and he urged the mare forward.
The strain of holding the shields as far out from him as he had been was getting to Quaeryt. He contracted them until they were more like a skin. That would also allow him to use the half-staff. As he did, he wondered why he hadn’t thought of the closer shields earlier. Because the kind of imaging you knew how to do needed distance? How many other things haven’t you thought of because-
“That one!”
Quaeryt glimpsed two riders ahead, one looking over his shoulder, and the other lifting what looked to be a short lance.
If that lance hits you, shields or not …
At the last moment, he flattened himself against the mare’s neck, but grasped the staff firmly with both hands and braced it against the front edge of the saddle pommel, letting it stick out.
The lance missed him-and his shields-but the staff struck something, and the other rider lurched backward in his saddle. Quaeryt’s hands felt bruised and mangled, and without the reinforcement of the shields, he would have lost the staff as well. He barely managed to hang on, and he had no idea what had happened to the man he thought he’d struck.
He straightened in the saddle and had managed to bring the staff forward when he had the feeling that, suddenly, the woods seemed to fill with thunder and the sound of hoofs. With those sounds he saw what looked to be scores of riders, seemingly one or two or even three riding abreast filling all the spaces between the trees, charging down the gentle slope. All seemed headed directly at him, and several had short, but pointed, lances.
Quaeryt reined the mare up just short of two pines, with enough space for a rider on either side of him, then projected his shields forward and around the pines, so that they were anchored to the trees.
Let’s hope this works.…
He raised his half-staff, as if in futile defense, and two of the charging hill riders charged directly at him.
The impact of the two mounts and riders on the shields still lifted Quaeryt up from his saddle, then dropped him hard on the leather. Both horses lay in a heap. One screamed, horribly. Neither rider moved, and neither looked as if he ever would again.
Quaeryt’s head was a splitting mass of pain, and he tried to shrink the shields back to cover his body alone. That hurt so much that it felt as though knives were jabbing into his skull through his eyes and ears, and he had to release the shields. That reduced the pain somewhat, but he could still barely see, although he could sense the other riders passing him.
He eased the mare back enough to get around the pine to his right, and then urged her forward. With no shields, he’d have to be even more careful-except, from what he’d experienced already, being too cautious was more deadly than being too rash.
Ahead of him, he saw yet another hill rider angling from behind a copse of low evergreens, almost galloping toward a gap between the ranker forward of Quaeryt and to his right and the rankers of the company farther to the west. Then he realized the ranker didn’t see the attacker, and he urged the mare forward, yelling as he did, “Ahead! Right!”