"Turn, turn," he shouted, leaping among the pongs who were rushing to enter the city through the southern gate. "Protect your rear." He managed to turn most of his force. As he faced south, he saw pongs dying. To his great pride they did not run. They turned from the walls and faced the lines of iron, giving forth their shrill battle cries, meeting iron with iron and not dying in vain, for guards died, too. But they were being forced back. Duwan began pushing his way forward. Jai was at his side.
"Go to the rear," he ordered. "Send messengers to my father and Dagner. Tell them to abandon the attack and form a defensive line just north of the city to give us a place to fall back upon."
"Duwan—" she began.
"Go," he roared.
He pushed his way into the front ranks, both hands filled with iron, and his swords began to take a toll. A group of his soldiers rallied around him and the advance of the guards, at that point, was halted, but to his left and his right the pongs continued to fall back.
"Give way," he shouted, "pass the word to give way slowly. Fall back. Pass the word for the men on our flanks to pull in toward us." His longsword split the helmet and the skull of a guardsman, and he took a few steps backward before another leaped forward to challenge his iron.
From a small rise Elnice and Hata watched the battle. "Look," Elnice said, pointing. "See that one with two swords who rallies them to his side." There was, she felt, something familiar about that figure.
"He anchors the line," Hata said. "We will account for him." He sent a group of his reserve to attack at the point where Duwan was rallying his troops. The fresh guardsmen began to push back the middle of Duwan's line. Seeing the situation, he passed orders to those near him to fall back, for the flanks to hold and then to slowly begin to fold in toward him.
"He gives ground," Hata said, laughing, as the center began to fade. Then he was screaming warnings as the flanks began to fold slowly in on his reserves, but it was too late. The fresh guardsmen were surrounded and, with Duwan leading, his two swords flashing, the pong army began to decimate the surrounded Devourers.
"Fall back, fall back," Hata was screaming. He sent a messenger to pass that information, but it was too late.
The small victory gave heart to Duwan's force, and he had difficulty in getting them to follow his orders. They wanted to pursue their advantage, but Duwan had seen ranks of guardsmen, their bright uniforms flashing through the forest, moving toward the site of battle. His orders were finally relayed and the pong army began to fall back, managed to disengage totally before the new force of guardsmen was in position. He found his father engaged in a heated little battle before the eastern gate, and his attack on the rear of the Devourer force resulted in many dead. Inside the city the pongs who had entered the gates were creating devastation, but the enemy inside had managed to stand, to hold the central square. Duwan sent messengers with orders to fall back. Many pongs inside the city did not get the orders. Left behind as Duwan moved to the north to join with Dagner's force, they perished as the enemy inside the city rallied.
The smaller force of pongs at the Wood Gate to the west had already begun to withdraw, with panic among some, and as Duwan retreated toward the north stragglers began to join him. He called a forced march. Rearguard scouts reported that the enemy forces were consolidating to the north of Kooh, and that there were many of them.
Duwan marched his troops for most of the night, called a halt, ordered a cold camp, and with the first light of Du was making the rounds of his various units, calling for an accounting. To his sadness, he estimated that a full third of his force had been lost, dead, too severely wounded to march, strayed, captured. He called his leaders together.
"Forgive us, Duwan," Dagner said. "We gave you bad advice."
"There is no blame," Duwan said. "The enemy will be counting their dead, too. Now we must march, and march fast, to the northwest."
"They will move to the west," Elnice said, her face grim as she listened to the various unit commanders report their losses.
"To the north," Hata said.
"Into the snows?"
"My High Mistress," Hata said. "I have spent my life studying military matters. I advised you not to split our forces, and we count many dead as a result. Had we had our entire force at the southern gate none would have escaped to join the others. I advise that we move north, and quickly. They are pongs and they cannot match the endurance of our trained soldiers. We can head them off by marching past them to the west and meeting them in the forests where their bows will be ineffective."
"Well, my military genius," Elnice said. "This time I will listen to you, although it seems to me that you were the one who told me that pongs could not fight."
The experienced guardsmen set a fast pace. Lashes were used to speed up the stragglers. It was true that the pong army could not match the pace of trained Devourers, not so much from physical conditioning— Duwan's forces had learned to fatten themselves off the land—but because of the superior organization of the Devourer force and the ruthless way that the officers drove their soldiers.
Scouts reported to Duwan, on the third day of the retreat, that the leading elements of the enemy army were to the west, blocking the route in that direction. Duwan, himself, went forward and saw the enemy moving in strength at a half-trot. To continue to the west would bring a head-on battle. He altered his route northward. Meanwhile, Hata's scouts had located Duwan's army, and Hata had ordered even more speed of movement, to put himself between the pongs and the great, dense, northern forests.
The chase continued for days. A captured Devourer scout, tortured without Duwan's knowledge by pongs, gave him a word for the enemy army. Conqforce. Conquering Force. An army, the invincible formation that had driven the Great Alon from the Land of Many Brothers. Thousands strong, the enemy seemed tireless, and as the days passed the Devourer force spread out in a long line to the west, with the lead elements forcing Duwan's course into a northeasterly direction. If that continued he would be pinned against the sea.
Now the destroyed settlements were being passed, and the sight of the devastation gave new strength to the enemy. Hata marched his guardsmen and the conscripts past the settlements, giving them time to see the decaying remains of those who had died. "No prisoners," he said, and this order was issued until every guard and conscript muttered it under his breath as the settlements were passed.
Duwan knew that the snows would fly soon, and his plan was to use the snow as cover to move his force into the deep forests. He was in familiar territory. Ahead was the wide, sheltered canyon where he and Jai had wintered, where he had planted his grandmother and the other oldsters. He had mixed emotions. He knew that the valley would be a fine place to make a stand, and it was becoming apparent that he could not continue to outdistance the enemy.
And yet to fight in the valley would risk the death of the relatively newly planted old ones.
It was the enemy who made the decision for him. A fast moving column crossed the head of the canyon to the west and positioned itself to the north. To the east the canyon tapered off and ended in high hills.
"Here we will stand," he told his leaders. "If we hold them until the snows come, they will be exposed, while our forces will have the shelter of the canyon. A winter siege will favor us, for we have food in the canyon, while they will have to hunt for theirs, or have it transported from the south."
He set up his headquarters in the cave where he had spent such a wonderful winter with Jai. The enemy could come at him from only one direction, the west. He positioned his bowmen behind tall brothers, behind boulders, with orders to fire and fall back to join the main force in defensive positions in front of the small grove where his grandmother lived on. In the following days, the enemy engaged them in probing actions. Devourers came down the steep sides of the canyon in small groups and were killed or forced to scramble up for their lives. A large force probed toward the east to find that the narrow confines of the canyon there, the steep, almost impassible hills, favored the defenders too greatly.