Выбрать главу

But Ferdulf answered, "If you're going to fight in one large, ugly lump, are you fain to have me tell Rihwin bring his horsemen back so they can take their lumps with the rest of you?"

"Oh, by the gods!" Gerin exclaimed, mentally kicking himself for having sent the demigod off too soon. "Yes, and thank you, Ferdulf. I'm in your debt. I admit it."

"You're in my debt, you owe your son a promise, you owe the imperials a thrashing-do you think you can deliver on any of these?" Ferdulf flew away before the Fox had a chance to reply.

He sent his men forward, toward that field he'd found that was well suited to the size of his force. As the main force advanced, Rihwin's riders began joining them. Gerin posted the horsemen as a screen in front of the main body of chariotry and on either flank.

"Is that Maeva?" Van pointed off to the right. He answered his own question: "Aye, it is." He waved, then muttered in disappointment. "She didn't see me, curse it."

Dagref's head was turned in that direction. He nodded. "It is Maeva, though, and she seems all right." He was better than he had been a little while before at sounding casual about it.

Gerin looked west down the dirt road that ran through the field. he nodded. Here came the imperials, exchanging arrows with the last of his horsemen. Like his own troops, the men of the Elabonian Empire were already deployed in line of battle, sweeping down the road and along the open country to either side. Catching them in column would have been sweet, but Swerilas, with his sobriquet, was too alert to have let that happen.

"Elabon! Elabon! Elabon!" the imperials shouted. Gerin, for one, was heartily sick of that battle cry. His own men yelled the usual northlands assortment of war cries and insults back at their foes.

"Forward!" Gerin put everything he had into his own shout. He wanted to be moving to receive the imperials' charge, not standing still, waiting to be overrun.

Dagref flicked the reins and cracked the whip above the horses' backs. They went from walk to trot to gallop. One wheel of the car hit a stone. The chariot flew into the air and came back to earth with a crash. Neither Gerin nor Van nor Dagref did anything more than shift weight back and forth.

Gerin looked to see if he could pick out Swerilas the Slippery among the imperials. He couldn't. Swerilas was slippery enough not to deck himself out in raiment that made him a target. The Fox shook his head in disappointment. He hadn't seen any other imperial officers that canny.

He started shooting anyhow. If he couldn't find the best target, he'd hit what he could. He didn't think Swerilas had sent an outflanking party off to either wing; if the imperial general had done such a thing, Ferdulf would have reported it-or so the Fox devoutly hoped. That made it a straightforward slugging match, army against army: the same sort of fight Arpulo had waged. Like the general he'd replaced, Swerilas had greater numbers.

But Swerilas quickly proved himself a better general than Arpulo. Arpulo had let Gerin's men get round his flanks and attack his force from three sides at once. Swerilas, by contrast, made his own battle line wide and kept trying to lap round Gerin's force to the right and left. Very much unlike Arpulo, he knew what he had and what to do with it.

Unhappily, Gerin extended his own line. He knew what Swerilas was trying to do: make him thin his force enough to let the imperials find or create a weak spot and punch on through. If they did that, they could split his army in two and destroy one of the parts at their leisure.

Other than retreat, the only counter he could find was doing it to them before they had a chance to do it to him. That meant thinning his line even more than he'd done already, to collect a force with which he could strike. Crew by crew, his chariotry remained better than that of the Elabonian Empire. Without that being true, he couldn't have done what he did. Even with its being true, he gripped the rail of the chariot hard, knowing the risk he took.

"Forward!" he shouted again. Dagref steered the car toward what looked like the weakest part of the imperial line.

For a brief, shining moment, he thought his striking force would break through. The imperials still had a respect for the Trokmoi just short of dread. Adiatunnus' howling warriors did make them hesitate. But Swerilas, unlike Gerin, did not have to stint one part of his line to send reinforcements to another. He brought enough men in against Gerin's striking force to keep it from piercing his army through and through.

"Well, what do we do now?" Van yelled in Gerin's ear once the attack had plainly bogged down.

"Good question," Gerin answered. Dagref maneuvered smartly to keep the imperials from getting a chariot to either side of his own at the same time. The maneuver brought the horses around so they were facing more nearly the way they had come than the way they'd been going. Gerin shot an arrow at one of the imperials closest to him, and wounded the trooper in the arm. But there were still too many soldiers from the Elabonian Empire close by. With a weary curse, the Fox said, "Now we go back. I don't see what in the five hells else we can do, not if we want to keep the army in one piece."

He managed the retreat as well as he could. By then, he'd had more practice managing retreats than he'd ever wanted. He'd never had to manage one against Swerilas the Slippery before, though. Swerilas did what he would have done himself in the same place: pushed hard and tried not merely to beat the army from the northlands but to wreck it.

Gerin had hoped to be able to make a stand back at his camp, but the leading imperials were too closely mingled with his rear guard to make that possible. They were pressing Gerin and his men too hard to make any stand possible for some time. Gerin had everything he could do to keep the imperials from getting ahead of his men and cutting off their line of retreat.

He did succeed in doing that much-that little, he thought of it at the time-but Swerilas drove him almost to the southern opening of the valley of Ikos before the light finally failed. By all indications, Swerilas aimed to keep right on driving him when morning came, too. He looked north. Temple guards no doubt waited at the mouth of the valley. He didn't care. But for Ikos, he had nowhere to go.

XI

A guardsman held his shield horizontally across his body to bar the road into the valley of Ikos. "The lord Biton forbids the entry of large bodies of armed men into the land surrounding his sacred precinct," the fellow said.

Gerin answered, "If the lord Biton punishes me for bringing my army into his land, then he will, that's all." He turned and waved his battered army forward. "Get moving, boys!"

"The god will know of your action!" the guard bleated as chariots began rolling past him and his spear.

"He's the farseeing god, so of course he will," the Fox replied. "He'll also know why we're doing it, which is more than you do. Swerilas the Slippery and the Elabonian army are on our tail. You're going to have more company than us, and worse company than us, too."

"Biton preserve us!" the guardsman said.

"That would be nice," Gerin agreed, "but don't count on it too much, because it's liable not to happen."

The guard glared at him. "Why did you have to lead the imperials here? Why couldn't you have fled in some other direction than this one?"

"It's hard to flee straight toward the fellow who's just made you do it," Gerin pointed out. "And it was either come here or head off east toward the plains of Shanda. Somehow, I don't think I'm cut out to be a nomad."

"But we've been free of the Empire for many years," the temple guard moaned. "Will the officious priests from south of the mountains stick their long snouts into the way we run our affairs, as I have heard they did in the long-ago and far-off days?"