“I go.” Sir Roger shook his close-cropped head. “Incidentally, if for any reason I don’t return, my men have orders to kill all the prisoners.”
Huruga heard me out. With a self-mastery I admired, he replied: “Go, then. But when you are back, we shall attack you. I do not propose to be caught between your camp on the ground and your friends in the sky.”
“The hostages,” Sir Roger reminded him.
“We shall attack,” repeated Huruga doggedly. “It will be entirely with ground forces — partly to spare those same prisoners, and partly, of course, because every spaceship and aircraft must get aloft and search for those attackers of Stularax. We will also refrain from using high-explosive weapons, lest we destroy the captives. But—” He stabbed a finger down upon the table. “Unless your weapons are far superior to what I think, we will overwhelm you with sheer numbers, if nothing else. I don’t believe you even have any armored wagons, only a few light ground cars captured at Ganturath. Remember, after the battle, such of your folk as survive will be our prisoners. If you have harmed a single one of those Wersgorix you hold, your people will die, very slowly. If you yourself are caught alive, Sir Roger de Tourneville, you will watch all of them die before you do yourself.”
The baron heard me render this for him. The lips were very pale in his sunburned face. “Well, Brother Parvus,” he said in rather a small voice, “it’s not worked out as well as I hoped — though perhaps not quite as badly as I feared. Tell him that if he will indeed let us two return safely, and confine his attack to ground forces, and avoid high-explosive shells, our hostages shall be safe from anything but his own fire.”
He added wryly: “I don’t think I could have made myself butcher helpless captives anyhow. But you need not tell him that.”
Huruga merely jerked his head, an icy gesture, when I gave him the message. We two humans left, swung into the saddle and turned back. We held our horses to a walk, to prolong the truce and the feel of sunlight on our faces.
“What happened at that Stularax castle, sire?” I whispered.
“I know not,” said Sir Roger. “But I’ll hazard that the blue-faces spoke truly — and I didn’t believe it! — when they said one of their more powerful shells could wipe out an encampment. So the weapons we hoped to steal are gone. I can only pray that our poor raiders were not also caught in the blast. Now we can but defend ourselves.”
He raised his plumed head. “Yet Englishmen have ever fought best with their backs to the wall.”
Chapter XIII
So we rode into camp, and my lord shouted haro as if this battle had been his dearest wish. In a great iron clangor, our folk went to their stations.
Let me describe our situation more fully. As a minor base, Ganturath was not built to withstand the most powerful forces of war. The lesser portion, which we occupied, consisted of several low masonry buildings arranged in a circle. Outside that circle were the armored emplacements of the fire-bombards; but these, being meant only to shoot upward at skycraft, were useless to us now. Underground was a warren of rooms and passages. There we put our children, aged, prisoners, and cattle, in charge of a few armed serfs. Such older people, or others not fit for combat, as were spry enough, waited near the middle of the buildings, prepared to carry off the wounded, fetch beer, and otherwise aid the fighting line.
This line stood on the side facing the Wersgor camp, just within the low earthen wall erected during the night. Their pikes, bills, and axes were reinforced at intervals by squads of bowmen. The cavalry poised at either wing. Behind them were the younger women and certain untrained men, who shared out our all too few pellet weapons; the force screen made fire guns useless.
Around us shimmered the pale heat-lightning of that shield. Behind us rose the ancient forest. Before us, bluish grass rippled down the valley, isolated trees soughed, and clouds walked above the distant hills. It all had the eerie loveliness of a landscape in Faerie. Preparing bandages with the aboveground noncombatants, I wondered why there must be hatred and killing in so sweet a realm.
Flying craft thundered skyward and out of sight from the Wersgor camp. Our gunners dropped a few ere they were all gone. A number remained on the ground, held in reserve. They included some of the very largest transport ships. At the moment, however, my chief interest was the ground.
Wersgorix streamed forth, armed with long-barreled pellet weapons and in well-ordered squads. They did not advance in close ranks but scattered as much as possible. Some of our folk let out a cheer at this, but I knew it must be their ordinary ground-fighting tactics. When one has deadly rapid-fire guns, one does not attack in solid masses. Rather, one employs devices to take the enemy’s guns out of action.
Such engines were in fact present. Doubtless they had been flown hither from the central bastion of Darova. There were two kinds of these horseless warwagons. The most numerous sort was light and open, made of thin steel, holding four soldiers and a couple of rapid-fire weapons. They ran immensely fast and agile, like water beetles on four wheels. As I saw them whip and scream about, bouncing at a hundred miles an hour over broken terrain, I understood their purpose: to be so difficult to hit that most of them could work up to the very bombards of the foe.
However, these small cars hung back, covering the Wersgor infantry. The first line of actual attack was the heavy-armored vehicles. These moved but slowly for a powered machine, no faster than a horse could gallop. This was because of their size — big as a peasant’s cottage — and the thick steel plating which could withstand all but a direct shellburst. With bombards projecting from their turrets, with their roaring and dust, they were like unto dragons. I counted more than twenty: massive, impervious, grinding forward on treads in a wide line. Where they had passed, grass and earth were smashed into stone-hard ruts.
I am told that one of our gunners, who had learned how to use the wheeled cannon which threw explosive shells, broke ranks and dashed for such a weapon. Sir Roger himself, now armed cap-a-pie, rode up and knocked him asprawl with his lance. “Hold on, there!” rapped the baron. “What’re you about?”
’To shoot, sire,” gasped the soldier. “Let’s fire at ’em ere they break over our wall and—”
“If I didn’t think our good yew bows could deal with such overgrown snails, I’d have you priming yon tube,” said my lord. “But as it is, back to your pike!”
It had a salutary effect on the badly shaken spearmen, who stood with weapons grounded to receive that frightful charge. Sir Roger saw no reason to explain that (judging from what had happened at Stularax) he dared not use explosives at such short range, lest he destroy us, too. Of course, he should have realized that the Wersgorix would have many kinds of shell of graded potency. But who can think of everything at once?
As it was, the drivers of those moving fortresses must have been sorely puzzled that we did not fire on them, and wondered what we held in reserve. They found out when the first war-wagon toppled into one of our covered pits.
Two more were similarly trapped ere it was understood that these were no ordinary obstacles. Surely the good saints had aided us. In our ignorance, we had dug holes broad and deep, which by themselves would not have been escape-proof for such powerful vehicles. But then we added great wooden stakes, almost by sheer habit, as if we expected to impale outsize horses. Some of these caught in the treads which girdled the wheels, and erelong those wheels were jammed tight with wood pulp.
Another wagon evaded the pits, which were not continuous. It approached the breastworks. A rapidfire gun spat from it, seeking the range, and stitched small craters along our earth wall. “God send the right!” roared Sir Brian Fitz-William. His horse spurted from our lines, closely followed by half a dozen of the nearer cavalrymen. They galloped in a semicircle, just beyond reach of the gun. The vehicle lumbered in pursuit, seeking to bring its smallest-bore cannon to bear. Sir Brian got it headed the way he desired, winded his war-horn, and galloped back to shelter as the wagon plunged into a hole.