The Torians' morning patrol was mounting up. It seemed to be stronger than usual this morning-several hundred men at least. Blade scanned the line of blue horses and barrel-chested, bowlegged riders. The average Torian seemed to be about five and a half feet tall, and wore a combination of pigtail and mustache that gave him a distinctly Mongolian appearance.
Each of the riders had a piece of equipment Blade had never seen before-a large square wooden shield, slung on one side of his mount. Blade stared at the shields for another long moment. Then he whirled, cupped his hands, and bellowed, «Sound the alarm! The Torians are attacking!»
His voice carried to every corner of the fort. Men were dashing out of their huts and tents and scrambling up the ladders on the inside of the wall before Blade could repeat his call a third time.
By the time the gongs and drums sounded, the Torians were on the move. They seemed to explode out of their camp toward the fort like members of a well-rehearsed dance group. Doubtless they had been doing more than a little rehearsing, well out of sight of the fort's defenders. As he watched the Torian attack unfold, Blade could not help admiring their skill, even though he realized that skill might mean his death within the next few hours.
The horsemen with the shields headed straight for the fort at an easy trot. Behind them moved more than a thousand men on foot, each two or three men carrying either a scaling ladder or a bundle of brushwood. The mass of men and horses moving forward raised a veil of dust from the dry ground. It was impossible to see through that veil and make out what was happening with the Torian battering rams. Doubtless they would appear in their own good time.
Meanwhile the Kargoi were manning the walls with a rush, each warrior with every weapon he had. As they reached the top of the wall and saw the Torian attack, they began dropping swords and spears and unslinging their bows. One by one they knelt, nocked arrows, and let fly.
In their eagerness the Kargoi opened fire before any of the Torians were within range. The Torians' speed quickly brought them under Kargoi fire, though. The wooden shields were too clumsy to protect a man on horseback, and in any case the Kargoi aimed at the horses. The blue-skinned animals began to go down, screaming, kicking, rolling about and sometimes rolling onto their fallen riders. Parts of the incoming line became ghastly tangles of riderless or fallen or stumbling horses and staggering or crawling or fallen men. Neither the Torians nor their horses died quietly.
The Torians came on, and soon they could dismount and return the arrow fire. With the speed and precision of circus riders, they sprang down from their horses, bows in one hand and the great shields in the other. With shouts and slaps they turned their horses back. The animals dashed away through the oncoming infantry, who opened their ranks to let them pass.
Meanwhile the archers set up their shields on the ground and knelt behind them. The Kargoi shifted their fire, but it was hard to hit a shielded man and nearly impossible to kill him. The Torians would duck behind their shields, nock an arrow, pop up, let fly, then duck down before the Kargoi could fire. They were not shooting very well, but they were shooting fast and furiously. A steady stream of arrows poured over the wall, and Kargoi began to go down as the arrows pierced their reptile-hide armor or found exposed areas of their bodies.
Blade bellowed orders for the Kargoi to kneel behind the railing. That gave them some extra protection, but the arrows continued to whistle over them and into the fort.
Arrows began to run short on the wall. Someone inside the fort organized a line of the women to pass filled quivers up to the archers, while others collected Torian arrows. Blade saw Naula running toward the wall and scrambling up it without using a ladder, agile as a monkey. He shouted for her to get back down, but she seemed to be deaf to everything except the mounting roar of the battle. Her eyes were wide, more with excitement than with fear, and Blade saw that she had a carving knife stuck in her belt.
Well, if she wanted to get into a full-scale battle, shed chosen the right time and place. Reluctantly Blade put the girl out of his mind and turned back to the battle.
The archers of both sides were shooting as furiously as ever, but no longer very effectively. Both sides were now so well protected that they were neither taking nor doing much damage. If there'd been only archers on hand, the archery duel could have gone on all day, the archers using and reusing each others arrows until all the arrows and all the bowstrings were broken and not an archer on either side could lift a finger.
Now the Torian infantry were crowding up behind their archers, standing ready to advance when somebody gave them the word. They stood there for several minutes, long enough for the Kargoi to pick off some of them, long enough for some Torian commander to realize that the Kargoi archers weren't going to give up. Then a horn blew at one end of the Torian line, and all the Torians surged forward, a solid mass of more than a thousand men hurling themselves at the wall of the West Fort.
Along the wall Blade saw the Kargoi dropping their bows and picking up spears and swords. The men with the bags of naphtha did not pick them up, but stood close by them, ready to go to work.
The oncoming mass of Torians reached the ditch around the fort and the men with the brushwood bundles ran forward. They hurled the bundles down into the ditch while their own archers kept up a steady fire. Blade saw Kargoi rise to hurl spears and be picked off by arrows.
He shouted to them to get down and save their spears for the close combat that was only minutes away. Some of them heard him, others were too full of battle fury to listen to anyone or anything. Blade ran along the wall, ignoring the arrows flying past, jerking men down onto their knees.
Now the ditch was filled nearly to the top with brushwood in three places, and the Torians with the scaling ladders were coming to the front. The Torians wore no armor and their weapons for fighting on foot were not as good as those of the Kargoi-only a short curved sword and a small circular wooden shield. There might not have been much to fear, if the Torians hadn't so badly outnumbered the defenders and if they hadn't been coming on as if nothing but death could stop them. Probably nothing could.
Now the ladders were banging up against the wall and the first Torians were scrambling up them. Some Kargoi eagerly thrust their spears against the ladders the moment they were in position. Other waited until Torians were on the ladders, then pushed. Ladders and Torians fell with clatters, thuds, and screams.
Blade ran to where three ladders were rising above the wall almost side by side. The shower of incoming arrows had stopped; the Torian archers were too afraid of hitting their own men. The Kargoi had no such fear, and wherever the Torians were not coming up the wall Kargoi bows were at work. The ground outside the ditch was becoming littered with still or writhing bodies and stained with blood.
Blade reached the first of the ladders just as a Torian head popped up over the railing. His sword fell with a swish, the Torian head leaped from its shoulders, and the blood-spouting corpse fell back on the men climbing up behind it. The ladder swung away from the wall and crashed down on top of half a dozen more Torians. Kargoi arrows hissed down onto the men before they could get themselves sorted out, and several of them never got up again.
From the second ladder a Torian actually scrambled over the railing, onto the wall. Blade and a Kargoi warrior struck him in the same moment. The Kargoi's spear went through the man from the back, while Blade's sword laid open his belly. Each grabbed the Torian by one arm and heaved his body off the wall.