In the narrow slot to the ford on “his” side of the river there was no way that more than one, or at most two, orcs could attack him. There he stood his ground, hammering on orc shields as they hammered right back. A few more of them had poured out of the encampment but he was killing them faster than they could be reinforced, his relatively light axe crashing through their guards and shattering shoulders, arms and heads.
The narrow ford soon became clogged with bodies and the following orcs had to clamber over the piles of the dead. Occasionally they fell towards him and he had to step backwards to avoid being pushed over, so he had slowly been backed towards the top of the bank. However, there were fewer than ten orcs left in the attacking force and, apparently realizing they could not defeat him in the meadow, they suddenly gave out a cry and ran back to the defile, then up through their gates, closing them firmly behind them.
With the retreat of the foe the battle fury came off of him and the pain from his wounds flooded in to replace it. Besides the catch in his side, which felt very much like a broken rib, he now noticed a rather nasty gash on the back of his right leg. A few inches deeper and he would have lost all use of the leg. As it was, he didn’t even recall getting it.
He whistled for Calaban and stumbled across the body-choked ford to the far side. There were probably some things worth looting on the bodies, but that could wait.
His lance was done for, until he could either give the head of it back to a good armorer or find an appropriate hickory sapling. He’d really rather let someone else fix it; he was for a town and a good rest as soon as this battle was done.
The horse walked up from wherever it had disappeared to as he found his sword under a body. He retrieved rags from one of his remaining saddle bags and wiped the blood off of it and his axe then loaded both onto the horse along with his shield, which was starting to get heavy.
He worked on Calaban’s wounds next. First he numbed the wounds with an odd gray poultice then worked the barbed heads out of the flesh. The latter was difficult because the horse, despite the successful local anesthesia, danced around from the odd pulling sensation. When he finally had the bolts removed he packed the punctures with salve that would speed the healing.
After that he worked on his own problems. He was tired and sore but except for treating the gash on his leg there wasn’t much he could do. He had some bruises and the rib, but they would require more work than he could do in the field. Finally he put a bandage, liberally laced with salve, onto the slash on his leg and laboriously repaired the mail over it. The cut had been an attempted coup de poing but it had not been quite powerful enough to cut through the well-wrought Alladon mail. At least not enough to do any real damage.
His wounds tended to, he took out a small vial and regarded it cautiously. The material in it was unpleasant to drink, oversweet but with a bitter undertaste, and it had limited effect. But it would invigorate him for a short period of time, enough to defeat the rest of the orcs. And if its effectiveness ran out he could take another. But each successive use gave less time invigorated. He’d need some real rest soon.
Finally he loaded his weapons back up and strode towards the gates of the encampment. No bow fire greeted him so he headed to the base of the defile and yelled up at the wooden palisade on the hilltop.
“I call upon you to let the daughter of the Earl of Shawton free. If you do so I will spare your lives. If you do not I will kill all the fighters and burn your village, turning your women and children out into the winter. Heed me!”
“Go away!” came the reply, not so loud or fearsome as before. “We have never been to this Shawton.”
“This is your last chance!” Herzer yelled, pulling out a vial of the herbal stimulant.
“Go away!”
“Stupid bastards,” he muttered, draining the vial in a single draught and tossing it over his shoulder. He drew his axe and raised it over his head. “For Mithras and Alladale!” he bellowed. Over his shoulder, out of the clear sky, a boom of thunder rolled. Cool.
He charged up the defile, holding his shield over his head against the anticipated rain of stones. Sure enough, every orc in the encampment seemed to be pelting him with rocks, chunks of wood, dead cats and whatever else could be found. With the exception of a couple of what must have been fair-sized boulders none of it was a hindrance and he quickly made it up the slot to the gate.
There were apparently stands behind the gate, but unlike in the defile, only a few orcs could look down at him here and he swung his shield to the rear to give himself room for two-handed swinging. The gate was made of thick logs held up with ropes and hinges but there were narrow gaps between the logs and he swung through the gaps at the bar on the far side. Some judicious chops at the logs opened up the gaps to where he could get at the bar better and he fell to a steady swinging rhythm, quickly chopping through the thick barrier.
As soon as the bar parted he dropped the axe and swung the gates open, ripping out his sword as the remaining defenders charged him at the gate.
He could see the earl’s daughter now. The girl was no more than sixteen, with fair skin and red hair, unbound and flowing to her waist. She was tied to a post in the center of the encampment, and a spit and fire had been erected nearby. It was clear that the orcs had been intending to have her for supper when Herzer arrived and interrupted. An orc shaman capered in front of the fire, casting in foul-smelling herbs and gesturing maniacally.
Now it was another fearsome melee but with nearly an arm’s length of good Narland steel in his hands, the orcs didn’t stand a chance. He pushed forward into their mass, striking from side to side and parrying their blows with his much battered shield.
But just as he neared the end of the defenders the shaman gave a last great cry and a fearsome apparition, a man-sized demon, arose from the flames. It was covered in spikes and had a vague resemblance to the orcs but that was all the description that Herzer could make as the thing leapt through the air and slammed into his shield.
He swung at it and connected on the shoulder. But for all the good the Narland steel had made it might have struck stone. It bounced from the shoulder with a jolt in his hand as the demon’s fist struck him in the chest.
The blow threw him backwards to slam into the palisade and he shook his head trying to clear it of the ringing as the demon pounced once again.
Suddenly, horny fingers closed around his mail-protected throat and started to squeeze. He flailed with his sword at the demon’s side but it was to no avail. Slowly the world around him went black…
“Fisk,” Herzer muttered, sitting up from the ground and looking around at the training field. His throat still had a psychosomatic tight feeling to it, but VR always did that. “I hate losing.”
“You should have more fully scouted the encampment,” his instructor said, handing him a flagon.
Herzer took the water and drank gratefully, then got to his feet. “I know that. Now. The demon was a bit unfair.”
“Life is unfair,” the avatar replied. It was a very high-end program, not fully AI but smarter than most standard systems, and it had a mass of proverbs and quips to draw upon. “You have to be more unfair. What should you have done?”
“As it was, I’m not sure,” Herzer replied. “I couldn’t take the demon. Not by myself.”
“What about the shaman?” the trainer asked.
“Hmmm…” Herzer called up the schematic of the recent battle and nodded. “I couldn’t have made it through the orcs to kill him before he completed the enchantment. So… take off most of the armor, climb the cliffs, reconnoiter. Wait for a good time and kill the shaman with the bow. That way I’d know about the troll, too. Maybe try to kill both from long range, and some of the orcs. They would have eventually come out, but I would have been fighting them from the top of the slope, not the bottom. But I’d have to get the shaman first, or else he’d summon the demon and I’d have to fight it anyway.”