Mainahkos was not entirely pleased with the force he had on hand to lead out. He sorely missed Ratface Billisos and Horsecock Kawlos; both had been good subordinate officers, Ratface’s highly innovative tactics having saved the day more than once for the bandits over the years; he also sorely missed the horses that the two had been bringing in from the west, for lacking them, the would-be thoheeks was going to be unable to mount all of his cavalry, and he was short of cavalry to begin. Moreover, without the wagonloads of seasoned pikeshafts which had made up a part of the now-lost supply train, Mainahkos would be unable to arm all of the spear levy of the city.
Nonetheless, the two partners, Stehrgiahnos and the other bandit sub-chiefs had done everything that they could: every house and every stable had been scoured of usable weapons and horseflesh of any and every description, age and type; straight, well-cured timbers of the appropriate lengths had been commandeered, even if doing so meant the partial razing of homes and other buildings, then impressed crews of carpenters, turners, joiners and even cabinetmakers had been set to rendering them into hafts to which pikepoints could be riveted, and the craftsmen were kept at it day and night at the points of swords where this was found to be necessary, though it seldom was, for the surviving citizens of Kahlkopolis were, after three years of occupation by the savage, brutal bandit horde, now virtually devoid of leadership and thoroughly cowed.
This exercise did turn out a goodly number of pikes—although but precious few of the hafts were of the preferred ash or oak, rather were they of elm, maple, pine, cedar, hickory and too many others to name or enumerate—but with few exceptions, they were short pikes, only eight to ten feet long, but Mainahkos knew that they would do, they would have to do.
The search for cavalry mounts, however, was far less successful, so few acceptable mounts being actually turned up that he gave over planning on putting former troopers up on a horse and decided to use them afoot or to crowd a couple into each war-cart, instead, to hurl darts alongside the archers.
Even so, the would-be thoheeks was able to march a force of some respectable size out of his city on the morning of the day of battle. To the roll of the drums came something over thirty hundreds of foot, about a third that number of horse and some fifty war-carts, each of them with six or eight missile-men, plus two armored postillions.
Screened by two files of mounted lancers whose orders had been to deliberately raise as much dust as possible in their progress, Captain of Elephants Gil Djohnz and the elephant Sunshine led the way toward the position assigned them for the opening of the battle, now looming close ahead. The three cows, Sunshine, Tulip and Newgrass, were all clad in most of the protective armor they would wear in battle, but their huge, distinctively shaped bodies had for the nonce been almost completely shrouded in long, wide sheets of dust-colored cloth, while the heavy, cumbersome archer boxes of wood and leather had been all dismounted and were now being borne in the wake of the pachyderms by the archers who would occupy them and some of the elephant grooms.
After the third or the fourth time he slipped and stumbled on the broken, uneven footing, his boots not having been designed for ease of walking anyway, Gil found himself steadied and easily lifted back onto his feet by the powerful but infinitely gentle trunk of Sunshine.
“I will say it once more,” came her strong mindspeak, “you are silly to try to walk, man-Gil. Why your poor little feet will be sore beyond bearing by sunset.
Those men yonder are all astride their own small, skinny-legged beasts, so why do you three not ride Sunshine and her sisters, brother?”
Gil sighed. Sunshine could be as stubborn as any hardheaded mule when she chose to so be. He beamed in reply, “It is still as I have said ere this, sister-mine: high as you are, if I should take my place upon your neck, anyone watching from the other army will then know that at least one elephant is in this area, and it is the plan of the Grand Strahteegos Komees Pahvlos that they gain no knowledge of just where we are until the time comes for us to attack them. Please try to understand this time, dear sister.”
“Silly, silly, silly!” Sunshine mindspoke disparagingly. “Two-legs are surely the very silliest of any living creatures! Fighting is surely the silliest of all two-leg pastimes, and Sunshine is herself silly for deigning to take any part in such ultimate sillinesses ... she only does so because it makes her brother happy and she dearly loves him, man-Gil.”
Even as man and elephant communicated, seven huge long-toothed felines were but just arrived stealthily in position a short distance behind the cavalry reserve of the bandit army. They crouched, unmoving as so many statues, only the respiration movements of their sleek, wiry bodies denoting that life resided in them. In a tiny copse they lurked, the agouti bodies blending well with the dead leaves that here thickly littered the ground.
One of the prairiecats—for such they all were, having come as part of the Horseclans force—meshed his mind with those of two others of his kind to gain sufficient mental projection for farspeak and then beamed out, “We are where we were told we should be, Chief Pawl. The horses cannot smell us. Not yet, but if the wind should shift . . . ? If they do smell us before you want them to, Chief Pawl, will we still get to fight? It has been so long since we were allowed to fight.” There was a wistful note to the last comment.
Pahvlos found it necessary, at the onset, to alter his carefully laid-out and planned battle line. With the bandit army forming up into position some hundreds of yards distant in clear sight on the verdant plain that lay between his camp and the walls of Kahlkopolis, it was become painfully obvious that was his center to not be overlapped by the more numerous enemy center, he must either stretch his lines of armored pikemen to a thinness that would be patently suicidal or he must commit to the battle line the unarmored pikemen of Captain Ahzprinos, and for the umpteenth time he foully cursed the old-fashioned, obstinate, obtuse officer and his stubborn failure to emulate the Freefighter regiment as had Captain Bizahros.
At length, the Grand Strahteegos made what he felt to be the very best of a singularly bad situation. He grudgingly extended the fronts of Captains Hehluh and Bizahros in a depth of only four pikemen, then he took the two battalions of the unarmored men from off the wings, rejoined them with their reserve regiment and used them to back the armored pikemen all along the battle line. He realized that there still would be some slight overlap, but it was the best he could do under the circumstances.
Of course, these rearrangements left him damnall reserve—one battalion of the old-style pikemen, the engineers, pioneers and artificiers who could be thrown in in a real emergency, the headquarters guard of heavy horse and a scattering of lancers—but it would just have to do.
Nor was he formed back up any too soon, for out from behind the battle line of the bandit army came the war-carts, moving at a slow walk until clear of their own men, then gradually increasing the pace of their big, barded draught mules to a fast canter. As soon as they were safely away, the entire enemy line began to advance, in formation, at a walk, their shouldered pikes standing high above them like some long, narrow forest of wind-slanted saplings, the silvery points all aglitter in the sun. Their form of advance told him exactly how the oncoming war-carts would be used, at least in the opening segment of this battle. He sent a galloper to the captain of engineers notifying him of the walking advance, that he might reset the torsions and tensions of his engines for the shorter range.
Only a mere two of the oncoming war-carts were struck by the volley of stones and spears hurled by the engines before they were reset, but even this was remarkable and lucky in the extreme, considering that the targets were moving quite fast and could not be seen by the men who loosed off the engines. Pahvlos had been told that Captain of Engineers Teemos was the best of the best and that he numbered among his company some real artists at the tricky skills of handling light engines; now the old strahteegos believed it, every word of it.