Barded to the fetlocks as the mules were, there was no way for Pahvlos to determine just how heavily or fully the draught mules werearmored, it was only safe to assume that they were. Between six and eight men stood in the bed of each jouncing, springless cart, mixed archers and dartmen from the looks of them; on the two nearside mules, fully armored men with sabers or axes were mounted, so none of the missile-men need worry about guiding the mules. He noted that the carts consistently kept a goodly distance one from the other, lest the long, cursive steel blades projecting from the wheel hubs become entangled with another set or, even worse, cripple a mule.
Even if the slow advance of the enemy infantry lines had not told him, Pahvlos would have known as soon as he saw just how few of the armor-plated war-carts there were that they were too few to tempt even such an amateur strahteegos as the bandit chief Mainahkos to send them head on at a hard gallop against the massed pikes and hope to get more than a mere handful of them back, for anyone with a grain of sense would realize that the cavalry in the rear areas could ride rings around such relatively slow, cumbersome conveyances, deadly rings, in the case of the horse-archers that the bandits knew he owned as a part of his army.
That left only a couple of alternative uses for the archaic carts. One of these would be an attempt to drive between wings and center and thus take the pike lines on the more vulnerable flanks; the other would be to make a series of passes across the front while raining the pikemen with arrows and darts.
It was to be the latter choice, Pahvlos saw. In staggered lines, the war-carts were drawn, clattering and bouncing over the uneven ground, the full length of the formations of pikemen, expending a quantity of arrows and darts for precious few casualties against the armored front ranks. As the leading war-carts reached the end of that initial pass, however, and began to wheel about, they received an unexpected and very sharp taste of similar medicine to that which they had been seeking to so lavishly dispense to the static lines of infantry. Captain Chief Pawl Vawn of Vawn, commanding the left wing, treated the carts and their mules and postillions to such a pointblank arrow storm that nearly a dozen were put out of action then and there. Nor did the hapless crews of the carts receive any less from the half-squadron of Horseclansmen under one of Captain Pawl’s sub-chiefs, on the other wing, which eliminated more of their number, almost halving the fifty that had set out to begin.
With it patent that the war-carts were doing no significant damage to his front, Pahvlos dispatched a galloper to carry his order to Captain Thoheeks Portos and his heavy cavalry. Out from the rear area they came, taking a wide swing around the right of their own lines to end in delivering a crushing charge against the mixed heavy and light horse on the left wing of the bandits’ battle line. That charge thudded home with a racket that could be heard by every man on the field and even in the camp and the city, walls or no walls.
Portos’ heavy cavalry fought hard and bravely for a few minutes after the initial assault, their sharp sabers carving deeply into the formations of opposing horsemen, even penetrating completely through, into the skimpily armored ranks of light-infantry peltasts who flanked the pike lines. But then, abruptly, a banner was seen to go down, and with cries and loud lamentations they began to try to disengage and withdraw in the direction of their own lines.
Sensing a victory of sorts within grasping distance, the entire left wing of the bandits’ army—horse and light foot alike—quitted their assigned positions to stream out in close pursuit of the retreating heavy horse.
And no sooner had they left the flank they had been set there to guard than up out of a brushy gully filed Sunshine, Tulip and Newgrass. With practiced speed, the cloth shroudings were stripped away, the last few pieces of armor put on and the heavy, unwieldy metal-plated boxes were lifted up onto the broad backs and strapped into place. As the archers clambered up into the boxes, Captain of Elephants Gil Djohnz and the other two feelahksee were lifted by the pachyderms to their places just behind the armored domes of the huge heads and those men still gathered about on the ground uncased the outsize swords—six feet long in the blades, broad and thick and very heavy, with both edges ground and honed to razor sharpness—which the behemoths would swing with their trunks in the initial attack. All of these last-minute preparations had been well rehearsed and so took bare minutes in the accomplishment. Once fully equipped and armed and out of the gully in which they had hidden, the three huge, fearsome-looking beasts set out in line abreast at a walk which the trailing and flanking lancers had some difficulty in matching for speed over the uneven terrain.
Now, much of Mainahkos’ “infantry” was no such thing, save by the very loosest definition of the term. Rather were the most of them just a very broad cross-section of male citizens who had been impressed in the streets of the city at the points of swords and spears, handed a short pike and hustled willy-nilly into an aggregation of fellow unfortunates, then all marched out to add depth and length to the bandits’ pike lines. To these, the mere distant sight of the three proboscideans fast bearing down upon them, swinging terrible two-mehtrah swords, their high backs crowded with archers and a horde of mounted lancers round about them, was all that was needful to evoke a state of instant, screaming panic.
Bandit army veterans strode and rode among the impressed men they chose to dignify with the term “citizen spear levy.” With shouts and with curses, with fists and whips and swordflats and spearbutts, they tried to lay the panic, get the untrained men faced around to try to repel the flank attack, all the while cursing the peltasts and heavy horse for so exposing the flank and profanely wondering just when Lord Mainahkos would get around to sending the reserve cavalry to replace those who had ridden off to who knew where.
Of course, they could not know that a few minutes before, Pawl Vawn of Vawn had farspoken but a single thought: “Now, cat-brother!”
With bloodcurdling squalls, the seven mighty prairiecats had burst from out the tiny copse and sped toward the mounting cavalry reserve. All of them broad-beaming mental pictures of blood and of hideous death for equines, never ceasing their cacophony of snarls, growls, squalls and howls, the muscular cats rapidly closed the distance between the copse and the horses and men.
Within the City of Kahlkopolis, things were not well. Ahreekos, frantic for a better view of the battle, one not partially obscured by folds of ground, high brush or copses, had decided on the city’s highest tower as an observation point and had led his followers in the climb up to its most elevated level. However, less than a third of the way up, he had gasped and fallen on a landing, jerking and beginning to turn a grayish blue in the face.
His followers had almost ruptured themselves in bearing his broad, corpulent bulk down the narrow spiral stairway, only to find upon finally reaching the first level that they had been carrying a fat corpse. Ahreekos was dead.
Leaving the body precisely where it lay, pausing only to strip off rings, bracelets and anything else of value from it, in the way of their unsavory ilk, the followers departed and began to make ready to leave the city, for what they had already been able to see of the progress of the battle had not been at all encouraging. It would seem that overconfident Mainahkos had finally met his match in the person of this white-haired eastern strahteegos and his small but very effective army, and the personal slogans of all of those who had for so long followed the two warlords had always been “He who fights and runs away lives to run away another day.” They were, after all, not warriors but opportunists, and so could desert without even a twinge of shame.