There was nothing Warshoe could do about that now, so he pulled out the crank of the cocking windless built into the dwarvish arbalest’s stock and began respanning the steel bow. It wasn’t a speedy process, but that was all right with him. He had no intention of getting directly involved in what was going to happen next.
Sir Fahlthu jerked a hand angrily at his bugler, and the armsman raised his bugle. It sang out, sounding the command to mount and advance, and his outsized company and the three troops Lord Erathian had assigned to him moved forward.
It wasn’t what Fahlthu wanted to do. Not without having killed more of the enemy, or at least broken them as an organized force, before he engaged. But his orders from Chalthar and Halnahk left him no choice. He doubted that there was any real chance of killing every single one of Trianal’s armsmen, whatever Lord Saratic wanted. Yet he could hardly pretend he hadn’t attacked them, and the men he’d already killed had upped the stakes enormously from simple cattle or horse-stealing raids. Now that he’d effectively declared war on Glanharrow, his orders left him and his “brigands” no option but to kill as many more as he could.
Sir Yarran’s belly muscles tightened as he watched the woodline spawning armsmen in the plain, unmarked leather and cuirasses of outlaws or unemployed mercenaries—if there was a difference. There were far more than there’d been in the party they’d been pursuing. At least ten-score, he estimated, and possibly as much as half again that number. Even without their opening losses, Trianal’s men would have been seriously outnumbered.
He darted a look at his commander. The youngster had reacted with more speed than most grizzled veterans would have shown. And he’d done the right thing by halting the column. Maybe not the perfect thing, but the right thing. Yarran knew Trianal would always blame himself for not having halted the scouts, as well. In his position, Yarran would have blamed himself just as bitterly, but stopping them in their tracks would have been unjustifiable with no more than disturbed birds as the vague indicator of something possibly out of the ordinary.
The critical thing was that Trianal had held the command together. Many a formation would have shattered like glass on an anvil under that sudden attack. If it had been composed of veterans, their troop commanders and sergeants would probably have rallied them … eventually. But in the meantime, their attackers would have sought to take ruthless advantage of their confusion. Yet Trianal’s orders had stilled that automatic, instinctive urge towards flight before it could take effect, and the armsmen Baron Tellian had sent with him to Glanharrow were hand-picked veterans themselves. Like Yarran’s own men, they knew the difference between an officer who had a firm grip on his command and one who did not, and they were responding to Trianal’s mastery like the well drilled troops they were.
Now to find out if the young man beside him knew what to do with them.
Trianal watched the main body of his men spread out as they fell back towards his standard. Sothoii tactical doctrine had taken over, and each troop commander knew exactly what to do. His troopers swirled in what anyone who had never faced Sothoii cavalry would undoubtedly have thought was utter confusion, but Trianal’s eye saw the underlying pattern. His men had their bows out now, and they sent their own shafts hissing back in reply to their attackers.
The ugly, bickering battle which had sprung so suddenly into existence was developing into a classic clash between light cavalry units. All was movement and speed, bursts of archery followed by sudden wheels away from the enemy while another twenty-man troop dashed up to rake the flank of anyone who followed the withdrawal too closely. Neither side was scoring a high percentage of hits now, for galloping horses, swerving evasively, were difficult targets.
Half a dozen of his troopers who’d been dismounted when their horses were wounded or killed were racing back towards his standard on foot. He saw some of their still-mounted companions swoop up beside them, reaching down a helping hand and offering them a stirrup as they galloped further back from the front of the combat. Riderless horses were also galloping back from the fray. Many of them, as well trained to the bugles as the riders they’d lost, were falling back, not simply running in panic. His double-strength command troop, which formed his only real reserve, let the panicked beasts go, but Captain Steelsaber had detached a sergeant and half a dozen men to scoop up the others and add them to the company’s remounts. Trianal wondered if he ought to order them not to, to stay concentrated. But the way things were going, he thought grimly, they were probably going to need every horse they had.
“Pigeons!” he snapped, and a wizened little trooper appeared as if by magic at his elbow. Soft, anxious cries and the flutter of worried wings came from the wicker carrying cage on the other man’s packhorse, but he laid a hand atop the cage and made soft, soothing noises to its inhabitants.
Trianal fumbled a block of thin, expensive paper and a stubby pencil out of his map case. He gazed out at the intensifying battle—damp as the ground was, dust was beginning to rise here and there, a thin haze breathing into the air as pounding hooves dashed back and forth over the same dryer pieces of grassland—and made himself think hard for several seconds. Then his pencil scribbled furiously. He had to make the best possible use of the few lines for which he had room, and he wrote quickly, then paused long enough to reread what he’d written. He grunted in satisfaction. It wasn’t perfect, but it would have to do.
“Send it,” he said, and handed the tightly folded message to the pigeon-keeper. The wizened man had already coaxed one of the pigeons out of the cage. Now he quickly but carefully fitted Trianal’s message under the band on the bird’s leg and threw it into the air. It circled twice, then headed off, straight as an arrow, into the west.
Trianal had no time to watch its flight. He had turned back to Sir Yarran even before the pigeon-keeper launched the bird.
“We’ll fall back towards Shallow Cross,” he told the older knight quickly, stabbing the air towards the northwest as he spoke. “I don’t want to let them force us into a close action, but I don’t want to break contact completely, either.”
Sir Yarran glanced at the swirling wave of combat falling steadily back towards them. Although horses were moving at breakneck speed in every direction, the actual westward movement of the combat itself was much more gradual, moving little more quickly than a single horse might have covered the same distance at a slow trot. That would probably change once the other side was completely free of the tangled underbrush and could begin to make its full numerical advantage felt, but both sides were Sothoii, and no one was better than the Sothoii at this sort of fight. The attackers would be wary of pressing too hard, too quickly, of letting themselves be drawn into fighting piecemeal. They would settle for a more cautious pursuit, using their greater number of bows—and, even more importantly, the greater number of arrows so many men could carry—to wear down Trianal’s command. They would nibble away, killing and wounding men and horses, exhausting the remaining mounts, and forcing Trianal’s troopers to expend their own arrows beating off attacks until, quite abruptly, the moment would arrive. The moment both sides would recognize, when mounting casualties, fatigue, and lack of ammunition shifted the momentum suddenly in the stronger side’s favor and the time came for it to finish its opponents off.
The only true counter to that eventual outcome was for the weaker side to break contact and pull away as quickly as possible. He knew it, and so did Trianal. But he also knew what the youngster had in mind, and it might just work. The odds were against it, but Trianal had the audacity of youth, and the superb quality of the troopers under his command might just let him pull it off.