Like an apple seed squeezed out from between thumb and forefinger, the Fox and his followers fought their way free from the far side of the fleeing Trokmê force. Now he was on the right wing of the attack, and most of his vassals on the left. He'd foretold that things would get mixed up in the fight; being of an uncommonly orderly turn of mind, though, he hadn't expected the mixing to include himself.
He still had arrows left, and shot them at the retreating Trokmoi. Some of the woodsrunners had their cars pounding down the narrow lanes between their homes. "Uh-oh," Van said. "Are you sure we want to go after 'em in there, Fox?"
Whenever Van urged caution, he had to be taken seriously. "Looks like a good way to get chewed to bits, doesn't it?" Gerin said after he'd taken a long look at the situation.
"Doesn't it just?" Van agreed. "We'll get a good many of 'em, and do the rest real harm, if we set the place afire. But going in there after the woodsrunners, you ask me, that's putting your prong on the block for the chopper."
Had Gerin been undecided before, the wince from that figure of speech would have been plenty to make up his mind. He waved his arms and shouted for his men to hold up and ply the Trokmê village with fire arrows. A good many Trokmoi, though, were thundering into the village between him and his vassals, so only a few of those vassals heard. And, while he was supposed to be in command of Aragis' men as well, they ignored him when he tried to keep them from pursuing the Trokmoi.
"Now what, lord prince?" Raffo asked as the chariots streamed past.
Gerin looked at Van. The outlander's broad shoulders lifted in a shrug. The Fox scowled. The only thing he could do that would let him keep his prestige among the Elabonian warriors was also the thing he'd just dismissed as stupid. "Go on," he shouted to Raffo. "If that's where the fight is, that's where we have to go."
"Aye, lord prince," Raffo said, and cracked the whip over the horses' backs.
It was as bad as Van had predicted, as bad as Gerin had thought it would be. Foundered chariots blocked several of the village lanes, robbing the Fox's force of mobility, the essence of chariotry. Some of the Trokmoi fought afoot, side by side with the monsters. Other men ran into the houses and shot arrows at the Elabonians from windows and doors, ducking back into cover after they'd shot.
And quite as fierce as the men were the Trokmê women. It was like fighting dozens of berserk Fands. They screamed and shouted. Under their pale, freckled skins, their faces turned crimson with fury and the veins stood out like cords on their necks and foreheads. Some threw stones; others used bows and swords like their men. They weren't merely unnerving; they were deadly dangerous.
"Back, curse it! Back and out!" Gerin shouted, again and again. "We'll throw everything away if we get stuck in this kind of fighting. Out and back!"
Little by little, his men and Aragis' began to heed him. But pulling out of the battle was harder than getting into it had been. Turning a chariot around in the crowded, bloody alleyways of the village was anything but easy; too often, it was next to impossible. Gerin wondered if going forward would have cost less than the withdrawal did.
A lot of the chariots had lost the firepots with which they'd begun the day's fighting. Still, before long, fire arrows sent trails of smoke through the air as they arced toward the thatched roofs of the Trokmê cottages. The weather had been dry. Before long, the straw on the roofs was blazing.
More chariots rampaged through the fields outside the village, wrecking the crops that still stood after the battle had gone through them. Through thickening smoke, Gerin saw Trokmoi fleeing into Adiatunnus' keep.
"Do you aim to lay siege to 'em?" Aragis the Archer asked. The grand duke's helmet was dented, maybe by a stone. The edge of the helm had cut him above one eye; when he healed, he'd have a scar like Gerin's.
"We can't take the keep by storm, however much I wish we could," Gerin answered. "We don't have the numbers, we don't have the ladders, and they'd be fighting for their lives. We can't starve them out, either. Adiatunnus will have more in his storerooms and cellars than we can draw from the countryside. We can send in fire arrows and hope to start a big blaze, but that's just a matter of luck."
"Aye, but we should try it," Aragis said. Nonetheless, he showed relief that Gerin did not intend to linger in Adiatunnus' country.
The Fox understood that. "You'll want to campaign against the monsters in your own lands as soon as may be, won't you?"
"As a matter of fact, that's just what's in my mind," Aragis said. "Harvest won't wait forever, and I'd like the woods cleared of those creatures before then . . . if that can be done. I'd not care to harm your campaign by pulling back from here too soon, but—"
But I will, if you don't pull back on your own hook soon enough to suit me. Aragis didn't say it—Gerin gave him credit for being a good ally, a better one than the Fox had expected—but he thought it very loudly.
"If it suits you, we'll spend the rest of the afternoon lobbing fire arrows into the keep in the hope of sending it all up in smoke, and then—then we'll withdraw," Gerin said. "We'll ravage more of Adiatunnus' lands as we go. By your leave, we'll stop at Fox Keep for a few days, to let me set up the defenses of my own holding while I'm in the south, and then I'll meet my end of the bargain."
"Couldn't ask for fairer than that," Aragis said, though his eyes argued that any departure later than yesterday, or perhaps the day before, was too late. But again, he held his peace; he recognized necessity, and recognized that against it any man struggled in vain.
The charioteers rode rings around Adiatunnus' keep, howling and shouting louder than the Trokmoi on the walls as they sent more fire arrows smoking through the air. Up on the walls of the keep with the woodsrunners were several monsters. Gerin hoped they and the Trokmoi would quarrel in the tight quarters, but had no way to make that happen.
Two or three times, thin columns of black smoke rose from within the keep. Whenever they did, Gerin's men, and Aragis' too, cheered themselves hoarse. But each time, the smoke thinned, paled, died. At last, as the sun sank ever lower in the west, the Fox called off the attack. He and his followers drew off toward the northeast, back in the direction from which they had come.
Wounded horses and men and monsters still thrashed and groaned and screamed on the battlefield. Now and again, an Elabonian chariot would halt so its crew could cut the throat of a horse or a monster or a Trokmê, or so the troopers could haul an injured comrade into their car and do for him what they could once they stopped to camp. Some of the injured cried out louder in the jouncing chariots than they had lying on the ground. Their moans made Gerin grind his teeth, but all he could do was keep on.
"One thing," Van said as they entered the woods from which they'd emerged to fight: "we won't have to offer much in the way of sacrifice to the ghosts tonight."
"That's so," Gerin agreed. "We gave them blood aplenty today. They'll buzz round the bodies the whole night long, like so many great carrion flies round a carcass—gloating, I suppose, that all those brave men joined their cold and gloomy world."
The chariots came out of the woods bare minutes before sunset. Gerin led them out into the middle of a broad meadow. "We stop here," he declared. "Van, I leave it to you to get the first fire going." He told off parties to go back to the forest and chop down enough wood to keep the fires blazing all through the night. Nothos would rise with a third of the night already passed, and the other three moons later still.