Wrath Of The Medusa (Book 2) (11 page)

“He is a stubborn cuss, this half-elf,” Dema growled. 

The clash of battle was closer now.  The Redfangs had reformed their line a me
re four hundred yards from the Medusa’s command post.  All semblance of rout had gone as the baying orcs presented a solid disciplined front to the advancing soldiers of Medyrsalve.   But the weight of silver numbers was beginning to tell.  In his centre division Rugan outnumbered the Redfangs two to one.  Archers firing over the serried ranks of spearmen added to the mayhem and, for all their brute courage and prowess in arms, the Redfangs were thinning fast.

“It is time, Lady,” Willem urged.  “Give the order.”

Dema reached over to seize the outlander captain by his gorget.  Kimbolt saw her fingers dent the metal of his armoured throat piece.  “Willem,” she spat into his face.  “No one, absolutely no one, tells me what orders to give or when.”

“Pardon, Lady,” the big outlander whimpered. “But Nagbadesh will be overrun within five minutes. I did not think we could delay.”

“It is not time, not yet.” Was her only reply, her gaze scanning left and right across the battlefield.

On either flank the forces of Medyrsalve sensed their imminent victory.  The sapping struggle in the centre was almost won, the next and final phase would be the rolling up of the wings of Dema’s army.  To the south, the
spearmen and archers who had held the nomads at bay began to surge forward, committing to an assault they were certain would be supported by a flanking manoeuvre from Rugan’s victorious centre.  To the North, the heavy cavalry, tired of toying at a distance with the Blackskulls, formed up for a charge into the heart of Porgud’s tribe. 

Dema nodded slowly at the commitment of Rugan’s entire sixteen thousand to wholesale assault.  “Now,” she said.  “Now is the time.”  She turned to Kimbolt, “ride, ride to the little wizard and tell him it is time.  Ride fast.”

Kimbolt spurred his horse in a frantic ride towards the bridge.

Major Darbon brought his sword crushing down on another orcish skull.  Black blood and brains spattered across the once silver barding of his horse, adding to the ichor of a dozen defeated Redfangs.  “Glorious,” he cried as he threaded a path through the thinning ranks of the orc tribe.

Somewhere to his right the Prince was shouting, “Drive on, Medyrsalve, Drive on, force the scum into the river.”

There was a fizzing noise distant but loud, which had the Major looking round.  From the bridge a smoky trail led into the sky where a small incandescent globe was rising upwards ever upwards.  There was flash of brilliant light as the globe exploded and then a thunderous blast of sound, so loud that for a fraction of a second all fell silent.  But nothing else happened, no harm was done, save to Darbon’s ringing eardrums.  So, without a second thought, he set to laying about him slashing through the grasping hands of orcs as they sought in vain to unhorse him.

The task was harder now, a new determination had fired the aching sinews of the Redfangs.  One flung itself at his horse’s neck, and clung there even after he’d cut the bastard’s head off.  The animal neighed and swung round in a desperate bid to dislodge the green spurting body.  Darbon struck it in the chest with the hilt of his sword and at last the corpse dropped to the ground to be trampled underfoot.

“By the Goddess,” the Prince cried out in alarm to the Major’s right.  Darbon glanced across.  Rugan, his sword slick with black-green blood from tip to hilt was gazing past him over to the Southern flank of the army.

Darbon swung to his left
to see the source of Rugan’s discomfort.  There were the nomads, locked in a tussle with the spearmen, but the archers behind them were breaking falling back.  Why?  Darbon looked beyond, standing up in his stirrups to see over the milling throng.

There were others, pouring up through gullies from the dry edge of the river bed.  Hundreds, no thousands. 
Hidden beneath the parapet formed by the banks of the low running Saeth, they now flooded out onto the plain, deploying in a long line running East to West all along the Southern flank of Rugan’s hard pressed army.  There were nomads in the lead, then orcs, then lumbering after them a division of something foul.  The fetid stench drifted over as far as Darbon’s nostrils. 

The M
ajor gulped back nausea and fear.  They were not just being outflanked, but in danger of encirclement.  The fast moving fresh orcs and humans could quickly circle round to cut off their retreat to the Gap of Tandar.  It was a whole new army scarcely smaller than the one they had fought so hard all morning, and this one entirely unscathed.

“Sound the retreat,” Rugan was yelling. 

He urged his horse close to Darbon as the Major relayed the dread command.  “Retreat.”

“The witch has betrayed us,” Rugan spat in Darbon’s ear.

“Which witch sire?”

“Both of them!”

“Hold a m
oment Captain, Captain Kimbolt isn’t it,” Odestus called back the anxious messenger.

“Aye, my Lord,” the soldier admitted looking down from the saddle at the wizard.  “That is my name, but now my message is delivered and the
signal given, I would be back at my Mistress’s side.”

“Your M
istress, yes,” Odestus stepped towards Kimbolt’s horse.  He took hold of the cob’s bridle and patted its neck clumsily.  The horse swung its head and would have taken a chunk out of the wizard’s shoulder but for the bit between its teeth. The wizard stepped back, stumbling out of the horse’s way, while Kimbolt watched in puzzlement.  “Er… I wanted to speak to you about your Mistress, Captain.”

“My Lord?” Kimbolt’s confusion was complete.

“It was just,”  Odestus stared over the Captain’s shoulder.  “I wondered… that is to say…”

“My Lord, I really must return to her,” Kimbolt insisted with firm deference.  “She will not be pleased if I delay.”

“Exactly, er quite so.  I mean – have you noticed any change in her manner?  Any differences these last few weeks?”

Kimbolt looked at him steadily.  “She
has always been good to me my Lord, when I have deserved it.”

Odestus frowned.  “And you
my fellow, are you quite well, recovered I mean?”

“I have had no fever since you tended me my lord,” Kimbolt smiled.  “Though to be sure, being cured by a wizard must have put the orcish shamans to shame.”

“And in your mind? All is well? You enjoy a restful and untroubled sleep? No uncertainties to cloud your day.”

“I am a soldier, my L
ord and a survivor as my Mistress has told me.  I serve the cause as best I can.”

Odestus stared into Kimbolt’
s eyes, peering for a window to his soul, but the Captain’s expression was unreadable.  He hauled on his horse’s reins and swung the cob away.  “I must go my lord,” he said gently and spurred his steed without waiting for the wizard’s dismissal.

“The lady’s pet is of great interest to you, Governor,” the pale secretary Vesten addressed the wizard’s shoulder.

“I am interested in Dema,” Odestus replied.  “And in everything about her.  That man has got closer to her than anyone I’ve ever known.”

“The Lady is o
n the brink of a great victory.   That should give her much pleasure, today.  We will all rest easier with her happiness.”

Odestus pursed his lips. 
“I wish her well of it.”

“It will rival your own triumph at Bledrag field, Governor.”

“That was my first and last battle, Vesten.  It was a far simpler and less subtle struggle than the one the lady engages in this day.  I have not Dema’s thirst for warfare, nor one fraction of her talent.”

“Will you not take station with the forces of Undersalve Governor.  Galen may have need of your counsel.”

Odestus shook his head.  “I’m staying here Vesten.  Let Galen have his glory. He’s brought them all the way from Undersalve, let him prove what he can do when the talking is done and the fighting begun.  But you go, go give the blasted necromancer my best wishes for success.”

Vesten shuffled from one foot to the other and pulled at his straggly beard.  “I’ll stay here, Governor, if it is all the same.  The Lord Galen – he, he…..”

“He is an arse,” Odestus interjected.  “While he is a skilful necromancer he is an even more consummate arsehole.  If he could but swop those aptitudes around he would still be a competent enough shitter, but a wizard to rival Maelgrum himself.”

“Indeed, Governor,” Vesten replied.  He stepped back out of Odestus’s field of attention, but made no move to travel further and deliver the governor’s regards to the despised apprentice.

“My Prince,” Darbon called across to Rugan in the midst of a disciplined reforming of battle lines.  “The southern division, they will be overrun.”

Rugan paused in his barked commands to look across at the hard pressed corps.  Around the two commanders the silver soldiers milled in disciplined re-ordering of their formation.  A fraction of the centre still kept watch against the Redfangs to the West, the orcs too exhausted to press home their advantage.  The rest of the Prince’s soldiers were swiftly redistributing themselves along a West to East line, in an effort to match the unfolding deployment of the newly revealed army of Undersalve to the South.  The lead humans and orcs in that fresh foe were racing East towards the Palacinta hills, trying to work around the end of Rugan’s line and encircle his force.   The Prince’s men were hurrying to head off that fate.

The southern corps were out of reach of any aid.  The archers overrun by the foul smelling undead that the Lady Niarmit had spoken of.  Without their protection the
spearmen were assailed to the front by the resurgent nomad foot soldiers and to the flank by the nomad cavalry.  It would be a charnal house.

“We must strike out for their relief,” Darbon urged his Prince.

“Fool, Major, they are lost,” Rugan barked.  “We can do nothing for them except hope that they buy us enough time to make good our retreat.  The Goddess will bless them for it.”

The P
rince wheeled his horse around, calling out for a yeoman to signal his heavy cavalry.

For a moment Darbon looked once more at the
spearmen enveloped by nomads and their covering archers mauled by vile creatures unhindered, still less halted, by the arrows which had turned them into mobile pincushions.   The Prince had abandoned to its fate a quarter of his already sorely outnumbered army, and the Major had to agree, he was right.  They must save what they could, which might well be nothing at all.

“He will break,” Willem said.  “He must break.”

“It matters not when or whether he breaks,” Dema growled.  “He is doomed.  All the discipline of the parade ground will not save him now.”

Kimbolt, breathing heavily after his gallop back from the wizard, stared out over the developing battlefield.  The forces of Medyrsalve were streaming out to cover the new threat from the south and still offer some resistance to the army of Dema to the west.  The L-shaped deployment was a hasty improvisation to try and cover a fighting withdrawal from two battle fronts.  Kimbolt could tell it would not work.  Neither arm would have the strength to withstand the forces opposing it.

“Gap, there lady,” Barnuck growled, pointing East.

“He wriggles hard this half-breed,” Dema admitted as they watched the Prince’s heavy cavalry galloping across the rear of his army to stop the vanguard of the army of Undersalve.

“He’s trying to keep open a door to retreat,” Willem said.  “Trying to keep a pathway to the Palacintas so his dogs can take refuge in the hills.” 

“But if the heavy cavalry has gone south, he has left nothing but a screen of skirmishers to cover his North side against Porgud and the Blackskulls!” Kimbolt found he had thought aloud.

“Exactly,” Dema concurred.  “See Willem, the good Captain has spotted the enemy’s mistake before you.  Perhaps it should be you I send with messages and he that I hark to for matters of battle.”

The big outlander glared at Kimbolt with deeply hooded eyes.

“The question,” Dema went on.  “Is why chief Porgud has not seized his advantage.  The Blackskulls should
now be able to trample all the way up Rugan’s arse.”

Kimbolt
looked away from Willem’s hostility across the Southern portion of the battlefield.  A movement caught his eye, something cresting the rise that separated the channel of Torrockburn from the plain where the Eastway ran.  He hesitated to say anything, for fear of attracting more ire from Dema’s generals, so it was Barnuck who called it first.

“Lady, more come!  T
here!”

“Horsemen?” Willem was puzzled as he squinted towards the fresh arrivals.  “Are they giants riding, or are they far away?”

“Not horsemen or giants,” Dema snapped.  “They’re men riding ponies.  It seems the force of Oostsalve is not so distant as Odestus had thought.”

“Make no difference,” Barnuck growled.  “More fools to kill.”

“Exactly.  Barnuck, Willem get your troops mounted.  It is time we joined this battle.  Let’s show the Redfangs how a warrior makes an end of it.  Kimbolt, head south.  Our nomads take too long chewing over Rugan’s spears and archers.  Bid them get back into battle.  Tell them the despatch of the dying and the looting of the dead can wait.”

“Mistress,” Kimbolt dipped his head, and reluctantly turned his horse away from Dema’s side.