Battledragon (47 page)

The tubes exploded almost as one, in a last titanic volley.

The ground heaved, the world was reduced to shattering sound, and a huge cloud of dust and smoke arose that obscured everything.

Shards of metal and superheated rock continued to fall from the sky for several seconds afterward.

Relkin and Jak were coughing fit to burst, even Stripey was snorting and snuffling inside the pack, but the hollow had sheltered them. The Kraheen who had rashly entered the position had been annihilated.

It was safe to stand up. Relkin took his taper back to where the fire had been. It had been scattered. A fragment of metal as big as himself had dug into the ground there like a giant knife.

He searched frantically for a few moments until he found a smoldering brand. This he took back to the surviving tube and pressed it to the touch hole.

"Run Relkin," screamed little Jak, taking off at a wild pace, his pack jouncing on his shoulders.

Relkin took out after him, pushing himself. He slipped on a patch of bloodstained ground and staggered.

A moment later the tube behind him blew, and the force of the explosion lifted him off his feet. Something hard struck him a glancing blow on the back of the helmet, and he never felt the landing.

Commander Voolward struggled to keep the lid on the panic he felt rising up to overwhelm him. The situation was very difficult and could at any time become nightmarish.

At first the retreat had seemed quite a tactical success. The enemy weapon tubes were destroyed in a series of cataclysmic blasts, and all but two of the volunteers were recovered. The legions, guarding the wagon train, had reached the western hillocks. The cavalry had selected a defensible position straddling two adjacent small hills that acted as towers, with good clear fields of fire, allowing good protection of the space between them. Here they cut down the forest to build a barricade and threw up a rampart. Behind this they packed the ox train and set up tents.

While they fortified, the Kraheen infiltrated the woods around them, and a harassing rain of arrows began to make operations more difficult. The legion bowmen and dragon-boys did their best to counter this fire, but they were greatly outnumbered. Dragons were used to hurl sudden barrages of rocks in the direction of particularly troublesome enemy archers. Yet the enemy clung on out there, circling, calling out to their Prophet, while their drums rumbled and thundered.

The legions did their best to ignore them while eating a necessary meal and taking some rest. The Kraheen showed no inclination to risk the casualties involved in attacking a fortified legion position, especially one as well protected as this. Thus a generous schedule of rests and watches was set up, leaving most of the men free to grab some food and then some sleep. It had been a long, exhausting day. Despite the danger of their position, they slept like the dead.

Still the drums thundered and arrows flicked in out of the dark, occasioning more casualties. The surgeons, aided by the witches, were working flat out to try and deal with the worst cases from the battle, but there was a mountain of work. And yet there was a steady dribble of freshly wounded men.

After the very worst cases had been dealt with, Lessis excused herself from the surgeons' tent and went with Lagdalen on a tour of the position. Wherever the Grey Lady went, morale soared, and the effect remained even after she had gone. It was not as if the men loved her, or any witch, that much. Indeed, they tended to regard the witches with suspicion. Nor was it the presence she projected, for that was ordinary to a fault, like her plain grey clothing. And yet when she had gone, with her small smile and honest grey eyes, the men felt better, stronger, and ready to take on the enemy no matter what they brought against them.

Lessis studied the situation, then went to see Commander Voolward.

"Well, Lady, what is the situation in the medical tent?" Voolward had the drawn, attenuated look of a man taxed to the limits.

"Not good, Commander, there are many men who should not be moved."

"Well, they needn't be for a few more hours, but I'm afraid they will have to move before dawn."

Lessis nodded, feeling relief that Voolward understood what was happening.

"The enemy is bringing up his weapons in the night."

"Yes, Lady, and he will assault us with them in the morning. We must be gone from here before then."

"What direction will you go?"

"I think south and west from here. Through country much like this, but there is a usable road that runs about eight miles westward of here. We can take it for as much as fifty miles south and west."

"You intend to remove the wounded from the scene, get to a place beyond the range of the enemy weapons."

"As a first step, yes."

"And then you will reengage?"

Voolward hesitated. "With such casualties, I am not sure that we can do that."

"There are still thousands of us, we must go on. We must stop the enemy from developing this weapon any further."

Voolward fell silent for a long moment, then he shrugged.

"Well, whatever we hope to do, we must withdraw first and recover. Our wounded must be seen to a place of safety."

Lessis agreed with Voolward's plan and did her best to improve his mood with only the mildest of spell effects. The prohibition against the use of magic to influence the military was only absolute when it came to changing the minds of officers and overruling their judgments. Morale improvements were not considered real breaches of the rule.

The witches returned to the surgeons' tent after taking some hot kalut at the cook fire. Once more they took up washbasins, towels, and bandages, and returned to the grisly tasks that are the residue of war.

Lagdalen had some saddening news. Relkin of Quosh had been lost in the retreat. He had been one of the volunteers for destruction of the enemy tubes, and had not returned from the explosive blasts. The broketail dragon was heartbroken.

Lessis gave a sigh. In the five centuries she had lived, she had seen a great many men and women come and go. She had regretted many an undeserved and early death. And yet she shared the dragon's grief, for this one came very close to her heart. In a very real way Relkin had saved her life on one occasion, in the catacombs of Tummuz Orgmeen. He had given much to the Argonath and would be missed by his friends. Lessis of Valmes felt a shaft of sorrow at the thought of this loss. That young rascal from that obscure village with the laughable name had come to personify for her the strengths of the Argonath itself.

The parade of the wounded went on and on, though the worst cases were finally behind them. These had been loaded directly onto the wagons that would go out in the second wave in the morning. This would allow them to recover slightly before they had to withstand the jolting progress of the wagons going through rough country. Meanwhile the lesser cases, men with cuts and gouges, some broken limbs and ribs, came in an endless tide.

Sometime around the midnight hour, however, there came a new development that made everyone very nervous. Suddenly the Kraheen began sending in fire arrows. At first just a few, then more and more, until there were Kraheen arrows sunk in many trees, burning steadily.

The trees were not that dry that they could be lit in this way, and wherever small fires did begin, the men soon put them out. Still the fire arrows came, and Voolward realized with grim horror that they were simply helping the enemy aim the tubes.

A minute later they heard the first distant boom. It was loud, and thus they knew the enemy had brought the tubes quite close to them. It was followed by a volley of eleven more.

The aim was poor, and the first few volleys crashed mostly into the forest, quite short of their position. Some of the balls ricocheted over their heads, screaming through the air, and one or two slammed into the wagon park, overturning wagons and slaughtering oxen.

This had Voolward on the edge of panic. Any loss in the ox train would be a deathblow. They would be forced to abandon their wounded. In practice, that meant they would have to kill them because no one would leave a comrade to the torments of the Kraheen.

Inevitably they had to move even sooner than anticipated. The cornets shrilled, orders were distributed, and while the enemy continued to fire volleys at them every twenty minutes or so, the legions made shift to move from their prepared positions.

A strong party was sent out on the preferred route, to clear the Kraheen out of the way. They burst through the Kraheen screen and dispersed the enemy on that side of the camp. Bowmen flooded the woods there to pick off enemy snipers.

The ox train began rolling. The cavalry went out ahead, working through the pitch-dark woods, seeking the best trail for the wagons.

By now the enemy was finding the range, and volley after volley fell on the hilltops or within the vale between them. This hurried the retreat, and things began to grow a little ragged. Even the training of the Imperial legionaries began to fray under these conditions.

Once they were out in the woods, a new phase of the struggle began as near invisible bands of Kraheen filtered in around them and engaged in hit-and-run attacks.

It became very difficult to maintain cohesion in these conditions. The long wagon trains had to be protected, and this stretched out their forces along the rough path they were taking. Dragons were essential to cutting and clearing the route they were following, which made them vulnerable to sniper attacks. There was a constant battle at the front of the column to keep the Kraheen away from the dragons and engineers, working to build the way for the wagons.

All this slowed their progress toward that promised road, eight miles to the west. Voolward was left to pray, helplessly, that the enemy would be just as slow in bringing up his terrible weapons.

Conditions approached a crisis, but the real catastrophe began when a great stone ball struck a pine tree right over Commander Voolward's head and dropped half of it right on him and Commander Flades. Both men were crushed into the muddy stream that the engineers were bridging with a rough-hewn construction of trees cut down with dragon-sword.

The legions struggled on; everyone had their job to do, and they continued to do it, but there was a fatal gap of time before Major Herta and Captain Denk rode up to take command. Count Felk-Habren was left in charge during this period and he called for volunteers to turn back and attack the enemy weapons in the dark. This dreadful retreat from an enemy they had bested on the battlefield was not the count's idea of how to wage war.

Dragon Leader Wiliger was taken with this idea and committed the survivors of the 109th to it at once. They grouped with fifty surviving Czardhans, some Bakani foot soldiers, and a dozen Kenor bowmen, and moved out, straight back on the road they had hacked out of the wilderness. The Grey Lady accompanied them, determined to destroy the enemy weapons if at all possible.

The legions continued the retreat, harried by the Kraheen for the rest of the night. Major Herta and Captain Denk drove themselves mercilessly and were finally brought a little good news from scouts riding in from a mission that had penetrated all the way to the western road.

They had the welcome news that the road was there, and that it seemed like a good one. Once they reached it, they would be able to make much better time. They would soon outdistance the enormously bulky enemy weapons.

Unfortunately, their progress was slowed by a stretch of deeply cut ravine land. Getting the wagons through in the dark was a horrendous task, and as they jolted over rocks, the wounded gave out piteous screams.

The dawn found them stretched out for miles in this difficult country, surrounded by packs of Kraheen. Chaotic fights were in progress at many points.

At the rear of the column, packs of trolls and platoons of imps had joined the Kraheen, and they began to overwhelm the resistance.

The imps reeked of the black drink, and under its spell they happily risked death as they sought to bury their blades in Argonath flesh. The fighting grew more desperate, and several times groups of trolls managed to cut their way through and get into the ox train, where they slew oxen and wounded quite indiscriminately.

But a sudden cessation of bombardment from the enemy weapons gave the escaping columns a fighting chance. By the forenoon, the front half of the wagon train was safely on the western road and moving away. The surviving fighting forces concentrated on extricating as much as possible of the rest. Dragons set several fierce little ambushes during the afternoon and soon made the pursuit turn cautious. Still the enemy took prisoners, both wounded and fit, and there was nothing the men of the Argonath could do to save their comrades. In the end the remnants of the army escaped onto the western road and fled as fast as they were able.

Consciousness was slow to return, and fitful. For a long while Relkin lay in the dark and drifted in and out of dreams in slow waves that broke on unseen shores of the dark. There was a dull ache in his head, blood crusted down his cheek and neck, and a very tender area on one side.

It was very dark, cool, and damp, and he wondered how he had come to be in this place.

His memories were hazy, however. For a long time he thought of Eilsa Ranardaughter, and of the life with her that he dreamed of. He thought of her wild blond hair, the determined jut of her chin, and her keen, well-directed intelligence. She had a startling honesty that sometimes made him love her so much it felt as if his heart would burst. He and she were made for each other, a match blessed by the gods and the Great Mother.

One day they would build a cabin in the forests of Tuala. And together with the dragon they would clear land and plant their first crops. While the crops grew, they would start a family.

Even in hazy dreams this thought was startling for Relkin, whose only family had been a two-ton leatherback dragon and the 109th Marneri Dragon squadron.

Then, gradually, memories came back of the long, arduous campaign. The march, the terror birds in the ruined temple, the monsters that haunted the eerie, ancient forest, the little striped elephant, images of all these things kept popping up in his mind until the pieces fitted back together. Finally came memories of the battle on the place of Broken Stone. The defeat of the Kraheen, the savage fight with the imps and trolls, and the terrible destruction wrought on the legions by the enemy's secret weapons.