Indomitus Est (The Fovean Chronicles) (63 page)

    
I chuckled.  “I wouldn’t recommend it,” I told him.

    
“Nor would I,” Ancenon said finally.  “Stop baiting him, cousin, he did nothing wrong, although I expect Glennen will pay large reparations to Sammin’s widow.”

    
“That is nothing to me,” I said, looking forward.  “The man had no honor.”

    
“Honor is a precarious thing,” Ancenon told me.  “You showed none when you slaughtered him – and yet your own men shouted your name.  You replaced him with a boy, and they embrace him.  These Wolf Soldiers of yours – this way you look at War – it is all strange to me, Rancor.  I need it, but I am not sure I like it.”

    
“Tell me again how you feel when we are coming home alive from this mission,” I said to him, a smirk on my face.  He nodded.

    
“There is that, of course,” he agreed.  D’gattis had something to add, but Dilvesh rode in, interrupting him.

    
“To the woods,” he said, out of breath.  I had never seen him that way before.  “A major army of Confluni infantry, heading this way.”

    
“How far?” I asked.

    
“How many?” D’gattis interrupted me.  It was probably a better question.

    
Dilvesh answered both, turning his horse already to bring in our scouts.

    
“Genna estimates ten, maybe twelve thousand,” he said.  “Maybe an hour away, between us and Volkhydro.  They knew we were coming, I am sure.”

    
He rode off, and Ancenon looked at me with silver-on-silver eyes that said everything and nothing.

    
“You were saying?” he asked.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

What Transpired in Conflu

     We numbered four thousand, one hundred men, our officers and ourselves.  They had three times our number, roughly, and surprise.  Thanks to Dilvesh we had a position in a huge glen in the Confluni woods.  I knew nothing about Confluni Wizards, if the Confluni had any, or what training their men had – but went into this fight outclassed.

    
D’gattis turned to Ancenon, and then to me.  Nantar had already started marshalling the troops.  I heard Karl calling orders and then saw him looking over his shoulder, back at me. 

    
“We aren’t ready for them,” the Uman-Chi informed us all.  Brilliant man.

    
“We better be,” I answered him as I reined Blizzard to my right.

    
“Or to die,” Ancenon said, following me.

    
Karl ran to my stirrup a moment later.  “Twelve thousand Confluni, an hour away,” I said.  “Call up the small city and keep them calm.”

    
I pulled Blizzard’s reins to the left and felt his hand on my stirrup.  “The what?” he asked.  “Call up
what
?”

    
I looked down into his sullen brown eyes.  Defeat had been beaten into them long before any idea of victory had been given a chance to take hold.  Blame his father for years of tearing the poor kid down and degrading him in an effort to build a so-called “better man.”  Another example of the high price of bad parenting.

    
“They’ll know,” I told him.  I reached down and put my hand on his shoulder, holding his eyes with mine.  “Act like you know what you want, they will give it to you.  They want winning strategy from me, they just need confidence from you.”

    
He nodded and I rode back toward Nantar.  The Wolf Soldiers and the Free Legion had been extensively trained.  They would do what they needed to do.  At least I hoped they would.

    
Nantar met me halfway through the ranks of the Free Legion soldiers.  “You spoke with Dilvesh?” he asked.

    
“Twelve thousand,” I said.  “Three to one odds.”

    
“Can your men handle that?” Nantar asked.  “Hold the center, let us flank them?”

    
“In infantry to infantry fighting?” I asked him.  “We wouldn’t break but we would be overrun before you could do anything.  I have them starting the small city.”

    
“Make camp?” that was Thorn, who had come up from the rear.  “Sit here and wait for them?  We’ll be slaughtered!”

    
“No,” Nantar said, grinning through his coarse black beard.  “Make them come to us, be prepared – that’s what you want, isn’t it?”

    
“If they can’t just blast us with their magic, then we have a chance,” I said, nodding.  “I put my money on Dilvesh, D’gattis and Ancenon.”

    
Nantar smiled.  Thorn looked skeptical, but he wouldn’t be Thorn otherwise.  The orders were given and that is what counted.

    
Next I found Shela standing next to Dilvesh, neither of them talking.  She’d dismounted and had one hand on a tree, the other on her belly.  She wore her riding leathers, the halter-top and skirt slit up the side.

    
I called her name and she ignored me.  I called her again, louder, and with a flicker in her eye I knew that she had heard.  I waited impatiently, not wanting to interrupt whatever she’d involved herself in.  It took several minutes but felt like an hour.

    
“What?” she asked, finally, her hair already damp with sweat.

    
“You need to go,” I told her.

    
She shook her head; her lips were held tight in a line, her foot planted in the ground.  I saw the defiance in her eyes and the set of her face.  I am sure she saw it in mine, too.

    
“You aren’t endangering our child’s life,” I said.  “We may not walk away from this.”

    
“If I go, I take you with me,” she said.

    
“I will take the skin off your ass.”

    
“So long as you’re there to do it.”

    
“I need her now,” Dilvesh said.  I looked from her to him, his hair damper than hers, his skin more flushed.  Obviously they were working some spell – I never thought they could do that sort of thing together.

    
“We are slowing them,” she answered me, before I could ask.  “We can turn the very forest against them.  He has the ability, I have the power.”

    
“You need the time,” Dilvesh told me.  He looked into my eyes.  “And you need to go, Lupus.”

    
He put his hand on my knee, and this time another held my eyes, reassured me because my confidence had failed me and needed it.  “You need to go.”

    
They were every bit as right as I had been and we could spare no time to argue, at least not then. 

    
I turned Blizzard back to the army, digging like terriers into the glen, and ran right into Genna.

    
I didn’t need this now.

    
“Look,” I began.

    
“You know the report – you know they’re coming?”

    
I looked down at her upturned face.  Finally I saw the professional killer I’d met in Conflu.

    
“I know,” I said.

    
“Can your groups of ten defeat them?”

    
I looked into her eyes.  She searched my face.  I didn’t know why.

    
“In full strength, I would say that the Wolf Soldiers could take them, especially with Aschire archers. These soldiers are my best, but there are just one hundred of them.  I don’t think the Free Legion soldiers can take them man-to-man.”

    
“Is that why we’re doing your biff – wack?”

    
“Yes.”

    
She took a moment to frame what she wanted to ask me.  Looking up, I saw Karl directing my men.  I raised my heels to kick Blizzard into a trot.

    
“Lupus,” she said.  I looked back down at her.

    
“You love her?”

    
Of all the freaking times!  I kicked Blizzard but I felt her hand on my stirrup.   I reined him in and looked back down at her.

    
“Do you?”

    
It would be easier to answer her than not to.  “Yes, Genna,” I said.  “I love her.  With all my heart, like I have never felt for another.”

    
I kicked Blizzard into a trot.

     I’d adapted the small city from what I’d read about the Roman conquest of Gaul.  We’d used it only as an exercise when we bivouacked up to now, but the Romans had originally adopted the practice to make legions more difficult to surprise at night.  Night hadn’t fallen but I still believed that Imperial Rome had something to offer us.

    
Free Legion veterans hit the soft turf with shovels as my Wolf Soldiers began setting up stands of sharpened stakes in the ground.  I had always wondered about that, even as I had included it in my own “small city.”  What type of screaming moron would run headlong into a sharpened stick?  They wouldn’t, of course, but would hesitate instead and move around the spears and ruin their charge, or else be forced into them in an all-out charge by the men behind them.

    
The Free Legion had brought a thousand horse, but my Wolf Soldiers were infantry.  I rode Blizzard, the most destructive force I knew of on four hooves.  As Ancenon, Nantar, Arath and I conferred and Thorn and D’gattis (of all people) directed the excavation of the small city, it became obvious who would lead the horse.

    
“I am not going to kid you, Lupus, you have the most dangerous job,” Arath told me.  “They have only foot troops, but even still, the horse are likely to be overwhelmed.”

    
“Not with me leading them,” I lied.  “I’ll take it.  We can head out into the forest, come back in a wide arc, and catch them in a pincer.”

    
“A what
?
” Ancenon asked.  Unlike the Prince to admit that he didn’t know something, but these were desperate times. “A
pincher
?  What is that?”

    
Earth-slang.  “A
pincer,
” I corrected him.  I made a claw of my hand.  “Like
this
?  Like a crab has.”

    
“You plan to do that with your hand?” Arath furrowed his brow.  It often occurred to me that if I acted more and explained less, then I would get a lot more done, and sooner.  Instead, I shook my head.

    
“A pincer catches a crab’s prey by coming around on either side of it, and squeezing it,” I explained.  “A pincer
movement
involves hitting your
enemy
from both sides or from front and back at the same time.”

    
Now they were nodding.  Actually the Soviet army had used this movement against the Germans in World War II.  The Russians had the advantages of superior numbers but not training – I hoped it would work for us in the reverse.

    
Assuming our training proved superior, of course.

    
Arath took me by my upper arm and drew me close.  “Do you remember the lances?” he asked.

    
I raised an eyebrow.  “I do,” I said, “but you weren’t there.”

    
He grinned.  “Ah, but I
saw
it,” he confessed.  “D’gattis watched you the entire time that day in Conflu.  Well, those troops have practiced with lances.”

    
Son-of-a-bitch.  I thought I was
so
cool.

    
“Thanks for telling me,” I said.  “Well, the secret stays safe a little longer, anyway.”

    
He nodded.  “I’m more worried about them seeing your squads,” Arath said.  “A Confluni army that can defeat three times its number in conventional troops could remake war on Fovea.”

    
“Then we had best kill ‘em all,” Nantar said, grinning.  “Leave no one to tell tales.”

    
I agreed with that.   We spoke some more and coordinated our efforts.  My twenty-three years made me the oldest Man.  Ancenon had lived for centuries, D’gattis had seen Men born and die, and Drekk had seen fifty years, still none of them had much experience to share.  The Confluni did nothing
but
fight.  This would be our greatest challenge yet.  My stomach churned at the thought that we would all likely die today.