Summa Elvetica: A Casuistry of the Elvish Controversy and Other Stories (50 page)

The gobbos came up to about a man’s chin, although here and there was a brute nearly as tall as an elf. Behind them was their drivers: big, ugly orcs wearing black leather vests and wielding their whips with indiscriminate savagery. The breeds was ugly, with sharp, elongated features and yellow-green skin, but there was more fear than hate in their eyes. The gobbos didn’t want to be there no more than we did, and it was almost enough to make a man sorry for them—until he recalled that the green bastards would eat you up if given half a chance.

The elves didn’t wait for the gobbos to close with them. They ain’t disciplined like men are. One of them just up and leaped at the goblin front line, jumping about three times farther than any man could, and stuck a sword through a gobbo’s chest on his left while beheading a second gobbo with his right-hand sword. The other elves followed his lead, keening and singing in that eerie way of theirs, happy as reavers in a convent. The center of the goblin line simply melted away before them as the shining elvenblades sent gouts of dark green flying high into the air to the music of the goblins’ frightened wails.

But the elves was louder. “LEE-AH, LEE-AH, LEE-OH!” They repeated it over and over again, cheerfully, and it almost seemed as if they was timing the complex combinations with which they swung their light, but lethal swords to the melodious chant. LEE-AH, LEE-AH, LEE-LEE-LOH-LAH, LEE-LEE-LOH-LAH-LEE-LOH.”

I looked at Capitaine Donnier.

He nodded reflectively and rubbed his chin.

“Impressive, isn’t it?”

“That singing they do—is it connected to how they swing their swords?”

“More or less. Look, you see Lord Ysfaliss there?”

I did. Couldn’t hardly miss him, what with the height and the red armor. Or what he did next.

My jaw dropped as I watched the elf lord effortlessly slash off the hand of one goblin swinging a club at him, then leap up, spin around, and behead two goblins and slash through the throat of a third before his feet touched the ground again. I heard men cry out in amazement, and I felt like I should be applauding. Never seen nothing like it, before or since.

“He’s one of the few blade dancers in Merithaim,” the capitaine observed. “Not a lot of the forest folk go in for that sort of thing, it’s more common among the high elves. Anyhow, that chant is a corruption of what the dancers do. See how he goes two strokes, two strokes, four strokes, six, in time with it? It’s a beautiful art, but with a considerable amount of practical application.”

“How do you know all this stuff, Capitaine?”

The capitaine laughed. “By talking to them, Sergent. Have you no intellectual curiosity? There is more to life than your next drink or your next woman, you know.”

“You sure about that?” I pointed to a second mass of approaching enemy. “Don’t the priests say we should eat, drink, and be merry before we die?”

“As it happens, they teach the precise opposite, Sergent. But I take your point.”

I frowned. I was pretty sure I remembered the words aright from the last time I heard a mass, and the priest was translating from the Script itself. It kind of struck a chord with me, made good soldier’s sense. But I wasn’t about to dispute the capitaine, since he reads a damned sight better than I do.

An elf voice was calling out for the capitaine, and we turned around and saw a young elf who might have even been a she-elf running up to us.

“Capitaine Donnier,” the elf said, a little breathlessly, “His Majesty the King presents his compliments to you and asks if you would relieve Lord Ysfaliss for the period of the next attack.”

The capitaine bowed, almost as graceful as an elf. “Inform His Majesty that I am at his service, and it will be the very great pleasure of the Compagnie de Fleurance to accede to his most gracious request.”

“I shall inform His Majesty at once, Capitaine.” To my surprise, the young elf half-returned the bow. “By your leave, Capitaine.”

Me and Shady looked at each other. An elf, even a young one, bowing to the capitaine? Damn, but we was impressed. I always thought elves was too stiff-necked to think we was any better than gobbos.

The capitaine noticed and shook his head. “What are you two looking at? Hell, Shadow, if you’d just gotten the job done right and fried those bloody boars, the king might have made me an elf prince by now.” He winked at me and turned toward the others. “All right, gentlemen, let’s get to it. You know the drill. Two ranks and a reserve of twenty. Jacques in the center and the reserve with me. Shadow, extricate the reserve from the others and get them back here. Sergent, Baldo, get your boys in place. You've got the flanks.”

Baldo Bigarse and me split up. He took the right flank and I took the left, as usual. The Company roster was two hundred six when we started, and now we was down to one sixty five taking the field today, with thirty-one either sick, wounded, or injured back in camp. We lost ten dead in the pass and looked to lose at least six more of the worse hurt. Everyone was hoping that Ulgor would give up and head back home before we put more names on the butcher’s bill.

“All right, men, time to earn your pay!” I shouted.

Once we was in formation, which didn’t take long, the capitaine addressed us. “Looks like we won’t be needing the pigstickers yet. If the orc sends in his cavalry, the reserve will get them to you before the pigs show up for you to stick them. You’ve fought these gobbos before. You’re going to beat them. But don’t get cocky!”

“Lee-ah, lee-ha, lee-ah,” someone shouted. I couldn’t see who it was, but it sounded like Jérôme. I couldn’t help laughing. So did the rest of the men.

Even the capitaine cracked a grin, but he shook his head.

“None of that elven shit. I see any of you bastards playing the fool out there, and I’ll bust your liquor ration for a month, right? Dancing’s for the bordello, not the bloody battlefield! Keep your shields up and watch your neighbor’s flank. When the horn sounds, we'll kill some gobbos so we can get paid and go home.”

The men cheered without needing any prompting. They didn’t get the capitaine no more than I did, but they trusted him, and I think they was a little giddy about not facing the boars yet.

“Sergent?” One-Eyed Jacques came over from the center with one of the recruits, a big, fair-haired lad named Denisot, in tow. “You need to, like, bless him, Sarge.”

“What?”

“I ain’t done my confession, Sarge!” The poor kid was terrified, almost in tears. “I don’t wanna die with my soul all black with sin, Sarge. I don’t wanna go to Hell! My maman and my sissy went to Heaven, and I gotta go there if I’m ever gonna see ’em again! The caporal said sergents was like priests, or as good as, so you gotta confess me before I gets killed!”

Futter me with a bishop’s bloody staff. Like I said, I ain’t the most religious man that ever walked the earth, them vows last night notwithstanding, but I was pretty sure God didn’t like folks pretending to be a priest when they ain’t. That was blasphemy, or something like.

“One-Eye said that, did he?” I glared at the caporal. “Whatever you did, it can’t be so bad, Denisot. You ain’t even twenty! You hardly had time to do no sinning.”

“Sarge, please, you gotta confess me!”

One-Eye, standing behind him, gestured at me to hurry up. The third wave of goblins was starting to fall back from the elves, making room for their reinforcements to take their place on the lines and leaving scores of their dead behind them.

“All right,” I relented. “One-Eye ain’t wrong. Sergents is like priests, in a way. That’s why you got to follow my orders.”

I glanced up nervously at the sky once or twice as the boy, down on his knees in front of me, confessed to a collection of evil deeds that would just about amount to a slow morning for Bigarse or the Bastard. But lightning didn’t strike me dead just yet, not even when I put my hand on his head like I seen the priests do and told him everything was good betwixt him and God.

“Innominay patree immacolatay feeleo spiritay,” I told him, and damned if I didn’t feel something make my hand jump, like some magic went out of my hand and into his head. Only he didn’t seem to notice it. I stared at my hand for a second then shook my head. Must have imagined it. “Okay, you’re all confessed and clean, lad. Now go forth and kill some gobbos.”

“Thanks, Sarge!” The lad was smiling, the near-tears in his eyes was gone. He walked back to take his position with damn near a spring in his step. If there was anyone on that field ready to face death today, it was that young man. I grinned at One-Eye.

“You got anything you need to confess, caporal?”

“Yeah, I futtered your maman.” He shook his head. “Thanks, Sarge. The lad needed it.”

“I know. Stay safe, Jacques.”

“You too, Sarge.” He saluted and left to rejoin his men.

The men wasn’t inclined to let me forget it, of course. I heard a non-stop stream of questions and ribald comments behind me as we waited for the goblins to approach.

“Hey, Sarge, you do weddings too?”

“Hey, Sarge, if they make you Sanctiff, do that make us celestials?”

“Sarge, why ain’t you wearing one of them funny white hats?”

I let them talk. It didn’t harm no one, and troops that talk are troops thinking they’re going to win. It’s when they get all quiet that you start to wonder if they’re going to break and run on you.

I stepped back into the ranks as the Silverbows went into their pincushion routine on the oncoming gobbos again, shooting over our heads this time, since we was now the front line. It seemed like they wasn’t firing quite as quickly, maybe because we wasn’t their kin or maybe they was just starting to run short on arrows and wanted to save some for the boar riders. Either way, they took out a good thirty or so, and that was thirty that wouldn’t bother us no more. I estimated the goblins was about two thousand in this wave, five hundred of which was coming for our part of the line. Less than four-to-one, which wouldn’t be a problem so long as the lads stood strong.

Unlike the elves had done, we waited for them to come to us. They charged at us, their sharpened wooden poles aimed at our midsections, and they screamed like banshees. But the lads wasn’t intimidated—even the greenest among us had seen it before in the pass.

With my shield, I turned aside the first pole to come my way, then I held my sword out and let the gobbo run himself onto the point. His momentum caused the blade to go all the way through his neck with more than two hands of steel jutting out behind him. Eyes wide with shock, he dropped his weapon and clutched at my sword with both hands, as if to pull it out. I booted him in the stomach and pulled. My sword came out nice and slick, and he collapsed at my feet. It don’t get much easier than that.

I glanced down the line to see how things was going, and I was pleased to see their charge hadn’t knocked us back a step. We might not be dancing, but we wasn’t retreating neither.

A pole knocked against my shield three times, so I slapped it aside with my sword and sent the gobbo holding it reeling with my backswing. I killed him with a stab. Then I killed another one with an overhead swing, and another by bashing it in the face with my shield, then pinning it to the ground. I’d killed four gobbos and wounded three more before I even started to breathe hard. But the gobbos kept coming, more scared of the whips behind them than the blades in front of them, most likely. They wasn’t soldiers. They wasn’t even warriors. None of them seemed to have any idea what to do with their rude wooden spears except poke them at us in a half-hearted manner that was less hazardous to your health than most of the whores I’ve known.

A couple of times some of our men got excitable and started to advance against the crumbling goblin line. I shouted at them to fall back in line, but when Colart pushed out too far and got hisself surrounded, I had to order the whole line forward, while being careful not to go so far that we’d open up a gap and lose contact with One-Eye in the center.

“Left Wing, march by front! Fifteen paces, fifteen on my command. Fifteen!” I shouted. “March!”

Fifty against near two hundred, but we threw them back, smashing our shields into their ugly mugs and cutting them down wherever they tried to stand. There was still four gobbos between our line and Colart, but Gille la Guillée stabbed one, sent another sprawling with a kick in its arse, and then Colart swept the third aside with the flat of his sword. The fourth had the sense to scramble back to the rest of its mates, narrowly avoiding the blades thrusting after it.

“Do we fall back now, Sarge?” someone yelled.

“We took this ground, we hold it,” I shouted back, and the men roared their approval. I was fit to burst, I was so proud of the bastards. But I made sure to catch Colart’s eye, and I glared at him. He was smart enough to look ashamed of hisself.

The goblin right was still falling back, and it wasn’t long before the falling back turned into a retreat even though we wasn’t chasing. The run fever rapidly spread to the enemy center, then to the left. The gobbos knew they couldn’t even push us back, let alone crack us, no more than they could crack the elves. It seemed the fact that, even outnumbered, we could push them back at will was enough to break them. I let the boys shout abuse at their retreating backsides while I went through the ranks, seeing who was hurt and how bad. Turned out Colart was the only one who took more than a few bumps and bruises. He’d taken two nasty cuts from a blade to his right side, so I sent him back to the capitaine and the reserve.

I was just about to tell the men to finish off the goblin wounded and pile the dead in front of the line in a sort of makeshift wall to slow up the next wave when Heimert showed up, dragging four pigstickers with him.

I cursed, knowing what they signified.

“The orc is sending in his boars,” Heimert told me unnecessarily. “Capitaine says two ranks, pair ’em up. Front man goes for the rider, second man for the pig. If they break through, leave them go, the king is sending over a hundred of his elves to reinforce our depth and deal with them. It looks like the infantry might be following the boars.”

“Orc or gobbo?”

“Orcs.”