The Folding Knife (35 page)
All the Mavortines knew about Vesani fire was that it was certain death--if it hit you, there was no way of putting it out, not even if you jumped into the sea. In the event, Aelius' improvised projector only worked indifferently well; it sent an impressive jet of flame just over the heads of the men pushing the ram, missed the ram itself and set fire to one side of the cart, which burnt in a gradual and unspectacular manner for the rest of the day. That didn't seem to matter, as far as the raiders were concerned. All they knew was that the garrison was armed with the Vesani Republic's deadliest and most secret weapon, and they had no interest whatsoever in getting any closer to it than they could help.
The debate that followed was passionate and bitter and lasted well into the night. Aelius was tempted to try another sortie, but resisted the temptation; his position was now comfortably strong, and a failed sortie was one of the few ways he could bring about his own defeat. He contented himself with shooting a few fire-arrows; they fell well short, but each time one streaked through the sky, the raiders stopped talking and stayed silent for some time.
Just in case, Aelius had thought out a number of strategies, both passive and active, for the next day. In the event, they weren't needed. His Cazar reinforcements arrived in the night, waited in the approved manner until just before dawn, and attacked. Aelius immediately led his men out of the village to take the enemy in flank and rear. There was no real resistance, and the standard encirclement manoeuvre Aelius used to keep any of the raiders from getting away worked perfectly. When there were fifty or so of them left, Aelius halted the massacre and accepted their surrender; the Vesani, he knew, would feel cheated in spite of everything if they had nobody to execute.
In the event, the fifty prisoners made very useful porters. One thing the Treasury men hadn't been able to procure at Anno was carts; which meant that they would have to carry twenty million nomismata down to the sea on their shoulders. To make matters worse, the nearest isolated and unfrequented anchorage capable of accommodating the stone barge was twelve miles away; fifteen, if they were sensible and took the long way round to avoid coming too close to the next village.
Even with the prisoners, Aelius recognised that he had no choice but to press-gang the villagers as porters; he would need at least fifty of his two hundred and seventy-eight men as guards, able to move fast and use their weapons. This would mean they would be both slow and conspicuous, and he had no doubts at all that the arrival of his reinforcements had been noticed in Inguiomera and had excited local curiosity. He would be in difficult, unfamiliar country (unfamiliar to him, but not to the people most likely to attack him) with only a sixty-year-old map copied by a scholar of the Studium from an unknown, unverified source to guide him. So far, true enough, the map had proved marvellously accurate--a miracle, in the circumstances--but, as he is reported to have said to one of his cousins at the time, luck is like an old country bridge: you don't want to have to rely on it when carrying fifteen tons of gold.
His luck held for most of the way. When it ran out, it did so to maximum effect. The band of Mavortines who eventually blocked his way had chosen their ground with care. They waited until Aelius' column had forded, with great difficulty, a deep, fast-flowing river running down from the mountains; then they jumped up from their hiding place among the rocky outcrops that flanked both sides of the only pass marked on the map through the curtain of steep hills that rose above the beach where the stone barge was presumably waiting. Escape to left or right was not attractive. Twenty-five yards on either side of the cattle-drove Aelius had been following, he could see a screen of four-foot-high tussocks of coarse-bladed swamp grass, the unambiguous sign of treacherously wet ground. The drove ran along a causeway, roughly twenty feet wide, six feet or so higher than the marsh, presumably built to allow cattle to be driven down to the sea. If he fell back and tried to escape across the river, the enemy would charge and take him in rear while he was battling with the current. Leaving the causeway and taking his chances in the march would be suicide. Three directions out of four were therefore closed to him, which left him with the cheerful prospect of charging into a narrow defended space, with the enemy commanding the heights above it. Any fool could see that he hadn't brought the Vesani fire projector with him, so the secret-weapon ploy wasn't available this time. He had a hundred men whose hands were free to fight, but at least half of them would be needed to keep the villagers and the captured raiders from running away as soon as his attention was engaged elsewhere.
The last problem was, of course, the least of his worries. In the confined space where the fighting would take place, numbers were as likely to be a hindrance as a help. That was a precept of war, written down in the Book; along with the principle that the best place to attack an enemy is his strongest point, because that's where he least expects it. After a quick conference with his section leaders, Aelius detached his fifty fighters and led them up the causeway toward the enemy.
They were met with a cloud of arrows, which fell short. That he found encouraging. The enemy, it appeared, were no archers. At a hundred and seventy-five yards range, he called a halt and ordered volleys of six shots rapid, aimed not at the defenders of the pass but the men on the hill. The Mavortines draw their bows to the corners of their mouths; the Cazars draw to the ear, and their bows are recurved and backed with sinew. At a hundred and seventy-five yards, the enemy might as well have been shooting at the sun, but they were comfortably within long range of the Cazars.
They killed no more than a dozen of the men on the slopes, but that wasn't the objective; the rest scampered for the cover of the rocks, at which Aelius gave the order to drop bows and go in. It was a risk: he was charging straight at archers, though the narrow mouth of the pass was only wide enough to allow eight men to stand and shoot. His quick mental estimate had been four shots from eight men in the time it'd take him to run a hundred and seventy-five yards; according to the tables at the back of the Book, that should cost him between six and ten men, a price he had no choice but to pay.
In all likelihood, the speed and ferocity of the charge, together with the unnerving sight of seeing their colleagues on the hill shot down or driven off at an apparently impossible distance, had a bad effect on the nerves of the archers in the pass. They managed to get off three shots each, but their first volley went high, the second was rushed and snatched and scored no hits; two of Aelius' men were hit by the third discharge, but he'd put the men with some form of armour in the front rank, and all three hits glanced off. The archers, having seen with their own eyes that arrows had no effect on these terrible people, dropped their bows and tried to run, only succeeding in barging into their colleagues jammed in behind them. At that point, Aelius' charge went home.
His last order had been: kill as few as possible. Dead bodies, he knew only too well, clog up a narrow space like nothing else. Unfortunately, presented with a confused mass of men who were more concerned with wrestling their way past their own rear echelon than trying to fight, it was an impossible order to follow. Even so, it didn't prove to be an insuperable problem. Scrambling over the mat of dead bodies, they quickly cut through into the open; the enemy had untangled themselves and run, leaving the road downhill to the sea wide open.
Aelius immediately called a halt. He could still lose the engagement and everybody's lives by pressing on to pursue an enemy he had no real interest in, and there were still enemies on the slopes above and behind him. He went back to the mouth of the pass and waved to his column to advance at the double; then he sent his men up onto the slope to flush out the enemies there.
Having seen the main strength of their force slaughtered and routed, the archers on the hill showed no interest in mounting a desperate counter-attack. They ran; and when Aelius was satisfied that they were going to keep running for some time, he sent twenty men ahead to make sure the road was clear and there were no further ambushes. He followed at the head of the column, forcing a lively pace. With no further annoyance from the enemy, they made it down to the seashore in excellent time, to find that there was no sign of the stone barge.
At that point, Aelius later admitted, he was sure he was going to die. If the ship wasn't there, it could only be because something had happened: it had sunk or been attacked or impounded, and it wasn't going to come. By now, he'd killed so many Mavortines that the obligation to revenge their dead would matter more to their kinsmen than the gold, which meant that dumping the treasure and running away wouldn't solve everything at a stroke. He seriously considered it, however; they could run a lot faster without the weight, and without several hundred prisoners. However, he dismissed the idea. It would be worse than death, he said, to have abandoned the gold and watched the survivors of the ambush help themselves to it, only to be rescued by the slightly delayed stone barge half an hour later. In short, the only option left to him was to sit on the beach and hope the ship came, and that he proceeded to do.
As Aelius had guessed, the ship had had its own adventures to contend with. When the two Treasury officials requisitioned the ship, naturally they didn't tell the crew what it was needed for. But they must have guessed, or overheard an indiscreet conversation between the Treasury men, because as soon as they were out of sight of land, they seized their captain and first mate and secured them in the charcoal hatch, and sent representatives to the Treasury men to tell them that they knew what the mission was, and they wanted five per cent of the recovered money as their fee for their part of the job.
The Treasury men denied all knowledge of any money, which annoyed the crew, who dropped anchor. The Treasury men then admitted that they were on their way to pick up the stolen gold, but they themselves had no authority to make any sort of deal, so it was pointless holding up the mission and quite probably dooming it to failure in an attempt to extort from them promises that they freely admitted would be worthless. If, however, they cooperated, released the captain immediately and did everything they could to make up lost time, there was still a chance that the mission would succeed, in which case they were quite confident that First Citizen Basso would show his generous gratitude to everybody involved in the recovery, including themselves. If the mission failed because of the crew's actions, however, they held out little or no hope of them ever returning safely to the City; instead, they would most certainly be arrested and charged with piracy, obstructing government agents and quite possibly aiding and abetting the raiders after the fact, any one of which offences carried the death penalty.
They presented their case well, and eventually the crew gave in; by then, however, the wind had dropped, and they had to wait four hours before it came back. By the time they reached the rendezvous point, they were running six hours late and night was falling. There was no sign of anybody on the beach. The crew representatives took this to mean that the mission had failed, and that if anybody was waiting for them, it would be hostile Mavortines. They therefore refused to take the ship in. It was only after a further hour of bitter debate that the Treasury men induced them to launch a boat and go in close, to see if anybody came out to make contact.
By then it was pitch dark, and the boat crew refused to show a light. The most they would agree to do was call out in Vesani and wait for a reply. On their third hail they were answered by Aelius himself (the only Vesani speaker in the party), who assured them that he was there, and asked them what they thought they were playing at.
The captain of the barge pointed out to the Treasury men that beaching the ship in the dark was too dangerous to contemplate. Either they could try and get the gold and the men aboard using the barge's two boats (big enough to carry six men, or two men and five hundredweight of cargo), or else they would have to wait for daylight. The boat went back to Aelius with these options, and Aelius reluctantly chose the latter. He and his men had been fortunate enough to find a cave, just above the tideline, where they'd cached the gold and the prisoners. If absolutely necessary, they could spend the night there. The ship, meanwhile, should stand out to sea, in case the Mavortines tried swimming out and boarding it.
Dawn brought with it the unwelcome sight of about four hundred Mavortines, drawn up on the beach; presumably the survivors of the fight in the pass, together with as much support as they'd been able to raise in a hurry. It was evident that they had too much respect for Aelius to try and force the cave, even in the dark. Beaching the ship with them there would, of course, be impossible. Aelius was (by his own later admission) at a loss when heralds came forward and asked to negotiate.
Their demands, they felt, were reasonable. They wanted a third of the gold, together with indemnities of a hundred nomismata per man for those of their colleagues who'd been killed at the village and in the pass: a sum which, by their calculations, came to seventy thousand nomismata. In return, they would go away and leave the Vesani to load their ship.
Aelius replied that he would give them a quarter of the gold in full settlement, but in return they would have to help load the other three-quarters. The heralds conferred for a while and said that that was acceptable, provided that the Vesani released the fifty survivors of the original raiding party before they started loading. Aelius said he would release the men, but only when loading was complete. The revised terms were agreed. The heralds went back to their colleagues, and Aelius' men began bringing the gold out of the cave onto the beach. Aelius, meanwhile, flashed the agreed signal to the barge to come in to land.
