Doom's Break (8 page)

The admiral's angry words broke the spell. But the men were still uncertain. The orders went out, the drums beat, and they set off again but at a noticeably slower pace.

They had taken five strides when the head appeared once more, this time about a hundred paces to the left of the previous spot. The huge head slid out of concealment and then rose just like a serpent's might.

The men quailed and came to a halt.

The head rose up, swung from side to side as if it were studying them, sizing them up for its next meal.

Officers shouted at the men. Heuze screamed at the officers. Polluk went white-faced with indecision and fear.

The head had disappeared again, back into the dim recesses of the forest.

"I don't care what the fornicating thing is. Get your men into those trees and find those monkeys."

"Yes, sir."

Once again the men set off, and this time the head did not appear. On into the trees they pressed, until they came to a ravine with a small stream at the bottom. The slopes were steep and strewn with boulders. The formations broke up as they scrambled down.

Then the head reappeared, upstream a little ways. This time it showed itself only for a moment and then vanished.

Everyone froze.

"It's up there," a soldier said.

"Silence in the ranks!" roared a captain.

The men were frozen. They hunched forward, spears in hand. The archers nocked arrows and prepared to fire. Everyone expected an attack from the thing.

Nothing happened. A long ten seconds passed, and then Heuze bellowed at them to get moving. Once again they obeyed, scrambling through the streambed and up the far side. Still there was no sign of the enemy, nor of the huge head and neck.

Heuze paused, undecided. To go farther into the unknown, unscouted woods was foolhardy. He knew what that might lead to. The chance of slaughtering a few hundred monkeys was not enough of a lure.

"All right," he said at last. "Turn them around. Let's get back to that siege tower and dismantle it."

"Yes, sir." Polluk was visibly relieved. The men were quite happy to turn about and retrace their steps, and in just a few minutes they were moving back through the woods.

Back across the gulley they went, with some chatter about the damned "beast" and its probable sexual habits. Officers yelled at the men to shut it, but still the chatter went on, though in whispers and grins.

They recrossed the wider meadow and returned to the scene of the siege tower. The carpentry team had been hard at work. Piles of neatly cut beams and planks were stacked at the bottom of the siege tower.

Orders went down the line. They would work in their usual units, five men making a squad. One man would carry all their shields and spears. The others would take up the beams and planks and lug them back to the fort.

In a few minutes a steady line of men, paired off to carry the beams, headed through the woods toward the fort.

Heuze was still puzzled. Why had the monkeys reduced their forces around the fort? Had they gone somewhere else?

With a little help from Combliss, he got back to the cleared space in front of the walls. He accepted Combliss's aid now without grumbles. His stump was far too sore for that.

Once he was out of the woods, Heuze noticed that something strange had happened. "The gate is shut. Who told them to do that?"

"No one, sir," said Polluk.

The men carrying beams were still marching toward the gate, expecting it to be opened at any moment.

Heuze also noticed that the imperial banner was no longer waving above the gate tower. "Who told them to take down the banner? I want to celebrate our triumph, damn it!"

With sickening suddenness, the top of the stockade filled with dark figures. Bows bent and arrows came hurtling out into the ranks of the men bearing timber.

Screams of rage and then terror broke out in the ranks. Beams were dropped hither and thither as the men scrambled back.

Heuze stared, dumbfounded. "The sodomistic monkeys have taken the fort," he breathed, scarcely able to believe it. "While we were out chasing that will-o'-the wisp in the forest, they captured the fornicating fort!"

"So it, uh, seems, sir."

Heuze flung his hat down into the dust and stamped on it with his peg leg, ignoring the sudden spurt of pain from his stump. "How in the name of the Great God did your men let this happen?" he roared at Polluk.

Polluk's eyes flashed in outrage. He was being blamed for this?

Heuze, for once, had the decency to look away and swallow his next words. Indeed, it was hardly Polluk's fault. He'd wanted to leave four hundred men. Heuze had insisted on leaving just two hundred.

"Sir?"

"Yes, Polluk?"

"What are we going to do now?"

Heuze reflected that he probably deserved that one. He gave a grunt and stood there, working on the problem, when a shout directed his attention to the woods on the far side of the clearing. A large formation of mots was marching out under their own banners. Pikes and spears formed a forest above their heads. Their shields were painted brown with a green wave, which made their united front look like a single living thing.

Heuze gave a strangled cry. He was trapped again. He was outside the protection of the fort and the enemy was launching a frontal attack.

Panic would be disastrous, Heuze understood that. But it was hard not to panic as rank on rank of monkeys came on with their shields held up.

He forced himself back from the brink of panic. He had a thousand men. In theory, that would be good enough to counterattack. But he knew that they were tired and out of formation. They'd been chasing the monkeys through the woods for an hour or more. And they were cut off from the fort, which had fallen in some mysterious fashion to the enemy.

Now his tired men were about to be attacked by what looked to be a force larger than their own. Heuze had learned from bitter experience that while the men of Shasht were better soldiers than the mots, they could not always overcome them.

A glance to his right showed that Polluk was waiting for him to make a decision. The officers behind Polluk were waiting, too. They were all waiting for him. He had taken command of this mission, and now it was up to him to get them out of this jam.

Heuze spun around. "We have to fight our way down to a beach. What is the nearest, practical route down from these cliffs?"

A young lieutenant with red hair shouted, "The backhead trail, sir! It's almost a mile north of here."

"Good. What's your name?"

"Cump, sir."

"General Polluk, I suggest you put Cump here up for promotion, if both of you survive the rest of this day."

Polluk said nothing to that but turned away and began issuing orders for the companies to face right and march quickly for the trees.

"At the treeline we will form into column by company and march up the coast to the backhead trail."

Earlier the men had wanted a fight, but now they weren't so keen. There seemed to be a hell of a lot of the fornicating monkeys over there. And there might be more in the woods trying to get on their flank.

At the edge of the forest, Heuze looked back. The monkeys were still coming, moving at a steady pace, keeping their formations crisp. There were no gaps to take advantage of with a quick counterattack. Heuze cursed steadily under his breath. He felt his stump starting to burn unpleasantly, while in the small of his back there was a sullen ache.

He went on, hurrying as fast as he could manage. The ground before them broke up into gulleys and pits where the underlying limestone had eroded away. It became harder for either side to maintain formation. Within ten minutes, the men were hopelessly mixed up in a mob that was on the verge of breaking into a rout.

Heuze was struggling to keep up. He sensed the gathering panic. Whenever he caught a glimpse of his men, he saw they had a lost, frightened look about them. Not that Heuze had any ideas. If he had, they fragmented every time he jammed his peg leg down into one of the cracks in the ground.

Suddenly Ensign Combliss and another soldier came up on either side of him, took hold of his arms, and carried him across the next pit. They set him down a moment, then took him up again and helped him over a set of natural steps in bare rock.

Heuze was beyond any embarrassment now. If he had to be half carried, then so be it. He went on, sweat running down his back, his stump burning in the socket.

Thankfully, the trailhead was discovered a few minutes later. Polluk organized a rearguard of two hundred and fifty men to hold the top of the trail while the rest made their escape to the beach.

Heuze came up just in time. When he heard Polluk's plan, he sensed the potential for a disaster.

"Wait a minute, General. No point in us all going down to the beach if there's no boats to take us off. We must signal the ship."

Polluk nodded. "Yes, sir, of course. I have a detachment setting a fire now."

"Good man. I should've known you'd do that. Do we have any signal flags?"

That was a point that Polluk had not gotten around to, and he was quick to order a search. Soon a set of army communication pennons was found, and a man went up a tall tree with a line. Arrows were falling among them by the time the first line of flags fluttered up on that line. The monkeys were gathering in the nearby woods, forming up for an assault.

By that point, the fire in the thicket was going pretty well. Clouds of white smoke were rising from it. Heuze had his spyglass trained on the
Anvil
. Surely Captain Pukh would have noticed the fire by now?

The smoke was thickening, and flames could be seen shooting up here and there. Still no flags were visible on the
Anvil
.

The monkeys attacked.

A solid column, ten across and perhaps ten deep, came storming forward. Their formation was loose enough to allow them to keep some semblance of lines as they covered the rough ground.

The Shasht rearguard rose up to meet them. The men were angry after the fright and humiliation of the chase along the cliffs. They came up with fire in their eyes, and the mots' first assault was stopped cold. A clatter of weaponry went up along with a roar, and the mots recoiled and stepped back. The rearguard thrust them back farther, and the assault column got mixed up on the bad ground. The men made the mots pay then, for they caught groups jammed together in pits or in the process of climbing up out of them. And there mots died, cut down from behind.

Polluk kept a close rein on his men, though. He didn't want them pulled too far out into the woods. He knew there would be archers waiting out there, not to mention other columns of infantry. When the enemy was definitely on the run, Polluk called his men back. They formed a line in cover and waited.

By then the fire in the cliff-top brush was blazing high along a hundred feet of the cliff line. Many men had reached the bottom and were massing on the beach, which was reduced to a strip by the high tide.

At last a line of flags broke out from the
Anvil
.

"Prepare for boats," read Heuze. "Well, thank the gods for that. I thought Pukh would never see us!"

He could see boats being hurriedly lowered from the ship. Still, even though the
Anvil
was carrying more boats than usual, they could only take a couple hundred men at a time. The rearguard would have to hold the top of the fort for an hour or more while the boats made several trips. Heuze realized that this might be difficult. It began to seem like a mistake to try and hold the monkeys off with only two hundred and fifty, but it would be hard to get men to come back up the cliff path.

Flights of arrows began falling like hail on the men of Shasht, who were forced to take shelter wherever they found it, in pits, behind trees or boulders. Again, Heuze sensed a disaster taking shape.

"Look, General, we have to find some way of getting all the men off the beach. Once the monkeys take the top, they'll turn the beach into a slaughterhouse."

Polluk looked at the narrow beach down below and saw doom approaching. He gulped and looked back to the admiral. There was no doubt about it. They were in a very tight spot.

A roar arose from the direction of the burning brush, and another assault column of mots and brilbies came pouring forward. Because the brush in that direction was partially ablaze, the men hadn't been watching it carefully. The nearest men were resting when the attackers broke from cover and sprinted at them.

Powerfully built brilbies wielding pikes and axes crashed through the lines before they could form properly. Men died by the dozen, going down under a sudden overwhelming tide of the enemy. The rearguard was shattered, and the fighting became a free-for-all around the top of the cliff trail.

Heuze himself, swinging a sword taken from a dead man, was caught in the thick of the fighting. He saw Lieutenant Fode killed not five feet away. Splatters of the man's brains fell across his legs. The huge monkey whose sword had felled Fode turned in Heuze's direction, but before he could close in on the admiral, two men engaged him. Their shields resounded from heavy blows, but they fought on. Heuze stumbled away, horribly aware that he'd just pissed himself from the terror but glad not to be facing that huge monkey. A few steps farther on and he reached the top of the downward trail to the beach.

There was no more to be done on the cliff top. The monkeys were all over them. With a terrified scream a man fell over the precipice, then another. The monkeys were pushing the men right to the edge and then out into thin air.

Down at the beach, meanwhile, the boats had arrived. Men surged out to meet them, and would have swamped them but for the remains of their discipline and a lot of bellowing from officers.

The first three hundred were taken off the beach. The boats headed back to the
Anvil
, which had raised her anchor and set a few sails to shift position toward the beach. With a practiced eye, Heuze calculated the time it would take for the ship to come close enough to exchange the rescued men. Still too long for those on the beach.