Chapter Twenty-Five
The moon rose after midnight to light the way for the Corenwalders as they made their way to either end of the canyon. It was only a quarter moon, but the white walls of the canyon reflected every bit of its light; for the men who knew the canyon, it was more than enough light. The newcomers who didn’t know the canyon followed the men who did.
The Corenwalders were in their positions well before daylight. A little wet-weather creek paralleled the right flank of the sleeping Pyrthens, about fifty strides away. It was lined by scraggly bushes that stood about as high as a man’s chest. Here, behind the bushes, Aidan and his four thousand men waited for daylight to come.
The sun had barely appeared over the lower canyon horizon when the Pyrthen thunder-tubes opened up on what, just a few hours earlier, had been the Corenwalder position. The earth shuddered with the explosions in the cannons’ mouths, and the smoke from the burning powder hung over the canyon. Great chunks of earth fell from the canyon wall to the floor after the first volley. By the second or third volley, the dust thrown up by the cave-ins made it impossible to see the other side of the canyon. Had the Corenwalders stayed in the canyons, any of those who survived the cave-ins would surely have suffocated in the dust.
The Pyrthen soldiers crowded near the canyon’s edge to watch the catastrophe, cheering raucously at what they believed to be the destruction of the last remaining enemy. The sight convinced them they would not be fighting that day.
A few of the Pyrthens saw the Corenwalders coming. A few on the right who had lost interest in the pounding of Sinking Canyons saw Aidan running toward them, his mouth stretched in a primal shout, with four thousand men behind him. A few on the left saw King Steren leading his men across the last few strides before they collided with the outer ring of Pyrthen soldiers. The sentries on both sides called warnings, but nobody heard them over the booming of the cannons. Hundreds of Pyrthens were struck down or hurled from the canyon rim before they had even drawn their swords.
The Corenwalders made remarkable progress in the initial surprise of their attack. For a minute it appeared as if the two halves of the Corenwalder army would snap shut on the two Pyrthen flanks like the jaws of an alligator.
But the Pyrthens were battle hardened, the veterans of many campaigns in many different settings. They soon regained their composure; though by the time they did, their numerical advantage wasn’t quite so overwhelming. The officers finally got the cannoneers to hold their fire, allowing them to better communicate orders to their men.
The Pyrthen cavalry mounted horses and were quite effective at scattering the foot soldiers until the Corenwalder cavalry collided with them. Otherwise, the combat was strictly hand to hand, carried out with sword, ax, and spear. The Corenwalders fought desperately in defense of their homeland; they had more to fight for than the Pyrthens did, and that was an advantage. However, the skill and strength of the Pyrthens soon began to show against the Corenwalders, most of whom were farmers and laborers instead of career soldiers.
Dobro fought in a manner worthy of the feechiefolk. In close combat like this, he was easily worth five civilizer soldiers. Maynard, too, fought like a man possessed, understanding for the first time what it meant to fight for Corenwald.
In the midst of the melee, the cannoneers and their horses turned the great gun carriages around and rolled them to the base of the peninsula, away from the rim. They aimed the guns in the direction of the skirmishers, against the remote possibility they would need to fire them.
The two lines of Pyrthen fighters were soon gaining back the ground they had lost, pushing the Corenwalders backward and opening the jaws of the alligator. More and more Corenwalders fell beneath the skillful swords of the Pyrthens.
The Corenwalders’ only real hope of victory lay in meeting each other in the middle, forcing the Pyrthens to defend themselves from Corenwalders in front of them and Corenwalders in back of them at the same time. That would have multiplied the Corenwalders’ strength. But the farther apart the two skirmish lines got, the more the Corenwalders’ strength was divided. Not having succeeded in the initial attack, the Corenwalder army was in danger of being flanked itself. Should that happen, all would be lost.
That appeared to be exactly what was happening to Aidan and his men when Aidan looked up and saw a horse sweeping down from the north, ridden by Bayard the Truthspeaker. His white hair was blown back against his head, and in his right hand he raised a sword. Behind him charged a whole army of feechiefolk-thousands of them. Gray-skinned, turtle-helmeted, bedecked in their gator-hide breastplates, wolf-paw necklaces, and spoonbill feathers, they looked like the swamp itself, come to life and ready to sweep the invaders into Sinking Canyons. They raised stone-tipped spears and kept coming, yodeling, barking, and screaming like wildcats: “Haaa- wwwweeeeee!”
The feechies funneled down between the two skirmish lines. Seeing that help had come, the Corenwalders fought with renewed vigor.
The Pyrthens’ hearts melted. Many of these same Pyrthens had been at the Battle of Bonifay Plain, when the feechies had routed them in the Eechihoolee Forest. These feechies inspired the same irrational fear that had overwhelmed the Pyrthens six years earlier.
The feechies destroyed those Pyrthens who did not succeed in running away from them. As Pyrthens fell, feechies picked up their curved, cold-shiny swords to use on the next Pyrthen. Some feechies wielded two Pyrthen swords, one in each hand. They were terrifying, the stuff of Pyrthen nightmares.
All of the vaunted Pyrthen discipline broke down completely in the face of the feechies. A few Pyrthens broke through to the open plain, but the great majority of them were funneled down toward the canyon rim. Corenwalders drove them back, back, back against the mouths of the thunder-tubes.
In their desperate panic, Pyrthen officers ordered their cannoneers to fire into the melee. The first round of cannon fire was devastating. The fleeing Pyrthens absorbed much of the damage, but many Corenwalders-both feechie and civilizer-fell in the blasts. The cannon fire didn’t stop the Pyrthens from retreating, as their officers had hoped it would. They were still more terrified of the feechies than the cannons, and they ran straight into the cannons’ mouths.
The cannon fire did have the effect of slowing the Corenwalder pursuit. The fleeing Pyrthens didn’t even notice, but kept streaming onto that big half-moon of land where the guns were placed. Soon all the Pyrthens who didn’t lie dead or wounded in the field were cowering behind the guns on the peninsula. They were packed shoulder to shoulder, thousands of them, and some of the men on the perimeter were jostled off into the canyon, where they fell to their deaths. But behind the guns, they were safe from the feechies.
The earth was shaking with the force of the cannon fire. The feechies had been put to confusion amid the smoke and the noise, and the civilizers were only a little better able to keep their heads. Aidan understood they would have to take the guns if they were to have any hope of winning the battle. But that would come only with great loss of Corenwalder life. He needed to find Steren, but the field was shrouded in smoke. He couldn’t hear himself think amid the chaos of the cannonade. He had no idea how many of his men were still alive. At any moment the barrage could stop and the Pyrthens could come pouring back over whatever shell-shocked Corenwalders remained.
The cannon fire didn’t stop. The earth continued to shake with the force of it. Aidan blundered through the smoke, trying to gather up men to take those guns.
But then came a cannon blast that set off a thunder and shake such as Aidan had never heard before. When the roar began, the sound of the cannons stopped, as if swallowed up by it. The screams of ten thousand men rose above the roar and then they faded, too, as if carried swiftly away. A great rush of air sucked the cannon smoke into the canyon, then belched it back up into a towering billow of dust and smoke.
The Pyrthens were gone. The cannons were gone. The whole peninsula had shaken loose with the vibrations of the thunder-tubes and fallen into the canyon, carrying the Pyrthen army with it.
A hush fell over the battlefield. The men knew they had witnessed a miracle, and their sense of awe did not allow them to speak. Even Dobro had nothing to say. Many Corenwalders were dead and dying on the field-both
