Exile's Honor

No time to say anything about his sudden thought; at that moment, a far-off trumpet sounded, and with a roar, the Tedrel shock troops flowed down the side of the hill carrying with them a wall of sound, their running feet making the ground shake. In a moment, they had crossed the little stream at the bottom, and so—broke the peace, and began the war.

As they pounded toward the waiting lines, the Valdemaran front ranks braced; spearmen butting their weapons on the ground and kneeling. Behind them, the pikemen also braced their longer weapons and stood fast. And behind them, the archers waited, arrows to bow, for their officers to call the first volley.

'Hoi!' The call came, a little ragged, as the first line of shouting men, their running feet pounding the meadow grass flat, set foot on Valdemaran soil. The sound of a thousand bows snapping, a thousand arrows swishing into the air was like a wind, a perilous wind; the archers aimed up, so as to clear their own ranks, and not at any specific targets, for with the enemy so thick, enough arrows would hit to make a difference—

The wind went up, the deadly rain came down, and hoarse battle cries turned to screams of pain as arrows found seams in plate, or chain-mail insufficiently fitted or tended, heads without helms or helms without visors. And some men went down, and the ranks behind them stumbled over their bodies, but it wasn't enough to blunt the charge. Screams of pain joined the sound of battle cries and pounding feet.

Now Alberich entered that singular state of hyperawareness that a fight put him into; he saw everything, but was affected emotionally by nothing. His feelings just vanished for the moment, leaving his mind clear and his body ready to act or react. He knew he would pay for this later, when all of that suppressed emotion hit him, but for now, he tightened his hands on his weapons, and watched, and waited— and, in a terrible sense, enjoyed.

The noise was incredible; it battered the senses, and it had a strange effect on the mind. He knew this of old, knew that the quickening of his pulse and the sudden surge of blood-thirstiness was due to the very noises that assailed his ears. Whether any of the others were affected in the same way, he didn't know for certain, but he suspected they were, more or less. Certainly the men of his company had been, some more than others. At the first sound of battle, some of them had nearly gone mad with bloodlust—but those did not last very long. They were first into the fight, charging in with no care for themselves. 'Spear catchers,' was what seasoned commanders called that sort.

'Hoi!' The best archers of Valdemar were good, none better; they could, if need be, get off two more volleys while the first was hitting the enemy. Again, the whirring, as much like the sound of an immense flock of birds as a wind, again the death-dealing rain rattled down—and still they fell, and still they came. Behind the ranks of charging men their archers walked in, slowly, and now it was their turn to come into play.

The spearmen and pikemen were protected by their armor and helms and stood fast; the Valdemaran archers dropped back beneath shields on orders from their officers, and the first of the Tedrel troops hit the line of spears and pikes with a shock.

The avalanche of sound as the two lines met was indescribable, and even Alberich winced. Screaming, shouting, the clash of weapon on weapon; there was nothing as dreadful as the sound of army meeting army. Some of the Tedrel fighters ran right up on the spears like maddened boars, screeching as they died; the rest hacked at the shafts with heavy broadswords and axes, shouting furiously, while more pikemen came up from the rear to take the place of those who'd lost their weapons.

A rain of Tedrel arrows fell on the pikemen and the archers behind them, but the pikemen had good armor and helms meant to defend against arrows, and the archers were under their shields. And the moment the hail of arrows stopped, the archers popped out from under cover and let fly a volley of their own. This volley fell on the Tedrel archers, who were lightly armored and not as fast as their Valdemaran counterparts. This time, the hail of arrows took a higher toll; more screaming, and louder now.

Men of both sides fell and died, or fell wounded, crying out in agony. The innocent little rill that marked the Border went from muddy to bloody.

Though Sendar watched it all, it would be up to the Lord Marshal to issue orders. Wise man, was Sendar; he knew he was no more than a fraction of the strategist under actual battle conditions that his underlings were. The Lord Marshal had faced these troops in his own person for the past three years, while Sendar had only gotten his reports. The Lord Marshal had the direct experience of the battlefield that the King did not, and Sendar knew it.

And at the moment, as the sun climbed into the sky and then reached its zenith, the Lord Marshal was looking for something, peering down at the battlefield with a frown on his heavily-bearded face.

'The cavalry,' Alberich heard him saying, as if he was thinking aloud. 'Where are their cavalry?'

And in the same moment, he turned to his Herald, and there was urgency in his voice. Alberich felt both relief that the Lord Marshal had noted the same thing he had, and a heart-sinking moment of dread. 'MindSpeak the flanks,' the Lord Marshal ordered, 'And ask the ones with the birds. Find out if the cavalry is behind their lines, still, or if they're trying to get us in a pincer.'

Alberich strained to hear the answer, which came within the instant. 'No and no, my Lord,' the Herald replied. 'There is no sign of mounted troops of any sort.'

Now Sendar turned his head, to fix the Lord Marshal with a look of surprise. 'Then where are they?' he demanded. 'Surely they haven't put all of their mounted troops afoot!'