Ell also urged his horse on and rode alongside the sergeant, holding an arrow in the string of his bow.
“I reckon this is stupid,” Hallas grumbled. “Why would the orcs wait about for us to come and tickle their bellies?”
“The Firstborn are capable of any filthy trick, master gnome,” said one of the soldiers. “And the Grun Ear- Cutters are the worst of all.”
“Harold, Kli-Kli, stay behind me. If anything happens, I’ll take them on,” said Hallas.
“You’re our little defender,” Kli-Kli giggled, but he followed the gnome’s advice and held Featherlight back a little.
The two scouts moved along slowly in front of us, but the street was calm and quiet.
The neat little houses with shutters and doors painted blue and yellow looked ominous, as if there was some threat lurking in them. The street widened out and the houses and fences painted blue and yellow became larger. The gates of a house where there were sunflowers growing in the garden had been knocked down and were lying on the ground. Somebody had used an ax to good effect here. There was a human body, bristling with arrows, lying on the porch. Like all the corpses in the village, it had no head. I looked away—I’d seen enough dead bodies for one day.
The houses on the left of the road came to an end and the orchards began. The thick bushes along the road oozed menace—an entire army of orcs could be hiding in there, and archers could easily be concealed in the branches of the apple trees, with their dense greenery. The soldiers kept a careful eye on the hedges, but the only movement was a startled wagtail that fluttered up off a branch and flew away behind the trees.
We had almost reached the end of Crossroads—three houses on the right, a small field, and then a forest of fir trees. On the left there was a field of cabbage, and Kli-Kli remarked that it would be a good idea to pinch a couple of cabbages for supper, the peasants wouldn’t have any use for them now. The goblin hinted clumsily that I ought to steal the cabbages, but after what I had seen in the square, my appetite had been completely destroyed, and I told the goblin so without mincing my words.
Disaster came when no one was expecting it. The immense gates of the last two houses suddenly collapsed and arrows came flying out through the dust raised when they hit the ground.
Screams of pain, the rustling of swords being drawn, the whinnying of horses.
“Orcs!”
“Firstborn!”
“To arms!”
“Sound the horn!”
A war horn sounded and then immediately fell silent when an arrow hit the soldier blowing it in the throat. He dropped the horn and fell under the hooves of his horse. Another horn sounded, and from somewhere behind the houses we heard the clash of weapons. We couldn’t expect any help; the other detachment had fallen into a trap, too.
“Some thieves we are!” the jester shouted, gazing at me with eyes wide in horror.
My memory of what happened after that is not very clear, and yet only too clear at the same time. I was myself, but I could see myself from the outside at the same time, as if watching what was happening around me. The entire battle is etched in my memory forever—it was like something happening in a nightmare, in a dream that is frozen in the frost, carved with an ax on separate blocks of ice.
Bowstrings twanged again and the orcs drew their yataghans and threw themselves on us. They attacked in silence, and that was probably the most terrifying thing that happened to me that day. They say fear has big eyes— in those first seconds it seemed to me that there were a lot of enemies, far more than there were of us.
We were at the very end of the detachment, and so the brunt of the first and most terrible onslaught was borne by the soldiers of the Border Kingdom … and Ell. I saw an arrow lodge in the eye slit of his helmet, I saw the elf leaning back, tumbling over …
The small number of men with crossbows started firing, and a few orcs fell, but the others came at us in silence.
The Borderlanders met the orcs with steel, repulsing the attack with swords and lances. The raucous din that filled the air was indescribable—oaths and screams, the clash of weapons, groans. The orcs were not deterred at all by the fact that their opponents were on horseback. One of them hurled himself at me. I fired and missed, then fired again and the ice bolt hit the Firstborn’s shield, releasing its magic with a ringing sound and transforming my enemy into a statue of ice.
“Honeycomb, cover me!” I roared, trying to shout above the din of the battle. I had to reload the crossbow as quickly as possible.
The orcs were still busy with the men up at the front. They weren’t really expecting an attack, and that gave those of us at the back of the column an extra twenty precious seconds to shower a deadly rain down on the Firstborn.
I don’t think I have ever loaded a crossbow so fast in life. Put the bolts in the channels, pull the lever toward me, take aim, hold my breath, press one trigger, then the other.
The battle moved from the street into the cabbage field, and before the orcs could reach me, I had taken down four of them, another three bolts had missed, and two had just bounced off our enemies’ armor as if it was enchanted. One of the orcs tried to break through to me, but he was stopped by Honeycomb’s ogre-hammer. The heavy flail caught him in the side and flung him away.
Little Bee reared up in fright and I crashed to the ground. I had to roll aside in order to avoid my own horse’s hooves.
Jumping up off the ground, I found myself face-to-face with a massive orc. I had dropped the crossbow when I fell and there was no time to get my knife out. The Firstborn was clearly intending to remove my curly head and cut the ears off it. His yataghan whistled repulsively. I pulled my head down into my shoulders and my enemy’s blade passed over it, merely ruffling my hair.
The battle was raging on all sides, our enemies were pressing hard and the men were all busy trying to survive, so I couldn’t expect any help. The orc struck again, and in reply I dropped to the ground, rolled over in the dirt, grabbed the nearest cabbage, and flung it at my opponent’s head. The Firstborn contemptuously knocked the cabbage aside with his yataghan, slicing it neatly into two halves. I had to jump back again, this lad was incredibly agile and—
Something went whistling past me and the orc’s head flew apart as messily as a ripe melon from the Sultanate, spraying me with hot blood.
I turned toward the sound. Hallas was standing on the ground, with his precious sack now dangling on his stomach. He was surrounded by rapidly thinning, bluish, foul-smelling smoke, and he still had his pipe in his mouth. In each hand my savior was holding a short, thick object that looked very much like a miniature cannon.
I’d never seen a wonder like that before.
Meanwhile three Firstborn came dashing at Hallas, realizing that he represented the greatest threat to them. Without any fuss, the gnome threw his terrible little cannons aside, took out another two exactly the same, raised one of them to the smoking pipe in his mouth, lit the fuse, and pointed it at one of the orcs rushing toward him.
The enemy performed a most amusing aerial kicking movement and fell down.
A hole the size of a fist appeared in the second orc’s coat of mail and he swayed and collapsed facedown in the dirt.
The third orc stopped as if he was suddenly rooted to the ground, and was immediately run through with a lance by one of Fer’s soldiers.
One-Eye could barely stay on his feet as one of the orcs crashed an ax down onto his shield. I pulled out my knife and committed the most insane act of my life. I took a run, jumped up, and hit the foul creature in the back with my feet, so that I ended up on the ground again. The orc, who wasn’t expecting anything like this, dove forward, fell to his knees, and immediately parted with his head.
One-Eye nodded gratefully and jumped into the next scrimmage.
