scowling.
‘Did you order the slave-master to spare those they reject?’
‘Yes, sire.’ Suddenly Huy was impatient with the king’s rages and tantrums, there were more important matters to occupy him now.
‘By what authority?’ Lannon demanded.
‘By the authority of a commander of a Royal Legion in the field,’ Huy answered him.
‘I commanded a burning.’
‘But not a massacre of the aged and infirm.’
‘I want the tribes to know that Lannon Hycanus passed this way.’
‘I leave witnesses to it,’ Huy told him shortly. ‘If these old ones would burden us, will they not also be a burden upon their tribe?’ Lannon drew himself up. Huy saw his rage boil over - and he took Lannon’s arm in unexpectedly conspiratorial grip.
‘Majesty, there is something of importance I must tell you.’ And before Lannon could give vent to his rage Huy had led him aside. ‘The regiments of Vendi have escaped us, they are in the field and out in battle array.’
Lannon’s rage was forgotten. ‘How close are they?’
‘I do not know - except that the longer we talk the closer they come.’
It was past noon before the long files of shuffling slaves were all tallied and moving. The slave-masters reported in to Huy’s command post, and the final count was almost 22,000 human beings.
Despite Huy’s orders to keep the column bunched and under control, the files of chained Vendi stretched over four miles and their pace was that of the slowest. At a laboured crawl like a crippled centipede, they wound through the hills and down into the bad broken ground of the valley bottom.
The first attack hit them a little after midnight on the first night. It came as a shock to Huy, for although he had taken every precaution for a night camp in enemy territory, he had not expected anything like this from the tribes. A few sentries with slit throats, a flight of arrows from ambush, even a swift rush and withdrawal at some weak spot along the line, but not a full-scale night attack which showed every evidence of planning and control, and which was pressed home with murderous intent.
Only training and discipline held his legion together before that howling torrent that hurled itself upon them from the darkness. For two hours they closed up and fought, with the trumpets blowing the standfast and the rallying cries of the centurions ringing out in the darkness.
‘On me, the Sixth.’
‘Steady, the Sixth.’
‘Hold hard, the Sixth.’
When the moon came out and lit the field, the attackers melted away into the forests and Huy could stride among his cohorts and assess his position.
The dead tribesmen were piled chest deep about the square where the cohorts had stood. In the torch light the skirmishers were finishing the enemy wounded with quick sword thrusts, while others were tending their own wounded and laying out their dead for cremation. Huy was relieved to see how small a toll the enemy had exacted from the defence, and how grievous a price they had paid themselves.
In the confusion of the battle many of the files of slaves had responded to the calls of the attackers and, with a concerted rush, had broken out of the square and escaped into the night still linked together. But there were still more than 16,000 of them howling with terror and hunger and thirst.
The legion lit its cremation fires in the dark and sang the praise chant to Baal on the march. Before the sun had been up an hour, it was clear what tactics the Vendi had decided upon for that day. Each feature along the route was contested by groups of archers and spearmen. They had to be laboriously dislodged, always falling back before the charges of Huy’s axemen, but at the same time the flanks of the column and the rear were harried and tested by repeated attacks in considerable strength.
‘I have never heard of this happening before,’ protested Lannon during a lull while he unbuckled his helmet to air his sweat-sodden curls, and wash his mouth out with wine. ‘They behave like drilled and trained troops.’
‘It is something new,’ Huy agreed as he accepted a cloth one of his armour-bearers had wetted for him. Huy’s arms and face were speckled with droplets of thrown blood, and blood had dried black and crusty on the blade and shaft of the vulture axe.
‘They have direction and purpose - I have never known tribesmen regroup after a charge has broken them. I have never known them come back after a mauling.’
Lannon spat red wine upon the ground. ‘We may have better sport than we had bargained for before the day is out,’ he laughed with anticipation and passed the wine bowl to Huy.
There was a place where the track crossed a narrow stream and then passed between two symmetrical rounded maiden’s breast hills. There was a ford at the stream and on the approaches to it sixteen spears had been set in the earth and spiked upon them were the severed heads of legionaries who had been with Bakmor’s cohorts that had gone ahead with the cattle.
‘Bakmor has not got through unscathed either,’ Huy remarked, as he watched the heads taken down and hurriedly wrapped in leather cloaks.
‘Sixteen from twelve hundred is hardly a disaster to rank with Lake Trasimene,’ Lannon remarked easily. ‘And with their grisly display they have warned us of their intention to hold the ford - weak tactics, Sunbird.’
‘Perhaps, my lord,’ Huy conceded, but he had noticed the faces of his men who had seen the ragged red throats and the dull staring eyes of the trophy heads. Their stomachs had cooled a little.
The ford was held as Lannon had predicted. It was held by a force that Huy guessed was not less than twice his own, and while they attempted to hack their way through the attacks upon the flanks and rear never let up. Twice Huy pulled his axemen and infantry out of the reddened mud of the ford to rest and reform. By now the day was baking hot and the legionaries were tiring.
