screamed and shouted. Under their pale, freckled skins, their faces turned crimson with fury and the veins stood out like cords on their necks and foreheads. Some threw stones; others used bows and swords like their men. They weren't merely unnerving; they were deadly dangerous.
'Back, curse it! Back and out!' Gerin shouted, again and again. ' We'll throw everything away if we get stuck in this kind of fighting. Out and back!'
Little by little, his men and Aragis' began to heed him. But pulling out of the battle was harder than getting into it had been. Turning a chariot around in the crowded, bloody alleyways of the village was anything but easy; too often, it was next to impossible. Gerin wondered if going forward would have cost less than the withdrawal did.
A lot of the chariots had lost the firepots with which they'd begun the day's fighting. Still, before long, fire arrows sent trails of smoke through the air as they arced toward the thatched roofs of the Trokme cottages. The weather had been dry. Before long, the straw on the roofs was blazing.
More chariots rampaged through the fields outside the village, wrecking the crops that still stood after the battle had gone through them. Through thickening smoke, Gerin saw Trokmoi fleeing into Adiatunnus' keep.
'Do you aim to lay siege to 'em?' Aragis the Archer asked. The grand duke's helmet was dented, maybe by a stone. The edge of the helm had cut him above one eye; when he healed, he'd have a scar like Gerin's.
'We can't take the keep by storm, however much I wish we could,' Gerin answered. 'We don't have the numbers, we don't have the ladders, and they'd be fighting for their lives. We can't starve them out, either. Adiatunnus will have more in his storerooms and cellars than we can draw from the countryside. We can send in fire arrows and hope to start a big blaze, but that's just a matter of luck.'
'Aye, but we should try it,' Aragis said. Nonetheless, he showed relief that Gerin did not intend to linger in Adiatunnus' country.
The Fox understood that. 'You'll want to campaign against the monsters in your own lands as soon as may be, won't you?'
'As a matter of fact, that's just what's in my mind,' Aragis said. 'Harvest won't wait forever, and I'd like the woods cleared of those creatures before then… if that can be done. I'd not care to harm your campaign by pulling back from here too soon, but-'
But I will, if you don't pull back on your own hook soon enough to suit me. Aragis didn't say it-Gerin gave him credit for being a good ally, a better one than the Fox had expected-but he thought it very loudly.
'If it suits you, we'll spend the rest of the afternoon lobbing fire arrows into the keep in the hope of sending it all up in smoke, and then-then we'll withdraw,' Gerin said. 'We'll ravage more of Adiatunnus' lands as we go. By your leave, we'll stop at Fox Keep for a few days, to let me set up the defenses of my own holding while I'm in the south, and then I'll meet my end of the bargain.'
'Couldn't ask for fairer than that,' Aragis said, though his eyes argued that any departure later than yesterday, or perhaps the day before, was too late. But again, he held his peace; he recognized necessity, and recognized that against it any man struggled in vain.
The charioteers rode rings around Adiatunnus' keep, howling and shouting louder than the Trokmoi on the walls as they sent more fire arrows smoking through the air. Up on the walls of the keep with the woodsrunners were several monsters. Gerin hoped they and the Trokmoi would quarrel in the tight quarters, but had no way to make that happen.
Two or three times, thin columns of black smoke rose from within the keep. Whenever they did, Gerin's men, and Aragis' too, cheered themselves hoarse. But each time, the smoke thinned, paled, died. At last, as the sun sank ever lower in the west, the Fox called off the attack. He and his followers drew off toward the northeast, back in the direction from which they had come.
Wounded horses and men and monsters still thrashed and groaned and screamed on the battlefield. Now and again, an Elabonian chariot would halt so its crew could cut the throat of a horse or a monster or a Trokme, or so the troopers could haul an injured comrade into their car and do for him what they could once they stopped to camp. Some of the injured cried out louder in the jouncing chariots than they had lying on the ground. Their moans made Gerin grind his teeth, but all he could do was keep on.
'One thing,' Van said as they entered the woods from which they'd emerged to fight: 'we won't have to offer much in the way of sacrifice to the ghosts tonight.'
'That's so,' Gerin agreed. 'We gave them blood aplenty today. They'll buzz round the bodies the whole night long, like so many great carrion flies round a carcass-gloating, I suppose, that all those brave men joined their cold and gloomy world.'
The chariots came out of the woods bare minutes before sunset. Gerin led them out into the middle of a broad meadow. 'We stop here,' he declared. 'Van, I leave it to you to get the first fire going.' He told off parties to go back to the forest and chop down enough wood to keep the fires blazing all through the night. Nothos would rise with a third of the night already passed, and the other three moons later still.
That accomplished, the Fox turned his hand to giving the wounded what help he could. As always in the aftermath of battle, he was reminded how pitifully little that was. He splashed ale on cuts to help keep them from going bad, set and splinted broken bones, sewed up a few gaping gashes with thread of wool or sinew, bandaged men who had ignored their hurts in the heat of action. None of what he did brought much immediate relief from pain, although some of it, he made himself remember, would do good in the long run.
More horses were hurt, too. He helped the drivers doctor them when he was done with the men. The men, at least, had some idea why they'd been hurt. The horses' big brown eyes were full of uncomprehended suffering.
He didn't know who'd ordered it, but the men had made the same sort of circle of fires they'd built the night before. He chose warriors who'd slept through the previous night undisturbed for sentry duty, and made himself one of them. He was tired down to the marrow of his bones, but so was everyone else.
'Did we win?' Van asked as he replaced the Fox for midwatch. 'Did we do all you wanted done?'
'Aye, we won,' Gerin said, yawning. 'Did we do enough?' Yawning again, he shook his head and made for his bedroll.
'Wait, Captain.' Van called him back. The outlander pointed to the woods, from which monsters were coming forth.
Sentries' shouts roused the camp. Swearing, men snatched at weapons and armor. Gerin found his sword in his hand. It wasn't magic; he just didn't remember drawing the weapon.
The monsters approached to the edge of bowshot, but no closer. ' There aren't that many of them,' Gerin remarked as the creatures began a chorus of their dreadful shrieks. Shriek they did, but they made no move to attack. After a while, the Fox said, 'I think they're trying to put us in fear, nothing else but. A plague on 'em, says I. No matter how they scream, I'm going to get some sleep.' He raised his voice: 'All save the sentries, rest while you can. We'll have warning enough if they truly aim to come after us.'
He rolled himself up in his blanket. The monsters' hideous outcry kept him awake a little longer than he would have been otherwise, but not much. Not even Mavrix the god of wine appearing before him would have kept him awake for long, he thought as sleep swallowed him.
He woke wondering why he'd worried about Mavrix, but shook his head at the pointlessness of that: sleepy minds did strange things, and there was no more to say about it. The monsters were gone. That didn't surprise him; with sunrise, the Elabonians could have started shooting at them with good hopes of scoring hits.
Not all the warriors had been able to sleep. Some of them shambled about as if barely alive. How they'd be after another day in the chariot was something about which the Fox tried not to think.
No help for it. After breaking their fast on hard bread and sausage and ale, they rolled northeast, back toward the Fox's holding. Knowing no large force lay directly ahead of them, they spread out widely over the countryside, doing as much damage to Adiatunnus' lands and villages and crops as they could with fire and their horses' hooves and the wheels of their chariots.
A victory, but not a perfect one. Gerin had hoped to smash Adiatunnus utterly; he'd hurt the Trokme chieftain, literally and metaphorically, but not enough to seize much of his territory with any assurance of keeping it. Maybe the monsters had learned not to attack large bands of armed and armored men, but they hadn't been exterminated-and Adiatunnus' lands still gave them haven.
'Not enough,' Gerin said under his breath. Van glanced over to him, but did not venture to reply.
