not so fond of battle. And will not die. So be it!'
Arrows planged just over their heads. Blade could not help but wince a little. Rahstum did not move a muscle but to calm his prancing horse.
'When we have made a ramp to the moat,' he said, 'it will be fair that we fall back for rest. Then I will send in the Khad's best troops. He will suspect nothing and if the Caths open the sea gates he will lose a great many men.'
Rahstum leaned to Blade and spoke a final word. 'Watch your back today.'
He brought his steed about and raised his sword high over his head. Blade moved his horse into position on the right. Sunlight glittered on their polished leather armor, flung sparks from the upraised steel.
Rahstum uttered a stentorian cry that echoed up and down the line of battle, heard clearly over the hiss-hiss- hiss-hiss of arrows.
'To me, Mongs! To me!'
The lines surged forward. High time. The crossbows had found their range and were chewing up the first ranks. Every volley brought down a score or more of the Mongs. The dead and wounded were ignored. When a man fell, another stepped forward to take his place.
Rahstum led them to the lip of the first sloping ditch. There his lieutenants dismounted the horsemen and set them to answering the fire from the city. They knelt, each beside his horse, and the short crooked bows began a nasty ssstt - ssstt - ssstt. This fire was not particularly effective, for the bows had no great range, and Blade, now beginning to be caught up in the battle fever, found himself wishing for an English long bow.
Yet the fire gave some cover. Under it the foot soldiers came storming up and into the ditch. They carried scaling ladders and some had large baskets of withe and digging utensils. This puzzled Blade at first.
He and Rahstum remained mounted, riding up and down the lip of the ditch, commanding and urging, and were fair targets for the Caths on the ramparts. As Rahstum had predicted they were in defilade now, beneath the fire of the crossbows, and the Sea Caths began to line their ramparts with bowmen who could aim better. Dark flurries of arrows came down, but the Cath bows were no longer-ranged than the Mongs', and only the first ranks, now deep in the ditch, suffered much.
The Mongs were tearing the obstacles out of the earth, clearing a way for horsemen, but they did not content themselves with loosening the pointed stakes and tossing them aside. They were passed rapidly down the line to the base of the slope, where the wall stopped progress. They were wedged into the ground and Blade, still puzzling, saw that a platform was being built. First one, then another. They were building stairs!
Mongs with baskets and tools were shoveling dirt frantically and filling in the narrow platforms as they rose. Blade nodded. He knew how agile the Mong ponies were. They would easily climb the stairs when they were finished, and the footmen behind them.
But the arrow fire began to intensify. The Caths had stronger bows and were bringing them into action. An arrow grazed Rahstum's horse and another, nearly spent, bounced off Blade's breast armor. Rahstum sent a rider off to order diversionary attacks on both flanks. Sadda's men, on the right, moved into action and immediately began to suffer from the big crossbows. Blade saw the Captain's lips move in a faint smile.
Blade was nearly caught unawares. But for his fine peripheral vision he would have been murdered. He caught a flicker of movement from the right and saw the bowman aiming. In the last second the bowman turned slightly and loosed his arrow at Blade. Blade got his shield up just in time. It was a Mong shield, round and of leather, and the arrow pierced it and hung dangling an inch from his throat. Blade pulled his horse around and rode at the man. The Mong ducked, eluding him, and tried to run. He ran straight into Rahstum, who slashed down with his sword and cleft the man from shoulder to belly.
Rahstum shouted. 'Coward. Deserter! Run toward the enemy, not away.'
He winked at Blade as he rode past. 'You see? On guard! They will try again.'
Blade peered down at the dead man. He wore the insignia of the Khad, not that of Rahstum. He had mingled, then, with the clear purpose of killing Blade.
His spine cold, Blade glanced about him. The incident had gone unnoticed in the din and clangor and rise and fall of the battle. From that moment on Blade guarded his back as well as his front.
The stairs were rising up the wall now. Another long line of warriors had moved up into position near the lip of the ditch. The Khad's own troops.
The Mongs had thrown another attack in on the left as a further diversion. These were also the Khad's men. Farther back, on the green slope, the second line of reserves moved into position.
It was still in essence a frontal attack, and brutal. The high cliffs guarding the moat at either end served as a funnel to divert the Mongs against the ramparts where the Sea Caths were strongest. No real flank attack could be mounted, and as the Mongs pressed forward, urged by the pressure of their own troops behind them, they began to converge and the separate companies to lose identity.
The ditch was now filled with thousands of screaming, working, fighting, blood-crazed Mongs. The sound was one long anguished scream of battle. Men died beneath the arrows and were stepped on and trodden into soft earth. Some who were merely wounded were trampled to death.
The Sea Caths, all this while, had been quietly warping their tall clumsy ships in toward the sea wall which held back the ocean. Blade had wondered about those tall ships, more like towers on a raft than ships, and now he saw their use. The sides of the towers fell away and revealed long slender poles with cup-shaped devices at the top end. Blade could see this because Rahstum had now given the order for his own men to fall back, and Blade rode back up the slope as the Khad's troops poured into the ditch and toward the completed stairs up the wall.
Blade, from this new vantage, saw a crew winching back one of the slender poles. It bent like a resilient whip and something was loaded into the cup. It glittered in the sun and even at that distance Blade recognized it. Jade. Not cannon balls, but jade just the same.
He saw a Cath officer pull a rope trigger. He could imagine the nasty spanggg as the slender catapult whipped up and over, though he could not hear it over the battle. A huge shard of jade, flattish and sharp edged, soared high over the city and came down in the ditch. Nearly a vertical fall, a mortar effect. The jade missile smashed twenty men to pulp. There was no way to miss the target in that fighting, dinning mass.
Rahstum was riding furiously up and down, extricating his men from the ditch so that Khad's men could rush in. He
