It was, and the mnemonically trained couriers galloped off to repeat his instructions exactly. Within ten minutes the army was moving.
The men of the Third Legion considered themselves privileged. Instead of riding like the others to battle, they were riding to sport. When they stopped that evening, sentries were posted, and patrols circled the camp, but this was Standard Operating Procedure, not a response to possible danger. And rather than each man sleeping by his picketed horse, the animals were hobbled and picketed within a single large rope corral around which the men camped.
To the Alpha’s infrared scanner,the paddock was conspicuous in the night.
For the Northmen, archery was more than a lifelong sport and sometime tool of war. It had also been an important means of feeding themselves, and its use had developed in them a fine sense of general marksmanship. They knew and used without questioning the basic principle that the way to hit something was to have a target and intend to hit it, not questioning your ability.
Charles had explained the automatic rifles to the four men assigned to him, through the bilingual skill of Sten Vannaren, had demonstrated and given them some dry firing. Finally each had fired several short bursts, and their targets were quickly rags. Afterward, waiting, they’d dry-fired from the door of the grounded pinnace at imaginary orcs, shouting “da-da-da-da-da-da!” like little boys. Charles had grinned at the sound as he worked beneath the nose of the craft.
The targets beneath them now were live, but the barbarians felt no qualms. A floodlight from above startled the sentries; then automatic rifles roused the camp. Slowly the pinnace circled the paddock as two riflemen fired into the horse herd. When one had emptied his magazine he threw an H.E. grenade from the door while another man seated a new magazine in the rifle and took his place. Hobbled horses pulled their pickets, milling madly or crowhopping through the confused camp and into the open prairie.
The well-spaced orc patrols, circling two to three kilometers away, stopped in the darkness to stare at the distant light, listening to the strange and somehow dangerous sounds. In a general way they realized that the camp was being attacked, and fearful and isolated though each squad felt, they did not ride toward the disturbance.
The distant floodlight blinked out, the explosions stopped, and they felt their aloneness even more in the silent and unrelieved darkness.
The darkness did not hide them. To the Alpha they were bright clusters of oblong lights. The pinnace settled undetected above one patrol and two grenades were tossed out, one H.E. and one fragmentation. Then it moved silently on to the second. The patrols were victimized by their separation; only three of the ten realized what the occasional scattered blasts meant and whipped their horses at last toward the crowded anonymity of camp.
Nearly 3,000 orcs huddled in the night, too disciplined to panic, too shocked and bewildered to plan, afraid to go out and hunt their horses. Not until dawn did they round up their animals and count them. Nearly a hundred had been killed or disabled by the Northmen from the air. Hundreds more, wounded or dangerous with panic, had been killed by the orcs to still their frantic hooves. Many, in the open prairie, had been felled with swords by night-covered Northmen riders.
The legion could not seek help or advice; there had been neither radio nor psi-tuner to send with them, nor apparent need. The commander and his staff agreed; they could reach the shelter of foothill forests with two days of steady riding-with only one more night beneath the open sky. Then perhaps they still might carry out their mission.
The eight hundred on foot might make it in four days of hard marching, but they’d be on their own. The men on horseback would not stay with them.
As the climbing sun began to heat the day, the orcs started westward again, heavy with foreboding. The prairie now seemed huge and hostile, with no help to be had, and home almost a four-day ride behind them. To go west, as they were, might be logical, but psychologically it was devastating. Especially to the men on foot as they saw the cavalry move farther and farther ahead and out of sight.
That same night the First, Second, and Fourth Legions had camped on the last extensive dry ground west of the Danube’s old west channel. They numbered 7,300 instead of 9,000; the five cohorts guarding the City had been assigned from the Fourth Legion and were half of its roster.
The old west channel had long been merely a marsh, with a series of lakes and sloughs connected by flood channels. Between it and the river the country was mostly more marshes and wet meadows. Across the marshes the orcs had built a military road to the Danube, of squared stone slabs laid on gravel. It crossed flood channels and creeks on low causeways. On the east side of the river it continued again to the City. The river itself was not bridged; men customarily swam their horses across.
The Northmen had not taken this road, and again Kamal was puzzled and mistrusting. They had followed instead an old road southeastward. This second route was really a cattle trail located to take advantage of what firm ground there was, filled with broken rock in the worst places, with a rough causeway over the main flood channel. It reached the river about six kilometers upstream of the military road, at rough stone docks. The dock location took advantage of the current in barging cattle to the City via the ancient ship canal.
It was disturbing when a shrewd and deadly enemy did the illogical for an unknown reason. It smelled of trickery. The best explanation Kamal could think of was that the Northmen feared meeting a strong orc force on the military road-feared being caught between armies where the marshes would frustrate their freedom of movement. They would have to abandon their horses in order to flee.
That was probably it, Kamal decided, and felt better. The Northmen were always wary of traps and couldn’t know there wasn’t another orc army. Kamal sent a light scouting patrol pounding down the Northmen’s trail while his army rested their mounts. Three hours later they returned on lathered horses. The Northmen, they reported, had followed the route to the river and entered it below the docks.
Kamal still wasn’t sure, but now this was beginning to smell like the overdue stroke of luck that could ensure success. For where the Northmen had crossed would put them on the south side of the ship canal, and the City was on the north side. When they discovered this they’d have another crossing to make, an impossible crossing. The bridge above the City was easily defended, and its center section could be raised. As for fording, the canal’s smooth current was strong, and except for easily defended boat landings, its sides were too steep for horses.
He had his trumpeter signal a speed march. Thousands of horses began an easy trot, taking the military, not the cattle, road. Within an hour Kamal was at the river, its dark water nearly a kilometer wide. Nagged again by misgivings, the grim-faced orc stared across for a bit. But he had to cross somewhere, and this was the logical time and place. Trumpets blew and the lead cohorts spread to form ranks along the shore. With the next signal, the first rank urged its mounts carefully down the rip-rapped bank and began swimming.
Hovering an oblique six kilometers away, Ivan Yoshida switched the visual pickup from the waiting Northmen to the orcs swimming their horses toward the ambush. When the first rank of their tiring horses had no more than fifty meters farther to swim, arrows began to sleet into it.
After a moment’s confusion the line of orcs straightened, still moving forward, the second rank advancing steadily behind them. Three thousand orcs were in the water now. Trumpets blew, and in less than a minute Kamal knew about the ambush. He realized at once what had happened. The Northmen must know the country after all. They had baited him by taking the cattle road, then had swum their horses downstream as they crossed, to land on the north side of the canal after all. He snapped a command. His trumpeter signalled a flanking movement and certain cohorts began letting themselves be carried farther downstream.
