Lest Darkness Fall (37 page)

            There was room for only six
horses abreast, and even so it was a tight fit. The rocks and logs hadn't done
much damage to the Imperialists, except to form a heap cutting their leading
column in two. And now the Gothic knights struck the fragment that had passed
the point of the break. The cuirassiers, unable to maneuver or even to use
their bows, were jammed back against the barrier by their heavier opponents.
The fight ended when the surviving Imperialists slid off their horses and
scrambled back to safety on foot. The Goths rounded up the abandoned horses and
led them back whooping.

            Bloody John withdrew a
couple of bowshots. Then he sent a small group of cuirassiers forward to lay
down a barrage of arrows. Padway moved some dismounted Gothic archers into the
pass. These, shooting from behind the barrier, caused the Imperialists so much
trouble that the cuirassiers were soon withdrawn.

            Bloody John now sent some
Lombard lancers forward to sweep the archers out of the way. But the barrier
stopped their charge dead. While they were picking their way, a step at a time,
among the boulders, the Goths filled them full of arrows at close range. By the
time the bodies of a dozen horses and an equal number of Lombards had been
added to the barrier, the Lombards had had enough.

            By this time it would have
been obvious to a much stupider general than Bloody John that in those confined
quarters horses were about as useful as green parrots. The fact that the
Imperialists could hold their end of the pass as easily as Padway held his could
not have been much comfort, because they were trying to get through it and
Padway was not. Bloody John dismounted some Lombards and Gepids and sent them
forward on foot. Padway meanwhile had moved some dismounted lancers up behind
the harrier, so that their spears made a thick cluster. The archers moved back
and up the walls to shoot over the knights' heads.

            The Lombards and Gepids came
on at a slow dogtrot. They were equipped with regular Imperialist mail shirts,
but they were still strange-looking men, with the backs of their heads shaven
and their front hair hanging down on each side of their faces in two long,
butter-greased braids. They carried swords, and some had immense two-handed
battleaxes. As they got closer they began to scream insults at the Goths, who
understood their East-German dialects well enough and yelled back.

            The attackers poured howling
over the barrier and began hacking at the edge of spears which were too close
together to slip between easily. More attackers, coming from behind, pushed the
leaders into the spear points. Some were stuck. Others wedged their bodies in
between the spear shafts and got at spearmen. Presently the front ranks were a
tangle of grunting, snarling men packed too closely to use their weapons, while
those behind them tried to reach over their heads.

            The archers shot and shot.
Arrows bounced off helmets and stuck quivering in big wooden shields. Men who
were pierced could neither fall nor withdraw.

            An archer skipped back among
the rocks to get more arrows. Gothic heads turned to look at him. A couple more
archers followed, though the quivers of these had not been emptied. Some of the
rearmost knights started to follow them.

            Padway saw a rout in the
making. He grabbed one man and took his sword away from him. Then he climbed up
to the rock vacated by the first archer, yelling something unclear even to
himself. The men turned their eyes on him.

            The sword was a huge one.
Padway gripped it in both hands, hoisted it over his head, and swung at the nearest
enemy, whose head was on a level with his waist. The sword came down on the
man's helmet with a clang, squashing it over his eyes. Padway struck again and
again. That Imperialist disappeared; Padway hit at another. He hit at helmets
and shields and bare heads and arms and shoulders. He never could tell when his
blows were effective, because by the time he recovered from each whack the
picture had changed.

            Then there were no heads but
Gothic ones within reach. The Imperialists were crawling back over the barrier,
lugging wounded men with blood-soaked clothes and arrows sticking in them.

            At a glance there seemed to
be about a dozen Goths down. Padway for a moment wondered angrily why the enemy
had left fewer bodies than that. It occurred to him that some of these dozen
were only moderately wounded, and that the enemy had carried off most of their
casualties.

            Fritharik and his orderly
Tirdat and others were clustering around Padway, telling him what a demon
fighter he was. He couldn't see it; all he had done was climb up on a rock,
reach over the heads of a couple of his own men, and take a few swipe at an
enemy who was having troubles of his own and could not hit back. There had been
no more science to it than to using a pickax.

-

            The sun had set, and Bloody
John's army retired down the valley to set up its tents and cook its supper.
Padway's Goths did likewise. The smell of cooking-fires drifted up and down
pleasantly. Anybody would have thought that here were two gangs of
pleasure-seeking campers, but for the pile of dead men and horses at the
barrier.

            Padway had no time for
introspection. There were injured men, and he had no confidence in their
ability to give themselves first aid. He raised no objections to their prayers
and charms and potations of dust from a saint's tomb stirred in water. But he
saw to it that bandages were boiled — which of course was a bit of the magic of
Mysterious Martinus — and applied rationally.

            One man had lost an eye, but
was still full of fight. Another had three fingers gone, and was weeping about
it. A third was cheerful with a stab in the abdomen. Padway knew this one would
die of peritonitis before long, and that nothing could be done about it.

            Padway, not underestimating
his opponent, threw out a very wide and close-meshed system of outposts. He was
justified; an hour before dawn his sentries began to drift in. Bloody John, it
transpired, was working two large bodies of Anatolian foot archers over the
hills on either side of them. Padway saw that his position would soon be
untenable. So his Goths, yawning and grumbling, were routed out of their
blankets and started for Benevento.

            When the sun came up and he
had a good look at his men, Padway became seriously concerned for their morale.
They grumbled and looked almost as discouraged as Fritharik did regularly. They
did not understand strategic retreats. Padway wondered how long it would be
before they began to run away in real earnest.

            At Benevento there was only
one bridge over the Sabbato, a fairly swift stream. Padway thought he could
hold this bridge for some time, and that Bloody John would be forced to attack
him because of the loss of his provisions and the hostility of the peasantry.

            When they came out on the
plain around the confluence of the two little rivers, Padway found a horrifying
surprise. A swarm of his peasant recruits was crossing the bridge toward him.
Several thousand had already crossed. He had to be able to get his own force
over the bridge quickly, and he knew what would happen if that bottleneck
became jammed with retreating troops.

            Gudareths rode out to meet
him. "I followed your orders!" he shouted. "I tried to hold them
back. But they got the idea they could lick the Greeks themselves, and started
out regardless. I told you they were no good!"

            Padway looked back. The
Imperialists were in plain sight, and as he watched they began to deploy. It
looked like the end of the adventure. He heard Fritharik make a remark about
graves, and Tirdat ask if there wasn't a message he could take — preferably to
a far-off place.

            The Italian serfs had
meanwhile seen the Gothic cavalry galloping up with the Imperialists in
pursuit, and had formed their own idea that the battle was lost. Ripples of
movement ran through their disorderly array, and its motion was presently
reversed. Soon the road up to the town was white with running Italians. Those
who had crossed the bridge were jammed together in a clawing mob trying to get
back over.

            Padway yelled in a cracked
voice, to Gudareths: "Get back over the river somehow! Send mounted men
out on the roads to stop the runaways! Let those on this side get back over.
I'll try to hold the Greeks here."

            He dismounted most of his
troops. He arranged the lancers six deep in a semicircle in front of the
bridgehead, around the caterwauling peasants, with lances outward. Along the
river bank he posted the archers in two bodies, one on each flank, and beyond
them his remaining lancers, mounted. If anything would hold Bloody John, that
would.

            The Imperialists stood for
perhaps ten minutes. Then a big body of Lombards and Gepids trotted out,
cantered, galloped straight at his line of spears. Padway, standing afoot
behind the line, watched them grow larger and larger. The sound of their hoofs
was like that of a huge orchestra of kettledrums, louder and louder. Watching
these big, longhaired barbarians loom up out of the dust their horses raised,
Padway sympathized with the peasant recruits. If he hadn't had his pride and
his responsibility, he'd have run himself until his legs gave out.

            On came the Imperialists.
They looked as though they could ride over any body of men on earth. Then the
bowstrings began to snap. Here a horse reared or buckled; there a man fell off
with a musical clash of scale-mail. The charge slowed perceptibly. But they
came on. To Padway they looked twenty feet tall. And then they were right on
the line of spears. Padway could see the spearmen's tight lips and white faces.
If they held — They did. The Imperialist horses reared, screaming, when the
lancers pricked them. Some of them stopped so suddenly that their riders were
pitched out of the saddle. And then the whole mass was streaming off to right
and left, and back to the main army. It wasn't the horses' war, and they had no
intention of spitting themselves on the unpleasant-looking lances.

            Padway drew his first real
breath in almost a minute. He'd been lecturing his men to the effect that no
cavalry could break a really solid line of spearmen, but he hadn't believed it
himself until now.

            Then an awful thing
happened. A lot of his lancers, seeing the Imperialists in flight, broke away
from the line and started after their foes on foot. Padway screeched at them to
come back, but they kept on running, or rather trotting heavily in their armor.
Like at Senlac, thought Padway. With similar results. The alert John sent a
regiment of cuirassiers out after the clumsily running mob of Goths, and in a
twinkling the Goths were scattering all over the field and being speared like so
many boars. Padway raved with fury and chagrin; this was his first serious
loss. He grabbed Tirdat by the collar, almost strangling him.

            He shouted: "Find
Gudareths! Tell him to round up a few hundred of these Italians! I'm going to
put them in the line!"

            Padway's line was now
perilously thin, and he couldn't contract it without isolating his archers and
horsemen. But this time John hurled his cavalry against the flanking archers.
The archers dropped back down the river bank, where the horses couldn't get at
them, and Padway's own cavalry charged the Imperialists, driving them off in a
dusty chaos of whirling blades.

            Presently the desired
peasantry appeared, shepherded along by dirty and profane Gothic officers. The
bridge was carpeted with pikes dropped in flight; the recruits were armed with
these and put in the front line. They filled the gap nicely. Just to encourage
them, Padway posted Goths behind them, holding sword points against their
kidneys.

            Now, if Bloody John would
let him alone for a while, he could set about the delicate operation of getting
his whole force back across the bridge without exposing any part of it to
slaughter.

            But Bloody John had no such
intention. On came two big bodies of horse, aimed at the flanking Gothic cavalry.

            Padway couldn't see what was
happening, exactly, between the dust and the ranks of heads and shoulders in
the way. But by the diminishing clatter he judged his men were being driven
off. Then came some cuirassiers galloping at the archers, forcing them off the
top of the bank again. The cuirassiers strung their bows, and for a few seconds
Goths and Imperialists twanged arrows at each other. Then the Goths began
slipping off up and down the river, and swimming across.