Roland Green - Great King_s war

Phrames had never been in such a storm; it was more like being under a waterfall than being out in the rain. He felt as if he were lifting a tangible weight as he struggled to his feet, his boot soles sinking into suddenly muddy ground. As the thunder rumbled away into silence, he heard someone squalling in panic:

"The gods are angry! This is a warning from Thanor not to fight today."

One such idiot could be more than enough to start a panic. Phrames drew his sword with one hand and gripped his banner-bearer's helmet to urge him upward with the other.

"Traitor! Fool! This storm is the gods themselves fighting for us! Dralm and Galzar and Thanor and Lytris have sent this storm to soak the Beshtan fireseed. We outnumber them ten to one; with no fireseed they're doomed. We can take the castle with our bare hands!"

Phrames gave one final heave to his banner-bearer, who struggled up to stand beside him. Then he raised his sword high and ran toward the breach without looking back to see if anyone was following him.

At first he didn't look back because he didn't want to give the impression of doubting his men's courage. Before long he didn't look back because he had to look where he was going to keep from falling over his own feet. He'd been noted both as a runner and a climber as a youth, but he'd never tried to do both at once, over muddy ground strewn with rain slick stones and shot, in a pouring rain, wearing three-quarter armor. He began to wonder if broken ankles would account for as many of his men as Beshtan fire would have otherwise.

By the time Phrames was actually at the breach, enough of his men had caught up so that while he was certainly the first there, it wasn't by much. He counted forty or more Hostigi scrambling over the rubble that had filled the moat, sometimes falling but helping each other up and always going on. The rain had brought Beshtan gunfire to an almost complete halt-something to thank Lytris for.

Suddenly his banner-bearer went down with a crossbow bolt in his leg halfway up the breach. Phrames caught the banner before it fell and made a mental note to set up a special fund in the Princely treasury to support the kin of his banner-bearers; the job seemed unreasonably dangerous.

Being one-handed because of his grip on the banner nearly cost him his life. Many of the Beshtans who'd lost their dry fireseed hadn't lost their courage; they swarmed down from the top of the breach, swinging swords, musket-butts, half-pikes and maces like madmen. Phrames had to use the banner pole like a spear, catching one swordsman in the throat, then he dropped it and laid about with sword and pistol butt. He made another mental note to carry a mace the next time he had to storm a breach. His sword was a fine weapon for use from a horse, but on foot he needed something that would stop an opponent as well as just kill him.

The second regiment of Hostigi came pouring up through the breach, and for a moment Phrames was wedged so tightly between his own men and his enemies that he couldn't have wielded a feather, let alone a mace. Finally the sheer weight of numbers pushed the Beshtans back. The gunners around the two-pounder gave up trying to find dry fireseed, drew swords or picked up their tools, and waded into the fight.

Phrames chopped through a rammer with one sword cut and through the gunner's raised arm with the next, then thrust the man in the face. Thank Galzar most of these soldiers don't have swords with points! In this kind of close-quarters brawl, the Hostigi ability to thrust was a large advantage. Maybe I should be thanking Kalvan instead of Galzar, Phrames wondered, although Kalvan has obviously been blessed by the Wargod with these new ideas of his. So I suppose I can thank Galzar and thank Kalvan without blaspheming the gods.

With lines being drawn now so that friend could be told from foe, the Beshtans on the wall were joining in. Some were leaping down to thicken the defenders' line, other adding bullets, arrows and even thrown stones from above. The number of fallen Hostigi began to increase at a rate that did not meet with Phrames' approval, and not all of them were men who'd slipped on wet stones or tripped over a comrade's foot.

Someone was shouting in his ear about bringing up the pikemen of Queen Rylla's Foot, the third regiment in the storming column. Without bothering to turn and face the man, Phrames bellowed, "Great Galzar, no! The pikes are the last thing we need until we're down in the courtyard. They won't have room to use their pikes or even defend themselves up here." A pikeman needed firm ground for both feet and both hands for his pike; if he lacked either, he was just an easy target instead of one of the deadliest kind of infantrymen ever to march.

The Beshtans were falling faster than the Hostigi; in places their dead and dying were strewn three deep. Reinforcements were still coming up; it looked as if the defenders were staking everything on holding the breach and the walls and not worrying about a second line of defense in the keep.

A man Phrames recognized emerged from the Beshtan line-a baron who'd commanded a Beshtan cavalry squadron on the Great Raid into Hos-Harphax in the spring. He'd done a good job, too; why had he chosen to follow his damnable Prince into treason? No one would ever know, most likely; all the man could be given now was an honorable death. Phrames shouted a war cry and raised his sword.

For about a hundred breaths it wasn't entirely clear who was going to give whom what sort of death. The baron's sword was heavier and his reach longer than Phrames'; three times the Baron beat down the Count's guard and would have finished him if Phrames' armor hadn't been sound. Finally, he hooked a foot behind the baron's leg and sent him crashing down on the stones, then thrust him in the throat through his mail aventail. When he stepped back from the dying baron, there appeared to be as many Beshtans as ever and he began to wonder if he hadn't been a little too hasty in dismissing the pikemen. They wouldn't help to get through the breach, but as for holding it against the Beshtans…

As Phrames completed the thought, a new uproar of screams, war cries, curses and the crashing and clashing of weapons and armor burst out behind the Beshtans. Somebody was hitting them in the rear. By the time Phrames had caught his breath, that somebody had opened enough of a gap in the Beshtan line to let him see men in Saski green and gold swarming across the courtyard. At their head was a bulky figure in freshly re-gilded armor, wielding a bloody mace and defaming the sexual habits of all Beshtans, their parents, and their illegitimate offspring by an astonishing variety of mothers-not all of them human or even earthly.

For a moment Phrames wanted to curse. To owe his success at the breach to Sarrask of Sask-! Then he sighed. His honor was one thing; the lives of his men another. He could not throw the second away because of some whimsical notion of the first. Besides, it was beginning to seem that Dralm and Galzar had so made Sarrask that there was some good in him-or at least a fighting man's courage that the right leader could bring out, and then Dralm and Galzar sent Kalvan…

No good ever came of questioning the judgment of Allfather Dralm or Galzar Wolfhead, even when one did not understand it.

So Phrames walked down the rubble over the outstretched bodies of the Beshtans to greet Prince Sarrask with outstretched hands. They touched palms and the big man grinned, then clapped Phrames on both shoulders.

Sarrask unhooked a silver-stoppered flask from his belt. "You look like a man who could use this."

"After we've cleared the courtyard, I won't say no."

"Then drink up, Count. We've got everything except the keep already. He swept his hand around to the broken Beshtans scattered around the courtyard, most surrendering and calling "Oath to Galzar!" with only a few clots still holding out against the Hostigi.