Olan Thorensen - Cast Under an Alien Sun

Denes had fired his musket at the closest raider. The ball hit the raider in mid-chest and knocked him on his back, unmoving. All of the other muskets and crossbows followed Denes. It wasn’t a simultaneous volley, but a rolling firing that lasted three to four seconds. Sixty-nine muskets and thirty-one crossbows sent their projectiles into the mass of raiders. Twenty shots went into the ground or over the heads of their targets. Ten projectiles, nine musket balls, and a single quarrel somehow passed through the raider mass without hitting flesh. One musket ball found the throat of an unarmed Abersford woman peering over the barricade on the opposite side from the ball’s origin. The other seventy projectiles hit raiders. Seven raiders were hit more than once. One unlucky raider was hit four times by musket balls and once by a quarrel. Of the fifty-three raiders struck in the first volley, forty-five of the hits were fatal or incapacitating.

Denes saw a grizzled raider shout, gesture with his sword, and lead a charge straight at himself, Carnigan, a cowering Yozef, and the opening in the barricade.

A second, smaller rolling volley followed from those barricade’s defenders having a second loaded musket, pistol, or crossbow at hand. Another thirteen raiders went down.

Yozef crouched behind the edge of the opening of the barricade. He had a perfect view to see what appeared to be an unstoppable mass of savage men screaming bloodlust and charging straight at him . His imagination envisioned blades lopping off his limbs or his head or cleaving him in half. Carnigan, Denes, and three other men filled the gap. One man went down without a sound, landing next to Yozef, a hole just above his right eye, both eyes staring skyward and blood running into the earth under his head. Yozef’s stomach contracted as if prepping to retch. He wanted to run. He wanted … to live ! More than anything, he wanted to drop the spear and run for the back of the abbey complex. There were other gates, or he could drop on the other side of the wall from a rampart . He could go somewhere else in Caedellium and start over. Or go to the Narthani and convince them of his worth and maybe end up more secure and honored than here on this primitive island. He wanted to be anywhere else but here at this moment.

He didn’t know why he didn’t run. Maybe because he didn’t know where to run. Maybe because no matter how terrified he was, he couldn’t leave his friends. Carnigan. Cadwulf. The abbot and the abbess who had cared for him. His workers and their families. Brak and Elian. Dour Denes, who pretended to ignore Yozef most of the time but listened when it counted.

Even if he wanted to run, his legs didn’t feel strong enough to take him there. So he crouched, both hands death-gripped to the spear shaft.

Abulli felt his men behind him. They had a chance, though perhaps he didn’t, as he faced the enormous islander in the middle of the gap. He snarled, voiced an appeal and an acceptance at the same time to whatever gods there were, and swung his sword.

Carnigan deflected the sword of the first raider to reach the gap with the shield on his left arm and, with the same twisting motion, brought the battle axe down onto a shoulder at the base of the swordsman’s neck. A shower of blood sprayed six feet and washed over Yozef. Within seconds, a melee engulfed the entire forty-foot section of barricade—defenders fighting for their lives against the wave of raiders.

Several raiders leaped over lower spots in the barricade to land in the midst of Keelanders. The raiders died quickly, though not before hewing down men and women.

The most desperate action centered at the gap. The tip of the raider assault followed their fallen leader. All that stopped them was that the gap was too small for the number of raiders wanting to hit it at the same time. A flurry of swords, axes, and spears held the gap long enough for defenders to flow in that direction.

A man next to Carnigan went down, a slash across his sword arm causing him to drop his weapon, and a second raider stabbed him in the belly. A white-haired man rushed to fill the place of the fallen man but went down himself from a pistol shot.

Another pistol shot glanced off Carnigan’s old shield, briefly staggering him. The deflected ball smacked into Yozef’s leg. He cried out but was too terrified to check for a wound. Carnigan stepped forward again, a new dent in his shield, as more raiders pushed forward.

Yozef was barely conscious of glancing down the line and seeing islanders fend off raiders who tried to climb over the barricade. Here and there, vicious exchanges started and ended within seconds. The brutal fact was that a blade fight with minimal protection tended to be short, one opponent or the other going down quickly. For the raiders, if they dispatched one islander, another took his place. If an old man fell, a teenage boy or girl was there with a spear, a sword, or even a pitchfork to stick any raider occupied with a defender.

Denes yelled, fending off raiders and yelling instructions at the same time. Not having the brute power of Carnigan, he made up for it with speed and form. His sword never stopped slashing, warding off other blades, and stabbing. Raider bodies mounded in front of the gap.

Yozef edged away from the barricade, though he never remembered moving from where he was crouching. Carnigan fended off several raiders by swinging his axe in mighty swaths. No raider was willing to come too close, but neither was the axe wielder able to concentrate on any one attacker. One raider slipped to one side of Carnigan, when a woman who had rushed to fill a space vacated by a wounded man went down from a spear. Carnigan could not turn to face the threat to his side, fully occupied with those to his front. The raider raised his sword to slash at Carnigan, and, without thinking, Yozef lunged forward and stabbed at the raider. His spear-point hit the raider’s leather armor just under the armpit and buried the blade into exposed, vulnerable flesh. The raider screamed and dropped his sword, blood streaming down his side, and turned a shocked face toward Yozef. Their eyes locked. Yozef stood frozen. Another defender slashed at the wounded raider, opening the side of his neck and severing an artery. The raider fell without a sound.

Seeing the raider he’d stabbed fall jolted Yozef. He had no idea how to handle any weapon, but he could stab with the spear he held in a death grip. He made no attempt to face a raider on his own, but two more times he came to the aid of defenders in trouble with raiders. His stab attempts did no damage, but both times it forced the man to divert effort to avoid Yozef’s feeble efforts, and the other defenders made good the distraction.

There was no time to reload firearms. After the initial volleys, it was all steel against steel, and steel into flesh. Underneath the yells of defiance, the screams of the wounded, and the clashes of metal, there was the scything of blades through air in their search for blood. Ssst . . . Sst … SSST . . . Ssssst . . . the sound and intensity varying with a blade’s shape and size and changing tone when metal found flesh or other metal. Somehow Yozef heard every Ssst , and every one seemed aimed at him.

What saved the defenders from being overwhelmed was the raiders initially charging a single point in the barricade. They were in one another’s way, instead of bringing all of their men to bear on the villagers at the same instance. By the time the raiders spread outward on both sides of the gap to climb the barricade, it had given the defenders farther away time to run to the points of attack.

The fighting was vicious but brief. Raiders died in front of the barricade, on it as they tried to climb over, or amid villagers on the other side. Of the 175 raiders who followed Omir Abulli’s order to charge into the gate, 153 entered the courtyard. Of these, 45 fell dead or were wounded in the first volley and 13 in the second. The remaining 95 raiders rallied to Abulli’s call and charged the barricade section in front of the cathedral.