Andrew Hartley - Act of Will

“Now what?” I shouted. At first they didn’t hear, and I had to clamber onto the front of the wagon and tap the young officer on the shoulder.

“What are they shouting about?” I said, conscious of a laugh creeping into my own voice as I caught something of their mood. The corporal leaned forward and pointed westwards towards the Downs and the treetops of the border forests.

I turned and looked. There was a dark ribbon of men and banners: the black flags of a great army of horsemen steadily advancing towards us.

“Reinforcements,” shouted the corporal.

“What?” I called back through the noise.

“We got word this morning,” said the corporal, “Shale has sent its entire army to smash the raiders. Two hundred cavalry and over seven hundred foot soldiers.”

I stared at him, suddenly cold.

But before I could say anything, there was another shout. A ripple went through our force, and the corporal’s smile faded as he stared off to where men were pointing: not towards the raiders, or to the army from Shale, which was advancing from the west, but behind us, to the south.

I turned, feeling a sudden swell of dread, and found that the plains at our back were suddenly awash in a thick grey mist. A moment later, the mist was blowing away, and in its place was an army that looked as if it had sprung from the earth like corn. But this army was not wearing the crimson of the raiders.

They wore white.

In the sparkle of their silver helms I saw our certain destruction.

I leapt down from the wagon and ran to where Renthrette and Lisha sat on their mounts with the villagers.

“It’s the Empire!” I shouted, pointing wildly at the men who had appeared to the south. “Shale and the Empire! They’ve been working together all along.”

Lisha was already driving her horse out of the throng, Renthrette quickly following. I didn’t need to explain what was about to happen. The raiders and their Diamond Empire brothers, joining with the strength from Shale, would turn on the unsuspecting forces of Greycoast and Verneytha and wipe them out. In one fell swoop Shale would destroy its rivals according to whatever cozy terms Arlest had agreed on with the Empire, and our armies didn’t even know it was coming. What had looked like a pair of manageable encounters had turned into one we could not hope to survive, let alone win.

Lisha jumped down from the saddle and shouted to Renthrette, “Tell Garnet! Tell everybody. Ride to the gatehouse and tell the duke, then Mithos. Stay close to the citadel and move quickly.”

Without a word Renthrette kicked her heels into her horse’s flanks and it lunged forward. Within seconds she had left Garnet shouting at his men and was galloping over the drawbridge into the gatehouse. The sound of cheering still echoed from the citadel and the Verneytha cavalry, but it was muted now, and there was confusion at the sudden appearance of these new soldiers clad in white. On my left, Orgos was addressing his troops, his voice uneven. He glanced round to the advancing black tide of horsemen that flowed towards us from the Downs, and south to the Empire cohorts who had appeared out of the fog and were now locked in a purposeful phalanx. We were surrounded.

The Greycoast soldiers shifted restlessly, scared and unsure what to believe. Some called out questions, wanting proof there was no time to give.

“What do we do?” I shouted to Lisha, all composure gone. Our two-to-one advantage had suddenly been inverted, and then some. “What can we do? We have to retreat into the citadel!”

“They’d be on us before we could get inside,” she said. “And we’d never get that portcullis down in time to keep them out. We have to stop the three armies from joining forces. If we can keep them separate we may yet hold out, for a while.”

She didn’t sound hopeful.

“How?”

“Drive a wedge between the raiders and the Shale regular army. If we can catch them before they have ordered their ranks we’ll have them at a disadvantage.”

“Who with?” I asked, looking around desperately. “All we’ve got is forty mounted police and a few dozen villagers with pitchforks. The raiders will tear us apart!”

“Mithos will help,” Lisha replied.

“How is he going to know?” I yelled back. It was supposed to be a rhetorical question. If our meager cavalry got stuck out there alone, it would be a bloodbath.

“He’ll know,” she said, and it was determination in her eyes, not hope. It was a doomed effort, but it was the best we had. She turned back to her horse and vaulted into the saddle, where she sat small and defiant, a triangular shield on her left arm and the elegant spear of silver and ebony in her right hand. She turned to Garnet and began speaking earnestly. For a second he glanced at his small force uncertainly, and then he looked back into her eyes and nodded.

I pointed to the horses Renthrette had moved away. “Get them yoked up to the wagon again,” I yelled to a couple of the villagers. They couldn’t have been older than fifteen, and I recognized one of them as a relative of Maia’s.

Garnet was bringing his horsemen about him and joining them with the villagers. They looked pathetically few. For a moment I faltered and looked towards the citadel. I could run the distance to the gate in under a minute and they would have to shoot me down to stop me. I glanced up and saw Renthrette, her hair trailing from her closed helm, spurring her horse away from Ironwall and heading obliquely for the Verneytha cavalry. She was crouched low in the saddle, streaking arrowlike under the eyes of the enemy.

Lisha was now talking to the villagers. Grath was amongst them, a long boar spear in his hand and a crossbow across his back. One of the riders with him was a grey-haired man whose dark skin hung in wrinkles under his eyes, but the eyes themselves were bright and he held his long hafted wood ax grimly. Behind him was the teenaged kid who had wrestled with one of the raiders the night I had got them out of the village.

“We’ll need that extra hundred infantry,” I shouted to Lisha. “Somebody get the duke and A Company out of that gatehouse and drop the portcullis. They are wasted in there.”

The boys had brought the horses over and were hurriedly hitching them up. Behind the spear line by the wagon were two men and a woman cradling heavy crossbows in their bare arms.

“You three,” I shouted. “Get up here. One in the front, two in the back. We need a driver, someone without a mount.”

One of the boys finished harnessing the horses and swung himself up into the front of the wagon. He was lithe and dark of skin and eyes.

“Can you drive this thing?” I asked uncertainly.

“As fast as it will go,” he said with a grim smile. I nodded and turned to the handful of Greycoast regulars who had been sent to reinforce us.

“Corporal, get a couple of your spearmen up here. We might need them.”

The corporal gave me a long, disbelieving look and said, “You can say that again. How many can you take?”

“No more than three.”

It was already getting pretty crowded up there. I stood in the center, protected to the waist by the folded sides of the wagon, my arms gripping the two scorpion bolt throwers. On either side of me knelt a villager with a crossbow, the teenaged kid on my right, a powerful-looking woman on my left. Another crossbowman rode in the front next to the boy. A couple of axes and shields were passed up to them and they looked about as ready as they ever would be. We could only get two more aboard comfortably, so the Greycoast spearmen, with their silver hauberks and curved body-sized shields, clambered up into the back, one at the tail, one next to the woman. I glanced around and saw Lisha watching. Renthrette must have reached Mithos by now, unless she’d been cut off by the raiders.