Dan Chernenko - The Scepter_s Return

"If they want to give us trouble, they'll have to close with us." Hirundo sounded somberly satisfied. "Otherwise, they can ride and whoop and holler as much as they please, but they're just a bunch of nuisances."

Before Grus could answer, cries of alarm rose from the inner palisade. "A sally! A sally!" The king caught the news through the general din.

Menteshe were pouring out of the gates of Trabzun and swarming toward the palisade. Their guttural war cries filled the air. "Hold them!" Grus shouted to the men on the inner ring. "Don't let them get over!"

"Now we see how smart they are and how smooth they are. Can they hit us from inside and outside at the same time?"

Hirundo might have been a scholar curious to see what someone else's students knew about his specialty.

Grus admired that detachment without wanting to imitate it. "If they can get over from inside and outside at the same time, we're in trouble," he said.

'There is that," Hirundo agreed. "We just have to make sure they can't, then, don't we?"

"Would be nice," Grus said. Hirundo laughed merrily, as though they were a pair of tradesmen bantering back and forth in front of their shops. And so they were, but at the moment their trade involved bloodshed and slaughter. As though to underscore the point, an arrow thrummed past Grus' head. He jerked up his shield. That would have done him no good at all if the arrow had been a little better aimed.

He trotted toward the inner palisade, drawing his sword as he did. "It's the king!" Avornan soldiers called to one another. "The king is coming to help us!"

Grus laughed almost as hard as Hirundo had a moment earlier. He would fight if he had to. He hadn't been a bad swordsman when he was half his present age. He still knew what to do with a blade. His body, though, was less willing – no, less able – to do it than it had been thirty years before.

Pikemen, archers, and swordsmen were holding back the garrison of Trabzun. The ditch in front of the palisade also helped. Some of the Menteshe leaped down into it and then tried to scramble up over the palisade and into the Avornans' ring around their city. Most of them got shot or stabbed before they even came close to the top.

Grus had always thought that the Avornans knew more about attacking works than the nomads did. The Menteshe hadn't proved good at taking walled towns in southern Avornis during their last invasion. They'd destroyed crops around them and tried to starve them into submission. The few times they'd tried to storm them, they'd failed, and paid heavily for their failure.

Here, though, they knew what to do about the ditch – or some of them did. They threw brush hurdles into it and ran across those before the Avornans could set them on fire. Then they started trying to boost one another over the palisade. They had a much better chance of managing that from the hurdles than they did from the bottom of the ditch.

Now they could strike back at the Avornans. One of Grus' men fell, his face a gory mask from the sword stroke that had laid him low. A Menteshe scrambled over the palisade and inside. Several Avornans rushed at him. He went down before any other nomads could join him.

Even so, shouts from all around the inner ring warned that this wasn't the only place where the Menteshe were using those bound piles of brush to span the ditch. More cries rose from behind Grus. That could only mean the horsemen outside the ring were trying to break in, too. He wondered whether they'd also brought brushwood with them. I'll find out, he thought.

Meanwhile, more Menteshe made it over the inner palisade. Knots of cursing, shouting men battled one another. A nomad broke out of the nearest knot and rushed at Grus.

The nomad cut at his head. He blocked the blow. Sparks flew as iron belled off iron. The Menteshe slashed again. He had no style, but what seemed like endless youth and vigor. That might suffice, and Grus knew it.

Then another Avornan ran at the nomad. The Menteshe's face twisted in anger and fear. He didn't fancy facing two at once. He had no choice, though. Figuring – no doubt accurately – the young soldier was more dangerous than the frost-bearded king, he gave more of his attention to the new foe.

He likely would have beaten Grus without much trouble had they faced each other with no interference from other fighters. But he couldn't fend off the king with only a third or a quarter of his aim focused on him. Grus' sword went home below the nomad's right arm, a spot the fellow's boiled-leather corselet didn't protect. The Menteshe howled like a wolf. The pain of the wound distracted him, and the other Avornan's sword bit into his neck. He swayed, blood spurting from the wound, and then crumpled.

"We make a good team, Your Majesty," the Avornan soldier said.

"So we do," Grus replied. "Tell me your name." "I'm called Esacus, Your Majesty."

"Esacus," Grus repeated, fixing the name in his mind. "Well, Esacus, you'll have a reward when all this is done."

"Thank you very much, but I didn't do it for that," the soldier said.

"Which makes you more deserving, not less," Grus told him. Esacus scratched his head, plainly not understanding. That proved he'd never had anything to do with the royal court. People there were apt to act much more heroic if they thought the king's eye was on them than they might have otherwise.

"You stay back, Your Majesty," Esacus called as more Menteshe made it over the palisade. Shouting, "Avornis!" the soldier rushed into the fight.

Grus did stay back. He knew good advice when he heard it. The Menteshe couldn't get enough men within the Avornan ring at the same time to give the defenders too much trouble.

The nomads were also trying to break into the palisaded ring from the outside. Despite the barrage of arrows they rained on the defenders, they weren't having much luck. They must have hoped that barrage would break the Avornans, which would give them the chance they needed to force an entry. Unlike the Menteshe inside Trabzun, the relief force hadn't brought any hurdles or other ways to cross the ditch and come to grips with Grus' men at close quarters.

They were brave. Like anything else, bravery didn't matter so much without the talent that would have supported it. If anything, it made the nomads take heavier losses than they would have with less courage. They kept on attacking even when the attacks couldn't succeed – and they paid for it.

At last, they had taken as much as they could take. They gave up trying to force their way into the ring. A few at a time, they began to ride off. Some lingered to keep on shooting at the Avornans from beyond the range where Grus' archers could respond. Then a stone flung from an engine knocked a chieftain out of the saddle – and knocked over his horse, too. After that, the nomads seemed to decide they'd had enough. The men who'd lingered rode away after their comrades.

Grus ordered some of the Avornans from the outer works to go to the aid of the men who were fighting off the much more stubborn attack on the inner ones. When the Menteshe trying to break out of Trabzun saw that the Avornans battling them were being reinforced, they sullenly drew back into the city – those who could, at any rate.

Later, the king realized he should have tried to force an entry then. The Menteshe were in disarray, and the gates had to stay open for a while to let them back within the walls. But the nomads, though they hadn't won, had fought well – well enough to rock the Avornans back on their heels. Grus did not issue the order. Neither did Hirundo. No one pursued the Menteshe as they retreated.

What Grus did do as the fighting eased was let out a long sigh of relief and stab his sword into the soil to clean the blood off the blade. He sent runners out to find Hirundo and bring him back. The general nodded as he came up. "Well, Your Majesty, we got through that one," he said.