Harry Turtledove - Conan of Venarium

Again, though, he and Vulth had to retreat to keep from being surrounded and cut off.. "How many damned Cimmerians are there?" he shouted.

"By Mitra, they're all dammed," answered his cousin. "But there are too many of them on the field here."

That there were. They forced the Gundermen and Bossonians back and back, until the men from the south were fighting desperately to hold the barbarians out of the fortified encampment. If the Cimmerians forced themselves into the camp, Count Stercus' army was probably doomed. That seemed all too plain to Granth — and to the howling savages who forced their way ever forward despite the reinforcements issuing from the camp.

A Gunderman to Granth's left slumped to his knees, bleeding from a dozen wounds that would long since have slain a less vital man. "What are we going to do?" cried Granth. "What can we do?"

"Fight," said Vulth. "This is where we'll win or lose, so we'd better win."

Granth fought, and fought hard. If the battle were to have a turning point, he and his comrades would have to make it here. If not— He shook his head. He would not think about that. It might befall him, but he would not think of it before it did.

Fight hard!" bellowed Mordec. "By Crom, wee can break them here. We can, and we must! Fight hard!"

Although he and his fellows had battled to the very gates of the Aquilonians' camp, they could not force their way inside. For one thing, the pikemen and archers at the gates battled back with the careless fervor of men staring disaster in the face. For another, more men kept coming forth from the encampment to add their weight to the fray. And, for a third, archers galled the Cimmerians from behind the ditch and palisade surrounding the camp.

Mordec smashed at the tip of a pike seeking to drink his blood. The iron head flew off. He roared in triumph. But the Gunderman he faced defended himself so fiercely, first with the pikestaff and then with his shortsword, that Mordec could not slay him. At last, balked of his intended prey, the blacksmith sought and soon found an easier victim.

Inside the encampment, a bugler blew a long, complex call. The Aquilonians outside the gate that Mordec faced fell back into the camp. The foot soldiers who had been hurrying out to help defend the place parted to the left and to the right. A great shout of victory rose from the Cimmerians, who loped forward, ready to taste at last the sweet fruit for which they had struggled so long and hard.

But they rejoiced too soon. The archers and pikemen had not given way from despair, but because they were clearing the path for their comrades. That sweet-voiced Aquilonian bugle cried out once more —and the armored knights who up until then had not joined the battle thundered forth against the Cimmerians.

The horsemen had used the whole width of the encampment to go from walk to trot to gallop, and when they struck, they struck like an avalanche. Here in the hilly, heavily forested north, cavalry was not much used. Not only was there little room for horsemen to deploy, but most of the few horses in Cimmeria were mere ponies, ill-suited to carrying heavy men and their armor of iron.

Shouting out the name of King Numedides as if it were a thing to conjure with and not that of a slavemaster, the Aquilonian knights slammed into the oncoming Cimmerians. Lances and slashing swords and cleverly aimed iron-shod hooves and the surging power of armored men and horses took their toll. The Cimmerians fought back as best they could, but their swords and spears would not bite on the knights' thick plate, or on the iron scales the horses wore to protect their heads and breasts.

Mordec's axe was a different story. When he brought it down between a horse's eyes, the beast foundered as if it had run headlong into a stone wall. Agile even in his well-articulated armor, the rider tried to scramble free. The blacksmith's countrymen swarmed over him. Their blades probed for every chink and joint in his suit of iron. He screamed, but not for long.

Yet even as he died, his comrades spurred ahead, spearing and hacking, their great mounts whinnying fiercely and rising on command to their hind legs so they could lash out with their front hooves. Along with Numedides' name, the knights cried out that of Count Stercus, and, whenever they did, one of the foremost riders gaily waved. His visor was down, so Mordec could not see his face, but he fought like a man who had no regard for his own life. Again and again, he urged his charger into the thickest part of the press. Again and again, the other Aquilonians followed to save him from his own folly—if folly it was, for even as he risked himself he routed the Cimmerians.

Had they been used to facing armored horsemen, they surely would have acquitted themselves better. But the Aquilonian knights had, along with the advantages of armor and momentum, that of striking from above and, greatest of all, that of surprise. Never had any of their foes here, no matter how ferocious, tried to stand against such an onslaught.

With the mercurial nature that marked the barbarian, the horde of Cimmerians who had been rampaging forward now suddenly turned to panic-stricken flight. Turning their backs to the knights who pressed them, they dashed for the safety of the woods.

"Stand! Hold fast, you fools!" shouted Mordec. "You but give yourselves into the enemy's hands if you run from him!" His was not the only voice raised trying to stem the rout, but all resounded in vain. Faster by far than they had advanced on the Aquilonians' camp, the Cimmerians fled from it.

And they paid the inevitable price for their folly. Laughing at the sport, the Aquilonian knights speared them down from behind, as if they were so many plump partridges. Bossonian archers sped the Cimmerians on their way with cleverly aimed shafts. More than a few bold warriors from those gloomy woodlands suffered the humiliation of taking their death wounds in the back.

Mordec had to run away with the rest. Had he stood at bay, alone, he would only have thrown his own life away— and for what? For nothing, not when his countrymen thought only of escape. And so, cursing fate and his fellow Cimmerians in equal measure, he ran. He was among the last to leave the field: a small" sop for his spirit, but the only one he could take from the sudden rout and disaster.

He had almost reached the safety of the trees when an arrow pierced his left calf. He snarled one last curse at the Cimmerians who had given up the fight too soon, and limped on. Once hidden from the now rampaging foe, he paused and tried to pull out the arrow. The barbs on the point would not let him free it from his flesh. Setting his teeth, Mordec pushed it forward instead. Out came the point. He broke off the fletching and pulled the shaft through the track it had made. Then he bandaged the bleeding wounds with cloth cut from his breeks. That done, he limped on toward Duthil.

When Mordec came upon a dead man who had fallen still holding on to his spear, he pried the other Cimmerian's hand, now pale from loss of blood, off the spearshaft and used the weapon as a makeshift stick to keep some of his weight off the injured leg. He would have gone on without the stick; he was determined enough to have gone on with only one leg. But having it made his progress easier.

"Home," he said, as if someone had claimed he might not go there. And so the Aquilonians had. They had done their best to stretch him out stiff and stark like the warrior from whom he had taken the spear. They had done their best, and they had failed: he still lived, while more than a few of them lay dead at his hands.

In the larger sense, his countrymen had lost their battle. Mordec, though, stubbornly reckoned his own fight a triumph of sorts.

A wounded Cimmerian, too proud and fierce to beg for his own life, glared up at Granth. The Gunderman hesitated before thrusting home with his pike. "Seems a shame to slaughter all these barbarians," he remarked. "The healers could keep a lot of them alive, and they'd fetch us a good price in the slave markets, eh?"