A Sword for Kregen by Alan Burt Akers Page B

tramped on steadily, rank on rank, file on file, and the pikes lifted, thick as bristles on a wild vosk’s back.
    The twin suns slanted their rays onto the battlefield from our right flank. Again I looked. Still no movement within the trees flanking the curve of the stream.
    Delia said: “The paktuns are coming perilously close.”
    “Let the bowmen and the spear men play a little longer on the dermiflons.”
    As I spoke another gigantic beast decided that he no longer wished to go in the direction from which these nasty stinging barbs were coming; braying, he turned about and with his ten legs all going up and down like pistons, he lumbered off.
    There were twenty-eight thousand of the enemy. I had spoken lightly of our near thirty thousand — but in that I lied or boasted. Of men we could put in fighting line we had sixteen thousand seven hundred infantry and seven thousand three hundred and twenty cavalry, plus the artillery. And, already, some of our bowmen were down, caught by the deceptive arrow, tiny bundles on the grass, lying still or, more awfully, kicking in the last spasms.
    The balance of our thirty thousand was made up of logistics people, medics, vets. Some of the wagoners would fight if it came to it — but I hoped profoundly it would not come to that.
    The swarths were moving, the scaled mounts advancing directly with the aim of crunching into the left flank of the Phalanx.
    Chuktar De-Ye Mafon, a Pachak with great experience in command of the Tenth Cavalry Division attached to the Phalanx, countered the move. His division consisted of a brigade of three regiments of zorca archers and a brigade of three regiments of totrix lancers. Now he launched the zorcas at the oncoming swarths. The nimble animals swirled in evolutions practiced a thousand times, lined out, and their riders shot and shot as they swooped past the right flank of the enemy mass.
    Disordered, the swarths angled to their left and, at that moment, Chuktar De-Ye Mafon led his totrix lancers into them.
    The outcome of that fight had, for the moment, to be awaited as the enemy commander pushed through in the center.
    The Phalanx had been aimed at the enemy’s center, his ten thousand infantry and his five thousand cavalry, mercenaries all, tough, professional, the hard core of his army. With that swerving recoil of the swarths pressing in on the massed infantry, the enemy general had ordered one of the tactical moves he had left open to himself. The ordered ranks of the paktuns inclined to their left. They broke into a fast trot, their banners and plumes waving, their weapons glinting.
    They would lap around the right flank of the Phalanx and I was about to give the order for Karidge’s Brigade to move up in support, when the last of the dermiflons on this side of the field broke. They fled back, immense engines of destruction, festooned with darts — one with a varter dart pinning three of his starboard legs together — and they crashed headlong into those smart and professional paktuns.
    The paktuns were professionals. They opened ranks; but in the incline that proved not quite so easy as it sounded. We were afforded enough space for the Phalanx to go smashing into them, the pikes down and level, the helmets thrust forward, the shields positioned, rank by rank, to serve each the best purpose. The noise blossomed into the sky. The yells and shrieks and the mad tinker-clatter of steel on iron, of steel on bronze, and the crazed dust-whirling advance encompassed by the raw stink of spilled blood brought a horror that underlay any thoughts of glory. On drove the Phalanx. On and with blood-smeared pikes thrust the paktuns aside.
    Now was the time for the enemy Kapt to hurl in his five thousand cavalry — and our Hakkodin, our halberd and axe and two-handed sword men, knew it.
    The Hakkodin flank the Phalanx and they take enormous pride in the protection they afford and their ability to ensure that no lurking dagger-man, no cavalryman, can