The Excalibur Alternative

There were two armies of the creatures, moving towards one another in an awkward-looking, hunched lope that managed to cover ground with surprising speed. None wore any armor, although the patches of leathery skin he could see here and there, peeping through the coarse hair, looked tough enough to stand for armor if it had to. For weapons, most of them carried a pair of two-handed axes which dwarfed even those of the wart-faces. Others carried maces, flails, or long pikelike spears, and a very few, perhaps five percent of the total, carried quivers of long darts, like javelins.

As the two armies neared one another, the warriors with the darts began to hurl them, and the disembodied baron tried to purse nonexistent lips in a whistle of astonishment. The dart-throwers carried some sort of sticks, and as he watched, he saw them fit the butt ends of their darts into the ends of the sticks. Then they snapped their arms up in graceful arcs, and the sticks were like extensions of those arms. The alien creatures were already far longer-limbed than any human, and the sticks gave them a reach and allowed them to exert a leverage which sent their darts whistling out to unbelievable ranges.

Sir George had never seen anything quite like it, but it reminded him a little of the staff sling he had once seen a shepherd use. He'd never known where the shepherd, a Scot, had gotten the sling, and the lad hadn't been very accurate with it, but he'd been able to throw stones to an extraordinary distance. These four-armed monstrosities, on the other hand, were extremely accurate, and he judged that their range was very close to that of a Genoese crossbowman. His longbowmen could outmatch that by at least a little, and their rate of fire would be higher, but not as much higher as it would have been compared to crossbows. In fact, with four arms and two throwing sticks each of these creatures could come very close to equaling a single longbow's rate of fire.

Fortunately, neither army seemed to have very many of them, and he wondered why that was. If he had commanded either of those forces, he would have mustered every dart-thrower he could find!

But the reason, whatever it was, became immaterial as the two armies continued to close through the deadly hail of darts. Their blood, he noted, was a bright orange, quite unlike human blood, except for the way it spurted and ran as darts drove into bellies and chests and four-armed corpses thudded to the ground like so much slaughtered meat or shrieked and writhed in agony that was all too humanlike.

Even with their high rate of fire, none of the dart-throwers on either side had emptied their quivers when the two charging battlelines slammed into one another, and Sir George's immaterial eyes narrowed. The demon-jester had called the English "primitive"; Sir George wondered what he would have called these creatures. The baron was no stranger to the terror and howling chaos of hand-to-hand combat and the way every soldier's world narrowed to the tiny space within the reach of his own weapons, yet never in all of his battles had he ever seen anything like this—not even from an army of Scots! Indeed, he doubted that anyone had ever seen its like since the days when men finally stopped painting themselves blue before going out to hack and hew at their neighbors.

There was no formation, no effort to maintain line or interval. There were simply two mobs of nine-foot monsters, each armed with two axes or spears, or here and there one spear and an axe, or a pair of massive flails, all slashing and stabbing away at anything that came into range. It was sheer, howling bedlam, without rhyme or reason, and it went on far longer than he would have believed it could.

While it lasted, casualties were brutal. However thick the hide under their coats of coarse hair might be, in the end it was only hide over flesh and bone, and not one of those warriors carried a shield. Nor, so far as he could tell, had any of these hulking warriors ever even heard of the notion of blocking or parrying blows when it might have been attacking, instead. It was all offense and no defense, and blood soaked the grass and turned dry soil into gory mud. Either the fighters were in the grip of battle madness, or else they were too stupid to realize how dreadful the carnage was... or so unlike any human Sir George had ever known that the death toll truly didn't matter to them at all. Those were the only explanations he could think of for how long those two armed mobs stood toe-to-toe, smashing away at one another in an orgy of mutual destruction.

But finally one side had had enough. Its surviving warriors turned to flee, and, as always happened, their foes howled and lunged forward as they turned their backs, cutting down still more of them.

In the end, the routed side managed to outrun the victors—partly because they had thrown away their encumbering weapons, and partly because those who are fleeing from death always tend to be just a little faster than those who are simply pursuing to kill.

Sir George floated above the field of battle, watching the victors tend crudely to their own fallen and slit the throats of their wounded enemies, and then, slowly, his vision faded away.

Sir George sat upright on the comfortably padded bench and, as Computer had instructed him to do when the "briefing" ended, removed the "neural interface" headset.

His hand trembled ever so slightly as he set the headset aside. Computer had told him what he would see, but he'd lacked the experience to fully understand what the unseen voice was telling him. He hadn't realized that it would be real—that he would be able to hear the shrieks of the wounded, smell the subtly alien copper scent of the blood or the all too familiar sewer stench of ruptured organs and death. This was one piece of the demon-jester's magical arts that the baron felt no desire to understand. Not just now. Not until the familiar shudders and belly tightening echoes of combat had worked their way through him and subsided.

He heard a small sound behind him, and turned to see Sir Richard, Rolf Grayhame, Walter Ski

"Tough bastards, if you don't mind me saying so, Sir," Grayhame said after a moment. "Don't care much for how far they can throw them spears of theirs, either."

"I'm not so very happy about that my own self," Howice agreed. "Still, Rolf, I'm thinking our lads have the range on them, by a bit, at least."

"Not by much," Grayhame grumbled. "Not by near so much as I'd like, any road!"

"Aye," Ski

"No," Sir George agreed, "they won't. On the other hand, I've no intention of sending you off to face them until they've been softened up a bit, Walter. Not when I'm riding along with them, at any rate!"

"With all due respect, Sir George," Maynton put in, "I'm of the opinion that you shouldn't be riding along with them even then. You're the one man we can least afford to lose."

"We can't afford to lose anyone at all, if we can help it," Sir George replied. "And if I'm going to send men off on a charge, then it's a charge I'll be making, too."

"You might as well give over, Sir Richard," Ski