The Excalibur Alternative

"At a walk!" he commanded, and the trumpet sang again.

The cavalry stirred back into motion, walking their mounts towards the weapons-waving mob of Thoolaas. He waited two or three more heartbeats, then shouted again.

"At a trot!"

The line of horsemen spurred to a trot, hooves thudding on firm earth as they gathered speed and momentum, and the Thoolaas warriors screamed their war cries and flooded to meet them.

"At a charge!"

The trumpet sang a final time, and a deep, hoarse bellow went up in answer from his troopers as the trot became a gallop. Sir George's vision was narrowed by the slots of his visor, but he saw the dart-throwers' arms come forward, saw the slender, javelinlike spears leaping from the throwing sticks. He smelled the dust, horse sweat and his own, and felt the sun which had seemed so dim in the murky sky beating down upon his armor while the equine thunder of the charge enveloped him. The spears came slicing wickedly downward, one of them impacting with a force and weight that struck his shield like a hammer. Somewhere he heard a horse screaming, and there were human screams mingled with the sound, but there was no time to think about that now. No time for anything which could distract him from the task at hand.

A huge Thoolaas came at him—a veritable giant, even for its own kind—with an enormous battle ax clasped in each pair of hands. The creature was as tall as Sir George mounted on Satan, and it shrieked its hatred and its war cry as it lunged towards him. But big as it was, and long as its arms were, they were shorter than a ten-foot lance, and it shrieked again as the bitter steel lance head slammed squarely into its chest.

The Thoolaas went down, but the impact ripped the lance from Sir George's grip. He was too experienced to try to maintain his grasp upon it at the expense of losing speed or balance, and his sword swept from its sheath in a reflex as automatic as breathing.

Satan thundered forward, screaming his own battle rage yet swerving, obedient to the pressure of Sir George's knees, and then the baron rose in his stirrups as another warrior confronted him. An ax and a huge, clumsy flail swung at him in a scissorslike attack, and the unbelievable shock as his shield took the weight of the flail nearly knocked him from the saddle. In an odd sort of way, the ax that struck home almost simultaneously actually helped him keep his seat. It slammed into the new, solid steel backplate which covered his hauberk, driving him forward and to the side, almost diametrically against the impact of the flail. It was like being trapped between two sledgehammers, but the baron maintained his balance, and his sword swept out and around with deadly precision.

The second Thoolaas tumbled backwards, his throat a blood-streaming gash while Satan trampled him underfoot, and suddenly Sir George was through their line, and he gri

The alien missile troops carried no hand-to-hand weapons at all. Two last-ditch darts slammed into him—one turned by his breastplate, and the other skipping off of the plate cuisse protecting his left thigh—while a third bounced from Satan's barding, and then Sir George was upon them. He rose in the stirrups as he passed between two of them, and his sword severed one's arm on the downstroke, then split the other's skull on the backhand recovery. A third alien reached up for him with one pair of hands, trying to drag him from the saddle while two more hands stabbed furiously at him with bronze-headed javelins. But his armor defeated the javelins, and he slammed his shield into the alien's forehead. The creature staggered backwards, and one of his troopers who had somehow retained his lance came past the baron at a gallop. The lance's steel head punched deep into the stu

Satan turned like an antelope under him, all trace of rebellion or resistance vanished, and Sir George's eyes swept the field.

The Thoolaas formation, such as it had been, had shattered like crystal under the impact of his charging troopers. Individually huge and powerful though they might have been, the aliens had discovered that even the ability to use weapons with all four hands was insufficient to overcome the discipline and armor of their far smaller opponents. At least half the aliens were down, and even as Snellgrave arrived beside Sir George with his standard, the handful of warriors who hadn't fled were being cut down by the surviving English. Other troopers were thundering in pursuit of those who had fled, hacking them down from behind in the ancient penalty cavalry had always exacted from infantry who broke and ran. This infantry, however, was very nearly as fast as the cavalry pursuing it, and Sir George turned to his trumpeter.

"Sound the recall!"

The trumpet notes blared out, cutting through the clangor and clamor of the battle, and the troopers responded quickly. Here and there someone took a moment longer to finish off one of the aliens, but these were experienced veterans, many of them personally trained by Sir George and Walter Ski

Sir George made a quick estimate of their numbers. He could see at least a dozen of his men scattered among the Thoolaas' wounded and dead, and several more humans were on foot. Horses were down, as well, but his initial impression was that more men had been unhorsed than had had their mounts killed under them. He didn't know how many of those armored figures sprawled in the trampled, bloody purple grass were dead, and how many were only wounded, but he had a very good notion of what would happen to any unprotected wounded the Thoolaas came upon. Under other circumstances, he might have relied on the dismounted troopers to protect their fallen comrades, but the Thoolaas were simply too big for him to count upon men on foot, however well equipped or led, to hold them off, and he raised his visor and turned to Ski

"Walter! Tell off twenty men to secure our wounded!"

"Aye, Sir!"

"Sir Richard!"

"Here, My Lord!"

"We'll continue to the village. When we reach it, take your half of the force and swing around to secure the gate on the east side."

"Yes, My Lord!"

"Very well." Sir George gave the field another glance, then grunted in gratitude when one of the dismounted troopers reached up to hand him a replacement lance.

"My thanks," he told the dismounted man, and turned his head as Ski

"Told you that one had the devil in him," the master of horse said.

"So you did—and a damned good thing on a day like this!"

"No argument from me on that, My Lord. Not now."

"Good!" Sir George flashed a smile, teeth white against his spade beard in the shadow of his bascinet. "And are we ready now?"

"Aye, Sir." Ski