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"You the official doom-crier now?" Haaken demanded.
"Company conference!" Sanguinet shouted after stopping one of the horsemen. "Come on! Move it!"
The Captain put it bluntly. "We're in for it. There's a mob of El Murid's men coming down that side road back there. We can't outrun them. They've already spotted us." He flung a hand at a brushy sugarloaf hill a mile away. The road snaked around its western base. "We'll go up yon hill and dig in. If you're religious, pray your ass off. There's a thousand of the bastards." He exaggerated. There were five hundred of the enemy. But that was trouble enough.
Bragi's squad stood to their weapons while their backups dug in. "Some friends," Haaken grumbled, watching the last of the Royalists gallop away. "We might've had a chance with their help."
"We still stand a damned good chance," Bragi said. "We're Guildsmen, remember?"
Reskird glanced over his shoulder. "Look at that dirt fly."
The secundus and tercio flailed at the earth. "Nothing like an unfriendly sword to motivate a man," Bragi observed.
The enemy reached the foot of the hill and halted. His commanders conferred. They seemed reluctant to attack.
"Hey!" Bragi said. "Some of those guys are westerners. Haaken. Can you make out their colors? Aren't they the same as those guys we met in Itaskia wore? Right after we came out of the mountains?"
Haaken peered. "I think you're right. Greyfells. Maybe this is another gang of Royalists."
"How come ours ran off, then?"
Sanguinet came to stand beside Ragnarson. "Itaskians?"
"Yes sir. Those are Greyfells colors."
"Lieutenant Trubacik. Take a white flag down. Find out who they are."
The command argument below continued till Trubacik approached and said something.
It electrified his listeners.
A man with wild grey hair cut Trubacik down.
A deep-throated roar rose from the hillside.
"We did something wrong," Bragi said. "But what?"
"Don't worry about it now," Sanguinet told him. "Worry about staying alive. They've made up their minds. They're coming."
The wild-haired horseman whipped his followers into line for a charge.
"Behind the ditch," Sanguinet ordered. "Primus, stand to your spears and shields. Bowmen, make every arrow count while they're coming through the brush. Men, if we turn their first attack we'll have our bluff in."
The enemy commander sent most of his warriors, holding only about eighty in reserve. Their animals struggled with the brush and the steep slope. The better Guild bowmen began taking them at extreme range. At least fifty did not reach the ditch, which lay just above the worst part of the slope.
The first riders up tried to jump the ditch but their animals had been ridden hard before being compelled to scale the hillside. Only a handful made the leap successfully. The others found their hindquarters dropping into the trench. They floundered around, blocking the progress of those behind them. Guild spearmen filled the trench with dead and dying animals.
The slower attackers walked their mounts into the ditch and up its farther side—into the thrusting spears. More animals went down. Only a handful maintained the momentum to crash the Guild battle line.
Guild arrows kept pounding into those farther down the slope.
Horsemen began leaping from their saddles and throwing themselves at the shield wall.
That was what Sanguinet wanted.
Bragi dropped his bloody spear and started plying his sword. The enemy kept coming. His dead and wounded carpeted the slope and filled the ditch.
Ragnarson pushed an attacker away with his shield. Three more leapt to take the man's place. He took one, but their combined weight forced him back a step. Perforce, Haaken and Reskird adjusted their positions so they could keep their shields locked with his.
A few riders answered the Guild arrows with shafts of their own. They did no damage because the secundus and tercio turtled with their shields.
Though the assault lasted only minutes, Bragi thought it an eternity before El Murid's warriors began to waver. At least a hundred of their number, and as many horses, had fallen.
The man with the wild hair rallied them. They began pressing again.
It was a slaughter without respite. Six, seven, eight of the desert horsemen went down for every Guildsman. But their captain kept driving them forward.
If that fool keeps on, he'll lose his whole command, Bragi thought. Why's he so desperate to wipe us out?
Then he heard Sanguinet shouting behind the line.
He dared not turn, but knew what had happened. The warriors who had not joined the initial assault had raced around the hill to attack from the rear. Sanguinet was trying to stop them.
The Captain succeeded, but only at the cost of taking his archers away from their bows.
The pressure on the main line redoubled. The shield wall began cracking. Desert warriors pushed into the gaps.
Bragi, Haaken, and Reskird soon found themselves isolated. They backed into a triangle and kept fighting as weary horses pushed past. "Andy! Raul!" Bragi shouted. "Push over here and link back up. Haaken, step backward when I say. Reskird, be ready to fit them in." He kept stabbing and cutting while he shouted.
The cohesiveness of the Guild line continued to dissolve.
A strange, fearless calm came over Ragnarson as death approached. His mind became detached from the body involved in the fighting. He saw what needed doing and tried to get it done.
He managed to reform his squad, having lost only two men.
His calm communicated itself to the others. Their panic declined. They settled down to the grim business of fighting the way they had been taught, maximizing their chances of surviving.
Bragi kept his men in a hard little square, moving when he could to incorporate other members of the company. He kept yelling, "Get their horses! We can murder them on the ground."
The man with the wild hair concurred. Too many of his men were being forced to their feet, where their sabers and small round shields were of little value against heavy infantry. He saw his battalion being destroyed by an inferior force. The gradual regathering of the Guild platoons promised to worsen the casualty ratio.
He was upslope of the Company now. He started gathering riders for another charge, one that would shatter the Guild formation more thoroughly and leave the individual infantrymen vulnerable to his horsemen.
Bragi took advantage of the lessening pressure to include more Guildsmen in his little phalanx and move them to a rock outcrop they could use as a core for their formation.
"Get the wounded back in the rocks," he ordered. "Haaken? See those guys over there? Take a couple men and see if you can help them get over here. You. With the bow. Cover them."
He stamped around the rock as if this were his company, gathering more men, recovering weapons and shields, and keeping one eye on the charge the horsemen were about to throw down the hill.
He gathered some forty able men, and a dozen wounded, before the charge. Despite constant harassment, the rest of the company had managed to coalesce into strong knots. Most had moved to the downhill side of the trench.
"Here they come," said Kildragon.
"All right. Reskird, take over on the left side. Haaken, you take care of the right. I'll stay here. You men, don't let them bluff you. They don't have the balls to ride through us into the rocks."
The charge did what the enemy commander wanted, though again he paid a terrible price. It shattered every Guild grouping but Bragi's. The hillside swirled with furious individual combats.
The chances of the Company surviving did not look good.
The horsemen sheered round Bragi's group, trying to cut at its flanks. "Get their horses!" he kept shouting. "Somebody with a bow, get that sonofabitch with the grey hair." Nobody did so, so he snatched up a fallen bow and tried himself. He had no luck either.