The Sea of Grass Page 17

  “I’m not familiar with that term,” Marcus told him.

  “Double-walled fortifications are common in the Jeweled Hills,” Atta told him. “The territory between the two walls is called a bailey. The territory between the inner wall and the fortified dwelling is called a courtyard.”

  Marcus nodded and then returned to the matter at hand. “So you ruin the day of a lot of savages leaving their dead bodies behind. What happens then? I can’t afford to lose your men from the defense of the inner wall. I can’t leave you out here to die. Would your men be willing to abandon their horses and climb the inner wall by hand?”

  “No!” Atta gave the response Marcus had expected. “Our horses are like a third hand. We will not leave them behind.”

  “Then I don’t see how we can set you loose in the bailey,” Marcus told him. “I can’t leave a path into the inner bailey against the numbers we expect to be fighting.”

  “There is a way,” Atta told him. “You could take down the front gates and use them like a bridge across the ditch you’ve dug around the inner fort. They are made of strong wood. They’ll hold my horses and they could be pulled into the inner fort after we’ve crossed them.”

  “Remove the gates?” Marcus asked. He knew he was showing his incredulity but it was such a bizarre notion.

  “Yes,” Atta affirmed. “In your plan of battle, you do not intend to truly defend them. They’re only real purpose is to keep the forerunners of the savage army from scouting inside the outer wall too soon. You could build another ditch across the front of the fortress and accomplish the same thing.”

  “Yes, I could, couldn’t I,” Marcus considered the idea. At Fort Segundus, lighting had blown the gates to pieces making them worthless. This idea of Atta’s preserved them for better use.

  He made his decision. “I’ll get a crew on the front gates immediately. I want this new ditch dug before dawn—otherwise it might get bloody before we want it to.”

  Day Sixteen

  The Time Things Would Be Hardest

  By dawn, a passable ditch and wall had been constructed across the front of the gate of Fort Defiance. Marcus had put the work crew under Red Vigil Honorius and a strong defensive force of ready legionnaires under Severus in case the savage scouts came forward to investigate the activity, but apparently their fear of night fighting held them off.

  Marcus kept his crew working now as the sun rose to give the new defensive barrier all the height possible. He thought it likely they would see the enemy arrive in numbers today, although he still hoped they’d wait to make their first attack until tomorrow. On the other hand, Teetonka must have thought them a beaten force after the Battle of the Thundercloud so perhaps seeing no real threat he would be in no hurry to come and finish them off.

  Marcus didn’t believe this last possibility would long hold up. Once the scouts reported that they were vigorously strengthening the fort’s defenses, Teetonka and his savages would come. He had almost succeeded in driving all the foreigners off the Sea of Grass. He would not want to leave an active fort to serve as a forward base for his enemies when he returned south to deal with Fort Prime.

  He considered for a moment Tribune Lucanus at the southern-most fort. He’d liked the man and wondered if he yet realized the danger he faced. That might well depend on the fate of those members of the caravan who chose to return to the south. If they encountered another group of savages before they reached Prime, then Lucanus might well remain ignorant of what had happened north of him. But if Burkhard and his people had gotten through, Lucanus would have been able to send warnings to Dona pleading for significant reinforcement.

  The war was far from over whatever happened at Fort Defiance. It was just a matter of how many more men would die before Aquila discovered the new threat to its trade routes.

  Ahead of him on the plain he could see three different camps of savage warriors. None were particularly close. He wondered if he had been right to focus on the defense and not make a sortie at night against these relatively weak forces. It had been very tempting to go out and strike a first blow, but he had ultimately decided to hold that option in reserve. If the savages held a strong superstition against night fighting, it was quite possible that they didn’t consider a night attack a realistic possibility. Making such a move now for relatively little gain would put them on their guard against future attacks, and it might even encourage them to strike sooner so they would not have to face their great fear.

  “Severus!”

  “Tribune?”

  “You’re in command here. Keep them working as long as you deem it reasonably safe. I have no problem with the savage scouts coming close enough to see what you’re doing so long as they don’t actually have a chance to hurt my work detail. I trust your judgment.”

  “Tribune!” Severus saluted him.

  Marcus started to return the gesture when he caught sight of something he hadn’t thought about in some time. A hawk flew high above them, flying over the wall and across Fort Defiance. Seneca had told him that it was through the birds of prey that savage shamans performed their farseeing. Were they watching them now? And if so, why was there none of the pins-and-needles feeling that had accompanied the dust storms and the enemy farseeing at Fort Segundus?

  He finished the salute and decided to reinforce his instructions. “Remember, we’re not planning to defend the outer wall against a serious attack. What these men are doing is more about breaking up the numbers of the attacking force and keeping them from casually observing our new lake and our inner defenses. I don’t want to lose men defending this line—we just don’t have enough people to do that.

  Severus nodded and Marcus started back through the rising water toward the inner fort.

  ****

  “Acting Magus Seneca, I have a question for you,” Marcus announced. He’d found the student in the smithy handing a very thin iron rod to one of the three burly men standing over anvils. One of the men held a large pair of shears with which he clipped six inch pieces off the rod. The other two men were heating a dozen or so of the pieces in the forge, before taking out glowing red pieces of iron to bang the ends into rough points and bend the metal against an identical piece to produce a four-pointed caltrop.

  The pile of finished objects had grown remarkably from the thirty or so reported last night. Now there were well over three hundred with a new caltrop tossed upon the finished pile even as Marcus watched.

  “Tribune?” Seneca jumped in surprise making the older men in the smithy laugh at his expense.

  Marcus was so surprised by the number of finished caltrops that he momentarily forgot the reason he had sought Seneca out. He picked up one of the finished weapons. It had not been sharpened to a serious point, but it was still highly likely to cripple an animal who stepped on it. “This is much more than the thirty you reported to me, Black Vigil. How is this possible?”

  Lysander chuckled good-naturedly and tried to tousle Seneca’s hair, much to the young man’s annoyance. “It was your young magus here who did the trick,” the older man said much to Marcus’ shock.

  “Seneca?” he asked and then wished he kept his surprised mouth shut.

  “The thing holding us back was making these thin little rods,” Lysander explained. “It takes forever but the boy here started poking around in the back of the smithy and found dozens, maybe hundreds of the things.”

  That made a lot of sense to Marcus. The legion would want the ability to quickly produce a device that crippled horses when it was light cavalry that was the primary enemy. The question was why hadn’t Lesser Tribune Cyrus included these rods in his list of the fort’s supplies?

  “Good work all of you,” Marcus complemented them. “Seneca, if I could have a moment? I need some magical advice.”

  Seneca eagerly followed Marcus out of the smithy.

  “You did very well in there, Seneca,” Marcus told him. “That discovery of yours may very well be the difference between success and failure in the
coming attack. Well done!”

  The young man beamed with pride.

  “Now I need you to help me understand something,” Marcus said. “Back at Fort Segundus you told me that a shaman can see through the eyes of a hawk up to a distance of ten or so miles. Remember?”

  “Of course, Tribune,” Seneca told him. “But I also said the distance would vary with the strength of the magus. A shaman, or a group of shamans, powerful enough to summon that thundercloud ought to be able to do a simple farseeing though a bird of prey for dozens if not hundreds of miles.”

  “So why aren’t they?” Marcus muttered.

  “Excuse me, Tribune?” Seneca asked.

  “I said…” Marcus started before trailing off. He didn’t want to tell anyone he thought he had felt the magic of the farseeing just as he had felt the magic in the dust storm. Something had happened to him when that gunk in Kekipi’s amulet had sprayed all over him back in the Fire Islands and he wasn’t comfortable with anyone knowing about it.

  “If I understand your question correctly, Tribune, I think the answer is that Fort Defiance’s wards are still intact.”

  “They’re what?” Marcus asked.

  “They haven’t been destroyed, Tribune. Surely that’s obvious, right? Fort Segundus was overrun by the savages. There the shaman sought out the wards and broke them. But they haven’t been able to do that here yet. They can’t see anything happening within the fort and for maybe a hundred or so yards beyond the outer wall.”

  “They can’t?” Marcus felt like an idiot asking questions that should be obvious to everyone, but the news startled him and added to his sense of hope. Teetonka really was going to be surprised by Defiance’s defenses.

  “Yes, Sir,” Seneca repeated. “We are invisible to them as long as the wards stand.”

  “That’s incredibly good news,” Marcus told him.

  “I should have brought this to your attention earlier,” Seneca apologized. “I didn’t realize you weren’t aware of this.”

  “Will the wards help us with stopping other forms of shaman magic?”

  Seneca shook his head. “A fully trained and experience magus might be able to manipulate the wards to do something else, but I can’t. But honestly, I don’t think any of them are likely to be able to stop the lightning this shaman can call. That is really powerful magic. But I’ve been thinking about it quite a bit and I think there are two possibilities which will increase our chances of withstanding it.”

  “I’m all ears,” Marcus told him.

  “First,” Seneca told him in a voice he’d probably learned from his teachers, “the enemy shaman will have to be able to see his target to strike it effectively and with the wards in place, he’s either going to have to come close or trust to luck as the lightning crashes down out of the heavens.”

  “That is very good news,” Marcus told him. “We need to talk about where these wards are and how we defend them.”

  “Oh, that’s easy,” Seneca told him. “One of the ward stones is beneath the praetorium in the center of the inner fort. The other four are at the four corners of the outer fort. I think we’re going to lose control of those, but it won’t matter if they are destroyed because your inner wall should be within the natural protection of a single ward stone. They will have to kill us to get to that one and,” the young man tried to smile bravely, “I don’t think it will matter to us then if it is broken or not.”

  “Very well thought out,” Marcus said. “Now what was this second point you wanted to make about our advantages in fighting the lightning shaman?”

  “I mentioned it before,” Seneca told him. “Weather magic is very complicated. Normally you would have a host of magi working together to manipulate magic on that scale, but from what we’ve heard it sounds as if Teetonka is somehow doing this on his own. If that’s the case, when the battle gets crazy, if we can distract him enough, I might be able to interfere with his control of the lightning storm.”

  Marcus remembered ignoring this suggestion earlier, but now he gave it his serious attention. “How would you do that, Seneca?”

  “I don’t know yet, Sir, but magic moves and flows in the air about us and in the earth and water. When the shaman begins to raise his storm, I will light my candles and try and observe what he is doing from a magical perspective. And if I see my chance, I will try and interfere with his working and see if we can’t make it blow up on him.” He shrugged with a hint of embarrassment. “I’m just a student, Tribune, but my teachers used to complain that I have a gift for making even the simplest of magics blow up in my face. I think that’s a gift I’d like to turn on our enemies.”

  Marcus put his hand on Seneca’s shoulder. “You have my permission to move forward with this plan only if you give me your word that you will be most cautious. I do not want Teetonka detecting you and bringing his lightning down upon you in retribution. We are in for a long siege and there is no need at all for you to hurry. Do you understand me?”

  “I do, Sir,” Seneca swore.

  “Then why don’t you go back into the smithy and see what else you can do to help those men?”

  ****

  The savages began arriving in numbers a couple of hours before dark—and what numbers they were. Traveling in bands of one hundred or so, they appeared everywhere on the plains with the lead forces establishing their camps a few hundred yards in front of the gate and forward walls and the later ones moving on to encircle Fort Defiance.

  Camp was not an accurate term by Aquilan standards. The legions fortified their castra every night when they were moving in enemy territory, but these savages basically threw themselves down wherever they stopped. They built campfires out of the dried bison dung that seemed to be everywhere—and that was even stranger than burning the coal rock—but other than that there was nothing to distinguish their campsite from any other spot on the plain.

  By nightfall, there were more than a thousand savages strung out around them, but Marcus felt certain there would soon be many more. These men were far too casual in their movements. Their belief in the inevitability of their victory was too great for so few men to hold on their own.

  This was also the time things would become hardest for his men. Waiting for an attack would fray their nerves and whittle away their self confidence. As the numbers grew outside the walls their own fears would squiggle and grow. The only things Marcus knew to do to counter this were launch a preemptive strike or keep the men too busy to think and worry. Since the strike would play to the savages’ strengths rather than his own, he chose the latter and kept his men digging, broadening the submerged ditch and heightening the wall.

  It was not making him popular, but if it helped keep his people safe he could live with that.

  They could all live with it.

  Day Seventeen

  We’re Not the Ones Who Are Going to Be Dying

  “That’s a lot of savages,” Lesser Tribune Cyrus noted from his place at the top of the outer wall where Marcus and his officers stood together observing the army gathering against them. Half the legionnaires were now on guard duty—armor on and shields in hand—manning the outer walls as if they meant business even though each man knew that they were not intending to defend them against a serious assault. This was a waiting game and the longer they could convince the savages to wait to start their assault the less time they would have to hold until Lord Evorik returned with reinforcements from the Jeweled Hills.

  “We call it a shitload,” Warrior Atta informed the legion officer. “When the enemy is too great to count and you’re shit deep in trouble, use shitload.”

  Every man present, even Acting Magus Seneca, smiled at the Gota warrior’s words.

  “It is looking to be rather more than the five thousand that I expected,” Marcus admitted.

  “And they’re still coming in,” Severus observed in his flat unimpressed voice.

  “Can we…can we hold out against that many?” Capitán Adán asked with a definite tre
mor in his voice.

  “Of course we can,” Marcus assured him. Then he chuckled and the sound was not in any way forced. “You almost have to feel sorry for the poor bastards. This isn’t a legion caught by surprise out in the field. It’s the hardest men on the planet dug in behind solid defenses just waiting for the chance to get some of their own back against the primitives who’ve been torturing their friends and comrades. Mark my words, men,” he lifted his voice so that the sound would carry to the closest legionnaires. “We’re going to turn Lake Defiance red with the blood of savages. The survivors will remember what we do to them here for a thousand years.”

  He could see a red bander standing on the wall fifty feet away nod his head in agreement and whisper an affirmation to the man beside him. He was one of fifty-three stragglers who’d made it to the fort yesterday and he’d almost broken down in tears of relief when he’d seen the preparations they were making and learned that Lesser Tribune Cyrus was not in charge of their defenses.

  As was so often the case in the legion, the problem was not the men, it was the leaders.

  “Capitán,” Calidus stepped in. “Perhaps you don’t understand what kind of legionnaires you’re fighting beside today. I’m sure you’ve heard by now that Tribune Marcus here single-handedly put down the resurrected Rule of Twenty in the Fire Islands, but did anyone tell you what that means. We were surprised in the field in what our leaders thought was a simple operation to mop up a few poorly organized rebels when we suddenly found ourselves confronting thousands of undead warriors rising up out of the ground to destroy us. Most of them were skeletons, but the bodies of our dead comrades rose up to try and kill us as well. Surprised and isolated from the rest of the legion, Tribune Marcus did not panic. Instead we fought our way through the undead horde and put the Rule of Twenty back in its grave. These savages are undoubtedly a dangerous foe, but they won’t catch us by surprise and we’re truly ready for them. You and your men should take heart. We’re not the ones who are going to be dying by the shitload,” he winked at Warrior Atta. “The savages are the ones who are about to find they’re knee deep in the muck.”