The Sea of Grass Read online

  “It’s time to wrap this up,” Marcus observed. He firmly believed that if you spent too much time bolstering the men’s nerve you ended up undercutting your efforts. “Red Vigil Honorius, you are in charge of the gate defenses.” Not that there was truly a gate anymore but the spot which had once held the great doors had been purposely left weaker than the rest of the wall. If the savages wanted to spend the time, they could knock enough of it down to let them jump their ponies over the ditch in front of it, top the wall, jump down onto the slope of the mound and pour over it into the field of caltrops they were planting on the far side.

  Which reminded him. “Calidus, I think it’s well past time we finish planting the caltrops. Make certain the area behind the mound is well saturated, then follow the plan with what’s left and make those bastards regret bringing any horses into Fort Defiance.”

  “As for the rest of you, let’s get back to our tasks. They could officially come at any time now. Let’s be as ready as possible when that happens.”

  Without waiting for their response he turned and waded through the deepening lake back to the inner fort.

  ****

  The day ground on interminably long as tribe after tribe of savages joined their cousins in making camp around Fort Defiance. The damming of the creek clearly caused some discomfort beyond the walls as the savages were forced—at least for the time being—to get by on the water they carried in skins upon their horses. That water was not going to last very long and thoughts of the thousands of enemy horsemen growing weaker day by day encouraged Marcus to fantasize about holding the outer wall against them despite the differences in numbers. But such an effort needed a thousand men more than he had and so he quickly discarded the overly tempting notion.

  As if to prove that he had made the right decision, a group of some one hundred savages suddenly charged the wall on horseback. Legionnaires scrambled to resist them, running from different directions on the wall to concentrate their numbers at the point of apparent attack. Marcus was too far away himself to direct their efforts, but the new black vigil, Lysander, rallied the men quite efficiently and directed a volley of pilum at the savages just as they dropped from their horses, hatchets in hand, and charged the wall, jumping the outer ditch and scrambling up the steep slope toward the legionnaires.

  They ran hard against the shield and swords of Lysander’s men and a dozen more died in the first seconds that the lines crashed. Then a bizarre thing happened. Many of the savages getting their first look over the wall froze in amazement and paid for their surprise with their lives. A moment later, sixty or so survivors of the assault jumped back down across the ditch and ran after their ponies—not frightened as Marcus’ legionnaires incorrectly assumed, but astonished by their look at the waters of Lake Defiance.

  They rode to the nearest tribe and spoke animatedly to them about what they had seen, and then they rode on, always pointing toward the wall of the fort and the water behind it. Within an hour, dozens of savages had decided that they needed to see for themselves the strange sight the first group had described to them. But instead of attacking the wall in great numbers, they stole forward singly from all directions, successfully finding gaps in the outer defenses that Marcus did not have the numbers to plug and climbing to the top of the wall to gape at the spectacle of standing water on the Sea of Grass. Then they jumped back down to go and tell their kinsmen what they had seen, starting the whole process over again.

  All of this proved to Marcus that his initial concerns about the indefensibility of the outer wall had been correct. He didn’t have the numbers to hold it and he quickly gave instructions that Lysander and Honorius were only to direct their men to resist significant groups of sightseers. If the savages wanted to waste the day looking at a man-made spectacle, Marcus was more than happy to accommodate them. The longer he could keep them looking and not fighting, the better for everyone.

  ****

  “Looks like we’ve survived another day,” Severus volunteered in a voice so quiet Marcus could barely hear it.

  “Tomorrow things will get violent,” Marcus predicted. The savages had come in far greater numbers than the five thousand warriors that the fleeing legionnaires had reported to him. With numbers at least two or three times higher, the chances of successfully resisting had plummeted as the day progressed.

  “Probably,” Severus agreed. “They can’t wait much longer because of the water situation.”

  “Maybe I miscalculated there,” Marcus suggested. In these circumstances, he wouldn’t voice that doubt to anyone but Severus, but the Black Vigil had been his mentor since he first entered the legion and he trusted him completely with his confidences.

  “No,” Severus objected, “I don’t think so. The savages are not going to sit out there for a week. Without the spectacle of the lake, they might even have come after you today. The lake gave them something to think about, although I doubt that they really understand what it means for them yet.”

  Marcus accepted the observation at face value. Severus would never lie to him just to protect his feelings. “If they’re probably coming tomorrow, I’m thinking of pulling the men back tonight. If they really charge with all ten or fifteen thousand warriors out there, they’ll overwhelm and cut off the men on the wall before they can get back to the inner fort and then we’re all dead.”

  Severus considered a moment before agreeing. “You’ll do it under cover of darkness?”

  “Yes.”

  “The problem is,” Severus pointed out, “that pulling back off the wall lets them come in and drain the lake without resistance. That would be the smart move on their part. Come in, drain the lake, and let the ground dry out again. What would that buy us—two or maybe three days?”

  “I’ll take the days,” Marcus said. “Is that what you think they’ll do?”

  “I don’t know,” Severus admitted. “This is not a civilized army. It’s a raiding culture. And raiding cultures move quickly. What we would do is dismantle the fort’s defenses one by one, seeking to minimize our losses by destroying the enemy fortifications. Depending on the larger strategic situation, we might even be willing to starve the enemy out. But these savages won’t necessarily think that way. They are always on the move. They may even be uncomfortable staying in one place for long. And there is always the chance that this group wants to finish here so it can move on Fort Prime. So I don’t know—a lightning dash at the walls of the inner fort might seem the best move on their part.”

  “Lightning,” Marcus repeated. “I’ve seen no sign of thunderclouds yet.”

  “Nor dust storms,” Severus reminded him. “Because of our pilum, I would expect them to at least raise a dust storm before they charge against us. As for the lightning, I could argue it either way, but I think I would want to bring the lightning down on my enemies if only to demoralize them.”

  “I guess we’ll find out tomorrow,” Marcus told him. “Make sure you get some sleep tonight because I think tomorrow’s going to be a long hard day.”

  Day Eighteen

  Severed Skulls Were Not the Ideal Choice of Weapons

  At dawn about eight hundred savages charged Fort Defiance from eight different directions, leaping off their ponies before the ditch and scrambling over the outer wall. They seemed angry, perhaps even insulted, when they encountered no resistance. These bands immediately began moving into the fort toward the inner wall, but not at the headlong speed they had approached the outer wall.

  With no resistance encountered, several hundred more savages approached the main gates and began to level the patchwork wall Marcus had erected where the doors once stood. To the legionnaires and their allies great surprise, this workforce was made of women and children. This discovery had tremendous implications for the coming battle and immediately bolstered the defenders’ morale. The savages didn’t have fifteen thousand men arrayed against them. They were nomads who had brought their families to the siege—a fact that Marcus might well be able to turn
against them. Teetonka, if he really was the war leader facing them, had been very foolish to reveal this bit of intelligence. But then, maybe he thought it so obvious that the families would follow his army that it hadn’t occurred to him the legion would not already assume they were there. It was always strange fighting a people who were so very different from your own.

  “Let’s not give it all up without a fight,” Marcus suggested. “Severus, give the order to Warrior Atta that his men are now free to operate in the bailey, but remind him that he is not to get close to the mound and all the caltrops we’ve deployed there.”

  Severus left to carry out his instructions and Marcus took a few minutes to walk the inner wall, check on his men and bolster their morale if he could.

  “Do you see that?” he asked one of the green banders who had been with him since they left Dona. “The savages are mostly women and children. And here I thought for a few minutes they could make us work up a sweat.”

  The young man grinned nervously but said nothing.

  Marcus clapped him on the shoulder. “You’ll do fine. It’s very hard to assault a prepared position. And it won’t even be hard to bury them when the battle’s over. You’ll already have dropped their corpses into that ditch.”

  With a gesture he indicated the trench the men had worked so hard to excavate, now filled with water a few feet beneath their feet.

  Marcus moved on when the smiles became a bit more genuine.

  He found Alberto standing with other Gente looking nervously at the savages spreading out in the space between the two walls. He was one of the men who had received a legion breastplate but his sword was of northern design with a fancy decorated hilt. Still, it would probably kill well enough if Alberto knew what he was doing.

  “And how is my little namesake?” Marcus asked him offering to shake the older man’s hand.

  Alberto licked his lips nervously. “He’s got a good appetite. Carmelita says he never wants to stop eating.”

  “Glad to hear it,” Marcus said. He knew almost nothing about children, but figured it could not be a good sign if the babe was never hungry. “You’re going to earn a great story to tell him today.” He gestured toward the other Gente. “All of you will. You went out to earn a living for your families and will come home mighty heroes.”

  Shoulders squared at his words. The Gente liked to think of themselves as worthy of great praise.

  “Now let me show you something,” Marcus said. He made no effort to quiet his voice because he assumed that it would be a rare savage who could speak the Gente language. “These savages are making a major tactical mistake right now. See how they are spreading themselves out. I assume they are doing this because they are used to fighting men with bows—men like themselves who do not use shields or spears. But watch what happens when your Gota neighbors are let loose upon them.”

  As if on cue, the wooden gates banged down, one plopped at an angle up onto the wall from within the inner fortress and the other from the top of the wall across the ditch. Within seconds, Warrior Atta raced his horse up and down the makeshift ramps with his forty-six men charging after him. In the bailey they plunged directly into the surprised savages spread out in front of them, expertly stabbing with their spears. If only there was some way to let them get the full weight of themselves and their mounts behind the blows, but a man who charged straight into his opponent was highly likely to find himself thrown backward off his horse. A man just could not grip the stomach of his horse strongly enough to keep him in his saddle with a straight on charge.

  As more and more of his numbers reached the bailey, Atta wheeled his men and began clearing out the southern side of the castrum. Savages scrambled to get out of the way while others shot arrows from their tiny bows. In the chaos of those early moments, few arrows even came close to their racing targets and many of the primitive warriors slipped and fell as they attempted to maneuver in the eighteen inches of standing water.

  Gota rode these men down without mercy, trampling them with the hooves of their steeds, and much to the surprise of even the Gente, the merchants-turned-soldiers cheered at the triumph of their overlords.

  After about ten minutes of fighting, Atta turned his men again and went charging back in the other direction, abandoning any apparent attempt to take the gate where women and children fled from the battle and warriors hurried to hold them off with massed arrow fire. Instead Atta led his men back across the southern side of the fort to attack the savages gathered in the west. These were much better prepared for him, and he suffered his first casualties—six injured and two dead, but he broke the savages ranks and sent them fleeing back over the outer wall of Fort Defiance.

  When he and his men returned to greater cheers across the makeshift ramp into the inner fortress, they left more than one hundred and fifty dead savages lying in the shallow water behind them.

  ****

  “Why aren’t they using the dust storms?” Seneca wanted to know. Except for a major covering force protecting the women and children tearing down the first wall at the former gate, the savages had pretty much departed from the rest of the bailey. “It’s good magic,” Seneca continued. “It would conceal their movements—keep us from seeing what they’re doing and how much progress they’re making.”

  “It would also make it a lot harder on the women and children dismantling that first wall and filling in the ditch,” Marcus told him. “I think they’ll bring the dust storm before they launch a real attack, but right now they probably figure it’s frightening us to see our defenses disappearing.”

  “Isn’t it frightening us?” Seneca asked.

  “No,” Marcus told him. “We want them to take down that wall, remember? While I don’t mind if it takes them a lot of time to do it, I want them to come crashing in here on horseback. That’s why you helped make all of those caltrops, right?”

  “Right,” Seneca agreed with a lot less certainty in his voice.

  “Look,” Marcus explained. “They are going to lose a lot of horses when they come charging through that gate. I hope that makes them really mad. I want them pouring in here to kill us in a blind rage. We have a few more traps out there to slow them down and really piss them off, but I want them thinking of nothing but killing us by the time they reach this wall.”

  As Marcus spoke, Seneca’s eyes grew wider and wider. “But why? Why make them angrier than they are now?”

  “Because angry men don’t think,” Marcus told him. “Angry men have no discipline. Angry men die on the swords of well-trained legionnaires.”

  “But there are thousands of them,” Seneca protested.

  “That’s right, and I want to kill the first two or three thousand right then before they get smart and remember the advantages their bows give them, or decide to take their time and soften us up with bolts of lightning. I want them to die and die and die so that the survivors can’t stand the thought of having to charge our defenses again.”

  “But, but won’t a lot of us die too if they come at us like that?”

  “Men die in war,” Marcus told him with just a hint of compassion. “But if we can goad the savages into a rash charge on our defenses, a hell of a lot more of them will die than we will.”

  “And the dust storm would actually hide what is happening from them,” Seneca said. “They’ll just keep coming.”

  “The dust storm probably hurts them more than us in this siege,” Marcus explained. “Yes, it hides their movements, but we’ll know they’re coming anyway unless they raise it and maintain it for days—which helps us because we want to buy time for Lord Evorik to return with a relief force. So it hides their movements, but it also hurts the accuracy of their arrows both because they can’t see us and because of the winds that raise the dust. They don’t suffer this problem when they come racing in on horseback and shoot at surprised caravans from ten feet away, but that’s not what they’re facing here. They should be standing back out of pilum range and firing tens of thousands of a
rrows into the inner fort while their brothers close with those hatchets of theirs. The dust storm really doesn’t let them use their arrows to greatest advantage.”

  “And the lightning?” Seneca asked.

  “The lightning worries me most because I haven’t faced it before. But if you’re right and Teetonka will have to come close enough to see what he’s trying to hit, then I think it will be something we can survive. After all, he can’t see behind our walls as long as the wards are in place. So he destroys a couple of buildings which we don’t need—most of our supplies have already been distributed away from them. Then what—attack our walls? Lightning hits the earth all the time. I would think that that is a very slow way to open our defenses and if he chooses to try that, why can’t we build a new inner wall as he does it?” That was actually something Marcus would have liked to have done if he’d only had a few more days.

  “I see, so we really are in good shape,” the young man mused.

  “Seneca, we have five thousand or more warriors who want us dead surrounding this fort. I’m sorry, but there is no way to make that into a good thing. But if we keep our heads and remember our discipline, most of us can survive this attack.” He was probably lying. Teetonka had the numbers to overwhelm the legionnaires if he had the nerve to keep attacking. And the lightning, Marcus really didn’t know what his enemy could do with that. But it never helped morale to be totally honest about the odds of battle.

  ****

  “They’re in,” Severus noted, pointing at a lone savage horseman who had just ascended the mound. He was a striking figure, even at this distance, practically naked in his loin cloth except for a fancy feathered headdress which flowed far down his back. In his right hand, thrust high over his head he held a short war spear, again with feathers trailing, and on his chest a pendant gleamed—the sight of which made Marcus’ blood run cold.