Nils sensed that these men no longer had hope of victory or even survival; they hoped only to sell their lives dearly. This time they had failed even that.
"You're the first Magyars we've come to," Nils said. "How many of you are left?"
"I don't know. I only know our losses have been heavy. But we don't operate as an army. At the beginning we separated into ten squadrons of three to five hundred each. We've done some regrouping since, as chance allowed, to bring the strength of the squadrons back up to that. Probably more than half of us lie dead, and Janos one of them."
"What of the other armies-the Ukrainians and Poles and Germans?"
"I've seen them several times but never talked to any. I speak no Anglic. But those who do say they've lost heavily, too, especially the Ukrainians, who were in it from the beginning." The man stopped again, looking like he might have cried had there been any tears in him. "We've probably lost more than the enemy, and we were a lot fewer to begin with.
"But I'll tell you this. After what I've seen, if I could get out of this safe, I wouldn't do it. I want to die with my teeth in a throat."
At midday, when the column stopped to water and rest their horses, a grim Magyar was assigned to each scouting group. That night they camped in a forest and stayed there the next day while scouts on their best horses searched the country ahead, where large prairies were interspersed with forests and woods. In the late afternoon they returned to report a large encampment of horse barbarians.
Bjorn Arrbuk gathered several groups, a total of three hundred warriors, and rode quietly out in the gathering dusk. After a time they saw enemy fires in the distance; clearly the enemy was not afraid of attack. Hooding their horses they lay down to rest.
Gradually the distant fires burned down and most of the warriors slipped out into the prairie on foot, disappearing into the darkness. The men who stayed behind with the horses watched and listened intently. Once they heard a mounted patrol pass at some distance in the darkness, and then it was quiet again.
Suddenly there were distant brassy blasts from foreign war horns, and fires blazed up. They pulled the hoods from their own mounts and sprang onto their bare backs, ready, nervous to know what was happening. In a few minutes they could hear the thunder of approaching hooves, the hooting of neoviking war horns, and then shouts in their own language. A herd of horses galloped past, driven by whooping northmen, and they rode in among them individually, changing mounts in the tumult.
When morning came to the neoviking camp, the group leaders counted their men. All but twenty-one had returned, straggling in on fine horses and driving others, blood on their swords and grins on their faces. They could not say how many they'd killed, but they thought a hundred at least, and they'd scattered a large part of the horses that they had not been able to steal. Once mounted, they had cut a spiral swath through the enemy camp before fleeing, and they all agreed it had been worth the long trip from the homeland.
Bjorn Arrbuk sent out two of his Poles and two Magyars to hunt for others of their own forces and spread word of the victory. Meanwhile scouts were dispatched again, much better mounted now, if still bareback, to get a better understanding of the country and the location of enemy camps. Groups not chosen for the first raid were impatient for action.
Another large encampment of horse barbarians was reported about twenty kilometers away. A few kilometers from it was a dense wood of several score hectares, forming a small island in the prairie. Bjorn Arrbuk called a council.
"Nils Jarnhann tells me we may be able to surprise horse barbarians but never the orcs, because the orcs have mind readers like himself who could sense our coming. If we want to kill orcs, the best thing is to have them come to us at a place of our own choosing. If we surprise the barbarian camp in the dark and then take cover in the woods nearby, they can surround us. They can attack us there if they want, but their horses will only be a hindrance to them in the timber and we can butcher to our hearts' content. Nils thinks they will send for orcs, though, to root us out on foot, and we can find out just what these orcs are made of.
"There's a spring in the woods for water, and it's less than three kilometers from a large stretch of forest, so that we can sneak out and escape by night when we want to.
"We'll be both bait and trap, and when we're done they'll have learned to hate and fear the northmen."
They broke camp at sundown and rode by moonlight to the woods near the enemy camp without encountering a patrol, then lay down to sleep until the moon set.
This time the raiders moved out on horseback, four hundred of them, silent until a patrol challenged them less than five hundred meters from the enemy camp. With loud whoops they charged, striking at anyone on foot as horse barbarians ran among the tents. Through the camp and back again they rode, chopping and striking in the confusion and darkness, then broke up and rode away hard into the concealment of night. Their shouts and laughter as they straggled into their own camp might have kept everyone awake until dawn if the group leaders hadn't insisted that they quiet down and rest.
Soon after daybreak several thousand horse barbarians were circling the woods and looking grimly into its thickets while more arrived periodically from other camps. Several times impatient groups charged their horses toward the woods, breaking off when swarms of arrows met them near the trees from freeholders stationed among the branches and from warriors on the ground.
About midday a large army of mounted men wearing black mail came into sight in broad, ordered columns, dismounting out of bow shot. Men in the treetops counted the width of the columns and the number of ranks and shouted down that there were about four thousand. The freeholders were ordered out of the trees. The orcs formed a line of battle, several deep, opposite one side of the woods and then, shields raised, began to walk forward. At thirty meters a war horn blew from among the trees, triggering a flight of arrows, and the orcs began to double time toward the woods.
Once engaged, the warriors drew back, tightening their protective line around the freeholders and the horse herd. The battle continued until midafternoon between the mailed and grimly silent orcs and the shouting, grinning northmen, and as the hours passed, the orcs became grimmer. Finally trumpets sounded and they began an orderly retreat. The northmen permitted them to disengage and followed them with twanging bows until they were out of range in the prairie.
For the rest of the day the neovikings moved among the trees, taking scalps, equipping themselves with black mail shirts, and dragging orc bodies to the edge of the prairie where they piled the mutilated corpses for the enlightenment of the watching horse barbarians, shouting their counts to the tallymen and exchanging clouts of exuberance. The scalps numbered seventeen hundred and thirty-seven. Their own dead came to a hundred and ninety-six, and they released sixty-five more whose bodies were too badly wounded to ride.
"So those are the orcs." Bjorn Arrbuk laughed. "You told me they are the toughest we'll see on the ground. Surely that can't be true."
Nils nodded. "It's too bad they broke off when they did; they were getting tired faster than we were. And we may have trouble getting them to fight us again on ground of our own choosing."
Bjorn turned to his runners. "Make sure that enough sentries are out and have the men eat and get some sleep. We'd better get out of here tonight. When the moon sets we'll sneak across to the big body of timber where we can move around again."