Khraishamo now had an ax in each hand and was tramping back and forth across the circle of wagons. As he moved he encouraged the people around him with gruesome descriptions of what would happen to the Goharans if they dared to get close. Beside him walked Rhodina, looking like a-Valkyrie in her armor. Khraishamo's end of the rebel line was in good hands. Blade started to walk along the line toward the center, where they might need more leadership. He hadn't seen Gribbon since word of the attack came, and couldn't help wondering if the rebel leader might have fled with the Maghri.
Then the Goharan advance struck the rebel line, and Blade had too much else on his mind to think about Gribbon.
The discipline, the armor, and the long slashing swords of the Goharans gave them an edge in some places. Rebels began to go down, skulls split open, arms lopped off, chests gaping-ghastly wounds which made their comrades turn pale but didn't make them run. In places the Goharans drove bulges into the rebel line, but they didn't break through.
Meanwhile Goharans were also going down. Wounded rebels who fell often found themselves under the swing of the Goharan swords. They stabbed upward with their own swords and knives, swung clubs at kneecaps and shins, bit and gouged if they didn't have any other weapons. Goharan soldiers fell on top of their victims and rolled over and over in desperate bare-handed struggles. The ground became covered with thrashing bodies, and Goharans coming up to join the battle had to pick paths around or through them.
In other places the rebels had enough men with spears to form pike-walls. Sometimes they invented the formation for themselves on the spot, at other times it was Blade shouting orders and pushing men which got them into position. In either case the result was a strong point in the rebel line, where the rebels had a longer reach than the Goharans. The Goharans could go around the flanks of the pike-walls, to be sure, but those flanks got fewer and fewer as the rebel line tightened up.
Blade helped defend one of those flanks himself. He'd just finished showing a boy who couldn't have been more than sixteen how to hold his spear when seven or eight Goharans raised a shout and charged straight at him.
«Get out of here!» Blade shouted at the boy.
«No.» He stood, holding his spear with the grip Blade had just showed him. Then he stepped forward and thrust hard. A sword cut missed his spear and the point drove into a Goharan throat. Before the boy could pull back, one sword chopped through his spear and another nearly took his head off. He dropped, spurting blood and still clutching three feet of his spear.
This left the Goharans to face a thoroughly enraged Blade. He feinted with his sword at the man who'd killed the boy, then closed to blind another with a dagger slash across the face. He blocked a descending sword with his dagger, losing the weapon in the process but bringing his sword around to cut off the attacker's sword arm. Then he stepped back, caught up a fallen spear, threw it straight at the man he'd blinded, and hit him in the chest. Two more Goharans had the courage to try pulling their dying comrade out of Blade's reach. All that courage brought them was a quicker death.
Then rebels were coming up all around Blade, pulling him back to safety while they moved into position on the flank of the pike-wall. Blade wiped his sword on a dead man's clothing and went back to being a general instead of a fighter.
Now the rebel line was holding nearly everywhere, but the Goharans were still pressing it hard. In a few places Goharans broke through and headed for the horse lines. Blade shouted for archers to shoot these intruders. If they managed to stampede many of the horses, it would be the rebels who'd have trouble retreating from this battlefield. Granted, they would be in friendly territory, but-
It suddenly occurred to Blade that two could play at this game. The rebels' archers weren't doing much in the fight now, because the fighters were now too mixed together for safe archery. But if a few hundred of them mounted up, slipped around to within bowshot of the Goharans' horses, and let fly?…
Blade started walking along the rebel lines, speaking to every archer he found who wasn't already using some other weapon. There weren't as many of these as he'd hoped. The rebel line was slowly falling back, leaving more and more men on the ground. Each time a man went down, someone had to take his place, and slowly the archers were being sucked into the hand-to-hand fight.
Blade managed to scrape up about eighty men with bows and full quivers. He led them toward the horse lines and watched them mount, then gave them their orders. «Move fast. Don't shoot at anything except the horses. Hit as many of them as-«
He stopped, because a low rumble was floating over the battlefield from beyond the hills to the east. Everyone else was hearing it too, and as the rumble grew louder, the fighting died down. Heads turned toward the hills-then Maghri drums sounded, and the whole rebel army exploded in wild shouts of joy and surprise.
The Maghri came over the crests of the hills on a wide front, moving at a trot. As they started downhill they broke into a canter, the fastest pace they could manage on the wet ground. Blade saw at once they were heading straight for the Goharan rear. A moment later he saw they were going to reach the — Goharan horses long before the Goharan soldiers could run to them.
Blade grabbed the bridle of the nearest free horse and swung himself up into the saddle. Then he shouted to the mounted archers.
«It looks as if the Maghri are going to do our work for us. Follow me!»
Blade remembered leading his mounted archers toward the rebel flank. He had some vague idea of getting a clear shot at the Goharans as they broke and ran. Then the whole battlefield dissolved into a chaos of running, fighting, screaming, and dying men, on horseback, on foot, and on the ground. He had only a few clear memories of anything happening after that.
— Seeing Khraishamo lead the teamsters and the other rebels who'd fought from the wagons out into the open. The pirate really deserved the name Bloodskin now. He was spattered from head to foot. His two axes still swung like scythes, reaping Goharans at every step.
— Seeing Goharans dropping their swords and going down on their knees to beg for quarter. Some of them were lucky enough to find a rebel or one of the Maghri in a good mood.
— Seeing a big bearded man on foot trying to rally his men, shouting, grabbing them, even beating at them with the flat of his sword. Blade rode in through the mob of Goharans and slashed downward with a captured Goharan sword. Only when a golden helmet fell off the dead man's head did Blade realize that he'd killed the Goharan general.
After a while the chaos began dying down, with only little knots of fighting men scattered here and there. Somewhat later, the fighting stopped entirely. Rebels on foot rounded up the prisoners, collected the dead, salvaged usable weapons and equipment, and started preparing dinner and tending the wounded. Rebels on horseback joined the Maghri in riding off to track down enemy fugitives and find the Goharan camp if they could.
«I think there will not be many who ran from this battle,» said Sigluf when he rode up to Blade. «But we should go out and look for others who may be coming.»
Blade resisted the temptation to point out that if scouts had gone out before the battle, the Goharans wouldn't have surprised the rebels in the first place. As far as he was concerned, his quarrel with Sigluf was over and done with.
So was Gohar's only field army in Mythor, as it turned out: Stunned and bewildered prisoners talked freely, and Blade was able to fill in the details they didn't give. General Kaurget, the man in the golden helmet, knew that Gohar couldn't face a long war against the rebels. As soon as he heard the rebels were gathering, he assembled four thousand picked mounted men and rode inland. When he learned that the rebel army was close at hand but apparently not on its guard, he decided to strike quickly. It was a gamble, trusting to surprise and discipline to offset three-to-one odds. With a little more surprise or a little less stubborn courage, the gamble would have been a success. Even then, without the Maghri attack the Goharans might have been able to retreat safely. There was more than enough glory to go around among the victors. Blade hoped this would reduce bad blood and bad tempers between the Maghri and the rebels.