Legacy (29 page)

King Euric was like a man possessed. The highest nobles of the Visigothic nation shrank from his fury.

"Dogs! Sons of Spanish whores and their African pimps! You still have at least five men to their one, yet there they stand, laughing at you for the puking cowards you are! By God, all it takes is one real man to make you wet yourselves with fear! But this Artorius Riothamus is only a man, I tell you—he's
just a man!
" Euric paused for breath, wiped flecks of spittle from his beard, and calmed down. "I command you to finish this before the
volk
and the true Arian faith suffer any further disgrace and humiliation. Attack at once, from all sides. And. . . ." He paused. It was as though his rage had burned away some kind of barrier, for he had a new idea. "Have our bowmen loose their arrows while the horsemen are charging. And keep doing it when the charge reaches the British formation."

"But," gasped one of his listeners, "then our own cavalry—men of noble blood—will be in danger of being killed by our own archers!"

Euric rounded on him and smashed him across the face, a backhanded blow that sent him spinning to the ground. "The Devil take them and their 'noble blood'! If they can't break the British line unaided, they're useless anyway!" He glared at them, eyes half-wild again. "Who else dares to question my command?"

A couple of them had seemed on the verge of saying the unsayable to their king. But the moment passed, and they hurried off to implement his orders. He watched them go, gradually bringing himself under control.

We'll win, of course. I am God's unworthy instrument, so He will grant me victory as He always has before. All the world knows the Visigothic war-host is invincible—we've beaten the Romans, the Suevi, the Vandals, and the Huns! This pathetic little band of Britons can't stop us.

Besides, what I told them is true. He's just a man. Isn't he?

"Tylar! Where the hell have you been?"

The time traveller had appeared, looking none the worse for wear, while Sarnac and the rest of the Artoriani were catching a moment's rest inside the perimeter. It was all Sarnac could do to keep his expression restrained, and remember to subvocalize.

"Oh, I
do
apologize, my dear fellow! But I had to take advantage of everyone's preoccupation with the first Visigothic cavalry charge to activate a portal and go to consult with Koreel."

"That's what I wanted to talk to you about. This situation is unravelling fast. How do you plan to get Tiraena out of Britain? I assume you've got some brilliant scheme for getting
us
out of this!"

"Oh, don't worry about Tiraena. That situation is under control. As for us . . . well, the fact of the matter is, it will probably be necessary for us to eschew any technologically advanced techniques in extricating ourselves from this battlefield."

"Wait a minute, Tylar," Sarnac began, forcing himself to concentrate. He felt like his brain was sinking into a bottomless pool of fatigue toxins. "Are you telling me we can't get out of here?"

"Not in the least! I'm merely saying that you will have to escape in a normal—by contemporary definition—way, along with Artorius and his men."

"What? You mean they're going to escape from this debacle?"

"Some of them will. That much is clear from the known historical facts. Of course, just how they manage it is unknown—and, at the moment, far from apparent! But I'm sure the details will become clear as the situation develops. The important thing is that you get back to Bourges, and from there to Dijon, in the Burgundian lands."

"Dijon? Why there?"

"I haven't time to explain. But I think you'll find that the Britons' escape route will take you in that direction. It will be a matter of . . . 'going with the flow' is, I believe, the expression."

"Now hold on, Tylar," Sarnac began frantically. But then Kai interrupted.

"Come on, Bedwyr. We're all mounting up. The Visigoths are forming up for another attack, and the
Pan-Tarkan
wants the Artoriani facing east. If necessary, we're to break out in that direction and fight our way back to Bourges." He was clearly delighted at the prospect of further action. Sarnac would have throttled him to death, but it was too much like work.

Mounted, they could see over the heads of the infantry perimeter. The Visigoths were moving around in sullen masses of men, their leaders shouting them into a growing rage. The roaring from thousands of throats beat in on the Britons from all sides, like surf.

"Will you listen to them, Bedwyr! Noisy buggers, aren't they?"

Sarnac had to chuckle, albeit weakly, at Kai's insouciant tone. Then the Briton began to hum a tune. After a couple of bars, he began softly singing it. The men nearest him laughed and began to join in. Kai laughed in return and let his voice out in a full-throated tenor. More of the Artoriani added volume, and the song began to spread along the infantry ranks, whole units coming in with seamless harmony, as if in response to some invisible director. The Visigoths grew louder in reply, but the Britons were now one great chorus, belting out a song into which the roaring of their enemies drowned tracelessly.

Sarnac tried to identify the song, but the lyrics were unfamiliar and seemed completely inappropriate—something about a girl—but he was certain he'd heard the tune in his own world. Then it came to him, and he joined in with what little he could remember of the words to "Men of Harlech," in an English that no one could hear in that overpowering storm of sound.

By the time they had reached the final note, the angry swarming-about of the Visigothic horde had acquired a single direction, and with a blood-chilling collective scream they advanced.

First the enemy archers came within range, and the duel of missile weapons began again. But this time the Visigothic cavalry charged past the archers . . . who kept on releasing even as they went down in windrows, and even as the mailed lancers neared the British lines.

"Look, Bedwyr!" Kai leaned forward in his saddle and stared at what was happening. "They'll shoot their own men and horses! They must have gone crazy!"

No
, Sarnac thought, feeling a chill lump in the pit of his stomach.
They're just getting smart. They've grasped something that's escaped a lot of people throughout history: that victory often depends on willingness to accept losses from friendly fire. At least one Visigoth has managed to grow a brain.

He watched the British line crumple here and there under the impact of the arrow storm. The messy gaps closed back up before the Visigothic cavalry charge struck home, in almost all cases . . . but not quite all. Where they did not, the barbarian riders fought their way in, and it became a melee. The losses to the Visigothic cavalry were devastating, from their own side's archery as well as from the Britons', even before the hand to hand butchery began. But the British perimeter was forced inexorably inward. And, with a deep-throated roar, thousands of Visigothic infantry came on in a massive second wave, pressing the Britons even further back by sheer weight.

Then Sarnac's attention was drawn from the battle, for Artorius was trotting up slowly, riding without any blatant sign of his wound. But Sarnac, who knew, thought he detected a certain pallor. He gave orders to runners, then faced the westering afternoon sun and raised his lance aloft.

A reserve of heavy infantry had been positioned in front of the Artoriani, just behind the western front of the hedgehog—a front that had been pushed back almost to the position where they waited. Now they advanced, throwing their weight into the struggle. In a supreme effort, they punched through the Visigothic front and then advanced to right and left, rolling the enemy back. At that moment, Artorius levelled his lance and spurred forward, and the Artoriani followed him.

They rode through the gap opened by the infantry Ambrosius had trained—the last real heirs of Rome's legions—and smashed through the Visigothic rear elements. Enemy cavalry frantically closed in from both sides to cut off their escape, and Sarnac became too busy to wonder where Tylar had gotten to now.

He saw the Artoriani break through in groups and vanish in the dust to the west. He saw old Hamyc go down, his voice stilled forever by a lance thrust. And he saw Artorius smash one Visigothic horseman, and then another, finally becoming entangled with a knot of infantry, one of whom slipped under his guard and thrust upward with a short single-edged sword that entered the High King's abdomen under his scale-armor hauberk.

With a cry that welled up from he knew not where, Sarnac spurred his horse forward, and he saw that Kai was with him. Together they charged into the Visigoths crowding around the High King, striking left and right in a delirium of slaughter until the survivors had fled, howling their terror. Kai grasped the reins of the horse to which Artorius clung, and they rode off toward the west. Behind them, the sounds of battle died away.

King Euric looked out over the carpet of dead on the field of Bourg-de-Déols, and was sick to the core of his being.

Oh, he had won. He held the field, and his forces were harrying the British remnants westward toward Bourges, which could not hope to hold out. Yes, he had won. . . . He recalled a tale the Romans told, of a king named Pyrrhus of Epirus, who had fought Rome before the City's rise to empire. Pyrrhus, too, had won—and afterwards had written: "One more such victory and we are undone."

It wasn't just the wholesale slaughter of the flower of the war-host that made this victory too costly. Something had gone out of the Visigoths besides the torrent of blood saturating this field. They had lost that sublime certainty of victory that had carried them forward on a tide of fearlessness since Adrianople, and the loss was as irrevocable as the loss of virginity. For now they felt fear—he could see it in their faces, and it was a fear he could do nothing to exorcise.

He had tried, of course. He had had the head cut off a British corpse of about the right looks. He had set that head, its face mutilated beyond recognition, on a lance and proclaimed it to be the head of Artorius Riothamus. Not even his own men believed it. He had heard the whispers, that the terrible Briton could not die. Some of his brainless wonders of nobles had wanted to make examples of those who repeated such talk. But Euric knew he could not kill a whisper, any more than he could smite with his sword the disease-bearing vapors of a swamp.

He forced himself to look to the future. The elimination of the Britons as a factor would make it possible for him to annex the Auvergne, although an unwelcome voice told him it would take years, not the one lightning campaign that the world would expect from the conqueror of Spain. And the Romans of Soissons would hold out, with the help of their Frankish vassals—who, he suspected, would not remain vassals for many more years.
Yes, the Franks will give us much trouble in Gaul,
he foresaw, taking refuge in practicalities from the realization that his great dream was dead. The Rhone and the Loire would be the limits to Visigothic rule, and the Arian Empire would be stillborn.

The blood-red sun sank, shuddering, leaving King Euric staring unseeing into a darkness that mirrored the inside of his soul.

"
Now
can you tell me what's happening?"

Tiraena put the question to Koreel as he followed her through the portal into the moonlit enclosure of the ruined villa. She had restrained herself when he had awakened her in her bedchamber at Camalat, ordering her to dress and follow him through the portal, whose glow she had hoped no one would notice in the crack under her door. But now she planted her feet and looked at him with a stubbornness he had come to know even in the course of a limited acquaintance.

At first he didn't reply, but busied himself with the device that projected this terminus of the portal connection. After the portal vanished, he turned to her and spoke rapidly.

"I talked to Tylar earlier. Matters in Gaul are coming to a head, and it's imperative that we get you over there to join him and Robert."

"Is Robert . . . ?"

"He's all right. But the British army has been broken, and now they're evacuating Bourges. In fact, the leading Visigothic elements will have reached the city. You'll emerge from a portal there."

"And be picked up by Tylar?"

"Not immediately. Tylar is unavoidably occupied with certain other matters."

"Now wait a minute, Koreel! You're saying you want me to step through a portal alone, into the middle of a routed army and a city being sacked by barbarians . . . ?"

"Oh, don't worry! Tylar has positioned a device which will activate at the exact moment Robert is nearby. You'll have no difficulty making contact with him. And Tylar will pick up the two of you as soon as possible. So you see," he beamed, "you have absolutely nothing to worry about. The situation is under control." Suddenly, his eyes went unfocused and he blinked. "Aha! It seems the time is now." He set the device on the ground, and a portal appeared, framing a darkness which was faintly illuminated by distant flames. She looked dubiously through at Bourges, but could see little of it. The energy field that caused the slight resistance one felt stepping through the thing also had a sound-muffling effect, but she could hear a background roaring with undercurrents she didn't like.

"Quickly, now! We can't keep this portal open forever, you know." Koreel gestured impatiently. "Oh, and be sure to pick up the portal device Tylar left; it will reconfigure itself into a dagger after you have passed through."

Tiraena took a deep breath and stepped through the portal. As soon as she did so, it blinked out of existence. She saw the little device changing shape on the ground, but her attention was monopolized by the scene which had replaced the moonlit peacefulness of the deserted British villa.

She was in an alley between two buildings of obscure function. The firelight she had seen came from what her implanted sense of direction told her was the west. The roaring was a composite of many distant voices, and it suffused the very air with the stench of panic.
And, speaking of panic, I don't see any sign of Robert.