The Battle for Skandia (20 page)

“If you don't, you may find you have no country left,” Halt replied. “As to what you would do next, you could try paying them. Make them servants instead of slaves.”

“Pay them? To do the work they're doing now?” Ragnak spluttered indignantly.

“Why not? The gods know you can afford it well enough. And you might find they do a better job if they've got something more than a beating to look forward to at the end of the day.”

“To hell with them!” Ragnak said. “And to hell with you, Ranger. I agreed to listen to you, but this is ridiculous. You'll turn me into a beggar if I let you have your way. First you want me to abandon Hallasholm to this rabble of horsemen. Now you want me to send all my slaves off back to where they came from. To hell with you, I say.”

He glared at the Ranger for a few seconds, then, with a contemptuous wave of his hand, he turned away, refusing even to make eye contact. Halt waited a few seconds, then spoke to Erak, who was standing by his Oberjarl, an uncomfortable look on his face.

“I'm telling you, we need these men,” he said forcefully. “Even with them, we can still lose. But with them fighting willingly for us, we'll have a chance.” He jerked a thumb in the direction of the Oberjarl. “Tell him,” he said finally, then turned on his heel and left the council room, Will hurrying behind him as he went.

As they left the hall, Halt said, almost to himself, but loud enough for Will to hear, “I wonder if it occurs to them that if the slaves agree unwillingly to fight for them, and if, by some mad mischance, we do win, there's nothing to stop the slaves from turning their weapons on the Skandians.” That thought had occurred to Will. He nodded agreement. “That's why,” Halt continued, “we've got to give them something worth fighting for.”

 

They waited at the training field for over an hour. The slaves had come to a decision, agreeing to fight against the Temujai. However, a few shifty eyes among the group told Halt and Will that, once the battle was over, the newly armed men were not going to return meekly into slavery.

There was a buzz of expectation as Erak arrived. He walked up to Halt and Will, who were standing a little apart from the archers.

“Ragnak agrees,” he said quietly. “If they fight, he'll free them.”

Halt nodded his head gratefully. He knew where the real impetus for Ragnak's decision had come from.

“Thank you,” he said simply to Erak. The Skandian shrugged and Halt turned to Will. “They'll be your men. They need to get used to taking orders from you. You tell them.”

Will hesitated, surprised. He had assumed that Halt would do the talking. Then, at an encouraging nod from his master, he stepped forward, raising his voice.

“Men!” he called, and the low murmur of conversation among the group died instantly. He waited a second or two to make sure he had their full attention, then continued.

“Ragnak has decided. If you fight for Skandia, he'll set you free.”

There was a moment of stunned silence. Some of these men had been slaves for ten years or more. Now, here was this slightly built youth telling them that the end to their suffering was in sight. Then a mighty roar of triumph and jubilation swept through them, at first wordless and inchoate, but rapidly settling into a rhythmic chant of one word from one hundred throats:

“Free-dom! Free-dom! Free-dom!”

Will let them celebrate for a while longer. Then he climbed onto a tree stump where he could be seen by all of them and waved his arms for silence. Gradually, the chant died away and they crowded closer around him, eager to hear what else he had to tell them.

“That's all very well,” he said when they had quieted down. “But first, there's the small matter of beating the Temujai. Let's get to work.”

Halt and Erak watched as Will supervised the issuing of arrows to the men. Unconsciously, both men nodded their approval of the boy. Then Erak turned to Halt.

“I nearly forgot, Ragnak had a further message for you. He said if we lose this battle and he loses his slaves as well, he's going to kill you for it,” he said cheerfully.

Halt smiled grimly. “If we lose this battle, he may have to get in line to do it. There'll be a few thousand Temujai cavalrymen in front of him.”

WILL CALLED THE LAST GROUP OF TEN MEN FORWARD TO THE firing line. The preceding group moved to the rear of the waiting ranks and sat down to watch. He was working the men in small groups at this stage. That gave him a manageable group to work with as he tested their ability to follow his orders and shoot at a predetermined elevation.

“Ready!” he called. Each man took an arrow from the bin in front of him and nocked it to the string. They stood ready, their heads turned toward him, waiting for his next order.

“Remember,” he said, “don't try to judge the shot yourself. Just go to the position I call, make a full draw and a smooth release when I call it.”

The men nodded. Initially, they hadn't liked the idea of having their shooting controlled by someone as young as Will. Then, after Halt had encouraged his apprentice to give a demonstration of highspeed pinpoint shooting, they had reluctantly agreed to the system Will had devised.

Will took a deep breath, then called firmly: “Position three! Draw!”

Ten arms holding bows rose to a position approximately forty degrees from the horizontal. Will quickly glanced down the line to see that each man had remembered the correct position. He'd been drilling the four different elevations into them all day. Satisfied, and before the strain of holding the bows at full draw became too great, he called:

“Shoot!”

Almost as one, there was a rapid slither of released bowstrings and a concerted hiss of arrows arcing through the air.

Will watched the small flight of shafts as they arced upward, then nosed over and plunged down to bury themselves up to half their length in the turf. Again he called to the waiting line of men: “Position three, ready!”

As before, the ten men nocked arrows to the strings, waiting for Will's next call.

“Draw . . . shoot!”

Again there was the slithering slap of released bowstrings hitting the archers' arm guards, and the sound of the wooden shafts scraping past the bows as they were hurled into the air. This time, as the arrows came down, Will changed his command.

“Position two . . . ready!”

The line of left arms holding the bows extended and tilted up to a thirty-degree angle.

“Draw . . . shoot!”

And another ten-shaft volley was on its way. Will nodded to the ten men, who were watching him expectantly.

“All right,” he said. “Let's see how you did.”

He began to pace across the open field, followed by the ten men who had just shot. There were markers set out down the middle of the field, marking 100, 150 and 200 meter distances. Position three, with the bow arm elevated forty degrees from the horizontal, should have equated to the 150 meter marker. As they approached that marker, Will nodded with satisfaction. There were sixteen arrows slanting up from the turf within a ten-meter tolerance of the mark. Two had gone long, he noticed, and two more had dropped short. He studied the long shots. The shafts were numbered so that he could assess how each member of the shooting line had performed. He saw now that the two overshoots belonged to two different archers.

Moving back to the arrows that had undershot the target, he frowned slightly. The arrows were both marked with the same number. That meant the same archer had dropped his shot short of the mark both times. Will took note of the number, then moved back to view the results of the final volley. The frown deepened as he saw that nine arrows were well grouped, with one falling short by the same margin. He didn't really need to check, but a quick glance showed him that, once again, the same archer had undershot the distance.

He grunted thoughtfully.

“All right!” he called. “Recover your arrows.” Then he led the way back to the firing point, the ten men following behind him.

“Who was at number four position?” he asked.

One of the archers stepped forward, hesitantly holding up a hand and looking like a nervous pupil in school. He was a heavyset bearded man of about forty, Will noticed, yet his demeanor showed that he was totally in awe of the young Ranger facing him.

“That was me, your honor,” he said. Will beckoned him closer.

“Bring your bow and two or three arrows,” he said. The man picked up his bow, and selected two arrows from the bin that stood by his firing position. He was nervous at being singled out and promptly dropped the arrows, scrabbling awkwardly to retrieve them.

“Relax,” Will told him. “I just want to check your technique.”

The man tried to smile in return. He'd seen they were his arrows that had fallen short and he assumed he was about to be punished. That was the way life went for a slave in Hallasholm. If you were told to do something and you didn't do it, you were punished. Now the brown-haired youth who was directing the session was grinning at him and telling him to relax. It was a novel experience.

“Take a stance,” Will told him, and the man stood side-on to the firing range, left foot extended, left hand holding the bow at waist height.

“Position three,” Will said quietly, and the man assumed the position that had been drilled into him all the previous day, his left arm holding the bow at forty degrees—almost maximum distance. Will studied him. There seemed to be little wrong with the man's stance.

“All right,” he said. “Draw, please.”

The man was using too much arm muscle and not enough of his back muscles to draw the bow, Will thought. But that was a minor fault and the result of long habit. There would be no way of changing that in the time they had left.

“And . . . shoot.”

There it was, Will thought. A fraction of a second before the man released his shot, he relaxed the draw length slightly—letting the arrow ease down a little before actually letting his fingers slip from the string. That meant that at the moment of release, the arrow was at something less than full draw, which in turn meant it was receiving less than the full power of the bow behind its flight. Halt and Will had tested all the bows to make sure they were similar in draw weight and the arrows were all exactly the same length to ensure results were as consistent as possible. The main cause for variation would be little technical errors like this one.

He looked down the range to where the colored flights of the arrow were visible against the brown, sodden grass of the spring thaw. As he had suspected, it was short again.

Will explained the reason for the problem to the man, seeing from the surprised expression that he had no idea that he was relaxing the draw at the crucial moment.

“Work on it,” he told him, giving him an encouraging slap on the shoulder. Halt had impressed on him the fact that a little encouragement in matters like these went a great deal further than scathing criticism. Will had been surprised when Halt had put him in charge of the archers' training. Even though he knew he'd be directing the archers during the battle, he'd assumed that Halt would supervise their training. But the Ranger had repeated his earlier sentiment.

“You're the one who'll be directing them once we're fighting. It's as well they get used to following your orders from the start.”

Will remembered another piece of advice the Ranger had given him. “Men work better when they know what you have in mind,” he told the young apprentice. “So make sure you tell them as much as possible.”

He stepped up onto a raised platform that had been placed here for the purpose of addressing the entire group.

“We'll break for today,” he said in a raised voice. “Tomorrow we'll shoot as one group. So if I've picked any technical faults in your shooting today, practice getting rid of them before the evening meal. Then get a good night's rest.” He started to turn away, then turned back, remembering one thing more. “Good work, all of you,” he said. “If you keep this up, we're going to give those Temujai a very nasty surprise.”

A growl of pleasure rose from the hundred men. Then they broke off, heading back for the warmth of the halls and lodges. Will realized that it was later than he'd thought. The sun was touching the tops of the hills beyond Hallasholm and the shadows were lengthening. The evening breeze was chilly and he shivered, reaching for the cloak that he'd hung from the platform railing as he'd directed the shooting.

A half dozen boys had been assigned to help and without orders from him they gathered the arrow bins and arrows, putting them under cover in one of the store sheds that fronted the practice field. Will couldn't help noticing the admiring glances they cast his way as they went about their work. He was only a few years older than they were, yet here he was, directing a force of one hundred archers. He smiled to himself. He wouldn't have been human if he hadn't enjoyed their hero worship.

“You look pleased with yourself,” said a familiar voice. He turned and realized Horace must have approached while he had been talking to the men. He shrugged, trying to act diffident.

“They're coming along quite well,” he said. “It's been a good day's work.”

Horace nodded. “So I noticed,” he said. Then, in a worried tone, he continued, “Evanlyn hasn't been here with you, has she?”

Will looked up at him, instantly on the defensive. “What if she has been?” he asked, an argumentative tone creeping into his voice. Instantly, he saw the worried look clear from Horace's face and realized he'd misinterpreted the reason for his friend's question.