Heuze suddenly understood what had to be done. It was the only chance. He turned and fought his way back through the crowd to General Polluk, who was standing on the trail beneath a rock overhang that gave some protection from the rain of missiles falling from above.
"Polluk!" snarled Heuze. "Where are the fornicating flags?"
Polluk stared at him. The general was trying hard to keep control of the remaining men fighting at the head of the trail. They were losing the fight, but they were stubborn men of Shasht, and they would hold their ground for a long time.
"The signal flags? Lieutenant Cump has them."
"Cump!" roared Heuze.
Young Cump was there, toting the pack with the signal flags and lines to string them on.
"Send a message to the ship: 'Send ropes. Seven hundred men have to move.'"
"What are you planning, sir?" Polluk had hold of his elbow.
"The fornicating monkeys have taken the cliff top. Look!"
A rain of rocks and logs, stones and arrows was hurtling down from the cliff onto the men packed on the beach below. The men had no choice but to walk out into the waves.
Cump and two men worked frantically to sort out the flags. A line was dropped over the edge of the cliff, and flags were fed onto it with desperate speed.
The
Anvil
got the message. Additional sails spread within seconds, and she accelerated toward the boats bearing the first three hundred.
As the ship swept down on them, the men were ordered out of the boats and made to swim. The boats turned about immediately and started back to the beach. The
Anvil
, slowing, with an anchor splashing into the water, caught up to the boats, and coils of rope were hurled down to them. Meanwhile, rescue netting was being lowered over the sides and stern to the swimmers.
Heuze gave thanks for Captain Pukh's wits. The man had been slow on the uptake originally. This was the Pukh whom he trusted in a fight. The first swimmers were clambering up the side. Sailors dived into the sea to help the wounded and those who couldn't swim very well.
Above him, the men at the top of the trailhead had been forced to retreat almost as far as Polluk's post under the overhang. More rocks, pieces of burning brush, and occasional men's bodies kept flying off the cliff and hurtling past.
Heuze had seen how it was going and was already hurrying downward, stumping as fast as he could go. Ensign Combliss was with him, while Lieutenant Cump had recovered the signal flags and was right behind. Combliss found a discarded shield and held it up to protect the admiral. It was good that he did so because a shower of small rocks came down almost immediately and banged off the shield.
About halfway down was the most dangerous stretch. The trail ducked in close beneath a near vertical drop from the top of the cliff. There was absolutely no protection. Even with the shield held above him, Heuze could not get past unscathed. A couple of stones struck him, one on the shoulder and one on the back. The second one almost knocked him over.
Then a bigger rock hit the shield, overwhelming Combliss and driving the shield down onto Heuze's head. He went down. Other men helped him get up. One of them was struck on the head by another rock and fell backward off the edge of the trail and plummeted down to the beach.
Horrified, Heuze got his crutch underneath him and drove himself across the next few feet to the relative safety of an overhang just past the turn. Combliss got in behind him.
"Admiral, are you all right?"
Heuze thought his heart was going to burst from the exertion, and his head was still ringing from the blow, but he muttered, "Of course," between gasps for breath. He hoped he looked better than Combliss, who'd lost his helmet and had blood trickling steadily down one side of his face. Then Lieutenant Cump joined them, still carrying the bag of flags, with rope coiled over his shoulder. He opened his mouth to say something but was interrupted by a shriek as a body flew past from above, bounced off the trail, and went on spinning downward. Far below, the men had abandoned the beach entirely and were bobbing in the waves as far out as they dared to go.
"Complete, fornicating disaster," muttered Heuze.
More men were coming down the trail, many of them wounded. The fight at the top had moved down past the overhang, and the retreat accelerated because the men could only fight while under a hail of rocks from above.
There was no way to stay under the overhang. Hundreds of men had to get past. Heuze got his crutch beneath him and shoved off once more, hurling himself from rock to rock, the crutch slamming up under his arm, his stump burning.
Bruised, battered, breathing hard, his vision fading to a red haze, the admiral finally reached the beach, where the hard trail gave way to soft sand. On the uppermost dunes the sand was deep and soft, and his peg leg sank in an inch or two with every step.
A rock the size of his head struck not three feet away, creating a crater in the sand.
Heuze dug deeper with his crutch and hauled himself over the sand. Stones spattered down around him, but he was still spared. Lieutenant Cump had the bag of flags on top of his head, which saved him when a rock clipped it a few moments later. Cump went down, however, knocked out cold by a fist-size piece of slate.
Heuze stopped with a weary shake of the head. They were all going to die in this miserable spot, he was certain. But he couldn't leave young Cump lying there. A soldier had leaned over the lieutenant to check his pulse.
"He lives."
"Damn," muttered the admiral. "Ah, well, can't be helped."
Some stones clattered off the beach nearby. Heuze bent over with a wheeze, grabbed Cump's trailing arm, and helped Combliss and the soldier carry the lieutenant toward the waves.
"Can you swim, Ensign?" asked Heuze.
"All my life, sir. I come from Gzia Gi."
"Good man. Then we'll just take him with us, eh?"
Somehow, Heuze found the strength to get down that soft dune while helping to carry Cump. They had just made the transition onto the softer mud flats when a tree stump about three feet across slammed into a pool a few feet away and covered him with gobs of muddy sand. Mouth full of grit, barely able to see, he kept pushing forward, felt the water splash over his boot, and dug his crutch in one last time.
The water was up to his waist, and Cump was floating. Heuze abandoned his crutch, tore off his coat and remaining armor, and kicked.
Combliss and the soldier had pulled Cump out through the waves. A wave lifted him off his foot, and he kicked off his boot. A duck of the head cleared the worst of the muck from his eyes. Something raised a big splash on his right, and there was a chilling scream. He didn't even look, but kept on, with the water now up to his waist.
He retained his peg leg, knowing he'd be helpless without it, and he was reluctant to abandon the sword, even though he felt its weight. Heuze was a strong swimmer, even with only one foot, and he caught up with Combliss soon enough. He took hold of one of Cump's arms and swam sidestroke, helping to push them all out through the surf into the deeper water.
He could see behind him. The cliff top far above was lined with dark figures, still hurling a rain of rocks down on the men scurrying across the sand and swimming out through the waves.
A rock fell just on the other side of Combliss, and several stones hit the water just behind them, but at last they were at the edge of the throwers' range.
Surrounding them were other men struggling to stay afloat. The good swimmers were doing their utmost to help the others keep their heads above water. Everyone had been forced to abandon their shields, armor, and weapons.
Heuze's luck continued to hold, however. Within a minute or so, the first boats came back in range, hallooing and throwing out lines to the men in the water.
"Five men to a line. Take hold and we'll tow you back to the ship."
Heuze tried to raise his voice to catch their attention. He was the admiral and he wanted to be taken back to the ship that very moment. But they didn't hear him in the general uproar. He bellowed, but everyone else was shouting, too. The boat went past him.
So, when a line drifted within range he had no option but to take hold and be dragged like all the rest. The line tightened with a sudden jerk, and then he was tugged away, with Combliss and Cump beside him. Ensign Combliss had put a loop of line around Cump under his arms, and the unconscious man lay on his back with his face above water.
The great mass of men clinging to ropes began to move more quickly as the rowers bent their backs to the task. They gave huge grunts as they dug deep with their oars. A quarter mile out from shore lay the
Anvil
, sails furled, anchors deployed, busy taking up the swimmers from the first three hundred rescued from the beach.
Once again Heuze looked back to the cliff. To his surprise the dark mass of mots had vanished. He couldn't see anyone left standing on the beach. The monkeys had gone back into their trackless forest. Damn them!
A familiar rage suffused the admiral's thoughts. Just when he'd had them on the run, the fornicating, sodomistic monkeys had sprung a surprise on him and turned the tables. It was insupportable, but he was going to have to live with the humiliation.
Turned around by the motion of the boat, he saw that the
Anvil
was appreciably closer now. The greater question, he realized, was how to keep this latest disaster from being perceived as such. He would have to make it sound like a success.
The fort had been lost. At least two hundred men were gone. But the rest had been saved, and that had been Heuze's work.
Yes. He had it now. That would be the focus, how he had stepped in and saved the rest of the army after Polluk had made a complete mess of things.
Heuze no longer gave defeated generals to the priests. Instead, Polluk would be hanged from the yardarm of the
Anvil
. After a trial, of course.
It was unfair, but it would be necessary to placate Nebbeggebben and the rest of the fleet. Either that or Heuze's own hide would be at risk.
The chill in the water was starting to get to him by the time he was finally hauled into a boat and recognized.
"It's the admiral, by gum. Sir, we had no idea."
"Thank you, boys. Take these men out of the water and then row us to the ship."
"Land ho!" rang down from the top of the mainmast. Feet thudded on stairs and decks.
Among the men of Shasht who ran to get a glimpse of the new land was one figure, decidedly different. Undeniably female, and undoubtedly not human, Nuza of Tamf ran up the rigging into the foremast crosstrees like any other sailor. She wore matelot pants like all the men, though she'd reworked them to fit her wider hips, and a shirt made from good Shasht cotton, but soft grey fur covered her from head to toe, except on the front of her face around the mouth, nose, and eyes. She was a mor of the Land, not a man of Shasht, and she beat all the topsail men to the crosstrees, even the best of them.
They'd grown to expect that, having sailed with Nuza for ten months. For her weight, she was as strong as most men, and she had far better balance than any of them. On a dare she had often walked out to the ends of the topsail spars, spun around, and come back on her hands.
For her, such stunts were actually easy. She'd been an acrobat and a tumbler all her life. The men of the
Duster
, even though they were veteran sailors, had had to adjust to the sight of her skinning up a line arm over arm and running out to the end of a yardarm like one of them.
But after a month or so, they had accepted her. It was just the latest of the strange developments brought upon them by their loyalty to the Emperor Aeswiren. Fortunately, there were no fanatical worshippers of He Who Eats among them, with all the prejudices and hatreds of that dire cult. Still, there were those who looked askance at the peculiar relationship Nuza shared with the Emperor. Endless gossip it had provoked, and even a few fights, but now even that was largely accepted. Nuza was somewhere between a wild animal and a concubine, but she was clearly athletically superior to any of them, and they respected that.
And, though it had never been tested, it was understood that she could fight. She practiced her kyo, mor's kyo, on the afterdeck every morning to loosen up her muscles. The men had all observed her swift moves, the whiplash speed of her feet when she struck a high kick. No one aboard had ever thought to challenge her.
Now she sat in the crosstrees and stared at the eastern horizon. There it was, at long last, a distant smudge of brown along the terminator. She felt her heart thud in her chest as she caught sight of it.
Home.
Once she had thought she would never see it again. Back in those dark, dreadful days of early captivity, when she was one of a dozen mots and mors jammed in the hold of a Shasht ship. Back then she had thought no more than a day ahead. Only squalor and death seemed to lie in the future.
But there was home, so close she could see it.
She was racked by sobs as her mind filled with thoughts of her family. Mother, father, brothers, sister, everyone she had left behind. More than two years had passed since she'd last laid eyes on them, back in Lushtan, the town in the Farblow Hills to which they'd fled after the burning of Tamf.
Tamf! Oh, by the wounds of the Spirit, poor Tamf! She cried again as she recalled how that beautiful old place had been burned to the ground by the men of Shasht. The towers, the houses, the ancient streets, all gone, destroyed by the hand of Man the Cruel.
But the Land still endured. She knew that the mots had held their own for two years and that no major battles had been fought in that time. She knew that the great Toshak must have come to the rescue of Sulmo in those dark, terrible days of the summer of defeat.
What she had learned since then had come directly from Aeswiren himself. She knew that the mots had avenged the defeat at Farnem and saved the city of Sulmo from the flames. The war went on, but on a smaller scale, with raids and the creation of Shasht forts on the coast.