Chapter 13 : Marching to War

The Count and his troops reached the front line in the early afternoon. All morning as they climbed through the woods they'd passed small bands of armed gnomes marching on the road and were aware of larger concentrations of the tiny troops moving purposefully through the trees beside them. Somewhere on the secret pathways and leaf dusted rides of the deep woods, Yaskarrak was marching at the head of the main army.

The men broke camp at first light but waves of gnomes had already begun moving out during the night and Pormysta was in contact with northern groups who'd been ready to advance out of the forest as soon as the Inter Ring convocation gave its approval. The leader of the High Moors Ring hitched a lift on the Count's Kestervaal and rode up front with a couple of his lieutenants. The gnomes employed a hybrid telegraph system to keep in touch with one another which used a mixture of mirrors, smoke signals and relays of coded whistles. They also had teams of trained bull finches which were deployed to carry written messages, although they weren't capable of acting as spies in the way that the Count used his own crows. All in all, Pormysta was able to receive a steady stream of information and transmit a constant stream of instructions. The Count was impressed with the level of organisation this implied. It rather put his own intelligence gathering to shame.

R'eskyl'ah'in flew to the moors with the airforce, one of the most remarkable achievements of the race of gnomes. Many stanzas ago they had managed to tame some of the migrating geese whose distinctive V shaped patterns were sometimes sucked into the Autumn Country and then found themselves with nowhere to go. The largest geese were just about capable of carrying the lighter gnomes, and a small aerial force of fifteen aviators had been trained to ride them. But R'eskyl'ah'in, himself flew on the back of a great white swan called Cloud Of Truth. The bird and the prophet both came from another Realm and it had been their dramatic arrival together which inspired so much of the awe of the Autumn Country's gnomes.

It was a desperately bleak day and the moors were frigid. Snow had fallen in the night and throughout the morning there were occasional flurries from low grey clouds which rolled restlessly across the sky. It was a dry and powdery sort of snow and it didn’t manage to blanket the ground but it did create small drifts against the tree trunks. On the open moor top, each shrubby outcrop of heather was outlined in white. A fierce little wind gusted and twisted across the unsheltered plateau making the Kestervaals screw up their eyes and rumble low voiced complaints. The wind lifted snow from the tiny dunes in the lee of the heather to sculpt them with sharp little edges and to produce a swirl of ground level flakes. The predominant colours were black and white, leavened only slightly by the purple tints of heather and the pale yellow stone of the moorland road. Apart from the hardy flowering of the heather, suddenly caught in the wrong season, this might have been a day straight out of January or February. It didn’t belong in the Autumn Country.

The soldiers were quiet and tense with the knowledge of battle to come. Even A'lekim was subdued, marshalling his inner resources to prepare for the coming conflict. The closer they came to the Temple Of November the darker the Count's own mood became. The continuing absence of Peter, Cerylia and Tarragon disturbed him greatly but there was nothing he could do about it. He was convinced of his advisor's treachery and he feared more than ever for the others' safety. He feared for the Realm too and he thought deeply about the words of R'eskyl'ah'in.

At last they reached a knoll of high ground within sight of Claremont Crag where the gnomes had chosen to stand their ground. Peat fires were burning slowly in a whole series of rudimentary stone hearths which protected them from the wind. On many of these fires, snow melt was being brought to the boil in small metal cauldrons.

The local commander was a gnome called Hygarag. He had assumed a vantage point on top of a tumble of grit stone rocks and was supervising the assembly of a number of wooden engines of war which looked like small catapults. The devices had apparently been carried in kit form from the woods.

"They're gathering in the trees under the Crag," Hygarag said. "There's been no contact as yet but their numbers are growing all the time. My guess would be that they're going to wait for nightfall when it will get really cold. Then they'll come out fighting and try to break our lines."

Pormysta squinted into the wind and studied the ominous organisation of ice warriors.

"You're probably right but we aren’t going to let them. We have Count Arcturus and his men to reinforce us now and contingents from the Yellow Mere and Pine Valley Rings are only a few minutes behind us. They'll take up static positions flanking the road and they should be dug in within an hour. I want this company ready to mount a sortie against those ice warriors by then.

"Yaskarrak is holding a considerable force back in the woods to harry the enemy and prepare for a second pitched battle should they defeat us. But frankly, unless we win here, I doubt if any defence in the trees will do much good. It's our job to make these bloodless things think twice about coming away from the Crag. We have to snuff out their beach head and shut down the Christmas Passage.

"Let's do it."

When he saw the number of foreign enemies that were gathering to oppose them, the Count knew at last that any lingering fantasy he might have had about breaking through to the Temple with his own force alone was completely hopeless. He needed the co-operation of the gnomes and he would have to integrate his battle plans with Pormysta.

The Leader of the High Moors Ring spent some time supervising the soldiers preparing their weapons. The gnomes knew from bitter experience that it was dangerous to wield any sword or axe with a metal hilt because Colonel Frost and his ice warriors could freeze weld it to the skin in a fraction of a second. All the sword hilts were wrapped with cloth or leather and the inside of every shield had been lined with fur. The gnomes all wore thick woollen jerkins, trousers that looked like they came from miniature ski suits and fat leather gloves.

Heat was obviously going to be the key. To fight the ice warriors, the gnomes were cooking some stones in their peat fires and boiling others with the water in the cauldrons. Their catapults were designed to fire this shot into the heart of the enemy ranks. When the ice warriors got closer they would be met with flaming spears. Many of the gnomes carried torches covered with oil soaked rags which could be lit quickly from a tinder box. The torches would be used to fire the spears and to ward off direct assaults. Finally there was brute force which was an extreme and rather hopeless measure given the relative sizes of the combatants. Nevertheless, ice can be brittle and with a perfectly timed and judiciously placed blow from sword or axe it was known to be possible to shatter an ice warrior where he stood. This was more of a theoretical way to fight ice warriors than a practical way. Everyone said it could be done but no one had actually seen it happen. Furthermore, the gnomes were so short that unless they could fell the ice warriors like trees they would be unable to reach any vulnerable parts of their anatomy. The Count and his men had a better chance but even your average human soldier was only chest high to an ice warrior and a toe to toe engagement with conventional weapons was far more likely to result in a frozen corpse than a shattered ice warrior. Fortunately they had the Dragon guns and even more fortunately they had plenty of fuel and sufficient guns for all the surviving troops. This did a lot to boost morale. Everyone much preferred the idea of blasting the enemy from a distance.

The allies had agreed that the Count's company would open the attack with a sortie into enemy lines. This would all have to be done on foot. Although the Kestervaals might have given them a height advantage they were too slow and vulnerable to the ice warriors.

Once the men had engaged with the sentries and guards they would hold their position until they attracted a strong force of opposing warriors. As soon as the enemy felt confident enough to press forward out of the trees they would fall back in a retreat which had be managed carefully but look disorganised. It would be a feint. The plan of battle was to draw the ice warriors out onto the open moor where they would be within range of the catapults on the tor. A flanking attack from the High Moor gnomes would then liberate the Count to circle round behind the advancing warriors and cut them off from the Crag. If they could be lured into trouble this way it might be possible to break the enemy organisation, spread their force out into diffuse and relatively harmless groups and melt them down to puddles, one by one. Any which got beyond the stone tor would be met with a second line of fire from the Yellow Mere and Pine Valley assault weapons. That, at any rate, was the theory. Azbyc Vewdx had been in enough battles to know that theory and practice very seldom matched.

Still, now it was the time to put the theory to the test.

There was no need for secrecy. The whole point was to provoke a reaction. The men lined up in a single widely spaced row behind the Count, fingering their guns with a mixture of nerves and eagerness. Harry raised the Count's standard, an orange star on a black field, and next to him A'lekim struck up a suitably violent and martial anthem with words liberally adapted from the original, but the words were less important than the tune.

To the opening chords of the Manic Street Preachers' blood stirring theme, "Slash and Burn" the soldiers marched slowly but relentlessly forward across the moor. Their formation was akin to that of a team of beaters come to raise pheasants for the guns. And in a way that was what they had come to do, except that these were very dangerous pheasants and if they got to the 'guns' there wouldn’t be much left of the hunters.

It didn’t take long for the ice warriors to respond to this provocation. Soon half a dozen dreadful pale blue forms with faceless heads and long stilt like legs were stalking towards them with terrifying speed.

The first burst of flame from a Dragon gun washed over the leading warrior who bent at the waist and slumped, then suddenly fractured with a loud crack, accompanied by a cheer from the men.

The Count breathed out tasting the frosty metallic excitement and fear in his mouth and turning his own weapon to face an onrushing enemy. Then there was very little time to think and hardly enough time to act.

So the forces of Autumn and the forces of Winter came to grips on the moors below the Temple Of November and battle was well and truly joined.