‘Dame Primus,’ said Leaf urgently. ‘I don’t know the number.’
‘Who is calling, please?’ asked the Operator.
‘Leaf,’ said Leaf. ‘Arthur’s friend Leaf.’
‘Hold, please.’
The voice went away and the crackling increased in volume. Leaf tapped her feet anxiously and gripped the main part of the phone even tighter.
‘Dame Primus is not available,’ said the Operator after at least a minute. ‘Can I take a message?’
Sixteen
THE POWER-SPEAR had hardly left Arthur’s hand when he was carried forward by the sheer press of bodies around him, as the Denizen ranks pushed ahead to replace the losses in the shield-wall of the front rank. It was incredibly loud, frightening, and confusing. At times Arthur wasn’t even sure which way was forward as the lines shifted and moved, and he had to move with the Denizens at either side or be trampled underfoot.
He’d automatically unsheathed his savage-sword, again without thinking, and he used it several times, moments of intense fear when he was either hacking at a Nithling that suddenly appeared in front of him or desperately blocking a lightning-tipped spear that came straight at him, apparently out of the blue.
Once he stood alone for several seconds, in a six-foot-wide circle of clear space in the middle of battle. Badly wounded recruits and Nithlings gasped and gurgled around his feet, small sounds that were drowned out again as Arthur was swept up once more by his companions. But he would remember them always, for they were the sounds of terror, bewilderment, and finality.
There was always noise. Metal screeched on metal. Weapons thudded into armour and flesh and bone. The drums kept banging. Denizens and Nithlings shouted and screamed and howled. Lightning crackled and sparked and fizzed. Smoke and hideous burning smells drifted through the melee, wafting up from burning power-spears.
Arthur’s mind overloaded on fear and adrenaline. He became like a robot, his body moving according to training and orders, with no real intelligence directing it. He felt like his conscious self had retreated into a bunker, letting his eyes, ears, and nose record what was going on. He would look at it later and think about what his senses reported. He could not handle it now.
The battle lines surged backward and forward for a time that Arthur could not measure, for it was composed of seconds of total fright and sudden action, but those seconds also stretched on so long that he felt exhausted, as if he had been running and fighting for hours and hours.
Then, like a natural turning of the tide, the Nithlings were pushed back. The recruits began to surge after them but were restrained by yelled commands and directed to reform ten yards ahead of the front rank’s previous position. They obeyed, trampling over dead enemies and their own fallen comrades. Against this flow of forward movement, there was also a steady stream of badly wounded Denizens heading to the rear, many supporting one another, though no able recruit left the lines.
The sun had almost set when the Nithlings’ withdrawal became a full retreat. They fled back to the tile border, trying to get across it before the last thin segment of the sun dipped below the horizon and the desert tile moved somewhere else.
Arthur stood with Fred on one side and an unknown Denizen on the other, dumbly obeying the commands that were being shouted around them. It was still too much for him to take in. There were too many horrible details everywhere, from the awful feel of blue Denizen and oil-black Nithling blood underfoot to the croaking cries of the Nithlings that were too hurt to flee.
Refuge could be had in looking straight ahead and trying not to think about anything other than following the shouted commands. The first of these was to march, so they tramped forward, steadily pursuing the Nithling force back to the tile border.
Twice groups of Nithlings turned to fight, and then the order was given to charge, but it was not a wild, every-which-way run. The recruits kept roughly in their ranks, double-timing, shouting the war cry as they charged.
These charges were exhilarating and exhausting and dangerous, and Arthur found that it took all his energy and attention to make sure he wasn’t knocked over and trampled by his own side. He wasn’t sure which rank he was in now, as there were many more behind him, the Denizen force shrinking its front line and turning more into a broad column, harangued into shape by shouting sergeants relaying and amplifying commands from Colonel Huwiti.
Finally it was too dark to continue, the green moonlight and pallid starshine insufficient to track down the small groups of Nithlings that were all that remained. Many of the attacking force were dead or wounded and captured, but a significant proportion had crossed the tile boundary just before sunset and had disappeared as that tile moved on, the desert instantaneously replaced by a square mile of lush, rolling grassland. Tall grass, helpful to the Nithlings who crossed a few minutes too late to be carried away with the tile change.