Chapter 25: Attack of the Flying Lizards

We had a surreptitious but friendly midnight meeting with Lucius Drusus, the commander of the garrison at Castra Taurorum. He was of mixed Saxon and Latin descent, showing the best of both worlds. He was one of those no-nonsense commanders who works his men hard and backs them to the hilt. He wasn’t a fan of wizardly oppression, and he wasn’t a fan of rapacious governors with enormous harems. He assured us that he was at the orders of the Dux before those of the Legate, who had his own private guard.

Torquatus, the Dux back in Burgundia, wasn’t a fan of slave raiders sweeping up free citizens and enslaving them. There were laws against that sort of thing. The office of “Tribune of the People” had been revived at some point in the past couple thousand years, actually a couple times, in fact. In its current incarnation it was an inspector general type position, but with executive powers. We had met with the Tribune too, once Torquatus had been convinced we weren’t a pair of lunatics. He came with us when we met with Drusus. His name was Bigodius Decimus and we had brought him back with us, rather than waiting six weeks for him to come by ship and maybe be lost at sea. He was now at our camp by the river, interviewing our people about how they had come to be there. Most of them would be restored to their free status after the blow-off, always assuming we won. They would be allowed to return home or to remain as our clients, at their preference.

The person of the Tribune of the People was sacrosanct, which meant that if he died of anything at all during his mission a major investigation would be launched under military auspices. If Decimus pegged out with a heart attack at age twenty eight it would be assumed to be murder. If the claims of oppression were corroborated, Rægan could be relieved on the spot and sent back to Burgundia for trial. Enslaving citizens without cause was a capital offense. If the Tribune needed further testimony, Millie and Chulëntët could take him where he needed to go in a flash. Eadgyth took him up to view the scorched farmland from the air and the dangling corpses along the highway. Decimus was looking at an oppressed countryside, citizens enslaved and mistreated at random, and, as we were certain, double sets of ledgers when it came to the taxes. Revenues hadn’t increased under Rægan, even though collections had. That’s always a no-no in government.

All in all, we had taken care of the official end of things, doing things by the book. That approach always keeps the authorities happy. That left Palégos for us to deal with. He was the Hand of the Legate, the power behind the throne. We were getting closer all the time to being able to root him out.

Then the dragons came zooming in and the merda hit the vannus. We had waited too long to take the offensive, and now the Wizard had beaten us to the punch.

As dragons go, the dragons weren’t over the top. Each was about six feet long from stem to stern. They looked like common garden lizards with bat wings. They breathed fire, but it was proportionate to their size; they only got about three feet of flame, and they were afraid of fire. The main problem for us was that there were so many of them. It looked like there were hundreds, maybe even thousands. They weren’t huge and they flew low, so they were on us before we quite knew what was happening.

One of the longhouses was burning and the witches took to the air, riding whatever was handy: Brooms, blankets, sheep, and in one case a fallen sapling, leaves and all. The witches and wizards were in their element, turning the fire back on the dragons, who tried their best to avoid it. The men and women on the ground were dumping water from the river on the longhouse fire. The warriors were filling the sky with arrows. The Tribune was taking notes.

Nevy could deal with the dragons, or I could later. I was keeping an eye out for the main threat.

Nannakussi

“Keep our warriors on alert,” our lord told me, watching the dragons as they tried to wreak havoc on our camp. “This attack is a diversion.”

I thought so too, despite the fact that a single longhouse was burning. The dragons were scary because of the fire they brought with them. If not for that, one of our witches could have produced a twenty foot house cat to deal with the lot of them. They had no other weapons. They were being controlled remotely, and groups of them tended to act identically, whether it was called for or not. There was a clumsiness about it that wasn’t new, but that I had never recognized when the Wizard had controlled operations remotely before.

Kogwahee caught the awkwardness as well. During his time as a Flying Monkey, the Iroquois boy had occasionally been under that remote control. Having someone else control your actions wasn’t the same as controlling them yourself. There was always a slight delay as the thought was translated to action. Now that we had a bit of knowledge on the subject we could both see it clearly.

Kogwahee called to our warriors to stop the dragon slaughter: “Don’t waste arrows on them unless they come at you or they present a threat to someone,” he told our little band. They had already brought down quite a few of the creatures, but there were far too many of them. The Wizard seemed to have more dragons than we had arrows.

Even as Kogwahee spoke, Lady Nevianne was acting. The dragons became little lizards again, losing their wings and dropping out of the air like so many rain drops, many with little “splats” when they landed. The falls of others were cushioned by the grass, and they were able to scuttle away. They weighed almost nothing.

“Their wings can’t possibly work like that,” our lady told me. “There aren’t any muscles to work them and they’re not big enough to actually propel those bodies. And what ignites their burp gas?”

Disbelief was a skill I wanted to develop for myself. It was a powerful weapon against Dark Magic. My Lord and my daughter had been working with me on it, but I wasn’t quite there yet. I looked and saw dragons; they looked and saw decked-out inflated lizards.

The lizards were supposed to keep us occupied until the second wave arrived. Because Our Lady had acted so promptly against them, we had a little hiatus between their arrival and the next attack. We used it to get the noncombatant women and our few children out of the line of attack. Our Lady sent them across the ford, to the other side of the river and told them to go into the woods until called. She and Lady Blæda had already hexed that area; it was invisible to the Dark Wizard, like the site of his house. We had rehearsed the evacuation several times. Naturally it looked nothing like what we had rehearsed. People went every which way, though at least in the same general direction. We were lucky we didn’t lose any of them.

The Tribune joined us. He looked a little pale, but he had come through the episode unscathed. Except for a few minor burns, it turned out all of our people had. “They were sent from the Wizard?” he asked our lord. “Or from the legate?”

“They came from the direction of Castra Taurorum,” dominus Jack told us. “Could be either or both. We don’t have any human survivors to confirm or deny either way. Their interests at this point are one. I expect the next attack will come from that direction too. Are the cannons ready?”

“Ready, dominus,” Tekoni replied, having also joined us. Decimus had been surprised at the fact that a girl in her teens was in charge of the artillery. She had fleshed out with decent food and now at least didn’t look like she was on her death bed. Her hatred for the Wizard was something to behold – from a distance. She also loved hearing things go “kaboom” and had grasped the principles of loading, aiming, and firing the guns quicker than anyone else, to include me. That girl loved her guns.

The Empire had cannons, provided by the engineers as part of siege trains of the legions. They were big, designed to batter down city walls. They were made of of bronze or iron, and occasionally one would blow up, usually killing its entire crew. The legionnaires didn’t like them much. Ours were small, made of steel, and “rifled,” which meant that there were spiral ridges cast inside the tubes to put spin on what came out. The spin increased accuracy. Our guns weren’t very big, only three inches in bore. We had a good supply of gunpowder, lead and bronze balls, chain, rocks, and gravel. Tekoni had been drilling her former Winky Bears until they were very proficient at ranges up to three hundred paces. We were expecting the Legate’s personal troops to appear and we were ready to give them a warm welcome.

Instead we got hogs. Really big hogs.

Nevianne

Someone screamed, which at least gave us a warning. It was our first casualty, the Wizard’s former master of accounts. He had been in the open, outside our earthen wall, searching for no one knew what. Maybe he was deserting. We’ll never know. He’s not around to tell us anymore. The hogs simply trampled him into the ground. It was hard to find his remains when it was all over.