"Dave Duncan - A Handful Of Men 1 - The Cutting Edge" - читать интересную книгу автора (Duncan Dave)

 The Cutting Edge


Karthin eventually ranked as the first of the year's seven victories, but it was a very narrow win. Proconsul Iggipolo held to the standard belief that
Zark was one huge waterless expanse of sand; he knew that djinns were red-eyed barbarians who fought on camels in the brightest sunlight they
could find. He therefore marched three road-weary legions into a swamp, an evening thunderstorm, and the caliph's trap.


Bogged down in mud by their armor, the imps soon learned that djinns fought very well on foot and could conceal ten men behind every clump of
reeds. Sunset failed to halt the slaughter, and dawn revealed Ylo's maniple isolated, surrounded, and hopelessly outnumbered.


Honor, politics, and even discipline had vanished in the night. Hunger, terror, and exhaustion were unimportant. Survival was all that mattered. The
morning was a foggy blur of noise and blood, sword strokes and the screams of the dying. The maniple shrank steadily. The centurions and the
optios fell; the standard disappeared. A tesserary shouted commands until he took an arrow in the throat, and after that it was every man for himself,
and no one seemed to know which way was home.


Whether he had tripped or been stunned or had merely fainted, Ylo never knew. He lay facedown in a bloody ooze for a long time, keeping
company with the dead. That was not cowardice, and he was far from alone in his collapse. Imps rarely made great fighters. They were never
berserkers, as the jotnar often were, nor fanatics like the djinns. They did not covet martyrdom, as elves did in their darker moods. They lacked the
suicidal stubbornness of fauns or the stony stamina of dwarves. Imps were just very good organizers, with a driving urge to organize everyone else
as well as they had organized themselves.


Eventually Ylo realized that he could still hear the beating of his heart. Then another beat, as well. And a bugle! He was very tired of the swamp. He
rose from the field of dead, lifted a sword from a nearby corpse to replace the one he had lost, and decided fuzzily that he was too weak to carry a
shield. He trudged off through the mud, heading for the drums and those twenty-three more years.


He had lost one sandal; bare skin on arms and legs was blistered raw by the sun. His sodden tunic was rubbing holes in his skin, something heavy
had dented his helmet so that it no longer fitted properly, yet none of the swords, arrows, and javelins that had been directed at him had penetrated
his hide.


The sky was blue; the fog had faded to patchy ghosts haunting the vegetation. The first Ylo saw of his salvation was the top of an Imperial standard
advancing toward him, the four-pointed star shining. in sunlight. Then out of the mist and the bulrushes below it came a wall of legionaries, driving
a ragtag mob of exhausted djinns before them.


Ylo was on the wrong side of that mob. Either courage or blind panic spurred him into life. Yelling like a maniac, he struck down a couple from
behind, plunging into the free-forall, clawing his way toward the impish standard. He would certainly not have made it, except that a murdering,
screaming horde of djinns appeared out of nowhere at his back like a tidal wave and swept him up.


The shield wall collapsed before the onslaught. Ylo was borne forward, all the way to his objective, the standard. He arrived as a javelin felled its
bearer. Two years of training stamped certain lessons on a man's bones, and the first of those was that standards were sacred. Without conscious
thought, Ylo dropped his sword, caught the falling staff with both hands, and raised it erect.