Free Doom's Break by Christopher Rowley Page A

fifty men to hold the top of the trail while the rest made their escape to the beach.
    Heuze came up just in time. When he heard Polluk's plan, he sensed the potential for a disaster.
    "Wait a minute, General. No point in us all going down to the beach if there's no boats to take us off. We must signal the ship."
    Polluk nodded. "Yes, sir, of course. I have a detachment setting a fire now."
    "Good man. I should've known you'd do that. Do we have any signal flags?"
    That was a point that Polluk had not gotten around to, and he was quick to order a search. Soon a set of army communication pennons was found, and a man went up a tall tree with a line. Arrows were falling among them by the time the first line of flags fluttered up on that line. The monkeys were gathering in the nearby woods, forming up for an assault.
    By that point, the fire in the thicket was going pretty well. Clouds of white smoke were rising from it. Heuze had his spyglass trained on the Anvil . Surely Captain Pukh would have noticed the fire by now?
    The smoke was thickening, and flames could be seen shooting up here and there. Still no flags were visible on the Anvil .
    The monkeys attacked.
    A solid column, ten across and perhaps ten deep, came storming forward. Their formation was loose enough to allow them to keep some semblance of lines as they covered the rough ground.
    The Shasht rearguard rose up to meet them. The men were angry after the fright and humiliation of the chase along the cliffs. They came up with fire in their eyes, and the mots' first assault was stopped cold. A clatter of weaponry went up along with a roar, and the mots recoiled and stepped back. The rearguard thrust them back farther, and the assault column got mixed up on the bad ground. The men made the mots pay then, for they caught groups jammed together in pits or in the process of climbing up out of them. And there mots died, cut down from behind.
    Polluk kept a close rein on his men, though. He didn't want them pulled too far out into the woods. He knew there would be archers waiting out there, not to mention other columns of infantry. When the enemy was definitely on the run, Polluk called his men back. They formed a line in cover and waited.
    By then the fire in the cliff-top brush was blazing high along a hundred feet of the cliff line. Many men had reached the bottom and were massing on the beach, which was reduced to a strip by the high tide.
    At last a line of flags broke out from the Anvil .
    "Prepare for boats," read Heuze. "Well, thank the gods for that. I thought Pukh would never see us!"
    He could see boats being hurriedly lowered from the ship. Still, even though the Anvil was carrying more boats than usual, they could only take a couple hundred men at a time. The rearguard would have to hold the top of the fort for an hour or more while the boats made several trips. Heuze realized that this might be difficult. It began to seem like a mistake to try and hold the monkeys off with only two hundred and fifty, but it would be hard to get men to come back up the cliff path.
    Flights of arrows began falling like hail on the men of Shasht, who were forced to take shelter wherever they found it, in pits, behind trees or boulders. Again, Heuze sensed a disaster taking shape.
    "Look, General, we have to find some way of getting all the men off the beach. Once the monkeys take the top, they'll turn the beach into a slaughterhouse."
    Polluk looked at the narrow beach down below and saw doom approaching. He gulped and looked back to the admiral. There was no doubt about it. They were in a very tight spot.
    A roar arose from the direction of the burning brush, and another assault column of mots and brilbies came pouring forward. Because the brush in that direction was partially ablaze, the men hadn't been watching it carefully. The nearest men were resting when the attackers broke from cover and sprinted at them.
    Powerfully built brilbies wielding pikes and axes crashed through