Out of the Dark Read Online Free Page A

worse.
    At which point the longbowmen, arrows exhausted, swarmed over the French flanks and rear with hatchets, swords, daggers, mauls, pickaxes, and hammers. They were unarmored, true, but that meant they were far more mobile than their heavily armored, mud-mired opponents, and if they lacked the protective visored helms of their foes, they also had unimpaired vision. Worse, they were fresh, while many of the French were so exhausted from their long slog through the mud, the heat, and the lack of oxygen in their closed helmets that they could scarcely even lift their weapons. The situation could have been specifically designed—indeed, it
had
been, by Henry—to negate the heavily armored men-at-arms’ advantages in close combat, and when a Frenchman went down, even if he’d only stumbled and fallen, he couldn’t get back up under the longbowmen’s mercilessly murderous attack.
    •  •  •  •  •

    “Clahdru!” Hartyr muttered the better part of three human hours later. “It doesn’t seem . . . How could anyone . . . ?”
    His voice trailed off, and Garsul shook himself. “Humans” weren’t Barthoni. In fact, despite his own decades-long commitment to Survey and his belief that all sentient species should be treated with dignity and respect, he couldn’t really think of them as “people” at all. Joraym was right about that, and it shamed Garsul somewhere deep down inside to admit the xenoanthropologist was correct about his prejudices. But even so, they
were
sentients, and what these “English” and “French” had done to one another was going to leave him with nightmares for the rest of his life.
    He didn’t envy the Council when it read the confidential report he was going to have to file, either.
    There were literal heaps of bodies, some taller than Garsul himself, piled in front of the “English” position. Clahdru only knew how many of the French had simply suffocated, drowned in mud, or been crushed to death by the weight of their own dead, and the third and final French line had declined to advance. Sensibly, in Garsul’s opinion, given what had already happened to three-quarters of their armored warriors. It seemed incredible, preposterous, that such an outnumbered force could have so decisively defeated such an overwhelming foe, yet the English had, and the evidence of their ferocity and bloodthirstiness was horrifying.
    “Do you still think they’re simply ‘juvenile’ and ‘immature,’ Joraym?” he heard Ship Commander Syrahk ask bitingly.
    “I don’t know.” The xenoanthropologist sounded badly shaken. “I mean, they
are
juvenile and immature—they couldn’t be any other way at their current level of advancement. But
this
—!” Joraym tossed his head in a Barthon gesture of bafflement. “I’ve never read anything in the literature about this kind of brutality.”
    “Let’s not get too carried away,” Kurgahr put in. The ship commander and xenoanthropologist both looked at him disbelievingly, and he snorted. “I’m not trying to make excuses for anything we’ve just seen, but I’ve read enough history to know this sort of conduct isn’t entirely unheard of among other species. For that matter, there were periods in our own pretechnic era when
we
did some things we’d be horrified to admit to today. Not over simple political disagreements, perhaps, and nothing remotely as bad as
this,
but when herds were faced with starvation conditions and forced to fight for range, they were capable of some pretty horrific actions. And I think if you looked into the histories of some of our omnivorous fellow citizens you might find some pretty bloody episodes there, as well.”
    “And then there’s the Shongairi,” Garsul pointed out. A symphony ofscowls greeted the remark, and he shrugged his upper shoulders. “I’m just saying these creatures at least have the excuse of their social and technical primitivism. The Shongairi don’t.”
    “Well, true,”