Feathered Dragon - Douglas Niles [93]
The archers fired volley after volley, sending the sharp and deadly heads of their missiles into the steadily advancing faces of their foes. But finally, when most of the arrows had been exhausted, the firing tapered off.
Still the ants crawled and crept upward, twitching and grasping as their six-legged forms gripped the nearly vertical surfaces with apparent ease. They crawled over the
knobs and shoulders of the slope’s higher places, gathering in thick red streams to cluster upward in the shallow ravines.
Closer and closer they came, advance seemingly unaffected by the cessation of arrow fire. They climbed at the same methodical, unhurried, yet inevitable pace as they had before.
Only now they were close enough for the Itza warriors to see the flat, translucent surfaces of their many-faceted eyes, close enough to hear the clicking jaws of the creatures’ mandibles, opening and closing hungrily. They climbed steadily and came closer still.
Now Gultec stood ready to unleash the second, and most potent, line of his defense.
“The rocks! Let them go! Push them back to the mud where they belong!”
Instantly the Itza warriors dropped their missile weapons, seizing the great boulders that they had carefully stacked along the ridge. Two or three men combined to 1 move the larger stones, while others hefted good-sized rocks by themselves. As the ants pressed upward, one warrior raised a heavy stone over his head, staggering under the weight, and then pitched the rock with both hands toward the swarming mass below.
A trio of warriors nearby pushed a boulder toward the slope. The missile teetered backward for a moment, but then they heaved mightily. Slowly it toppled forward, and then it rolled over. The rock quickly gathered momentum, plunging and bouncing down the steep-sided ridge.
The stone plummeted some fifty feet and then crashed into one of the highest of the climbing ants. It smashed past the creature, leaving the ant flailing with the three legs on its right side. Its left legs had all been crushed by the boulder, and slowly the monster slipped to the side. In another second, it fell free, toppling unnoticed past the ants that climbed behind ft.
The boulder, at the same time, continued its destructive plunge. It crushed the head of another ant, much lower than the first, and then tore through the joint between the
segments of a third. It continued to crash downward, smashing and crunching into anything that lay in its path
through the heart of the ant army. Another boulder tumbled free, followed by a handful of
gat-sized stones and large rocks that a single man would raise over his head, pitching it into the insect horde. Beginning as a small clatter, punctuated by a dull roar, the deluge of stones started toward the unnatural enemy below.
All along the line, the men threw and rolled their missiles, until the air resounded with the cracks and crashes of smashing rock. A hail of stones tumbled downward into the faces of the advancing ants. The rocks bounced and crushed their way in sharp descent, careening along the slope of the mountain, some of them cracking and splintering into clouds of debris, while others ricocheted far out into the air, tumbling away from the climbing horde-But many of the boulders rolled true, striking straight into the center of the ant army. They continued downward to crush more heads and snap more legs, cracking the shell-like carapaces and even, occasionally, tearing through an ant and breaking it in two-
The men raised a spontaneous cheer as they saw the attack start to take effect. For the first time, the inexorable advance of the ants seemed to waver. The entire front rank of the ants tumbled away, carried downward by the momentum of the stone storm.
More and more of the boulders crashed downward. Some of these broke away parts of the cliff face itself, and great masses of rock, a few as big as small houses, plunged into the face of the insect horde. More and more of the creatures