Corvus (19 page)

The advance was
ragged, halting. Some of the League’s contingents were better ordered than
others and had to mark time while their comrades caught up. In the middle, a
great body of spearmen remained in good order throughout, many thousands. They
were the core. The men on the flanks were not as well drilled, but they
presented a fearsome sight for all that.

“That is Machran,
in the centre,” Corvus said. “See the sigils?” It was too far for Rictus to
make out, but he nodded.

“Their polemarch
is Kassander, an ex-mercenary and close friend of Karnos himself. He has
trained the spearmen of Machran well - so far as a citizen army goes. Karnos is
wise enough to know he is an orator, not a soldier, but he’s a good judge of
men, by all accounts, and he can charm the birds off the trees when he has a
mind to.

“I want him to die
today.”

“I’m sure he feels
the same way about you,” Fornyx drawled, and Corvus laughed.

Their own army had
begun to move now. On the left, Teresian was taking forward the veteran spears,
four thousand men in eight ranks. Their line extended some half pasang, and
they too began to sing the Paean as they advanced. Rictus watched their
dressing with the close attention of a professional, and he had to grudgingly
admit to himself that they were not half bad.

The conscript
spears under Demetrius remained immobile, stubbornly refusing to move. Alarmed,
Fornyx grabbed Corvus by the arm, his black beard bristling.

“Half your
spearline is still asleep, Corvus.”

“No. This has all
been set in train by my hand, Fornyx. Be patient. Enjoy the view. When was the
last time you were able to stand and watch history being made?”

It was quite a
sight, indeed. Thirty thousand men were on the move now across the plain in
various formations. To the south, Druze’s Igranians were pulling back, and the
League’s reinforced right wing was making good time, though their ranks were
not all they might be; the soft ground was scrambling them. Teresian’s veterans
were marching out to meet them, veering left as they advanced. An oblique. Only
good, disciplined troops could accomplish such a manoeuvre.

Finally, Demetrius’s
conscripts began to move. Their line was as untidy as that of the enemy, and
there was a widening gap between them and Teresian. The two bodies of spearmen
advanced separately on the enemy. In the centre there was nothing but a growing
hole.

“Phobos,” Fornyx
whispered.

Valerian joined
them, out of breath. He hauled off his helm, his lopsided face burning with
urgency. “Rictus - Corvus - for the love of God, look at the line! We’re broke
in two before we even begin!”

Corvus held up his
hand. “Do not concern yourself, centurion - get back to your men and stand-to.
I shall be wanting you presently.”

His whole
attention was fixed on the moving bodies of men out on the plain. There was
none of his flashing levity now; he was as solemn as a statue.

But his eyes
blazed, like a gambler watching the fall of the dice.

“Rictus!” Valerian
protested.

“Do as he says,”
Rictus said quietly. “Shields up, Valerian.”

The young man
stamped off unhappily, but a few moments later the order rang out and the
Dogsheads lifted their shields onto their shoulders, donned their helms, and
worked their spears side to side to loosen the sauroters in the sucking ground.
Rictus’s heart began to quicken in his chest, pushing against the confines of
Antimone’s Gift. He and Fornyx stood silent, watching as Corvus sent couriers
out to right and left, young men on tall horses beating the animals into
gallops that sent clods of muck flying through the air like birds.

“Rictus,” Corvus
said, turning back to the mercenaries. “What is it the Dogsheads can do that
citizen soldiers cannot?”

“We can die
needlessly, that’s for damned sure,” Fornyx murmured.

“We can advance at
the run,” Rictus said.

Corvus nodded. “I
like to read. Have you heard of Mynon?”

“He was a general
of the Ten Thousand. He made it home.”

“He wrote it all
down, some fifteen years ago, before dying in some stupid little war up near
Framnos. I read his story, Rictus; they had it in the library at Sinon, copied
out fair by a good scribe. He talked of Kunaksa, how it was won, what you all
did that day.”

The Paean rose and
rose, tens of thousands of voices singing it now all across the plain. Druze
was taking his men in again, harassing the enemy’s southern flank once more,
and Teresian’s spears were going in alongside him. The enemy line was skewed
and slanted to meet this threat.

A gasping courier
reined in before them.

“Ardashir is
ready, Corvus.”

Corvus cocked his
head to one side, like a crow eyeing a corpse.

“Tell him to go.”

The courier
galloped off like a man possessed, a youngster bursting with the enthusiasm of
his age.

“At Kunaksa, the
Kefren had thousands of archers, who should by rights have shot the Ten
Thousand to pieces before they closed - am I right?”

“What is this, a
fucking history lesson?” Fornyx demanded.

“We went in at a
run. They hit us with the first volley, but by the time they’d readied a second
we were already at their throats,” Rictus said. He had not been a spearman that
day, but he remembered watching, seeing the morai go in.

“Citizen soldiers
cannot advance at the run, or they lose their formation,” Corvus said, and he
shrugged.

“Now watch.”

There was a
long line of movement
out to their right, in the ranks of the dismounted Companions. Ardashir led a
solid mass of his command forward, following in the wake of Demetrius’s slowly
advancing conscripts. There was something odd about them, Rictus noted.

“Kufr,” Fornyx
said. “He’s taking in all the Kufr. Corvus, this won’t -”

“Shut up,” Corvus
said.

Some sixteen
hundred Kufr, tall Kefren of the Asurian race, who had, like all their fellows,
been brought up to do three things. They had been taught how to ride a horse,
how to tell the truth… and how to shoot a bow.

They cast aside
their brightly coloured cloaks, left them lying on the mud, and from their
backs they pulled the short recurved composite bows of Asuria. They had
quiver-fulls of arrows at their hips, and at a shouted command from Ardashir
they nocked these to their bowstrings.

Ardashir raised
his scimitar, a painfully bright flash of steel. He held it upright one moment,
watching the battlefield to come, the advancing League spearmen on the plain
before him. They were perhaps four hundred paces away.

In front of him,
Demetrius’s gruff voice rang out, and the conscripts halted.

A shouted command
in Asurian, the tongue of the Empire, and following it a heartbeat later came
the sweeping whistle of the arrows, some one and a half thousand of them arcing
up in the air over Teresian’s spears, to come down like a black hail on the
advancing enemy.

That is the
sound
, Rictus thought.
That is what I heard that day.

A staccato
hammering as the broadheads struck bronze, the individual impacts merging to
form a hellish, explosive din of metal on metal.

Scores of men went
down. The line of advancing shields buckled, faltered, the ranks merging,
breaking, gaps appearing up and down, men tripping over bodies, men screaming,
cursing, shouting orders.

And moments later
the second volley hit them.

It was like
watching a vast animal staggered by the wind. Some men were still advancing,
others had halted and were trying to lift the heavy shields up to counter this
unlooked-for hail of death. Others were standing in place with the black shafts
buried in their limbs, tugging on them, looking to left and right, shouting in
fear and fury. Centurions were seizing the irresolute, thumping helmed heads
with their fists, moving forward out of the mass of stalled spearmen, urging
them on.

A third volley.

The ground was thick
with the dead and the wounded. These soldiers were small farmers, tradesmen,
family men. There were fathers and sons on the field, brothers, uncles. Some of
the untouched spearmen were dropping their arms to help relatives, neighbours.
Hundreds fell back, but a core came on regardless of casualties. They were
Macht, after all.

Corvus was
watching it all with a kind of grim satisfaction, but at least he did not seem
to relish the developing massacre. If he had - if he had shown any kind of
pleasure at the sight - Rictus would have killed him on the spot.

“And now,
Demetrius,” Corvus said quietly.

Rictus had lost
count of the volleys, but the others had not. The conscript spears began
advancing again, five thousand of them moving to meet what had been a line of
six thousand League troops. The odds were evened out now, but more than that,
the League forces were little more than a mob, a snarled-up confusion of armed
men struggling in a mire which their own feet were deepening with every minute.

“That should do it
on our right,” Corvus said. He turned to look south.

Teresian was about
to make contact with the enemy right, and Druze was supporting him, worrying at
the end of the enemy line, his cloud of skirmishers partially enveloping it. He
was working round the back of the League army while they advanced steadily to
meet the spearmen to their front.

Even as they
watched, they heard the roar and crash as the two bodies of heavy spears met,
bronze smashing against bronze, spearheads seeking unprotected flesh. Two bulls
meeting head on -Rictus could feel the ground quiver under his own feet at the
clash of armour.

As soon as the
enemy was committed to the attack, Druze led his men north behind the line. The
Igranians split in two. Half pitched into the rear of the enemy phalanx that
was now irretrievably entangled with Teresian’s veterans. The other half -
almost fifteen hundred men - kept going north, parallel to the League
battle-line - towards the rear of the enemy centre.

That centre was
now almost upon them. These were the best of the League troops, the levies from
Machran under Kassander. Seven thousand men in good order, they had paused as
Corvus launched his army on the wings, seemingly unable to believe that there
was nothing facing them but the empty plain. Now they were advancing again.
They could pitch in to either one of the two separate battles that were now
raging to north and south.

Corvus turned to
Rictus. “I have a job for you, brother, you and your Dogsheads.” He pointed at
the long line of shields bearing the
machios
sigil.

“I want you to
take your Dogsheads and hit those fellows as hard as you can.”

“You’re not
serious,” Fornyx breathed.

“You have only to
halt them in their tracks, hold them a little while, bloody their noses a
little. You have to buy me time.” He gestured to the north and south. “We will
beat them on the flanks, and then come and meet you in the centre. And Druze is
already in the rear of the Machran morai - as soon as he sees you going
forward, he will attack. And Ardashir will support you also.”

“I’m like to lose
half my men,” Rictus said, staring Corvus in the face.

“Fight smart,
Rictus - don’t get enveloped. All you have to do is poke them in the eye.”

The thunder of the
battle rose and rose. The critical point of it was approaching - Rictus could
feel it, like he could feel the loom of winter in his ageing bones. Was Corvus
trying to have him killed? He did not believe it. No - he was simply moving the
knucklebones on the board, using what he had. Sentiment did not even, enter
into it.

Rictus pulled on
his crested helm, reducing his world to a slot of light.

“Very well,” he
said.

“One more thing,”
Corvus added, tossing up his hand as though it were an afterthought.

“What?”

“I’ll be going in
with you.”

For Karnos the
world had become a
strange and fearsome place. He was the fifth man in an eight-deep file, one cog
in the great machine that was the army of Machran, which in turn was but part
of the forces assembled here today. He alternated between an inexplicable
exhilaration and bowel-draining apprehension.

This, the greatest
clash of armies in a generation, was his first battle.

In earlier years
he had drilled on the fields below the Mithos River along with the other men of
his class, but since his elevation to the Kerusia he had not so much as lifted
a spear. He was Speaker of Machran, as high as one could be in the ruling
hierarchy of the city, but on the battlefield he was the same rank as all the
other sweating men in the spear-files. Here, Katullos the Cursebearer commanded
a mora - Kassander, the entire levy - but he, Karnos, commanded only himself.
He found it unbelievable now that he had overlooked something so basic
-incredible that he was included in this anonymous horde like every other
citizen.

Gestrakos and
Ondimion, who had set the world alight with their intellect and their art, had
fought as humble foot-soldiers also, so he was in good company. But that did
not ease the weight of his armour, the burden of the bronze-faced shield and
the dozen aches and scratches that his barely-worn cuirass inflicted on his
torso.

He was fat, unfit,
and desperately aware of his own martial ignorance. His only consolation in all
of this was that he was fifth man from the front. No-one had ever told him that
the men in the middle of the files took the heaviest casualties, which was why
the most inexperienced were placed there, sandwiched between the veteran file
leaders and closers.

And around him was
the army, these myriads which surely no -