Corvus (40 page)

To the east of
this clash, Corvus was leading the Companions at a fast canter round the enemy
flank. Every time he raised his hand, the centon next to him would peel off
from the main body and remain behind, reining in their horses and stabbing
their lances into the ground alongside them as if they meant to be there “for
some time. Then the Kefren riders swung their deeply curved compound bows off
their backs, already strung, and began fishing for arrows from the quivers
hanging at their thighs.

The overlapping
morai on the eastern flank of Teresian’s spears had begun to move in on the
flank to roll up the enemy line, but they hung back at the sight of Corvus’s
cavalry flashing past. Periklus of Pontis jogged forward of the hungry advance.
The men at the front could see only that they were about to outflank their
foes, and it took him several minutes of shouting, grabbing centurions, and
banging his spear on the shields of the file-leaders before they came to a
ragged halt, the open flank of the enemy right in front of them, as inviting a
sight as any spearman on a battlefield could wish for.

But the men on the
outside of the formation had seen the cavalry, and were turning to meet it. The
right wing of the League forces curled in and then out again, a great swirl of
close-packed men. Orders were- shouted and then countermanded. The lines within
the formation began to merge. File-closers found men behind them, and
file-leaders looked over their shoulder to see strange faces there, their own
file dislocated by the momentum of the confusion.

And then the first
arrows came raining down on them.

There was no
dust to cloud the air,
and the ground was cold and firm for the horses. Corvus cantered two lengths
ahead of the rest of his cavalry, trailed by his banner-bearer and Ardashir. He
looked back quickly and saw the growing confusion of the League right wing;
that end of the line had bunched up and halted, the senior officers bellowing
at their men, the first casualties slumping in the press with arrows in their
necks.

“Pick up the pace,
brothers!” he shouted in Kefren, the language of the Great Kings. The remaining
Companions broke into a gallop, the big Niseians rocking under them like boats
on a stiff swell. He still had some fourteen hundred cavalry following after
him like a great thundering cloak of flesh and bronze trailing across the
plain. He was in the rear of the League line now, a pasang from the
file-closers. The Kefren on their massive warhorses leaned forward in their
saddles and braced their lances on their shoulders, following the slight figure
and his raven banner at their head.

Druze wiped the
sweat off his face
and exchanged a grin with the man next to him. It was close-packed in the
confines of the tower, and the massive structure creaked and rumbled under
them. They were in the belly of a beast, a rancid darkness stinking of green
hides and pitch and newly sawn wood. The whole structure lurched, and the men
inside fell against each other, swearing and wide-eyed as hunted deer.

“This ain’t no way
to go to war,” Druze’s neighbour said.

“Make way there,
lads - I’m going to puke,” another snapped out.

There was a
massive crash full on the front of the tower. Druze leapt back instinctively as
the broad blade of a ballista bolt smashed through the wooden ramp in front of
his nose. Sparks and gledes spattered into the interior with it, and men began
stamping them out feverishly. The reek of burning was added to the other stinks
and men began to cough and heave for breath.

“Phobos help us -
the thing’s on fire!” someone wailed.

“It’s just the
hides on the front,” Druze said. “Stand still, you fucking girls. “Show these
westerners how Igranians can take the pain. We’ll be on the walls before you
know it.”

They stood in the
lurching darkness as the smoke rose around them, blind men in a box. There were
three stories to the towers, and fifty men on each, packed as tight as arrows
in a quiver.

The tower halted.
To its front the wood was thumped and rattled as unseen missiles cascaded
against it, and there was the crunch and splinter as another bolt struck the
side of the structure. This one punched straight through and impaled a man
standing by the right hand wall. He screamed and thrashed while his comrades
tried in vain to pull him off the great barbed arrowhead transfixing him.
Finally he died, held upright like a puppet with only one string.

Panic rose in the
dark interior of the tower, a reek as heavy as their sweat.

“Steady, boys,”
Druze warned. “We get this wrong and we’re stepping out into empty air.”

There was the
sound of a horn-call from outside.

“Now!” he shouted.

Two men cut the
ropes holding up the heavy ramp. It swung down with a crash, and the light and
cold air of the winter day flooded in.

“On me, brothers!”
Druze yelled, blinking madly, advancing blind into the sudden white winter
light with his drepana raised. The men poured out of the tower in a torrent of
raging faces and upraised iron, intent only on getting out of the
panic-stinking darkness of the compartment. Below them the tower rocked and
shook, while the men on the lower levels were climbing ladders to follow off
the ramp in their turn.

So tall was this
contraption of Parmenios’s that the ramp had swung down square on the topmost
battlements of the tower abutting Machran’s East Prime Gate. Corvus’s
bald-headed little secretary had judged the measurements correctly to within
the span of a man’s hand, the result of days of observation and calculation.
The men on the ropes below had pulled it. into perfect position, their
determination marked by the trail of bodies leading all the way out of bowshot.

Of the six towers,
four had made it to the wall. Two more were standing burning within a hundred
paces of the masonry, and screaming men flooded out of them with the bright
hungry flames blackening their flesh. But in the four which had survived were
six hundred others who were desperate to get out, and who would not be halted.
They flooded the tall towers of the East Prime Gate and overran the ballista
crews on the battlements, slashing at the hated weapons and tossing the
unfortunates who operated them over the edge. There was no quarter asked or
given.

The rest of Corvus’s
forces at the eastern end of Machran had not been idle. They surged forward now
in their thousands, bearing hundreds of scaling ladders. Now that the ballista
towers had been neutralised, the ladders went up in a forest of timber too
thick to be thrown back. But the defenders of Machran did not retreat. They
stood and fought on the walls, toppling ladders and skewering Druze’s men as
they made it to the embrasures. They died hard, fighting for every foot of
stone.

Four pasangs away
, the scarlet
arrowhead of close-packed spearmen that was the Dogsheads broke into a run. The
men loped along with spears at the shoulder, each shield covering the man to
the left, the tall horsehair crests bobbing on their helms. Rictus was at the
apex of that rumbling mass of meat and metal, a conspicuous figure in his black
armour. He did not speak - the Dogsheads had dropped the Paean and were now
powering forward, so that all six centons of them seemed to be one single huge
organism, breathing hard and the sound of their breathing attuned to a kind of
rhythm in itself.

In the moment
before impact, Rictus saw the ranks of the enemy recoil before him, the line of
citizen spears fracturing right in front of the gate. They had never seen a
spearline advance like this before, and the redcloaked mercenaries had acquired
a fearsome reputation during the course of the siege. Half-starved citizen
spearmen of Arkadios and Avennos and Machran itself flinched at the moment of
impact, backing in on themselves.

The Dogsheads
struck. Rictus lifted his spear clear of the melee in the first moments to keep
it from shattering. So great was the pressure of the advancing men behind him
that he was propelled into the ranks of the enemy. An aichme broke in pieces
upon the breast of his cuirass. Another struck his shield so hard that it
penetrated the bronze facing and broke off in the oak beneath. There were
snarling, terrified faces inches from his own. One man had lost his helm, and
Rictus head-butted him at once, the heavy bronze of his awn helm mashing bone
and flesh, one eye glaring out of the red ruin before the man went down, lost
underfoot.

The Dogsheads kept
their formation, a red lance aimed square at the open gateway of the South
Prime. Men were trying to push the massive gates closed, but so great was the
press of bodies in the gatehouse that it was impossible; they succeeded only in
packing the crowd of shouting spearmen tighter.

Here the work
began, and the discipline told. The Dogsheads settled in to the fight, choosing
their targets, jabbing overhand at helm-slots, glimpses of flesh at the necks
of cuirasses. Rictus saw an enemy spearman’s arm pierced clean through by the
spear of someone behind him. The man jerked his flesh off the aichme and the
keen blade sliced him open like a cut of meat, exposing bone.

Blood sprayed
through the air, hot and steaming in the cold. Rictus stabbed one man through
the eye-guard of his helm, and his own spearhead snapped off as the fellow went
down. There was no way to switch to the sauroter, not in that packed mass, so
Rictus continued to stab out with the splintered shaft of the spear, grunting
as he did so like a man at heavy labour in his fields.

The roar of the
othismos rose up, enveloped them all. The struggle in the gate had become a
different kind of world, a place of bronze and iron and lacerated flesh, men
screaming, men underfoot, men pushing on the armoured torsos of their fellows.
It was a dark, sodden universe of carnage.

But it was moving
inexorably backwards, into the shadow of the walls. The deep formation of the
Dogsheads, all that massive concentration of power, shewed the line of the
defenders in on itself. The mercenaries maintained their ranks, while those of
Machran disintegrated. The defenders fought bitterly, but they were fighting
now as individual men in a mob, and only the brute mass of their numbers held
their attackers in place.

And they were
dying fast. The Dogsheads had lost scores of their number, the defenders of
Machran many hundreds, shunted backwards, stumbling into the press to be
trampled and suffocated, or stabbed by the aichmes and sauroters of the
attackers. They could not present a coherent front, and the struggle in the
gateway became a business, an exchange of lives for space. It was pure and
simple killing.

Rictus found
himself struggling uphill, and could not quite account for it until his foot
slid on the convex bowl of a shield. He was stepping on a mound of the enemy
dead, and the Dogsheads were climbing it. The men of Machran were dying where
they stood, all training and drill forgotten. They were fighting for
themselves, but conscious also that the gates were open wide at their backs,
and the way into the city lay open.

They were building
a new wall in front of the tall stone of the city, a breastwork of corpses.

The Dogsheads
ascended it, their formation growing tighter as they closed ranks over their
own dead. The weak winter sun was cut off, and Rictus found himself in shadow.
He was inside the gateway itself, and the ancient gates of Machran loomed on
either side of him like indifferent totems, their black oak now splashed red
and glistening.

“One more!” Rictus
shouted. “One more push, brothers!” and he felt behind him the surge of bodies,
heard the animal roar of his men as they answered him.

“Form line on
me!” Corvus cried. He
held his lance up so the sunlight sparked off it, as though it had flashed out
in white flame above his head. His white horsehair crest streamed behind him,
and the black horse half-reared as he reined it in.

On either side of
him the Companions formed up, wheeling in by centon, extending their ranks to
left and right. They formed a line almost a pasang long, two ranks deep, the
big horses sliding in next to one another foaming and snorting, their manes
like black flags. The armour of their riders glittered as the winter clouds
cleared and Araian looked down upon the battlefield.

Before them, the
army of the League was closely engaged in the business of destroying the morai
of Teresian and Demetrius. The right wing of the League was trying to wheel to
meet the challenge of the bow-armed Companions that Corvus had dropped off to
harass them, but the main body was committed wholly to the fight in front of
it, a raging conflict of close-quarter spearwork.

The file closers
at the rear of the line were turning around, and men were running up and down
the back of the line frantically, warning their comrades of the sudden
appearance of the Kefren cavalry, but the main body of the army was like a
fighting dog in the pit, its jaws locked in its opponent’s throat. Only death
would loosen that grip.

Corvus turned to
Shoron. “Brother, sound me the charge.”

Shoron shared a
look with Ardashir, wet his lips, closed his eyes, and put the horn to his
mouth.

Clear and shrill
over the battlefield the long ululation of the horn-call rang out; the shrill
notes of the call to hunt, a sound heard on battlefields across the lands
beyond the sea since the Empire had existed. Now it was ringing out in the
heartland of the Macht.

The line of the
Companions began to move, fourteen hundred brightly armoured riders on fourteen
hundred tall black horses. They broke into a trot and then, as Corvus spurred
his own mount, a canter.

The ground seemed
to echo with the trembling impact of that mass of horseflesh, and the sound of
it rose to challenge every other noise on the battlefield, to be heard even by
Rictus and his men fighting in the gateway to the north.