Authors: Miles Cameron
Opposite them, they could see the enemy’s main cavalry force forming. They had to open the centre of their line to let the peasants through, and that wasn’t going well. It was a missed opportunity, but following the peasants too closely could have been a disaster.
Zac shrugged. ‘Ready, my loves?’
Their shouts rang in the air.
He glanced left. The Nordikans were in it – they’d die where they stood. The centre of the line seemed to be winning. He frowned.
Ser Giorgios rode over from the head of the magnificent Scholae. ‘That was like a textbook exercise.’ He shrugged. ‘The skirmishing. The—’
Count Zac beamed with pleasure. ‘High praise indeed from the Count of the Scholae.’
The enemy was still having trouble with the terrified peasants clumped up in front of their cavalry.
Alas
, thought Count Zac.
‘But now,’ Giorgios said.
‘Bah!’ Count Zac laughed. ‘Two thousand country cavalry? We have five hundred between us. We can handle them.’ He grinned. ‘Until their Easterners sweep around these buildings in an hour, and then we all die.’ He shrugged. ‘I am true to my salt. You?’
Ser Giorgios smiled. ‘How shall we begin?’ he asked.
‘Ah, you grant me the command?’ Count Zac was a small man, but he sat up straighter at these words.
‘I do.’
‘Then we will start with a dramatic failure, I think. Yes?’ He laughed.
Ser Giorgios tried to match his laugh.
‘Here they come!’ shouted Dmitry, Ser Christos’s
hypaspist.
Ser Christos watched the Vardariotes and the Scholae – men he’d commanded on other fields – come at him. The crispness of their lines and the neat precision with which they drew their bows from their bow cases contrasted sharply with his own rural
tagmas
, still struggling with their own peasants. In many cases, their friends and neighbours. A landowner would bend down from the saddle to hear a weeping man tell how his brother had died screaming, gut shot by the red-clad barbarians.
It was all very Morean, and he loved them for loving their men. But he could also see how all this was about to go wrong.
‘Look alive, there!’ he roared. ‘Clear my front! This will be a false charge – see their bows? They will come in, loose arrows, and then run. We will not respond – Hear me, Hetaeroi? Stand your ground!’
The enemy line came forward at a fast trot. Two hundred paces away, as the Latin mercenaries slammed into the distant Nordikans with a sound like their own Ragnarok, the two regiments of the guard broke into a canter.
‘Shields up!’ Christos roared.
The peasants huddled in front of the cavalry raised what shields they had.
The flight of arrows came in. Some of the Vardariotes loosed arrows with whistles and they screamed.
Those of his own stradiotes who were practised bowmen loosed back.
Men and horses fell on both sides.
The Guard turned together and cantered away, leaving a handful of dead horses and men in their wake. Over the backs of their saddles, they loosed again. Again, the whistles shrieked. It took real courage to stand straight as the whistles came closer – the longest heartbeat of your life. And maybe the last.
There were screams. And grunts.
Ser Christos looked at the sun, which hadn’t moved by a quarter of an hour.
Ser Christos thought,
What am I doing here? Why am I fighting these men? This has all gone terribly awry. We were supposed to save the Morea.
Men were looking to him. His battle plan was simple – to wait for the Easterners to come in on the enemy flank, and only then to charge. With sheer weight of numbers his two thousand horse might break the Guard, but the casualties would break a generation and farms – hundreds of farms – would go back to the Wild. The Guard would not die easily.
Whereas, if they were outflanked, they would retire like the professionals they were. And live to fight for a new Emperor. And his men could vent their rage on the foreigners in the centre.
‘Stand fast!’ he called again.
Demetrius was winning, he could feel it, and he hadn’t even bloodied his sword. He suspected that his pater would have been in the centre with the infantry. Or leading one of the flanks in person.
Dariusz – in many ways, his best man, but an irritating, over-focused man who did not take enough care about how he phrased his criticisms – rose in his stirrups. ‘The Thrakians are beaten. Why does Ser Christos not charge through them?’ He shook his head.
Demetrius rose in his stirrups and watched for a long time – as long as a priest might take to consecrate the host. ‘Go and tell the old man to charge. Now.’ He looked at his own right and saw the knights – his best purchase – closing their visors and preparing to charge the Nordikans, whom he feared like other men feared disease and death. The foreigners were too ignorant to know what they were facing, and they were recklessly brave – let them take some time dying, and he’d have the whole battle.
The centres were locked. As he expected. Men died. And other men stepped on their corpses – whether they were alive or dead – and pressed on.
Fifty paces to his front, Aeskepiles sat alone on his pale horse and no light seemed to fall on him, nor did he leave a shadow. He was facing just slightly to the left. He had four shields – one round, one square, two shaped like knight’s shields – all a deep black. They moved as he moved.
Whatever he was doing was far, far more spectacular than anything in the previous battle. Lightning of every colour and no colour sparkled among his shields and struck well off to the left of the enemy centre – at the very end of the foreigners, the so-called
company.
Detonation after detonation rolled against the distant mountains and came back as thunder, and men died every time. Blown to pieces by forces they could not comprehend.
Aeskepiles’ shoulders slumped and then rose, as if the man was wielding a great smith’s hammer, and he struck again, this time with both hands.
And men died.
Aeskepiles was lost in the great fugue of his borrowed sorcery – aware, at one panicked level, that he was spending his reserves too profligately. Shocked that the young practitioner to his left had such power. Wary that the old one to his right had fallen silent.
But it didn’t matter, because his working – his new, unsubtle working – was building to its climax. It built without him, sorcery multiplying upon itself the way living creatures bred and multiplied.
Like a watched pot—
But he didn’t need to watch.
The student – he had the boy fixed as a senior Academy student, based on the manner of his casting – produced a very respectable blade of light. Aeskepiles lost two shields, and was aware, in the corner of his mind that was aware of the battle, that the centre was not quite as it should be,
If I do this just right, they will all die – on both sides.
But first, the two who could threaten him. The young one, and then the old one.
Aeskepiles was close – so close that Mortirmir had no chance to parry the attack. The blow from the green-black axe, when it came, collapsed all four of Mortirmir’s carefully wrought shields.
John le Bailli died, burned to ash in his armor. Bent died, his lungs on fire inside his body. Ser Jehan died. The company lost a generation of leaders and twenty men in the blink of any eye.
But the main force of the blow fell on Mortirmir.
And it was deflected.
He didn’t have time or thought to be shocked.
Move aside
, Harmodius said. In the
aethereal
, he took control of Mortirmir’s body and his
potentia
. And everything else.
You were just bait
, he said.
Now you are the skin of the lion.
A wall of sparkling white fire stood between them and Aeskepiles. Men screamed – men half burned or caught at the edges of the massive working.
I’m the lion.
Faster than the thought of a mortal, Harmodius rode the casting back to its source – as Richard Plangere had taught him to. He’d declined to do it to a dog – but now—
Instead of casting, he followed the course that Thorn had taught him.
And then Morgan Mortirmir was alone.
The Red Knight had his arms pinned by corpses, and someone stepped on his breastplate. A rib cracked. And he was helpless. Another foot – this time on his armoured shin. The pain was immense, the damage negligible.
He couldn’t move.
Panic – blind panic, the panic that comes from helplessness and impending death – was
right there.
And so was death.
He ran, as he had when he was a child, for his hermetical palace, and waited for the end.
Time was different here.
It is difficult to be panicked when you have time to think.
There was the new statue on the plinth in the middle of his casting rotunda. It had been empty for many months, and he stared at it and realised that he was used to having another mind available to feed him workings.
And then he realised that he wasn’t without resources himself.
It wasn’t something he had practised. He had to improvise. And he didn’t know whether the foot on his breastplate belonged to an enemy or his brother.
In the end, he settled for simplicity. He placed the end of an
aethereal
chain of iron in his left hand. And he pulled it with
ops –
slowly. The sigils whirled above his head – creation, displacement, enhancement, augury (because he needed to know which way to face). He cast the most complex working of his hermetical life – merely to stand.
He stood.
Thrakian spearmen who had seen twenty fights in the Wild and a dozen actions with men fell back a pace. Toby, straddling him, was brushed aside – Ser Milus took advantage of the shock he gave them and cracked a helmet with his great two-handed hammer.
The Red Knight drew his sword. His draw was fluid, his hips rotated – he had seldom felt more
alive.
The great red sword flashed from the scabbard and the heavy point went over the shield of the next spearman.
‘Captain’s up!’ screamed Toby.
There was a sound like a watermill, a roar like a waterfall, and the whole company
pushed.
The Red Knight disdains to kill his enemies by sorcery. And if I win this, I need as many of them alive as I can manage
, he thought. He was under their spears – most of the Thrakians had short swords in their hands. He gripped his sword two-handed, and started hacking men to the ground.
On his left, Ser Milus saw something he didn’t and began yelling for men to join on him.
The Thrakians were pushed back another step, and another.
He turned his head – safe for a moment – and saw Milus and Francis Atcourt and a dozen other men-at-arms running to the left.
The company was pivoting on the centre, the right advancing, the left sliding back. And he had no idea why. Trapped in the airless, sweat-stink of his faceplate, he could see nothing beyond the next foe.
He stopped. Pivoted again and let Toby push past. The press was lighter – there was room. A wider space opened in the centre and the Thrakians backpedalled a dozen paces and stopped. Those men who still had spear points raised them.
The centre of the company shuddered to a stop.
Toby stepped past him, and then Cully. And then he was past Nell, who was white-faced and had a red slash from the base of her chin to the top of her left breast – right through her maille.
He had no time for her. He stepped back again. And again.
A boy was holding his warhorse. By an act of pure will he got into the saddle. Flipped his visor back after fighting the buckle. Washed himself in air. Wrenched crisp, clean breaths of it after the foul stuff trapped against his visor—
And saw the Nordikans were dying.
They’d killed a great many knights and more horses, but they were now an island in a sea of cavalrymen. The enemy’s stradiotes were mixed in with the mercenary knights – he could see Derkensun’s gilded helm, and axes still flashed.
Ser Milus, at the head of a third of the company, smashed into the side of the melee.
To his right, where young Mortirmir should have been anchoring the company shield, there was a light show unlike anything hermetical that the Red Knight had ever seen. Despite which, Ser Michael was far up the field, advancing at a steady walk – so far that he was almost at weapon’s length from Demetrius.
The enemy centre was moments from collapse – like his own left.
Aeskepiles – he could just see the man over the swirl of the melee – was writhing like a man fighting a pack of wolves. Except that he was alone, and his shields had all fallen.
And beyond him, further to the right, by the old road to Dorling, there was confusion in the ranks of the enemy’s main body of cavalry – confusion that cheered his heart. Even as he glanced that way, the Vardariotes and the Scholae went forward.
One deep breath.
It was all perfectly balanced.
It was not a time for chivalry.
He pointed his sword at the enemy’s mercenary knights, and he cast.
The Easterners hadn’t appeared.
Count Zac reined in from his latest feigned flight and, while his crack light horsemen rallied on their squadron banners, he cantered around the stone barn and looked west. What he saw made him smile.
He rode back to where the Scholae and the Vardariotes joined. ‘Change horses,’ he ordered.
Ser Giorgios had an arrow in his right thigh, snapped off short. He waved. He was white, but in charge of himself – to a man like Zac, that was worth high praise. ‘You are like one of my own children,’ he said.
Ser Giorgios nodded. ‘Hurts like poison,’ he muttered. ‘The centre seems to be holding,’ he said. ‘What do we do now?’
Zac nodded. ‘Now we win,’ he said. He pointed with his riding crop, to the west.
Ser Giorgios managed a pained smile. ‘I don’t see anything.’
‘That’s why we win!’ Zac said.