The Seventh Friend (Book 1) (42 page)

Arbak didn’t recognise her, but he’d heard stories, old stories. The bow, the red hair, and the timing all pointed one way.

“Do I have the honour of addressing the lady of a thousand eyes?” he asked.

She laughed. “You’re a sharp one,” she said. “That’s the first time I’ve been recognised in two hundred years. You must be Arbak. Narak said you’d be here.”

He slid down from the saddle, managed a formal bow, and the others copied him. He felt stiff; riding for over a week with twelve hours and more in the saddle each day had been hard. There had been a time when he would have done it and been ready to swing a sword, but the grey in his hair was frosting his joints.

“Deus, you have word from the Wolf?” he asked.

“No more than you,” she replied. “But I have grave news. Two armies march on the gate from the west. The Telans have sent a regiment of men, about fifteen hundred, I would say, and Seth Yarra have sent ten thousand north from the coast.”

“Ten thousand?” Arbak was stunned. Such a large force of proper soldiers would be more than a match for his part-timers. “When will they arrive?”

“The Telans will be here tomorrow,” she said, “the Seth Yarra the day after. We must take the gate today.”

“Today? My men are tired. I have pushed them hard to get here,” he said.

“Well, shall we ask the Telans to wait?”

Arbak coloured. Of course he was being stupid, voicing concerns that made no difference. Tired or not, they would do better against eight hundred today than they would against twenty-three hundred tomorrow or twelve thousand the day after. He looked down the valley again. The Telan positions were arranged so that they could support each other. If one was attacked in isolation then two others could support it, so he must attack on both sides of the pass at once.

“It will cost a lot of lives,” he said.

“There I can help,” Pascha said. “It will go easier if they have more than one thing to worry them.”

“You have a plan?”

“I would not grace it with the name, but I can be on the high bluffs above the pass, and I can shoot down on them. There are also men beyond the gate, Berashi soldiers. They can take the wall while the enemy’s eyes are on you.”

“Some survived, then, Deus?” It was the captain who asked.

“Less than a hundred.”

“Was my uncle among them?” Simfel asked. “He was the commander, Major Tragil.”

“He is well,” Pascha smiled. “He is ashamed that the wall fell on his watch, but he will recover from that, all the sooner when you retake the gate.”

“We must move now,” Arbak was looking up at the sky. He did not want to fight at night. Darkness hid friends and enemies alike, and torchlight made good targets. It was already after noon.

“As you say, colonel,” the Durander said. “What is the plan?”

“It must be simple. We have no time to drill the men. The infantry will advance as best they can on both sides of the pass and take the archers’ positions. We will lose men, but that cannot be avoided. Our archers will support, but I prefer to leave them as far back as possible. We will need them later. When the smaller positions are cleared we will attack with cavalry, up the middle, and try to storm the wall they have built. Their numbers are not large, and we should prevail. The infantry will follow the cavalry.” It all seemed clear. Now that the moment had come his options were limited. He understood how battles went, what worked and what didn’t. As much as he disliked the idea they had no choice but a costly frontal assault.

“That’s it?”

“That is it. If you are looking for subtlety or genius then I have none. No plan survives the first ten minutes of a battle, so I hope it will be over by then. Deus, sow confusion as you may, and if the Berashi take the wall have them hold off until the cavalry move up.”

“As you wish, colonel.”

A remarkable thing happened. As soon as Pascha said the words she dissolved into a mass of wings and beaks, and a hundred sparrows flew into the trees in a rush of beaten air. They all stood still for a moment.

“Well, I have never seen such a thing,” the captain said.

“Nor I.” Arbak climbed back into the saddle, wheeled his horse and trotted back along the pass. He could see his men setting up tents. He could see fires kindled. It pained him that some of those tents would be unused tonight. The men hammering in the pegs and spreading their bedrolls would be lying on the stones of the pass, no longer carpenters or smiths, but dead soldiers all.

He called them to assemble, and they did, Avilians and Berashis and Duranders all mixed together. They listened to his words, and he saw the fear in their eyes, the doubt, and on some faces a look of resignation.

“They will be brave for you, Sheshay,” Sheyani said. She sat atop her horse not an arm’s reach from him, and her pipes were in her hand.

“You will play for them?” he asked.

“I will play, and they will be soldiers without equal.”
 

Arbak looked at the men again. Soldiers without equal? He had heard her play, and he knew that her music worked miracles, but the Avilians were green men, and until they had fought there would always be doubt, fear, and the fear or fear itself. The Duranders looked eager. Perhaps that would
lift his own men’s’ spirits.

He led them back to the pass. The infantry lined up, a thousand men each side. There was no subtlety about this. The Telans could see them. They had arrows on the string and the pass was too narrow to escape.

He heard a shout. A body rolled out from the nearest of the archer’s hides. He saw heads bobbing around behind the wall. His eye caught a flash in the air and another man stood up from behind the wall, clawing at something at his neck.

Passerina. He counted until he saw another flash. He was looking for it this time, but almost missed it because it struck at the second hide, the one opposite the first. There was more shouting from the Telans. Arbak drew his blade. Useless as it was, it would signal the advance. He wished for his right hand, for the simplicity of soldiering as he had known it.

“Advance!” he shouted. “Keep those shields high. Arrows come down.”

He watched as the men moved forwards. Arrows began to strike at them. Men began to die, but it was not as bad as he had feared. The thin rain of deadly accurate arrows from above kept the Telans confused. By now seven had fallen. A couple of men from one of the hides abandoned it, rushing back to join their comrades further up the valley. A second hide was overwhelmed by his men. He saw swords rise and fall, and then they were moving on.

“Move up!” he called, and he eased his own mount forwards another fifty yards. Each pair of hides that fell allowed them to draw closer for their charge.

He heard Sheyani start to play. It was a simple tune with a strange rhythm, but he found that it stirred his blood. Doubts began to fade from his mind, and he glanced across at the Durander colonel. Coyan was sitting with his eyes half closed, half a smile on his lips. He noticed Arbak’s glance.

“Her skill is a wonder, colonel,” he said. “It is as though Hammerdan himself piped for them.”

The men heard it too. The Durander infantry first. They began striking their swords against their shields, picking up the beat. Crash, pause, crash, pause, crash crash. Simple as that, but the sound was a sound of power. Men’s feet were surer on the loose rock, their shields held firmer against the arrows that fell among them.

The second pair of hides fell, and Arbak began to feel the certainty of their victory. In the distance he saw men on the high wall. They were keeping low and spreading out. These must be the Berashi troops who had attempted to defend the wall against Telan treachery, and now they were moving with stealth, all Telan eyes being fixed on the advance down the valley.

The men’s feet began to imitate the rhythm of Sheyani’s battle song. It almost seemed as though the arrows bounced off them as they tramped relentlessly down the pass. Arbak felt his own impatience building, an eagerness to be part of the slaughter. He knew it was the music, the magic of the pipes, and he reached into his pocket to find his copper medallion, the thing that would make him immune, but it was not there. He had left it in his saddlebags, or even on one of the wagons.

He cursed to himself. He needed a clear head, but he was not inclined to tell Sheyani to stop playing. Her music was the music of victory, and his men needed that strength. He would have to resist. Surely it would be easier to resist if he knew it was only the music?

The cavalry moved forwards now at walking pace, the horses impatiently stamping their way down the centre of the pass two hundred yards behind the infantry. The hides were falling quickly now. Passerina’s arrows falling from above and the tide of death sweeping towards them turned some of the Telan archers and they broke from their cover and ran to join the main force.

Now. It was now! No obstacle remained but the low wall behind which the Telans crouched. He glanced around him and saw the impatience, the lust for blood filling the eyes of all the riders. Swords were drawn, lances levelled in the front rank.

Arbak let out a cry that was an inarticulate bellow, but all his men understood, and they surged forwards, an angry steel tide sweeping towards a defensive line that now seemed wholly inadequate. Inside, deep inside Arbak heard his own voice begging him not to charge, telling him to hang back, explaining to him that with only a weak left hand he was just so much practice meat for the Telan swordsmen, but he ignored the voice, swung his blade generously through the air.

An arrow struck his left shoulder and glanced off the armour plate. He hardly noticed. The low wall flashed below his horse and he was among the enemy, one of the first. Even as he swung at the men who swarmed around him he saw a dozen of them fall. The Berashi on the high wall had loosed their first volley.

A sword bit his right arm, and a moment later his mount screamed and twisted beneath him. By good fortune he was not trapped as it fell, but thrown on top of a Telan swordsman. He scrambled to his feet. The voice within was louder now, and the degree of his danger began to penetrate.

Two men came at him, both running, and more by luck than judgement he cut one of them, but went down again as the wounded man crashed into him. He struck at the man’s head with the hilt of his sword, and again, and again. Tried to kick himself free of the weight before the other killed him, but as he rolled away he saw the man face down with an arrow in his back. A lucky escape.

A horse appeared beside him, and he only just managed to stop himself striking up at the rider. It was the Berashi captain, Miresh. The man had a riderless horse in tow, the reins in one hand. He pushed them into Arbak’s. He cursed his one hand again, and himself for a fool. He had to sheath the sword to mount the horse, feeling all the time the itch of an arrow or a sword between his shoulders.

By some miracle he managed to scramble up and draw his blade again. He swept the area before the wall with anxious eyes, but all he saw was victory. Telan dead lay everywhere. Even as he looked he saw a hundred fleeing up the pass, but he had left his archers there, and as he watched the fleeing men ran into a hail of arrows that shattered their numbers. Those that remained threw their arms away and raised their hands, calling for mercy.

It was over.

Arbak raised his sword and held it above his head, the signal for his men to accept the surrender, to stop killing. A moment later he was aware that the music had stopped, and a dazed calm descended on the pass. He had never known so swift and complete a victory. He looked around at his men and saw smiles and bloody swords. What now? He must get men onto the walls, archers, in case the Telans came sooner than expected. He put his blade away and turned his mount towards the distant camp, but the world did not stop turning with his horse. It spun about him, and a ringing filled his ears. The valley became edged with black, and the ground was rushing up to meet him. Then nothing.

On the other side of Terras, Narak waited. Dawn had come and gone, and today would see the fate of the world decided, at least for now. He stood with five hundred Avilian infantry on the edge of a shallow lake, drawn up in lines that stretched from the water to the foot of a short rise. It was not a good position, defensively. They could be easily flanked by a large enough force, but that was the idea.

He heard a horse snorting and looked anxiously behind, to the left. The noise had carried easily in the still air, and would carry well down the valley. He dismissed the worry. No one would hear it. There would be too much noise.

Aidon stood beside him. The heir to the dukedom had not been very vocal, and Narak suspected that the boy was in awe of the company he was keeping. He could not help thinking of him as a boy. He had wines twice Aidon’s age in his cellar.

“Your father seemed better this morning,” he said.

Aidon jerked as though woken from a reverie. “Yes,” he said “Yes. I think it is the coming battle.”

Narak felt sympathy for the boy. His father had not told him. Both of his sons were ignorant of their father’s failing health, and he believed that he knew what their father was anticipating. He was not a man to die in bed of a wasting disease, and now there was to be a battle. It could not be plainer. Yet he had not considered for a moment that he should intervene. How a man chose to die was his own business, and so was the way he behaved with his family.

“Well, I’m sure we will be up to our ears in blood soon enough,” he said.

Aidon gave him a sidelong look.

“Deus, may I ask a question?”

Narak studied the boy. He was certainly built like a man – tall and broad shouldered – his armour was spotless, chased in silver and gold with the five leaves of the Avilian royal crest, and he was fair of face.

“What is it?”

“How do you know what they will do?”

Narak laughed. “Nothing is certain,” he said.

“And yet you are never wrong, Deus.”

“It seems that way to you, but believe me I have made more mistakes than most. It helps to have seen so many years.”

“Can you see what is in their commander’s mind?”

“No, but I understand what is in my own, and I can make adjustments. The Seth Yarra, for example, are a people of fixed ways. They have prepared most carefully for this war, but they will not fare well because their plans assume that we are like them, that we will do as they do, but we shall not.”

“But how do you know this?”

“I have fought them before. Centuries ago they faced us, and they suffered greatly because they have no cavalry. They lacked the power and speed that horse soldiers gave us. If this had happened to you, if you were beaten by some technical advantage that favoured your enemy, what would you do?”

“I would seek to counter it,” Aidon replied, his brow creasing. “Or at the least to acquire something of equal strength. I would want my own cavalry.”

“And yet they do not.”

“They are stupid.”

“No. Many of them see this advantage and rue it, but they cannot do as you would do. All of their world is written in a book, and there are no horses in its pages, so they believe that it is wrong to use horses, and indeed that horses themselves are wrong.”

“Then we shall always defeat them.” Aidon seemed satisfied with his conclusion.

“Perhaps, but how certain would you be if there were fifty thousand Seth Yarra soldiers marching towards us, or a hundred thousand?”

“Can such an army exist?”

“Perhaps. We think that we are clever and flexible and subtle, but it is Seth Yarra that has taken Telas without a fight, and how long will Durandar hold out now that they are cut off from assistance? And the Green Isles? It seems that we have lost half the world without a battle.”

“But we will take it back.”

“I have yet to see how,” Narak confided. “You saw how well they fortified their camp, and I have no doubt that they will do the same all over Telas, and cavalry are no advantage in a siege.”

“Then we are locked in a position that cannot change.”

“You think so? When summer comes the White Road will be open. There is no gate there to hold them back.”

“But that is in the great forest! They would have to march…”

“…Through my own domain. Why would they not?”

“Deus, your words bring me no comfort.”

“Nor should they. This is a Great War, Aidon. It is a war that will be remembered for thousands of years. Our deeds on this field and on others to come will speak to generations of warriors if we prevail. If not then our names will be forgotten in twenty years.”

“But this battle?”

“If they do as I expect it will be a victory.”

Aidon asked no more questions, and time passed slowly. Narak was thinking through the moves that they enemy would make. They had broken camp that morning and abandoned their walls. The eagles had seen it. Their only task was attrition, to kill as many of the allied army as they could, and so they would follow. It would not be a quick departure, but quicker for them having seen him abandon his own camp the night before, and they would come on quickly. He had only moved ten miles, and had taken up a prepared position, one that he had scouted weeks before when he knew this moment was likely. It was always wise to choose the ground on which to fight. There were times when it was not possible, but this was a good place.

It was close to noon when a rider came down the valley, pressing his mount hard. He skidded to a halt twenty feet short of Narak and saluted.

“Deus, they come,” he said.

“On the path?”

“On the path, Deus.”

He waved the man away and he rode off behind them, out of sight. Narak turned to his five hundred men.

“Now we must see that they catch us unawares,” he said. “You know what to do.”

The men formed up as though they were a column marching away from their position, and as he had instructed them they began to shuffle their feet to and fro, kicking up dust.

By the time the van of the Seth Yarra army appeared at the far end of the lake they had been at it for ten minutes, and a respectable dust cloud as might indicate the passage of an army had climbed into the blue sky. They resembled the rearguard of a great force, just about to march out of sight.

One of Narak’s men cried out and pointed at the approaching enemy, and they formed up quickly into a line, exactly as they had been before the messengers signal. The trap was in place. All it needed now was bait.

“Hold steady,” Narak said. He pushed his way to the front of the line and stepped out in full view of his enemy. For weeks he had taunted them with this moment in mind. The red armour, the two swords, the way he stood and looked down on the Seth Yarra camp while they died on the end of Jiddian’s arrows, while they vomited the poison he had put in their water, while they listened to his blasphemies against their god, while they thirsted and wished they were at home. It was all for this.

Narak dropped the veil and stood before his men in his aspect, drew his twin blades and held them above his head.

“Come and fight me,” he called down the valley, and his voice was louder than the voice of any man. He knew it reached their ears. “Come, you dog killers, ambushers, cowards and fools, come and claim your place in paradise. Come and die by my hand.”

He could not have wished for a better response. At the other end of the valley he could see the glitter of steel and blood silver as swords were drawn. He heard the rage in their collective voices, heard the thunder of their feet as twenty thousand men poured across the lake shore intent on his death.

He turned to Aidon.

“Right again,” he said.