Authors: Paul Kearney
And she caught
herself, shocked, as she realised who
we
had become in her mind.
Jason had given
her a knife, a long, wicked iron blade with a leather-wrapped handle. It felt
huge and unwieldy in her fingers, and she disliked it for the smell of someone
else’s sweat in the leather, the nicks on the blade in which old blood had
collected, so wedded to the metal that the iron would have to melt before it
was wholly gone. When would this thing start? When would it—
Now—there it was.
The roar of many voices from the far side of the hills. Something, at least,
had begun. She fingered the edge of the knife. Whatever else happened today,
she promised herself, she would be ready for it. She would bury this iron in
her own heart before she was tied to another wagon-wheel.
Restless, like a
horse that smells fire, Rictus strode up and down the loose-ordered ranks of
his mora. The men were shuffling from foot to foot, blowing their noses,
twisting the shafts of their javelins in their palms. To stand wholly still was
impossible it seemed, at least, if one were not wearing the panoply of a
spearman. The men tossed skins of water to and fro, more for something to do
than because they were thirsty. There was little talk. When Rictus paused in
his pacing, he could hear the men breathing, those hundreds of lungs speeding
up their work as the cold white loom of the battle rose through the men’s
blood. At times like this a man’s heart would beat and beat until it seemed
almost to be a shadow thudding in the corner of his eyes.
To the left of
Rictus’s men, a mora of heavy spearmen stood like graven images, helms on,
shields resting on the ground before them, propped against their knees. To
their front, Aristos was striding up and down in much the same way as Rictus.
He had taken off his helm, the better to listen to that mighty surf of sound on
the other side of the hill. Even through it, the bees were loud in their
endless work among the stones, a peaceful industry which knew nothing of the
murderous chaos to come. It was a day to take apples and cheese and wine and a
sweetheart, and find a sun-warmed hollow in the shelter of the stones, there to
eat and drink and make love and stare up at the hovering skylarks above, and
count the passing clouds.
Phobos, Rictus
thought, I hate this.
Up near the
western crest of the hill, Gasca stood third in the file amid thousands of
others. He tilted his head to left and to right, like someone striving to see a
cockfight over the shoulders of a crowd. There was stone under his feet,
something good and solid to bear him at last. He barely felt the weight of his
panoply. This beats slogging up a muddy hill, he thought. This time, let them
come up here and try and push us off these stones.
“They’re on their
way, brothers,” the file-leader, big Gratus said. “Kufr to our front, spindly
bastards a girl could kick over. Juthan on the right, a big damn crowd of them,
and out on the left I see that bastard cavalry of theirs.”
“Fuck, I hate
cavalry,” someone said.
“They won’t come
up here—too many stones for them to stub their toes on. I hope Aristos and his
lot are ready to take on horses, because you mark my words, they’re heading out
round the flank for the baggage.”
“How many of this
crowd are there, Gratus?” someone back in the file asked.
“Maybe five times
what we have here. Enough to go around, at all events. All right, brothers,
here comes Jason. Shields up as he passes.”
Jason strode past
the front of the phalanx, helm off, nodding to those file-leaders he knew best.
As he passed, so the Macht reached down for their shields and slid their arms
through the bronze bands in the centre, gripping the strap at the rim.
“Hold fast,”
Gratus said. “Spears stand until we get the word.”
The Paean began,
out on the right, and it swelled as the eight thousand men on the hill took it
up centon by centon. The Kufr army began to march up the rocky slope towards
them, the neat lines of spearmen splintering and reforming, rippling around the
larger boulders. To their rear, the archers opened their ranks and began
sticking arrows in the ground at their feet, the swifter to pluck them for
their bows.
Down the Macht
line the centurions bellowed out the order: “Level spears!” The first three
ranks of the phalanx brought down their spearheads and gripped the weapons at
shoulder-height. This time, Gasca was one of those who would be shearing the
sheep from the start. His aichme thrust out just to the right of Gratus’s helm.
Behind him, he could sense the men of the rear ranks bracing themselves,
jamming their bare feet amid the rocks, seeking purchase for the pushing match
to come. He closed his eyes for a second, and saw the terrorised eyes of the
Kufr girl at Ab-Mirza. All around him, the noise of the approaching Kufr army
rose up, the tramp of their feet, the catcalls and cheers and inchoate screams
of them. And then the hissing sound in the air above as the first wave of
arrows swooped down and began the day’s killing.
The Kufr line was
the better part of four pasangs long. Vorus sat his horse in the centre rear,
his head turning left and right as he tried to keep track of the various
elements in the army. The archers were firing volley after volley now, and the
main body of the heavy infantry was well up the hills, about to engage. The
Asurian cavalry was out of sight, hidden by the rising ground to the north, but
he could still hear the low rumble of the moving horses, even over the clamour
near at hand. He meant to outflank the Macht on the right with the cavalry, and
on the left with the Juthan Legions. In the centre he simply meant to hold
them. He knew now that there were no troops in the Empire who could hope to
prevail against the Macht in a stand-up fight, not even the Honai of the Great
King. In the centre, he would feed in his troops line by line, and keep the
enemy spearmen pinned in place, buying time with their lives. On the flanks,
the decision of the day would turn. He had agreed the plan with Proxis the
night before.
The Kufr centre
made contact with the Macht. They were eye to eye up there, for the Macht were
on the upslope. The spearheads of the Macht phalanx jabbed in and out, a long
glitter caught in the sun. Before them, the Kufr formation rippled in and out
as the front ranks fell, or recoiled, and then lunged forward again. Now the
armies were joined together, two fighting dogs with their teeth locked in one
another’s throats. This was the time.
Vorus turned to
one of his couriers. They sat their horses around him like eager children, the
tall Niseians stamping under them.
“Go to Proxis.
Tell him to move in.”
“Yes, general,”
and the Kefre took off, his mount scattering clods of turf as it went.
Another one came
in to replace him, his horse foaming and blown. “General, Archon Tessarnes is
south of the Imperial Road with his command. He is in the enemy rear, and means
to attack at once.”
“Very well. Have
yourself some water.” Vorus felt a wave of relief flood him. The cavalry were
in place. The building of the thing was done. He had set it up and loosed it
according to plan. Now it was up to those at the spearheads.
The Asurian
cavalry broke into view over the embanked line of the Imperial Road, a shining
mass of horsemen two pasangs wide and many ranks deep. They were behind the
Macht phalanx, ready to gut it from the rear. They were singing as they came,
and the heavy Niseians were surrounded by a fog of their own sweat as the ranks
separated out. They came on at the gallop, losing riders here and there whose
mounts had tripped on the rough ground, but holding together, a brute mass of
muscle and flesh and bone, a gold-flecked tide.
Rictus saw them
burst into view and was staggered by their numbers, the momentum they carried
with them, the true weapon of all cavalry.
“No,” he said
aloud. “Oh, no.”
They curved in,
wheeling like fish in shoal. Before them now was the rear of the Macht phalanx
on the rocky hillside ahead. Bad ground for cavalry. But the Asurians seemed
not to care. They gave a great triumphant cheer and kept the pace, spreading
out and drawing their bright swords. The horses grunted as they hit the slope and
powered on.
At last, Aristos’s
mora was on the move; to his right came Rictus, his men spreading out and
already beginning to throw their javelins into the press of horsemen. Rictus
sprinted over to Aristos, who was labouring along at a run in front of his men,
his helm bobbing on his head.
“Thin out your
line! Go in four deep or you’ll just get bogged down!” He was ignored.
The heavy mora
crashed into the right flank of the horsemen. The Asurians had wheeled several
squadrons round to meet their advance, but the movement robbed them of all
momentum. They were virtually at a standstill as the spearmen struck. The
horses recoiled, staggering backwards, rearing, screaming as the lines of
spearheads did their work. Aristos and his mora cut into the Asurians like an
arrowhead seeking flesh. But like the arrowhead, their own momentum was burying
them. They had engaged perhaps a third of the horsemen. The rest had kept
going. Up on the hilltop, the bulk of that cavalry was about to hit home.
Rictus raised his
fist. “Hold!” Behind him, his men came to a ragged halt. Javelins were still
being thrown over his shoulder. He stopped, eyes wide, and looked around his
portion of the battlefield.
Too late. The
cavalry had made it to the top of the hill, and had crashed into the rear of
the Macht spearmen. Thousands of horsemen. The left-hand portion of the Macht
line seemed to simply disappear, engulfed.
Whistler came up
beside him, panting. “Oh,
Phobos,”
he groaned.
Lower down the
hillside, Aristos’s mora were embroiled in a bloody, futile contest with
perhaps two thousand Asurians. The cavalry had surrounded them. The riders
hacked with great courage at the heavily armoured spearmen, whilst underneath
them their mounts were slaughtered by the keen aichmes. But Aristos had missed
the main body. He was entangled now; he would be fighting there for precious
time to come.
“Throw away your
javelins,” Rictus said. “We use the spear today.”
“Last time we took
on cavalry we got our arses fucked,” one of the men said.
“This time it’s we
who take them up the arse. Brothers, they’re killing us up on that hill. That’s
Jason’s mora there on the left, and they’re destroying it. I’ll walk up there
alone if I have to.”
“My arse, alone,”
Whistler said, and tossed his bundled javelins aside. There was a clatter all
around as scores, hundreds of men did the same.
“Lead us, Rictus,”
someone called out.
They started up
the slope at a swift run, short spears in their right hands, peltas on their
left arms, fear and hatred blazing out of their eyes.
* *
*
Gratus had gone
down, and so Gasca was now in the second rank, with Astianos in front of him.
His spear had snapped in half, the fore part of it lost in some screaming Kufr’s
head, so he had reversed it and was now stabbing out with the sauroter, the
splintered end of the shaft slicing out slivers of his palm as he thrust it
into the faces of the Kufr in the enemy line before him. Under his feet, Gratus
had crawled back from the forefront of the fighting, one eye stabbed out from
his head so that it flopped on his cheek. He had made it back a little, the
spearmen straddling him, protecting him, but then had died. Less spectacularly
he had been pierced through the thigh as well, and had bled to death with his
comrades fighting around him. Now they were standing on his corpse, their feet
shunting it back and forth as they struggled to keep the line intact. His was
not the only corpse the Macht spearmen were standing upon, but he had been
well-liked, and his death had infuriated his comrades. Before them, the Kufr
marched up the hill only to be cut down. Now they were climbing over mounds of
their own dead, their heels set in the flesh of their comrades.
There was a
shudder from behind, and Gasca was jolted off balance. He fought to stay
upright, and before him Astianos was shoved forward. He beat back a Kufr with
the bowl of his shield, head-butted another, and stabbed out blindly with his
spear. “Easy—easy!” he yelled as he and Astianos fell back into the line.
A horse screamed,
right in Gasca’s ear it seemed. He half-turned, and as he did the files of men
around him broke up, shouting. The whole mass of the formation, which had
seemed so locked together a few moments before, was smashed open. The light of
the westering sun was cut off by a mass of horsemen careering into the back of
the spearmen, knocking them down, hacking at their backs, stabbing them through
their napes.
“Rear ranks, face
about!” a voice was thundering. It was Buridan, his russet beard trailing below
his helm. “Stand fast brothers!”
He had dropped his
shield and now hauled a Kufr horseman off his mount. The animal collapsed on
him as one of his comrades speared it through the skull. Buridan went down,
smashed between the horse and the unforgiving stones. The Macht around him set
up a great shout. The Asurians’ horses careered and stamped and reared, butting
the line into pieces, bowling men off their feet. In the press it was hard to
turn round and face this new assault, harder still to bring the long spears
into play. The Macht line was splintered into chaos, and dozens of the heavy
spearmen were hacked down before they could even bring their weapons to bear.
“Gasca!” Astianos
was down. He had turned to see what was afoot behind him and a Kufr spear had
taken him in the armpit. He toppled. At once Gasca moved forward, set his
shield over the fallen man and jabbed out with the sauroter spike, his head
snapping back and forth, trying to see what was going on beyond the confines of
the helm-slot. The line was broken, in front as well as rear. He could not see
what was happening.