Corvus

by Paul Kearney

  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 o
thismos 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.

  It echoed across the earth. Druze heard it in the midst of the great slaughter at the east gate. It carried clear across the city, so that Sertorius and his men lifted their heads and paused a second to listen as they stood at the foot of the Kerusiad Hill. Kassia and Rian heard it as they stood upon the balcony from which Aise had leaped to her death, and peered out across the teeming bulk of Machran to the battling formations on the plain beyond the walls, wondering what it signified. It did not seem like a sound made by the agency of man. It sounded like the muttered anger of the gods.

  The Companions broke into full, tearing gallop, and their lances came down, the wicked points held out at breast-height. Too late, the morai of the League realised what was thundering towards them from the south. Some managed to turn and present their spears; others simply stood and stared at that rolling mass of murder approaching, that black line of death.

  The Companions smashed into the Macht battle-line with the impact of a flash-flood. The Niseians had been trained not to flinch from men, but to use their bulk, their iron-shod hooves, their teeth. They were warriors as much as the Kefren who rode them, and their sheer weight and momentum was irresistible.

  The charge broke upon the rear of the League army like an apocalypse and broke clear through it, chopping the fighting centons of Avensis and Pontis to pieces.

  Hundreds of men were bowled off their feet, and the big horses trampled them into the bare muck of the earth while their riders stabbed out with the long lances, a flickering hedge of darting iron.

  Parnon died there, still struggling to make himself heard. The flower of the fighting men of two cities were annihilated in a few minutes. The League army, which had been on the cusp of routing the foes to their front, simply ceased to exist.

  Men threw down their shields and tried to squirm out of the press any way they could. Some died fighting, clustered together in stubborn knots and clots, battling back to back. More died without the opportunity to strike a blow, crushed in the deadly space between Corvus’s anvil and the hammer he had sent galloping upon it.

  The men on the walls of Machran who were able to lift their heads and look south saw a long vast rash of men and horses embroiled in a formless mob, pasangs long: the sun glittering across it, catching spearpoints, the flash and gleam of helms and shields tilted to the sky. And then the teeming crowd opened, and across the plain men were running for their lives, hundreds, thousands of them, heading south away from the walls.

  But the horsemen reformed their line and, before them, so did a long battered formation of spearmen. They dressed their ranks, and began to advance north towards Machran to join their comrades fighting and dying in the shadow of the walls, and they were singing as they came.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  MACHRAN

  SOMETHING HAD CHANGED. Some kind of current had gone through the men fighting and dying in the gatehouse of the South Prime, like the hide of a horse twitching at the bite of a fly. Rictus felt it -he had known it before on other battlefields, but so tight and entangled and brutal was the fighting here that it almost went unnoticed.

  The packed mass in front of him seemed somehow to ease a little. He heard men shouting - not the wordless baying of the othismos, but some kind of news that travelled through the ranks of the enemy like fire on a summer hillside.

  Fornyx was at his side now, brought close by the murderous attrition of the battle. At the beginning of the morning they had been separated by a full centon of men, but those were all gone now.

  “The League is in flight, Rictus,” he yelled. There was blood on his mouth and all down his neck, though they were all slathered in it. Impossible to tell until the thing was done whether it was one’s own or other men’s gore.

  “You hear them? Corvus has done it - he’s beaten off the relief army.”

  The pressure slackened. Men were backing away now, the desper
ation still in them, but with these tidings they knew the beginning of despair. They were fighting automatically now, and hope was leaving their eyes - it was a thing impossible to explain to any man who had not been in the belly of a hard fought battle, but Rictus felt it too.

  “Dogsheads!” His voice was a gravel-hard croak. He reversed his broken spear at last to use the sauroter. There were weapons aplenty lying at his feet, but they were all broken. Men were fighting with swords now, but there was little room to swing, and the slashing drepanas were hard to manipulate in the crowded phalanx.

  “Dogsheads, on me - advance!”

  Fornyx was on his left, Kesero on his right. The Dogshead banner was five feet above their heads, but splashed with blood all the same. Rictus saw Valerian off to one side - he had lost his helm and his mutilated face was streaming blood. All the old veterans of the Dogsheads seemed to have moved up through the ranks and were in the forefront. The newly trained men were good - better than any other spearmen on the field - but they were still not the hardened veterans of Rictus’s old command, and they were not bound to him in the way that these men were.

  “Same old faces,” Fornyx said with a grin. “You just can’t get rid of us, Rictus.”

  “Same old game, brother. One more push, and we’re over the hump. Can you feel it?”

  The Dogsheads surged forward. Before, it had been like setting their shoulder against a stone wall. Now it was as though they were pushing on a rusted gate. There was movement. The fight shifted, the men of Machran backing away foot by foot, dying with every step. The fearsome crush in the gatehouse lessened.

  Then the sun was on their faces again. They were through the gates, into the open square beyond, and Rictus’s men were opening out into line, centon by centon. Centurions stood only paces apart, so worn down had their commands become. But there were enough red cloaks to hold one side of the square.