by Paul Kearney
“Keep that fucking sauroter out of my crotch, you hear me?” the man behind him said. “Keep your aichme up and out of the bloody way. You push when you’re told, and you step up if you see a gap, all right, strawhead?”
Gasca said nothing. Green though he was, he already knew those who felt they had to talk going into the thing. It was a phenomenon, like having to piss, or wipe one’s mouth every minute. Rictus had told him that. Where in the hells was Rictus anyhow? He’d find some way to get into the thick of it, Gasca was sure. That skinny bastard would never rest until he was in the front rank.
The water—they were wading into the river now. Phobos and all his tits, it’s cold. Antimone, look down on me now and—arrows—they’re shooting at us!
God in hell, the water is cold—ah, Phobos—it’s on my balls. He raised his shield, casual and frantic at the same time. A lead-weighted dart banged off the rim. He actually found himself overcome by curiosity rather than fear. What the hell was that? Do they make those in—
The man next to him went down without a sound. They were waist deep now, and Gasca could only see a faint darkness of blood in the dark water. Where do you have to get hit, he wondered, to fall down all at once like that?
As the river deepened, so the current grew stronger. The column of men began to veer downstream as the vast volume of water pushed on the bowls of their shields. The man on Gasca’s left was lurching into him, as he was into the man who had filled the gap on his right. Something entangled Gasca’s legs, and he almost went down. It was a body, anchored to the floor of the river by the weight of its armour. The water was up to his breastbone now, and under his feet Gasca could feel the rolling stones and pebbles of the riverbed, more bodies, which he stepped over as though climbing stairs. Once his sandal slid on the smooth convexity of a shield. He gasped for breath; his helm seemed to be suffocating him. Anyone who even tripped up in this press, this rush of water, would drown in moments, dragged down by their armour, trampled by their comrades. It was insane—it was not war; how did courage avail anyone here? Gasca wanted to cry out, but none of the other men were making a sound apart from hoarse, ragged panting and curses hissed venomously into their beards.
Then a voice began up front. It was Jason, Gasca realised. The centurion had begun to sing, at first in fragments as broken as his breathing, then stronger, as if the very act of singing somehow helped the labour of his lungs. It was the Paean, the battle hymn.
More men took it up, spitting out the ancient words like curses, teeth bared against the assault of the river and the shower of missiles that was now raining down on them. The song travelled down the column until all at once there were thousands of them singing it. The slow, sonorous beat of the hymn grew in their blood, bringing them almost into step with one another. They lifted their heads and looked up at the far riverbank ahead and the waiting line of Kufr. Some men began to grin insanely. The Paean boomed out, implacable, a fearsome battery of sound. The men found their feet and settled their shoulders into the bowls of their shields, shoved forwards as if assaulting an enemy line. They attacked the river.
Amid a fearsome clattering of missile-points on metal, the water-level began to sink. There was squared-off masonry below their feet now, the remnants of the bridge. More men went under, stumbling to their deaths in tombs of bronze. The arrows and darts came falling in a black hail, finding the eye-slots of helms, the nape of necks, the fleshy muscle at the space between shield and cuirass. But the column was still intact. The water was thigh-deep, knee-deep—and suddenly the terrible press of the river was gone and there was the weight of the armour and shield dragging downwards again, the men exhausted and dripping and sweating and bloodied before they had even come to grips with the enemy. Now men were taking arrows in their knees or shins— no one had donned their greaves for the water-crossing—and there were gaps everywhere. Jason, up front in his transverse helm, began barking out orders. The head of the column halted, and centons began to deploy to the left and right of the Dogsheads, broadening the line. The Dolphins were on the left—Gasca recognised their banner—Mynon’s Blackbirds on the right. Phiron had put his best at the van of the attack.
Men fell, shot through, and others stepped up from behind them. The gaps were filled, the line remained unbroken. Ahead, the enemy spearmen had donned their shields and were standing with spears levelled.
“Advance!” Jason shouted, and up and down the line the Centurions took up the call. In front and rear of the line the experienced file leaders and closers led the way or shoved on the backs of those before them. The line shunted into motion. The Paean, which had died away, now began again. One of Gasca’s sandals was sucked off by the churned mud of the riverbank but he never paused, grinding forwards with the shield of the man behind him occasionally dunting him in the back, stepping on the heels of the man in front, fighting to keep his spear upright in the press and the wicked sauroter-spike from slashing his lower legs. So busy was he with these tasks, and so utterly exhausted by the struggle in the river, that he had not a moment to feel fear. Merely advancing took up all his energies, mental and physical. Around him, that sea of men and metal marched with the remorseless efficiency of some great machine, but on the level of the individual spearmen there was only the treacherous sucking of the mud underfoot, the shoving of neighbours, and the blinding sweat trickling down in the confines of the bronze helm. When the Macht battle line finally struck the Kufr defenders there was nothing that registered with Gasca, save the fact that they had halted at last. The man behind him leant into his back with his shield and said, “Push.” So he did so. Up ahead, in the leading ranks, he could see the levelled spears going in and out, stabbing at the Kefren ranks. The Macht were shorter than their enemies, but more heavily built. They shoved the enemy line asunder through sheer brute strength, and as the line splintered and gaps appeared, so the wicked aichmes licked out. There was no extravagance to the fighting; no glory, Gasca realised. These men were doing their job. They were at work. They did not raise battle-cries, or scream curses. They pushed with their comrades, they looked for openings, and they stabbed out with a swift, economic energy, like herons seeking minnows. The Kefren were shouting and snarling and trying to beat down the Macht shields, but their impetuosity fragmented their own line. One of their champions would physically batter down a Macht warrior’s shield, but as the Kufr then raised his spear to strike, three Macht aichme would riddle him.
The Kefren could not match this remorseless efficiency. At first in pockets, then in struggling masses, they began to turn away from the Macht line and drop their shields in a frenzied panic. The Macht spearheads killed most of those in the first two ranks who did this, but those farther back were getting away. And now a great animal growl seemed to go up in the phalanx, as the tide of battle turned. The line surged forward, but still men kept within the shadow of their neighbour’s shield, and the centurions could be heard shouting, “Hold your line!” Someone struck up the Paean again, and the hymn steadied them. They began to advance, dressing their gaps and putting their feet in step with scarcely a conscious effort. They stepped over corpses uncounted. Up in the front ranks the best killers in the army were still at their work, cutting down the hindmost of the fleeing foe.
It is over, Gasca realised. This thing is won. I have been in my first battle and I am alive, and I am not disgraced. A wave of cool relief washed over him. He felt lighter, and yet weak as a half-drowned pup. His spear was unbloodied, but that did not matter. He had gone into the othismos, the heart of battle, with the rest of the veterans and had come out alongside them with his shield still on his arm.
The Kefren army abandoned its baggage and became a hunted mob of individuals, all order lost as the line shattered and the Kufr looked to their own lives, tossing away anything that might slow down their flight. The Macht heavy infantry stood down and opened ranks. Through the gaps came the skirmishers, the light troops who were fleet as deer and who would complete the destruction of the enem
y army. Gasca saw Rictus at the forefront of these wild, hallooing fiends, but to his friend he was just one more anonymous, helmed spearman, and his triumphant greeting was drowned out by the general cacophony. The skirmishers coursed after the retreating Kefren like a pack of hounds and began stabbing these tired warriors in the back as they caught up with them. They generally worked in groups of four: fists, they were called, and while the fleetest member of the fist would trip up their quarry, the rest would pounce on him and cut him into quivering meat. Then they would move on. Mercenaries did not loot the dead while the enemy was still on the field, and in general did not pursue their foe to the death; it was foolish, dangerous, and uneconomical. But they were not fighting in some inter-city battle of the Harukush now, and Phiron wanted to set an example. So he had loosed his Hounds with orders to slaughter every Kufr on the eastern bank who fell into their hands. And the bloody business was thus scattered over the plain to the east of the Abekai River, and carried on to the very surrounds of Tal Byrna itself. The gates of the city were shut in panic, cutting off a mass of the Kefren soldiery who had marched out the day before. The last remnants of this army had their throats cut within sight of the city walls.
That night the Macht camped before the towering battlements of Tal Byrna, the fortress-city of southern Jutha, made rich by the caravan trail that passed through it on the way to the Land of the Rivers. This had been a Juthan fortress once, in the far-off misty days when the Juthan had been a free people living under their own kings; then it had become a Kefren stronghold, garrisoned to hold southern Jutha for the Empire. Now, militarily speaking, it was a husk, a beautiful towered shell with half a million Kufr quivering inside it and barely a soldier left to man its walls. There were countless mud-brick villages in the region around it, and the richest farmland outside Pleninash, farmland watered by the tributaries of the Abekai and the irrigation systems of the Imperial Engineers. While the Macht gathered their dead and stockpiled the masses of enemy wargear left on the field, the Kufr elements of the host crossed the river and sent out a dozen foraging parties to gather food for the army. These covered southern Jutha like hungry locusts, sucking up the resources of the entire region to feed the hungry masses of Arkamenes’s hosts.
“To the victor, the spoils,” Phiron said. “What’s the butcher’s bill, Pasion?”
“Larger than it ought to have been,” Pasion said sharply. “Almost two hundred dead or too crippled ever to lift spear again. And twice that wounded, though most of those will come back to the colour, given time.”
The campfire crackled between them in the dark, and behind them Kufr servants, a whole company of them, were rearing up Arkamenes’s tent, a laborious job which would take them half the night. In the morning, Arkamenes would receive the surrender of the city within it, and he wanted everything just so.
“It had to be done,” Phiron said with unwonted gentleness. “Arkamenes was right. And now we have put the fear of God into these fellows. This one battle may have saved us a dozen more.”
“I see it; I’m not some strawhead fresh off the mountain. It’s good to take the measure of our enemy, too.”
“Don’t put too much store by their performance today. These were a levy, no more. The Imperial troops will be another thing entirely. And this lot had no cavalry. In the plains ahead we will be up against horsemen by the thousand, and our skirmishers will not be able to run riot.”
“Beef up the centons then. There’s good gear piling up head-high outside the camp. The cuirasses are too big, but the shields and spears and helms are a fair enough fit. Draft in a thousand of the Hounds to bolster the battle line.”
“I will,” Phiron said. Then he set a hand on Pasion’s shoulder. “This was a good beginning, brother.”
“It is only a beginning,” Pasion said with a tight smile.
The Dogsheads were fewer in number that night, the crowd about the steaming centos somewhat thinner as the cooks ladled out the stew. Two dozen of them had fallen to the river or the Kufr in the morning and many of the remainder were carrying wounds, mostly punctures to the upper body, or lost eyes. Jason had gone the rounds of the hospital tents and now he and Buridan stood back as his centon wolfed down the good, hot food, the best that could be gleaned from the farms and storehouses of southern Jutha. The desert was behind them, they had a victory under their belt, and the army’s quartermasters were busy accounting for every captured spearhead. Plus, there had been an issue of palm wine, the sweet, thick, intoxicating brew of the Middle Empire. As the men settled about their plates and jugs, so a raucous recalling of the fight began, all fear forgotten, blows dealt and received now part of a story that all had a hand in telling. This, while the stink of the Kefren army’s corpses was beginning to rise from the water channels and dyked fields that surrounded them. They had trampled half a harvest beneath their feet and pitched their tents on the other half, but the granaries of the countryside round about seemed inexhaustible. Round, bee-hive mounds of fired brick built on columns of stone to keep them from the vermin, they held enough millet and barley to feed a score of armies. Herds of pigs and cattle and goats had been rounded up by the bloody-handed skirmishers. Many of these were now spitted and turning above broad fires, which in turn were fuelled by the felling of the innumerable palm trees which lined the irrigation channels. We may be freeing this country, Jason thought with a pang, but we’re laying waste to it too. The Juthan have exchanged one master for another. That is the way of things. There is no such thing as real freedom, not here, on this continent.
The young Iscan, Rictus, was standing slopping stew into his mouth and listening to the boasting of his strawhead friend. He had filled out a little, and was dressed in a red Kufr tunic that had been cut down to size. He looked up as Jason approached and nodded, that Iscan arrogance dripping off him. Even by firelight, Jason could see the dried blood that still caked his hands.
“A good hunting?” he asked casually.
“A good hunting,” Rictus said. Something twisted his mouth. He looked down into his stew. “Not much of a fight though, once they broke.”
“Fight enough for me, getting cross that bloody river undrowned,” his friend said, rising; Gasca, that was the name. This fellow was beefy, his face shining with fat. He was drunk, too, but then most of them were. Drunk with having survived. It came upon even veterans after a battle, and Jason thought none the worse of him for it. But Rictus interested him.
“You think we should have let them go?” he asked.
“I think the slaughter was excessive. If we’re here to win an Empire for our employer, I don’t see how we’ll do it by killing every mother’s son who stands up against us.”
“Mother’s son—listen to him,” one of the veterans scoffed. “They’re Kufr, lad. Not even human. What do we care how many of them bleed under our spears? The more the merrier I say.” And there was a chorus of full-mouthed approval around the great black, steaming centos.
“You got to break eggshells to eat eggs,” someone else said, spitting gristle into the fire.
Rictus shrugged. He was a self-contained young fellow, Jason thought. “I’ve not met many Iscan mercenaries,” he said.
Rictus spooned his stew around his plate. “Isca is gone. It’s barely a memory now. Here, we’re all the same.” He raised his head and looked about him at the catcalling, carousing company which filled the night, and there was a kind of hunger in his eyes. He still wants to belong, Jason thought. Well, that’s a good thing. I can use that, perhaps.
Rictus spoke again. He was awkward now, some of the maturity dropping off him. “I found a good shield with a bronze facing. It’s smaller than ours are, but sound enough. And I have a spear and a helm now. I could take my place in the battle line. I’ve drilled; I know the way of it.” He met Jason’s eyes, then looked away again.
“I’ll think on it,” Jason said, though he would not. He thought there were other things to be had from this young fellow, things that hunger in his eyes mig
ht make him good at.
ELEVEN
THE PASSAGE OF THE STORM
Tal Byrna, a great city, now scooped up as a man will stoop to lift a chestnut off the ground and put it in his pocket.
There it clicked with the others: Tanis, Geminestra. The south-eastern portion of the Empire had been secured by Arkamenes now, that change in ownership ratified in the blood of the Abekai Crossing.
The army marches, there is a slaughter, and a form of words is made to make the world change. But the world does not change; the water still flows, the seeds still sprout, and those who work the soil continue to work it, a little poorer, a little thinner and sadder than before. The storm moves on, and in its wake the world goes once more about its business. This is war, this passing storm on the land. This stink on the air, this dust-cloud which hems the sky. These creatures marching in their thousands, changing everything and changing nothing with their passage. This is war.
So thought the lady Tiryn as she pulled back the curtains of her bobbing litter to watch the green hills of Jutha roll past, their bases bedded in the glittering tracery of water-channels which enriched this earth and held it back from the embrace of the desert to the west. Nothing in her life had so sickened her as the sight of the broken Kefren army lying scattered for pasangs between the Abekai River and the walls of Tal Byrna. The corpses had been stripped naked, high-born Kefren some of them, all of them high caste, the masters of this world. As naked frameworks of meat they had been piled into mounds by the Juthan peasants and set afire, great stinking pyres topped with pillars of oily smoke that could be seen for pasangs. Thus did the mighty of the world pass away: as ashes, to be scattered into the dirt and nourish the seeds of next year’s harvest.
