Pressure from behind forced Abivard's horse forward against the thorns, no matter how little it cared to go. Branches scraped at the beast's armored sides and at the iron rings that protected Abivard's legs. Then he, too, was through the barricade, and a knot of Sharbaraz's warriors right behind him. Shouts of triumph rang in his ears, and cries of fear and dismay from Smerdis' infantry.
Some of the foot soldiers, recklessly brave, rushed toward the horses and tried to pull their riders from the saddle. Most of them were speared before they got close. Panic spread through the archers. Many threw away their bows to run the faster.
But they could not outrun horsemen. Abivard struck with his lance till it shivered; by then it was scarlet almost to the grip. He took out his sword and cut down more of the fleeing foe.
He never looked back on that part of the battle with pride-it always struck him afterward as more like murder than war. With their center broken, the cavalrymen Smerdis' generals had posted on either wing also had to give way, lest they be cut off and defeated in detail. The chase went on until nightfall forced Sharbaraz to break it off, Abivard's stomach twisted as he rode back over the field. His horse had to pick its way carefully to keep from stepping on the bodies of fallen foot soldiers. Every few yards it would tread on one despite all its care, and snort in alarm as the corpse shifted under its hooves.
Then Abivard passed the broken barrier and saw what the archers had done to his own companions. He had pitied the hapless infantrymen as he had speared and hacked at them and afterward as he saw their bodies sprawled in death. Now he realized they were soldiers, too, in their own fashion. They had hurt Sharbaraz's followers worse than Smerdis' cavalry had managed in either of the earlier two fights.
He looked around for the banner of the rightful King of Kings. The fading light made it hard to spot, but when he found it he rode toward it. Sharbaraz had dismounted from his horse; he held out his arm for the physician Kakia's ministrations.
"You're wounded, Majesty!" Abivard exclaimed.
"An arrow, through my armor and through the meat," Sharbaraz answered. He shrugged, then winced, wishing he hadn't. He tried to make the best of it.
"Not too bad. Your sister needn't worry that I need replacing."
Having done his utmost to make light of an injury of his own not long before, Abivard turned to Kakia for confirmation. The physician said, "His Majesty was fortunate in that the arrow pierced the biceps of the upper arm, and again in that the point came out the other side, so we did not have to draw it or force it through, causing him further pain. If the wound does not fester, it should heal well."
"And you'll make sure it doesn't fester, won't you?" Sharbaraz said.
"I have a decoction for that very purpose, yes," Kakia answered, taking a stoppered vial from a pouch on his belt. "Here we have verdigris and litharge, alum, pitch, and resin, stirred into a mixture of vinegar and oil. If your Majesty will undertake to hold the wounded member still-"
Sharbaraz tried valiantly to obey, but when Kakia poured the murky brownish lotion into the wound he hissed like red-hot iron with water poured into it.
"By the God, you've set fire to my arm," he cried, biting his lip.
"No, Majesty, or if so but a small fire now to prevent the greater and more deadly fire of corruption later."
"That brew will prevent anything," Sharbaraz said feelingly as Kakia bandaged the arm. "Copper and lead and alum and pitch and resin-if I drank it instead of having it inflicted on me as you did, I'd be poisoned for certain."
"No doubt you would, Majesty, but the same holds true for many nostrums intended to go onto the body rather than within it," Kakia replied with some asperity. "For that matter, your caftan belongs around you, but would you swallow it chopped up with cucumbers? To everything its proper place and application."
With his arm paining him not only from the wound but also from the physician's treatment of it, Sharbaraz was not inclined to be philosophical. He turned to Abivard and said, "Well, brother-in-law of mine, you seem to have come through this fight with your brains unscrambled, for which I envy you."
"Aye, I was luckier this time. The day is ours." Abivard looked around at the grisly aftermath of battle. "Ours, aye, but dearly bought."
Sharbaraz suddenly looked exhausted as well as hurt. His skin stretched tight over his bones; Abivard was easily able to imagine how he would look as an old man-if he lived to grow old, which was never a good bet, most especially for a claimant to the throne of Makuran engaged in bruising civil war.
"Each fight is tougher," the rightful King of Kings said wearily. "I thought Smerdis' backers would collapse after the first battle, but they've given me two tougher ones since. How his officers keep their men in line I could not say-but they do. We'll have to fight again before we reach Mashiz, and if Smerdis is stronger then than now…" He didn't go on; he plainly didn't want to go on.
"You didn't expect him to offer battle till just in front of the capital." No sooner had he spoken than Abivard wished he could have his words back-no point to reminding Sharbaraz of past errors he couldn't correct now.
But Sharbaraz did not get angry; he only nodded. "My graybeard cousin has proved himself a man of more parts than I'd guessed, the God curse his thieving soul. It won't save him, but it makes our task harder."
Again Abivard envied the King of Kings for being able to haul himself out of swamps of gloom, apparently by sheer force of will. He asked, "How many more foot soldiers do you suppose he can bring against us? They hurt us worse than I would have dreamed such troops could."
"And I," Sharbaraz agreed. "Well, there's a lesson learned-I can't charge straight at archers with any sort of protection, not unless I want more of a butcher's bill than I fancy paying." He curled the hand on his wounded arm into a fist; Abivard was glad to see he could do that. "I hope the lesson wasn't too dearly bought."
"Aye," Abivard said. "Much will depend on the spirit of the men. If they decide this is another victory on our way to Mashiz, all will be well. We have to worry that they don't see it as a setback."
"Too true-if you think you're beaten, you probably are." Sharbaraz looked bleak. "I thought Smerdis would reckon himself beaten by now."
"Well, Majesty, if he doesn't, we'll just have to convince him," Abivard said, and hoped he sounded optimistic.
* * *
The land of the Thousand Cities was a revelation to Abivard. The land of his own domain wasn't rich enough to support one city, let alone a thousand. But in the river valleys, large towns squatted on little hillocks raised above the flat, muddy terrain.
When Abivard asked how those hillocks came to rise in the flatlands, Sharbaraz chuckled and said, "It's the cities' fault." Seeing that Abivard didn't follow, he explained: "Those cities have been there a long, long time, and they've been throwing out their rubbish just as long. When the street gets too much higher than your door, you knock down your house. It's not stone, only mud brick. Then you build a new one at the level the street has risen to. Do that for hundreds of years and pretty soon you're sitting on a hill."
From then on, Abivard looked at the hillocks in a whole new way: as pieces of time made visible. The idea awed him. The hill on which Vek Rud stronghold perched was purely natural-dig down a foot anywhere and you hit rock. That people could make their own hills had never occurred to him.
"Why shouldn't they?" Roshnani said when he spoke of that in her cubicle one evening. Her voice turned tart. "From all I've seen, this land is nothing but mud. Pile mud up and let it dry and you have a hill."
"Hmm," he said; his principal wife had a point, and one that diminished his wonder at what the dwellers in the Land of the Thousand Cities had done. He wasn't sure he wanted that wonder diminished: man-made hills seemed much more impressive than heaps of mud. "It takes a lot of mud to make one of those hills."
"As I said, there's a lot of mud here." Roshnani might have been sweet-natured, but she was also as tenacious in argument as a badger. Abivard changed th
e subject, tacitly conceding the skirmish to her.
Along with the mud went abundant moisture; irrigation canals spread the waters of the Tutub and the Tib over the plain between and alongside them. Qanats would have wasted less, but you couldn't drive qanats through mud, either.
Wherever it was watered, the plain grew abundantly: grain, dates, onions, melons, beans, and more. Farmers worked their fields wearing only cloths round their loins and straw hats against the pounding sun. Sweltering in his armor, Abivard most sincerely envied them. A few yards past the far ends of the canal, the land turned gray and dusty and held only thorn bushes, if those. The folk of the Thousand Cities fled into their towns and took shelter behind their walls as Sharbaraz's army drew near. "How are we supposed to get them out?" Abivard asked at an officers' council.
"We don't," Zal answered. "If we besiege every one of these towns, we'll stay in the land of the Thousand Cities forever and we won't get to Mashiz. We just pass 'em by: take what we need from the fields and keep moving."
"They won't love us for that," Abivard observed.
"They don't love us now," Zal said, which, though cynical, was also undoubtedly true.
Abivard looked an appeal to Sharbaraz. "Zal is right," Sharbaraz said. "If we win the war with Smerdis, we'll hold the allegiance of the land of the Thousand Cities. And if we don't-what difference will it make?" He laughed bitterly. "So we take what we need."
Ten days after the battle with the archers Smerdis had mustered against them, Sharbaraz's men turned west again, away from the valleys of the Tutub and the Tib and toward the Dilbat Mountains once more. Ahead lay Mashiz.
Also ahead, and closer, lay the army Smerdis had gathered to hold his rival out of the capital. Smoke from its cook fires smudged the sky as Sharbaraz's forces drew near.
"He's making us come to him," the rightful King of Kings said as his own army encamped for the night. "There's only one broad, straight route into Mashiz. Caravans and such have other choices, but a handful of men can block those passes. I'll send scouts out to check, but I don't think Smerdis would have left them open for us."
"Can his men sally from any of them?" Abivard asked.
Zal did not sound happy when he answered: "It could happen, lord; we have a harder time keeping him away than he does us. But he hasn't shown much in the way of fighting push or trying to do more than one thing at a time with his armies up to now. Odds are good-not great, but good-things will go on that way."
"Since the odds of my ever being free to fight this war were long indeed, I am content and more than content with good odds," Sharbaraz declared. "The chief question ahead of us remains how best to win the main battle. There once more, I fear, we have little choice but to go straight at the foe."
He said I fear; the top of his mind still vividly remembered the tough fight when his men had attacked Smerdis' archers head-on. But, despite his words, he sounded eager to go toe to toe with the enemy. Like his father before him, he had as his chief notion of strategy closing with whatever enemies opposed him and pounding them to pieces.
That worried Abivard, but he had to keep silent: he did not know the lay of the land in front of Mashiz and so could not offer an opinion on how best to fight there. Zal had served at the capital. The tough, gray-bearded officer said, "Aye, if they're going to stay there and wait for us, we don't have much choice but to try and hammer 'em out. If we try to outwait them, make them come down and attack us, it's just a gamble on where disease breaks out first, and since the water coming out of the Dilbats is cleaner than what we're drinking, it's a gamble we'd likely lose."
"Onward, then," Sharbaraz said with decision. "Once the capital is in our hands, all the realm will come to see who properly belongs at its head."
"Onward," his captains echoed, Abivard among them. As Zal had said, all other choices looked worse-and one more victory would give Sharbaraz Mashiz and all of Makuran. Viewed thus, chances looked good enough to bet on.
* * *
Mashiz! Till he had rescued Sharbaraz, Abivard had never imagined seeing the capital of the realm. He had been born on the frontier and expected to live out his life and die there. But now, tiny in the distance but still plain, his eyes picked out the spreading gray mass of the palace of the King of Kings, and not far from it the great shrine to the God: in all the world, only the High Temple in Videssos the city was said to be a match for it.
Seeing the wonders of Mashiz, though, was not the same as entering the city in triumph. Between those wonders and Abivard stood Smerdis' army in a position its leaders had chosen for making a stand. The closer Abivard got to that position, the more his stomach griped him, the more misgiving grew in his mind. By the look of things, no army made up of mere mortals was going to force its way through Smerdis' host. Yet the effort had to be made.
Horns blared. "Forward the archers!" officers cried. Heavy horse, usually the cream of a Makuraner force, could not play its normal role today, for Smerdis' captains, perhaps learning from their failure in the recent battle to the south, had posted unmounted bowmen behind a barrier of stones and dirt and timber. What the lancers could not reach, they could not overwhelm.
And so the horse archers, men wearing leather rather than costly mail and splint armor, rode ahead of the lancers to try to drive Smerdis' infantry back from its sheltering barricade. Shafts flew in both directions. Men and horses screamed as they were pierced. Mounted detachments brought fresh sheaves of arrows from the supply wagons to help the horsemen keep shooting.
Smerdis' barricade did not quite cover the entire width of the approach to Mashiz. The usurper's heavy cavalry waited at either wing. When Sharbaraz's archers were well involved in their duel with the foot soldiers, Smerdis' lancers thundered forth.
In that narrow space, the mounted archers could not stand against the charge of their ironclad foes. Some were speared out of the saddle; more fell back in confusion. But Sharbaraz had been waiting for that. "Forward the lancers!" he cried, a command echoed by his officers and the martial musicians in the army.
At last, the chance to fight, Abivard thought, with something between eagerness and dread. He swung down his lance, booting his horse in the side. The foe he struck never saw him coming; his lance went in just below the fellow's right shoulder. The luckless warrior gave a bubbling scream when Abivard jerked out the lancehead. Blood poured from the wound and from his nose and mouth as he slumped over his horse's neck.
The melee in front of the barricade became general. Smerdis' archers kept shooting into the milling crowd of warriors even though some of them were on their side. All of Smerdis' horsemen and horses in the fight were armored in iron, while many of Sharbaraz's were not, so their arrows remained more likely to hurt foe than friend.
Abivard was in the thick of the melee. "Sharbaraz!" he shouted again and again. Riders on both sides cried out the name of the King of Kings they favored; in such a mixed-up fight, that was the only way to tell Smerdis' backers from those who followed Sharbaraz.
A man yelling "Smerdis!" cut at Abivard. He took the blow on his shield, then returned it. Iron sparked against iron as their swords clanged against each other. They traded strokes until the tide of battle swept them apart.
Little by little, Smerdis' cavalry gave ground, retreating back toward either end of the barricade that sheltered the archers. Some of Sharbaraz's riders raised a cheer. Abivard yelled, too, until he took a good look around the field. Driving those horsemen back meant nothing. As long as the barrier kept Sharbaraz's men from breaking through and advancing on Mashiz, victory remained out of reach.
Sharbaraz's mounted archers went back to trading shafts with Smerdis' foot soldiers. That wouldn't do what needed doing if the battle went on for the next week. As long as those archers held their ground behind the barrier, Sharbaraz's men couldn't get close enough to tear it down. That was what had to happen for victory, but Abivard didn't see how it could.
Sharbaraz had another idea. Pointing to the left of the barrier, he cried,
"We'll force our way through there-we have more lancers than Smerdis can throw against us. Then we can take those cursed bowmen in flank instead of banging our heads against their wall."
Horns and yelling officers slowly began to position Sharbaraz's army for the charge he had in mind. Abivard didn't know if it would work, but it held more promise than anything he had come up with himself. He swung almost out of the saddle to grab an unbroken lance that had fallen from someone's hands.
Smerdis' horsemen gathered themselves to withstand the assault. Before the charge was signaled, though, the horns on the right wing of Sharbaraz's host rang out in confused discord. Shouts of dismay and fear rose with the alarmed horn calls. "What's gone wrong now?" Abivard cried, twisting his head to see.
All at once, he understood why Smerdis' army had seemed so light in cavalry. It was light in cavalry, for the usurper's generals had divided it, sending part of the force to emerge from one of the narrow canyons and take Sharbaraz's men in the flank, much as Abivard had done against Smerdis' troops earlier in the civil war.
The results were much the same here, too. The right wing of Sharbaraz's army crumpled. Even Zal, who commanded there, could do little to stem the collapse. And with their enemy in disarray, Smerdis' men, who had been about to receive a charge, made one instead. They shouted with fresh confidence and fury. Sharbaraz also shouted. Fury filled his voice, but not confidence. "Fall back!" he ordered, sounding as if he hated the words. "Fall back and regroup. Rally, by the God, rally! The day may yet be ours."
His men did not give way to panic or despair. Most of them were raw troops who had gone from victory to victory; Abivard had wondered how they would face defeat if ever it came. The answer was what he had hoped but hadn't dared expect-they kept fighting hard.
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