Garnedd’s men fired their second pistol over the cruppers of their saddles as they withdrew. The enemy column seemed snarled by its own dead, staggered by the power of the mountain river. Bodies were rolling half-buried in foam downstream. A tattered, horse-skull standard bobbed in the midst of the Khornate host, and the things under it were growling like animals.
‘Open ranks!’ Jubal shouted, and Garnedd’s squadron came through his line, the horses wide-eyed, nostrils blood-red and open, pluming hot steam.
Jubal’s men trotted forward. The enemy was halfway across the river now, a solid mass unfazed by the casualties they had taken. One of their champions, bare-headed, his skin white as carrion, lifted a great polearm and roared defiance at the Imperials.
Jubal turned to the trooper next to him and pointed with his scimitar. ‘Shoot me that whoreson!’
Another volley. The enemy champion went down, a heavy matchlock-ball smashing through his skull. His fellows paused for a second, slavering with fury. Jubal’s second volley sowed more chaos in their ranks. But only for a few moments.
‘Back, back!’ Jubal shouted. ‘Fall back to Garnedd’s line – move, you clodpolls!’
One man was not fast enough. As the horsemen turned tail, his mount stumbled and went down. He rolled in the shallows of the river, the horse screaming. A knot of the enemy lunged forward and engulfed horse and rider. The poor beast thrashed in the middle of a crowd of dark, gleaming forms as they congregated about it and hacked it to pieces in the water. The trooper disappeared, engulfed as though he had never existed.
Jubal joined Jonas Garnedd up the riverbank. He wiped his mouth with the back of one leather gauntlet.
‘I call that cutting it close,’ Garnedd said casually.
‘Aye, But we did turn the river red, didn’t we?’
‘Lances?’
‘I believe so, Jonas.’
The horsemen unclicked the short pennoned lances from their backs and hefted them in their right fists.
‘In and out quick, lads, like you’re with someone else’s wife!’ Jubal bellowed, and up and down the line men laughed.
‘Charge!’
The line erupted into a canter, then a full gallop. The lances came down from the vertical and the hammering thunder of the heavy horses seemed to shake the very ground. With a wordless shout, the Imperials poured down the slope to the ford, where the first of the Khornate warriors was stepping onto the southern bank. The front ranks of the enemy seemed to shrink as the cavalry swooped down upon them.
And struck.
The wicked points of the lances went in at chest-height, and driving them came the armoured men on horseback, with all the momentum of their charge. The enemy warriors were impaled, smashed off their feet, trampled, and as the front ranks recoiled, so they collided with those coming after them. The head of the enemy column was driven in, the ford erupting in a tangled, evil scrum of flesh and iron and blood and icy water. Horses reared and screamed, men shouted, shrieked, flailed at each other, brutal murder carried out again and again in the white whipped fury of the river, the foam rising red about their legs.
Jubal pulled back, sawing on the bit of his maddened horse. The cavalry were at a standstill, fighting with swords, their lances lost or broken. Their momentum had carried them halfway across the ford. But now the enemy was flooding in around them, scores of enemy warriors thrashing through the deeper water on either side of the ford, up to their necks, many carried away by the current. Heedless of their losses they came on, hoping to surround the horsemen.
‘Withdraw!’ Jubal shouted. ‘Jonas – get them out! Lads, fall back up the hill!’
By ones and twos, they hacked their way free of the carnage. The Khornate warriors mobbed the horses, chopping at their legs with great axes, hauling the Imperials off their mounts to be torn apart in the water. A mob of horsemen broke out of the melee – Jubal decapitated a fanged enemy intent on hamstringing his own horse, and then followed his men out.
They galloped back up the slope, out of the river towards their own lines. Jubal looked about him as he rode clear, counting heads. Garnedd was beside him, his moustache stiff with blood, his horse lacking an ear but otherwise hale.
‘On me, on me!’ Jubal bellowed. The stink of blood was sickening – it was congealing in his beard. His entire right arm was scarlet to the shoulder.
The horsemen drew together on the upslope, panting, their eyes still wide with the fury of the fight. The horses shifted and danced under them, in pain and fear. The Khornate infantry was across the river, on the southern bank. In the midst of the ford the bodies were rolling and turning downstream in the grip of the cold water, a ghastly flotsam. The enemy column continued its relentless march out of the forest.
Jubal counted heads as they sat their horses looking down upon the enemy advance. Fifty-one had gone down to the river. Twenty-nine had returned.
Morgan watched the struggle in the ford with a face as stiff and drawn as a marble statue. He turned to his trumpeter.
‘Galloran, sound me the recall.’
The grizzled trooper put the slim brass horn to his lips and blew, eyes closed. The long, mournful note rang out into the falling snow. After a moment, Morgan saw Jubal and his men turn and begin trotting up the slope to the main body. So few of them. Jubal had lost near half his men.
The two armies had disengaged, like fighting dogs. A flurry of violence, and then all was fluid again, and they were watching each other, ready for the next lunge. Gabriel felt the ground trembling under his horse and looked west to see Briscus bring in his wing, a hundred heavy cavalry to join the main body, a cloud of steam hanging above the labouring bodies of the horses. Looking east, he saw Harpius on the move also, another hundred men. In a few minutes his ragtag army would be reunited, the fists clenched, ready for the knockout blow.
Jubal rejoined him, breathing hard. The big man began to methodically reload his pistols, spitting the bullets down the muzzle of each one and ramming them home.
‘You really think he’s there, Jubal?’ Gabriel asked.
‘He’s there – someone is directing all this, with some skill, too. He’s won the ford and almost caught us divided with his feint moves. No Chaos champion I’ve ever fought before would be so subtle.’
Gabriel smiled weakly. ‘It’s all too familiar, Jubal. He was always a one for playing with the enemy before the main event. He’ll form up now, south of the river, and then come on in a body.’
‘What do we do?’
‘Let them dress their ranks. I want a horde of them with their back to the river. Once they have a few hundred on our side of the water, we charge, and pull out again as quick as we can.’
Jubal reholstered his pistols with a grunt. ‘The charge part is easy – it’s the getting out again that takes a little work. Gabriel, if he sits behind his men, he’ll break us down in the end. There’s a few thousand of them in the trees – they can soak up all we throw at them and ask for more.’
‘What, then?’
Jubal would not meet his eyes. ‘Call him out. Fight him sword to sword. See if he’ll accept single combat. This Chaos scum is no more than rabble once their leader goes.’
‘You’re assuming I could beat my brother if it came to a single combat, Jubal.’
‘I did not say it would have to be a fair fight,’ Jubal growled in reply. ‘Get him out from behind his phalanxes, and we’ll kill him if it takes every one of us – that’s what we’re here for isn’t it?’
‘That’s what we’re here for,’ Gabriel agreed, but the words were mechanical.
‘We’ll see what a charge or two can do first,’ he said.
Jubal opened his mouth as if to speak, then shut it again. He knew better than to argue with the look in his general’s eye.
The afternoon drew on, and the winter’s night grew closer, the light fading as the sun began to climb down into the Sea of Chaos, far to the west. The Chaos host advanced out of its forest fastness and crossed the
river, company by company. From the dark ranks of the enemy obscene insults, animal bellows and crazed shouting came and went. Individual champions strode forward of the main ranks and shook their standards at the silent cavalry on the hill above them. The snow drew off a little, becoming a thin, stinging veil which whitened the horses, and made of Gabriel’s men a ghost army, a grey, looming shadow lining the high ground.
And finally the commander of the Chaos forces appeared. Flanked by columns of goat-headed warriors, he rode a monstrous steed, which might once have been a horse, but which had been warped and bloated into something else. It bore him into the middle of his stamping, cheering, roaring host, and the whole riverbank erupted into a howl of hate and fury and triumph, so that the snow slid from the boughs of trees at the very sound.
‘It’s him,’ Gabriel said. ‘He’s come at last.’ He turned to Jubal and saw that his grizzled comrade was looking down at the maddened spectacle below with a rictus of hatred slashed across his face, and tears in his eyes.
Gabriel drew his sword, and kissed the blade.
‘Galloran, signal me the advance.’
The high, fierce notes of the horn sounded out across the river-valley, and the horsemen on the hill began to move. A flash of movement went down their line as they unholstered their matchlocks, the smoke from the smouldering match-coils at their pommels leaving a skein of dark lines behind them as they advanced. Below them, the warriors of the Chaos host paused in their gibbering and dancing, to stare up at the wolf-grey line, ominous in its silence. For a moment the valley was almost still, save for the rushing of the river, and the rising tremor of the earth as the heavy horses passed across it, the rumour of a distant war.
‘A quick volley, then straight in with the lances,’ Gabriel said to Jubal. ‘Pass it down the line.’
The pace of the cavalry quickened. They broke into a trot. The Chaos horde set up its clamour again, and some of the more frenzied of its warriors broke ranks to run up the hill at the horses in a mad rage.
Eighty yards from the enemy line Gabriel reined in. He raised his sword. ‘Give fire!’
The front rank erupted in fire and smoke, two hundred matchlocks going off as one. The vanguard of the enemy staggered, the heavy bullets blasting warriors off their feet, blowing away limbs, blasting skulls to fragments. Scores of them went down, hardly a round missing its target in that tight-packed mass of muscle and iron.
‘Fire!’ Gabriel shouted again, his face red with the blood-pumping effort. Spittle flew from his lips; he felt the bones in his fist grate as he gripped his sword until the ivory hilt creaked in his fingers.
Another volley. The enemy had begun to surge forward, but this one set them back again. A ghastly windfall built up before them, a tangled mass of corpses, some half-supported by the press of their fellows. The snow blushed scarlet under them. For a few minutes the Chaos host was dazed by the double-strike of the volleys. The wounded shrieked in pain and anger and were kicked aside by their comrades, the ranks choked with maimed and dead figures.
‘Out lances!’ Gabriel shouted, and to Galloran, ‘Sound me the charge!’
The horn-call rang out, clear and clean in the darkening winter afternoon. It was repeated up and down the line, and then the horsemen began to move once more, their mounts springing up under them, straight into a canter. The riders kicked them on frenziedly, and the big horses screamed, put their heads down and thundered forward, a tide of muscle and iron, with the lances levelled before them.
They piled into the van of the Chaos horde like a hammer. The heavy horses bowled over the front ranks, smashing deep through the enemy formation, every lance finding a target, and kept going until the sheer press and mass of the enemy warriors brought them to a rearing, butting, kicking halt. The warhorses bit and lashed out and reared, whilst their riders drew their swords and began hacking at every half-glimpsed skull and unguarded piece of flesh they could see. The entire Chaos army was shunted backwards, scores trampled underfoot, hundreds more packed so tight they could not even raise their arms.
Gabriel’s men fought like fiends, until they were no longer the grey ghosts they had seemed on the hillside, but bloody apparitions of slaughter, slathered with the innards and blood of friend and foe alike, their eyes wide under their helms, and the big horses churning below them like dark engines of battle.
Now, Gabriel thought, this is the heart of it. Now you will come to me brother. This is the time.
Galloran was still beside him. Gabriel yelled at him over the torrential roar of battle. ‘Sound the withdrawal, and keep sounding it!’
The call rang out, was interrupted as Galloran decapitated an enemy warrior, then rang out again. It was picked up by the trumpeters of the other wings, and the army began to pull back. Rear ranks first, then those caught in the middle, and then in knots and groups, the men at the very front.
As they turned about, many died, dragged from their horses or stabbed through from behind. Gabriel saw one great destrier go down riderless with at least a dozen enemy warriors clinging to it, hacking at its legs, stabbing its eyes out as it collapsed. He rode over bodies, swung Arion round so the destrier could strike another Khornate berserker who was trying to disembowel him. The wide iron-shod hooves smashed the foe to the ground and crushed his ribcage as they stamped down on him.
Jubal was here, beside him, and Garnedd and Kyriel his standard-bearer. Galloran had gone down in the muck and murder of the roaring press, never to rise. The army was breaking free, galloping by the hundred back up the slope behind them, while the Chaos warriors struggled over mounds of their own dead to follow, shrieking like demented animals.
They were out, Arion at a canter. The big animal had taken a slash along the neck and, as his muscles worked the blood sprayed back in Gabriel’s face, masking him in scarlet. He reined in back up the hill and stood up in the stirrups, waving the vermilion length of his sword.
‘On me! On me! To me, brothers!’
They gathered on him, and their surviving officers set them back in rank. Dozens were afoot, and stood at the rear, gasping, vomiting with the effort it had taken to run up the slope in full armour. Gabriel looked around and with a dozen years’ experience knew at once that he had lost a third of his men.
Back down at the river, the Chaos regiments which had crossed the ford were milling in a crumpled wreckage of corpses, all order lost, and perhaps half their number now lying broken and gutted upon the ground and in the red-running shallows of the ford. Those who were still on their feet were busy mutilating the corpses of Gabriel’s men who had fallen there. One Chaos champion reared up the dismembered head of a great warhorse on a pole, and danced under it as the blood rained down from the stump onto his face. None of the enemy showed any great inclination to continue their advance however.
‘We gave better than we got, at least,’ Jubal said, teeth bared. ‘Think it’ll bring him out?’
‘It’s got to,’ Gabriel replied, wiping his face. ‘Look at them. We’ve cut the head off this chicken, and now it’s doing a dance. If he wants them to come up this hill after us, he’ll have to lead the way himself.’
Jubal spat a tooth into the snow along with a gobbet of scarlet phlegm.
‘I hope you’re right, because we’ve maybe one more charge left in us, and then we must say goodnight.’
The two men looked at one another. ‘It’s been a long road,’ Gabriel said at last.
‘Aye, but we’ll have rest soon enough. One way or another.’
They leaned over on their horses and grasped each other’s forearms in the warrior salute, their vambraces clinking together.
‘You didn’t have to do this,’ Gabriel said quietly. ‘Jubal, I would have thought no less of you had you walked away.’
Jubal spat again, wincing. ‘My arse, walk away. You are my friend, as was your brother. I do not walk away from friends. A man does that, and he’s not much of a man at all.’
Garnedd joined them, doffing his helm to show
a face streaked black with his sweat-soaked hair. ‘Warm work for a winter’s day.’ His moustaches were drooping and crusted with filth, but he was smiling. The smile faded as he looked down the slope to the river. ‘Sigmar! Do you see that, Gabriel?’
The ranks of the Chaos host were opening, and their commander was now splashing through the icy waters of the ford on his great beast, as casual as though he were out for a morning’s ride. In his wake fresh regiments were mustering and waiting to cross, thousands strong. As the thing which had once been Michael Morgan set foot on the southern bank, so they set up a great clamour, a sneering, triumphant roar which seemed to shake the very landscape. The broken lines began to reform, and the enemy army seemed to take fresh heart at once.
‘This is it then,’ Gabriel said. ‘One last charge, brothers, and the thing is done.’
‘What of
Michael?’ Jubal asked.
‘You leave him to me.’
Jubal leaned over. In a low voice he said, ‘That thing is no longer your brother – remember that, Gabriel. You kill it any way you can.’
‘I know, Jubal. And I will.’
In later years, men of the northern Empire would speak of that last battle of the eagles. They would conjure a picture of the swift onslaught of Morgan’s grey horsemen, riding down to meet their doom. In the story, the great horses would thunder into the enemy with the force of a thunderbolt, and make of the Urskoy Ford a fabled battlefield.
In reality, three hundred exhausted and bloodied men, most on horseback, but many on foot, threw themselves down the hillside to the bloody ford with a kind of resigned despair. They did not waste breath on battle cries, for they had none to spare. They did not appeal to the gods, for they no longer expected an answer to any of their prayers. If there was one thing in each man’s mind as they made that final charge, it was a determination to die well. And that, the storytellers got right, as they told the tale in hushed and crowded taverns in the years to come. For what man does not wish to make a good end of his life?
This time the Chaos host surged up the hill to meet them, and the lines crashed together south of the ford. Once again, the heavy cavalry smashed deep into the enemy lines, and once again the Chaos host recoiled from that fearsome impact. But this time they had the numbers on hand to soak up the charge. Gabriel’s men were drawn deep into the enemy formation, and more warriors fanned out to left and right along the river, seeking to outflank the cavalry whilst they were embroiled in a savage melee to their front. This time, there would be no withdrawal.
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