by Kearney Paul
It had been a shock, when the Honai had crashed into them, for the Dogsheads had not yet fought Kufr like these. To begin with, the Great King’s bodyguards were all picked for size; they towered over the Macht by a head and more. And they wore heavy armour; solid plate bronze polished bright, with heavy round shields like those of the Macht themselves.
But more than any of these things, they were willing to stand and die.
Rictus had lost contact with Fornyx in the press, and did not know if his friend was dead or alive. He had seen men knocked unconscious by the first clash, and then speared as they were held upright between the two pushing lines. The Macht had held doggedly, for despite their lesser size, they were stronger than the slender Kefren, and though the Honai were the best trained of any troops in the Great King’s army, they had not seen the years of hard service that the Dogsheads had.
So they died fast – at first. Rictus himself had speared some senior officer through the eye-slot of his helm in the first moments, and had thus shattered his spear. The drepana had buckled against a brazen breastplate soon after. It was meant for cutting, not thrusting, and it had snapped like a biscuit. After that he had retreated into his own men, his feet balancing on corpses and the awful nameless sludge bulging through his sandals.
He backed clear out of the line for a moment, breathing hard. Looking up, he could see nothing of the sky; they fought in a tent of dust which hid everything more than twenty paces away. But he could hear the sound of battle beyond his sight, the all-encompassing roar of it from which individual screams sometimes rose in a high pitch of agony. The sound reminded him of Kunaksa, it was so intense, so utterly huge. He had known nothing like it in the last thirty years, not even at Machran.
He looked behind him. Parmenios’s engineers had loaded their ballistae and were standing with their swords to hand. If – when – the Honai broke the line, they would not delay the Great King’s elite for more than a few minutes.
Rictus tugged a man out of the line. The fellow was wide-eyed, with the rigour of the othismos still upon him, brown foam flecking the corners of his mouth. Rictus had to shake him, hard.
‘Who are you – your name, man!’
The spearman had to think about how to respond.
‘Serenos of Pontis.’
‘Serenos, drop your shield and your spear. I want you to go south, to our right, and find one of the marshals or the King himself – you understand? Tell them that the centre is about to break. We need reinforcements – anything we can get – we need them now. Listen to me – do you understand?’
The man nodded dumbly.
‘Good lad – now, go, and be quick, for Phobos’s sake.’
Stark relief on the man’s face as he ran off. For a second, Rictus envied him. There was a part of him that also wanted nothing more than to be able to disappear into the dust and wait for the noise to go away. All men felt that in battle. There was only one cure for it.
He bent, picked up the man’s discarded spear, hefted it a moment thoughtfully, and then limped back into the fighting.
By some miracle he found himself close to Fornyx. He pushed forward into the front rank to replace a falling man, and immediately took a spearhead in the shoulder. It jolted him backwards a step but skewed off his armour, carving a track through the mud embossing his cuirass. He growled like an animal, the sound lost in that raging tumult, and shortened his grip on the spear. Past the mid-point he stabbed with it, the first thrust striking a shield, the second gauged more carefully, taking the glaring Honai at the neck and severing the bulging vessels there. It was like up-ending a bottle of wine. The Honai glared and raged a moment more, then gripped his neck, astonished, and sank down into the mud. Rictus plunged the sauroter onto the nape of the Kufr’s neck, and saw the sputtering square hole it made as he yanked the weapon out again. Then it was forgotten, as the gap was filled, and another impossibly tall golden-skinned monster with blazing eyes was trying to kill him.
The Macht were pushed back. They exacted a terrible toll on the Honai as they retreated, for in their eagerness the Great King’s elite were pressing forward heedless of losses, and their formation began to open a little. When that happened, the aichmes of the close-knit Macht would stab out with the swiftness of a kingfisher’s strike. It was death for one of the Honai even to lower his shield to shout to a comrade.
But the Dogsheads had been fighting for hours now, and they were stepping on their own wounded as they fell back. The Honai dispatched the fallen without pity as they passed over. They outnumbered the Macht to their front some four to one and no amount of skill or valour could hope to hold out much longer against those odds.
‘Break on the left!’ a single shout, almost lost in the roar. But Rictus felt the thing shift around him. On both sides the Macht were falling back, not as part of a line, but in knots and fragments of still fighting men.
‘Stay together!’ he bellowed. ‘Face your front, you bastards!’
The line was gone, engulfed like a broken dyke. Now the Honai were pouring through, chopping it up still further. The Dogsheads were an elite even among veterans; they knew that to turn and run meant instant death. So they fell back with their face to the enemy. They died with their shields still on their arms even when surrounded and stabbed to carrion by half a dozen of the enemy at a time. Their bodies piled up in mounds of bronze and scarlet.
Some centons hung together, what was left of them, and a tattered grouping gathered under the banner and faced out in all directions, fighting back to back now. Fornyx was the banner-bearer. He had lost his helm, and one eye was gone, nothing left but a torn hole, but he stood holding up the oak staff from which hung their ragged flag; the same one which had flown at Kunaksa, thirty years before.
Rictus joined him, and around the pair of cursebearers other broken remnants of the Dogsheads coalesced, until there were several score brought to bay in a rough oval, a crowded mass of grim, exhausted men with the light of death in their eyes. There was no quarter given or asked, nor any thought of surrender.
Rictus dropped his shield and, taking Fornyx’s free arm, he set it over his own shoulders and took some of the younger man’s weight. Fornyx grinned, his teeth black with blood and dust.
‘Where have you been, you strawhead bitch? Back of the line having a sit-down, I’ll bet.’ He tilted his head until it rested briefly against Rictus’s helm.
‘I knew things were in good hands,’ Rictus told him. He pulled off his helm, and even the hot air seemed cool to him after the confining bronze. He kissed Fornyx on his bloody cheek.
‘Antimone found us at last, brother.’
‘Aye. She’s been looking for us this long time.’
‘We will go into her darkness together, Fornyx.’
But Fornyx did not respond. His weight grew as his legs buckled. His one eye was still open and that black grin was carved on his mouth. Rictus lowered him to the bloody churned earth at their feet. Only then did he see the blood trickling in a black bar from a gash in Fornyx’s thigh. The blood was pooled about his feet; he had stood there a long time.
Rictus closed the staring eye, and then took the banner from his friend’s hand.
Lord, in thy glory and thy goodness, send worthy men to kill me.
He set a hand on Fornyx’s head, the kind of touch a father might bestow on his sleeping child. Then he straightened, the world livid, dazzling in his eyes, and in a low voice he began to sing the Paean once more.
It went unheard. The island of Macht was engulfed, the Honai crashing over it in their hundreds. They clambered over bodies still breathing and stabbed downwards at the dying men without looking to see where their spearheads went. Their faces were set towards the west, and the open space beyond the mounded corpses which was the rear of the Macht army. Unstoppable now, they surged on, hundreds, thousands of the tall Kefren cheering as they advanced at an eager trot.
They had broken the Macht line, and Corvus’s army was now split in two.
THE STANDARD OF THE KING
‘TIME TO GO,’ Ardashir said calmly. He was looking at the oncoming torrent of Arakosan cavalry, which was approaching at a gallop, thousands of horsemen on beautiful Niseians, a glorious and terrible sight. He leaned in the saddle and set a hand on his banner-bearer’s arm.
‘Shoron, signal retire.’
The Kefren trooper, clad in scarlet like all of Corvus’s army, tilted the banner horizontal three times. At once, Ardashir felt the movement of the ranks behind him. ‘Quickly, brothers!’ he cried. ‘We don’t want to be in the middle of this one!’
Almost a thousand Companion cavalry began filing out to the open flank in trotting lines, the warhorses bucking nervously under them. Ardashir let the mora file past and raised his hand in salute to the spearmen standing ready behind them, hidden from the enemy up until now. Demetrius raised his own fist in response and barked an order which was repeated all down the line by his centurions. The morai levelled their spears. Six thousand men, six ranks deep, one and a half pasangs long.
Ardashir broke into a canter, almost the last to leave the front of the phalanx. The Arakosans were perhaps two hundred paces away, a mass of horseflesh at full charge, the very earth quivering under their feet like a tapped drum. Nothing would stop them now; it was too late for them to pull up.
At the sudden sight of the spearline some tried to rein in, and went down, bowled over and crushed by the hordes coming up behind them. The outer companies tried to wheel left, but Ardashir’s troopers were already curving round in a great arc to meet them and hammer in that flank. They were held on their course by their own momentum.
The horses balked at the sight of the steady line of spearmen; at the last moment they refused the contact. But the hundreds behind them could not see what was happening to the front rank; they piled into their fellows with a fearful crash. Ardashir saw one massive Niseian hurled end over end through the air, its rider a rag doll flung headlong into the crush.
It was a kind of carnage he had never witnessed before. Hundreds of horses went down, the Macht spearing them without pity, disembowelling the magnificent animals or jabbing out their eyes. Riders were lifted out of the saddle by the thickets of spears impaling them. Here and there the sheer weight of the animals broke in the Macht line, but the spearmen swarmed over the still-kicking beasts and fought while standing upon their beating flesh.
The Arakosans had charged into a wall of spears and armoured men, head-on and unprepared, and their own numbers were piling them upon the wreckage of the leading ranks. It was like watching a man’s face being smashed repeatedly into a stone.
Demetrius’s green spearmen stood their ground, and the Arakosans milled in front of them, horses rearing to bite and kick, their riders slashing with their tulwars and scimitars and light lances. But they were striking down upon a line of shields and bronze, whereas the aichmes of the spearmen were stabbing upwards into the soft flesh of the horses. When the big animals fell they entangled others, crushed their riders, lay thrashing and screaming in a mire of their own entrails.
‘Get your horn, Shoron. Sound the charge,’ Ardashir shouted over that holocaust. He felt sickened, but would not shirk his role in the slaughter.
Shoron lifted his horn from the saddle-pommel and blew the clear hunting call of the western empire, which the Companions had used since before the siege of Machran. Ardashir’s mora smashed into the outer flanks of the Arakosans once again, Niseians fighting one another, Kefren killing Kefren, the red at war with the blue.
The Macht started to sing as the horn-notes died away. With their death hymn in their throats they began to advance, Demetrius out in front and waving them on. He stood atop a dead horse and pointed his spear eastwards like some warlike prophet.
The Arakosans were fighting their own horses now. They had been brought to a standstill and a ridge of their dead lay for over a pasang in front of Demetrius’s morai, while they had now been assailed in the flank by a thousand of the Companions. They were brave men, superb horse-soldiers, but they had never encountered a Macht phalanx before, and no matter how intent they were on attacking, their mounts would not charge that unbroken battlement of bronze and iron.
They broke.
First in one and twos, then clotted groups, many clinging two to a horse. They streamed away from the advancing Macht, and Ardashir’s Companions harried them in pursuit, breaking up any companies which halted and tried to reform. In minutes, they were in full retreat, their officers trying to stem the rout, beating their own men with their swords. That massive sea of horsemen began to pour back the way it had come, with the Macht phalanx advancing inexorably in its wake, and as the Arakosans fled, they slammed into the formations of levy infantry which the Great King had sent in behind them to follow up their assault. A boiling mass of cavalry and infantry was brewed up there in the towering, choking maelstrom, and the whole imperial left flank was thrown into utter confusion. Out of the dust to the west, the sound of the Paean rose out of six thousand voices, and confusion gave way to stark terror. The Arakosans gave up any attempt to rally and began to flee in earnest, galloping through the oncoming infantry which had been meant to reinforce their victory.
Demetrius’s men came upon that vast mob of enemy soldiers, and the Macht went to work with their spears, while Ardashir’s cavalry hung on the flank like a hound tearing at the legs of a maddened bull.
ALMOST TWO PASANGS away, in the broken centre of Corvus’s army, the Honai were still in full, jubilant cry. Their formations had lost all order in their delight at having annihilated the much-vaunted Dogsheads. They considered the battle won; now they had only to secure the enemy baggage train and the Macht army would have the legs cut out from under it.
Dyarnes was near the rear of his men, still climbing over the clotted dead where the fighting had been thickest, and he paused to grab the shoulder of a fleet youngster with wild eyes.
‘You – get you back to the Great King and tell him we are through the enemy line, and are advancing on his baggage.’
‘The Great King?’ the young Kefre sputtered.
‘Tell his people, you fool – they’re back at the Royal Chariot. Tell them I need further orders. We have this thing won, if I can but wheel some of my troops round to strike the enemy in the rear. The thing is won – you hear me?’
The Honai was grinning now, an open-mouthed grin like that of a cheerful dog.
‘Drop your shield and run.’
The young Kefre took off, tossing away his helm as he sprinted into the dust. Dyarnes chuckled. He was alone save for a cluster of aides. One leaned close and shouted in his ear.
‘Shall we recall the men, lord? Or halt them, at least?’
‘Not yet. Let them have their triumph, Arnosh. I want them well clear of the line before I begin to turn them around.’
‘It’s won sir. We did what the legends said we could not – we broke the Macht.’
Dyarnes bent amid the corpses. They lay so thick he had to stand upon dead flesh.
‘They did not break,’ he muttered, staring at a white, snarling face. ‘They did not run. They stood and died.’
Some new note in the tumult to the west, where he could still see the tail end of the victorious Honai companies. A breath of wind, a lift in the air, and suddenly it was as though a new stage had been unveiled in a close-packed theatre. His view opened out; he found himself staring at a moving crowd of thousands of his own Kefren, the King’s Bodyguard in its moment of hard-won victory. He began to smile at the sight.
But then something else tugged his gaze south, to where the Arakosans were engaged in a sepia thundercloud, fighting their own battle. A wave of relief swept over him as he recognised the sight of cavalry spilling north across the plain, thousands of them. The Arakosans had done their work quickly; they must already have broken through the Macht right wing.
But there was no blue in that massive, arrow-shaped body of horsemen. They were clad i
n red, the colour of the Macht.
Despite the furnace-heat of the day, Dyarnes felt a nerveless chill steal along his spine.
‘Oh, Bel deliver us,’ he gasped. ‘No – no, no!’
The Companions of King Corvus, four thousand strong, shook out into line of battle, and at the sound of a bright, tugging horn-call, taken up all along their galloping line, they brought down their lances and charged full-tilt into the scattered, disorganised mass of the Honai.
And that was not all. At the same moment, there came from the south a boiling mass of Macht infantry – not spearmen, but lightly armoured swordfighters, bearing wickedly curved blades of iron. They paused fifty paces from the Honai, then threw a shower of javelins. And then they pitched into the Kefren with a roar, the sword-blades catching fire from the westering sun as they arced through the air.
Dyarnes sank to his knees, aghast. The wind changed; the dust-cloud rose again, rolling across the plain to blot out the panorama he had glimpsed. He looked down at his hands, still clean despite the carnage surrounding him. A Macht face, bloodless and stiff, stared up at him in surly triumph.
As quick as that, like a cup slipping through one’s fingers. For a few minutes, he had seen victory with his own eyes.
‘The King,’ he croaked. ‘The King must be warned.’
He looked up at a new note in the thunder of battle. Horses. They were coming closer.
He stood up and drew his scimitar.
And a hundred heavy cavalry exploded out of the dust before him.
THEY HAD BROUGHT fresh water in skins to the chariot, and wine for those who wanted it. Kouros took a cup, stood on the leather-strapped floor of the vehicle, and rinsed the dust out of his mouth.
The noise around him; that roaring cataclysm. He had almost become accustomed to it. Hard to believe so many men could make such a din for so long.
