by Tim Stead
“I would seek to counter it,” Aidon replied, his brow creasing. “Or at the least to acquire something of equal strength. I would want my own cavalry.”
“And yet they do not.”
“They are stupid.”
“No. Many of them see this advantage and rue it, but they cannot do as you would do. All of their world is written in a book, and there are no horses in its pages, so they believe that it is wrong to use horses, and indeed that horses themselves are wrong.”
“Then we shall always defeat them.” Aidon seemed satisfied with his conclusion.
“Perhaps, but how certain would you be if there were fifty thousand Seth Yarra soldiers marching towards us, or a hundred thousand?”
“Can such an army exist?”
“Perhaps. We think that we are clever and flexible and subtle, but it is Seth Yarra that has taken Telas without a fight, and how long will Durandar hold out now that they are cut off from assistance? And the Green Isles? It seems that we have lost half the world without a battle.”
“But we will take it back.”
“I have yet to see how,” Narak confided. “You saw how well they fortified their camp, and I have no doubt that they will do the same all over Telas, and cavalry are no advantage in a siege.”
“Then we are locked in a position that cannot change.”
“You think so? When summer comes the White Road will be open. There is no gate there to hold them back.”
“But that is in the great forest! They would have to march…”
“…Through my own domain. Why would they not?”
“Deus, your words bring me no comfort.”
“Nor should they. This is a Great War, Aidon. It is a war that will be remembered for thousands of years. Our deeds on this field and on others to come will speak to generations of warriors if we prevail. If not then our names will be forgotten in twenty years.”
“But this battle?”
“If they do as I expect it will be a victory.”
Aidon asked no more questions, and time passed slowly. Narak was thinking through the moves that they enemy would make. They had broken camp that morning and abandoned their walls. The eagles had seen it. Their only task was attrition, to kill as many of the allied army as they could, and so they would follow. It would not be a quick departure, but quicker for them having seen him abandon his own camp the night before, and they would come on quickly. He had only moved ten miles, and had taken up a prepared position, one that he had scouted weeks before when he knew this moment was likely. It was always wise to choose the ground on which to fight. There were times when it was not possible, but this was a good place.
It was close to noon when a rider came down the valley, pressing his mount hard. He skidded to a halt twenty feet short of Narak and saluted.
“Deus, they come,” he said.
“On the path?”
“On the path, Deus.”
He waved the man away and he rode off behind them, out of sight. Narak turned to his five hundred men.
“Now we must see that they catch us unawares,” he said. “You know what to do.”
The men formed up as though they were a column marching away from their position, and as he had instructed them they began to shuffle their feet to and fro, kicking up dust.
By the time the van of the Seth Yarra army appeared at the far end of the lake they had been at it for ten minutes, and a respectable dust cloud as might indicate the passage of an army had climbed into the blue sky. They resembled the rearguard of a great force, just about to march out of sight.
One of Narak’s men cried out and pointed at the approaching enemy, and they formed up quickly into a line, exactly as they had been before the messengers signal. The trap was in place. All it needed now was bait.
“Hold steady,” Narak said. He pushed his way to the front of the line and stepped out in full view of his enemy. For weeks he had taunted them with this moment in mind. The red armour, the two swords, the way he stood and looked down on the Seth Yarra camp while they died on the end of Jiddian’s arrows, while they vomited the poison he had put in their water, while they listened to his blasphemies against their god, while they thirsted and wished they were at home. It was all for this.
Narak dropped the veil and stood before his men in his aspect, drew his twin blades and held them above his head.
“Come and fight me,” he called down the valley, and his voice was louder than the voice of any man. He knew it reached their ears. “Come, you dog killers, ambushers, cowards and fools, come and claim your place in paradise. Come and die by my hand.”
He could not have wished for a better response. At the other end of the valley he could see the glitter of steel and blood silver as swords were drawn. He heard the rage in their collective voices, heard the thunder of their feet as twenty thousand men poured across the lake shore intent on his death.
He turned to Aidon.
“Right again,” he said.
39. The Wall
Arbak looked up at the sky and wondered if he was dead. He was surrounded by what seemed to be thousands of bodies, distorted, bloated, undignified. Crows circled against the blue, dark silhouettes waiting to ply their grisly trade on the carnage below.
Sheyani was sitting beside him, holding his hand. He could feel the pressure of her fingers digging into his palm, but when he tried to turn his head, to speak to her, he could not move, and words would not come. Perhaps I am dead, he thought. He wanted to reach out and hold her, to take her in his arms and press his lips to hers, and that surprised him. Sheyani was not his, not in that way. She was too breakable. She needed protection and stability, not the advances of an ageing mercenary.
Certainly not a dead one.
Now he was standing on the high wall, and there were fifty men with him. He looked out into Telas, and saw a lone warrior walk towards the gate. He was Seth Yarra. The warrior shimmered and became two, then four, then eight. It seemed only moments before the entire plain was covered in men, tens, hundreds of thousands; a forest of black and green banners waved in the sun.
“What shall we do?”
The man next to him was smiling confidently at him, waiting for orders. He looked at the other men, and did not see a single bow. They all bore swords.
“Where are your bows?” he asked them.
“You told us to bring swords,” the young man said.
Bows. We need bows. He looked back down the pass into Berash and was horrified to see that the pass swarmed with women and children, playing games, laughing and running about. They seemed unaware of the monstrous danger that stood a few hundred yards away, and he had no way to save them.
Despair engulfed him.
“No!”
He sat up, and immediately fell back again, clutching at his left shoulder. His right arm felt like it was on fire.
“You’re back with us then.”
He looked across and became aware that he was lying on a soft bed, that the sky above him was dark canvas, and that the whole was illuminated by lamps. His eyes focussed on the source of the voice. Passerina. It seemed that they were alone together.
He had been dreaming.
“How many men did we lose?” he asked.
“Just like Narak,” she said, smiling. “Apart from the total lack of skill with a blade. He would have asked the same question.”
“How many?”
“One hundred and twenty dead. Two hundred injured. You’ll probably have lost a hundred and fifty by the morning, but four hundred Telans died, two hundred are wounded, and another two hundred threw down their arms. Considering they had the better position it seems a remarkable victory.”
He looked around the tent again, noticed that his right arm was swathed in bandages.
“I was wounded?”
“Quite badly. You lost a lot of blood, and your shoulder is swollen to the size of a pumpkin.”
“And the wall?”
“Major Tragil has resumed his c
ommand, swearing to never again allow a single Telan through the gate unless he strips naked and burns his clothes first. All three gates are closed and the fighting platform is crowded with archers – yours, Tragil’s and Coyan’s.”
“How long have I been out?”
“Eight hours, perhaps nine. You should talk to that Durander of yours. She’s been moping about for hours, saying it was her fault that you got cut. Silly woman. If you’re not bright enough to wear the copper she gave you it’s your own fault.”
“That’s true enough. Will you ask her to come in?”
“On my way out? I’m not finished with you yet.” There was something in the tone of her voice that made him forget that he was injured. There was malice there. She moved her seat closer so that she could look down into his eyes as she spoke. “I’m not a good judge of character,” she said. “Narak is. He sees things in people that others do not see, and he chose you for this work, and for other tasks. He has not revealed his reasons to me, nor will he. Your Durander has the talent, also. I know their skill, and she is high, very high, too high for you, Cain Arbak, but it is not my place to say so.” He wondered what she was saying. It didn’t seem to make sense.
“I lived in Wolfguard for two hundred years,” she went on. “I knew all of Narak’s people, the ones he called friends and held in his favour, and I, too, counted them as friends, but there was one who I loved more than all the others. Her unaffected honesty, her exceptional beauty that she could never admit, her kindness, her sense of humour, her strength, all of these qualities marked her out even in that exalted company.” She paused, searching Arbak’s eyes for understanding. “Her name was Perlaine.”
Arbak recognised the name at once. She was the beautiful woman with the wolf, the one that his men had shot in the woods by the Bel Erinor road. Words rose in his throat. He wanted to explain to her that he was not the cause of her death, merely an agent of mercy. She had been shot through the gut and the lung and left to die in agony. Even Narak had admitted she could not have been saved.
He said nothing for a moment, forcing back words that sounded like excuses. Eventually he could no longer meet her eyes, and he looked away.
“There is nothing about that which I do not regret,” he said.
He kept his face averted, waiting for her to say something else, but when he could summon the courage to look back she was gone. She had left the room without making a sound. He stared at one of the lamps. It was not a miracle that he was alive, he reflected, it was a stack of miracles.
40. The Battle of Finchbeak Road
Wolf Narak watched the Seth Yarra army flow across the ground towards him. He checked to either side to be certain that he had fighting room. He did not like to be crowded in battle, liked to have space to move and swing his blades, and the space was there. The Avilians had given him a respectful gap to do his work.
He wondered if the trap was big enough.
They came on and on. It was a long shoreline, about half a mile from the point where they had crested the ridge and seen him to the point where he waited. He allowed himself to glance to the left, to the woods that clothed the low hills. He could see nothing there. He did not turn his head. Even so tiny a clue might forewarn them.
He studied his enemy as they approached, looking for any sign of the black clad cleansers, the like of which he had fought at Bel Arac, but what he saw were like levy soldiers. They had leather armour for the most part. Every tenth man had a breast plate or a metal helmet. Their swords were also mixed in quality, and mostly ill suited to their bearers. None of these men would have blood silver blades. Even with the amount they had taken from the mines they could not afford to be so profligate.
This was going to be a slaughter. Even the troops behind him, just the five hundred, had more armour and better weapons than all the men that he could see. Somewhere there would be cleansers, somewhere back there. He had seen them over the wall. Jiddian had shot a few. They were hanging back to allow these men, these expendable men, to take the brunt of the first clash.
Narak waited until he could see their eyes, full of fear and anger and desperation, until he could smell their sweat and their breath like a wind preceding their hasty advance. After such a rush even the best men would be tired. These men were already dead.
He dropped both his swords to his side – a prearranged signal.
The forest above the lake came to life. Men poured from the trees, and stopped no more than twenty paces in the clear. Five thousand archers, all that he had, lifted their bows and released a deadly volley into the flank of the Seth Yarra army.
Men fell in mounds all over the shoreline. The army slowed, turned, and received the second volley. How many had died, Narak wondered? Five thousand? A third volley ripped through their ranks, and now the bulk of their force turned to face the hill, and the archers withdrew to be replaced by pikes and swords.
About two hundred men completed the dash to face Narak and the Avilians, but they were winded, and poor fodder for the steel that awaited them. Narak cut five men down with five strokes, and suddenly there was nobody to kill. He turned and looked behind him.
“Havil, now!” he roared. His voice rolled like thunder down the lake shore, and he saw faces turned towards him, hundreds of faces. Behind him he heard Havil’s voice calling to his men, and from a hollow behind a nearby mound the dragon guard rode out, decked in full armour, glittering like a steel forest. Even the horses shone, their armour polished and mirror bright in the sun.
They picked up speed slowly, but by the time they passed Narak and his Avilian guard they were flying, lances level, swords drawn. It was hardly fair. The Dragon Guard were a weapon feared by anyone in Terras, but for men who had never fought against cavalry they were all but unstoppable. Their front rank ploughed into Seth Yarra soldiers who were already trying to flee, cutting them down like rotten wheat before a scythe.
They did not slow. Men fell beneath the horses hooves, but mostly the Seth Yarra host tried to part before the onslaught like a curtain, running up the hill into arrows and pikes, or down into the water. Some tried to rally, and shot their arrows into the charging men, but they seemed to have no effect.
Narak signalled his own men forwards. They were the cork in the bottle, pushing what the cavalry had left alive back towards their own rear guard. There were still thousands of soldiers in the trap, and if they rallied things could still go badly.
He saw them. About four hundred yards from where he stood there was a mass of black. Cleansers. He guessed there were five hundred of them, and they were not panicked. They had tightened into a square and begun to press upwards into the archers and pikemen, cutting their way into the forest. If they broke through and managed to take enough of their men with them the battle would become a messy hand to hand through the trees.
Narak wanted to run to be with his men where the fighting was most intense. He wanted to be there to face the cleansers, but he knew his own plan, and he knew his place in it. If he rushed to their aid the cork in the bottle would become the weak point. Its strength depended on him. It was why they had so few men here. He watched grimly as the cleansers fought their way to the edge of the trees, and there they stopped.
He could see an axe flashing in the air, a pair of axes, and he knew they had run into Beloff. That would be an education for them.
Back on the lake shore the Seth Yarra soldiers were beginning to find their feet. Thousands were already dead, but they were still a formidable force. Several hundred archers and swords had coalesced and were shooting volley after volley into the trees in support of the cleansers. They, too, saw the opportunity that they had for escape.
As Narak pushed his men forwards they passed some of the units he had stationed in the forest, and those came out and joined his advance, giving him more options. He ordered the bowmen to shoot their arrows at the most organised part of the enemy force, and it had the desired, if not altogether desirable effect of turning their arrows from the for
est onto Narak’s group.
“Shields!” he called, but already the Avilians had their shields up to protect their heads and upper bodies. Only Berashi infantry carried shields big enough to protect a whole body. His own shield went into place just as the first volley fell on them. He felt the arrowheads hammering just inches from his arm, felt them strike his armoured legs.
In the distance he heard the rumble of hooves and knew that Havil had turned the dragon guard and was coming back along the shore. He raised his shield high enough to glance under it and saw that they were sweeping the edge of the forest, riding high from the lake shore. It was a clever move. The cleansers would be forced to disengage, and would suffer losses both from the Dragon Guard and the archers in the woods before they could engage again.
