Authors: Paul Kearney
“He’s never led so
much as a dance-line in his life,” Pasion said. “Ignore him. Do it properly.”
“No. This is a
test he’s setting. We do as he says, this time. We cross that river in full
panoply, we beat those Kufr on the far bank. After that, we will do things our
own way, I promise you.”
“Who leads?” Jason
asked. He, too, was staring up at the stars. He loves all this, Phiron
realised. It’s all just a vast education for him, a richening of experience. He
felt a pang of envy, a memory of youthful energies.
“You do,” he said.
So they attacked
at first light, as so many of their fathers had. But the first thing they had
to assault was the river itself.
Gasca was in the
fifth rank, about as untried as one could be. He could not quite believe it
when he saw them marching towards the river, but once he was in the midst of
those foul-smelling, heavily armoured ranks of men, there were no ways in the
world he was going to turn back.
“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 enemy 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.