Authors: Paul Kearney
“Brothers,” Phiron
said simply, “let us start the Dance.”
Starting on the
right, the Macht line began to move. The men kept the bowls of their shields on
their left shoulders, to save their strength, and carried their spears down the
length of their right arms, snug against the body. The mud sucked at their feet
and broke up their step until they had marched clear of the last night’s ground
and were on packed earth and pasture once more. File-leaders and file-closers
barked out the time. The men began to march in step, and with that the ground
began to echo under their feet, ominous thunder. Jason’s mora, close to a
thousand men in eight ranks, led off. After it came Mynon’s, then Orsos’s, then
Castus’s, then the morai of Pomero, Argus, Teremon, Durik, Gelipos, and Marios.
To their left the
Juthan Legion stood watching as the Macht line moved up the slope towards the
King’s army, close on two pasangs of tight-packed men marching in almost
perfect time, and now in almost complete silence. Above their heads the centon
banners hung heavy in the morning air. Hardly a breeze stirred about the plain,
but the heat of the sun had already burned away the last of the mist. The men
in the ranks had the sunlight in their eyes for the first few hundred paces,
until the shadow of the heights above them cut it off.
The light troops
kept pace with the phalanx, and in their midst Rictus strode easily along, his
heart thumping so hard it seemed the beat of it would leap up his throat.
“We’ll fight like
spearmen today, if we have to,” Agrimos, overall commander of the skirmishers
had said. “There’s cavalry out on the right, and we’re to hold our ground
against it. No retreating today, boys; no falling back. We fight where we
stand.”
At long last,
Rictus was to be part of a real battle, not some honourless skirmish fought
with knives and javelins. Today would be a spear-fight, and he was wholly glad
of it.
Look down on me
today, father. Grant me your courage. Help me live or die well before the sun
goes down.
Jason, in the
midst of his thousand, struck up the Paean. It was taken up by the whole mora
almost at once, and travelled down the line until the entire Ten Thousand were
singing it, the slow mournful beat of the ancient song clenching their feet in
time with one another. As always, Jason felt that cold thrill in his flesh at
the sound. The Death hymn of the Macht. It had been millennia since a Great
King had heard it, and now here in the heart of the Empire, ten thousand voices
were rolling it out with a fine relish, their feet providing the beat. Ten
thousand voices, the sound of them echoing off the heights of the hills to
their front, the ground rising under them as they marched, and the ranks of the
Great King’s army awaiting them at the crest.
This, Jason
thought, is what the poets sing of; it is what it means to be truly alive. And
as he marched, singing, the tears trickled down his cheeks within the
tall-crested helm.
Seated on his
quiet mare, Vorus watched the line of spearmen march up the hill with a wall of
sound that was the Paean preceding them. He thought he had never seen a sight
so fearsome in his life: that moving battlement of scarlet and bronze, that
wave of death approaching. All along the Kefren ranks, there was a kind of
shudder as the troops moved in restive increments, as a man will flinch before
a blow.
“Lord,” he said, “let
me go out to the left.”
Ashurnan shook his
head. For now, he was standing in the Royal Chariot again, shaded by a parasol
and surrounded by bodyguards, couriers and staff officers.
“Stay here, Vorus.
They may be coming our way soon enough.”
The Kefren troops
on the left had begun to shout and jeer and batter their spears against their
shields in an emboldening din of defiance. To their rear the archers had nocked
arrows to their bows. A flag went up to show that all was ready. Ashurnan waved
a hand, as gracious as a greeting to a friend, and the archers loosed.
All at once the
air filled with another noise; the swoop of clothyards blotting out the sun.
They rose in a cloud, and then arced down towards the Macht line.
The sound of their
strike came even to the Great King’s position, a hammering, clattering madness
of metal on metal. Gaps appeared in the ranks of the Macht. Men folded in on
themselves, dropped as if pole axed, staggered as though struck by a gale of
wind. For a few seconds the line wavered, and the Kefren cheered and shouted in
derision and triumph. Then the gaps were closed, the phalanx drew itself
together, and the Macht came on.
An order was
shouted, carried down their line, and the first three ranks of the Macht
levelled their spears. Another series of orders, and they picked up the pace to
a lumbering trot. Ten paces from the Kefren line they uttered a hoarse roar,
and then plunged forward.
The crash of the
battle lines meeting, a sound to make the hearer flinch. It carried clear down
the valley, and close on that unholy clash there came the following roar of
close-quarter battle. The ten thousand Macht slammed into forty thousand Kefren
like some force out of nature. In the rear of the Kefren left the archers
loosed another volley, twenty thousand arrows overshooting to pepper the ground
behind the Macht army. Before them, the ranks of their spearmen were shoved
bodily backwards, pressing in on each other. Vorus could see the glittering
aichmes of the Macht darting forward and back at their bloody work all along
the line, like teeth in some great machine, whilst the men in the rear ranks
set their shields in the back of the man in front, dug their heels into the
soft ground, and pushed. The Kefren phalanx staggered under that pressure, as a
man’s stomach will fold in on the strike of a fist. The battle line was
simultaneously chopped to pieces and pushed in on itself. Vorus found the
breath clicking in his throat. It had been a long time. He had forgotten what
his people looked like in battle, and what savage efficiency they brought to
war.
Now the Juthan
legion on the Macht left was marching up the hill, and to the left rear of it
the traitor’s entire battle line was on the move, pinioning the King’s troops
with the threat of their approach. An advance in echelon; brilliant. This
Phiron knew his tactics. All along the plain below, for fully six pasangs,
great formations of troops were on the move. For the moment, the traitor’s
armies had the initiative, but that was part of the plan.
Gasca had moved up
from the fifth rank to the third, and now was stabbing overhand with his spear
whilst the crushing weight of the men behind him forced him forward. In the
frenzied press of the phalanx he periodically felt his feet lifted off the
ground and was borne along bodily by the close-packed crowd. He ducked his helm
behind the rim of his shield as an enemy spearhead came lancing out at his
eyes, was jolted by the impact of the point on his helmet, and stabbed out
blindly, furiously. Under his feet, bodies squirmed in the gathering muck and
the men behind him with their spears still upright were jabbing downwards with
their sauroters, finishing off the wounded, grinding their heels into Kufr
faces. The heat was indescribable, the sound deafening, even over the sea-noise
of the bronze helm. This was the
othismos
, the very bowels of warfare.
It was where men found themselves or lost themselves, where all their virtues
were stripped away, leaving only courage; for one could not endure the
othismos
without it.
The line lurched
forward as the Kufr ranks shrank from the Macht juggernaut. The file leaders
shouted hoarse, half-heard commands and from the rear the unrelenting pressure
of the file-closers ground the phalanx onwards. Dead men were carried upright
in the files, held there by the press of flesh and bronze. The aichmes of the
first three ranks stabbed out endlessly.
Shearing the sheep
this was
called, the decimation of the front ranks of the enemy with skilful spear-work,
a hedge of wicked metal plunging into the enemy’s faces, shoulders, chests,
bellies, anywhere there was an opening. The Kufr infantry were not so heavily
armoured as the Macht, and the spear-points were drilling clear through their
wooden shields, the leather caps and corselets of their panoplies. Gasca found
himself stepping over a layered mound of corpses and half-dead, squirming
things that the rear ranks spiked through and through with their sauroters.
A spear-blow to
his shield-rim stretched the metal. The men in the front ranks had their heads
down as though sheltering from a storm. Many had gashed and bleeding spear-arms
from the thrusts of their own comrades behind them. Gasca rested his spear on
the shoulder of the file-leader, three ranks ahead; it seemed insufferably
heavy. The file-leader’s spear broke off in the body of a Kufr maniac who threw
himself at the line of shields, and he flipped the shaft round, tearing up the
thigh of the second-rank man as he did so. With the sauroter now facing
forward, he began stabbing out with as much energy as before. In this mass of
sharp bronze and iron the flesh of men was a fragile thing, to be scored and
sliced without comment or complaint. They were expendable parts in the machine,
and they would endure their role without complaint until the thing was done.
That was part of the philosophy of the
othismos.
Ten thousand
Macht, pressing forward with all the professionalism of their calling. The
Kefren spearmen could not hold back that mass of murder. The deep formations of
troops here on the left, stacked up to absorb the Macht assault, became a
weakness rather than a strength. Reserve regiments, moving forward to the aid
of their comrades, became close-packed by the ordeal of the men at the front,
packing lines of bodies against the enemy spearheads.
The Kufr army was
pulling back; no, it was in flight—but the flight was so constricted as to be a
mere shuddering of movement, no more.
But the Macht felt
it. A lessening of pressure, like pushing on a stiff-hinged door past the point
of equilibrium. A knowledge that the back of this thing is broken.
Those in the
Kefren front rank were showing their backs now, pushing and clawing at the men
behind them to get away from the spears. These whose courage had failed were
stabbed to bloody quivering meat and their toppling bodies entangled the legs
of the next rank; the struggling mob that resulted was cut down without mercy.
Gasca found himself hiccoughing with a manic kind of laughter as he stabbed out
over the shoulders of the men in front of him. The pressure from the rear had
eased somewhat, and the Macht ranks were opening up as the enemy to their front
disintegrated. Now Gasca felt the rasp of his tongue about his teeth, the taste
of salt about his lips: sweat and splashed blood. His legs were scarlet to the
knee, and the ground under all their feet stood pocked with puddles of blood
where it was not carpeted with the enemy dead. The Great King’s left wing had
been smashed asunder.
A gap opened up
between the fleeing Kufr and the remorseless, ordered ranks of the Macht. The
order to halt was ferried down the line by men whose throats could barely
sustain speech. And the phalanx halted, the men breathing hard, many bending to
vomit. Up through the opening files came light-armed skirmishers with skins of
water hanging from their shoulders. These were passed up and down the line.
Gasca managed a few swallows before passing it on, and closed his eyes as the
stale, warm liquid set his tongue to moving in his mouth again.
Now the centurions
left the ranks and came to the fore. Jason was up front with them,
gesticulating, his black armour all ashine with blood, half his helm-crest
hacked away. The Kufr left wing was a mob of retreating figures running downhill
in their thousands, cavalry mixed in with infantry, officers beating their men
with the flat of their swords. The ground they left behind them was littered
with cast away shields and weaponry, and straggling wounded by the hundred were
dragging themselves at their rear, limping on spear-shafts or crawling on hands
and knees, crying out to their fellows not to leave them behind. A few centons
of Macht skirmishers went chasing after them, hurling javelins into their
spines or finishing off the wounded where they crawled and screamed on the
ground. A centurion called them back, cursing them for ill-disciplined fools,
and they came trotting up the slope again shame-faced and with arms bloody to
the elbows. A few had severed heads hanging from their belts. Gasca wondered
where Rictus was, and if he had been anywhere near the meat of the fighting. He
would have a story to tell him tonight, by Antimone’s Veil.
A trembling took
him, and he had to clench his teeth tight against the sob which ballooned in
his chest. A whimper made it out his mouth, and another. He disguised it with a
fit of coughing, but then felt a thump on the back of his cuirass. Old Demotes,
his white beard dyed rust-red as it trailed out the bottom of his helm. “It’s
all right, lad. It’s the Goddess. She must have her say. Let her out, and you’ll
be better off.”
“Back in line—back
in line you fuckers!” someone was shouting. It was Orsos, running up and down
the relaxed ranks with his helm off and his spear resting on his shoulder. His
shaven head gleamed white with sweat in the sunlight and there was spittle
flying from his mouth. “Jason! Jason—we’ve cavalry coming up on our right and
rear, maybe ten morai of them. Wheel your men about to the right. We’re taking
the rest into the Kufr centre. Do you hear me, Jason?”
* *
*
The cavalry came
on in a wave, tall horses bearing shrieking Kufr with luminous eyes and
billowing, multi-coloured robes. They had scimitars, javelins, and a few
stabbing spears. Their line extended two pasangs to left and right. Had the
ground been firmer, they would have made it into a gallop, so frenziedly were
the riders beating their wild-eyed and snorting mounts. But here the earth had
been churned into a mire by the infantry battle, and the hillside was strewn
with dead and dying of both sides and bristling with spent arrows, like the
hair on a man’s forearm when the cold hits it. So they advanced at a fast trot,
some horses tripping up and toppling even at that. There were thousands—Rictus
had not believed there could be so many of the beasts in the world. The ground
shook under their hooves, and the blood rippled in its muddy craters.