The Ten Thousand (24 page)

They rode down
their own wounded. At a hundred paces the skirmishers threw their first volley
of javelins. There were perhaps three morai of light troops out here on the
Macht right, and for the moment they were entirely unsupported. The heavy
troops were at the top of the hill with their backs to the cavalry.

A second volley.
Fifty paces. There would not be time for a third. “Spears!” Rictus shouted. “Close
up, close up!”

They had not been
drilled for this, unlike their heavier brethren. They did not come together in
a solid line, but in clumps and knots of men and boys, pelta shields on their
left arms, single-headed spears thrusting out on the right. Rictus felt a
moment of pure, almost incapacitating terror. He had never been charged by
cavalry before; none of them had.

The big horses
struck home. Some, confined by their fellows on right and left, charged
straight into the spears. Most streamed to left or right of the broken,
scattered line, their riders hacking at the heads of the skirmishers as they
passed by. Rictus and his comrades were islands in a raging sea of horseflesh
and hacking steel. They stabbed out at the bellies of the animals and in
moments had a bank of the injured beasts thrashing around them, riders pinned
beneath their carcasses or finished off before they could rise out of the mud.
But more and more cavalry kept streaming past, turning and coming back again,
hooves hammering the ground into a bloody morass, bogging themselves down.
There was no fluidity to the fight; the cavalry did not charge and
counter-charge. They slogged through the light troops of the Macht in bursts of
pure mass and muscle, and bore down the defenders by numbers and bulk.

Rictus’s
half-centon was now facing out on all directions, surrounded. In their midst a
dozen dead and dying horses made a sort of bulwark. Thrusting his spear at a
passing rider, Rictus leaned his foot on the equine carcass before him and felt
the warmth and heartbeat of the animal as it lay dying in the bloody mud, not
comprehending why it should have to endure the agony of such an end. He killed
it with a spear-thrust to the brain, unable to listen to its screaming gurgles.
When the Kufr went down they screamed no less piteously, but that afforded his
conscience no trouble at all.

The sun climbed
higher on that endless morning. It topped the hills upon which the Great King’s
armies now struggled and came bursting over the battle, setting alight a
million tiny shards of reflected light, caught on helmets, spearpoints, and
sword-blades, on the sweat of men’s flesh and in the madness of their eyes. The
Kufr cavalry fought in a cloud of their mounts’ steam and the sun caught it and
made wands and bars of restless light that speared through the carnage in a
bitter kind of beauty. The Arakosan horsemen had been brought to a bloody halt
by the amorphous ranks of the Macht skirmishers, and now some eight or nine
thousand soldiers were embroiled in a charnel-house of blood and muck and
animals screaming out on the Kefren left wing. For perhaps two square pasangs
the tortured, sucking ooze that was the earth could not be seen below the
maddened press of men and animals contending there. All thoughts of higher
tactics were lost as the base struggle went on. But though the skirmishers were
being steadily destroyed, they had protected the flank of the heavy infantry.
The Macht spearmen were wheeling left on the crest of the hill, by morai, and
were now advancing once more, their ranks thinner now, but as ordered as they
had been at the beginning of the day. Before them, the Kefren centre was
pulling back, threatened now by the Ten Thousand to the south and the advancing
Juthan Legion to the west. The Kefren right wing was being hurled forward,
courier after courier urging the Great King’s generals there to advance at the
double, to support the King’s position on the right. A line of troops four
pasangs long thus began to wheel inwards to try and catch the echeloned
regiments of Arkamenes’s army before they could close the pincers of their
formations. More cavalry led the way, this time the heavy lancers of the
Asurian heartland with their blue and gold enamelled armour. These burst
forward out of the Kefren line with all the dash and brilliance of a kingfisher’s
strike, and began thundering down the slope towards the contingents from Tanis
and Istar below, five thousand strong, fresh and unblooded.

“We should move
back,” Vorus said to Ashurnan. He had taken off his helm the better to dictate
to the battle-scribes and now his gaze swivelled back and forth between the
advancing Macht on their left and the Juthan legion to their front. The Kefren
left wing had been beaten up so badly it was beyond rallying; the plain behind
the hill was black with fugitives for two pasangs, thousands of troops throwing
down their weapons and their honour in a bid to escape the Macht
killing-machine. What had once been their centre was now a flank. Forty
thousand men, blown away like dead leaves in autumn. He would not have believed
it had he not witnessed it with his own eyes.

“We should perhaps
have hired some of these fellows ourselves,” Ashurnan said. There was a smile
on his face, and though fear had paled the gold of his shining skin, the humour
in his tone was genuine. “No matter. We shall just have to do the thing with
what remains.”

“My lord, you must
pull further back from the front line,” Vorus grated.

“Look down there,
General, to the right of their Juthan troops. You see the horsetail standard?
That is my brother. I have a hankering to meet with him. It has been a long
time since we looked into one another’s eyes.”

The Macht had
started up the Paean again, and their line was lengthening as mora after mora
came up to right and left. Their discipline was incredible. Just over a pasang
separated the spearheads of their front rank from the Great King’s chariot.

“Bring me my
horse,” Ashurnan said. He was not watching the Macht, but the horsetail
standard that bobbed above the press of advancing men on the slopes below. “Vorus,
I want you to hold on here. Retreat if you must, but slow your countrymen down.
Buy me time.”

For what? Vorus
wondered, thoroughly alarmed now. The Great King had climbed out of his chariot
and was mounting a tall Niseian. An aide brought him his cedar-wood lance.
Prancing with impatience around them were the great horses of his bodyguard
cavalry, and in their midst the standard-bearer with the winged symbol of the
Asurian kings upon a twelve-foot staff.

“I go to greet my
brother,” Ashurnan said; he smiled again as he said it. His father’s smile. The
protests died in Vorus’s throat.

He bowed. “I will
hold them, my lord, or I will die trying.”

Ashurnan leaned in
the saddle and grasped Vorus’s shoulder. “Do not die. I have too few friends
already.” Then he straightened, raised his hand, and around him the great mass
of cavalry, a thousand at least, began to move, the Kefren nobility following
their king down the hillside and into the maw of war.

The battle lines
had veered round. Both the rebel right and the Great King’s right were
advancing, as though following agreed-upon steps in some cataclysmic dance.
Arkamenes’s centre was now almost upon the Royal line at the crest of the hill.
The Great King led his thousand-strong bodyguard of heavy cavalry straight into
this, the roar of that meeting coming even to the Macht spearmen two pasangs to
the south. The rebel advance halted, recoiling from the impact of these, the
finest cavalry of the Empire, whilst another three pasangs to the north the
Asurian cavalry had also made contact with the rebel left. The entire field was
now a milling scrum of troops, and where the fighting was heaviest the earth
beneath their feet was tormented into a calf-deep morass of sucking mud in
which the wounded were trampled and suffocated beneath the feet of those still
fighting.

Young Morian had
fallen; his neck hacked half-through by a shrieking Kufr horseman. Beside his
corpse, Rictus had taken the second blow on his pelta, and the keen blade had
sheared off half of it even as he raised his own spear and took his attacker in
the armpit, above the leather corselet. The Kufr tilted and slid down the side
of his horse, the animal maddened with rage and fear. It reared up and Rictus
stabbed it in the belly, a twisted rope of intestine springing out of the hole
the aichme made. Then the poor beast lurched away, hooves caught up in its own
entrails as it strove to run from the agony, trailing its dying master by one
hopelessly entangled stirrup. It careered into two other riders, their mounts
already hock deep in the bloody mud. Rictus discarded his shattered shield,
staggered forward, and jabbed his spear at these two in turn. He caught one in
the thigh, the other about the groin. They shrieked with a sound not remotely
human, their eyes bright as some gems dug out of the mountains. Rictus let the
flesh-stuck spear go as their horses staggered and tilted and fought the mud.
On his hands and knees he crawled over carcasses and through the bloody mire to
regain what was left of his centon. Whistler left the ragged ranks to pull him
back in, over a rampart of horseflesh. There were spears and shields aplenty
about it in the hands of the dead and so Rictus re-armed himself for the third
time that morning, his palms sticking to the spear-shaft, some other man’s
blood the glue. He looked at Whistler; the older man’s bald head was a cap of
blood, his scalp hanging down one ear. But he managed a gap-toothed grin all
the same. There was no need to speak.

At the start of
the morning this had been a bare and smooth slope of scrub-peppered earth, wide
and open enough to have run footraces upon.

Now the work of
war had transformed it into a swamp within which the corpses piled up in banks
and outcrops of carrion like soft, rotting boulder-fields. It was no longer
ground for cavalry, but the Arakosans were slogging it out to the end, their
horses almost immobilised under them. What bastard brings a horse to war?
Rictus wondered, outraged to the brim of his exhausted mind, shattered by the
slaughterous waste, the stunning profligacy of the enemy.

Nevertheless, the
Macht had been beaten here. Of the three thousand skirmishers who had held this
slope at the start of the morning, there might be a thousand left who were
still standing weapon in hand. And these would soon follow their fallen friends
into the mud. They knew this, but they fought on because they also knew that
behind them, up on the hill, the line of their heavy kindred had its back to
them. Should the enemy break through their ranks there would be a slaughter on
the hillcrest which would make this one seem trivial by comparison.

So the
skirmishers, who had not been trained or created for this task, stood their
ground. Because they were Macht, and it was what they had been ordered to do.

For Arkamenes the
morning had been a marvel of sensation, the ultimate spectacle. Not even the
most jaded libertine could fail to have his senses aroused by this, the
grandest kind of theatre. I say go, he thought, and they go. They die in
thousands, the lines move, the thing is done. I have said it shall be so, and
so it becomes.

He had never been
so happy in his life.

He had seen the
Macht march up the hill and had watched them annihilate the Great King’s left
wing, an army in itself. The cavalry which had ambushed the Macht had been
fought to a standstill by their camp-servants. He could see that struggle still
going on, a dark stain on the land some three pasangs to the south. He could
also see the Macht battle line reforming on the hilltop. Soon they would
advance and take on the Great King’s centre. When that happened he would lead
his personal bodyguard up the hill to complete the victory, to be in at the kill.

It was hot, now
that the sun had climbed. He could feel the heat of it even through the fine
linen of his komis, and the jewelled breastplates of his bodyguard were too
bright to look upon. He held out his hand, and a Kefren attendant placed within
it a cool goblet of spring-water.

The water was
never drunk. Halfway to his lips, the goblet stopped, and hung there in the
air, his fingers suddenly cold about it. There it was, the Great King’s
standard, the holy symbol of Asuria. And it was coming down the hill towards
him in the midst of a great cloud of fast-moving cavalry.

The goblet spun
through the air and the tall Niseian half-reared under Arkamenes, catching its
master’s shock. He wrestled and beat the animal to quiet, staring. It could not
be.

The enemy cavalry
took a loop out to the north a few hundred paces, to avoid striking the ranks
of the Juthan Legion now making its dogged way up the hillside. They wheeled
back in like fish in shoal, not in ordered ranks, but a crowd of superb
horsemen following their leader—and that leader was out in front now with a
bright scimitar raised up to catch the flash of the sunlight.

Arkamenes drew his
own sword and waved it forwards. “Go, go go!” he cried to the Kefren horsemen
about him, his mind reaching for words but not finding them in its tumult.

The enemy cavalry
struck his own at a gallop, a thunderous crash of flesh and metal; suddenly the
war came near and to be smelled and felt and feared. Back, the stationary ranks
of the rebel horse were crushed by the impact, some bowled over in the first
onset, others smashed onto their haunches, riders pinned in the melee, legs
broken between the ribs of the maddened animals. From these platforms of
plunging flesh their masters hacked at each other with bright swords or stabbed
overhand with their lances, the points and blades clashing amid flurries of
sparks. Asurian steel struck Asurian steel, Kefren killing Kefren, and the
momentum of the enemy charge was still felt through the horseflesh and the
confusion, the King’s standard rearing up like a raptor above the killing.