The Year of Our War (3 page)

“Thousands! They are—” And then they broke through.

Tawny’s men drew together. “Guard!” he roared. A shield wall went up. As Insects began to pour through the breach in their Wall, they met, ricocheted off, crawled up the colored shields. Tawny’s men were shoulder to shoulder and their arms were strong, but the gap between them and the Wall filled quickly with Insects. They rushed over each other, their sword’s-length jaws scraping at the painted shields. I flapped upward for a better view.

The men on one ram were safe. They raised their square shields and retreated until the shield wall absorbed them.

The second team’s ram was stuck on some rubble; they wasted a second heaving at it and the Insects went through them like living razors. I saw mandibles close on a forearm and sever it, the blood ceased as another Insect tore his throat open.

I saw two soldiers make a stand, back to back, but when the tide of creatures went over them they simply disappeared.

Tawny from the shield wall hacked off an Insect’s antennae; confused, it turned to bite at other Insects.

An Insect nibbling at a fallen man got its jaws caught in the gap between breastplate and backplate. Another soldier severed them with an ax, slicing his dead friend’s body. He cut the Insect’s back legs off with another clean blow. He was a good fighter, but he couldn’t stand against the torrent that now flowed between him and the shield wall. He went down chopping and screeching, Insect antennae flickering in his face and claws sliding over his armor. Insects bit into his ankles to the bone. They hauled him, still kicking, to the Wall, where Insects crouched, repairing the breach. They built around the stranded battering ram, which was being covered in fast-hardening froth.

The men felt the pressure on their shields, mouthparts and antennae forced into gaps between them, and they shouted to each other. The Insects made no noise. As it came up to me, the sound of Insect bodies crawling over Insect bodies was a clicking, scratching, rasping. I watched, and flew so slowly I stalled. Panicking, I climbed on a thermal so the shrinking battlefield rotated below.

The men fell back in the center of their line. As they withdrew, a dent appeared in the shield wall; it grew bigger, curving inward. Insects surged into the gap. Gradually, Tawny’s division split in half, the men walked back and back, cramming together. The maneuver created a conduit down which Insects poured, men with shields controlling them on either side. I marveled at the fyrd’s bravery. On the ground men were pressed together, crouching behind their shields, sweating, shouting. Each soldier felt the strength of the man on his right, the man on his left, and the wall held. An Insect antenna caught briefly between one shield and the next. The soldier watched it in terror, his arm in the shield bracket up in front of his face. All his childhood fears were true. The Insect ripped its antenna free and rushed on.

Some Plainslanders with ropes gathered around an overturned Insect; it was thrashing on its back, its soft abdomen showing, compound eyes drab from grass stains. They roped its middle pair of legs together and turned it right side up. The Insect tried to rush at them, but two men were braced with the end of the rope and it simply pulled itself over. It tried this a couple of times before giving up. Its mandibles gnashed and frothed. Confused that it had no freedom of movement, it twisted round and discovered the leash. It closed its jaws around the rope and the soldiers then wound another rope around its jaws, trussed up its back legs and dragged it off the field.

I heard the hollow sound of shell creatures rattling down the wooden tunnel, glancing off the shields. More Insects ran from behind the Wall and the flood went on. Insects, like water, flow downhill. They were directed to the mouth of a long corral.

The enclosure, built by Dunlin’s men over the previous months, was made from sharpened wooden posts, set deeply into the ground. It was half a kilometer long, and archers on higher ground sped Insects along down the narrowing valley. I left Tawny’s fyrd and flew over Lightning’s, gaining height to be above the arrows. Awian archers were an azure splash on the parched yellow ground. They had quivers on their right hips, bare heads, and scarcely any armor. They drew only to their cheeks, because the distance to the corral was short, and they shot at a rate of ten flights a minute. Their mechanical repetition impressed me, and I circled above hearing Lightning’s voice distorted by distance: “Notch. Stretch. Loose.”

“Notch. Stretch. Loose.”

Closer—“Notch! Stretch! Loose!”

Swarms of arrows flew up, reached their greatest height just beneath me, descended on the corral like hail.

Lightning shaded his eyes with a gloved hand and looked around the sky for me. I flew behind the archers’ ranks.

“Messenger!” he yelled. “Comet? Are you there?”

“Yes!” I yelled back.

“Get out of the sun so I can see you!”

“Sorry.”

“Is everything satisfactory?”

“They’ve nearly all gone past,” I said, circling.

“Are you
sure
?”

“There are very few casualties.”

Lightning looked pleased. He turned back to the two lines of archers. “Attention! Now to resume! There are arrows left. Notch! Stretch! Loose!”

When they reached the end of the corral, some of the Insects were so full of arrows they looked like leggy hedgehogs. Most were missing limbs or were wounded, dripping yellow liquid. A few had holes in their carapaces where arrows had passed straight through, sometimes catching and hanging in their transparent vestigial wings. Arrows do not kill Insects unless the creature’s head is hit directly, with enough force to break the shell. Rather than points, the arrows that Lightning’s team shot had broad heads, like blades; they tried to sever limbs and shatter shells. All along the valley enclosure I saw trails of yellow fluid, pieces of glossy carapace. Insects skittered on the ground, some with just one leg left, some with no legs; thoraxes with just the stems of legs attached, bulbous joints with holes where legs should be.

The end of the corral was a palisaded pen, and Insects ran round and round inside, filling it. Still they ran silently while the men howled with effort. Around the fence, the Awian infantry was waiting. Dunlin and his guard were on horseback some distance at the rear. His gray wings trembled.

Some more of the generals—Mist and Ata—were even farther back with a division of the Island Fyrd. They were under orders to ride following the soldiers and round up those who ran away in terror, and push them back into the fray. Mist peered at the corrugated wall of the rough corral rising in front of him; stared back toward the gleaming inhuman Wall behind. I saw Mist’s stripy charcoal hair, and Ata’s polished armor under a limp smalt-blue cloak that hung over her saddle’s cantle and her horse’s butt.

The Awian foot soldiers raised their sarissai to the top of the palisade. These spears were full seven meters long with crossbars behind the point. They used sarissai to thrust at the Insects that were running around inside the corral. Javelins thrown by another fyrd division reached the center of the corral. Insects hit by javelins died pinned to the ground.

Too many Insects were dying at one place. The mound of carcasses built up until—so fast I couldn’t call out—it grew high enough for Insects climbing it to fall over the top of the palisade and escape. Five were free. Ten. Fifty. A hundred. The first skewered and writhed on the sarissai, then Insects went under the spears, and between them. The Awian spearmen turned and fled. They ran into the men behind, who also turned to run, but Insects cut a path through them, biting, clawing, throwing them aside. Spearmen at the edges who were smart enough to draw broadswords and maces lasted a little longer but two Insects together are more than a match for a man.

“Shit,” I said. “Oh no. Shit!” I flew through a thermal and had to flutter furiously.

Dunlin from his vantage point saw what was taking place. I streamed down over his cavalry as soldiers lowered their lances, and a hundred spurs set to a hundred flanks at once.

I screamed, “Rachiswater—Dunlin! Can you hear me? Do what I tell you!” The wind whipped back my words and I got no answer from him at all.

We rarely ride horses against Insects. They normally fear them and will simply shy away. I’ve seen past battles where horses bolted over lines of infantry. But one of the advantages of having immortal leaders is that we live to learn from our mistakes. Hayl Eske had spent centuries breeding and training the Awian destriers that Dunlin’s men now used.

The Insects were covered in human blood as well as their own. They moved fast, close to the ground, their six legs jointed above low bodies. Claws raked on the ground, lifted; the same ground flattened by Dunlin’s lancers a second later.

I flew fast enough to overtake the Insects and saw that they were fleeing to the Wall. I wheeled back and tried to tell Dunlin. His helmet visor was down, the blue and argent mantle was tucked into the back of his belt but it billowed. I could see the blue sheen on his chain mail. His guard followed in a wave; on their saddles were fastened long feathers cut from leather, wide ribbons, metal lace.

They went round the side of the corral opposite the archers, and I saw Lightning and those at his side draw their bows and take out the leading Insects. Lightning’s arrow went well home, the Insect died instantly and rolled, then the rest trampled it. The archers would have drawn again but Lightning stayed their hands as Dunlin thundered past.

The lancers crossed the clearing where the battering rams had been, littered with bodies, chewed edges of wounds drying like brown mouths. They went past Tawny’s fyrd, who, axes in hand, were standing to seal the mouth of the corral. Tawny’s barrier had by now broken up into amorphous groups of men, tan and wine colored. As Dunlin’s lancers passed them shields were raised instinctively. Tawny stood openmouthed. I circled him; my wings were fucking killing me and this was all going wrong.

“Follow him!” I shouted at Tawny, but that was impossible. Tawny’s broadax over his shoulder caught the sunlight. He started walking after them, and his soldiers gathered in a crowd around him. They looked so immovable from the air.

Dunlin charged on, over the dead grass.

And then he went through the Wall.

He went through the Wall where Tawny had breached it, and onto the Insect plain. All the soldiers followed, heads bent over horses’ necks, braids in horse tails streaming out behind. They knew it was forbidden to cross the Wall but curiosity spurred them. They’d follow Dunlin.

I know why he is doing this. It’s bravery, not bravado. He really is determined to beat the Insects and he does want to show the Castle how much can be done. He may have reasons for disobeying my orders, but that’s no less reprehensible. I decided all I could do was watch, witness the actions of the King, to relate to the Emperor later. I was shaking with tension.

The riders passed a paper archway half-sunk in the ground. It was the mouth of a tunnel, like a gray hood, standing without support and leading into a smooth passage. A few minutes later, they reached five identical archways in a line between gnawed tree stumps. The Insect group ran down the first of these without breaking pace, and disappeared. Dunlin reined his horse in so rapidly she lost her footing and stumbled to a halt in the tunnel mouth, her eyes showing white with fear. The soldiers stopped in a mass around him, listening to him curse. “We’ve damn well lost them after all that.” He stripped off his gauntlets, slapped them on the saddle pommel. “I don’t believe it. Damn it. Shit! Let’s get these horses out of the tunnel; they hate the Insect stink.”

One of the soldiers called, “Your Highness! Can we ride back to the other side of the Wall?”

“If you want, Merganser, you can.” Dunlin stared at him and uncertain laughter stirred among the soldiers. They were glancing around, taking in a new landscape where half a kilometer away, an endless sea of paper roofs began. There were hundreds of thousands of identical Insect buildings. They were pointed pagodas and low halls, like angular fungi. No windows, no doors, just gray paper cells. I flew between them, seeing their laminated surface, rippled and unbroken. I swooped below the height of the Wall, and called again, “Dunlin, can you hear me? It’s—”

“Yes. I can hear you.”

“Come back to the camp. That’s an order!”

He ignored me. Nobody had seen the tunnels so close before unless Insects were dragging them there. Dunlin seemed to be rapt. “I’m going down,” he said. “Anyone to follow me?”

“No! Rachiswater!” I searched about for a safe place to land and stop him.

“Don’t you want to know what’s down there?” Dunlin asked his men. “Let’s go!” He drew on his gauntlets, plated with tiny metal squares, and lowered his visor. More than half the men followed his lead and he gave them time to arrange themselves, muster their courage. Merganser backed off, turned around deliberately and began to canter back toward the Wall, which looked just the same on the Insect side.

Dunlin urged his horse forward until he was in the overhang’s uneven shadow. A soldier, sword in hand, came to guard him. They looked down into a steep, circular passageway, cut into the brown earth, dark as night.

A cry came from behind them, sound of metal on shell. Swarms of Insects were running from the other tunnels. The Insects moved fast. There were hundreds, the ground was covered. Barbed claws gripped Dunlin’s thigh, pulling him from the saddle. With a slash he severed them; they hung on, dripping, and then there were eight more as another two Insects grabbed hold.

No—please god, no! When I got control of myself again I called to Dunlin. With his guard he was fighting for his life, cutting Insects down left and right, a backhand with a long sword, sticking a stiletto knife through the shell heads that came up to the saddle. His heavy horse stepped sideways to crush the Insects gnawing at her hooves. Landing would not be wise. I leaned back on the air and, wheeling, left him.

Merganser had almost made it back to the Wall. His black mare swayed on the scorched grass. I unhooked my spurs from my belt and, legs dangling, glided round and landed in front of him. It knocked the breath out of me, but I ran on and he reined in his horse. I could see the creature’s eyes beneath her scallop-edged armor. She may have been bred to deal with Insects, but she wasn’t keen on Rhydanne and I thought she would rear.