He opened with two simultaneous maneuvers intended to deny Aliver any opportunity to grasp the initiative. He set his troops marching, and he had the catapults begin to lob boulders of flaming pitch at either wing of Aliver’s forces. His army was tightly formed, disciplined. They progressed forward with a steady pace that could not be ignored. The front lines of the Acacians would have heard their chants and the rhythmic tromping of their feet and the bursts of sound as different clans shouted in answer to prompts of their family names. All frightening enough.
Add to it the tremendous snapping motions of the catapults as they shot searing paths into the sky, arcing, arcing, falling before a tail of black smoke. They had modified the weapons from the ones the Numrek had first brought into the Known World. These were larger, improved versions of the originals, with massive gear works and the capacity to hurl missiles twice as far as before. With help from league engineers, they had managed to make the pitch into stable spheres that they could roll onto the cocked catapult arm before lighting them. Once airborne, they held their shape and burned undiminished until they smashed back to earth. Embedded within them were small, pronged iron tripods. On impact they dispersed across the ground, their sharpened, barbed points almost always ended sticking straight up. They were small weapons, but he was sure they would lame men and horses by the hundreds. Aliver had no weapon like this, nor would he be prepared for its devastating power. In response, his troops offered up timed barrages of arrows that-though they inflicted some damage-seemed of little more consequence than a swarm of gnats.
The first orbs exploded before the armies ever met. The blasts fanned out in all directions, incinerating everything within a fifty-yard radius and throwing globs of molten matter even farther. The soldiers ran away from the impacts in a frenzy, clambering over one another, pressing bodies in toward the center. Confusion already sown. Maeander had several of the catapults repositioned and recalibrated. Within a few minutes the first of them dropped an orb on the rear of Aliver’s forces. It took out a unit that might have expected to see no action the entire day.
Let them feel surrounded, Maeander thought, hemmed in by fire and destruction on three sides, facing their executioners on the other. Watching the billowing smoke and the waves of confused motion within the enemy ranks, he turned to offer a grin and jest to the man beside him. That man was not Larken, however. The thought of this soured his mood. Only for a moment, though.
The two armies met as the rain of fire from the sky continued. Watching what happened next, Maeander could not have been happier with how he had planned this action. He’d placed a wedge of cavalry in the center of his line. Aliver could not match them even if he wanted to; he had no cavalry unit at all, just a splattering of mounted men here and there. Hanish’s horsemen were heavily armored, bearing lances with which they darted foot soldiers, puncturing breasts and necks and faces before yanking the weapons out. They were top-heavy, muscled men who had trained and trained and trained for a moment like this. They could repeat their overhand thrusts hundreds of times without fatigue. Their horses were the largest in the empire, unshakable, belligerent mounts trained to smash men beneath their hooves.
Within a half hour they had carved a gash right toward the center of the Acacian troops. This might have seemed a risky maneuver, as they were soon deep within the enemy, hemmed in on three sides. But behind the horsemen poured a river of infantrymen, swinging swords and axes. The weapons were of such quality and honed to such sharpness that they cut through flesh and muscle and bone, leather and light mail. Aliver’s lightly armored troops fell in bloody pieces before them. Maeander’s foot soldiers ate into the center, leaving the bulk of the enemy army as largely immobile targets for the catapults.
In many ways Maeander felt that he controlled the ensuing slaughter with his own hands. It went on for hours, through the morning and into the afternoon. It was fatiguing just watching this bloody work. By the time he signaled for his troops to pull back he was drenched in sweat, muscles sore as if he had been in the thick of it all day himself. Nothing had transpired the entire day that he had not planned and pulled the strings of. He had lost few men and slaughtered a great many, it seemed. It was only because of the sheer numbers of Aliver’s troops that any of them were left.
His generals, when they debriefed later that evening, were not as sanguine. They’d killed many, yes, but not as many as Maeander seemed to think. The battle that they described bore a resemblance to what Maeander had witnessed, but it differed in some particulars as well. Numbers, for one. The Acacians had been trampled, hacked, battered. Some of them had fallen to grave wounds. Many, however, managed to back away despite injuries that should have lamed them. Others, whom the infantrymen believed they had dispatched and stepped over, rose sometime later and attacked them from behind. To their eyes the catapults had not been as destructive as Maeander thought. They had hit, yes, but only the immediately incinerated died. The others were blown from their feet, sent hurtling. They were aflame one moment and then out, steaming and largely unharmed the next.
“They’re hard to kill,” one officer said. “That’s the disconcerting thing. They are just hard to kill.”
All the generals who had viewed it up close agreed. None of them could make much sense of it. Again, Maeander wished he had Larken to consult with or his brother or uncle…but he doubted any of them would have advised him in any way he could not manage himself. Regardless of the details, the day had been theirs. If the Acacians came out to meet him on the morrow, it would be the end of them. His generals did not dispute this much, at least.
The next morning Maeander joined the front ranks of his soldiers. He wanted to see the enemy up close, to take his bloody part in the victory he anticipated. But from the first moment the two armies met, nothing transpired with the inevitability he had imagined. The enemy did prove hard to kill. Wounded, they fell back when they should rightfully have fallen dead. Those he thought killed often crawled away or rolled back up to their feet, not so badly hurt as he imagined. It almost seemed like he had to separate a head from its body to be sure of a kill.
And they fought improbably well also, despite their inferior weapons and training, regardless of their thin or partial or nonexistent armor. In one instance, clashing hand to hand with a boy in his early teens, Maeander found himself having a hell of a time killing him. It should have been easy. The boy was a slender-shouldered Bethuni, fighting with only a spear, his legs and arms and chest all bare, easy targets. He was terrified, Maeander could see. He was trembling, eyes wide and frantic. He managed to move just fast enough, blocking, defending, occasionally lashing out. Maeander could not help but laugh at him, at the strange combination of the boy’s fear with Maeander’s inability to strike him. It was comical, until the whelp nicked his shoulder. Angry at this, Maeander dove to press his attack. But, pushed by a sudden surge of motion from one side, he lost sight of the boy. He was left fuming and spitting, watching him slip away, something like mirth in the lad’s brown eyes. This incident was just one of many of the morning’s frustrations.