He no longer liked to sing it when fighting against his own people.
The enemy line levelled their spears and began to advance to meet the Dogsheads.
“Shoulder!” Rictus shouted, and his own men brought the long spears up so that the wicked points of the aichmes were jutting out to their front. The files were six men deep; usually they fought eight to a file, but Rictus had wanted to lengthen the line somewhat, and they were still a deeper formation than the more numerous enemy.
The men of Goron had made an error, trying to cover all the ground between the woods. They had thinned out their centons, the classic mistake of amateurs worried about their flanks.
Rictus turned his head this way and that, taking in the positions. In a few minutes he would be in the middle of the othismos, and blind to everything except the man in front who was trying to kill him. He saw Druze’s men going into the woods like a crowd of screaming fiends to his left, and saw the hidden skirmishers of the enemy rise out of the brush to meet them. His flank was covered.
“Charge!” he shouted. And the Dogsheads broke into a run.
They kept formation; they had drilled and drilled this a thousand times over the years. No citizen army could maintain their ranks at a run; they grew scrambled and ragged, lost the compact momentum that was the key to phalanx fighting. But Rictus’s men were professionals, the finest of their calling. They ate up the ground at a fast lope, still singing, and smashed into the enemy formation with an appalling crash of bronze.
Shields smashing against shields. An aichme thrust past Rictus’s eyes. Another went through his horsehair crest.
He gave a grunt as the weight of the men behind piled into him, lifting his feet off the ground for a moment. He jabbed out with his spear, ignoring the shrieking enemy spearman who was pressed up close to his face, stabbing into the third and fourth ranks.
He killed the file-closer with a jab to the eyes, slotting his spearhead into the man’s helm, the blade grating on bronze and bone as he pulled it out again. Blood sprayed warm across his forearm. The stench of excrement rose as men lost control of their bowels.
The Dogsheads shunted backwards a huge segment of the enemy’s line. Men went down, stumbling, disappearing in the scrum.
The enemy ranks became a formless mob of yelling figures, painted with blood, jabbing wildly with their spears. There was a sound like the clatter of a hundred blacksmiths at work. A broken spearhead arced through the air, the shaft a splintered flower.
The Dogsheads worked mechanically, stabbing out at eye-slits, naked throats, raised arms, picking carefully the flesh they wanted to ruin. This was shearing the sheep. A man had to stand in the ranks and take it. There was no running away for those at the forefront of the fighting. They lowered their heads into their shields and dug in their heels.
Rictus heard his centurions shouting above the clamour of the fight.’ “Push, you bastards, push!” Fornyx yelled, and the men in the rear ranks set their shields in the backs of the men in front and obeyed him.
Another shunt forward, the crushing weight of the men behind and the men in front.
Without the protection of his black- cuirass Rictus would not have been able to breathe in that packed mill of murder. Men passed out and were carried upright in the midst of it. There were bodies underfoot now, abandoned shields, and the ground was being trampled into muck beneath them, becoming mired with blood and other, baser fluids.
“One more!” Rictus shouted with what breath remained in his bruised lungs. “Dogsheads, forward!”
He could feel it, like a sudden change in the weather. The men of Goron were faltering; the pressure to his front was growing less. He met the eyes of the man pinned against him, and saw the doubt and defeat in them. He grinned.
“You are a dead man,” he said, and laughed.
The enemy line broke as the Dogsheads pushed forward a third time. First the men at the rear dropped their shields and ran, and then the panic spread. In seconds, the battle opened out. The enemy formation lost all order, became a mob in which every man thought only of himself. The pressure eased. The man pinned against Rictus backed away one pace, two, still looking into his eyes. He was a good soldier – it was why he was a file leader. He did not want to run, to drop his shield in shame and present his back to the aichmes of his foes. He was weeping.
Finally, when those behind him had left him, he turned to follow them, to run for the safety of his city walls. When he turned, Rictus stabbed him through the back of his neck, feeling the spearhead crunch through the man’s spine. He went down bonelessly.
Rictus stepped over him. The entire enemy line was in flight. To the right, Teresian’s men were following up with a chorus of wild halloos and shrieks of laughter: wordless, mindless noise, both exultation and relief. Rictus raised his spear, breathing fast as a sprinter.
“Halt!” He shouted. “Reform!”
The Dogsheads came together, tightened their ranks, and stood motionless amid a tide-wrack of bodies, piles of discarded shields. The men fleeing them were no longer soldiers, and not worth killing. The only way to catch up with them in any case would have been to drop their own shields. They had done enough.
Rictus stepped forward of the front rank, stabbed the sauroter of his spear into the ground and unhelmed, feeling the blessed chill of the winter’s day ease his throbbing skull. Fornyx joined him. His black beard was matted with blood.
“It’s always the third shove that does it,” he said, and nudged a corpse with his foot. It was the man Rictus had speared through the neck. He wore a bracelet of dried grass about his wrist, the kind a daughter might plait for her father on a summer afternoon. Rictus looked away from it.
There was a thunder on the air, a tremble felt through the soles of the feet. Teresian’s men opened up their ranks to the right, and through the gap came a torrent of cavalry, Corvus leading them with his personal banner snapping above his head. The spearmen roared as the Companions swept past, tall Kufr on big horses with bright coloured cloaks opening out from their shoulders like flags.
They took off after the fleeing men of Goron, a cavalcade of death, and began spearing them from behind as they ran. Soon the open ground leading up to the city in the distance was black with scattered bodies, and still the Companions hunted them, killing scores, hundreds, riding them down like greyhounds slaughtering hares.
“That is murder,” Fornyx said, his teeth bared with distaste.
Druze joined them. His Igranians were running in the wake of the cavalry, looting the dead, spearing the wounded, clearing up like jackals in the wake of a pride of lions. He offered Rictus and Fornyx a wineskin. Bitter highland wine, like that Rictus made at Andunnon. Druze wiped his mouth. His dark face was shining with sweat.
“I know what is in your mind,” he said, “but if you fight against Corvus, this is what happens. These men had only to stay within their walls, accept our terms, and they would be alive with their families today.”
“War has its conventions,” Rictus said. “One does not pursue to the death when the foe is beaten.”
“He is different,” Druze retorted. “His wars are different. It is why he wins them.”
Fornyx took a long squirt of the wine and handed the skin back to Druze, his gaze never leaving the receding slaughter. “Yes, he’s quite some general, our little Corvus. But it’s one thing to beat an outnumbered band of citizens, something else to face up to the army of the League.”
Druze nodded. “I know this. And you know what, Fornyx? He is looking forward to it. He wants it with all his heart. And the more men the League brings against us, the happier he will be. Sometimes I think his sire is Phobos himself. He has no fear.”
“All men fear something,” Rictus said. “Even if it’s not death.”
“Then he fears failure,” Druze acknowledged. “More than anything else. More than death.”