The Paean rose and rose, tens of thousands of voices singing it now all across the plain. Druze was taking his men in again, harassing the enemy’s southern flank once more, and Teresian’s spears were going in alongside him. The enemy line was skewed and slanted to meet this threat.
A gasping courier reined in before them.
“Ardashir is ready, Corvus.”
Corvus cocked his head to one side, like a crow eyeing a corpse.
“Tell him to go.”
The courier galloped off like a man possessed, a youngster bursting with the enthusiasm of his age.
“At Kunaksa, the Kefren had thousands of archers, who should by rights have shot the Ten Thousand to pieces before they closed – am I right?”
“What is this, a fucking history lesson?” Fornyx demanded.
“We went in at a run. They hit us with the first volley, but by the time they’d readied a second we were already at their throats,” Rictus said. He had not been a spearman that day, but he remembered watching, seeing the morai go in.
“Citizen soldiers cannot advance at the run, or they lose their formation,” Corvus said, and he shrugged.
“Now watch.”
There was a long line of movement out to their right, in the ranks of the dismounted Companions. Ardashir led a solid mass of his command forward, following in the wake of Demetrius’s slowly advancing conscripts. There was something odd about them, Rictus noted.
“Kufr,” Fornyx said. “He’s taking in all the Kufr. Corvus, this won’t -”
“Shut up,” Corvus said.
Some sixteen hundred Kufr, tall Kefren of the Asurian race, who had, like all their fellows, been brought up to do three things. They had been taught how to ride a horse, how to tell the truth… and how to shoot a bow.
They cast aside their brightly coloured cloaks, left them lying on the mud, and from their backs they pulled the short recurved composite bows of Asuria. They had quiver-fulls of arrows at their hips, and at a shouted command from Ardashir they nocked these to their bowstrings.
Ardashir raised his scimitar, a painfully bright flash of steel. He held it upright one moment, watching the battlefield to come, the advancing League spearmen on the plain before him. They were perhaps four hundred paces away.
In front of him, Demetrius’s gruff voice rang out, and the conscripts halted.
A shouted command in Asurian, the tongue of the Empire, and following it a heartbeat later came the sweeping whistle of the arrows, some one and a half thousand of them arcing up in the air over Teresian’s spears, to come down like a black hail on the advancing enemy.
That is the sound, Rictus thought. That is what I heard that day.
A staccato hammering as the broadheads struck bronze, the individual impacts merging to form a hellish, explosive din of metal on metal.
Scores of men went down. The line of advancing shields buckled, faltered, the ranks merging, breaking, gaps appearing up and down, men tripping over bodies, men screaming, cursing, shouting orders.
And moments later the second volley hit them.
It was like watching a vast animal staggered by the wind. Some men were still advancing, others had halted and were trying to lift the heavy shields up to counter this unlooked-for hail of death. Others were standing in place with the black shafts buried in their limbs, tugging on them, looking to left and right, shouting in fear and fury. Centurions were seizing the irresolute, thumping helmed heads with their fists, moving forward out of the mass of stalled spearmen, urging them on.
A third volley.
The ground was thick with the dead and the wounded. These soldiers were small farmers, tradesmen, family men. There were fathers and sons on the field, brothers, uncles. Some of the untouched spearmen were dropping their arms to help relatives, neighbours. Hundreds fell back, but a core came on regardless of casualties. They were Macht, after all.
Corvus was watching it all with a kind of grim satisfaction, but at least he did not seem to relish the developing massacre. If he had – if he had shown any kind of pleasure at the sight – Rictus would have killed him on the spot.
“And now, Demetrius,” Corvus said quietly.
Rictus had lost count of the volleys, but the others had not. The conscript spears began advancing again, five thousand of them moving to meet what had been a line of six thousand League troops. The odds were evened out now, but more than that, the League forces were little more than a mob, a snarled-up confusion of armed men struggling in a mire which their own feet were deepening with every minute.
“That should do it on our right,” Corvus said. He turned to look south.
Teresian was about to make contact with the enemy right, and Druze was supporting him, worrying at the end of the enemy line, his cloud of skirmishers partially enveloping it. He was working round the back of the League army while they advanced steadily to meet the spearmen to their front.
Even as they watched, they heard the roar and crash as the two bodies of heavy spears met, bronze smashing against bronze, spearheads seeking unprotected flesh. Two bulls meeting head on -Rictus could feel the ground quiver under his own feet at the clash of armour.
As soon as the enemy was committed to the attack, Druze led his men north behind the line. The Igranians split in two. Half pitched into the rear of the enemy phalanx that was now irretrievably entangled with Teresian’s veterans. The other half – almost fifteen hundred men – kept going north, parallel to the League battle-line – towards the rear of the enemy centre.
That centre was now almost upon them. These were the best of the League troops, the levies from Machran under Kassander. Seven thousand men in good order, they had paused as Corvus launched his army on the wings, seemingly unable to believe that there was nothing facing them but the empty plain. Now they were advancing again. They could pitch in to either one of the two separate battles that were now raging to north and south.
Corvus turned to Rictus. “I have a job for you, brother, you and your Dogsheads.” He pointed at the long line of shields bearing the machios sigil.
“I want you to take your Dogsheads and hit those fellows as hard as you can.”
“You’re not serious,” Fornyx breathed.
“You have only to halt them in their tracks, hold them a little while, bloody their noses a little. You have to buy me time.” He gestured to the north and south. “We will beat them on the flanks, and then come and meet you in the centre. And Druze is already in the rear of the Machran morai – as soon as he sees you going forward, he will attack. And Ardashir will support you also.”
“I’m like to lose half my men,” Rictus said, staring Corvus in the face.
“Fight smart, Rictus – don’t get enveloped. All you have to do is poke them in the eye.”
The thunder of the battle rose and rose. The critical point of it was approaching – Rictus could feel it, like he could feel the loom of winter in his ageing bones. Was Corvus trying to have him killed? He did not believe it. No – he was simply moving the knucklebones on the board, using what he had. Sentiment did not even, enter into it.
Rictus pulled on his crested helm, reducing his world to a slot of light.
“Very well,” he said.
“One more thing,” Corvus added, tossing up his hand as though it were an afterthought.
“What?”
“I’ll be going in with you.”
For Karnos the world had become a strange and fearsome place. He was the fifth man in an eight-deep file, one cog in the great machine that was the army of Machran, which in turn was but part of the forces assembled here today. He alternated between an inexplicable exhilaration and bowel-draining apprehension.
This, the greatest clash of armies in a generation, was his first battle.