The phalanx was losing its cohesion, men turning this way and that, desperate to see what was going on. The advance stalled and the lines intermingled. Packed close together by the threats to front and rear, the men of Machran stood irresolute, frightened, angry. The centurions were bellowing orders like men possessed, but the spearmen in the ranks seemed as unresponsive as cattle.
The sweat running down the small of Karnos’s back went icy cold. This was not how it was supposed to be. There was no order now, and even the centurions were beginning to look about themselves in growing panic. How had -
A crash to the front – the fearsome red-cloaked mercenaries had hammered into their face again, laying on the pressure. The air was crushed out of Karnos’s chest as the crowd tightened, recoiling on itself. Some men tripped and went down, unwounded, and were then trampled to suffocation in the deepening mud at their feet.
Karnos looked at the sky, the black arrows raining across it. The press of men tilted this way and that, battered on all sides. He heard the roar and clash of a fresh onset off to his left, and the entire phalanx shuddered as though it had taken a body-blow. Someone shouted that the left wing had been routed, and then a few moments later some other idiot insisted it was the right wing.
It did not matter – they were pinned here like a turtle on its back. The cohesiveness of the phalanx might have gone, but the pure brute weight of meat and metal remained. It was being packed tighter on itself.
Karnos’s feet were dragged from the mud, sucking as the press shifted and took him with it. He gasped for air, and beat down the impulse to scream for space, for room to move and breathe. For the first time, the reality of his own death began to crowd his mind.
And the pressure began to ease. The sea-roar of noise – in his helm changed, picked up a note. Oh, thank Antimone, the crowd was opening out. The tide had turned, it seemed; this was the way it was supposed to happen after all. Victory was still there, in the air. In his relief, he felt he could almost taste it.
Men were throwing down their shields and tearing off their helms, shouting about betrayal and defeat. The phalanx, which a few moments before had seemed a brute, packed, immovable thing, now began to fall apart. As men abandoned their bronze burdens, so they became more mobile, and somewhere out at the edges of the formation, or what was left of it, they were running.
They were running away. Karnos stared in disbelief so utter that it cancelled out the bowel-draining fear. “No! No!” he screamed. All Machran was here in front of him, seven thousand men, the heart of the greatest city in the Macht world – and it was bleeding to death in the churned muck, or in flight right in front of his horrified eyes.
He sagged as the men about him moved away. A shield, dropped by his neighbour, struck his anklebone an agonising blow. He raised his head to shriek his pain and his anger at the cold sky, and the falling arrow lanced cleanly through the right wing of his cuirass, sinking into his shoulder with an impact that sent him reeling on his back into the bloody mire below.
TWELVE
Rictus watched the blood dripping from his fingertips with a kind of morbid fascination. He was clenching a filthy clout about his arm at the elbow, twisted tight as he could make it, and the trickle had slowed at last. Even so, the torchlight in the tent seemed incredibly bright to him, splintering in shards and blades, like ground glass in his eyes. That would be the thump on the head, he supposed. He had already been sick once, and were there anything left in his stomach he had no doubt he would be so again.
Fornyx’s face swam into view, shadow in light. He felt the weight of his friend’s hand on the numb meat that was his forearm.
“I got the carnifex.”
“There are men hurt worse than me,” Rictus said muzzily.
“That artery wants stitched shut, or you’ll bleed white. Now shut your mouth before I slap you.”
Rictus smiled. He leaned back, was caught by Fornyx before he toppled off the blood-slimed wooden table, and drifted into a hazier place in his mind. Aise was there, young and smiling again, and Rian had flowers in her hair, a marriage-crown of primroses and forget-me-nots. But who was the man in shadow beside her?
He felt a stab of sharp pain that jolted him awake again. They were holding his arm down and old Severan, one of the Dogsheads’ two carnifexes, was working a blood-brown needle through his flesh. Another scar for Aise to find, Rictus thought.
His gaze drifted. The great tent was full of the stink of death, a slaughterhouse reek. Men were lying on sodden straw or were being pinioned upon stout wooden tables as the army physicians went to work. A strange and horrible calling, to spend one’s days delving into the living flesh of other men.
Rictus dragged himself back to the present, putting to the back of things the pop of the needle as it threaded through skin and muscle and dragged the slashed halves of his arm back together.
“What’s the butcher’s bill?” he asked Fornyx.
The dark little man bent close and looked in his eyes. “Lucky you had a good helm, or that spear would have drilled a hole through to the bone.”
“Fornyx -”
“Forty-six dead on the field, nine from our own fucking arrows. Ninety-six wounded, of whom -Severan?”
The grey-haired man working on Rictus’s arm grunted. “Thirty or so of those will be back in scarlet within a week or two – like the chief here. But of the rest, there are a dozen who will take longer – broken bones and the like. The rest are done with soldiering for good.”
“A third of us,” Rictus said in a cracked whisper.
“A hard day’s work,” Fornyx said. “He gave us the worst job on the field.”
“He gave it to us because he knew we could do it,” Rictus said.
“That’s pretty fucking magnanimous of you.”
“It’s the truth, Fornyx. You know it too. He gave us the hardest job because we are the best he has.”
A bleak smile flitted across Fornyx’s face. “It is a distinction which could well prove the death of us all.”
“Not today,” Rictus answered. He closed his eyes, nausea rising like a blush in his throat. He clenched his teeth shut until his jaws creaked, let it pass.
“I’m done here,” Severan said, rising with a groan and pushing his fists into the small of his back in the way Rictus often did after rising in the mornings.
“Keep that arm slung for a week, and stay awake for the rest of the night – Fornyx, don’t you let him sleep – I’ve seen too many men with a knock on the head sleep their way through Antimone’s Veil. You hear me now?”
“I hear you, you old bugger.”
Severan slapped him on the shoulder and then stumped off to the carnage of the tent without another word.
“No sleep. Ah, Phobos take it,” Rictus groaned.
“You heard him. Let me get you to Corvus’s tent. He wants to see all his underlings tonight, and it’s as good a way to keep you awake as any.”
“Fuck you, you evil-eyed little scrawny bastard.”
“Careful, Rictus; you know I love it when a girl talks dirty.”
Antimone was weeping. It happened often after a battle, especially a large one. The more blood on the ground, the more tears she shed, it was said. The rain came down in a soft cold shroud to fill up the rutted footprints of the living and the dead, to patter on the eyes of the corpses littering the field. At least at this time of year, the process of decay would not set in so quickly as during the usual summer campaigning.
Rictus leant on Fornyx’s bony shoulder as they made their unsteady way through the camp. He could remember little of the battle’s end. The Dogsheads had charged into the mass of Machran warriors once, withdrawn, and then charged again. The next thing he remembered was fighting to keep his head out of the mud while men stood on him.