“Brothers,” Rictus said loudly, “Remember your drill. Watch the man in front. Keep together, and don’t think about anything else than what’s ahead of you. Other battles are being fought around us, but for now all you have to think about is this one.
“To those of you who wear the scarlet in war for the first time today, do not disgrace it, either in the thick of the fight or afterwards. The colour has been worn by both good men and bad for centuries, but it has never been worn without courage.”
He raised his spear. “Forward!”
TO the south of the Dogsheads, the spearline of Teresian and Demetrius was the first portion of Corvus’s army to make contact. The Paean” was snuffed out as they crashed into the morai of the Avennan League, three thousand men in a compact phalanx in a head-on collision with seven thousand others. The appalling clatter of the impact carried clear across the plain to the walls of the city.
To the east of this clash, Corvus was leading the Companions at a fast canter round the enemy flank. Every time he raised his hand, the centon next to him would peel off from the main body and remain behind, reining in their horses and stabbing their lances into the ground alongside them as if they meant to be there “for some time. Then the Kefren riders swung their deeply curved compound bows off their backs, already strung, and began fishing for arrows from the quivers hanging at their thighs.
The overlapping morai on the eastern flank of Teresian’s spears had begun to move in on the flank to roll up the enemy line, but they hung back at the sight of Corvus’s cavalry flashing past. Periklus of Pontis jogged forward of the hungry advance. The men at the front could see only that they were about to outflank their foes, and it took him several minutes of shouting, grabbing centurions, and banging his spear on the shields of the file-leaders before they came to a ragged halt, the open flank of the enemy right in front of them, as inviting a sight as any spearman on a battlefield could wish for.
But the men on the outside of the formation had seen the cavalry, and were turning to meet it. The right wing of the League forces curled in and then out again, a great swirl of close-packed men. Orders were- shouted and then countermanded. The lines within the formation began to merge. File-closers found men behind them, and file-leaders looked over their shoulder to see strange faces there, their own file dislocated by the momentum of the confusion.
And then the first arrows came raining down on them.
There was no dust to cloud the air, and the ground was cold and firm for the horses. Corvus cantered two lengths ahead of the rest of his cavalry, trailed by his banner-bearer and Ardashir. He looked back quickly and saw the growing confusion of the League right wing; that end of the line had bunched up and halted, the senior officers bellowing at their men, the first casualties slumping in the press with arrows in their necks.
“Pick up the pace, brothers!” he shouted in Kefren, the language of the Great Kings. The remaining Companions broke into a gallop, the big Niseians rocking under them like boats on a stiff swell. He still had some fourteen hundred cavalry following after him like a great thundering cloak of flesh and bronze trailing across the plain. He was in the rear of the League line now, a pasang from the file-closers. The Kefren on their massive warhorses leaned forward in their saddles and braced their lances on their shoulders, following the slight figure and his raven banner at their head.
Druze wiped the sweat off his face and exchanged a grin with the man next to him. It was close-packed in the confines of the tower, and the massive structure creaked and rumbled under them. They were in the belly of a beast, a rancid darkness stinking of green hides and pitch and newly sawn wood. The whole structure lurched, and the men inside fell against each other, swearing and wide-eyed as hunted deer.
“This ain’t no way to go to war,” Druze’s neighbour said.
“Make way there, lads – I’m going to puke,” another snapped out.
There was a massive crash full on the front of the tower. Druze leapt back instinctively as the broad blade of a ballista bolt smashed through the wooden ramp in front of his nose. Sparks and gledes spattered into the interior with it, and men began stamping them out feverishly. The reek of burning was added to the other stinks and men began to cough and heave for breath.
“Phobos help us – the thing’s on fire!” someone wailed.
“It’s just the hides on the front,” Druze said. “Stand still, you fucking girls. “Show these westerners how Igranians can take the pain. We’ll be on the walls before you know it.”
They stood in the lurching darkness as the smoke rose around them, blind men in a box. There were three stories to the towers, and fifty men on each, packed as tight as arrows in a quiver.
The tower halted. To its front the wood was thumped and rattled as unseen missiles cascaded against it, and there was the crunch and splinter as another bolt struck the side of the structure. This one punched straight through and impaled a man standing by the right hand wall. He screamed and thrashed while his comrades tried in vain to pull him off the great barbed arrowhead transfixing him. Finally he died, held upright like a puppet with only one string.
Panic rose in the dark interior of the tower, a reek as heavy as their sweat.
“Steady, boys,” Druze warned. “We get this wrong and we’re stepping out into empty air.”
There was the sound of a horn-call from outside.
“Now!” he shouted.
Two men cut the ropes holding up the heavy ramp. It swung down with a crash, and the light and cold air of the winter day flooded in.
“On me, brothers!” Druze yelled, blinking madly, advancing blind into the sudden white winter light with his drepana raised. The men poured out of the tower in a torrent of raging faces and upraised iron, intent only on getting out of the panic-stinking darkness of the compartment. Below them the tower rocked and shook, while the men on the lower levels were climbing ladders to follow off the ramp in their turn.
So tall was this contraption of Parmenios’s that the ramp had swung down square on the topmost battlements of the tower abutting Machran’s East Prime Gate. Corvus’s bald-headed little secretary had judged the measurements correctly to within the span of a man’s hand, the result of days of observation and calculation. The men on the ropes below had pulled it. into perfect position, their determination marked by the trail of bodies leading all the way out of bowshot.
Of the six towers, four had made it to the wall. Two more were standing burning within a hundred paces of the masonry, and screaming men flooded out of them with the bright hungry flames blackening their flesh. But in the four which had survived were six hundred others who were desperate to get out, and who would not be halted. They flooded the tall towers of the East Prime Gate and overran the ballista crews on the battlements, slashing at the hated weapons and tossing the unfortunates who operated them over the edge. There was no quarter asked or given.
The rest of Corvus’s forces at the eastern end of Machran had not been idle. They surged forward now in their thousands, bearing hundreds of scaling ladders. Now that the ballista towers had been neutralised, the ladders went up in a forest of timber too thick to be thrown back. But the defenders of Machran did not retreat. They stood and fought on the walls, toppling ladders and skewering Druze’s men as they made it to the embrasures. They died hard, fighting for every foot of stone.
Four pasangs away, the scarlet arrowhead of close-packed spearmen that was the Dogsheads broke into a run. The men loped along with spears at the shoulder, each shield covering the man to the left, the tall horsehair crests bobbing on their helms. Rictus was at the apex of that rumbling mass of meat and metal, a conspicuous figure in his black armour. He did not speak – the Dogsheads had dropped the Paean and were now powering forward, so that all six centons of them seemed to be one single huge organism, breathing hard and the sound of their breathing attuned to a kind of rhythm in itself.