Hundreds of men were bowled off their feet, and the big horses trampled them into the bare muck of the earth while their riders stabbed out with the long lances, a flickering hedge of darting iron.
Parnon died there, still struggling to make himself heard. The flower of the fighting men of two cities were annihilated in a few minutes. The League army, which had been on the cusp of routing the foes to their front, simply ceased to exist.
Men threw down their shields and tried to squirm out of the press any way they could. Some died fighting, clustered together in stubborn knots and clots, battling back to back. More died without the opportunity to strike a blow, crushed in the deadly space between Corvus’s anvil and the hammer he had sent galloping upon it.
The men on the walls of Machran who were able to lift their heads and look south saw a long vast rash of men and horses embroiled in a formless mob, pasangs long: the sun glittering across it, catching spearpoints, the flash and gleam of helms and shields tilted to the sky. And then the teeming crowd opened, and across the plain men were running for their lives, hundreds, thousands of them, heading south away from the walls.
But the horsemen reformed their line and, before them, so did a long battered formation of spearmen. They dressed their ranks, and began to advance north towards Machran to join their comrades fighting and dying in the shadow of the walls, and they were singing as they came.
TWENTY-FIVE
Something had changed. Some kind of current had gone through the men fighting and dying in the gatehouse of the South Prime, like the hide of a horse twitching at the bite of a fly. Rictus felt it -he had known it before on other battlefields, but so tight and entangled and brutal was the fighting here that it almost went unnoticed.
The packed mass in front of him seemed somehow to ease a little. He heard men shouting – not the wordless baying of the othismos, but some kind of news that travelled through the ranks of the enemy like fire on a summer hillside.
Fornyx was at his side now, brought close by the murderous attrition of the battle. At the beginning of the morning they had been separated by a full centon of men, but those were all gone now.
“The League is in flight, Rictus,” he yelled. There was blood on his mouth and all down his neck, though they were all slathered in it. Impossible to tell until the thing was done whether it was one’s own or other men’s gore.
“You hear them? Corvus has done it – he’s beaten off the relief army.”
The pressure slackened. Men were backing away now, the desperation still in them, but with these tidings they knew the beginning of despair. They were fighting automatically now, and hope was leaving their eyes – it was a thing impossible to explain to any man who had not been in the belly of a hard fought battle, but Rictus felt it too.
“Dogsheads!” His voice was a gravel-hard croak. He reversed his broken spear at last to use the sauroter. There were weapons aplenty lying at his feet, but they were all broken. Men were fighting with swords now, but there was little room to swing, and the slashing drepanas were hard to manipulate in the crowded phalanx.
“Dogsheads, on me – advance!”
Fornyx was on his left, Kesero on his right. The Dogshead banner was five feet above their heads, but splashed with blood all the same. Rictus saw Valerian off to one side – he had lost his helm and his mutilated face was streaming blood. All the old veterans of the Dogsheads seemed to have moved up through the ranks and were in the forefront. The newly trained men were good – better than any other spearmen on the field – but they were still not the hardened veterans of Rictus’s old command, and they were not bound to him in the way that these men were.
“Same old faces,” Fornyx said with a grin. “You just can’t get rid of us, Rictus.”
“Same old game, brother. One more push, and we’re over the hump. Can you feel it?”
The Dogsheads surged forward. Before, it had been like setting their shoulder against a stone wall. Now it was as though they were pushing on a rusted gate. There was movement. The fight shifted, the men of Machran backing away foot by foot, dying with every step. The fearsome crush in the gatehouse lessened.
Then the sun was on their faces again. They were through the gates, into the open square beyond, and Rictus’s men were opening out into line, centon by centon. Centurions stood only paces apart, so worn down had their commands become. But there were enough red cloaks to hold one side of the square.
Rictus looked up and saw to his left the white dome of the Empirion rise up out of the maze of streets before him, untouched and inviolate, whilst to his right was the bulk of Kerusiad Hill in the distance, whitewashed villas clinging to it like tiers of swallow’s nests. The gates were taken, and behind the Dogsheads fresh morai of spearmen were moving in support.
But the men of Machran were not yet beaten. They reformed on the far side of the square, and began to advance again. They were led by a Cursebearer, whose black armour was like a hole in the sunlight. He raised his spear and shouted for them to advance, and hundreds followed him, roaring.
“We need that bastard dead,” Fornyx said. “They see a Cursebearer go down, and I think we’ll have them.”
The Dogsheads lowered their spears, those who still had them, and charged. They kept their lines intact as they moved, where the enemy hurtling towards them had lost formation, becoming a mob of crazed men in bronze.
But they had momentum. As the two sides crashed into one another the Dogsheads were halted in their tracks by the savagery of the Machran assault, and all up and down the square the thing restarted in earnest.
The struggle in the gatehouse had been bitter; this one verged on insane. As men went down dying they clutched at the legs of their enemies, reached up under the short chitons to tear at their genitals. Rictus had a sandal pulled off his foot and brought his heel down on a snarling face, then stabbed the sauroter into an eye-socket.
The enemy Cursebearer was almost opposite now, and he left his own line and hurled his spear-butt in the man’s face. It clanged off his helm, making him look round. Rictus swung his shield and smashed it into the torso of a soldier opposite, kicked him in the knee-joint and drew his drepana. He stabbed downwards as though it were an oversized knife, not looking to see the damage it did. He hauled it free of quivering meat, trusted Fornyx to finish the job, and lunged into the enemy line, utterly unaware of the animal snarling from out of his own mouth, intent on coming to grips with the man in the black cuirass.
Their shields clashed. The other man stabbed down with his spear-butt and the sauroter point struck the rim of Rictus’s shield, clinked off the bronze, and skittered from the surface of his armour. The press had tightened again, and Rictus could not raise his sword. He let go of it, reached up and caught the Cursebearer’s spear. The sauroter sliced open his palm, but he was able to wrest it out of the other man’s grip. The man was tired. His neck was corded and gaunt under the helm, a big vein pulsing blue in the shadow of the cheek-guard.
Rictus flipped the spear-butt round, the two of them swaying breast to breast in the packed mass of the melee. He looked into the other man’s eyes through the helm-slot, felt a strange flash of recognition, and then stabbed downwards, into the man’s neck. The sauroter went so deep as to bury the bronze, and the Cursebearer slid bonelessly to the ground.
Something like a wail went up from the Machran men all around. “Karnos is dead, Karnos is dead!” they shouted.
It was the breaking point. The line fell apart, and into the gaps the Dogsheads lunged with methodical professionalism. Men were speared as they turned to flee, tripped up and stabbed before they could get past the reach of the spears, hemmed in by the mass of men boiling behind them. The battle in the square disintegrated; in moments, heartbeats, it transformed, became a slaughter.