The northerners spread out across the plain, widening their front as they went. Piles of dead and dying marked their progress.
When Batalix sank once more, the fight was still undecided. Freyr was below the horizon, and three hours of darkness ensued. Despite attempts by officers of both camps to continue the fighting, the soldiery sank to the ground and slept where they were, sometimes no more than a spear’s throw from their opponents.
Torches burned here and there over the disputed ground, their sparks carried away into the night. Many of the wounded gave up the ghost, their last breath taken by the chill wind rolling over them. Nondads crept from their burrows to steal garments from the dead. Rodents scavenged over the spilt flesh. Beetles dragged gobbets of intestine into their holes to provide unexpected banquets for their larvae.
The local sun rose again. Women and orderlies were about, taking food and drink to the warriors, offering words of courage as they went. Even the unwounded were pale of face. They spoke in low voices. Everyone understood that this day’s fighting would be decisive. Only the phagors stood apart, scratching themselves, their cerise eyes turned towards the rising sun; for them was neither hope nor trepidation.
A foul smell hung over the battlefield. Filth unnamed squelched underfoot as fresh lines of battle were drawn up. Advantage was taken of every dip in the land, every hummock, ever}’ spindly tree. Sniping began again. The fighting recommenced, wearily, without the previous day’s will. Where human blood was voided it was red, where phagor, gold.
Three main engagements took place that day. The attack on the Isturiachan perimeters continued, with the Pannovalan invaders managing to occupy and defend a quarter of the settlement against both the settlers and a detachment from Loraj. A manoeuvre by Uskuti forces, eager to make amends for their previous delay, was held south of the bridge, and involved sections of either army; long lines of men were crawling and sniping at each other before engaging in hand-to-hand fighting. Third, there were prolonged and desperate skirmishes taking place in the Campannlatian rear, among the supply wagons. Here Luterin Shokerandit’s force again set the pace.
In Shokerandit’s contingent, phagors stood side by side with humans. Both stalluns and gillots—the latter often with their offspring in attendance—fought, and male and female died together.
Luterin was gathering honour to his family’s name. Battle lust made him secure from caution and, seemingly, injury. Those who fought with him, including his friends, recognised this fearful enchantment and took heart from it. They cut into the Pannovalan enemy without fear or mercy, and the enemy gave way—at first with stubborn resistance, then in a rush. The Shiveninki pursued, on foot or in the saddle. They cut down the defeated as they ran, until their arms were weary of thrusting and stained to the shoulder with blood.
This was the beginning of the rout of the Savage Continent.
Before the forces from Pannoval itself began to retreat, Pannoval’s doubtful allies cast about for a safe way home. The battalion from Borldoran had the misfortune to straggle across the path of Shoke-randit, and came under attack. Bandal Eith Lahl, their commander, valiantly called on his men to fight. This the Borldoranians did, taking refuge behind their wagons. A gun battle ensued.
The attackers set fire to the wagons. Many Borldoranians were slain. There came a lull in the firing, during which the noise of other encounters reached the ears of the protagonists. Smoke floated over the field, to be whipped away by the wind.
Luterin Shokerandit saw his moment. Calling to the squadron, he dashed forward, Umat Esikananzi at his side, throwing himself at the Borldoranian position.
In the wilds of his homeland, Luterin was accustomed to hunting alone, lost to the world. The intense empathy between hunter and hunted was familiar to him from early childhood. He knew the moment when his mind became the mind of the deer, or of the fierce-horned mountain goat, the most difficult of quarries.
He knew the moment of triumph when the arrow flew home—and, when the beast died, that mixture of joy and remorse, harsh as orgasm, which wounded the heart.
How much greater that perverted victory when the quarry was human! Leaping a barricade of corpses, Luterin came face to face with Bandal Eith Lahl. Their gazes met. Again that moment of identity! Luterin fired first. The Borldoranian leader threw up his arms, dropping his gun, doubling forward to clutch his intestines as they burst outwards. He fell dead.
With the death of their commander, the Borldoranian opposition collapsed. Lahl’s young wife was taken captive by Luterin, together with valuable booty and equipment. Umat and other companions embraced him and cheered before seizing what loot they could gather.
Much of the booty the Shiveninki gathered was in the form of supplies, including hay for the animals, to ease the return of the contingent to their distant home in the Shivenink Chain.
On all quarters of the field, the forces of the south suffered mounting defeat. Many fought on when wounded, and continued to fight when hope had gone. It was not courage they lacked, but the favour of their countless gods.
Behind the Pannovalan defeat lay a history of unrest extending over long periods. During the slow deterioration of climate, as life became harder, the Country of a Thousand Cults was increasingly at odds with itself, with one cult opposed to another.
Only the fanatical corps of Takers had the power to maintain order in Pannoval City. This swom brotherhood of men lived inside the remotest recesses of the Quzint Mountains. It still clung to the ancient god Akhanaba.
The Takers and their rigid discipline had become a byword over the centuries; their presence on the field might have turned the tide of defeat. But in these troublous times, the Iron Formations judged it best to remain close to home.
At the end of that dire day, wind still blew, artillery still boomed, men still fought. Groups of deserters wended their way southwards, towards the sanctuary of the Quzints. Some were peasants who had never held a gun before. The forces of Sibornal were too exhausted to pursue defeated foes. They lit camp fires and sank down into the daze of battle slumber.
The night was filled with isolated cries, and with the creak of carts making their way to safety. Yet even for those who retreated to distant Pannoval, there remained other dangers, fresh afflictions.
Enmeshed in their own affairs, the human beings had no perception of the plain as other than an arena on which they made war. They did not see the place as a network of interrelated forces involved in the continual slow mechanisms of change, its present form being merely the representative of a forgotten series of plains stretching into the remote past. Approximately six hundred species of grass clothed the North Pannovalan flatlands; they were either spreading or in retreat under the dictates of climate; and with the success of any one kind of grass was bound up the fate of the animal and insect chains which fed on it.
The high silica content of the grasses demanded teeth clad in strongly resistant enamel. Impoverished as the plain looked to a casual human glance, the seeds of the grass represented highly nutritious packages-nutritious enough to support numerous rodents and other small mammals. Those mammals formed the prey of larger predators. At the top of that food chain was a creature whose omnivorous capabilities had once made it lord of the planet. Phagors ate anything, flesh or grass.
Now that the climate was more propitious to them, free phagors were moving into lower ground. To the east of the equatorial continent stood the mass of the High Nyktryhk. The Nyktryhk was far more than a barrier between the central plains and the horizons of the Ardent Sea: its series of plateaux, building upwards like steps of a giant staircase, its complex hierarchies of gorge and mountain, constituted a world in itself. Timber gave way to tundralike uplands, and those to barren canyons, excoriated by glaciers. The whole was crowned nine miles above sea level by a dominating plateau, a scalp on nodding terms with the stratosphere.