Confident in his youth that he'd hit on not just an answer but the answer, Evripos spoke out in challenge: "How could you do anything but that, Father?"
"If we can lure folk back to the true faith by persuasion rather than fear, we cut the risk of having to fight the war over again in a generation's time," Krispos anwered. Evripos only snorted; he thought in terms of weeks and months, not generations.
Then Krispos had to stop thinking about generations, or even weeks: a scout from the vanguard came splattering back, calling, "The bastards aim to try and hold the pass up ahead against us!"
Open fighting at last, Krispos thought—Phos be praised. Already, at Sarkis' bawled orders, the musicians were ordering the imperial army to deploy. While it traveled as a strung-out
snake, it could not fight that way. It began to stretch out into line of battle.
But, as Krispos saw when he rode forward to examine the ground for himself, the line of battle could not stretch wide. The Thanasioi had cunningly chosen the place for their stand: the sides of the pass were too steep for cavalry, especially in the rain, while at the narrowest point the enemy had erected a rough barricade of logs and rocks. It would not stop the attackers, but it would slow them down .. . and here and there, behind the barrier, cloth-covered awnings sprouted like drab toadstools.
Krispos pointed to those as Sarkis came up beside him. "They'll have archers under there, or I miss my guess. The barricade to hold us in place, the bowmen to hurt us while we're held."
"Likely you're right, your Majesty," the cavalry commander agreed glumly. "Livanios, curse him, is a professional."
"We'll send some infantry around the barricade to either side to see if we can't push them back, then," Krispos decided. It was the only maneuver he could think of, but not one in which he had great confidence. The foot soldiers were the poorest troops in his force, both in fighting quality and literally: they were the men who could not afford to outfit themselves or be outfitted by their villages with horse and cavalry accouterments.
Being a horseman himself, Sarkis shared and more than shared the Avtokrator's distrust of infantry. But he nodded, not having any better plan to offer. A courier hurried off to the musicians. At their call, the infantry went forward to outflank the Thanasioi, who waved spears and yelled threats from behind their barricade.
"We'll send the horse forward at the same time, your Majesty, if that's all right with you," Sarkis said, and Krispos nodded in turn. Keeping as many of the enemy as possible busy would go a long way toward winning the fight.
Shouting "Phos with us!" and "Krispos!" the imperials advanced. As the Emperor and Sarkis had thought they would, bowmen under cover from the rain shot at soldiers who had trouble answering back. Here and there along the line, a man crumpled or a wounded horse screamed and broke away from its rider's control.
Then the enemy's awnings shook, as if in a high breeze— but there was no breeze. Several of them fell over, draping Thanasiot archers in yards of soaked, clinging cloth. The stream of arrows slackened. Krispos' men raised a cheer and advanced. The Avtokrator looked round for Zaidas. He did not see the sorcerer, but had no doubt he'd caused the collapse. Battle magic might have trouble touching men, but things were another matter.
Yet the Thanasioi, even with their strategem spoiled, were far from beaten. Their men swarmed forward to fight the foot soldiers who sought to slide around their barrier. The heretics' war cry was new to Krispos: "The path! The gleaming path!"
Their ferocity was new, too. They fought as if they cared nothing whether they lived or died, so long as they hurt their foes. Their impetuous onslaught halted Krispos' infantry in its tracks. Some of his men kept fighting, but others scrambled out of harm's way, skidding and falling in the muck as they ran.
Krispos cursed. "The ice take them!" he shouted. "The good god knows I didn't expect much from them, but this—" Fury choked him.
"Maybe the rebels will make a mistake," Sarkis said, seeking such solace as he could find. "If they come out to chase our poor sorry lads, the cavalry'll nip in behind 'em and cut 'em off at the knees."
But the Thanasioi seemed content to hold off the imperial army. Again Krispos saw the hand of a well-trained soldier in their restraint: raw recruits, elated at success, might well have swarmed forward to take advantage of it and left themselves open to a counterblow like the one Sarkis had proposed. Not here, though. Not today.
The imperial cavalry tried to force its way through the barrier the rebels had thrown up. On a clear day, they could have plied their poorly armored foes with arrows and made them give ground. With the sky weeping overhead, that didn't work. They fought hand to hand, slashing with sabers and using light spears against similarly armed opponents who, while not mounted, used the barricade as if it were their coat of mail.
"They've got more stick in them than I looked for," Sarkis said with a grimace. "Either they put the real soldiers who defected in the middle or ..." He let that hang. Krispos finished it mentally: or else we're in more trouble than we thought.
Unlike the infantry, the imperial horsemen stayed and fought. But they had no better luck at dislodging the stubborn heretics. Curses rose above the clash of iron on iron and the steady drumming of the rain. Wounded men and wounded horses shrieked. Healer-priests labored to succor those sorest hurt until they themselves dropped exhausted into the mud.
Time seemed stuck. The gray mat of clouds overhead was so thick, Krispos had no better way to gauge the hour than by his stomach's growls. If his belly did not lie, afternoon was well advanced.
Then, not far away, shouts rang out, first in the squadron of Haloga guards and then from the Thanasioi. Through the confused uproar of battle came a new cry: "To me! For the Empire!"
"By the good god!" Krispos exclaimed. "That's Evripos!"
At the head of a couple of dozen horsemen, the Avtokrator's second son forced a breach in the heretic's barrier. In amongst them, he lay about him with his saber, making up in fury what he lacked in skill. Half the Halogai poured into that gap, as much to protect him as to take advantage of it in any proper military sense.
The result was satisfactory enough. At last driven back from their barricade, the heretics became more vulnerable to the onslaught of the better-disciplined imperial troops. Their confident yells turned suddenly frantic. "Push them hard!" Krispos shouted. "If we break them here, we have an easy road on to Pityos!" With its major city taken, he thought, how could the revolt go on?
But the Thanasioi kept fighting hard, even in obvious defeat. Krispos thought about the prisoner he'd ordered tortured, about the contempt the youth had shown for the material world. That, he saw, had not been so much cant. Rear guards sold themselves more dearly than he would have imagined, fighting to the death to help their comrades' retreat. Some men who had safety assured even abandoned it to hurl themselves at the imperials and their weapons, using those to remove themselves forever from a worldly existence they judged only a trap of Skotos'.
Because of that fanatical resistance, the imperial army gained ground more slowly than Krispos wanted. Not even more daredevil charges from Evripos could break the heretics' line.
Sarkis pointed ahead. "Look, your Majesty—they're filing over that bridge there."
"I see," Krispos answered. Ten months out of the year, the stream spanned by that ramshackle wooden bridge would hardly have wet a man's shins as he forded it. But with the fall rains, it not only filled its banks but threatened to overflow them. If Krispos' men could not seize the bridge, they'd have to break off pursuit.