The Northmen were already horrifyingly close, breaking through the nearest hedgerow. He could pick out faces across their line. Snarling, screaming, grinning faces. Like animals, weapons raised high as they bounded on through the barley. Lasmark took a few steps backwards without thinking. Sergeant Lock stood beside him, his jaw muscles clenched.
‘Shit, sir,’ he said.
Lasmark could only swallow and ready himself as his men flung down their weapons around him. As they turned and ran for the river or the hill, too far, far too far away. As the makeshift line of his company and the company beside them dissolved leaving only a few knots of the most stunned and hard-bitten to face the Northmen. He could see how many there were, now. Hundreds of them. Hundreds upon hundreds. A flung spear impaled a man beside him with a thud, and he fell screaming. Lasmark stared at him for a moment. Stelt. He’d been a baker.
He looked up at the tide of howling men, open-mouthed. You hear about this kind of thing, of course, but you assume it won’t happen to you. You assume you’re more important than that. He’d done none of the things he’d promised himself he’d do by the time he was thirty. He wanted to drop his sword and sit down. Caught sight of his ring and lifted his hand to look at it. Emlin’s face carved into the stone. Didn’t look likely he’d be coming back for her now. Probably she’d marry that cousin of hers after all. Marrying cousins, a deplorable business.
Sergeant Lock charged forward, wasted bravery, hacked a lump from the edge of a shield. The shield had a bridge painted on it. He chopped at it again, just as another Northman ran up and hit him with an axe. He was knocked sideways, then back the other way by a sword that left a long scratch across his helmet and a deep cut across his face. He spun, arms up like a dancer, then was barged over in the rush and lost in the barley.
Lasmark sprang at the shield with the bridge, for some reason barely taking note of the man behind it. Perhaps he wanted to pretend there was no man behind it. His sword instructor would have been livid with him. Before he got there a spear caught his breastplate, sent him stumbling. The point scraped past and he swung at the man who thrust it, an ugly-looking fellow with a badly broken nose. The sword split his skull open and brains flew out. It was surprisingly easy to do. Swords are heavy and sharp, he supposed, even cheap ones.
There was a clicking sound and everything turned over, mud thumped and barley tangled him. One of his eyes was dark. There was a ringing, stupidly loud, as if his head was the clapper in a great bell. He tried to get up but the world was spinning. None of the things he’d promised to do by the time he was thirty. Oh. Except join the army.
The Southerner tried to push himself up and Lightsleep knocked him on the back of the head with his mace and bonked his helmet in. One boot kicked a little and he was done.
‘Lovely.’ The rest of the Union men were all surrounded and going down fast or scattering like a flock o’ starlings, just like Golden said they would. Lightsleep knelt, tucked his mace under his arm and started trying to twist a nice-looking ring off the dead Southerner’s finger. Couple of other lads were claiming their prizes, one was screaming with blood running down his face, but, you know, it’s a battle, ain’t it? If everyone came out smiling there’d be no point. Away south Golden’s riders were mopping up, driving the fleeing Southerners to the river.
‘Turn for the hill!’ Scabna was bellowing, pointing at it with his axe, the smug arse. ‘To the hill, you bastards!’
‘You turn for the hill,’ grunted Lightsleep, legs still sore from all that running, throat sore from all that screaming besides. ‘Hah!’ Finally got the Union lad’s ring off. Held it up to the light and frowned. Just some polished rock with a face cut into it, but he guessed it might fetch a couple of silvers. Tucked it into his jerkin. Took the lad’s sword for good measure and stuck it through his belt, though it was a light little toothpick of a thing and the hilt rattled.
‘Get on!’ Scabna dragged one scavenger up and booted him in the arse to set him going. ‘Bloody get on!’
‘All right, all right!’ Lightsleep jogged on after the others, towards the hill. Upset at not getting the chance to go through the Southerners’ pockets, maybe get his boots off. It’d all be swept by the pickers and the women following after now. Beggar bastards too cowardly to fight, turning a profit out of other men’s work. A disgrace, but he guessed there was no stopping it. Facts of life, like flies and bad weather.
There were Union men up on the Heroes, he could see metal glinting round the drystone wall near the top, spears pricking the sky. He kept his shield up, peering over the rim. Didn’t want to get stuck with one of those evil little arrows they used. Get stuck with one o’ those, you won’t never get yourself unstuck.
‘Will you look at that,’ Scabna grunted.
Now they’d climbed a little higher they could see all the way to the woods up north, and the land between was full of men. Black Dow’s Carls, and Tenways’, and Ironhead’s too. Thralls surging after. Thousands of ’em, all streaming across towards the Heroes. Lightsleep had never seen so many fighters in one place, not even when he fought with Bethod’s army. Not at the Cumnur, or Dunbrec, or in the High Places. He’d half a mind to let ’em take the Heroes while he hung back, maybe pleading a twisted ankle, but he weren’t going to raise a sharp dowry for his daughters on a cheap ring and a little sword, now, was he?
They hopped over a ditch patched with brown puddles and were out of the trampled crops at the foot of the slope. ‘Up the hill, you bastards!’ screeched Scabna, waving his axe.
Lightsleep had swallowed about enough of that fool’s carping, only Chief ’cause he was some friend to one of Golden’s sons. He twisted sideways, snarling, ‘You get up the fucking hill, you—’
There was a thud and an arrowhead stuck out of his jerkin. He spent a silent moment just staring at it, then he took a great whooping breath in and screamed. ‘Ah, fuck!’ He whimpered, shuddered, pain stabbing into his armpit as he tried to breathe again, coughed blood down his front, dropped on his knees.
Scabna stared at him, shield up to cover them both. ‘Lightsleep, what the hell?’
‘Bloody … I’m stuck right … through.’ He had to spit blood out, gurgling with every word. He couldn’t kneel any more, it was hurting him too much. He slumped over on his side. Seemed a shitty way to go back to the mud, but maybe they all are. Boots hammered around him as men started thumping up that hill, spraying spots of dirt in his face.
Scabna knelt, started to unbutton Lightsleep’s jerkin. ‘Let’s have a look here.’
Lightsleep couldn’t move hardly. Everything was going blurry. ‘By the … dead, it … hurts.’
‘Bet it does. Where did you put that ring?’
*
Gaunt lowered his bow, watched a few Northmen in the crowd topple over as the rest of the volley flickered down into them. From this height, the bolts from a heavy flatbow could split their shields and punch through chain mail easily as a lady’s gown. One of them threw his weapons down and ran off hooting, clutching his stomach, left a gently curving trail through the crops. Gaunt had no way of knowing if his own bolt had found a mark or not, but it hardly mattered. It was all about quantity. Crank, load, level, shoot, crank, load …