‘Stand!’ bellowed Tarn. ‘Stand together! Hold firm!’
Berren could see the eyes of the first man charging at him now, wide and wild, full of fear and thoughtless rage. Those eyes terrified him. This wasn’t fighting in Tasahre’s circle or Silvestre’s square; this was death coming at him, over in a flash, one swing, one stab and then one of them would be dead. The urge to run was almost overwhelming.
‘Stand fast!’ screamed Tarn.
Berren took a step back. The two cohorts had formed a single line of shields. All he had behind him was the sea, the boats still struggling through the waves back towards Talon’s ship. A madman with an axe rushed at him. Out of the corner of his eye he saw someone fall, staggering back as though he’d been shot. He made himself stand firm and never mind how his heart was racing or how much he was sweating and his hands shaking. His mouth was dry with fear, his hands too tight on his sword, his legs had lost all strength and his feet had grown roots. It wasn’t an axe coming at him, he realised, it was a cleaver and it looked big enough to fell a horse. He was going to die!
And then it was almost as though he stood and watched and it was someone else who calmly stepped aside. The man with the cleaver tore past and swung, but where Berren had been only his blade remained. The man took a few more steps, stumbled, then fell face down onto the sand, his guts spilling around him. Berren blinked. The world seemed to go quiet for a moment. He stared at the man on the sand behind him, doubled up, clutching at himself as he spread a red strain across the beach. Then he looked at his hand, already holding his sword straight out in front of him, aimed at the eyes of the next man racing towards him. He stared at the steel, at the blood dripping from it. .
. . and snapped back to where the air was filled with shouts from so many voices that nothing made any sense, with the ringing sounds of steel on steel and with screams. The next man came at him with a sword. Berren didn’t move, didn’t flinch, just kept his own steel pointed straight at the man’s face. The man’s charge faltered. He slowed; the look in his eyes changed, fear winning out over fury, until he almost stopped, and it was the easiest thing in the world for Berren to step forward, lunge and stab him in the neck.
The Hawk to Berren’s right fell, ribs smashed open by the blow of an axe. The force knocked him sideways and he clawed at Berren’s arm as he died. The man who’d killed him was screaming bloody murder and already swinging again. Berren jumped out of the way of both of them. He stepped inside the swing of the axe, chopped the axeman’s arm off with one blow, smashed him with his shield and then stabbed him between the ribs.
More raiders were emerging from the woods. Bodies littered the sand now, some of them dead, most still moving, the crippled and the dying simply trying to get away. Outnumbered like this the two cohorts of the Hawks were supposed to form a single circle of swords and shields that would simply shrink back into itself whenever a man fell. They all knew it but they hadn’t drilled it, and Berren had no idea how it was supposed to work when the only thing you could do was jump out of the way of an axe and your own dying brother trying to drag you to the ground. They were all muddled together now, the mercenaries and the men from the woods, in a swirling melee where every man fought for himself with no idea of what was going on around him.
Berren danced amid the press of swords, dodging whichever way would keep space around him. Men fell, Hawks and raiders both. He had no idea how many there were, how hopeless the battle might be, whether they were on the brink of victory or defeat. All he could see was the space around him, the circle that marked the reach of his sword and anything that breached it. Another man with an axe came at Berren and lost his hand, and at the same time a heavy blow landed on his back. It knocked him forward but he was already spinning and pushing himself away. The man who’d attacked him had a club, raised for another blow. Berren split his face in half before he could bring it down.
Then he saw Tarn with three of the enemy around him. He leaped through the fight the way Tasahre had taught him, moving so fast that no one could touch him, chopped most of the way through the first man’s neck and barged the second aside with his shield. Tarn finished the third. Berren lunged again, but then there was another coming at him and he had to jump away, back towards Tarn, except Tarn wasn’t where he’d been, and now there was another man coming at him, this time with a spear, and all he could do was bat that aside and jump again, swinging at another raider as he did, missing, all the while feeling the sharpness seeping from his arms and his legs, the edge of speed draining away.
And then the raider in front of him turned his back and ran; and as Berren took a step after him, he saw that they were all running, twenty or thirty of them, fleeing back up the sand towards the woods. There were bodies everywhere.
‘After them!’ Berren felt a fresh surge of energy, his first rush of victory. He raced the other mercenaries, seeing which of them would be the first to bring a man down, but then they were at the edge of the woods and Tarn was screaming at them to stop, to hold, to watch for ambushes and archers. The hunger for more was strong, the urge to rush on and finish the enemy almost too much to resist. Berren tried to catch his breath and then, when he’d done that, he tried to work out what had actually happened.
‘Hold! Hold here!’ That was Tarn trying to sort out who was alive and who was dead, how many could still fight and how many were hurt. The men who’d made it to the woods were unscathed or else carried only small wounds, a nick or a sprain. There were others, though, left on the beach. You didn’t get in the way of a man swinging an axe and come out with just a scratch, after all. The scouts had taken the worst of it. Most of Tarn’s cohort was still standing as far as Berren could see, and so far they all had the usual number of arms and legs.
‘You fought like a man possessed. Like a demon.’ Tarn grinned as he passed. ‘Hurt?’
Berren shook his head.
‘How many did you send back to the sun?’
‘Four, I think. Maybe five.’
‘Maybe six or seven, more likely.’ Tarn laughed. ‘There’s about twenty of them lying on the beach back there and there’s six of us gone to the sun. Think about that.’ He nodded. ‘Glad to be your sergeant, soldier.’
They waited at the edge of the woods, tense and on their guard in case whoever had attacked them came back, but there was no more fighting. When the boats returned to the shore once more, Talon was with them with two fresh cohorts. There were a few hasty words with Tarn and then they were all at a run, Talon at the front, straight through the woods. The cohorts that followed would burn the dead and tend to the wounded, but for now Talon wanted to bring the raiders to bay before they had a chance to escape.
Ten minutes later they were standing in fields staring at a collection of huts that had been crudely thrown together from mud and wood. The Hawks swarmed through. Berren and Tarn kicked in door after door, shields raised and blades poised, but one after another the huts were empty. Berren was shaking: the excitement of the fight and then the charge through the woods and now the air of danger, the threat of every shadow, they all had a hold on him. His eyes flicked this way and that, and with every sign of movement, his hand flashed to his sword.
They passed a hut whose door was hanging broken from its frame. Tarn went straight past, but Berren thought he caught a flicker of movement, and when he stopped and looked again, he saw a pair of eyes looking back at him from the far corner of the floor. At first he couldn’t understand what he was seeing, but when he took a step through the doorway, the eyes rose and a woman scrabbled to her feet, showering cold ashes everywhere. She was dressed in rags, old and with a bad leg. Someone who couldn’t run. She had a knife and she was pointing it at him, holding it as far away from her as she could. She’d hidden in the firepit, covering herself with ash and half-burned wood and they’d almost missed her.