At this Kleist started to cackle as if it were the funniest joke he’d ever heard.
“Leave her alone,” said Cale.
“You want to be worrying about yourself, mate. She’ll be fine, I should think.”
With that Cale started for the edge and disappeared over it, sliding down the steep hillside at almost running pace. In thirty seconds he was on the battlefield. Ahead of him the second rank was already moving into the brutal shambles of the first attack, another eight thousand men crammed into a space too small for half that number. Already the Redeemers were spilling around the sides, penning the new arrivals in-the reinforcements merely giving them more immobile soldiers they could take their time to hack and trip.
The packed ranks of soldiers had split here and there as they pushed and shoved, and huge piles of bodies, some as high as ten feet, caused the scrum to flow around them like the sea around rocks. Cale took up a fast trot, and within two minutes he was moving around the Materazzi rear of the fight. In contrast now to the overview from the hill, he had no sense at all of what was going on. Some of the soldiers at the rear were hanging back, uncertain; others were pressing forward. Only because of the view from the hill did he know that, at the front and moving down the sides, a massacre was going on. Here there wasn’t even much noise, just groups of soldiers moving to go forward, changing direction as each one saw a gap or, following another collapse at the front, surged forward, thinking they had made another break in the Redeemers’ ranks. And so thousands of men a little impatient, hoping that they would not miss out, went slowly to their dreadful deaths.
Cale raced along the line at the rear looking for Simon, a task as hopeless as Kleist had said it would be. But if he had been deluding himself when he started down Silbury Hill, now there was only despair. He would never find Simon, even if he were not already dead. All that would happen is that he would die down there or return a failure in Arbell’s eyes. Even if she accepted that there was nothing he could do, he did not want her to accept such a thing. He did not want to give up what it meant to be adored.
Then he had other things to be worried about. Around the side of a line of Materazzi pressing forward, two dozen Redeemers appeared. In groups of three they attacked any men-at-arms looking for a way to get to the front of the fight. One tripped them with a long billhook, a second hit them with one of the hefty mallets they had used to bang in their wooden stakes, and a third stabbed them under the arm or through the eyeholes of the helmet. With the stragglers down, they even started to use the billhooks to pull back the legs of the men pushing in line to get to the front. In the crush and mud, and not expecting an attack of this kind, soldiers who would have been almost invulnerable anywhere else slipped and fell and were dispatched waving and struggling in the mire, helpless as newborns.
Then a group of Redeemers saw Cale and moved to take him from three sides. An arrow struck the one to his left in the eye, a bolt the one on his right. The first fell silently, the second screaming and scratching at his chest. The third still had a look of astonishment on his face as Cale struck at his neck and cut his throat deep into his spinal cord. He fell thrashing in the mud beside the Lord of Six Counties he had slaughtered only seconds before. Then Cale stepped into a second fight, holding the arm of his attacker to one side, crashing his forehead into the Redeemer’s face and stabbing him skillfully through the heart. A billhooker went down openmouthed to one of Henri’s bolts, but Kleist’s arrow only took the mallet-wielder in the arm. His luck lasted two seconds as Cale, slipping in the mud, missed the fatal stroke and took him in the belly. He fell crying out, and lay where it would take him hours to die. Then another wave of men-at-arms pushed back the Redeemers that remained, and Cale stood, covered in blood and impotent, not knowing whether to turn this way or that. All his great skill was nothing in the press and the confusion-now he was just a boy in a crowd of dying men.
And then, just as he was about to turn away, there was another collapse. Sixty men deep ahead of him, the biggest yet, and a split going far toward the front opened up. For a second, terrified, he hesitated, knowing this breach was the very jawbone of death opening up for him. But fear of failure in his lover’s eyes drove him into the briefly widening gap, and able to run far faster than the slipping armored men around him, he made it to within a dozen feet of the front. But all that met him was an impenetrable wall of dead and dying Materazzi. No one in front of him had a wound; they had simply collapsed on top of each other and were being crushed by the weight of those above them and pushing from behind. For a few moments there were only the piles of dead and a strange, low groaning. The helmets of some had come loose, others, trapped but with a hand free, had removed them in a desperate bid for air. Their faces now were purple, some were nearly black-a few groaning in a horribly wheezing effort to fill their lungs-but nothing could enter their horribly crushed chests. Even as Cale looked, the breathing stopped and the mouths gaped like fish on a riverbank. Several spoke to him-horrible whispers. “Help! Help!” He tried to pull a couple free, but they might as well have been set in the rice flour and concrete of the Sanctuary walls. He turned away and scanned the piles of the dead and dying moaning around him.
“Help!” creaked a voice. He looked down at a young man, his face a dreadful purple blue. “Help!” Cale looked away. “Cale. Help!”
Astonished, Cale turned back. And then he recognized him, even beneath the puffed-up black and blue of his face. It was Conn Materazzi. An arrow shot past Cale’s right ear and pinged as it hit one of the armored dead. He ducked down next to Conn.
“I can finish you quickly. Yes or no?”
But Conn didn’t seem to hear. “Help me! Help me!” he said-a horrible soft and rasping sound. Once again, more powerful now with the appalling sight of someone he knew, Cale felt the awfulness of being here-and how useless. Looking anxiously over his shoulder, he could see the gap that had let him so near the front begin to squeeze to a close as the Redeemers forced the Materazzi on the edges back into the middle. He stood up to run for it. “Help me!” Something in Conn Materazzi’s eyes froze the hairs on his neck-the dreadful horror and despair. Cale reached into the pile of dead and heaved with all the strength he had, doubled by rage and fear. But Conn was pinned, one below and three on top, by a thousand pounds of dead weight and sheet steel. Again he heaved. Nothing. “Sorry, chum,” he said to Conn. “Time’s up.”
Then he was sent sprawling to the ground by a hefty shove in the back. Frightened and surprised, he slipped on the mud as he tried to pull his sword and scramble free of his attacker.
It was a horse. It looked at him and snorted expectantly. Cale stared at the animal-its rider dead, it was looking for someone to lead it away from the battlefield. At once Cale grabbed the rope fastened to the saddle, knotted it around the hefty pommel then rushed to tie it round Conn’s chest and under his armpits. His face was black now and eyes sightless. Luckily the rope was thin but very stiff, more ceremonial than practical, and easily pushed under one arm and then the other. Cale tied it, howling in rage as he fumbled it twice, and then fell over in the mud trying to jump into the saddle. More desperate than ever now, he grabbed the pommel and, seeing the gap closing, screamed in the horse’s ear. Startled, it set off, slipping and flailing in the mud, almost falling but finally getting a purchase as it pulled with all the strength of a large hunter used to carrying three hundred pounds on its back. At first nothing moved, then with a rush and the snap of Conn’s right leg, he was pulled free of the pile of dead men crushing him. With this rush of movement the horse nearly fell again and Cale almost lost his grip on the saddle. Then they were off, the three of them heading for the gap at no more than four or five miles an hour. But the horse was strong and well trained and it moved, happy now, for all the disaster around it, that it had a rider on its back. The instinct that had kept the horse safe in its wanderings around the battlefield for more than fifteen minutes in the middle of a massacre now kept it safe again. Cale held his body as flat to the horse’s back as he could, ready to pull his knife and cut Conn free if he threatened to pull them over. But the mud that had caused the death of so many Materazzi, and was to kill many more, was Conn’s savior. Unconscious, he slumped easily in whatever direction he was pulled, almost like a sled in snow. Cale kept his head down and urged the horse on with his feet, not seeing the two Redeemers coming to meet the slowly moving animal. Nor did he see them fall, crying out in their horror and distress as if one man, cut down by the dreadful watchfulness of Kleist and Vague Henri.