But Temrai played his part as if they’d been rehearsing together for weeks; the pavises held up to the barrage (they were an improved design of his own, stretched hides backed with thick coils of the plaited straw matting the Empire issued for making archery targets with; designed by experts to stop an infinite number of arrows) and when the hail of arrows faltered and became sporadic, he opened the screens and sent the pikemen through.
It was a hedge of spears, dense as the undergrowth in an unmanaged wood. The archers carried on loosing into it, but their arrows didn’t get very far, it was worse than trying to shoot through a matted tangle of thorns. The distance to be covered was only twenty yards or so; and then the pikes were close enough to touch, and the plainsmen tried to run away; but they were backed up on their own ranks, who were backed up on the supply carts bringing up more arrows, which were backed up on the reinforcements coming down the path. There was a certain limited scope for compression, as the front ranks cringed away from the spearblade hedge, like children on a beach skipping out of the way of the incoming tide. But when they’d flattened themselves against the men behind them, packed together like arrows in a barrel, there was nowhere left for them to go; all they could do was watch the pike-heads come on to them and into them.
Some of the front rank were killed outright. Others hung from the pikes still living, like the chunks of meat on skewers that the Sons of Heaven ate with rice and peppers. The force of the advance was enough to lift them off their feet, still struggling like speared fish (because the halberdiers were backed up too, the rear ranks pressing forward were still advancing, cramming into the ranks in front so that they couldn’t have lowered their pikes even if they’d wanted to; so the long shafts of ash and apple bent like bows under the weight of the skewered meat, but being tested and approved to the highest specifications of the empire, they didn’t break and neither did the men packed in round them). The second rank of the enemy joined the first on the spike, like a second layer of cloth joined to the first by the needle; a few pikeshafts snapped, but not enough to matter. After the first two ranks had been gathered up on the pikes, the forward progress stopped; dead or impaled, they served the third rank like a gambeson or some other form of padded or quilted armour, resisting the thrust with softness rather than strength or deflection (the padding of the gambeson smothers and dissipates the force of the thrust, clogging the advance of the blade). The forward momentum of the pikemen faltered, as the shower of arrows had done; the manoeuvre had run its course, and it was time for the next stage.
Temrai, meanwhile, had seen another opportunity. He was on the path, looking down at the compressed mass of the slaughter, when the advance stalled and the two sides stood staring at each other through the dust across the ashwood thicket, like two neighbours on either side of a hedge. He turned to the man next to him, a section leader called Lennecai, and tugged at his sleeve.
‘They’re stuck,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘They’re stuck,’ Temrai repeated. ‘They can’t move, same as us. Get this path clear and bring down six companies of archers.’
They cleared the path by dumping the carts, pushing them off the crumbling track. Most of them tumbled harmlessly down, smashing into junk timber as they bounced off the rocky face of the slope; a few landed like trebuchet shot in the compacted mass of bodies, some on one side of the hedge, some on the other. Lennecai lined his archers out in a double column and ordered them to face about; enough of them had a clear shot down into the pikemen to make the manoeuvre worthwhile. Bardas’ men instinctively looked up as the arrows hissed and whistled into the air, and were able to watch the arrows bank and pitch, slanting in at them like rain on a windy day. Of course there was no hope of getting out of the way; they had no choice but to stand and watch the arrows, as closely packed as rows of standing wheat. It wasn’t just the front rank, or the front three ranks. The archers were raking the whole formation from front to back.
As men died or were spitted, so they stopped pushing; the momentum went out of the push of pikes like tension from a rope bridge when one of the main hawsers is cut through. The mass started to crumple, just as a crushed plate folds up under the hammer, until the pressure from the men on the other end of the spears forced them to give ground. As they slipped back so the formation no longer supported the weight of the pikes, with their tremendous weight of meat hanging from the sharp end. The pikes went down, like trees felled in an overgrown forest, fouling and tangling in the undergrowth. Now would be a good time for a counterattack, Temrai observed, and a few moments later he saw it happen, as the survivors of the third and fourth ranks of his men pushed and shoved their way past the bodies of their fellows and tried to press home an attack with their scimitars. It was only a partial success; there still wasn’t enough room to swing a sword, to bring down an overhead blow, and in any case the pikemen’s helmets and pauldrons were easily proof against light cuts delivered with the force of the arm and wrist alone. The best they could do was trim off a few fingers, ears and noses (like foresters trimming a newly felled trunk).
‘He’s about to make a mistake,’ Bardas said aloud.
The pikemen were slumping, falling back; and Temrai’s men were pushing forward, following up an opportunity they’d never anticipated. Bardas sent a couple of runners to the sergeants of halberdiers, and another to the artillery crews.
Temrai saw it too, but not quite in time; by that stage it was out of his control, as his men surged out through the breaches in pursuit of the pikemen, and were immediately enfiladed by Bardas’ archers, positioned on either side. The shock of volley fire at close range stopped them in their tracks, as men went down like cut corn; before they could turn round and go back, the halberdiers moved in to cut them off. Temrai’s runners arrived in time to stop anybody else going beyond the stockade, but for those already outside nothing could be done. The work crews had started piling trash in the breaches to block them up even before the last of the pursuit party were killed. Bardas’ second opportunity didn’t amount to much; the trebuchets only managed two clear shots each on the archers lined up on the path before Temrai pulled them out.
They packed up the portable bridges and withdrew in good order, without interference from Temrai’s battered and out-of-commission artillery. Once the assault party was safely home, the bombardiers restored the trebuchets to their previous settings, locked down the handwheels and carried on with the bombardment of the path and the engine emplacements.
‘On balance,’ Bardas explained, ‘we came out ahead. We killed more of them, we made them waste a lot of arrows, and of course there’s the morale effect of having the advantage at the end. More to the point, we learned another lesson about close fighting in the fortress, and we learned it in a practice run rather than the actual main assault. All they can say is that they’re still there, and that hardly counts as progress.’ He sighed; and if he could see the wounded men sprawled on the wagons outside the surgeons’ enclosure, he didn’t say anything about them. ‘We’ve got a long way to go yet,’ he said, ‘but we’re getting there. After all, Perimadeia wasn’t built in a day.’
‘What, me?’ Gorgas looked shocked. ‘Certainly not. Why should I do such a stupid thing?’
The envoy’s expression didn’t change – did they breed them that way, Gorgas wondered, or did they have the sinews in their cheeks and jaws cut when they were children, as part of a lifelong apprenticeship in the art of diplomacy? ‘I’m only repeating what we were told,’ he said. ‘Our sources say that the rebellion was started by your men, acting on your orders. The fact that you’re discussing the matter with me rather than twenty thousand halberdiers ought to give you some indication of how much faith we put in reports from that particular source.’