"I wonder how this fight is going," Abivard muttered. He was too busy trying to stay alive to have much feel for the course of the action as a whole. Had he advanced since his charge ended, or had he and Sharbaraz's men given ground? He couldn't tell. Just getting back up with the rightful King of Kings seemed hard enough at the moment.
When he finally made it to the King of Kings' side, Sharbaraz shouted at him: "How fare we?"
"I hoped you knew," Abivard answered in some dismay.
Sharbaraz grimaced. "This isn't as easy as we hoped it would be. They aren't falling all over themselves to desert, are they?"
"What did you say, Majesty?" Abivard hadn't heard all of that; he had been busy fending off one of Smerdis' lancers. Only when the fellow sullenly drew back could he pay attention once more.
"Never mind," Sharbaraz told him. By now, the King of Kings' lance was long gone; his sword had blood on the blade. For one of the rare times since Abivard had known him, he looked unsure what to do next. The stubborn resistance Smerdis' men were putting up seemed to baffle him.
Then, just as he was starting to give orders for another push against the foe, wild, panic-filled shouts ripped through the left wing of Smerdis' army. Some men were crying "Treason!" but more yelled "Sharbaraz!" They turned on the warriors still loyal to Smerdis and attacked them along with Sharbaraz's soldiers.
With its left in chaos, Smerdis' army quickly unraveled. Men at the center and right, seeing their position turned, either threw down their weapons and surrendered or wheeled in flight. Here and there, stubborn rearguard bands threw themselves away to help their comrades escape.
"Press them!" Sharbaraz cried. "Don't let them get away." Now that striking hard had been rewarded, he was back in his element, urging on his warriors to make their victory as complete as they could.
For all his urging, though, a good part of Smerdis' army broke free and fled south. His own force had fought too hard through the morning to make the grinding pursuit that might have destroyed the enemy for good and all.
At last, he seemed to realize that and broke off the chase. "If I order them to do something they can't, next time they may not listen to me when I tell them to do something they can," he explained to Abivard.
"We did have a solid victory there," Abivard answered.
"It's not what I wanted," Sharbaraz said. "I had in mind to smash the usurper's men so thoroughly no one would think of standing against me after this. Just a victory isn't enough." Then he moderated his tone. "But it will have to do, and it's ever so much better than getting beat."
"Isn't that the truth?" Abivard said.
Sharbaraz said, "I want to question some of the men we caught who fought so hard against us: I want to learn how Smerdis managed to keep them loyal after they learned I hadn't given up my throne of my own free will. The sooner I find out, the sooner I can do something about it."
"Aye," Abivard said, but his voice was abstracted; he had only half heard the rightful King of Kings. He was looking over the field and discovering for the first time the hideous flotsam and jetsam a large battle leaves behind. He had not seen the aftermath of the fight on the Pardrayan steppe; he had fled to keep from becoming part of it. The other fights in which he had joined were only skirmishes. What came after them was like this in kind, but not in degree. The magnitude of suffering spread out over a farsang of ground appalled him.
Men with holes in them or faces hacked away or hands severed or entrails spilled lay in ungraceful death amid pools of blood already going from scarlet to black, with flies buzzing around them and ravens spiraling down from the sky to peck at their blindly staring eyes and other dainties. The battlefield smelled something like a slaughterhouse, something like a latrine.
The crumpled shapes of dead horses cropped up here and there amid the human wreckage. Abivard pitied them more than the soldiers; they hadn't had any idea why they died.
But worse than the killed, men or beasts, were the wounded. Hurt horses screamed with the terrible sopranos of women in agony. Men groaned and howled and cursed and wailed and wept and bled and tried to bandage themselves and begged for aid or their mothers or death or all three at once and crawled toward other men whom they hoped would help them. And other men, or jackals who walked on two legs, wandered over the field looking for whatever they could carry away and making sure that none of those they robbed would live to avenge themselves.
Still others, to their credit, did what they could for the injured, stitching, bandaging, and setting broken bones. A couple of the village wizards had healing among their talents. They could treat wounds that would have proved fatal save for their aid, but at terrible cost to themselves. One of them, his hands covered with the blood of a man he had just brought back from the brink of death, got up from the ground where he had knelt, took a couple of steps toward another wounded warrior, and pitched forward onto his face in a faint.
"Looking at this, I wish we hadn't brought our wives," Abivard said. "Even if they don't picture us among the fallen, they'll never be easy in their minds about the chances of war."
Sharbaraz looked back toward the baggage train, which lay well to the rear of the actual fighting. That distance seemed to ease his mind. "It will be all right," he said. "They can't have seen too much." Abivard hoped he was right.
The prisoner wore only ragged linen drawers. One of Sharbaraz's followers who had started the day in boiled leather-or perhaps in just his caftan-now had a fine suit of mail from the royal armories. The captured warrior held a dirty rag around a cut on his arm. He looked tired and frightened, his eyes enormous in a long, dark face.
Realizing who Sharbaraz was frightened him even more. Before the guards who had manhandled him into Sharbaraz's presence could cast him down to the ground, he prostrated himself of his own accord. "May your years be long and your realm increase, Majesty," he choked out.
Sharbaraz turned to Abivard. "He says that now," the rightful King of Kings observed. "This morning, though, he'd cheerfully have speared me out of the saddle."
"Amazing what a change a few hours can bring," Abivard agreed.
The prisoner ground his face into the dust. "Majesty, forgive!" he wailed.
"Why should I?" Sharbaraz growled. "Once you knew I'd not abandoned my throne of my own free will, how could you have the brass to fight against me?"
"Forgive!" the prisoner said. "Majesty, I am a poor man, and ignorant, and I know nothing save what my officers tell me. They said-I give you their very words, by the God I swear it-they said you had indeed given up the throne of your own accord, and then wickedly changed your mind, like a woman who says 'I want my red shoes. No, my blue ones. They said you could not go back on an oath you swore, that the God would not smile on Makuran if you seized the rule. Now, of course, I see this is not so, truly I do." He dared raise his face a couple of inches to peer anxiously at Sharbaraz.
"Take him away, back with the others," Sharbaraz told the guards. They hauled the prisoner to his feet and dragged him off. The rightful King of Kings let out a long, weary sigh and turned to Abivard. "Another one."
"Another one," Abivard echoed. "We've heard-what? — six now? They all sing the same song."
"So they do." Sharbaraz paced back and forth, kicking up dirt. "Smerdis, may he drop into the Void this instant, is more clever than I gave him credit for. This tale of my renouncing my oath of abdication may be a lie from top to bottom, but it gives those who believe it a reason to fight for him and against me. I thought his forces would crumble at the first touch, like salt sculptures in the rain, but it may prove harder than that."