Gavin Smith - The Age of Scorpio

The deep bass note of the carnyx sounded out over mud, marsh and water. Bress moved to the side of the curragh and looked north towards the two islands and the mainland. Ettin joined him. Bress noted that he now carried a great axe with a double head made of two crescents of bronze. On his shoulder Ettin’s second head, that of a painted man with a lacquered beard and dark hair, remained silent. The tall pale man glanced at his second with distaste.

‘If he has told you all he can, let him die,’ Bress said.

‘There,’ Ettin said pointing. Though some miles away yet, they could make out the horses on the causeway.

‘Cowards! Your king begged for mercy while we ate his flesh, raped the corpses of your women and fed your children to our wolves!’ one of the Corpse People shouted, a rider in the front rank. He opened his mouth to shout again. The casting spear broke his teeth on its way through his head. Fachtna kept moving through the ranks of the Cigfran Teulu borrowing another two casting spears as he went. He stopped just behind the last three ranks.

‘They will charge,’ he said.

‘Horsemen will not charge a wall of spears,’ one of the warband replied.

‘They will charge. You must not break. You must hold. Those of you not in the front three rows, lend your strength and push. Put your spears in the horses. Push them deep and up – make them rear – you understand me?’

The warriors around him did not look happy but they nodded. Morfudd was otherwise occupied in the rearmost rank preparing to receive the charge.

‘First give me some room.’ Fachtna had seen who had given the order to halt the horses and the man behind him who had given the order for the carnyx to be blown, presumably to warn the black curraghs. Across the channel on the other island the mad jeered and called for their blood.

With a simple gesture Gwydyon ordered the advance. The three horses in the front rank, one of them now ridden by a truly dead man with a casting spear through his head, charged. The line of horses behind them moved forward at a slower pace.

Hands changed their grips on the hafts of longspears. Feet shifted for better purchase on the causeway. Despite Fachtna’s words, they expected the horses to shy from the spears at the last moment. Closer, the horses becoming larger, their colouration told of their heritage, known from dark tales told around the campfire or late at night when the warriors were children. Those they had thought, until recently, to be unkillable dead rode the Otherworldly steeds.

As the horses reached the spearheads they all but leaped into them. Spears pierced horseflesh. Horses screamed. The spears soaked in the blood of the daughter of their goddess and her champion held, somehow, and did not splinter. Men and women slid back on the causeway; those behind them pushed, stopping the slide, adding their strength to the three rows of spears, giving them the strength to hold their ground.

One of the horses, the one with the dead rider, a longspear nearly all the way through its body, opened its mouth impossibly wide. Its teeth were those of a predator. It bit the face off the spearman who’d run it through. The dead man, his face a bloody ruin, did not fall. The press of the melee held him up. A warrior in the third rank, who’d just seen her lover’s face bitten off, screamed and despite the press lifted her spear and pushed herself forward to run the weapon through the horse’s skull.

‘And step!’ Morfudd cried. And somehow they did. The two remaining horses reared. Spears forced them back. One of the riders fell off his steed, impaling himself on three spears, but they did not drop due to the press of bodies.

The other horseman in the front row stabbed out with his longspear as his shield caught blow after blow. His spearhead ran through the head of the woman next to Morfudd.

‘And step!’ Morfudd screamed, furious now as her friend’s hot blood splattered her face. And again they did, holding their dead up in the press of bodies as they went.

Fachtna had pulled his boots off. He climbed up onto the shoulders of the spearmen and -women and ran from shoulder to shoulder over the warband, his bare feet giving him more purchase. Then he leaped. Powerful leg muscles, infused with what Britha would have thought of as the magics of his people, carried him over the heads of the first rank of horsemen as the spears in their flesh forced the rearing horses over and into the mud of the marsh.

Fachtna threw both his casting spears in mid-air. The rider next to Gwydyon died, a spear in his chest. Gwydyon raised his shield just in time, the spear meant for his head hitting the shield, its point piercing the wood.

Fachtna tore his sword out of its scabbard. His spear had made Gwydyon raise his shield so that his face was covered. Fachtna swung as he came in. The ghostly singing blade cut straight through Gwydyon’s shield and then continued its path through his body and then through his screaming horse’s flanks.

Ysgawyn watched the warrior he had seen from afar the other night land in front of him as his warband leader’s torso slid diagonally off the rest of his body. The man spun and sliced upwards with his sword, held two-handed. Ysgawyn threw himself back off his horse as it was decapitated. The warrior kicked at the horse as it toppled and came straight for him. Ysgawyn lost interest in the fight and leaped from the causeway onto an island in the marsh.

None of the horsemen near Fachtna seemed interested in fighting him. He watched the Corpse People’s king flee across the marsh as he tried to recover his breath.

Behind him the Cigfran Teulu charged the second rank, butchering the horses and killing the last remaining rider. Soon they were killing the third-rank riders as they tried to turn their horses. Morfudd was next to him now.

The rest of the horsemen were turning their horses as best they could to make their escape. Those close to the front were in disarray. Horses reared; others jumped into the marsh and got bogged down or broke their legs. There was no battle now, just killing. It could have gone very differently. The Corpse People could have ridden straight through them, but the Cigfran Teulu had held.

There was a savage grin on Morfudd’s blood-spattered face. The warband’s blood was up. They were feeling the rush of combat.

They had lost three fighters. Fachtna had respectfully suggested to Morfudd that they recover all the weapons that had been blessed with the blood magics. He, along with some of the warband, took discarded Corpse People’s shields. Unfortunately they did not have time to strip the dead of their armour.

Fachtna was impatient to get going. Tangwen had scouted ahead a little. The hunter could see that one of the curraghs had come close to the shore and warriors, the tips of their spearheads glinting in the sunlight, were making their way across sandbanks to the island. The giants were moving too, but none were approaching them.

Morfudd and Fachtna joined Britha and Teardrop at the front as Britha moved ahead to keep an eye on Tangwen. Some of the moonstruck wretches had made it to this side of the channel and more were following, but they seemed happy to wade around in the mud, occasionally throwing it at the warband but not getting any closer.

‘We need to move more quickly,’ Teardrop told Morfudd, who nodded and turned to hurry her warriors.

Britha was coming to the conclusion that she hated beaches, or indeed any body of sand close to water. She wished for night. She wished for enough woad to cover herself and the warband, and she wished for a warband who would fight naked.

Instead what she saw was a line two deep of a hundred demon-ridden Lochlannach spearmen standing on a sandbank, a curragh in the water behind them and behind that two of the horribly misshapen giants towering over the ship. She remembered broken chariots and horseflesh and the mangled bodies of the warriors of the Cirig. What were they thinking? They could fight the spearmen, just, with the help of blood magic, but the giants?