Stephen Baxter - Bronze Summer

Deri raged against Muwa’s strong grip. ‘You will get your chance,’ Muwa murmured. ‘Another place, another day, the man will die at your hands. But not here-’

An arrow slammed into the Spider’s back, knocking him to the ground. He lay still, dead immediately. There was an angry roar from the Trojans.

Deri looked back at the Northlander forces. Mi had come out of the lines. She screamed abuse, brandishing her bow. Others from her unit of archers came to drag her back. Another damaged child, Deri thought.

To gruff shouts of anger, outrage, dishonour, Trojans started to advance, all along the line, spontaneously, raggedly. Their sergeants had to follow the events; they ran forward, bellowing to the rest to follow and form up.

And Tibo slumped and fell at last, the spear twisting out of the ground.

‘So,’ Muwa said. ‘Dishonour on both sides, and we must fight after all. But at least we got rid of the Spider.’

Deri spat, ‘And that’s worth the life of my son, is it? My own life ends with him, whatever happens today. Come — help me with him. I won’t leave him here.’

They hurried forward to the body before the Trojan line reached it.

The commanders stalked before the Northlander lines. ‘Hold your places! Let them come at you! Let the archers do their work!’ The words were repeated by bellowing translators in the tongues of the Northlanders, Albians and Gairans, and in the several dialects spoken by the Hatti warriors.

Milaqa was at the rear of the lines now, in the ruins of an abandoned, oft-raided settlement, standing on an old flood mound with Raka, Kilushepa and other leaders. From here they got a clear view of the field, of the units of the Northlanders and their allies, of the scuffed little arena in the middle of the field from which Deri and Muwa hurried back with the body of Tibo — and of the Trojan horde closing like an approaching storm.

It was happening, she realised. The battle that had been anticipated all summer, if not since the Midsummer Invasion last year. It was here, it was now. But the scale of the armies drawn up on the plain below the Wall, the thousands of men and their glittering weapons, the rigid discipline of their phalanx blocks, the sheer determination to kill they represented — nothing had prepared her for the reality of it. And already blood had been spilled, her own cousin’s.

But battle had yet to be joined. In this still, oddly luminous moment, Milaqa looked around, at Kilushepa surrounded by a handful of Hatti soldiers, the Tawananna sleek and determined in a grand, colourful, highly visible robe that swept to the ground. Raka, Noli and the other Annids also wore their robes of office, their faces pinched after the hunger of the blockaded summer. There was Teel, her uncle, standing in his owl cloak with the others, all his manipulations and stratagems now ending in this day of blood and bronze and iron. And the soldiers, yelling, waving their weapons, holding the line as the Trojans advanced, their commanders whipping up their lust for the fight. There were a few Hatti veterans among them, and foreign units from Gaira and Albia, but most were Northlanders, from across the Wall and the lowland, here to defend their homeland from the greatest threat it had faced since it had been saved from the sea itself.

But, Milaqa thought, looking across the battlefield, they must be outnumbered two to one by Qirum’s forces. Only their wits and their courage would enable them to see out the day.

The Trojans passed some predetermined mark, and the Northlanders’ planned response began. First, to shouted commands, the Northlander archers raised their bows and began their lethal work. Soon the single arrow fired by Mi with such devastating consequences was followed by a hundred others, a thousand, a flock that seemed to blacken the sky as they rose. The slingers too hurled their lumps of sandstone. As the volleys fell Milaqa heard distant cries, and gaps appeared briefly in the lines of the advancing Trojans. Yet the fall of arrows was not even. This was a stratagem of Kilushepa’s; she had suggested targeting the Trojans on Qirum’s left flank but sparing the Greeks at the centre, in the hope of causing rifts among the allies.

The advance was not stopped. Those who survived just stepped over the fallen, although Milaqa saw little knots of squabbling men form over the dead, like carrion birds, fighting for armour and weapons.

And now Milaqa saw arrows arcing up from the Trojan lines in a response. In half a dozen languages, there were cries of ‘Shields, shields!’ The men before her in their blocks and rows raised their shields, overlapping them with a clatter of wood on wood, and the Hatti troopers standing with Kilushepa on the exposed mound raised their own shields to make a kind of shell to protect their queen and the Annids. The first arrows fell, most clattering into leather shields, or falling away harmlessly, but some found a way through to soft flesh, and men fell screaming, some only paces from Milaqa, blood splashing bright. Yet still the lines held.

Next, to guttural commands, the units of Albians on the right of the Northland line formed up for their counter-charge. They were huge men, with good bronze weaponry but with shields only of wood, and no armour save for heavy skins of bear and wolf. These Pretani warriors, come to honour an ancient alliance between their country and Northland, were men of the thick forest that still coated the peninsula. Some said that as the farmers had advanced, clearing the forest that had once covered the Continent, the old gods had fled to Albia, and today they were ready to unleash their fury on the sons of the men who had burned them out. Whatever the truth of that, the Albians lacked the discipline of the others, despite months of training under Hatti officers, and it was thought they were best used as shock troops before the battle proper was joined.

Now, at their leaders’ barked commands, they roared, picked up the pace, and ran directly at the Trojan lines, apparently oblivious to arrow-fire. Milaqa saw how their bear-like aggression alarmed the Trojans, who closed up in their compact blocks.

Albians slammed into Trojans, and the fighting began at last, a collision of blades, blood and flesh.

And now, from the left of the Northland line, Milaqa saw the final surprise element planned by the military men: units of archers running right out onto the field, wielding their bows even as they ran into the closing gap between the armies.

Mi, beside commander Piseni himself, ran with the other archers through a narrowing corridor between the armies. She was dressed for speed, armed only with her bow and her quiver of special iron-tipped arrows, with no more protection than a light tunic and the boots on her feet. The Trojan infantry was close, only heartbeats from meeting the Northlander army.

Piseni, the Hatti who had trained the Northlanders’ archers, was a warrior of the bodyguard of the Hatti king in Hattusa. He was the best archer Mi had ever seen — better than her, better than Medoc, better by far than anybody she had practised with back on Kirike’s Land. And as they had trained through the summer he had picked out Mi and fifty others, the fastest runners, the best shots, for a special assignment. A task to be completed at a specific moment in the battle, he said — one moment that could determine the outcome of the war.

Now that moment had come, and here she was running between the closing lines. Nothing in her training had prepared her for this reality. The charging phalanxes didn’t seem human; they were like huge animals, bristling with armour and weapons, that would roll over her and obliterate her in an instant. The air was thick with arrows, slingshot and javelins, some of them lanced into the ground close to Mi, and the noise was tremendous, thousands of male voices yelling as one.