Stephen Baxter - Bronze Summer

But she was here, with a chance to kill a few Trojans and avenge her adopted mother. What elsewas life for? She screamed with aggression and exhilaration.

Close to the centre of the facing lines, Piseni stopped dead. ‘Make ready!’ he yelled. He took his own bow, notched it with a grey-tipped arrow, and aimed it at a running Trojan. ‘Make your formation! Hold your fire!’

Mi stood beside him, readying her own shot. Others stood at her sides and behind her back as the formation gathered. There was a moment of stillness, of waiting.

She watched them coming, over the length of her arrow, the men leading the Trojan charge, and her archer’s eyes made out every detail. The fore-fighters, Piseni had called them, the elite warriors, those who would lead the charge for glory. They were bigger physically than the men who followed, and the best equipped. They wore armour of varying designs, bronze breastplates with extensions to cover the neck and shoulder and thighs, leather kilts, shin guards. Some wore conical helmets like the Hatti, some elaborate helmets with horsehair plumes or savage-looking boars’ tusks. They had shields of different types too, some shaped like towers, some with big indentations so they were like two shields in one. They all carried weapons, spears and swords in hand or in scabbards. Many had armour plates or masks or grills over their faces. Closer and closer they came, and still the archers held their positions.

Piseni called, ‘Hold your fire! Don’t waste a shot!’ — and an axe caught him in the chest, a lucky shot by some brute in the Trojan lines, and he was thrown back, landing with his chest cavity splayed open, splinters of broken bone sticking out of his frothy flesh.

Mi looked down with horror. She had never been so close to violent death before, even though she herself had killed. The rest of the archers stood in their rows as Piseni had taught them, their bows notched, as shocked as she was.

And still the Trojans advanced.

Mi screamed, ‘Fire!’ She released her own bow.

The arrows sang through the air, taking only a heartbeat to reach their targets. The hardened iron tips punched through softer bronze breastplates and faceplates. Fore-fighters went down, shocked and screaming, to be trampled by those who followed. Mi knelt, notching her bow again, as the row behind her fired in turn. And then she stood and fired again. You had to make every shot count, it had been impressed on her in training over and over. Though Zidanza and his apprentices had toiled at their foundries deep within the Wall all winter, there had been no time to make as much iron as they hoped, and not enough ore either, once the shipments arriving over the Northern Ocean had been stopped, and some of the arrowheads, hastily manufactured, would inevitably be brittle or otherwise flawed. You had to make every decent shot take a life. So she picked her targets, one after another, that man’s visored face, the next’s shining breastplate. She loosed each arrow without thinking, imagining its flight, where it would strike, and then immediately launching another, over and over.

But now the Trojan lines were nearly on her, and the Northland lines too were breaking, running forward to meet the Trojans. Both sides carried spears two, three, four paces long. Too late Mi tried to run.

The two lines came crashing together all around her, the long spears clattering and stabbing, and men cried out and blood spurted. A Trojan shield slammed into Mi, and she was on the ground. She had lost her bow, her quiver. She was surrounded by a forest of legs, of kilts and bronze armour plate, and over her head swords flashed and the long spears thrust, and the screaming intensified. A booted foot stamped on her back — no, she was being walked over. Then a hand grabbed the scruff of her tunic and hauled her back along the crowded ground, through the Northlander lines. It was Deri, she saw, yelling at her.

The hilt of a sword slammed into her temple and the world fell away.

Deri had scarcely hauled Mi to safety when a huge Trojan ran straight at him, spinning a sword over his head. Deri raised his shield to fend off the first blow, taking an impact that felt as if it drove his arm back into its socket. But he and the Trojan were shoved together as the lines closed, shields clashing with a slam. Deri was face to face with his man, their faces a hand’s length apart. His breath smelled of strange spices, and he wore an elaborate helmet with a horsehair plume. Arms pinned by the struggling crowd, it was difficult for either of them even to move, let alone make an effective strike. But the Trojan was stronger. With a single hand in Deri’s chest he shoved him back, and raised the wicked blade of a bronze dagger. Deri twisted so the descending weapon landed on his breastplate. All the air was knocked out of him by the punch, but the bronze blade only scratched Deri’s heavy armour of hardened iron. And in that instant Deri swung his own sword across the man’s throat, cutting through flesh and gristle until the blade lodged in bone. No hesitation. The man gurgled and choked. Deri yanked at the sword to get it free of the bone; it came away with a scrape. The sword was a new kind sent from allies on the Continent, to the east beyond Gaira, bronze but with less propensity to snap at the hilt when you used it to slash than others. Well, it had already proven its worth. The Trojan, bleeding out, had no room to fall. Deri pushed him down by brute force and stepped over the body to get at the next man following.

This man had no armour save a leather helmet, a small round shield, leather kilt and shin guards over a tunic. Already the Northlanders were cutting through the Trojan elite; Piseni’s archers had done the job that was asked of them in thinning out the fore-fighters. But the man was muscular and determined, Deri could see from the blood smeared on his tunic that he had already killed today, and he raised a stubby spear. But Deri was faster; he swung the flat of the sword to chop at the man’s belly, twisted the weapon and hauled it backwards, dragging out a loop of grey entrails. The man looked down, as if astonished. Then Deri slammed the hilt of his spear into the man’s forehead with a satisfying crunch of bone, and the man fell back.

His falling created a space, and Deri had a heartbeat free of the fight. He was already breathing hard, already his arms and chest ached from the heavy blows he had taken. Neither of the men who had stood by him at the start of the fighting was still there; both of them had been replaced by those pushing from behind. Yet the battle was only moments old.

And here came the next man, as lightly equipped as the last. Deri managed to get his spear in play this time, and impaled the man before he got within arm’s length. But before he could get the spear loose another came, and he had to swing his sword again, this time a lucky strike that cut the man’s face open so that he fell back, jaw dangling, screaming in a strange, liquid way. And then the pressure from behind shoved him forward almost into the arms of his next opponent, and he lunged and stabbed again.

So it went on, the great blocks crashing into each other in a band of bloody friction, where men screamed and lunged and slashed and stabbed in a compressed, struggling mass. There was a stink of piss and shit from emptied bowels, and the blood was everywhere. Deri had to fight just to stay upright, let alone to give himself room to swing a blade. He had barely moved from the position where he had started, the lines were collapsing in on the front where they met, and soon he found himself slipping on a heap of corpses underfoot. Yet he remembered Tibo, and Nago, and Vala, and all the others who had fallen because of the Trojan, and let the anger fuel his muscles as he slew and maimed, again and again.