Brian Ruckley - Bloodheir

The centre of the Black Road army halted. Its wings came on, closing on the higher ground that flanked the road. Taim stretched up out of his saddle, gazing across towards the low ridge to the west where Aewult had stationed himself. He could make out no detail save a thicket of pennants, and the pale glimmer of Palace Shield breastplates. The first blows would fall there, Taim thought, and here where he himself was trapped. The enemy chose to test itself on rising ground, against prepared defenders. It was foolish, but typical of the Black Road: a charge across the low ground where the road pierced the centre of the Haig lines would have been easier, but offered less reward for success, so they chose the harder course, in the hope of a greater prize. They would not care what price they had to pay.

“They’ll learn a hard lesson today,” he heard one of his guards say.

He could see over the heads of the warriors lined up to the meet the assault. The companies coming rushing up towards them were incoherent, lightly armed. Yet here and there amongst the disordered mass, Taim could see Inkallim, and there were clusters of more disciplined warriors. The Black Road roared with a single voice as it came boiling up the north face of the hillock and crashed into the Haig lines. Taim tugged instinctively against his bonds. They were secure, he already knew, but his body cried out for freedom of movement, now that battle was joined so close. For all his weariness with the brutal business of the warrior’s craft, still it was his calling and his life, and it was not in his nature to stand by while others died at the hands of his Blood’s oldest enemies.

The Taral-Haig horsemen were caught up in the moment too, and they closed up into a tighter formation. Some of them were shouting out. Other voices crowded the air: cries of the wounded and dying. Taim saw a single Inkallim burst through the ranks of Haig spearmen. Isolated, she blurred into flashing movement as she was surrounded. She shattered spears and ducked and rolled; took the legs from under one man, cut up into the armpit of a second. An axe came down on her shoulder blade. She staggered, spun and landed a fatal blow. Her shield turned aside another attack, her sword stove in the side of a helmet. They killed her eventually, but not before she had slain or crippled six.

The struggle along the hilltop burned fierce and furious and then faltered. The Black Road flood receded. Their warriors fell back, running and tumbling and slipping down the slope. Cheers rang out, and spears were shaken aloft and rattled against shields. A rider came cantering up and called the company of Taral-Haig horsemen off down the line to where battle was still joined. They went gladly. Too gladly, Taim thought, too hopeful of a speedy end to a struggle that had not yet run its course.

The dead and injured were dragged out from the front line. Men shifted themselves, closing up gaps. Taim looked westward. The far flank of the Haig army was still intact too. Aewult held the ridge beyond the road, and there was a dense speckling of the fallen strewn across the grass before and beneath it.

“They’re coming again,” someone said, and Taim turned back to the still-living enemy closer at hand.

A dark line, tight-packed, was forming across the front rank of the Black Road at the foot of the hill. It came fragment by fragment, out from amongst the mass, flecks of charcoal drifting to the fore and thickening into a wall. It was a soundless thing, and its silence spread, quieting the field, quieting even, it seemed to Taim, the Haig warriors arrayed before him. They were bloodied but undefeated, these spearmen from Nar Vay and the woods of Dramain, yet they grew soft and still. Like a black fog clinging to the ground that line was coming on, far away and thus slow, across the trampled grass; hundreds of warriors, moving at a steady trot. The sound of their feet on the slope swelled, it rumbled. But still no cry came from a single throat. There was only the building, deep, rhythmic roar of their footfalls.

“Send to get your horsemen back,” Taim hissed at the nearest of his guards.

The man turned reluctantly, his eyes lingering upon the scene unfolding before him.

“Don’t try to give any orders here,” he snapped.

Taim too found himself unable to look away from the approaching storm. They were close enough now that he could make out individual figures, all of them smooth and flowing in their movements, not one of them breaking rank, falling behind. He was filled with a kind of awe, and a numb surprise that he should be here, on this day, to see this.

“If you can’t put horses on their flank, you’re done.” he persisted. “Your line’s too thin.”

The guard snorted in disgust. “Maybe if it was Lannis men in it. Three’s deep enough when it’s Haig.”

Three ranks: shield-bearers with short stabbing spears kneeling, and behind them a second row brandishing longer pole-spears; then fierce moorsmen from the high ground between Dramain and Dun Aygll, with axes and hammers and short swords. It was a spiny nut for any attacker to seek to grasp. But not enough, Taim knew in the pit of his stomach. He knew it with the certainty of every year he had spent in the warrior’s craft, and every winter he had spent upon his Blood’s northern border, staring out across the Vale of Stones and knowing what kind of enemy might one day come across it.

“They’re Inkallim, you fool,” he said, wearily, knowing it was too late. “All of them. Six might not be deep enough, let alone three.”

The guard glared at him, then snapped his gaze back to the mass of warriors now pounding up the slope, only a few shallow breaths from impact. They wore dark leather breastplates, or studded jerkins, leggings with black greaves, shields with carved ravens, and black hair streaming out. Taim heard the guard’s sudden intake of breath.

“So many?” the man murmured.

The moment elongated itself, as if the whole world shared in that sucking-in of breath, holding it, poised, as the rolling thunder of the charge resounded through the earth and shook the roots of the hill and built and built until the Inkallim plunged in amongst the spears and there was nothing save the vast crashing clamour of slaughter. The air above the two meeting lines was suddenly full: blood and fragments of broken spears, mud and grass and splinters from shields. Taim wanted to look away, but could not. The front rank of defenders was already gone, consumed in that first fierce impact, nothing more than a long heap of the dead, wounded and fallen. The ravens came over it, trampling their own as willingly as they trampled their foes, unpausing, and danced their way on into the second and the third.

Out to the west, down the long sweep of ground to the road and across it, the rest of the Haig line was shifting, drawn as if by invisible cords towards the murderous chaos enveloping the hillock. Already, though, the whole host of the Black Road was surging into motion, pressing forwards. Taim experienced a twist of horrified disgust at what he was witnessing: thousands upon thousands of men and women, flinging themselves into full, unrestrained battle. More would surely die this day than had fallen on any since that of Kan Avor Field, when the Gyre Blood was driven into exile, over two centuries ago. A terrible decision would be made, through carnage.

He looked for any sign of the men he had led to An Caman and back, to Kolglas and Glasbridge, but the armies had become great beasts in which all the warriors were only sinews and scales, no longer recognisable. The two hosts seethed across the plain, flung limbs made of horsemen against one another, tore at each other with claws built from swordsmen. A soft, misty cloud rose from the heaving masses: the steam of breath and sweat rising as from the back of a huge, labouring monster.