Paul Kearney - Kings of Morning

He bent, picked up the man’s discarded spear, hefted it a moment thoughtfully, and then limped back into the fighting.

By some miracle he found himself close to Fornyx. He pushed forward into the front rank to replace a falling man, and immediately took a spearhead in the shoulder. It jolted him backwards a step but skewed off his armour, carving a track through the mud embossing his cuirass. He growled like an animal, the sound lost in that raging tumult, and shortened his grip on the spear. Past the mid-point he stabbed with it, the first thrust striking a shield, the second gauged more carefully, taking the glaring Honai at the neck and severing the bulging vessels there. It was like up-ending a bottle of wine. The Honai glared and raged a moment more, then gripped his neck, astonished, and sank down into the mud. Rictus plunged the sauroter onto the nape of the Kufr’s neck, and saw the sputtering square hole it made as he yanked the weapon out again. Then it was forgotten, as the gap was filled, and another impossibly tall golden-skinned monster with blazing eyes was trying to kill him.

The Macht were pushed back. They exacted a terrible toll on the Honai as they retreated, for in their eagerness the Great King’s elite were pressing forward heedless of losses, and their formation began to open a little. When that happened, the aichmes of the close-knit Macht would stab out with the swiftness of a kingfisher’s strike. It was death for one of the Honai even to lower his shield to shout to a comrade.

But the Dogsheads had been fighting for hours now, and they were stepping on their own wounded as they fell back. The Honai dispatched the fallen without pity as they passed over. They outnumbered the Macht to their front some four to one and no amount of skill or valour could hope to hold out much longer against those odds.

‘Break on the left!’ a single shout, almost lost in the roar. But Rictus felt the thing shift around him. On both sides the Macht were falling back, not as part of a line, but in knots and fragments of still fighting men.

‘Stay together!’ he bellowed. ‘Face your front, you bastards!’

The line was gone, engulfed like a broken dyke. Now the Honai were pouring through, chopping it up still further. The Dogsheads were an elite even among veterans; they knew that to turn and run meant instant death. So they fell back with their face to the enemy. They died with their shields still on their arms even when surrounded and stabbed to carrion by half a dozen of the enemy at a time. Their bodies piled up in mounds of bronze and scarlet.

Some centons hung together, what was left of them, and a tattered grouping gathered under the banner and faced out in all directions, fighting back to back now. Fornyx was the banner-bearer. He had lost his helm, and one eye was gone, nothing left but a torn hole, but he stood holding up the oak staff from which hung their ragged flag; the same one which had flown at Kunaksa, thirty years before.

Rictus joined him, and around the pair of cursebearers other broken remnants of the Dogsheads coalesced, until there were several score brought to bay in a rough oval, a crowded mass of grim, exhausted men with the light of death in their eyes. There was no quarter given or asked, nor any thought of surrender.

Rictus dropped his shield and, taking Fornyx’s free arm, he set it over his own shoulders and took some of the younger man’s weight. Fornyx grinned, his teeth black with blood and dust.

‘Where have you been, you strawhead bitch? Back of the line having a sit-down, I’ll bet.’ He tilted his head until it rested briefly against Rictus’s helm.

‘I knew things were in good hands,’ Rictus told him. He pulled off his helm, and even the hot air seemed cool to him after the confining bronze. He kissed Fornyx on his bloody cheek.

‘Antimone found us at last, brother.’

‘Aye. She’s been looking for us this long time.’

‘We will go into her darkness together, Fornyx.’

But Fornyx did not respond. His weight grew as his legs buckled. His one eye was still open and that black grin was carved on his mouth. Rictus lowered him to the bloody churned earth at their feet. Only then did he see the blood trickling in a black bar from a gash in Fornyx’s thigh. The blood was pooled about his feet; he had stood there a long time.

Rictus closed the staring eye, and then took the banner from his friend’s hand.

Lord, in thy glory and thy goodness, send worthy men to kill me.

He set a hand on Fornyx’s head, the kind of touch a father might bestow on his sleeping child. Then he straightened, the world livid, dazzling in his eyes, and in a low voice he began to sing the Paean once more.

It went unheard. The island of Macht was engulfed, the Honai crashing over it in their hundreds. They clambered over bodies still breathing and stabbed downwards at the dying men without looking to see where their spearheads went. Their faces were set towards the west, and the open space beyond the mounded corpses which was the rear of the Macht army. Unstoppable now, they surged on, hundreds, thousands of the tall Kefren cheering as they advanced at an eager trot.

They had broken the Macht line, and Corvus’s army was now split in two.

‘Time to go, ’ Ardashir said calmly. He was looking at the oncoming torrent of Arakosan cavalry, which was approaching at a gallop, thousands of horsemen on beautiful Niseians, a glorious and terrible sight. He leaned in the saddle and set a hand on his banner-bearer’s arm.

‘Shoron, signal retire.’

The Kefren trooper, clad in scarlet like all of Corvus’s army, tilted the banner horizontal three times. At once, Ardashir felt the movement of the ranks behind him. ‘Quickly, brothers!’ he cried. ‘We don’t want to be in the middle of this one!’

Almost a thousand Companion cavalry began filing out to the open flank in trotting lines, the warhorses bucking nervously under them. Ardashir let the mora file past and raised his hand in salute to the spearmen standing ready behind them, hidden from the enemy up until now. Demetrius raised his own fist in response and barked an order which was repeated all down the line by his centurions. The morai levelled their spears. Six thousand men, six ranks deep, one and a half pasangs long.

Ardashir broke into a canter, almost the last to leave the front of the phalanx. The Arakosans were perhaps two hundred paces away, a mass of horseflesh at full charge, the very earth quivering under their feet like a tapped drum. Nothing would stop them now; it was too late for them to pull up.

At the sudden sight of the spearline some tried to rein in, and went down, bowled over and crushed by the hordes coming up behind them. The outer companies tried to wheel left, but Ardashir’s troopers were already curving round in a great arc to meet them and hammer in that flank. They were held on their course by their own momentum.

The horses balked at the sight of the steady line of spearmen; at the last moment they refused the contact. But the hundreds behind them could not see what was happening to the front rank; they piled into their fellows with a fearful crash. Ardashir saw one massive Niseian hurled end over end through the air, its rider a rag doll flung headlong into the crush.

It was a kind of carnage he had never witnessed before. Hundreds of horses went down, the Macht spearing them without pity, disembowelling the magnificent animals or jabbing out their eyes. Riders were lifted out of the saddle by the thickets of spears impaling them. Here and there the sheer weight of the animals broke in the Macht line, but the spearmen swarmed over the still-kicking beasts and fought while standing upon their beating flesh.