Paul Kearney - The Iron Wars

Corfe felt his mount go up and down small dips, rising and falling with the shape of the earth. Someone stumbled-he glimpsed it out of the corner of his eye, and there was the scream as a horse went pinwheeling. A rabbit hole, perhaps. They were blind to whatever was below the hooves of their mounts, an unnerving experience for a horseman, especially when he is encumbered by armour and lance, his vision, such as it is, circumscribed by the weighty bulk of an iron helmet. But the men held together, shrieking their shrill, unearthly battlecry. A hundred armoured troops on a hundred heavy horses, lances out chest-high. They crashed into the enemy at full career, like some iron-shod apocalypse come raging out of the dark, and trod them into the ground, impaled them, crushed them, knocked them flying.

Corfe was able to see more clearly. The burning campsite made the night into a chaotic, yellow-lit circus of toiling shadow, the flash of steel, faces half seen and then ridden down, stabbed at with the tall lances or hacked down with swords.

There was no coherent resistance. The enemy could not form ranks, and the cavalry hunted them like animals, spearing them and knocking them off their feet. It was murder, pure and simple. Those who could were running through the gaps in Corfe’s first line, now a series of struggling knots of horsemen brought to a standstill by the press of bodies and beasts around them. They ran to what they thought was salvation-northwards towards Staed and the castle of their overlord.

And these staggering survivors who kept running were hit by Corfe’s second line which Ensign Ebro now brought screaming out of the night at full gallop. Another thunderous wave of giant shadows which resolved itself into raging eyes and hooves and wicked piercing iron, not horsemen at all but some terrible fusion of beast and man out of nightmare myth. They smashed their way through mobs of men, dropping broken lances and drawing swords to slash and stab whilst under them the trained destriers reared up to bring down shattering hooves and bit and kicked in tune with their riders.

Corfe was not surprised to hear some of his men laughing as they whirled and swung and stabbed relentlessly in that maelstrom of slaughter, their exhaustion forgotten, their blood rising in that strange, reckless exaltation which sometimes comes upon men in combat. They were born horse-soldiers, well-mounted and in the midst of battle. They were doing what nature had created them to do. Corfe realized in that moment that in these few he had the kernel of what could be a great army, a force to rival Fimbrian tercios. With ten thousand of these men he could wipe anyone who opposed him off the face of the earth.

The sun rose at last in a bloody welter of cloud out of the glittering sea. Shadow lingered in the folds of the hills and there was a ground mist which hid the battlefield like a shroud pulled over for decency’s sake. Morning, in all its chill grayness, and the aftermath of the night.

It was Andaon , the first day of the Year of the Saint 552.

Over seven hundred corpses littered the field, and of those only thirty were from Corfe’s command. Duke Narfintyr’s army was a dismembered wreck. More than a thousand prisoners taken, scores more ridden down and killed in the pursuit all the way to the outskirts of Staed. A few hundred had mustered some shreds of discipline and had fought their way clear of the trap. They were in the hills now, their way to the town barred by the heavy cavalry. They could stay there. Corfe’s men were hollow-eyed and quaking with tiredness, the adrenalin of the battle dying. And they had lost heavily in horses: the carcasses of more than eighty of the big destriers littered the field.

Corfe stood beside his steaming, quivering horse, grimacing at the flap of flesh some blade had taken out of its shoulder. This was the worst part, the part he hated, when the glory of the fight gave way to maimed men and animals and the trembling aftershock of battle. When one had to look at the contorted and broken faces of the dead, and see that they were one’s fellow countrymen, killed because they had been ordered to leave their small farms and do the bidding of their noble masters.

Andruw joined him, bareheaded, his blond hair dark with sweat. His usual jauntiness was subdued.

“Poor bastards,” he said, and he nudged the body of a dead boy-not more than thirteen-with his foot.

“I’ll hang Narfintyr, when I catch him,” Corfe said quietly.

Andruw shook his head. “That bird has flown the coop. He got on a ship when word of the battle reached the town. He’s out on the Kardian, probably making for one of the Sultanates, and half his household with him. The piece of shit. But we did our job, at any rate.”

“We did our job,” Corfe repeated.

“A night cavalry charge,” Andruw said. “That’s one for the history books.”

Corfe wiped his eyes, knuckling his sockets until the lights came. The tiredness was like a sodden blanket which hung from his shoulders. He and his men were shambling ghosts, mere wraiths of the butchering demons they had been during the fight. He had two hundred of them overseeing the slow, limping progress of the prisoners back to town, whilst the rest looked after their wounded comrades and scoured the battlefield for anyone who might have been overlooked and who was lying still alive under the sky. Others under Ebro were commandeering Narfintyr’s castle and all it contained, setting up a crude field hospital and collecting anything in the way of provisions that Staed had to offer. So many things to do. Clearing up after a battle was always much worse than the preparation for one. So many things to do… but they had won. They had defeated a force many times their own, and at such slight cost to themselves that it seemed almost obscene. Not a battle, but a massacre.

“Have you ever seen men such as these?” Andruw asked him wonderingly. He was staring at the Cathedrallers who shambled about the field leading their worn-out horses, their armour cast in the strange and barbaric style of the east. They looked like beings from another world in the morning light.

“On horseback? Never. They make Torunnan cuirassiers look like boys. There is some… energy to them. Something I have never seen before.”

“You have made a discovery here, Corfe,” Andruw said. “No-you are creating something. You have added discipline to savagery, and the sum of the two is something awesome. Something new.”

They were both drunk. Drunk with fatigue and with killing. And perhaps with more than that.

“A few of the surviving local notables are waiting for us in the town,” Andruw said more briskly. “They want to treat for peace and hand in the arms of their retainers. They have no stomach for fighting, not after this.”

“Do they know how few we are, the shape we’re in?” Corfe asked.

Andruw grinned evilly. “They think we’ve two thousand men out here, everyone a howling fiend. They don’t even know which country we hail from.”

“Let’s keep them in ignorance. By God, Andruw, I’m as feeble as a kitten, and I feel like lord of the world.”

“Victory will do that,” Andruw said, smiling. “Me, I just want a bath and a corner to pitch myself in.”

“It’ll be a while before you have either. We have a busy day ahead of us.”

Albrec had never known any soldiers before, not even the Almarkan troops of the Charibon garrison. He had assumed that men of war were necessarily crude, rough, loud and overbearing. But these men, these Fimbrians, were different.

A blinding white snowscape that reared up in savage, dazzling mountains on both sides. Snow blew in flags and banners off the topmost peaks of the Cimbrics to his right and the Thurians to his left. This was the Torrin Gap, the place where west met east, an ancient conduit, the highway of armies for centuries.