Col Buchanan - Stands a Shadow

The wounded soldier groaned in pain and muttered something from his dry lips. She looked down at him. He was bearded, middle-aged. Someone’s father. Someone’s husband. Curl remembered what she was supposed to be doing here.

She checked his pulse, found it was still beating strongly. With haste she fumbled through her medico bag for the glass dropper of sanseed. She squeezed his mouth open and shook a few drops against his tongue. He groaned again, and she poured a dribble of water into his mouth from her flask. ‘Thank you,’ he gasped, and tried to roll onto his side.

‘Don’t move,’ she said to him, and took out a compress bandage and held it against his wound.

Around them the light infantry were being pressed back by an approaching formation of Imperials. Men fired darts at the enemy, grenades, arrows. Squads rushed past her, trying to outflank the approaching mass. An explosion ripped through the night. A man fell facedown in the snow not ten paces away.

‘Press hard!’ she shouted into the Volunteer’s face, and she took his clammy, hairy hand in her own and pressed it against the bandage. His eyes rolled again and then refocused on her. ‘Press!’ she told him. He blinked to show he understood.

Curl yanked one of the thin poles from the quiver on her back. It was fitted with an arrowhead on one end, and she cleared away some snow and stabbed it into the ground until it held firm. She unfurled the little white flag on the top of the pole, so that the stretcher-bearers would see the wounded man more easily. She glanced across at the other wounded man lying nearby.

Hand over her head, she ran towards him.

‘General!’ Bahn shouted as they walked step by step with the front line of chartassa. ‘General Reveres requests reinforcements on the left. He says the Seventh Chartassa has been lost and the Sixth is being pushed back.’

‘Lost?’

‘They were detached from the main force somehow. He’s not sure where they are.’

The general stormed towards Bahn with his bodyguards in tow, his long hair hanging wet about the shoulders of his bearskin coat. In anger, the man seemed to loom larger than life.

‘The bloody fools, what are they playing at over there?’

Bahn had no answer for him.

Creed straightened with a snort and clasped his hands behind his back. He looked behind to the archers and the boy slingers loosely positioned in the long corridor of space within the tight formation of the army. They had no shields to protect themselves from incoming fire, and were taking losses as a consequence. Behind them, beyond the medicos and stretcher-bearers running back and forth, it was too dark and distant to see the light infantry who held the rear of the formation, marching backwards in step to the army’s drums. The general scanned ahead again to the front lines.

A dart struck one of the outstretched shields that protected him. The bodyguard looked sceptically at the barbed tip protruding through his shield, the third one so far. They were coming down like a hard rain now.

Not more than six paces from Bahn a flying spear skewered a medico to the ground. The young man floundered, screaming, a pink froth bubbling from his wound.

Bahn panted, numbed to all that was occurring around him. The advance had slowed badly. They were still pushing forwards, though only marginally, and now it seemed the Imperials were forcing them back on the left. Worse, the entire army was surrounded now, with no hope of escape.

Captains and step sergeants swore at their chartassa and shouted to push harder. Close to his left, a captain was physically shoving at the backs of his men as he screamed obscenities over their heads.

‘Send a runner to Ocien in the Ninth,’ Creed shouted into his ear, and nodded to the few remaining reserve chartassa barely visible on the right. ‘Have him send a chartassa over to bolster the left.’

Bahn marvelled again at the general’s ability to store the names of every officer under his command.

‘And, Lieutenant,’ Creed hollered as Bahn turned to find a nearby runner. ‘Inform General Reveres that if he gives away any more ground, I will go over there personally and sort out his affairs.’

‘Sir.’

As he dispatched a runner to Ocien, Bahn wiped his face with a trembling hand. An explosion nearby made him jolt.

Nothing could prepare a man for the sheer noise of a pitched battle. He recalled the first time he’d ever heard such a thing, the first day the Mannians had assaulted the Shield; how his bowels had turned to water and his mind to mud. It was like being in the midst of a thunderstorm: your bones shivering, your ears hurting even more than your throat that was screaming itself raw just to be heard.

The sounds from the front ranks were unimaginable now. It was bloody murder out there on the fringes, and he witnessed the action only as its consequences emerged in the form of bodies beneath the rear boots of the advancing lines. The stench too was hard to cope with. Blood soaked the muddy ground, mixing with everything else that bodies released at such times as these; a reeking, slippery mess that he’d fallen into more than once so far.

In the middle of the army’s formation, the open space was piling up with the dead and wounded. Stretcher-bearers ran back and forth over-burdened by the rate of casualties, struggling to move them all in pace with the army’s momentum. Monks helped where they could. The medicos fought their own battles trying to hold men together. The injuries were hard on the eyes; even to Bahn, who had witnessed his own share of gore on the walls. Open wounds bled with profusion, the exposed flesh shockingly vivid. Feet slipped on grey intestines lying unravelled across the mud. Skin flapped. Eye sockets gaped empty. Bodies shorn of limbs jetted blood.

On the ground some of the men seemed entirely unhurt, and simply sat sobbing or staring dazed into space. One man was trying to pull his armour off. He’d been at it for several minutes, and still he couldn’t manage the simple task of removing his breastplate. Worst of all were those unable to walk. Some were being left behind as the entire warhead-shaped formation advanced in step, trampled where they lay by the rearguard.

Bahn turned away from it all. He sought out the reassuring bulk of General Creed, saw that Koolas, the war chattero, was bending his ear.

‘We seem to be grinding to a halt!’ the man was saying.

‘What?’

‘I said we seem to be grinding to a halt! Is there anything we can do?’

‘Do?’ replied the general. ‘If there was something we could do, man, we’d be doing it.’

Koolas looked as though he’d been hoping for something more inspiring than this. He glanced at Bahn, and Bahn could see that he was visibly shaking.

‘We still have one advantage,’ declared the general, and both Koolas and Bahn leaned closer to hear him. ‘Since we’re entirely surrounded, our men have nowhere to run. We will not be routed, in any case.’

Bahn blinked rapidly. Creed slapped his arm, almost bowling him over with the force of it.

‘We grabbed hold of the bear! Now we must suffer its grip while we work our way to its throat.’

Even now, Koolas had his mind on his story. ‘And what if she runs for it, General? The Matriarch. What then?’

‘Then her own people might finish her for us. These Mannians hold great store in their leader’s courage.’

‘And you think – if we kill her – they will break?’

‘Perhaps. Or perhaps Sparus will succeed in holding them together. Who knows?’ General Creed flashed his teeth, a rare display. Perhaps it was only for the benefit of this man and his writings. He turned away and started to holler more orders.

Despite what the general had just claimed, men were starting to break from the front ranks to the left. Officers struck the fleeing soldiers down or screamed in their faces, shoving them back into the lines.