Paul Kearney - Corvus

Yes, it had. He could hear it now. A surf of noise rising up around him – it was almost impossible to guess which direction it came from. He heard sharp above the roar the screams of men in a last extremity of pain and fear, and a hammering of metal.

“Front rank, level spears!” came the order. Kassander again. “Centurions, hold together -prepare to advance – advance!”

And they were off again, but more quickly this time, the files shuffling into a fast march with the centurions calling out the time. “One, two, one, two – pick it up there!”

“It’s redcloaks – mercenaries!” someone shouted at the front.

His head bobbing from side to side in the bronze helm, Karnos caught glimpses of the world beyond the phalanx, and saw something coming towards them, something with glittering teeth and shining in bronze and scarlet. He heard the Paean being sung – but not by his own side. What in the hell was -

An enormous crash. He was brought to a full stop, piling into the man in front. Behind him, the weight of the three men of the file crushed him, the cuirass fighting the pressure. He thought he would faint. He could see faces – helmed men facing the wrong way – Phobos -they were facing him! And then the adder-strikes of spearheads. He saw an aichme come lancing through the ranks in front of him to bury itself in a man’s head and then snap off. The man was borne along by the press for a few minutes, and then slid out of sight. The file closed the gaps, the pressure unrelenting.

This is it, Karnos thought. This is what the stories are for, what the poetry is about. I am here in the middle of it at last.

The pressure and the fear emptied his bladder, and the piss ran hot down his legs, but he barely noticed.

“Level your fucking spear!” the man behind him shouted, and he hefted the weapon horizontal on his shoulder, feeling the sauroter tear into flesh behind him as he brought it up. He rested the long weapon on the wing of the file-leader’s cuirass for a second, getting used to the balance of it, and then thrust forward into the red-cloaked mass that faced him. The spearpoint jarred, the whole shaft quivering in his fist as he struck a shield.

He tried again, aiming for a helm-slot, but struck empty air. A spear came the other way, the two shafts clashing together as they met. The aichme dunted him in the forehead, rasped along the crestbox and snapped his head back. He would have fallen were it not for the men behind him pushing into the small of his back. His eyes were full of tears. There was something wet inside his helm and he did not know whether it was blood or sweat.

He stabbed again, angry now, and from his chest there came that hoarse animal roaring that had no thought behind it but was a base response, a defiant bellow of rage. Thousands of men were making it -it was part of every battlefield. It rose now and filled the air above them, as deafening as the blacksmith’s clatter of iron on bronze. This was the othismos, the bowels of war itself.

They were advancing, step by step, and mixed in with the wordless bellowing were cries of triumph. Karnos stepped over a body, glanced down quickly and saw a red cloak on the ground. He stepped on the man’s body and it moved under his feet, still warm.

He vomited, with the sensation and the heat of the press and the singing sound in his head. The vomit ran down his fine ornate cuirass unheeded, one more stink among many. The fluids of mens’ insides were running into the muck at their feet, and making of it a terrible mire. They plunged their dogged way through it, calf-deep.

The sandal was sucked off Karnos’s right foot, but trailed behind him, its strap entangled in his greave, until someone behind him trod on it and snapped it free. They were still advancing. Up front, someone shouted, “They’re pulling back!” and a growl of triumph tore through the files. But seconds later someone else shouted, “Arrows – they’re shooting at us!”

The long black clothyards of the Kefren poured down upon them. As if in a dream, Karnos saw an arrow strike the helm of the man in front and flick up into the air, jerking his head to one side. Most of the men were wearing cuirasses of stiff, layered linen, and Karnos watched in horrified fascination as the arrows came arcing down like black snakes and clear through the wings of the armour, burying themselves in men’s shoulders, smashing collar-bones.

A new cry, from behind this time. A javelin flew over Karnos’s head – he saw the cold gleam of the iron point not a foot from his eyes. The file-closers were shouting. “About face! The bastards are behind us, brothers!”

The phalanx was losing its cohesion, men turning this way and that, desperate to see what was going on. The advance stalled and the lines intermingled. Packed close together by the threats to front and rear, the men of Machran stood irresolute, frightened, angry. The centurions were bellowing orders like men possessed, but the spearmen in the ranks seemed as unresponsive as cattle.

The sweat running down the small of Karnos’s back went icy cold. This was not how it was supposed to be. There was no order now, and even the centurions were beginning to look about themselves in growing panic. How had -

A crash to the front – the fearsome red-cloaked mercenaries had hammered into their face again, laying on the pressure. The air was crushed out of Karnos’s chest as the crowd tightened, recoiling on itself. Some men tripped and went down, unwounded, and were then trampled to suffocation in the deepening mud at their feet.

Karnos looked at the sky, the black arrows raining across it. The press of men tilted this way and that, battered on all sides. He heard the roar and clash of a fresh onset off to his left, and the entire phalanx shuddered as though it had taken a body-blow. Someone shouted that the left wing had been routed, and then a few moments later some other idiot insisted it was the right wing.

It did not matter – they were pinned here like a turtle on its back. The cohesiveness of the phalanx might have gone, but the pure brute weight of meat and metal remained. It was being packed tighter on itself.

Karnos’s feet were dragged from the mud, sucking as the press shifted and took him with it. He gasped for air, and beat down the impulse to scream for space, for room to move and breathe. For the first time, the reality of his own death began to crowd his mind.

And the pressure began to ease. The sea-roar of noise – in his helm changed, picked up a note. Oh, thank Antimone, the crowd was opening out. The tide had turned, it seemed; this was the way it was supposed to happen after all. Victory was still there, in the air. In his relief, he felt he could almost taste it.

Men were throwing down their shields and tearing off their helms, shouting about betrayal and defeat. The phalanx, which a few moments before had seemed a brute, packed, immovable thing, now began to fall apart. As men abandoned their bronze burdens, so they became more mobile, and somewhere out at the edges of the formation, or what was left of it, they were running.

They were running away. Karnos stared in disbelief so utter that it cancelled out the bowel-draining fear. “No! No!” he screamed. All Machran was here in front of him, seven thousand men, the heart of the greatest city in the Macht world – and it was bleeding to death in the churned muck, or in flight right in front of his horrified eyes.

He sagged as the men about him moved away. A shield, dropped by his neighbour, struck his anklebone an agonising blow. He raised his head to shriek his pain and his anger at the cold sky, and the falling arrow lanced cleanly through the right wing of his cuirass, sinking into his shoulder with an impact that sent him reeling on his back into the bloody mire below.