Paul Kearney - Corvus

They stood in the lurching darkness as the smoke rose around them, blind men in a box. There were three stories to the towers, and fifty men on each, packed as tight as arrows in a quiver.

The tower halted. To its front the wood was thumped and rattled as unseen missiles cascaded against it, and there was the crunch and splinter as another bolt struck the side of the structure. This one punched straight through and impaled a man standing by the right hand wall. He screamed and thrashed while his comrades tried in vain to pull him off the great barbed arrowhead transfixing him. Finally he died, held upright like a puppet with only one string.

Panic rose in the dark interior of the tower, a reek as heavy as their sweat.

“Steady, boys,” Druze warned. “We get this wrong and we’re stepping out into empty air.”

There was the sound of a horn-call from outside.

“Now!” he shouted.

Two men cut the ropes holding up the heavy ramp. It swung down with a crash, and the light and cold air of the winter day flooded in.

“On me, brothers!” Druze yelled, blinking madly, advancing blind into the sudden white winter light with his drepana raised. The men poured out of the tower in a torrent of raging faces and upraised iron, intent only on getting out of the panic-stinking darkness of the compartment. Below them the tower rocked and shook, while the men on the lower levels were climbing ladders to follow off the ramp in their turn.

So tall was this contraption of Parmenios’s that the ramp had swung down square on the topmost battlements of the tower abutting Machran’s East Prime Gate. Corvus’s bald-headed little secretary had judged the measurements correctly to within the span of a man’s hand, the result of days of observation and calculation. The men on the ropes below had pulled it. into perfect position, their determination marked by the trail of bodies leading all the way out of bowshot.

Of the six towers, four had made it to the wall. Two more were standing burning within a hundred paces of the masonry, and screaming men flooded out of them with the bright hungry flames blackening their flesh. But in the four which had survived were six hundred others who were desperate to get out, and who would not be halted. They flooded the tall towers of the East Prime Gate and overran the ballista crews on the battlements, slashing at the hated weapons and tossing the unfortunates who operated them over the edge. There was no quarter asked or given.

The rest of Corvus’s forces at the eastern end of Machran had not been idle. They surged forward now in their thousands, bearing hundreds of scaling ladders. Now that the ballista towers had been neutralised, the ladders went up in a forest of timber too thick to be thrown back. But the defenders of Machran did not retreat. They stood and fought on the walls, toppling ladders and skewering Druze’s men as they made it to the embrasures. They died hard, fighting for every foot of stone.

Four pasangs away, the scarlet arrowhead of close-packed spearmen that was the Dogsheads broke into a run. The men loped along with spears at the shoulder, each shield covering the man to the left, the tall horsehair crests bobbing on their helms. Rictus was at the apex of that rumbling mass of meat and metal, a conspicuous figure in his black armour. He did not speak – the Dogsheads had dropped the Paean and were now powering forward, so that all six centons of them seemed to be one single huge organism, breathing hard and the sound of their breathing attuned to a kind of rhythm in itself.

In the moment before impact, Rictus saw the ranks of the enemy recoil before him, the line of citizen spears fracturing right in front of the gate. They had never seen a spearline advance like this before, and the redcloaked mercenaries had acquired a fearsome reputation during the course of the siege. Half-starved citizen spearmen of Arkadios and Avennos and Machran itself flinched at the moment of impact, backing in on themselves.

The Dogsheads struck. Rictus lifted his spear clear of the melee in the first moments to keep it from shattering. So great was the pressure of the advancing men behind him that he was propelled into the ranks of the enemy. An aichme broke in pieces upon the breast of his cuirass. Another struck his shield so hard that it penetrated the bronze facing and broke off in the oak beneath. There were snarling, terrified faces inches from his own. One man had lost his helm, and Rictus head-butted him at once, the heavy bronze of his awn helm mashing bone and flesh, one eye glaring out of the red ruin before the man went down, lost underfoot.

The Dogsheads kept their formation, a red lance aimed square at the open gateway of the South Prime. Men were trying to push the massive gates closed, but so great was the press of bodies in the gatehouse that it was impossible; they succeeded only in packing the crowd of shouting spearmen tighter.

Here the work began, and the discipline told. The Dogsheads settled in to the fight, choosing their targets, jabbing overhand at helm-slots, glimpses of flesh at the necks of cuirasses. Rictus saw an enemy spearman’s arm pierced clean through by the spear of someone behind him. The man jerked his flesh off the aichme and the keen blade sliced him open like a cut of meat, exposing bone.

Blood sprayed through the air, hot and steaming in the cold. Rictus stabbed one man through the eye-guard of his helm, and his own spearhead snapped off as the fellow went down. There was no way to switch to the sauroter, not in that packed mass, so Rictus continued to stab out with the splintered shaft of the spear, grunting as he did so like a man at heavy labour in his fields.

The roar of the othismos rose up, enveloped them all. The struggle in the gate had become a different kind of world, a place of bronze and iron and lacerated flesh, men screaming, men underfoot, men pushing on the armoured torsos of their fellows. It was a dark, sodden universe of carnage.

But it was moving inexorably backwards, into the shadow of the walls. The deep formation of the Dogsheads, all that massive concentration of power, shewed the line of the defenders in on itself. The mercenaries maintained their ranks, while those of Machran disintegrated. The defenders fought bitterly, but they were fighting now as individual men in a mob, and only the brute mass of their numbers held their attackers in place.

And they were dying fast. The Dogsheads had lost scores of their number, the defenders of Machran many hundreds, shunted backwards, stumbling into the press to be trampled and suffocated, or stabbed by the aichmes and sauroters of the attackers. They could not present a coherent front, and the struggle in the gateway became a business, an exchange of lives for space. It was pure and simple killing.

Rictus found himself struggling uphill, and could not quite account for it until his foot slid on the convex bowl of a shield. He was stepping on a mound of the enemy dead, and the Dogsheads were climbing it. The men of Machran were dying where they stood, all training and drill forgotten. They were fighting for themselves, but conscious also that the gates were open wide at their backs, and the way into the city lay open.

They were building a new wall in front of the tall stone of the city, a breastwork of corpses.

The Dogsheads ascended it, their formation growing tighter as they closed ranks over their own dead. The weak winter sun was cut off, and Rictus found himself in shadow. He was inside the gateway itself, and the ancient gates of Machran loomed on either side of him like indifferent totems, their black oak now splashed red and glistening.

“One more!” Rictus shouted. “One more push, brothers!” and he felt behind him the surge of bodies, heard the animal roar of his men as they answered him.