Paul Kearney: Corvus

“Form line on me!” Corvus cried. He held his lance up so the sunlight sparked off it, as though it had flashed out in white flame above his head. His white horsehair crest streamed behind him, and the black horse half-reared as he reined it in.

On either side of him the Companions formed up, wheeling in by centon, extending their ranks to left and right. They formed a line almost a pasang long, two ranks deep, the big horses sliding in next to one another foaming and snorting, their manes like black flags. The armour of their riders glittered as the winter clouds cleared and Araian looked down upon the battlefield.

Before them, the army of the League was closely engaged in the business of destroying the morai of Teresian and Demetrius. The right wing of the League was trying to wheel to meet the challenge of the bow-armed Companions that Corvus had dropped off to harass them, but the main body was committed wholly to the fight in front of it, a raging conflict of close-quarter spearwork.

The file closers at the rear of the line were turning around, and men were running up and down the back of the line frantically, warning their comrades of the sudden appearance of the Kefren cavalry, but the main body of the army was like a fighting dog in the pit, its jaws locked in its opponent’s throat. Only death would loosen that grip.

Corvus turned to Shoron. “Brother, sound me the charge.”

Shoron shared a look with Ardashir, wet his lips, closed his eyes, and put the horn to his mouth.

Clear and shrill over the battlefield the long ululation of the horn-call rang out; the shrill notes of the call to hunt, a sound heard on battlefields across the lands beyond the sea since the Empire had existed. Now it was ringing out in the heartland of the Macht.

The line of the Companions began to move, fourteen hundred brightly armoured riders on fourteen hundred tall black horses. They broke into a trot and then, as Corvus spurred his own mount, a canter.

The ground seemed to echo with the trembling impact of that mass of horseflesh, and the sound of it rose to challenge every other noise on the battlefield, to be heard even by Rictus and his men fighting in the gateway to the north.

It echoed across the earth. Druze heard it in the midst of the great slaughter at the east gate. It carried clear across the city, so that Sertorius and his men lifted their heads and paused a second to listen as they stood at the foot of the Kerusiad Hill. Kassia and Rian heard it as they stood upon the balcony from which Aise had leaped to her death, and peered out across the teeming bulk of Machran to the battling formations on the plain beyond the walls, wondering what it signified. It did not seem like a sound made by the agency of man. It sounded like the muttered anger of the gods.

The Companions broke into full, tearing gallop, and their lances came down, the wicked points held out at breast-height. Too late, the morai of the League realised what was thundering towards them from the south. Some managed to turn and present their spears; others simply stood and stared at that rolling mass of murder approaching, that black line of death.

The Companions smashed into the Macht battle-line with the impact of a flash-flood. The Niseians had been trained not to flinch from men, but to use their bulk, their iron-shod hooves, their teeth. They were warriors as much as the Kefren who rode them, and their sheer weight and momentum was irresistible.

The charge broke upon the rear of the League army like an apocalypse and broke clear through it, chopping the fighting centons of Avensis and Pontis to pieces.

Hundreds of men were bowled off their feet, and the big horses trampled them into the bare muck of the earth while their riders stabbed out with the long lances, a flickering hedge of darting iron.

Parnon died there, still struggling to make himself heard. The flower of the fighting men of two cities were annihilated in a few minutes. The League army, which had been on the cusp of routing the foes to their front, simply ceased to exist.

Men threw down their shields and tried to squirm out of the press any way they could. Some died fighting, clustered together in stubborn knots and clots, battling back to back. More died without the opportunity to strike a blow, crushed in the deadly space between Corvus’s anvil and the hammer he had sent galloping upon it.

The men on the walls of Machran who were able to lift their heads and look south saw a long vast rash of men and horses embroiled in a formless mob, pasangs long: the sun glittering across it, catching spearpoints, the flash and gleam of helms and shields tilted to the sky. And then the teeming crowd opened, and across the plain men were running for their lives, hundreds, thousands of them, heading south away from the walls.

But the horsemen reformed their line and, before them, so did a long battered formation of spearmen. They dressed their ranks, and began to advance north towards Machran to join their comrades fighting and dying in the shadow of the walls, and they were singing as they came.

Something had changed. Some kind of current had gone through the men fighting and dying in the gatehouse of the South Prime, like the hide of a horse twitching at the bite of a fly. Rictus felt it -he had known it before on other battlefields, but so tight and entangled and brutal was the fighting here that it almost went unnoticed.

The packed mass in front of him seemed somehow to ease a little. He heard men shouting – not the wordless baying of the othismos, but some kind of news that travelled through the ranks of the enemy like fire on a summer hillside.

Fornyx was at his side now, brought close by the murderous attrition of the battle. At the beginning of the morning they had been separated by a full centon of men, but those were all gone now.

“The League is in flight, Rictus,” he yelled. There was blood on his mouth and all down his neck, though they were all slathered in it. Impossible to tell until the thing was done whether it was one’s own or other men’s gore.

“You hear them? Corvus has done it – he’s beaten off the relief army.”

The pressure slackened. Men were backing away now, the desperation still in them, but with these tidings they knew the beginning of despair. They were fighting automatically now, and hope was leaving their eyes – it was a thing impossible to explain to any man who had not been in the belly of a hard fought battle, but Rictus felt it too.

“Dogsheads!” His voice was a gravel-hard croak. He reversed his broken spear at last to use the sauroter. There were weapons aplenty lying at his feet, but they were all broken. Men were fighting with swords now, but there was little room to swing, and the slashing drepanas were hard to manipulate in the crowded phalanx.

“Dogsheads, on me – advance!”

Fornyx was on his left, Kesero on his right. The Dogshead banner was five feet above their heads, but splashed with blood all the same. Rictus saw Valerian off to one side – he had lost his helm and his mutilated face was streaming blood. All the old veterans of the Dogsheads seemed to have moved up through the ranks and were in the forefront. The newly trained men were good – better than any other spearmen on the field – but they were still not the hardened veterans of Rictus’s old command, and they were not bound to him in the way that these men were.

“Same old faces,” Fornyx said with a grin. “You just can’t get rid of us, Rictus.”

“Same old game, brother. One more push, and we’re over the hump. Can you feel it?”

The Dogsheads surged forward. Before, it had been like setting their shoulder against a stone wall. Now it was as though they were pushing on a rusted gate. There was movement. The fight shifted, the men of Machran backing away foot by foot, dying with every step. The fearsome crush in the gatehouse lessened.