“No. This is a test he’s setting. We do as he says, this time. We cross that river in full panoply, we beat those Kufr on the far bank. After that, we will do things our own way, I promise you.”
“Who leads?” Jason asked. He, too, was staring up at the stars. He loves all this, Phiron realised. It’s all just a vast education for him, a richening of experience. He felt a pang of envy, a memory of youthful energies.
“You do,” he said.
So they attacked at first light, as so many of their fathers had. But the first thing they had to assault was the river itself.
Gasca was in the fifth rank, about as untried as one could be. He could not quite believe it when he saw them marching towards the river, but once he was in the midst of those foul-smelling, heavily armoured ranks of men, there were no ways in the world he was going to turn back.
“Keep that fucking sauroter out of my crotch, you hear me?” the man behind him said. “Keep your aichme up and out of the bloody way. You push when you’re told, and you step up if you see a gap, all right, strawhead?”
Gasca said nothing. Green though he was, he already knew those who felt they had to talk going into the thing. It was a phenomenon, like having to piss, or wipe one’s mouth every minute. Rictus had told him that. Where in the hells was Rictus anyhow? He’d find some way to get into the thick of it, Gasca was sure. That skinny bastard would never rest until he was in the front rank.
The water—they were wading into the river now. Phobos and all his tits, it’s cold. Antimone, look down on me now and—arrows—they’re shooting at us!
God in hell, the water is cold—ah, Phobos—it’s on my balls. He raised his shield, casual and frantic at the same time. A lead-weighted dart banged off the rim. He actually found himself overcome by curiosity rather than fear. What the hell was that? Do they make those in—
The man next to him went down without a sound. They were waist deep now, and Gasca could only see a faint darkness of blood in the dark water. Where do you have to get hit, he wondered, to fall down all at once like that?
As the river deepened, so the current grew stronger. The column of men began to veer downstream as the vast volume of water pushed on the bowls of their shields. The man on Gasca’s left was lurching into him, as he was into the man who had filled the gap on his right. Something entangled Gasca’s legs, and he almost went down. It was a body, anchored to the floor of the river by the weight of its armour. The water was up to his breastbone now, and under his feet Gasca could feel the rolling stones and pebbles of the riverbed, more bodies, which he stepped over as though climbing stairs. Once his sandal slid on the smooth convexity of a shield. He gasped for breath; his helm seemed to be suffocating him. Anyone who even tripped up in this press, this rush of water, would drown in moments, dragged down by their armour, trampled by their comrades. It was insane—it was not war; how did courage avail anyone here? Gasca wanted to cry out, but none of the other men were making a sound apart from hoarse, ragged panting and curses hissed venomously into their beards.
Then a voice began up front. It was Jason, Gasca realised. The centurion had begun to sing, at first in fragments as broken as his breathing, then stronger, as if the very act of singing somehow helped the labour of his lungs. It was the Paean, the battle hymn.
More men took it up, spitting out the ancient words like curses, teeth bared against the assault of the river and the shower of missiles that was now raining down on them. The song travelled down the column until all at once there were thousands of them singing it. The slow, sonorous beat of the hymn grew in their blood, bringing them almost into step with one another. They lifted their heads and looked up at the far riverbank ahead and the waiting line of Kufr. Some men began to grin insanely. The Paean boomed out, implacable, a fearsome battery of sound. The men found their feet and settled their shoulders into the bowls of their shields, shoved forwards as if assaulting an enemy line. They attacked the river.
Amid a fearsome clattering of missile-points on metal, the water-level began to sink. There was squared-off masonry below their feet now, the remnants of the bridge. More men went under, stumbling to their deaths in tombs of bronze. The arrows and darts came falling in a black hail, finding the eye-slots of helms, the nape of necks, the fleshy muscle at the space between shield and cuirass. But the column was still intact. The water was thigh-deep, knee-deep—and suddenly the terrible press of the river was gone and there was the weight of the armour and shield dragging downwards again, the men exhausted and dripping and sweating and bloodied before they had even come to grips with the enemy. Now men were taking arrows in their knees or shins— no one had donned their greaves for the water-crossing—and there were gaps everywhere. Jason, up front in his transverse helm, began barking out orders. The head of the column halted, and centons began to deploy to the left and right of the Dogsheads, broadening the line. The Dolphins were on the left—Gasca recognised their banner—Mynon’s Blackbirds on the right. Phiron had put his best at the van of the attack.