Only for a moment.
Fourteen
KUNAKSA
Off to the north, the Arakosan cavalry had begun to move, six thousand horsemen with the mist of the morning grey about the bellies of their mounts. The ground was packed red and hard under them, the chill of the night holding it firm. The rumble of the horses could be heard and felt over the earth for pasangs on every side. A harbinger of what was to come perhaps, a dark music borne upon the waking world.
The noise woke Gasca from an uneasy sleep, and many others around him. They rose from their cramped ranks, cursed the snag and jab of bronze on their shins, and tugged their cloaks tighter about their torsos, the mist all around them, deep and unknowable as the currents of the sea.
Old Demotes raised his hawk nose to sniff the pre-dawn air and cocked his grey head to one side. “That’s cavalry,” he said. He spat on the ground and bared what remained of his teeth as he stretched his worn and warped limbs into function.
Around him more men rose ahead of reveille, that dark murmur in the earth bringing them out of what scant sleep they had endured. Close on ten thousand spearmen had lain down the bright evening before with their heads pillowed on their shields and their cuirasses biting their hips. Now it was almost a relief to stand up, to make the blood work about the bones and face the thing which had brought them all here.
Gasca checked all his gear automatically, touched the upright planted length of his spear for luck and tried to shiver some warmth into his limbs. The cloak had helped, but his father’s layered cuirass had been stiffened by the cold. His flesh would have to warm it into some kind of compliance before it stopped biting him.
Buridan was walking down the line; he had taken over the Dogsheads after Jason’s promotion and now had the transverse crest of a centurion on his helm. “Up, up, get in rank you motherless fucks. We’ve a big day ahead of us.”
“I hope you slept well, centurion.”
“I dreamed of your mother last night, Bear.”
“Aye, she fucked half the centon in her dreams!”
They rose, pissing where they stood and garnering curses and shoves and the ribaldry which was the meat of an army’s morning. The file-leaders geared up and strode forward a pace or two, bitching and murmuring to each other about where precisely the line should run, and behind them the hastily armouring men fell into their files one after another, pushed, cajoled, and threatened by the file-closers, who counted in each man. When he had six ahead of him, he clapped the shoulder of the man in front, who did the same to the man before him, until the file leader felt the thump on his own shoulder and knew that behind him the file was complete. Buridan then strode down the front of the centon and as he passed each file the leader raised his spear. All down the mist-choked length of the Macht ranks, centurions were doing the same. In the half-light of dawn, the Macht had reformed their battle line in a matter of minutes, whilst to their left the Kefren troops were still milling in bad-tempered disorder, and their officers were cantering up and down among them on horseback, waving swords to get them into place.
The sun rose through the mist; mighty Araian who loved her bed in the north, but in this country seemed eager to rise and reluctant to quit the day. The mist thinned. There was not the breath of a breeze. Even before the sun was well clear of the Magron, the heat had begun to simmer out of the ground itself, and with it the tiny black flies that plagued the low river-country. The ground softened as it warmed, and the Macht spearmen sank an inch into it with all the weight of arms and armour pressing upon their flesh. Gasca heard the file-closer, big Gratus, talking to the light-armed skirmishers who had remained to the rear. “You keep that water coming today. I don’t give a fuck if you have to fetch it all the way from the river, but you keep the skins full, lads.”
“Any word from up front?” someone beside Gasca asked. He was yawning himself, the bronze of the helm constricting his skull. There was a worn spot in the padding within; he should have replaced it before now.
“They’re on the hill, same place as they was last night, except there’s more of them now.”
“Where’s Phiron, I wonder?”
“Licking Kufr arse.” And a mutter of hard laughter went down the ranks.
Arkamenes met with the ten generals of the Macht to the front of their battle line. Phiron and Pasion were there also, every one of them in the transverse crested helm of officers, and every one wearing the Curse of God. They carried their shields on their shoulders and bore spears the same as the lowest infantryman on the field. Arkamenes looked down on them from his horse and when the eyes in the T-slits of the close helms stared back at him he felt a kind of shiver trail down his backbone. He was glad, so very glad, that he was not up on the hill above, waiting to fight these things.