The Ten Thousand(63)

This, Jason thought, is what the poets sing of; it is what it means to be truly alive. And as he marched, singing, the tears trickled down his cheeks within the tall-crested helm.

Seated on his quiet mare, Vorus watched the line of spearmen march up the hill with a wall of sound that was the Paean preceding them. He thought he had never seen a sight so fearsome in his life: that moving battlement of scarlet and bronze, that wave of death approaching. All along the Kefren ranks, there was a kind of shudder as the troops moved in restive increments, as a man will flinch before a blow.

“Lord,” he said, “let me go out to the left.”

Ashurnan shook his head. For now, he was standing in the Royal Chariot again, shaded by a parasol and surrounded by bodyguards, couriers and staff officers.

“Stay here, Vorus. They may be coming our way soon enough.”

The Kefren troops on the left had begun to shout and jeer and batter their spears against their shields in an emboldening din of defiance. To their rear the archers had nocked arrows to their bows. A flag went up to show that all was ready. Ashurnan waved a hand, as gracious as a greeting to a friend, and the archers loosed.

All at once the air filled with another noise; the swoop of clothyards blotting out the sun. They rose in a cloud, and then arced down towards the Macht line.

The sound of their strike came even to the Great King’s position, a hammering, clattering madness of metal on metal. Gaps appeared in the ranks of the Macht. Men folded in on themselves, dropped as if pole axed, staggered as though struck by a gale of wind. For a few seconds the line wavered, and the Kefren cheered and shouted in derision and triumph. Then the gaps were closed, the phalanx drew itself together, and the Macht came on.

An order was shouted, carried down their line, and the first three ranks of the Macht levelled their spears. Another series of orders, and they picked up the pace to a lumbering trot. Ten paces from the Kefren line they uttered a hoarse roar, and then plunged forward.

The crash of the battle lines meeting, a sound to make the hearer flinch. It carried clear down the valley, and close on that unholy clash there came the following roar of close-quarter battle. The ten thousand Macht slammed into forty thousand Kefren like some force out of nature. In the rear of the Kefren left the archers loosed another volley, twenty thousand arrows overshooting to pepper the ground behind the Macht army. Before them, the ranks of their spearmen were shoved bodily backwards, pressing in on each other. Vorus could see the glittering aichmes of the Macht darting forward and back at their bloody work all along the line, like teeth in some great machine, whilst the men in the rear ranks set their shields in the back of the man in front, dug their heels into the soft ground, and pushed. The Kefren phalanx staggered under that pressure, as a man’s stomach will fold in on the strike of a fist. The battle line was simultaneously chopped to pieces and pushed in on itself. Vorus found the breath clicking in his throat. It had been a long time. He had forgotten what his people looked like in battle, and what savage efficiency they brought to war.

Now the Juthan legion on the Macht left was marching up the hill, and to the left rear of it the traitor’s entire battle line was on the move, pinioning the King’s troops with the threat of their approach. An advance in echelon; brilliant. This Phiron knew his tactics. All along the plain below, for fully six pasangs, great formations of troops were on the move. For the moment, the traitor’s armies had the initiative, but that was part of the plan.

Gasca had moved up from the fifth rank to the third, and now was stabbing overhand with his spear whilst the crushing weight of the men behind him forced him forward. In the frenzied press of the phalanx he periodically felt his feet lifted off the ground and was borne along bodily by the close-packed crowd. He ducked his helm behind the rim of his shield as an enemy spearhead came lancing out at his eyes, was jolted by the impact of the point on his helmet, and stabbed out blindly, furiously. Under his feet, bodies squirmed in the gathering muck and the men behind him with their spears still upright were jabbing downwards with their sauroters, finishing off the wounded, grinding their heels into Kufr faces. The heat was indescribable, the sound deafening, even over the sea-noise of the bronze helm. This was the othismos, the very bowels of warfare. It was where men found themselves or lost themselves, where all their virtues were stripped away, leaving only courage; for one could not endure the othismos without it.

The line lurched forward as the Kufr ranks shrank from the Macht juggernaut. The file leaders shouted hoarse, half-heard commands and from the rear the unrelenting pressure of the file-closers ground the phalanx onwards. Dead men were carried upright in the files, held there by the press of flesh and bronze. The aichmes of the first three ranks stabbed out endlessly. Shearing the sheep this was called, the decimation of the front ranks of the enemy with skilful spear-work, a hedge of wicked metal plunging into the enemy’s faces, shoulders, chests, bellies, anywhere there was an opening. The Kufr infantry were not so heavily armoured as the Macht, and the spear-points were drilling clear through their wooden shields, the leather caps and corselets of their panoplies. Gasca found himself stepping over a layered mound of corpses and half-dead, squirming things that the rear ranks spiked through and through with their sauroters.