The cavalry came on in a wave, tall horses bearing shrieking Kufr with luminous eyes and billowing, multi-coloured robes. They had scimitars, javelins, and a few stabbing spears. Their line extended two pasangs to left and right. Had the ground been firmer, they would have made it into a gallop, so frenziedly were the riders beating their wild-eyed and snorting mounts. But here the earth had been churned into a mire by the infantry battle, and the hillside was strewn with dead and dying of both sides and bristling with spent arrows, like the hair on a man’s forearm when the cold hits it. So they advanced at a fast trot, some horses tripping up and toppling even at that. There were thousands—Rictus had not believed there could be so many of the beasts in the world. The ground shook under their hooves, and the blood rippled in its muddy craters.
They rode down their own wounded. At a hundred paces the skirmishers threw their first volley of javelins. There were perhaps three morai of light troops out here on the Macht right, and for the moment they were entirely unsupported. The heavy troops were at the top of the hill with their backs to the cavalry.
A second volley. Fifty paces. There would not be time for a third. “Spears!” Rictus shouted. “Close up, close up!”
They had not been drilled for this, unlike their heavier brethren. They did not come together in a solid line, but in clumps and knots of men and boys, pelta shields on their left arms, single-headed spears thrusting out on the right. Rictus felt a moment of pure, almost incapacitating terror. He had never been charged by cavalry before; none of them had.
The big horses struck home. Some, confined by their fellows on right and left, charged straight into the spears. Most streamed to left or right of the broken, scattered line, their riders hacking at the heads of the skirmishers as they passed by. Rictus and his comrades were islands in a raging sea of horseflesh and hacking steel. They stabbed out at the bellies of the animals and in moments had a bank of the injured beasts thrashing around them, riders pinned beneath their carcasses or finished off before they could rise out of the mud. But more and more cavalry kept streaming past, turning and coming back again, hooves hammering the ground into a bloody morass, bogging themselves down. There was no fluidity to the fight; the cavalry did not charge and counter-charge. They slogged through the light troops of the Macht in bursts of pure mass and muscle, and bore down the defenders by numbers and bulk.
Rictus’s half-centon was now facing out on all directions, surrounded. In their midst a dozen dead and dying horses made a sort of bulwark. Thrusting his spear at a passing rider, Rictus leaned his foot on the equine carcass before him and felt the warmth and heartbeat of the animal as it lay dying in the bloody mud, not comprehending why it should have to endure the agony of such an end. He killed it with a spear-thrust to the brain, unable to listen to its screaming gurgles. When the Kufr went down they screamed no less piteously, but that afforded his conscience no trouble at all.
The sun climbed higher on that endless morning. It topped the hills upon which the Great King’s armies now struggled and came bursting over the battle, setting alight a million tiny shards of reflected light, caught on helmets, spearpoints, and sword-blades, on the sweat of men’s flesh and in the madness of their eyes. The Kufr cavalry fought in a cloud of their mounts’ steam and the sun caught it and made wands and bars of restless light that speared through the carnage in a bitter kind of beauty. The Arakosan horsemen had been brought to a bloody halt by the amorphous ranks of the Macht skirmishers, and now some eight or nine thousand soldiers were embroiled in a charnel-house of blood and muck and animals screaming out on the Kefren left wing. For perhaps two square pasangs the tortured, sucking ooze that was the earth could not be seen below the maddened press of men and animals contending there. All thoughts of higher tactics were lost as the base struggle went on. But though the skirmishers were being steadily destroyed, they had protected the flank of the heavy infantry. The Macht spearmen were wheeling left on the crest of the hill, by morai, and were now advancing once more, their ranks thinner now, but as ordered as they had been at the beginning of the day. Before them, the Kefren centre was pulling back, threatened now by the Ten Thousand to the south and the advancing Juthan Legion to the west. The Kefren right wing was being hurled forward, courier after courier urging the Great King’s generals there to advance at the double, to support the King’s position on the right. A line of troops four pasangs long thus began to wheel inwards to try and catch the echeloned regiments of Arkamenes’s army before they could close the pincers of their formations. More cavalry led the way, this time the heavy lancers of the Asurian heartland with their blue and gold enamelled armour. These burst forward out of the Kefren line with all the dash and brilliance of a kingfisher’s strike, and began thundering down the slope towards the contingents from Tanis and Istar below, five thousand strong, fresh and unblooded.