At the start of the morning this had been a bare and smooth slope of scrub-peppered earth, wide and open enough to have run footraces upon.
Now the work of war had transformed it into a swamp within which the corpses piled up in banks and outcrops of carrion like soft, rotting boulder-fields. It was no longer ground for cavalry, but the Arakosans were slogging it out to the end, their horses almost immobilised under them. What bastard brings a horse to war? Rictus wondered, outraged to the brim of his exhausted mind, shattered by the slaughterous waste, the stunning profligacy of the enemy.
Nevertheless, the Macht had been beaten here. Of the three thousand skirmishers who had held this slope at the start of the morning, there might be a thousand left who were still standing weapon in hand. And these would soon follow their fallen friends into the mud. They knew this, but they fought on because they also knew that behind them, up on the hill, the line of their heavy kindred had its back to them. Should the enemy break through their ranks there would be a slaughter on the hillcrest which would make this one seem trivial by comparison.
So the skirmishers, who had not been trained or created for this task, stood their ground. Because they were Macht, and it was what they had been ordered to do.
For Arkamenes the morning had been a marvel of sensation, the ultimate spectacle. Not even the most jaded libertine could fail to have his senses aroused by this, the grandest kind of theatre. I say go, he thought, and they go. They die in thousands, the lines move, the thing is done. I have said it shall be so, and so it becomes.
He had never been so happy in his life.
He had seen the Macht march up the hill and had watched them annihilate the Great King’s left wing, an army in itself. The cavalry which had ambushed the Macht had been fought to a standstill by their camp-servants. He could see that struggle still going on, a dark stain on the land some three pasangs to the south. He could also see the Macht battle line reforming on the hilltop. Soon they would advance and take on the Great King’s centre. When that happened he would lead his personal bodyguard up the hill to complete the victory, to be in at the kill.
It was hot, now that the sun had climbed. He could feel the heat of it even through the fine linen of his komis, and the jewelled breastplates of his bodyguard were too bright to look upon. He held out his hand, and a Kefren attendant placed within it a cool goblet of spring-water.
The water was never drunk. Halfway to his lips, the goblet stopped, and hung there in the air, his fingers suddenly cold about it. There it was, the Great King’s standard, the holy symbol of Asuria. And it was coming down the hill towards him in the midst of a great cloud of fast-moving cavalry.
The goblet spun through the air and the tall Niseian half-reared under Arkamenes, catching its master’s shock. He wrestled and beat the animal to quiet, staring. It could not be.
The enemy cavalry took a loop out to the north a few hundred paces, to avoid striking the ranks of the Juthan Legion now making its dogged way up the hillside. They wheeled back in like fish in shoal, not in ordered ranks, but a crowd of superb horsemen following their leader—and that leader was out in front now with a bright scimitar raised up to catch the flash of the sunlight.
Arkamenes drew his own sword and waved it forwards. “Go, go go!” he cried to the Kefren horsemen about him, his mind reaching for words but not finding them in its tumult.
The enemy cavalry struck his own at a gallop, a thunderous crash of flesh and metal; suddenly the war came near and to be smelled and felt and feared. Back, the stationary ranks of the rebel horse were crushed by the impact, some bowled over in the first onset, others smashed onto their haunches, riders pinned in the melee, legs broken between the ribs of the maddened animals. From these platforms of plunging flesh their masters hacked at each other with bright swords or stabbed overhand with their lances, the points and blades clashing amid flurries of sparks. Asurian steel struck Asurian steel, Kefren killing Kefren, and the momentum of the enemy charge was still felt through the horseflesh and the confusion, the King’s standard rearing up like a raptor above the killing.
Ashurnan’s bodyguard were the finest warriors of their race, mounted on the mightiest warhorses the Empire could breed. And they had momentum on their side. The Great King fought his way forward, and those who died under his blade saw that there was a kind of gladness on his face, a recklessness. He did not expect to live long, and so meant to live well for what remained of this life to be measured in moments, the mere drips of an almost empty waterclock. His followers had caught his mind and were with him in the moment, wholly reconciled. Even Arkamenes, watching, thought there was a kind of beauty about it. And for one broken second, he found himself loving the brother he had known as a boy, who had been his conscience and his ally. That familiar face, transfigured so as to be a boy’s again.