The Hollow March

by Chris Galford

  They should have known. Yet the Yanuskielt, their eyes and their ears, still had not returned. Many feared the worst. More were too focused on the looming lines to care. As for Leszek, Rurik could only hope the march had left his columns weary.

  Instead of hosting a slumbering camp, the Effisians now stood deployed along the road in a strong defensive position, reinforced with trenches that had been deepened in the night. Their right flank, which extended into the outskirts of Iłóm, was anchored on a low hill overlooking the battlefield, and watchmen had detected men laboring throughout the night to haul the brunt of the Effisian artillery upon it. That gave them the high ground, and a good vantage point from which to command the rest of the field. Wherever the Imperials moved, there would be artillery fire to greet them.

  Rurik stared into the sea of pikes and long guns and had the unsettling feeling they were staring back into him. It was a curious thing to look on those that would kill them. Their uniforms were different, but they held the same shape, same grim looks, same determination. Kill or be killed, and he told himself that he had killed before. He had warded knives, watched their bearers bleed to death at his feet. Yet this seemed different. He wasn’t fighting for his life. He was fighting to take someone else’s. Their land. Their homes.

  Some of the other men whispered prayers to their maker.

  Standing there, Rurik told himself he could not die, for Assal loved him. All too soon this fell away, however, with the realization that Assal loved everyone, and that many of them would die or be ruined in the hours to come, and he broke out in a cold sweat.

  They would march. In an organized mass of chaos, they would crash against them and fight in shapeless disarray, until one or the other lay dead upon the field. Some would die without even seeing their killer’s face. Such was the majesty of the arrow; the cruelty of the gun.

  As Rurik breathed, trying to steady his nerves, the lines lengthened out. Artillery was ushered forward as longbowmen staked their arrows. Rurik tried to count them all—the Imperial cannon—and found more than sixty wheeled against the Effisian lines. From what he could see, the Effisians held less than half that, and these concentrated on the hill of their right flank, and at their center. The left, where the Company poised to march, held but lines of arquebusiers crouched along the trenches and the fences by the sunken road.

  It was eerily calm as they shifted into position. The air was dead and dry. Serenity greeted them in blue where the clouds opened, and no wind howled to stir them closed again. No sounds arose from the enemy, no salvos to halt their advance. There were no birds to sing for them, nor any distant roar.

  For all his father had told him of such moments, Rurik had expected a symphony of sound, some tumultuous cacophony of calamitous destruction. Death, he expected, would beat a solemn tune in the moments leading to such horror, and guide them with it in the moments after. Such absence before such gathering hordes seemed inconceivable. Yet the closer they grew, the deeper the hush, until he thought the world might tear asunder. The Effisians let them gather. It was the proper way.

  In the moment before the push, he felt a steady hand on his shoulder. “Breathe,” Alviss told him. “It will be over soon.”

  As if on cue, shouts went up to a drummer’s tune and the fusillade began. One after another the cannons belched and rolled, and the flames leapt from them, shaking the earth as the air was consumed in a flood of coarse black smoke. From the outlying hill, the Effisian guns answered in turn. Figures jerked all along the distant sky as black shapes hurdled through the air. The sky darkened and burst. Men tensed beneath this bitter rain.

  Dirt and snow exploded along the road and through the field. The first volley fell short, but it would not do so again. In the distant light, Rurik beheld clumps of dirt hurled twenty feet high and bodies vanish under the cannonade. The Effisians adjusted; the Idasians did not have to.

  Then the explosions hit home. Men screamed as iron balls tore through the lines, sometimes bursting on the ground, sometimes leaping from crater to crater as they skidded along the earth. There was an explosion in the air as a cannonball exploded early. Men sheltered under shield and helm as they sought to hide from the debris. The flash was blinding even before the midday sun, and Rurik wheeled away from it, shielding his eyes with his buckler, and waiting.

  Once the second volley had been exchanged, he heard the shouts rise, listened to the shrieking roar of some captain’s trumpet. He felt Alviss’s hand on his back, urging him forward.

  “It’s time.”

  The words hung ominously as the bodies around him shifted. He stared past the Kuric, to Essa and Rowan and Chigenda, standing side-by-side. Rowan made for a colorful target, painted and ready for a musket shot. Essa did not belong at all. She should have been back among the archers, bow stretched taut, arrow poised. This was not her place. She would surely fall. “Stay close,” Alviss said, and he stared up at him, watching those kind eyes darken and focus on the fields beyond them. The arm pulled him close, then fell away.

  “LOOSE!”

  The word seemed louder than it should have, and he jolted at its tremor, watching the swarm tip back and launch into the air. Black-shafted arrows flooded the sky from lines of longbowmen. The sky darkened before their approach, with the answering volley from the Effisians, and everywhere there were men raising shields and striking to a knee—falling and crying out and saying nothing ever more.

  They were marching before he realized his feet had lifted with them. It had a curious beat to it—the repetition of a thousandfold boots, lifting and falling as one. The lines of archers slid back to let them pass. Someone, he was certain, had taken up a song, and all around him others echoed it, as best they could. Alviss was silent, focused, and Rurik looked around for the source of the tune, but he could not find it. Drums echoed—the alarum of the charge. The column dipped and pressed on for the road, and all along the fence line Rurik beheld soldiers rising, to the cries of their sergeants.

  The Company was not amongst the first column to descend upon the line, but it followed closely on its heels. At their backs, thousands more stirred, a gathering swarm. Column upon column lay before and behind them, pressing into the fray, intent on pushing it harder than any other point along the line. The center moved forward with them, and the left beyond them, but these were the distraction, the pressing multitude of corpses that would be sacrificed upon the field of victory for whatever scraps they could gain from the entrenched Effisian positions.

  Beyond the road, into the field, Rurik could see men rushing along the lines. Breaths quickened to the Gorjes’ hollers, competing with the music of his heartbeats. The lines marched forward, to render the blood for the most sacrilegious of feasts.

  All at once, the arquebusiers along the road opened up on the Imperial lines. They waited until they had nearly reached the road itself and fired into them at point blank. The first line plummeted, was gone. The second fell in scattered masses, but the third stepped over them, and the columns pressed on. The arquebusiers sank back, ramming the gunpowder and shot from the safety of their trenches. Then the corners of the Imperial columns opened up as well, and with a shout, the rest sprang for the fence, and all along the lines there rose a roar that was tempered only by the blistering bellow of the guns. The air was alive with lead, and the earth was smothered with the dead.

  Death had always stalked Rurik’s life. Yet neither exile nor the skirmishes that had come before this hell could have prepared him for the plunge into real war. Amidst the marching throng, it seemed nothing as the songs described. Even his father’s stories, which he had always thought starkly vivid descriptions, did not scratch at the madness of the moment.

  Chaos. Everything around him was chaos, and they marched willingly into it.

  Rurik saw a man before him. In step, he marched them on. As they were going over the fence, he straightened suddenly, and Rurik felt a slimy warmth spatter his cheek. Without thought, he raised a hand to it, and pulled back to
wonder at the scarlet line it bloomed. The man toppled, and Rurik could see his head was split like a nut. Skull cracked, more of the red dribbled down, and only after the body was underfoot did he realize that he would never see that face again. It was passed, gone, and only the fence mattered. Everything else was just a dream.

  The lines wavered as they hit the fence, but they poured over the stones and into the gunners, even as the Effisians cried out to fire at will. Shots rang out, indiscriminate along the trench, and the Imperials poured on, an unstoppable horde.

  Rurik was in the third line to leap the fence, and he landed heavily, bending at the knees as he pawed his sword. One man pulled a pistol in front of him, aimed it for Alviss. Another man speared the pistoleer in the chest and the shot went wide. He plummeted, and the man that stabbed him shortly fell as well, struck by the blunt of a long gun. Rurik drew up taut as a bowstring, looking this way and that for a fight, but all he saw were bodies, and everywhere was fire, for the smoke rose and the lead fell, and both sides fired down on them from above.

  “Fire! Fire!”

  Men struck him from behind and bowled him forward. Men swung at him from the front, and drove him back. He dropped down, was shoved forward, and stabbed out, catching a man at the waist and carving him through. He watched the man’s eyes dull as he screamed and plummeted off. Again and again he stabbed, hoping to make the sound stop.

  Alviss pulled him away, slapping him up against the fence. “Are you alright?” Alviss shook him, but he was cold, numb. He stared at Alviss, stared past him. Chigenda was spearing men without pause, leaping through, like each was a springboard to the next. Rowan moved with Essa, stepping back toward them. The black horde was beginning to move up and out of the trench, on toward the fields. No pause. No rest.

  “Are you alright?”

  Rurik nodded dimly, and was yanked along with the crowd. “Stay close,” he heard only vaguely. “Do not stray.” Alviss’s hand gripped his arm and led him, as he always had. Never more had Rurik felt as a sheep, born to follow, never to lead.

  “Is he alright?” Rowan asked. He could hear him, somewhere in the horde. A shot burst overhead, striking the hat from the fencer’s head. Rurik’s ears rang, and he stumbled, reaching for it, but Alviss pulled him on. Faces passed stiff and stoic, focused on the field beyond.

  “This mess is bloody awful.” Someone shouted. “Form up,” the voice was crying. “Form on me.” The columns were shifting, growing, reforming as the arquebusiers fled and died before them. On they marched, up, up into the hail.

  They hit the line and were repulsed, only to fall on them again. Lines were shifting along the field to meet them—they were pushing out, and away, and all around them the artillery fell.

  The columns were before them, bullets and arrows swarming over their shoulders. As the long guns rotated, a wall of pikes and spears rose up to meet them, boots grinding holes into the earth. The Effisians would hold them or they would break. There was no alternative.

  The army wheeled, was beaten back, and wheeled again, with still more corps for the killing. Both sides plunged headlong into the battle, a seemingly inexhaustible supply of bodies and guns behind them. The ground was soaked in their blood, but they slipped in it and still they poured in, unwilling to yield this desolate earth. Rurik was flung upon the spears and poles of the enemy again and again, and every time the Imperials broke, he fled with them, finding his feet again only at the next column, rising to join the fight.

  Then from the east they heard it: the whooping, hollering cry of the Yanuskielt brigade—the light horse—joined by the clattering clamor of their full and unrestrained gallop. At twenty paces, clouds burst in wisps around them, and the Effisians fell reeling, confused and horrified. Others rushed in to fill the gap. Five paces out, another cloud—they had tossed their first pistols aside, and fired a second. Then came the sabers with their rattling cries. Howling, they smashed into the Effisians, slashing and trampling them underfoot. Rurik and the rest poured after them.

  More poured on, and on, and the pikemen broke before the horsemen as they struck and swung away again as quick, driving for the baggage trains. But other soldiers surged to meet them. The fighting was terrible there. Rurik saw it, felt it, breathed it more truly than he had ever felt another living, breathing thing. Yet the Effisians were yielding. Their lines wavered, reinforced and broke. Men started to run, but as Rurik fell screaming on them with the rest, a battle horn roared from their rear.

  When he heard it, he thought it was the Yanuskielt, wheeling around for another pass. Too late he saw the heavy cavalry ride, scorching the earth with their stride. Rurik watched as one musketeer whirled, waving to them, only to realize they were not breaking stride. A shot from a long gun caught the man by the throat, and carried him away, and Rurik tore himself away as well, screaming for Alviss and Essa. Lines bubbled into jostling waves of fears and spears. He could not get away.

  It seemed thousands poured across the plain from the north—reserves, hidden among the low hills. But the knights, with their curved sabers and lances long as any pike, plowed into the pursuing Imperials from behind, throwing their ranks into confusion and disarray. In a wedge, they rode them down like so much grass. The fighting grew ever more pitched, and men were swallowed up in the furious sea of hooves.

  The Imperials wavered, retreated to the next line. Some were splintered, caught in pockets by the resurging Effisians. Riderless horses ran on and scattered through the lines.

  Alviss saved Rurik from that fate, surging through the multitude that had come between them to put an axe to the nearest man and shove his own body squarely between the enemy and him. He threw another Imperial back, shouting at him to run. Pace by pace, he inched back, keeping Rurik at his. At his urging, they broke to the east, snared Essa and Rowan, and watched as the men they fled with were trampled and torn. They searched for Chigenda, but when they spotted him, he was too far out, caught in the lines of horsemen, and he was slick with blood. Alviss called out to him, but his voice was lost in the tumult. The air was hot and dry and sucked at all sound. They retreated.

  Only the continuous wall of fire from Imperial gunners finally subdued the enemy cavalry. Smaller cannons, wheeled by horse, discharged blindly into the ranks. Someone shouted that a general had fallen. Rurik never thought to ask whose.

  It must surely have been the Effisians’, however, for as soon as the smoke had cleared, their riders were collapsing. A cannonball shredded a line of men, and others fled screaming.

  Hours traded in such ways. What one lost would be retaken. Men fought and died inches from where a friend had died half an hour before. Where columns fell, reserves were sent in.

  Rurik felt like a ragdoll, jerked back and forth across the lines, never knowing quite where he stood, never having a moment to consider it. His muscles ached and his lungs burned with saltpeter. A blow along the stomach set him wheezing, and when he coughed, it came up thick and black.

  They did not even see the worst of it. Across the field, the center pressed, with all the veterans of Othmann’s army. Rurik knew luck, compared to them. Glimpses through smoke formed the picture of a struggling army, staggering up into a hail of cannon and long gun fire as they pressed from the road. Those who survived the barrage had the honor of a lance’s tip, thousands of Effisian cavalry charging out from behind the cover of their own lines. Every time he dared a glance, Rurik saw less and less of the embattled veterans.

  Trumpets bleated hopelessly—they rang hollow in Rurik’s nearly deafened ears.

  Entangled at the foot of the plains, dozens stared back down the road, where it seemed all at once that the entire army lay on the verge of collapse. It seemed unfathomable to Rurik that death as such could ever cease once begun. He saw death, and felt it, and never thought that he would ever come through it to see life again. All was butchers’ work. If the center gave, they would be alone, and they would die, beleaguered until the moment of nonexistence.

  It seem
ed unimportant. He beheld flares of devastation and thought only of the moment, of his hand and his foot and the blades that danced. Men flashed before him, separated sometimes by mere inches, their wrathful and dying breaths hot on his face. It was not murder when he killed. It was life, that was all. He fought to preserve it. Not because of a voice, or a crown, but for the simple rush that surged through heart and mind with the reality that a single pause could cost him everything.

  Images of Rowan’s stances and maneuvers flashed through his mind, at chaotic intervals. He dismissed them as quickly as they came. War offered no such formality. It was less about the art of killing than the momentum of it. You stabbed, ducked and weaved as the situation commanded, surrendered your body to the battle and moved with its flow. It was about survival, plain and simple, and the death of the other man. One had to have eyes in the back of their head to do it, but when the heart pumped with fear, it felt as though every inch was on edge, tingling with each sweep and swoosh of a saber stroke, feeling out the rush of swings before they ever came to head. It was horrifying how quickly the threat of death honed one’s senses to the task—how completely they eroded all else.

  Before or behind, a motion caught him twisting, blade poised. The shout of his name was all it took. He spun at the word, the familiarity of the voice lost in the roar of the steel all around him. Rowan lurched from a clump of locked swordsmen, a hand on his hip. In the distance rose the faint cry of trumpets on the wind. Rowan’s hair swept and plastered to his gaunt features. He pressed between men to reach him, and Rurik for him, stumbling dumbstruck between the advancing lines. Surrounded, yet alone.

  Rowan stumbled against him, sliding an arm about his shoulders and leaning heavily on him. Men pushed past, in lines that broke on other lines. The wounded fencer rasped unbidden.

  “We need to get west.”