The rearguard began yielding ground once again, relinquishing the old channel as the enemy pushed relentlessly. Kamist Reloe’s heavy infantry was perhaps five minutes from striking the north flank.
“This isn’t looking good,” Duiker said.
Corporal List adjusted his helmet strap and said nothing, but the historian saw the tremble in the lad’s hands.
Weasel Clan riders were streaming from the line now, burdened with wounded soldiers. They rode past Duiker’s position, blood- and dust-streaked wraiths, their tattooed faces and bodies making them look demonic. The historian’s gaze followed them as they headed toward the seething refugees. The mass of civilians on this side of the river had shrunk considerably since he last looked. Too fast. They must have panicked at the ford. Thousands drowning in the deeps. A disaster.
“We should withdraw now, sir,” List said.
The rearguard was crumbling, the stream of wounded growing, the horses thundering past were each carrying two, sometimes three fighters. The line contracted, the flanking edges drawing in toward the center. In minutes they would be encircled. Then slaughtered. He saw Captain Lull bellowing commands to form a square. Soldiers still on their feet were pitifully few.
In one of those mysterious vagaries of battle, the Sialk and Hissar infantry paused, there on the threshold of complete victory. Off to one side the heavy infantry arrived, two rectangular blocks fifty soldiers across and twenty deep, bands of archers now in between those blocks and to either side. For a moment, stillness and silence rose like a barrier in the open space between the two forces.
The Weasel Clan continued plucking footmen. Lull’s square was disintegrating from this side, becoming a three-sided, hollow ring.
“The last of the refugees are in the water,” Lull said, his breath coming faster than before, his hands twitching as they gripped the reins. “We have to ride—”
“Where in Hood’s name is Coltaine?” Duiker demanded.
From a dozen paces away Nil reined in amidst a rolling cloud of dust. “We wait no longer! Thus the Fist commands! Ride, Historian!”
Horsemen gathered the last of Lull’s troops even as, with an air-trembling roar, the enemy ranks rushed in. Avenues opened between the infantry, releasing at last the frenzied rage of the peasant horde.
“Sir!” List’s cry was a frantic plea.
Cursing, Duiker wheeled his mount and drove his heels into the mare’s flanks. They bolted after the Wickan horsewarriors.
Now unleashed, the horde poured in pursuit, eager to claim this side of the ford. The Sialk and Hissar infantry and Kamist’s heavy infantry let them go unescorted, maintaining their discipline.
Wickan riders were plunging into the dust clouds ahead at full gallop. At that speed they would clash with the rear elements of the refugees who were still in the midst of crossing. Then, when the peasant army hit, the river would run red. Duiker reined in, shouting to List. The corporal glanced back, his expression one of shock. He sawed the reins, his horse skidding and slipping on the muddy slope.
“Historian!”
“We ride south, along the bank!” Duiker yelled. “We swim the horses—ahead lies chaos and death!”
List was fiercely shaking his head in denial.
Without awaiting a reply, the historian swung his mount to the left. If they rode hard, they would clear the island before the horde reached the ford’s bank. He drove his heels into the mare’s flanks. The animal lunged forward.
“Historian!”
“Ride or die, damn you!”
A hundred paces along the shore was the sunken mouth of the old oxbow, a thick, verdant swath of cattails miraculously untouched by the day’s events. Beyond it rose the hills shielding L’enbarl. If Coltaine extricates himself, he’ll do the smart thing—straight into the river. Even if the current carries them down to the ford itself, they’ll have a head start. A few hundred drowned is a damned sight better than three thousand slaughtered trying to retake this side of the ford.
As if to defy his every thought, Wickan horsewarriors appeared, sweeping down the opposite slope. Coltaine rode at the head, his black feather cape a single splayed wing behind him. Lances were lowered, flanking bowmen nocking arrows on the fly. The charge was coming directly for Duiker.
The historian, half disbelieving, dragged the mare around into a staggering about-face. “Oh Hood, might as well join this doomed charge!” He saw List doing the same, the lad’s face white as death beneath his dusty helm.
They would strike the peasant army’s flank like a knife blade plunging into the side of a whale. And about as effective. Suicide! Even if we make the ford, we’ll flounder. Horses will fall, men will drown, and the peasants will descend to reap slaughter. Still they rode on. Moments before contact, he saw Weasel Clan horsewarriors reappear from the dust cloud. Counterattack. More madness!
Crow riders swept to either side of the historian, the momentum of their charge at its peak. Duiker turned his head at Coltaine’s fierce, joyous shout.
Arrows whizzed past. The flank of the peasant army contracted, flinched back. When the Wickans struck, it was into a solidly packed mass of humanity. Yet, at the last moment, the Crow Clan riders wheeled toward the river and rode alongside the flank. Not a knife plunge. A saber slash.
Peasants died. Others fell in their frantic retreat and were trampled by the frenzied horses. The entire flank bloomed red as the savage Wickan blades traveled its length.
The peasants holding the ford’s landing were crumpling beneath the Weasel Clan’s counterattack. Then the lead riders of the Crow Clan struck the north edge.
The peasant line seemed to melt away before Duiker’s eyes. He now rode with the Crow Clan, horse shoulders hammering his legs to either side. Blood rained from raised weapons, spattering his face and hands. Ahead, the Weasel Clan’s riders parted, covering their kin’s wild charge straight into the clouds of dust.
Now the mayhem truly begins. For all the glory of Coltaine’s charge, ahead lay the river. Wounded soldiers, refugees and Hood knew what else.
The historian snatched what he felt would be his last breath a moment before plunging into the sunlit dust.
His mare splashed water, yet barely slowed. The way before him stretched clear, a swirling, strangely choppy sweep of muddy water. Other riders were barely visible farther ahead, their horses at full gallop. Duiker could feel the unyielding, solid impact his mare’s hooves made as they rode on. There was not four and a half feet of river beneath them, but half that. And the hooves struck stone, not mud. He did not understand.
Corporal List appeared alongside the historian, as well as a straggling squad of Crow horsewarriors. One of the Wickans grinned. “Coltaine’s road—his warriors fly like ghosts across the river!”
Various comments the night before returned to Duiker. Tumlit—that nobleman’s observations. Reinforced wagons apparently overloaded with wounded. Stone cutters and Engineers. The wagons crossing first and taking most of the night to do so. The wounded were laid atop the stone blocks. The damned Engineers had built a road!
It still seemed impossible, yet the evidence was there beneath him as he rode. Poles had been raised to either side, strung with rope made from Tithansi hair to mark the edges. A little over ten feet wide—what was surrendered in width was made up for with the relative swiftness of crossing the more than four hundred paces to the other side. The ford’s depth was no more than two and a third feet now, and had clearly proved manageable for both livestock and refugees.
The dust thinned ahead and the historian realized they were approaching the river’s west side. The thunder of sorcery reached him. This battle’s far from over. We’ve temporarily outrun one army, only to charge headlong into another. All this, just to get crushed between two rocks?
They reached the shallows and a moment later rode upslope twenty strides, emerging from the last drifting shrouds of dust.
Duiker shouted in alarm, he and his companions frantically sawing their reins.
Directly in front of them was a squad of soldiers—Engineers—who had been running at full speed toward the ford’s landing. The sappers now scattered with foul curses, ducking and dodging around the stumbling, skidding horses. One, a solid, mountainous man with a sun-burnished, smooth-shaven, flat face, flung his battered helm off, revealing a bald pate, and threw the iron skullcap at the nearest Wickan rider—missing the warrior’s head by scant inches. “Clear out, you flyblown piles of gizzards! We got work to do!”
“Yeah!” another growled, limping in circles after a hoof had landed full on a foot. “Go fight or something! We got a plug to pull!”
Ignoring their demands, Duiker spun the mare around to face the ford. Whatever sorcery had held the dust over the water was now gone. The clouds had already drifted fifty paces downstream. And Coltaine’s Road was a mass of armed, screaming peasants.
The second sapper who’d spoken now scrambled to a shallow pit overlooking the muddy landing.
“Hold off there, Cuttle!” the big man commanded, his eyes on the surging thousands—the lead elements now in the middle of the crossing. The man anchored his huge hands on his hips, glowering and seemingly unaware of the rapt attention his squad held on him, as well as that from Duiker, List and the half-dozen Wickan horsemen. “Got to maximize,” the man rumbled. “Bastard Wickans ain’t the only ones who know about timing.”
The horde’s vanguard, glittering with weapons, looking like the iron-fanged maw of a giant snake, was three-quarters across. The historian could make out individual faces, the expressions of fear and murderous intent that make up the faces of battle. A glance behind him showed rising columns of smoke and the flash of sorcery, concentrated on the right flank of the Seventh’s defensive positions. The faint screeching Semk war cry drifted from that flank, a sound like claws scraping taut skin. A fierce melee was underway at the first earthworks.
“All right, Cuttle,” the big man drawled. “Yank the hair.”
Duiker swung back to see the sapper in the pit raise both hands, gripping a long, black cord that trailed down into the water. Cuttle’s dirt-smeared face twisted into a fierce grimace, his eyes squeezing shut. Then he pulled. The cord went slack.
Nothing happened.
The historian chanced to look the big man’s way. He had a finger stuck in each ear, though his eyes remained open and fixed on the river. Realization struck Duiker even as List cried, “Sir!”
The ground seemed to drop an inch under them. The water on the ford rose up, humped, blurred, the hump seeming to roll with lightning swiftness down the submerged road’s length. The peasants on the river simply vanished. Then reappeared a heart-beat later—even as the concussion struck everyone on shore with a wind like a god’s fist—in blossoms of red and pink and yellow, fragments of flesh and bone, limbs, hair, tufts of cloth, all lifting higher and higher as the water exploded up and out in a muddy, ghastly mist.
Duiker’s mare backstepped, head tossing. The sound had been deafening. The world shivered on all sides. A Wickan rider had tumbled from his saddle and now writhed on the ground, hands held to his ears.
The river began to fall back, horridly churned with bodies and pieces of bodies, steam twisting away on sudden gusts of wind. The giant snake’s head was gone. Obliterated. As was another third of its length—all who had been in the water were gone.
Though he now stood close by, the big man’s words sounded faint and distant to Duiker’s ringing ears as he said, “Fifty-five cussers—what the Seventh’s been hoarding for years. That ford’s now a trench. Ha.” Then his satisfied expression drained away. “Hood’s toes, we’re back to digging with shovels.”
A hand plucked the historian’s sleeve. List leaned close and whispered, “Where to now, sir?”
The historian looked downstream at the twisting eddies, red-stained and full of human flotsam. For a moment he could not comprehend the corporal’s question. Where to? Nowhere that’s good, no place where giving pause to slaughter will yield something other than despair.
“Sir?”
“To the melee, Corporal. We see this through.”
The swift arrival of Coltaine and his Crow horsewarriors to strike at the west flank of the Tithansi lancers on this side of the river had turned the tide of battle. As they rode toward the engagement at the earthworks, Duiker and List could see the Tithansi crumbling, exposing the Semk footmen to the mounted Wickan bowmen. Arrows raked through the wildhaired Semk fighters.
At the center stood the bulk of the Seventh’s infantry, holding at bay the frenzied efforts of the Semk, while a hundred paces to the north, the Guran heavy infantry still waited to close with the hated Malazans. Their commander was evidently having second thoughts. Kamist Reloe and his army were trapped—for this battle at least—on the other side of the river. Apart from the battered rearguard marines and the Weasel Clan, Coltaine’s force was relatively intact.
Five hundred paces farther west, out on a broad, stony plain, the Weasel Clan pursued remnants of Guran cavalry.
Duiker saw a knot of color amidst the Seventh, gold and red—Baria Setral and his Red Blades, in the heart of the fighting. The Semk seemed eager to close on the Malzan lapdogs, and were paying in blood for their desire. Nonetheless, Setral’s troop looked at no more than half strength—less than twenty men.
“I want to get closer,” Duiker announced.
“Yes, sir,” List said. He pointed. “That rise there—it’ll put us in bow range though, sir.”
“I’ll take that risk.”
They rode toward the Seventh. The company standard stood solitary and dust-streaked on a low hill just behind the line. Three gray-haired veterans guarded it—Semk bodies strewn on the slope indicated that the hill had been hotly contested earlier in the day. The veterans had been in the fight, and all bore minor wounds.
As the historian and the corporal rode to their position, Duiker saw that the three men crouched around a fallen comrade. Tears had clawed crooked trails down their dusty cheeks. Arriving, the historian slowly dismounted.
“You’ve a story here, soldiers,” he said, pitching his voice low to reach through the clangor and shouts of the struggle thirty paces north of them.
One of the veterans glanced up, squinting. “The old Emperor’s historian, by Hood’s grin! Saw you in Falar, or maybe the Wickan Plains—”
“Both. The standard was challenged, I see. You lost a friend in defending it.”
The man blinked, then glanced around until he focused on the Seventh’s standard. The pikeshaft leaned to one side, its tattered banner bleached into ghost colors by the sun. “Hood’s breath,” the man growled. “Think we’d fight to save a piece of cloth on a pole?” He gestured at the body his friends knelt around. “Nordo took two arrows. We held off a squad of Semk so he could die in his own time. Those bastard tribesmen snatch wounded enemies and keep ’em alive so’s they can torture ’em. Nordo wasn’t gettin’ none of that.”
Duiker was silent for a long moment. “Is that how you want the tale told, soldier?”
The man squinted some more, then he nodded. “Just like that, Historian. We ain’t just a Malazan army any more. We’re Coltaine’s.”
“But he’s a Fist.”
“He’s a cold-blooded lizard.” The man then grinned. “But he’s all ours.”
Smiling, Duiker twisted in his saddle and studied the battle at the line. Some threshold of spirit had been crossed. The Semk were broken. Dying by the score with three legions of supposed allies sitting motionless on the slopes behind them, they had carved out the last of zeal in the holy cause—at least for this engagement. There would be curses and hot accusations in the enemy camps this coming night, Duiker knew. Good, let them crack apart of their own accord.
Once again, it was not to be the Whirlwind’s day.
Coltaine did not let his victorious army rest as the afternoon’s light sank in the earth. New fortifications were raised, others reinforced. Trenches were dug, pickets established. The refugees were led
out onto the stony plain west of the ford, their tents arranged in blocks with wide avenues in between. Wagons loaded with wounded soldiers were moved into those avenues, and the cutters and healers set to work.
The livestock were driven south, to the grassy slopes of the Barl Hills—a weathered, humped range of bleached rock and twisted jackpine. Drovers supported by riders of the Foolish Dog Clan guarded the herds.
In the Fist’s command tent, as the sun dropped beneath the horizon, Coltaine held a debriefing.
Duiker, with the now ever-present Corporal List standing at his shoulder, sat wearily in a camp chair, listening to the commanders make their reports with a dismay that slowly numbed. Lull had lost fully half his marines, and the auxiliaries that had supported him had fared even worse. The Weasel Clan had been mauled during the withdrawal—a shortage of horses was now their main concern. From the Seventh, captains Chenned and Sulmar recounted a seemingly endless litany of wounded and dead. It seemed that their officers and squad sergeants, in particular, had taken heavy losses. The pressure against the defensive line had been enormous, especially early in the day—before support had arrived in the form of the Red Blades and the Foolish Dog Clan. The tale of Baria Setral and his company’s fall rode many a breath. They had fought with demonic ferocity, holding the front ranks, purchasing with their lives a crucial period in which the infantry was able to regroup. The Red Blades had shown valor, enough to earn comment from Coltaine himself.
Sormo had lost two of his warlock children in the struggle against the Semk wizard-priests, although both Nil and Nether survived. “We were lucky,” he said after reporting the deaths in a cool, dispassionate tone. “The Semk god is a vicious Ascendant. It uses the wizards to channel its rage, without regard for their mortal flesh. Those unable to withstand their god’s power simply disintegrated.”
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