Arcanum

by Simon Morden

  She ran to her left, to the centurion of the spears at the end. “Charge them, sir. Charge now.”

  He nodded, and shouted his orders over the groan and grind. The drummer hammered out a double pace as the spears wheeled about, and when they were in position, they roared and ran.

  The effect was instant. Instead of going backwards, the centre started forwards. There was another noise, too, a distant rumbling thunder like an avalanche. A field of pennants as bright as a summer meadow fluttered into view, the white bird of the Franks on every one.

  The pennants dipped with the spears they were tied to, and Clovis’s cavalry came galloping up behind the dwarves, already penned in on three sides.

  It broke them. They died with blades in their fronts, in their backs, and it didn’t matter where they turned, there were always more. The Franks, after the first shock of the charge, wheeled away rather than engage in an unruly melee, and that left the rear momentarily free.

  The dwarves fled through the opening, first in ones and twos, then in a kind of mass brawl that saw them fighting each other to escape. The Carinthian spears surged forward to give chase, but Sophia wanted them back. Let Clovis have the duty of running them down before they could cross into the smoking Gehenna that Thaler had created.

  “Hold,” she called, and the drummers sounded the retreat.

  They re-formed, and Sophia ordered that the abandoned wagons be rolled back through her lines and set up across the via, blocking it and any way around it. The two they’d destroyed, they pushed into the marsh.

  Inside both was a charnel house, blackened with soot, reddened with blood. They’d done this. She’d done this. If she lived through today, this would be what she’d see when she closed her eyes at night, not fire, but ash.

  She sent her wounded back across the river to Rosenheim, and had her dead laid out behind the tower. She resented the loss of each and every one of them. They’d been living and breathing that morning, and now they weren’t.

  Clovis, fine in his plate and with his moustache bristling, rode up beside her. “My lady. We scent victory.”

  Sophia stared up at him. “The main host hasn’t reached us yet, and there are still far more of them than there are of us. We have a saying about chickens and eggs, and when to count them.”

  Clovis’s horse stamped its feet, because its master could not.

  “You Carinthians are so gloomy. In the Franklands we would have pressed home our advantage and routed the enemy.”

  “This,” she spread her hands wide, “this is the first time we’ve ever seen them run. We’ve slaughtered thousands of them, and still they come at us. You’ll keep your hot-headed impetuosity until after we’re done.”

  Clovis leant forward in his saddle. “And what if I take my men and leave the field, my lady?”

  “In order to lead an army of free people, a commander needs the respect of their soldiers, my lord. I’m confident I have the respect of everyone in my army, including your sergeants. How confident are you?”

  He sat bolt upright. “You will not call me that name again.”

  “I’ll have no need to call you that name again if you follow my orders. Pretend that they’re yours, if you prefer, but an army has to act with a single mind.”

  “Yours.”

  There was no time for an argument, so she simply said “Yes”, and turned to shout up at the tower. “Aelinn? What can you see?”

  “Master Thaler is running out of things to shoot at. The horde are massing at the southern end of the field. The wagons next to Master Büber’s position are staying still.”

  “We absolutely have to get them out into the open.” She regarded Clovis. “Take your men around the back of Büber’s position. Be ready.”

  The Frank snorted. “We are always ready.”

  “Good. A general can’t ask for any more.” It would sour him further, and she needed to be careful. But her blood was up, and she wasn’t about to take lessons from this nudnik.

  Clovis wheeled his horse around and rode back to his men. She had to trust that he’d do what she said, because anything else was unthinkable.

  “Horst? To me.” Then, to the tower: “Aelinn? I need a message taken.” Finally, to her centurions: “Form up. We’re marching.”

  Aelinn was at her side, presenting her with her distance-pipe. “My lady.”

  “Tell Master Thaler he’s to stop firing his … his things. Wait for a double-horn, then fire at the southern end of the field, into the forest.”

  She was gone, running for the bridge, and Horst came trotting over on his horse, carrying one of the Frankish pennants on his spear.

  “Have you switched sides, sir?” she asked.

  He dragged his eyes back from Aelinn’s flying skirts. “I might carry this pigeon, my lady, but I’ve a leopard over my heart. What do you need?”

  “A message. Find Master Büber and tell him to pull back to the very eastern edge of the woods and take cover. Then you need to find Master Reinhardt, and tell him he’s to join Rabbi Cohen behind the dwarvish host. Tell him to go back up the valley, deep into the trees. Once Master Thaler’s finished, they’re to move up and kill any dwarves who come their way.” She frowned. “Did I need to say that?”

  “No, my lady. From what I’ve heard, your priest won’t need telling.”

  “You’re a good man, Horst. Do me a favour and stay alive.”

  Horst touched his hand to his forehead. “As my lady commands.”

  He rode off, going wide of the road and across country, chasing the rest of the Frankish horse. Across the river, Thaler’s Gunnhildes fell silent, and the breeze cleared the smoke from their emplacements. She could see the people stationed there start to work at turning their weapons to the south. If she squinted, she could also see the observation tower they’d built, and, below it, a table, where a figure sat crouched over. Her father.

  How had it come to this, that her father was here, that Thaler was here, that Cohen was here, that she was here, and that Felix was not?

  Aelinn was on her way back. Sophia pursed her lips and stepped out onto the via, among the blood and scorch-marks and debris of war. Her spear centuries faced her, solid and battle-proven as she was now. She lifted her spatha into the air and jerked it in the direction of travel.

  “Follow me.”

  99

  The ground was shaking. He’d felt that happen before – avalanches, mainly, where he’d have a heartbeat to decide the direction he needed to run. And once it had been a dragon. He’d actually pissed himself then, but that hadn’t been so much fear itself as the aura of fear the dragon had magicked up, trying to flush him out from his hiding place.

  He’d held firm then, and he held firm now, despite the urge to bury his hands in the soft soil to try to cling to the earth. He wasn’t the only one terrified. With every crack and boom, some of his men crouched lower than ought to be possible, cowering like dogs.

  And every so often, something would go astray, and the leaves above his head would shiver as a fast-moving sliver of metal punctured the canopy and buried itself in the bark of a tree.

  They could do nothing about that. They had to wait. To move forward would be to killed along with the dwarves. It was like being at Obernberg all over again, watching Nikoleta spit fire from her fingers at anything and everything that moved, with him no more than a passive spectator at a unique and ghastly event.

  When the first shots had been fired, and that sharp, broken-quartz smell started to drift through the trees, they’d whispered to each other, keeping a watch for attack while trying to see what was happening further up the via.

  Their voices had been bludgeoned into silence. Büber wasn’t sure he could even speak any more. Nikoleta’s flames had been part of her, extending from her body. Thaler’s were different: impersonal, chemical, mechanical. Nikoleta had targeted her fury, while Thaler merely pointed his roughly in the direction he wanted it to go, and had little choice who it struck.

&nbs
p; Clovis’s Franks were another five stadia back from the wooded ridge. He wished he was there with them, or with Cohen’s Jews, deep in the forests with their steep valleys and thick walls of rock. Instead, he had this thin place that lied about the amount of cover it could provide and the depth of defence it offered.

  Worse than the noise was the anticipation. The certain knowledge that when the ground stopped moving and the air fell still, whoever had survived would surge up the via. He half-wished it would come soon, while the other half of him hoped it never would.

  There was one moment when a stray ball had hurtled through the wood at them. It cleared the crest of the ridge and struck a tree-trunk at mid-height. Where it hit, the tree vanished in a cloud of whirling white splinters that flew in all directions. Those underneath had barely started to recover when the crown of the severed tree descended like a giant’s fist.

  Büber lost someone to that, someone who couldn’t get out of the way in time, who couldn’t quite believe that they were going to be crushed by half a tree that had appeared out of nowhere.

  They even managed to die quietly, so as not to give away their position.

  After that, the initial sharp crashes and subsequent rushing of wind grew closer. The earth shivered and shook, and debris repeatedly lifted up on the far side of the ridge to patter down on their heads.

  Büber pressed his cheek to the prickly leaf mould and begged for it to stop, but it didn’t: instead, the cry went up as dwarves started to clamber over the ridge, stunned, shocked, seeking shelter, and finding only Carinthians with spears and bows and swords.

  Up, up, he thought as he hugged the ground. Around him, the figures huddled behind trees and in hollows started to stir, and he knew he had to be among the first to rise, if not the first. Certainly the first to the ridge line, sword drawn, to fall on whoever dared cross it.

  He struggled up and shook his head free of confusion and of that gods’ awful sound. Starting forward, he steadied himself against another man who’d reeled into him. It was as though they were drunk – dizzy and incompetent – from the barrage.

  Some deep breaths of the tainted air. Hints of slate and copper and pine made him spit. Up through the trees, towards the top, he unsheathed his sword.

  The dwarves came in a trickle, all across the long low line. They hadn’t expect anyone to be there and oppose them, but fleeing from Thaler’s bellowing had simply pushed them against Büber’s force.

  While all around him, his men picked off dwarves in their ones and twos, Büber faced off against a weary, pale-faced thing with barely the strength to swing its axe any more. It toppled forward as the huntmaster stepped back, its momentum overbalancing it, and it lay there face-down in the ground as he drove his sword through its unprotected back.

  His blade was red. And instead of the bloodlust rising within him, he felt only pity.

  More blundered over the top to escape the bombardment, and the lee side of the ridge degenerated into a series of brief, brutal encounters in which Carinthia invariably held the upper hand.

  Another shell went astray and filled the translucent air with stinging shards of metal. The dwarves, with their backs to the blast, seemed to fold to the ground, as if it were a blessed relief. The men who faced it staggered back, some bleeding from wounds that just opened in their flesh.

  The horn on the Roman tower called. And again. Thaler’s barrage ceased and left a numb silence hanging over the smoke-streamed woodland. Büber shouted for an advance, and hoped enough had good ears to hear him. He loped up the shallow rise to the top of the ridge, and looked down the other side.

  Gods. The trees looked like they’d been chewed, fresh white wood exposed everywhere from blasted branches and torn trunks, and in among the debris were dwarves, scattered over every patch of ground, and not just in the first few feet of the trees, but all the way across the road to the marshes on the far side.

  Thousands of them, wading through their own dead, tripping on and over them, grimly levering themselves over fallen logs and fighting their way through severed boughs.

  His soldiers took the ridge, and, like him, stared down at the shifting, groaning mass, moving like oil and covering the land as thoroughly.

  Why wouldn’t they give in? What spirit possessed and animated them? Any human army would have fled the field long ago, and yet they were still trying to head north, to take the tower, take the bridge and take the road to Juvavum.

  He stared at them, trying to make sense of it, when he thought he saw a face he already knew. It couldn’t be Heavyhammer; he was dead already by Büber’s own hand.

  Which meant this was a face he’d seen during his audience with King Ironmaker. Now he could see it: the finer armour, the better weapons, the remnants of coloured cloaks. Ironmaker’s thanes. And Ironmaker himself, behind those stout bodies and thick shields.

  He was the cause of this madness. His death would be the end of it.

  Büber looked down his own line. They were waiting for him. Very well, then.

  “Ironmaker! Ironmaker!” His voice was unmistakable, his sword pointed at the knot of dwarves where the king was hidden. “Do you yield?”

  The shields shifted, and now Büber could see him clearly, his crown welded to the circumference of his helmet, sharp points undulled.

  “Yield,” screamed Büber.

  His answer came quickly enough. Ironmaker roared his defiance and the pole bearing Felix’s head was raised up behind the dwarvish thanes, turned to face the ridge, shaken at the men gathered there.

  Büber charged as the dwarves surged up towards them. He started to cut his way towards where the dwarven king stood, and he wasn’t alone. Every Carinthian wanted to do only two things now; kill the king, and get their prince back. They converged on that point, a wedge of spears with Büber’s sword forming its point.

  The left roared, and Cohen’s Jewish centuries pressed in. The right ululated, and Sophia’s men came down the road in a spear wall, pushing and stabbing.

  But it was in the centre that the fighting was fiercest. The Franks had followed Büber to the ridge, and Clovis realised it would be disastrous to lead his horses into such a chaotic crush.

  Proud and vain, he nevertheless ordered his sergeants to dismount, and they joined Büber’s thrust, his men with longswords and oval shields, and himself with a singularly unsophisticated and ungentlemanly mace.

  The dwarves’ defence began to falter. They were so close to each other that they were finding it difficult to swing, and so exhausted that they had little strength to elbow themselves some space. Every time one of their fellows was cut down, the net around them closed tighter. Büber, lost completely now in the frenzy of slaying and slaughter, stepped on the eviscerated, punctured bodies of the dead to get to his next target, slashing and striking, forehand, backhand, while spears darted out to his flanks, killing all who came in range.

  He raised his sword, brought it down, cut deep into a shoulder, raised it again but the dwarf was already falling. He pushed it instead into another bearded face and felt it grind against bone and metal. Pulling it back, he cut up into an exposed armpit, near enough filleting the joint. Bright blood spurted out; the dwarf crumpled, taking Büber’s sword-point with it. He would have been left open to a counter, but the dwarves were now running from his onslaught.

  As they turned, they ran into their rear ranks still trying to advance. And they fought each other.

  The dwarvish army collapsed in a ripple spreading out from Büber; a ripple that turned into a wave, washing backwards through the dwarves’ constricted, cramped mass. They broke, and headed towards the only place that offered any respite: the river.

  Büber found himself running to keep up with them, at the head of a surge of Carinthian spears and Frankish swords. The way ahead suddenly cleared, and there was the dwarvish elite, exposed like a rock amid melting snow. He trampled the bodies and launched himself into the air, leaping and screaming, his sword a bright stripe over his head. His f
eet landed square on an angled shield, breaking the wielder behind it, and his sword howled down until it ground against compacted gristle and bone.

  Similar impacts collapsed the shield wall: men throwing themselves and their weapons against it, running and jumping and crashing through with their full weight behind their sharp blades. The bearer of the pole carrying Felix’s head looked to his left and right and found no way out. The edge of the wood was at his back. The ditch, via and marshland stood between him and the water, but the way was already being barred as the flanks closed in to meet.

  He abandoned his trophy and tried to run.

  Büber, dragging his sword free, was aware that the pole was starting to topple, that it was significant, that there were only two thanes left, that they were on the verge of victory.

  None of that mattered while Ironmaker still lived.

  He hit the shield of one thane so hard that he shattered the rim and split the wood all the way down to the boss. That he also severed the dwarf’s arm was incidental: his sword was stuck fast.

  He lifted it all – sword, shield, arm – and threw it at Ironmaker. It hit him square in the side of his head, knocking his hammer from his grip, his crowned helmet off his head, and forcing him to one knee. Büber was right behind it, his few fingers tightening around the king’s neck and his thumbs across his throat.

  The remaining thane that might have stopped him was dragged down by Clovis before he could drive his axe between Büber’s shoulders, and was swiftly run through by an ordinary Carinthian spearman.

  Ironmaker beat at Büber’s hands, then started to claw at his face. Büber ignored him, concentrating on crushing the hard lump of windpipe. There’d be more scars, more damage, more ruin. His blood dripped down into the king’s beard, his mouth, his nose. The scratching and gouging grew weaker. It was now like the batting of bird’s wings against his skin.