by K. J. Parker
Bardas’ men had made it to the top of the path unopposed by the time the shouts and screams from below attracted attention. They knew what to do and where to go; one company toward the main encampment, the other two round the sides, following the stockade, to push back the enemy as they ran. As they broke into the firelight the enemy lashed out at them, like a wave breaking on rocks and falling back.
As was only appropriate, Bardas Loredan was the first man to draw blood. His opponent was a long, thin man, wearing nothing but a helmet and waving a scimitar as if it was a charm against witchcraft. First, Bardas took off the hand holding the sword; then he rolled his wrists and brought the Guelan back for a rather showy cut across the side of the neck. The man staggered and fell over backwards, and Bardas thanked him. The next man he killed came at him with a spear and the lid of a kettle. Bardas feinted high and swept low, feeling the shock as his sword jarred on the man’s shin, then drew the sword through and thrust into the ribcage. A slight twist freed it, and he was ready for the next man, who bounced a scimitar off Bardas’ left pauldron before the Guelan sheared through his neck and collar-bone. The man dropped and Bardas stepped over him, muttering perfunctory thanks as he sized up the next one, a boy with a looted Imperial halberd. Bardas knew enough to respect the weapon no matter who was behind it; he watched the blade while taking a couple of short sideways steps, then lunged at the boy’s heart through the crook of his elbow. He thanked him as he slid off the blade on to the ground, then ducked his head a little to the right to avoid a swing from a big hammer in the hands of a heavily built bald man who looked like a blacksmith. He watched the swing go astray, exposing the man’s armpit (the way to a man’s heart is through his armpit) but instead of lowering the sword to let the body slide off, he jerked it sharply to the right, so that it impeded the man with the long-handled axe who was next in the pile waiting for proof. Startled, the man pulled his blow and so threw himself out of position. Leaning back, Bardas swung a short cut that slit open his stomach; while he was frozen with terror and pain, Bardas put him down with a head-shot that split his skull, and thanked him.
They were loosing arrows now, close enough to test Imperial plate. But Bardas had anticipated that; on top of the plateau, hedged around by the stockade, cluttered with tents and dead men, there wasn’t the room for hit-and-run tactics. He signalled the charge and his halberdiers pressed home; some of them fell, but not enough to throw out the accounts. The first archer Bardas killed held up his bow to block the thrust; the Guelan bounced off the sinewed back but Bardas turned the blade and guided it down across the man’s knees, leaving his head at a convenient height. An arrow punched through his right vambrace but stopped before it reached his skin. He paused to jerk it out, then held out his sword for a man to run on to, the way he used to hold the dustpan ready for the brush when sweeping the shavings off his workbench. The next man had drawn his scimitar and was holding it in a semblance of a guard, but Bardas was too many years past fencing to bother with that sort of thing and swung down directly on the top of his head, crushing the helmet and driving him to his knees; then he kicked him in the face and finished him off with the point. Victory to Bollo and the big hammer, he thought as his lips shaped the words of thanks, and then he was ready for the next man, and the next, and the one after that.
Then he saw Temrai, huddled in a small crowd of half-dressed men; he’d jammed on a helmet and a pair of knee-cops, but the cop-straps weren’t tight enough and they were sliding down his legs. Bardas smiled and walked towards them, but before he could start work someone ran past him, a tall man in a helmet and jack-of-plates, swinging a halberd and yelling at the top of his voice.
‘Theudas,’ he called out, but the boy wasn’t listening; he ran straight at Temrai like an arrow, and when one of the men lunged at him with a spear, he didn’t notice he’d been hit until he stopped moving, wedged up against the spear’s cross-bar. He tried to turn and slash at the spearman, but the spear-shaft was too long and he couldn’t quite reach, though he tried twice before he fell down. One of the other men jabbed him through the ear – the helmet had fallen off, being too small for him – and he stopped moving.
That’s not right, Bardas thought, and he tried to open his eyes, but they were already open.
Temrai’s party was backing away, trying to get deeper into the encampment, where there were more bodies to put between their King and the Guelan. Bardas followed them for a few yards, until something that had been chafing at the back of his mind became clear. There were, he realised, fewer people here than he’d have expected to find. Wasn’t this supposed to be the entire plains nation, every last one of them? True, it was dark; but he hadn’t seen more than a few hundred men –
He understood. Very clever, he thought. But I should have seen it coming.
By then it was too late. Someone down below gave some kind of signal, and the plains army broke out of cover, from tents and wagons, from supply pits and trenches; they had spears and halberds (copied from the Imperial pattern, the sincerest form of flattery) and they kept together in dense formation, pushing the Imperials away from the path and any prospect of escape. As the last of the decoys scampered out of the way (had they known that it was a trap and they were the bait? Bardas wondered; if it had been my plan, I wouldn’t have told them), the lines wheeled and extended – Imperial drill-sergeants couldn’t have done much better – to complete the encirclement. Meanwhile, reinforcements were coming up the path, led by Iordecai, the man who’d so helpfully opened the gates . . . That didn’t bode well; it implied that the pikemen who’d poured into the lower level had been driven off or killed. Me and my sense of historical symmetry, Bardas thought ruefully, looks like I’m going to get what I wished for. His wrists and forearms ached from the strain of handling the sword, all the jarring shock travelling down the blade from bone to bone (in a sense, the armour serves to prove the hammer) and the sweat, dripping down his forehead under the bevor of his helmet, was getting in his eyes. He closed them – Now what do I do? – but there was nobody home. From an abandoned cooking-fire nearby came the smell of coriander.
I hadn’t thought it’d be as bad as this, Temrai thought, as they hustled him away. I thought winning might be enough. But just knowing he’s there –
He forced himself to dismiss the image from his mind; Bardas Loredan walking towards him, armed. He wasn’t sure how he’d known who it was – a man in armour, with his bevor up; but he’d known all right. It was all he could do to keep from wetting himself.
‘Where’s Sildocai?’ he asked.
‘With the reserve,’ somebody answered. ‘Iordecai’s bringing up the main attack. Once we commit the reserve, it’ll be the hammer and the anvil.’
Whatever, Temrai thought. His mind didn’t seem able to hold on to a coherent train of thought; it slipped off, like a chisel point on tool steel. ‘That’s good,’ he said. ‘What about the lower level? Any word from Gollocai and his people?’
‘Last I heard, it was all under control.’ He couldn’t see who was talking to him, and he couldn’t recognise the voice. ‘The rest of the army’s fallen back on the camp, and there’s absolutely no way this lot are going anywhere. It’s only a matter of time now.’
Temrai shivered. ‘Make it as quick as you can,’ he said. ‘And whatever else you do, make sure you get him, understood?’
‘Sure. Alive?’
‘Good gods, no. As dead as possible. I want to know his head’s been cut off before I go anywhere near him.’
Someone laughed, assuming Temrai had meant it as a joke.
‘By the way,’ someone else said. ‘That kid who made the suicide run just now; you know who that was?’ Nobody said anything, and the voice continued, ‘I recognised him; it was Loredan’s nephew. You know, the one who showed up a while back with the wizard.’
‘He wasn’t Loredan’s nephew,’ someone else pointed out. ‘I don’t think they were related at all, actually.’
‘Theudas Morosin,’ T
emrai said.
‘That’s him. Anyway, that was him.’
‘Fine,’ Temrai said. ‘Now get me out of here.’
The line of spearpoints crowded in close, probing and groping for the joints and gaps in the Imperials’ armour – the inside of the elbow joint, the gap between breastplate and gorget, gorget and helmet, the inside of the thigh, the armpit. For their part, the halberdiers were fighting hard (the anvil proves the hammer), crushing helmets and smashing bones and blood vessels under the proof skin of mail. But the line had momentum, impetus; and as they advanced over the dead and fallen, like the sea washing round rocks on the sea-shore, the axemen and hammermen cracked open helmets and armour like thrushes knocking open snails, or a man at a good dinner-party prising open oysters. If Anax had been alive to hear them he could have told the story of the battle from the sounds alone; the clear ringing of the blade on sound armour, the duller clack on compromised armour, the wet crunch when there was no armour left. The battle was mostly in the dark now; Bardas’ men fought with their backs to the camp-fires, masking the light. There wasn’t much need to see when the enemy was all around, precisely a spear-length away.
As the enemy closed around him like a gallery collapsing, Bardas swung and cut to dig himself out. His helmet was long gone, the rivets of his gorget and pauldrons cut through by deflected axe-blows glancing off the convex surfaces, so that the plates sagged from the points and straps like overripe fruit bending the branches of a tree. His right gauntlet had become so distorted with the shock of the blows he delivered that its lames had bent and jammed, so he’d discarded it at the first opportunity. Behind him and on either side the bodies and parts of bodies fell; he was carving and jointing, as skilful and quick with his blade as a cook preparing for a banquet, and the blows of his enemies planished his steel skin. It was almost like old times, fighting in the dark; this was dull, hard work, like kicking clay, the cutting out of waste and spoil from the wall in front of him. The sounds and smells, though, were so rich and varied that they bewildered him, a banquet for the senses; sweet blood and piquant steel, heady sweat, garlic and coriander on the last breath of a man falling across him, and all the Imperial music of the proof house.
There was a man who was wearing an old-fashioned four-panel helmet, crossed with straps; having parried his spear, Bardas took the obvious shot, an over-the-shoulder cut to the man’s temples. But the noise as the man dropped was wrong, there was a tiny flaw in the crisp ring of the Guelan. He noticed it, but then he had to step across and parry a halberd-cut, which left an opening across the side of a captured Imperial kettle-hat. He made the blow, and the sword snapped in two, a handspan and a half up from the quillons. Not again, he thought, as he dropped the hilt; then a man came at him with a spear, and he had nothing to parry the blow with. Instead he turned sideways, using the contour of his breastplate to deflect the blow, reached out with his left hand and drove his gauntleted fist into the man’s face. He saw blood well up along the lines scored by the edges of the lames, straight as a well-ploughed field (Clefas was best at ploughing, but lazy; Gorgas was almost as good, and always willing to do his share) but the man didn’t drop; he drew the spear back for another lunge, which would’ve gone home if Bardas hadn’t managed to grab the spearhead around the socket and pull it clear. He tried to hold on, but the man jerked back hard, drawing the sharp edges of the spearblade across Bardas’ palm and the base of his fingers –
(Well; there’s no such thing as proof, just an infinite variety of ways of failing.)
He let go, and just had time to stamp on the man’s kneecap. Down he went this time, and all Bardas could do was grind his heel in the man’s face, there simply wasn’t time to pick up the spear and do a proper job. There were more of them pressing in on him, and he was unarmed. A pity; he’d dug three quarters of the way through the enemy line, the seam, to the point where he could see still darkness above the moving shadows. Without something to fight with, however, he was only an anvil. He backed away until he could turn round, and started to run –
Which wasn’t as easy as it should have been. His greaves and cuisses were mangled and jammed, and the hinge-pin of his left knee-cop was curved so wide that he knew he’d have to cut the thing off piecemeal, if ever he got out of this. Even without the armour, he wouldn’t have got far before tripping and falling.
He landed badly, cracking the side of his head. When he opened his eyes again, he saw what he’d fallen against – a supply wagon with a high bed and not much in the way of suspension. He knew without needing to prove the matter that he wasn’t going to be able to pull himself upright for a while, so he flattened himself on his belly and crawled painfully under the cart.
He was so tired he shut his eyes for a moment –
- And he was back in the mines, as usual; but he could see (it was pitch dark) an abandoned dolly-truck; and underneath it, staring up at him with all the fear there ever had been, was a boy’s face. Sure enough it was Temrai who was staring at him, but it was also Theudas, whom he’d pulled out from under a cart during the Fall. Why are you frightened of me, Theudas? he asked, but the boy didn’t move or say a word –
- ‘There he is.’ Bardas’ eyes snapped open; and there, across twenty yards or so of the battle, was Temrai’s face again. ‘Over there,’ Temrai was screaming, ‘under the wagon, see? Kill him, for gods’ sakes. Kill him now!’
They came for him; three plainsmen with pikes and scimitars, men of Temrai’s personal guard. When they were right up close to the cart, fishing for him under the bed with their spears like a man trying to reach a coin that’s rolled under a table, he convulsed away; a spear-blade stroked his cheek, slitting the skin, as he shuffled backwards (he’d learned how to do it in the mines) and then he was out the other side, with the cart between him and them. He pulled himself up against the cart’s rear wheel and started to run. When he looked over his shoulder he could see them clambering over the cart, following him up with a degree of professional zeal that he’d not come across since Maxen’s war, when the young man who’d eventually grown into this snake’s second skin had followed up a group of running plainsmen into the dire and noisy nightmare of the dark, while all around the firelight roared and smelled at him like the gatekeepers of paradise.
Time to do something clever. He slowed right down, waited till the first of his pursuers was almost on top of him, then dropped down into a crouch. The plainsman crashed into him and went tumbling over his shoulder in a tangle of arms and legs, as Bardas stood up and smacked the second man smartly across the face with his remaining gauntlet. He could feel the man’s nose crack, the failure of the bone transmitted to his own bones through the steel; the look on the poor man’s face was priceless, a sort of dumbstruck horror. Then he took away the man’s scimitar and chopped open his neck with it.
Now that he had a weapon again, he wasn’t bothered about the third man, whose pike he parried in a preoccupied sort of way before slashing off his left ear and bringing the scimitar back horizontal to cut his throat. It wasn’t a class of weapon he was terribly familiar with – the curved blade wasn’t meant for thrusting, the hilt was too small for his hand and the large flat pommel chafed his wrist – but it had all sorts of advantages over nothing at all. He took half a second to decide what to do, then headed back towards Temrai at a comfortable trot.
A couple of optimists got in his way, but not for very long. Temrai looked as if he’d taken root; even in the red glow of the camp-fires, his face was as pale as death and his eyes were wide open, like a rabbit’s. Bardas was only a few yards away by now; a guards-man blunted a scimitar on his left rerebrace and earned his thanks, leaving only two men between him and the enemy king. Of course, killing Temrai wouldn’t solve anything (it’d probably win the war, but that was the last thing on his mind) but at least he’d restore the symmetry of the situation a bit. He had nothing better to do. A high right parry, wrist turned, blade down, followed by a flicked cut just under the chin; that was one less.
Thank you, he muttered; and then he saw something that made him forget all about Temrai, the war and patterns in history. He saw a gap.
It was only a very little gap, between the tail end of one line and the front of another, and it was closing fast; but if he was very quick, he might just be able to slip through and get down the path without having to fight for every step.
‘After him,’ someone was screaming (Temrai, probably). An arrow glanced off his left elbow-cop and jagged sideways into the advancing line. He nearly lost his balance twice – once when he trod on a dead man’s head he hadn’t noticed was there, once when he stumbled on the lip of a trebuchet-shot crater – but the weight of his armour gave him so much momentum that he was able to correct the errors and keep going, almost bouncing off the ground (like a hammer on an anvil). In the event, he had to push one man out of his way and carve a chunk off the shoulder of another, but he made it. He was on the path –
- Which was, of course, in a deplorable state after days on end of constant bombardment. The crumbling dirt gave way under his weight and suddenly he was sliding on his backside down the slope. He managed to slow himself down by digging into the piled-up spoil with his heels before he veered off the verge and over the drop, and used the momentum to bounce himself back on to his feet and on to the path. After that he took it rather more slowly; his pursuers were doing the same, so it didn’t matter much. He crashed into one fool of a plainsman who didn’t get out of the way in time, sending him sprawling over the edge. Clumsy, he thought, as he wobbled himself back upright. A menace to traffic, that’s what I am.