‘Storm Divisiooon,’ Kurunta bawled, bashing his spear upon his shield. ‘Raise your weapons!’
A hiatus of a breath was followed by a stiffening, a resolve along the line. The steps back halted. Then the Kaskan cries were almost drowned out by the almighty cry in return from the five regiments of the Storm.
‘Tarhunda, God of the Storm, coat my heart in bronze!’ Hattu roared with the rest.
At the same time, the pipers amongst the ranks found their lungs and blew hard – the fierce skirls quickly falling into the frantic song of war. And it seemed to instil a bronze spine through the other divisions also.
‘Arinniti’s fire rages in our blood!’ the officers of the Blaze pitched in.
‘Let Aplu’s Fury rise!’ Muwa screamed, his maddened, torn gaze shooting along the line of his division and all the way to Hattu.
‘Protect the Labarna, Appointee of the Gods!’ Volca shrieked, the horned one taking up a position behind the front lines, near the royal carriage with the ring of Mesedi.
Now the Hittites were like a bronze, hide and leather redoubt holding the line of the stream, bristling with sharp spear points. The Kaskans splashed across the stream, water churning up in their wake, the veins in their bulging eyes and the red wetness at the back of their throats visible, axes and spears raised like demons’ talons.
‘The Wolves,’ Dagon snarled through gritted, chattering teeth in the final moments.
‘The Wolves!’ Hattu growled, his body pulsing with emotion.
‘The Wolves!’ Tanku bawled as the enemy bounded over the last few paces.
At the last moment, the Mountain Wolves erupted as one in an animal wolf howl.
The endless horde smashed against the Hittite line in a serrated, shuddering boom of colliding shields, metal and men. Heads were cleaved, faces scored, necks opened and limbs severed, sent spinning through the air, hands still clutching weapons. Water and shingle spat and sprayed, mixed with blood and spit. Swords, spears, maces and axes swung, ruining bodies as the two long lines tussled, surged and sagged like giant, entangled millipedes.
A bull of a fighter tried to barge Hattu over, but he stayed on his feet, shoving back as a mass of axes and spears bit, hacked, prodded and hammered at his shield. Hattu sliced his spear downwards into the foe’s thigh so deep the blood that pumped out was black and he was dead in a few heartbeats. A mace slammed down on the top of his shield, gripping the edge, the bronze fangs of the weapon’s gem-eyed lion head biting as the holder tried to haul away the shield. Hattu slid his arm from the loophole to the rear and let the foe take the shield. The rugged fellow’s eyes brightened in a moment of triumph, only to see the small bronze axe Hattu held in his shield hand. A fire raged inside Hattu and his hair and plume swung like whips as he swept the weapon up and into the foe’s temple. The Kaskan’s skull broke, his eye burst and a soup of grey-red filth spurted from the ruined head.
Snarling, panting, enraged, disgusted, Hattu twisted to the flashing movement on his left. He ducked back from the Kaskan spear then cast the axe out with a backswing of his arm. The three fang-like spikes on the back edge of the weapon sank into the attacker’s neck like the bite of a predator. He drew the weapon back and the Kaskan seemed frozen for a moment, touching the three black holes in his neck. The warrior grinned and started laughing, thinking he was unharmed; then three dark red springs spouted from the holes. The man’s laughter vanished, his face sagged and turned grey and he crumpled from sight.
Men fell from either side, Kaskans run through with Hittite spears and Hittites cleaved with Kaskan axes. Tanku and Dagon fought like wolves, butting, punching and kicking. Sargis took an axe blow to the side of his head that tore his ear off before he drove his spear up and hard into his foe’s guts. Chief Raku flat-face struck down three Kaskan warriors, before his arm was cleaved off by an axe, then a sword punched through his face and another plunged into his chest.
Vultures began to gather above, screeching and swooping as if they were part of the battle. The water of the stream had grown hot, Hattu realised, knowing from the stink rising up that it was blood and floating entrails that had stolen the chill from it. When a Kaskan spear ripped through the leather armour on his shoulder, scoring deep across the flesh there, he let out a fierce cry. The Kaskan drove forward, forcing Hattu back from the water and onto his knees, knocking his helm off with a swat of his free hand then bringing a mace out and raising it, ready to crush Hattu’s skull.
Hattu, pinned, gazed up, not at the warrior, but at the mound of Nerik, off past the right of the Hittite line. ‘I’m sorry,’ he mouthed to the tiny figure of Atiya up there.
The Kaskan’s hand swept down, but another clean, snapping noise sounded, and the man brought down not the mace, but a stump where his forearm had been a breath ago. The warrior made an animal grunting noise, gawping at the angry red oval with a white bone core at the stump-end, before Tanku finished what Dagon had started, driving his spear through the Kaskan’s neck from the side. The fellow tried to rasp some killer final line, but died with only a weak hiss.
Dagon and Tanku, soaked with sweat, streamwater and blood, dragged Hattu back as the Wolves’ front shrank a little to close the gap Hattu had left.
‘Let me up,’ Hattu snarled, thrashing to be free of them.
‘Hattu, Captain,’ Dagon bellowed. ‘We need to defend the rear… look!’
Hattu saw it before Dagon had even pointed it out: a golden cloud of dust shooting up from behind the mound of Nerik, like a fast moving serpent racing through shallow soil. But Hattu realised what it was – far more deadly than a serpent. He saw the glint of bronze, heard the pained whinny of horses, the snap of whips. Chariots. Kaskan Chariots? Hattu knew the Kaskans fought on foot – never on battle cars.
‘No… how?’ Tanku gasped.
At first he saw just a single vehicle, the sides daubed with streaks of black dye and with the face of a fanged demon painted on the front. It was led by two white stallions, rumbling towards the Hittite right, set to strike along the rear of the three divisions. Then, with some high-pitched horn signal, many more fanned out from behind this one, left and right. The now wide, staggered line of some two hundred chariots sped into a gallop. The men on board wore their hair in a curious fashion: shaved bald on top, long and flowing at the back and sides. They wore hide armour, some with bronze vests instead.
‘Azzi,’ Hattu stammered, recalling the talks in the palace planning room. ‘The Kaskans sold those they captured from our lands to the Azzi… in return for a wing of charioteers.’
The Azzi drew bows and hoisted javelins, emitting a shrill, foreign cry.
‘Back ranks, about face,’ Hattu rasped. ‘About face!’ he screamed as the Azzi cars sped to within one hundred paces of the Hittite rear, then loosed a cloud of arrows and spears. Only a fraction of the rearmost men turned in time.
‘Shields!’ Kurunta cried.
Hattu knelt and snatched up a dead Kaskan’s shield just an instant before a pair of arrows whacked against it at throat height. The hail was thin, but most of the missiles struck unshielded flesh. Hittites went down in a swathe across the back of all three divisions. Now panic set in. Some turned, while those still facing the stream didn’t understand what was happening and thought they had been routed.
‘Stay in line!’ Muwa’s cry to the Fury men sailed across the plains of Nerik.
Hattu was sure the Azzi – being mercenaries – would now wheel away and come back for another volley, staying at a safe distance. But on they came, hurtling towards the Hittite rear, the warriors now drawing out sickle-like swords, the drivers bending the chariots’ paths to sweep along the rear of the Hittite lines like harvesters. One vehicle arced like this just by Hattu, Tanku and Dagon. A scar-faced Azzi warrior leant from the side of the carriage and swung his sickle out. Dagon ducked, Tanku fell back and Hattu threw up his spear to block. The chariot sped on towards Kurunta’s men, the sickle taking the heads from two warriors and tearing the jaw from
another – Scarface shrieking in delight, his tongue extended as he snatched one of the spinning Hittite heads from mid-air and roped it by the side of his chariot where it danced like a gory bauble. The rest of the speeding vehicles wreaked similar havoc. And when the Azzi chariots finally pulled away, Hattu saw that they were being driven into a tight loop, set to come again: for a hail of arrows then another harvesting strike. The rear-facing line was in some order now, but still no match for marauding chariots.
As the Azzi war cars came round again, Hattu tossed his spear at the spokes of Scarface’s chariot with what strength remained in his numb arms. The lance was shredded into kindling and the chariot went on, unharmed. A comrade fell by his side, and others barged against him, back-to-back. The Hittite line was bending out of shape, disintegrating, compromised by the fangs of Kaskan pressure pushing across from the southern bank and the constant scourge of the Azzi chariots circling unimpeded on the northern side. He heard men of the Wolves trying to hold the stream crying out as they were run through with spears and battered with cudgels. The stirring pipe song faltered too. One glance back and he saw the nearest piper being lifted up on the ends of Kaskan spears in a grim repeat of poor Sarpa’s end.
‘We’re being cut to pieces,’ Dagon cried as a hurling mace skimmed past his ear from behind and a charioteer’s arrow spat into the earth between his feet.
The Hittite line, besieged on both sides, was shortening and thinning, falling into a disarray of man-on-man melee combat – a spitting, writhing trough of boiling bronze. Hattu saw the jaws of Pitagga’s trap for what it was, just like the maw-cave of his dream: cut the bridge to deny the Hittites their supplies and chariots, bring war wagons of their own to the field, hit them from the back and the front. He looked along the Hittite lines, seeing guts being torn out, heads staved in, limbs hacked off.
All was lost.
Chapter 22
Thunder of the Gods
Summer 1300 BC
Volca leapt up onto the roof of the royal carriage and crouched on one knee. Axes, stones and arrows hummed past him from every direction. He looked over the sea of fighting men all around him. There were no lines now – just chaos: a mass of snarling faces, flashing blades and spurting blood. The Hittite army was doomed. He cast his eye up to Nerik’s mound, seeing Pitagga and his small retinue of guards up there. A pair of men waited by the frame, holding a long, two-handled saw. The young priestess tied there writhed in vain to be free.
‘Aye, Lord of the Mountains, today is our day,’ he muttered. ‘Tomorrow, and every day thereafter… will be mine.’
A scrabbling, clawing sound came from the edge of the wagon. A filthy, bloody hand slapped onto the roof’s edge, then another, clutching a straightsword. Then came the bald, sneering head of a Kaskan warrior. The cur scrambled up onto the roof and leapt at Volca, halting only when he recognised the Sherden.
‘Forgive me, Master Volca,’ he said. ‘I did not realise it was you.’
Volca’s skin prickled with horror. He was sure some of the Mesedi defending the wagon had heard. Without a moment’s hesitation, he lunged forward and drove his trident up, under the Kaskan’s chin. The central spike burst from the top of the warrior’s skull, his eyes flooded with blood and rolled in his head and his face half-collapsed as Volca yanked the trident free and kicked the corpse from the wagon roof. ‘Fool,’ he spat.
And sure enough, down on the ground where the Mesedi were locked in frantic battle to protect their king, Gorru, the hirsute guardsman, was alternating between keeping Kaskans back with his spear and glancing up at the wagon roof, his eyes dark with suspicion.
‘Time for a distraction,’ Volca mused, glancing up at the Nerik mound again and drawing the polished bronze disc from his purse, angling his hand so it caught the sun. This conjured a throaty tirade from up there.
‘Dying men of the Hittite ranks,’ Pitagga cried, his voice carrying across the basin. ‘Turn your eyes, if you still have them, to me.’ The fighting carried on unabated: screaming, gurgling cries, groans, smashing bronze, clacking spears and whizzing arrows; but more than a few Hittite heads glanced to the mound. ‘You will all die here, in the shadow of your long lost city. And on the ancient rubble of its temples, I will melt down your greatest god and I will split the last of your priestesses in two.’
Volca’s lips curled up in a ghoulish smile. He imagined Atiya to be two of the bastard Sherden people who had peeled off his scalp and mutilated his genitals. He heard laments from some of the Hittite warriors, saw some visibly slow in their fighting, exhausted and now robbed of hope. One was speared through the neck, another finally let his arms drop to his sides, strength gone, the clamour of Kaskan axes he had been fending off now sinking into his chest at all angles.
Volca stood tall, glorying in the sound of slaughter, seeing the two warriors up on the mound flex their long copper saw. He tilted his head skywards and spoke to the cloudless azure ether – now thick with circling vultures – in a spiteful whisper.
‘Tarhunda, God of the Storm, when I first landed on these foreign shores as a starving outcast they told me that you were almighty… invincible. They were wrong. I am invincible. You are nothing. Where are you now? Where is your thunder?’ He gloried at the god’s silence, stepping round on the spot, goading the skies.
Then he heard it.
A low, reverberating grumble rolled across the plains of Nerik. His face fell and he swung round to look east. He scoured the chimeral heat. Nothing. But the noise grew louder and louder, sharper and more frantic, invisible but coming right for the fray. He backed away towards the edge of the carriage. Many heads in the sea of battling men glanced to the east too, the fighting slowing just a fraction. Then the heat haze swirled and, with a clap of thundering hooves, an arrowhead line of speeding Hittite chariots exploded from the mirage.
Volca, eyes like full moons, gaped at the sight: charging steeds, gleaming chariots, howling, roaring scale-clad warriors crowned with high, bronze helms, spears and bows primed, speeding straight for the Azzi chariots. He saw the fork-bearded Hurrian bastard, Colta, expertly guiding his two yellow-dun horses, a brute of a fighter crammed into the car with him.
How? Volca mouthed in panic.
The Hittite war pipes struck up again, defiant and strident.
‘The Lords of the Bridle are here – they found a way across!’ Gorru yelled. A mighty cheer arose at this and the fighting recommenced in full. ‘The Gods are with us!’
***
The Lords of the Bridle sped forth, one hundred and forty or so chariots crashing into the Azzi war cars like a storm wind. Arrows blazed out, striking down the fierce mercenaries and their horses. Spears plunged through Azzi hearts as Colta’s finest joined the fray. But the Azzi were quick to react, turning their attentions away from the Hittite infantry and delving into swift and deadly manoeuvres of their own, speeding and striking like asps. Three Hittite chariots were cast on their sides and one noble warrior – a member of the Panku and one of Hattusa’s richest men, was robbed of his head. The battle had swung, but only back to a precarious and deadly balance – the infantry locked in combat with the Kaskan horde and the Lords of the Bridle weaving and bending expertly in a deadly dance with the Azzi.
Amidst the infantry fray, Hattu readied to tackle a giant Kaskan running for him, when Colta – having pulled his battle car from the chariot tussle – ran the foe down with a wet crunch and struck down at three others, opening a narrow corridor of respite and drawing his vehicle close to the Wolves. ‘Riders amongst you, take to your cars,’ the fork-bearded Hurrian cried as he arced away again, waving towards an approaching, small secondary wave of Hittite chariots – sixty strong. Hattu saw that they were being ridden by servants and stablehands. ‘We need every chariot active,’ he screamed before plunging into action against the Azzi once more.
‘Thunder,’ Dagon gasped.
‘Rage…’ Hattu added.
‘Tanku, the Wolves are yours,’ Hattu rasped. ‘Wolves,
fight on!’ he yelled, before lashing out with his spear and fighting clear of the battle, then bounding over to where the secondary chariot wave cantered, a few hundred paces away from the eastern edge of the fight. He and Dagon saw Rage and Thunder tethered to the pale blue war car they had trained in at the Fields of Bronze. They waved the stablehand over, running alongside then leaping aboard their vehicle as the stablehand leapt off. A few other teams serving amongst the infantry broke from the foot melee to do likewise. Within moments they sped into a gallop and arrowed towards the delicately-balanced chariot battle.
The wind of the gallop rapped and howled around Hattu, deafening him to all but the blood crashing in his ears. Balanced like a warrior by Dagon’s side, his left hand on the bronze lip of their car.
‘Nock your bows and choose your targets,’ a commander’s voice cried out from his right. The warriors on the reinforcement chariots left and right immediately complied, pulling bows from their backs and nocking arrows.
Hattu let go of the chariot lip, spreading his feet on the reverberating rawhide mesh of the carriage floor to balance – just as Colta had taught him. ‘Keep her level,’ he cried over the thunder of hooves.
‘Aye,’ Dagon replied, his sinewy arms flicking the reins a fraction this way and that. Rage and Thunder responded to the slight tweaks of the leather cords as if they were connected to Dagon’s fingertips by sinew and flesh.
Hattu lifted his bow, pulled an arrow from his back quiver and nocked. Arrows spat forth from the other chariots along the speeding Hittite reinforcement line, thudding into unsuspecting Azzi drivers’ and warriors’ backs. Nine chariots were stricken: some crashing into one another, some falling to a standstill with their arrow-riven drivers slumped over the reins and others speeding off across the plain, arrow-pricked horses panicked and fleeing. But Hattu’s arrow remained strung as his eyes combed the fray madly to find the right target.
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