“This is the day that we have been waiting for,” she called out and, although she was young and small, her voice echoed easily across the square. “I cannot say what happened to the world to make it the way it is. I do not know where the Old Ones came from or how they were allowed to take control. All I can tell you is that it’s over. After today, the world will belong once again to us and even if some of us must die, it will have been worth it. Matt and Flint are waiting for us. Inti will be riding in from the east. I am here and I am not alone. Sapling is with me. Yes! Sapling was not killed.”
The beginnings of a cheer broke out among the soldiers closest to the front, but Scar raised a hand for silence.
“The Five are coming together at last!” she exclaimed. “The Old Ones thought they’d beaten us, but they were wrong. And now we’re going to show them. We’re going to show them the power of Five.”
“Five!” The single word blasted out all around. Banners flew, swords were raised and from somewhere came the thunder of drums and a great fanfare. Jamie looked up and saw the musicians, three small boys, none of them older than ten, perched high up on one of the aqueducts. Their horns glittered in the daylight as they saluted the crowd below. Scar’s horse had been led forward and she leapt onto it. The grey horse had been brought out for Jamie and he did the same. This time he didn’t need help. A moment later, they were riding forward with Finn, Erin and Corian, leading their cheering army between the two pagodas and along the mosaic path that led to the city walls. There were people riding singly, others two to a horse. A few ran behind. With so many of them, it took several minutes simply to pass through the gate.
As they left the city and emerged onto the plain, Jamie turned to Scar. “That was quite a speech,” he said.
“You have to make a speech before a battle,” Scar said. She looked down guiltily, then back up again. “Actually, if you must know, Finn wrote it for me. He made me learn it last night.”
“Well, I think it worked.”
“I hope so.”
They were circling the City of Canals, travelling in the opposite direction to Scathack Hill. Ahead of them the landscape was flat and open, a table top covered with wild grass and a few flowers. But the flowers were strange, unnatural colours and the grass was sharp and leathery. They rode under the branches of a fruit tree and Jamie reached up to pick what looked like a mauve-coloured peach but with a hard prickly skin. Scar stopped him. “Don’t!” she called out. “It’s poisonous.”
They continued into the fields and for the first time Jamie saw animals – or their remains. A herd of cows had died here. They were lying, bloated and stiff, their tongues lolling out, their eye sockets buzzing with black flies. As he rode past, Jamie smelled the sweet decaying flesh and felt his stomach churn. He was glad he hadn’t been offered breakfast.
Ahead of them, less than a mile away, the ground rose up, covered by a wood. The trees looked like pines, with branches that were so straight they could have been artificial. They had dark green needles like splinters of broken glass. Jamie could hear something now, a strange unnerving sound. It was a rhythmic hammering of metal against metal. Boom, boom… boom. Boom, boom… boom. Each time, the third beat was the loudest. It was as if there was some kind of huge machine still out of sight on the other side of the hill.
Scar was moving ahead of him so Jamie urged his own horse on. He didn’t need to kick it or snap with the reins. Somehow, the horse seemed to understand him. He jolted forward and caught up. They reached the first of the trees and began to weave their way through the trunks, climbing steeply towards the top of the hill. Jamie felt a growing nervousness in the pit of his stomach. Just a few weeks ago he had been walking onto the stage at the Reno Playhouse to perform a magic act with newspapers and playing cards. And here he was now, riding to war.
He should have been terrified. He should have been hollowed out by the horror of it all. But the strange thing was that he felt nothing but a sense of elation. They were still scrambling up the slope, surrounded by the soaring, hostile trees and he knew that there could be no going back. This was it. The drumbeat was still calling to him. Boom, boom… boom. Boom, boom… boom. And he was being carried forward willingly with the soft thunder of hooves all around and the smell of the horses’ sweat in his nostrils. He had discovered the secret of war, the moment when soldiers cast aside their fear and become part of a machine that is so much bigger than themselves. For only then are they prepared to die.
They were moving faster and faster. As they arrived at the last reaches of the hill, the trees thinned out and they broke into a gallop. But then Scar raised a hand and they slowed down to a stop. They had arrived. The fighters who had hitched a lift with the riders were dismounting and preparing their weapons. The wagons were emptying and Jamie saw children as young as eleven and twelve flexing their bows, their faces set in grim concentration.
“How are you feeling?” Scar asked.
It took Jamie a moment to realize that she was talking to him. He nodded. “I’m all right.”
“It’ll be over very quickly,” she said.
“How do you know?”
“Matt has a plan.”
“Do you know what it is?”
Scar smiled. “He told me last night.”
To his surprise, Jamie felt a little annoyed. Matt must have spoken to Scar in her dreams. Why had he been excluded? But there was no point in arguing about it now. “Are you scared?” he asked.
Scar shook her head. “Not really. What’s the worst that can happen?”
Jamie could think of all sorts of things but decided not to answer.
Scar looked behind her. The rest of her forces had finally assembled and were looking upwards, awaiting her command. Finn was leaning forward on his horse as if he were listening for something. He looked even older than he had that morning and Jamie saw that he was close to exhaustion. Not just tired after a bad night’s sleep but worn out from years of fighting. “Finn is scared,” Scar muttered, making sure that Finn couldn’t hear her. “He’s trying not to show it but he always is. He’s scared for me.”
“You mean a lot to him.”
“I suppose so. I’m the daughter he never had, although he tells me he has four sons.” She turned to Jamie. “I’ve been hard on you and I’m sorry. I’ll try to be kinder if either of us survives.”
Jamie didn’t know what to say, but it didn’t matter because Scar didn’t give him a chance. She signalled, and at once they began to move forward, covering the last few yards to the top of the hill. They were very quiet now. Jamie could just hear the horses’ hooves as they padded through the carpet of dead needles but otherwise the animals made no sound. The rest of the attackers, tiptoeing with their weapons and shields, barely seemed to breathe. At the very top, a last line of trees provided shelter. Once again they stopped and at last Jamie saw what was awaiting him on the other side.
The battleground.
It was like nothing he had ever seen before. It was more terrible than anything he could have imagined.
He was standing above a strip of very dark, almost black grass about a quarter of a mile wide that flowed like a river between the hills on one side and a dense forest on the other. Below and in front of him, the last great army of humanity had been assembled, two thousand strong, united under the blue five-pointed star that he himself carried on his sword. It was on their banners and on their shields. It flew from the tents which slanted out of the bottom of the hill, tall and triangular, like the sails of a ship caught in the breeze. Had there been more light it would have shone out, but the sky was grey and threatening and the shadow of imminent death stretched across the entire scene.
The army was advancing in three blocks – a central phalanx and two wings – each one made up of so many people that, for Jamie high up on the hill, it was impossible to separate them. The horsemen were at the front, hundreds of them, leading the charge. Then came the foot soldiers. Behind them a long line of men stood waiting, each one holding onto what looked like a length of copper pipe almost the same height as themselves. Then came the archers and finally, just in front of the tents, a row of cannons with two soldiers kneeling beside each. Jamie was puzzled by the variety of weapons, for they seemed to belong to different times and different continents. But he realized that there was nothing uniform about the people either. They had assembled here having travelled from all over the world.
Two boys were preparing to lead them into battle. Jamie saw them, at the very front, both of them riding on
