and blood. Their razor-sharp blades slashed through the Hesperuks' bronze armor. I gritted my teeth against the sight of the hacked limbs and cleaved men falling to the reddened earth.
Then, from the very point of the wedge, where Ymiru had met up with Lord Tomavar, I heard Ymiru's great voice bellow out above the din of battle: 'A hrole! For King Valamesh, let us make a hrole!' I could almost feel, however, the exhaustion burning into Ymiru's great arm and body — and those of his men and Lord Tomavar's. Lord Tomavar himself fought like a fury, cutting through one soldier's chest, stabbing his kalama through the throat of another, and then ripping free his sword with a quick stroke to decapitate a Hesperuk lord. I sensed in him not only a fierce will toward victory but a desire to redeem himself for his wrongful pride in challenging me as king. But I did not know how much longer he or his men behind him could go on fighting this ways.
Then Kane looked back behind us toward the river, and so did I. There, the Seven had come up from our encampment. Abrasax's snowy hair and beard gleamed in the bright sunlight, and so did Master Juwain's bald head. The Masters of the Brotherhood stood gathered in a circle on the grass, with their hands held out toward each other. I knew that each held one of the great gelstei. Arrows fell around them. How they maintained their almost tangible calm in the midst of the great noise and death all around them I did not know.
But I soon saw the fruition of their efforts, or thought I did: the ground, from the river to the rocks of the Detheshaloon, suddenly seemed to grow transparent, as if dirt had been cleansed from a window pane. Deep within the darkness of the earth, a great wheel of light spun with a varicolored radiance. Somehow, the Seven called upon the great earth chakra's flames to feed the life fires of the men doing battle on the field above. They could not direct this force with any kind of precision, favoring the men of my army over our enemy's soldiers. But the flames found their way into those most open to them; they especially enlivened the blood and beings of the Valari warriors, who had sat each morning and evening for many years practicing the Brotherhood's meditations.
'A hole!' I heard Lord Tomavar call back to Yrniru. 'If we must slay a thousand men, we'll make a hole big enough to march an army through!'
I blinked then, and the vision of the earth opening to a deep splendor vanished before my eyes. I felt, however, a terrible new strength flowing into me. Its fire drove back the burning of the kirax and the agony of men dying near me. I sensed this same onstreaming force in Kane, and in Lord Avijan and Joshu Kadar, and in all the Guardians drawn up close behind me. It seemed that the earth was pouring into us her very life.
'Look!' Sar Shivalad cried out as he pointed with his lance ahead of us. 'They have broken the line!'
To the dreadful sound of iron-shod clubs crunching in armor and kalamas chopping through bronze and bone, the wedge of warriors ahead of us worked if the hole they had ripped into the Hesperuk Phalanx. Yrniru and his men fell against one end of the ragged Hesperuk line, while Lord Tomavar directed our Meshians against the other. In the course of two minutes, as our enemy fell in tens and twenties screaming to the ground, the wedge widened to a
funnel into which I might lead my fight hundred knights.
And ride we did. Altaru's great muscles hurled us forward almost without my prompting him. It was dreadful working through the hole in the Hesperuk lines for Altaru's hooves crunched against the bodies of the dying and the dead. Too many of my men, I saw, had been compelled to sacrifice themselves, and they lay on the bruised grass like lumpy carpets of diamond or white fur. When I came to the point where the funnel of my still savagely fighting warriors opened out behind the Hesperuk lines. Ymiru pointed with his bloody borkor, and cried out, 'This is hrorrible, Val! I didn't know it would be so hrorrible!'
When Altaru and I burst into the space beyond the killing zone, fewer corpses littered the ground. Few men, for the moment, opposed us, but those who did fought for their lives. A hundred skirmishers came running at us and casting their javelins. And three score of the Hesperuk infantry who had panicked and broken, suddenly ceased their wild flight across the grass to turn and make a desperate stand. One of these — a giant with blood and brains dripping from his bronze fish scales — planted the butt end of a long pike in the grass in hope of impaling either Altaru or me. I cast one of my throwing lances straight through his eye, and I screamed as he died. Sar Shivalad and the Guardians close to me fell upon other Hesperuks, running them through with their long lances or using their kalamas to cut them down.
Archers, gathered nearby, loosed their bolts at us. Many broke against my knights' armor. But many, at this range, ripped through the diamond seams and found out the places where our mounts had no covering. Men gasped at arrows sticking out of their faces or embedded in their chests; horses screamed and stumbled, crushing their riders under. Then my men fell into a rage. They charged the masses of archers, and soon killed all of them, for the archers had but leather tunics to protect them against our terrible swords.
There came a moment when no enemy stood nearby to threaten us. My knights milled about, sticking their lances through the bodies of our wounded enemy, and I did not stop these executions. I looked off to the left; it seemed that King Hadaru's cavalry and the battalions of Ishka and Anjo might have pushed back the Uskadans, but it was hard to see, for clouds of dust obscured much of the battlefield. Likewise, I could not tell what was happening on our right flank. But at the field's center, the Hesperuk phalanx had pushed deep into the Alonian and Eanna lines, just beyond that place where Lord Tomavar's and Ymiru's men still fought savagely to keep open the hole they had made, and widen it, if they could.
Then I looked up to the right at the Owl's Hill ahead. Bemossed hung upon his cross like a carcass drained of blood. Breath still stirred within him, however, for somehow he managed to lift up his head and gaze out toward me. I sensed within him, even deeper than his pain, an immense disappointment. And a fear for me. I thought I saw his throat working and his lips moving as if to tell me: 'Go back, Val! It is a trap!'
A pack of Blues, thirty strong, stood at the top of the hill around the cross as if waiting for me. Their broad- bladed axes gleamed in the sunlight.
Just then, to our left, from behind the ridges of rocky ground close to the Detheshaloon, men in great numbers began to pour forth. They bore bright, steel-jacketed shields, long spears and good armor, of mail and plate. Two thousand more Blues marched out with them, and light and heavy cavalry in the hundreds. I recognized the hawk and bear standards of men that my companions and I had fought at Khaisham. I did not want to wait as the forty or fifty battalions of Yarkona formed up. I knew that Morjin would throw most of them against the hole that my warriors had torn in his lines, and so block our retreat.
As if in answer to my question, more cavalry burst forth from around behind the Owl's Hill. The famed Red Knights bore a heavy burden of thick, crimson-tinted armor that weighed down their huge horses. Although they could not move very quickly, Zahur Tey and their other captains at the front of their column were closer to Bemossed than my knights and I. I remembered Atara putting the count of the Red Knights at three thousand.
'We must reach the Maitreya before they do!' I cried out to my men, pointing ahead of us. 'Charge!'
Altaru, in a surge of mighty muscles, leaped forth almost to a full gallop in a single bound. Wind whistled through my helm, and my eight hundred knights and their mounts thundered across the ground behind me. Our course took us nearly straight up the gende slopes of the Owl's Hill. The Red Knights had to work up and around the curving sweeps of grass to our left.
Even so, the foremost of them cut across our line of assault. They should have been able to intercept us and throw us back. But a rare spirit blazed through our hearts. Perhaps the earth fires that the Seven unleashed with their gelstei filled us with a terrible joy for killing perhaps we all knew that only the most desperate hope remained of saving Bemossed — and the world. In the first seconds of this battle,
I hurled five throwing lances at our enemy, and five of the Red Knights fell dead or dying with wooden shafts sticking out of their eyes, mouths or necks. So it was with Kane, loosing his lances with a terrifying aim, as with the hand of an angel — and with Lord Avijan, Lord Noldashan. Sar Jonavar, Sar Shivalad and my other Guardians who came forward to try to protect me. But it was the Red Knights, at that moment who needed protection from us.
I drew Alkaladur, and our enemy before us on the slopes of the hill seemed to shudder at the sight of this brilliant blade. I cut down a huge Red Knight, then thrust Alkaladur's point through another's chest. I wrenched my blade free, and crimson blood spurted from the hole in his crimson armor. A thrown lance slammed into my side, but did not pierce me. Then three more men rode at me, and I killed them with three lightning slashes, and I gritted
